Species of Civilizations

Friday

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These galaxies would certainly gain the mythological attention of any sentient beings living in full view of such spectacular displays.

When a future science of civilizations begins to take shape, it will need to distinguish broad categories or families of civilizations, or, if you will, species of civilizations. In so far as civilizations are out outgrowth of biological species, they are an extension of biology, and it is appropriate to use the terminology of species to characterize civilizations.

Just a few days ago in A Copernican Conception of Civilization I distinguished between eocivilization (i.e., terrestrial civilizations), exocivilization (extraterrestrial civilizations), and astrocivilization (an integrated conception of eo- and exocivilization taken together). This is a first step in identifying species of civilizations.

Given that astrocivilization follows directly from (one could say, supervenes upon) astrobiology, it is particular apt to extend the definition of astrobiology to astrocivilization, and so in A Copernican Conception of Civilization I paraphrased the NASA definition of astrobiology, mutatis mutandis, for civilization. Thus astrociviliation comprises…

…the study of the civilized universe. This field provides a scientific foundation for a multidisciplinary study of (1) the origin and distribution of civilization in the universe, (2) an understanding of the role of the structure of spacetime in civilizations, and (3) the study of the Earth’s civilizations in their terrestrial and cosmological context.

Some time ago in A First Image from the Herschel Telescope I made the suggestion that particular physical features of a galaxy might result in any and all civilizations arising within that galaxy to share a certain feature or features based upon the features of the containing galaxy. This is a point worth developing at greater length.

Of the images of the M51 galaxy I wrote:

If there are civilizations in that galaxy, they must have marvelous constellations defined by these presumably enormous stars, and that one star at the top of the image seems to be brighter than any other in that galaxy. It would have a special place in the mythologies of the peoples of that galaxy. And the peoples of that galaxy, even if they do not know of each other, would nevertheless have something in common in virtue of their relation to this enormous star. We could, in this context, speak of a “family” of civilizations in this galaxy all influenced by the most prominent stellar feature of the galaxy of which they are a part.

We can generalize about and extrapolate from this idea of a family of civilizations defined by the prominent stellar features of the galaxy in which they are found. If a galaxy has a sufficiently prominent physical feature that can witnessed by sentient beings, these features will have a place in the life of these sentient beings, and thus by extension a place in the civilizations of these sentient beings.

There is a sense in which it seems a little backward to start from the mythological commonalities of civilizations based upon their view of the cosmos, but it is only appropriate, because this is where cosmology began for human beings. If we remain true to the study of astrocivilization as including, “the search for evidence of the origins and early evolution of civilization on Earth,” the origins and early evolution of civilization on earth was at least in part derived from early observational cosmology. We began with myths of the stars, and it is to be expected that many if not most civilizations will begin with myths of the stars. Moreover, these myths will be at least in part a function of the locally observable cosmos.

The more expected progress of thought would be to start with how the physical features of a particular galaxy or group of galaxies would affect the physical chemistry of life within this galaxy or these galaxies, and how life so constituted would go on to constitute civilization. These are important perspectives that a future science of civilizations would also include.

Simply producing a taxonomy of civilizations based on mythological, physical, biological, sociological, and other factors would only be the first step of a scientific study of astrocivilization. As I have noted in Axioms and Postulates in Strategy, Carnap distinguished between classificatory, comparative, and quantitative scientific concepts. Carnap suggested that science begins with classificatory conceptions, i.e., with a taxonomy, but must in the interests of rigor and precision move on to the more sophisticated comparative and quantitative concepts of science. More recently, in From Scholasticism to Science, I suggested that these conceptual stages in the development of science may also demarcate historical stages in the development of human thought.

It will only be in the far future, when we have evidence of many different civilizations, that we will be able to formulate comparative concepts of civilization based on the actual study of astrocivilization, and it is only after we have graduated to comparative concepts in the science of astrocivilization that we will be able to formulate quantitative measures of civilization informed by the experience of many distinct civilizations.

At present, we know only the development of civilizations on the earth. This has not prevented several thinkers from drawing general conclusions about the nature of civilization, but it is not enough of a sample to say anything definitive about, “the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of civilization in the universe.” The civilizations of the earth represent a single species, or, at most, a single genera of civilization. We will need to study the independent origins and development of civilization in order to have a valid basis of comparison. We need to be able to see civilization as a part of cosmological evolution; until that time, we are limited to a quasi-Linnaean taxonomy of civilization, based on observable features in common; after we have a perspective of civilization as part of cosmological evolution, it will be possible to formulate a more Darwinian conception.

In the meantime, while we can understand theoretically the broad outlines of a study of astrocivilization, the actual content of such a science lies beyond our present zone of proximal development. And taking human knowledge in its largest possible context, we can see that our epistemic zone of proximal development supervenes on the maturity and extent of the civilization of which we are a part. This does not hold for more restricted forms of knowledge, but for forms of knowledge of which the study of astrocivilization is an example (i.e., human knowledge at its greatest extent) it becomes true. Not only individuals, but also whole societies and entire civilizations have zones of proximal development. A particular species of civilization facilitates a particular species of knowledge — but it also constrains other species of knowledge. This observation, too, would belong to an adequate conception of astrocivilization.

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The Hierarchy of Perspective Taking

Tuesday

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Jean Piaget

One of the important ideas from Piaget’s influential conception of cognitive development is that of perspective taking. The ability to coordinate the perspectives of multiple observers of one and the same state of affairs is a cognitive skill that develops with time and practice, and the mastery of perspective taking coincides with cognitive maturity.

From a philosophical standpoint, the problem of perspective taking is closely related to the problem of appearance and reality, since one and the same state of affairs not only appears from different perspectives for different observers, it also appears from different perspectives for one and the same observer at different times. In other words, appearance changes — and presumably reality does not. It is interesting to note that developmental psychologists following Paiget’s lead have in fact conducted tests with children in order to understand at what stage of development that they can consistently distinguish between appearance and reality.

Just as perspective taking is a cognitive accomplishment — requiring time, training, and natural development — and not something that happens suddenly and all at once, the cognitive maturity of which perspective taking is an accomplishment does not occur all at once. Both maturity and perspective taking continue to develop as the individual develops — and I take this development continues beyond childhood proper.

While I find Piaget’s work quite congenial, the developmental psychology of Erik Erikson strikes me a greatly oversimplified, with its predictable crises at each stage of life, and the implicit assumption built in that if you aren’t undergoing some particular crisis that strikes most people at a given period of life, then there is something wrong with you. That being said, what I find of great value in Erikson’s work is his insistence that development continues throughout the human lifespan, and does not come to a halt after a particular accomplishment of cognitive maturity is achieved.

Piagetian cognitive development in terms of perspective taking can easily be extended throughout the human lifespan (and beyond) by the observation that there are always new perspectives to take. As civilization develops and grows, becoming ever more comprehensive as it does so, the human beings who constitute this civilization are forced to formulate always more comprehensive conceptions in order to take the measure of the world being progressively revealed to us. Each new idea that takes the measure of the world at a greater order of magnitude presents the possibility of a new perspective on the world, and therefore the possibility of a new achievement in terms of perspective taking.

The perspectives we attain constitute a hierarchy that begins with the first accomplishment of the self-aware mind, which is egocentric thought. Many developmental psychologists have described the egocentric thought patterns of young children, though the word “egocentric” is now widely avoided because of its moralizing connotations. I, however, will retain the term “egocentric,” because it helps to place this stage within a hierarchy of perspective taking.

The egocentric point of departure for human cognition does not necessarily disappear even when it is theoretically surpassed, because we know egocentric thinking so well from the nearly universal phenomenon of human selfishness, which is where the moralizing connotation of “egocentric” no doubt has its origin. An individual may become capable of coordinating multiple perspectives and still value the world exclusively from the perspective of self-interest.

In any case, the purely egocentric thought of early childhood confines the egocentric thinker to a tightly constrained circle defined by one’s personal perspective. While this is a personal perspective, it is also an impersonal perspective in so far as all individuals share this perspective. It is what Francis Bacon called the “idols of the cave,” since every human being, “has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolours the light of nature.” This has been well described in a passage from F. H. Bradley made famous by T. S. Eliot, because the latter quoted it in a footnote to The Waste Land:

My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it… In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346, quoted by T. S. Eliot in footnote 48 to The Waste Land, “What the Thunder Said”

I quote this passage here because, like my retention of the term “egocentric,” it can help us to see perspectives in perspective, and it helps us to do so because we can think of expanding and progressively more comprehensive perspectives as concentric circles. The egocentric perspective is located precisely at the center, and the circle described by F. H. Bradley is the circle within which the egocentric perspective prevails.

The next most comprehensive perspective taking beyond the transcendence of the egocentric perspective is the transcendence of the ethnocentric perspective. The ethnocentric perspective corresponds to what Bacon called the “idols of the marketplace,” such that this perspective is, “formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other.” The ethnocentric perspective can also be identified with the sociosphere, which I recently discussed in Eo-, Exo-, Astro- as an essentially geocentric conception which, in a Copernican context, should be overcome.

Beyond ethnocentrism and its corresponding sociosphere there is ideocentrism, which Bacon called the “idols of the theater,” and which we can identify with the noösphere. The ideocentric perspective, which Bacon well described in terms of philosophical systems, such that, “all the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion.” Trans-ethnic communities of ideology and belief, like world’s major religions and political ideologies, represent the ideocentric perspective.

The transcendence of the ideocentric perspective by way of more comprehensive perspective taking brings us to the anthropocentric perspective, which can be identified with the anthroposphere (still a geocentric and pre-Copernican conception, as with the other -spheres mentioned above). The anthropocentric perspective corresponds to Bacon’s “idols of the tribe,” which Bacon described thus:

“The Idols of the Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions as well of the sense as of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.”

Bacon was limited by the cosmology of his time so that he could not readily identify further idols beyond the anthropocentric idols of the (human) tribe, just as we are limited by the cosmology of our time. Yet we do today have a more comprehensive perspective than Bacon, we can can identify a few more stages of more comprehensive perspective taking. Beyond the anthropocentric perspective there is the geocentric perspective, the heliocentric perspective, and even what we could call the galacticentric perspective — as when early twentieth century cosmologists argued over whether the Milky Way as the only galaxy and constituted an “island universe.” Now we know that there are other galaxies, and we can be said to have transcended the galacticentric perspective.

As I wrote above, as human knowledge has expanded and become more comprehensive, ever more comprehensive perspective taking has come about in order to grasp the concepts employed in expanding human knowledge. There is every reason to believe that this process will be iterated indefinitely into the future, which means that perspective taking also will be indefinitely iterated into the future. (I attempted to make a similar and related point in Gödel’s Lesson for Geopolitics.) Therefore, further levels of cognitive maturity wait for us in the distant future as accomplishments that we cannot yet attain at this time.

This last observation allows me to cite one more relevant developmental psychologist, namely Lev Vygotsky, whose cognitive mediation theory of human development makes use of the concept of a Zone of proximal development (ZPD). Human development, according to Vygotsky, takes place within a proximal zone, and not at any discrete point or stage. Within the ZPD, certain accomplishments of cognitive maturity are possible. In the lower ZPD there is the actual zone of development, while in the upper ZPD there lies the potential zone of development, which can be attained through cognitive mediation by the proper prompting of an already accomplished mentor. Beyond the upper ZPD, even if there are tasks yet to be accomplished, they cannot be accomplished within this particular ZPD.

With the development of human knowledge, we’re on our own. There is no cognitive mediator to help us over the hard parts and assist us in the more comprehensive perspective taking that will mark a new stage of cognitive maturity and possible also a new zone of proximal development in which new accomplishments will be possible. But this has always been true in the past, and yet we have managed to make these breakthroughs to more comprehensive perspectives of cognitive maturity.

I hope that the reader sees that this is both hopeful and sad. Hopeful because this way of looking at human knowledge suggests indefinite progress. Sad because we will not be around to see the the accomplishments of cognitive maturity that lie beyond our present zone of proximal development.

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Palm Sunday and April Fools Day

Sunday

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How often does Palm Sunday fall on April Fools’ Day? It must happen with a certain (predictable) regularity, I would guess, since April Fools’ Day falls within what we might call the parameters of Easter. No doubt someone, somewhere, has made the calculation and can give a definite answer to the question. Since Easter is a moveable feast, and it carries all of Passiontide with it, including Palm Sunday and Good Friday, all these days move around the Gregorian calender like wanderers seeking a place to rest.

Easter must be calculated, since it falls on the first Sunday after the full moon following the vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere. And Easter is the still point in the turning world of moveable feasts in the Christian calendar, because all the other moveable feasts are calculated in number of days before or after Easter. The calculation of the date of Easter is an astronomical task that requires some expertise. Copernicus was among the few in early modern Europe who possessed the expertise to arrive at a better calculation.

The accumulating errors of the Julian calendar had, over the centuries, contributed to confusion and unnecessary complexity in the calculation of dates. It was possible to continue with the old system, but the whole process could be streamlined by a root-and-branch rethinking. This is what Copernicus provided. He did not limit himself to local and parochial concerns, but attempted to get the cosmology right so that it agreed with astronomical observations, and this in turn could bring the calendar into accord with both cosmology and astronomy.

Copernicus, like Darwin, long delayed the publication of his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium not least because he was, like Darwin, concerned about the reaction it would cause. The story is that Copernicus received a copy of the first printed edition of his book on his death bed, roused himself from a stroke-induced torpor long enough to recognize this life work, and then passed away. The fears of both men were justified.

Copernicus’ calendar reform had some unintended consequences. This is perhaps the ultimate April Fools’ joke. While it is true that Copernicus himself completed only the first step from geocentric cosmology to heliocentric cosmology, and that we have since gone far beyond heliocentric cosmology even to the point that today any center of the world at all is questionable, it is probably also true that Copernicus’ reform extended as far as cosmological knowledge extended in his time. In its context, the Copernican revolution was radical and complete.

Now we know that neither earth nor sun nor galaxy nor galactic cluster nor super cluster nor the universe itself is the center of anything. There is no center — or, rather, everywhere is the center, which amounts to the same thing, and this coincides with the perennial insights of mysticism and mythology.

The Copernican revolution is still unfolding. The slow, gradual, cumulative process of attaining Copernican conceptions continues today. It is worth noting that the revolution began at the rarefied intellectual level of cosmology, so that a Copernican conception of cosmology itself preceded a Copernican conception of any of the special sciences. Indeed, in Eo-, Exo-, Astro- I recently argued that we are only now able to formulate Copernican conceptions of the sciences, which have, to date, received mostly geocentric formulations.

The calculation of the date of Easter turned out to be one of the truly deconstructive episodes in Western history, when the unraveling of what had seemed to be a single intellectual thread eventually meant the unraveling of a world entire. Copernicus was the first deconstructionist.

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Eo-, Exo-, Astro-

Monday

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The Philosophical Significance of Astrobiology as a

Cosmological Extrapolation of Terrestrial Biology

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In yesterdays’ Commensurable Perspectives I finished with this observation:

Ecology is the master world-narrative that unifies the sub-narratives employed by individual species in virtue of their perceptual and cognitive architecture. Ultimately, astrobiology would constitute the universal narrative that would unify the ecological narratives of distinct worlds.

The naturalistic narrative has the power to unify even across species and across worlds. This power may not be particularly evident at present, but in the long term future of our species (if our species does in fact have a long term future) this power will prove to be crucial.

If indeed astrobiology is the universal narrative of life, that gives astrobiology a privileged position among the sciences. That is a tall order. But what is astrobiology? At one time I had heard both the terms “exobiology” and “astrobiology” and I was not quite clear about the exact difference between the two, or how each was defined. Thereby hangs a tale. The distinction between the two is in fact a very interesting story, and it is a story to which an entire book has been devoted, The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of Astrobiology, by Steven J. Dick and James E. Strick.

I urge the reader to get this book and peruse it for yourself for the detailed version of the emergence of astrobiology as a scientific discipline. I will give only the bare bones of that story here, which will be only enough to grasp the crucial concepts involved. And our interest is in the concepts, not the personalities.

Joshua Lederberg before he had formulated the distinction between eobiology and exobiology.

Exobiology is the older term, introduced by Joshua Lederberg (first used in a public lecture in 1960), and contrasted by him to eobiology. Exobiology has some currency in the public mind, but I didn’t know about eobiology until I read about the history of the discipline. However, the contrast between the two terms is conceptually important. Exobiology is concerned with biology off the surface of the earth, while eobiology is biology on the surface of the earth. (cf. p. 29) In other words, all biological science prior to human spaceflight was eobiology, even if we didn’t know that it was eobiology. Another way to formulate this distinction is to say that eobiology is the biology of the terrestrial biosphere, while exobiology is the biology of everything else.

In the book The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of Astrobiology the authors give a lot of background on the internal politics and budgeting of NASA and how this affected the emergence of astrobiology. It is an interesting story, but I will not go into it here, as our interest at present is exclusively with the conceptual infrastructure of the discipline. Suffice it to say that in 1996 the first attempts were made to define astrobiology (cf. p. 202), and within a couple of years there was a virtual Astrobiology Institute.

The NASA astrobiology website characterizes astrobiology as follows:

“Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. This multidisciplinary field encompasses the search for habitable environments in our Solar System and habitable planets outside our Solar System, the search for evidence of prebiotic chemistry and life on Mars and other bodies in our Solar System, laboratory and field research into the origins and early evolution of life on Earth, and studies of the potential for life to adapt to challenges on Earth and in space.”

The NASA strategic plan of 1996 gives this definition of astrobiology:

“The study of the living universe. This field provides a scientific foundation for a multidisciplinary study of (1) the origin and distribution of life in the universe, (2) an understanding of the role of gravity in living systems, and (3) the study of the Earth’s atmospheres and ecosystems.”

The important lesson to take away from this is that astrobiology is the more comprehensive concept, and that in fact we can consider astrobiology the union of eobiology and exobiology. This sounds simple enough (and it is), but it is important to understand the conceptual leap that has been taken here.

From the perspective of astrobiology, earth sciences are only fragments of far larger and more comprehensive sciences. Just as all biology was once eobiology, the same observation can be made in regard to the other earth sciences, and the same tripartite conceptual distinction can be brought to the other earth sciences. We can formulate eogeology and exogeology unified in astrogeology; we can formulate eohydrology and exohydrology unified in astrohydrology; we can formulate eovulcanology and exovulcanology unified in astrovulcanology; we can formulate eoclimatology and exoclimatology unified in astroclimatology. All of these are cosmological extrapolations of earth sciences. One suspects that, in the future, the prefixes will be dropped and we will return to climatology simpliciter, e.g., but while the conceptual revolution is underway it is important to retain the prefixes as a reminder that science is no longer defined by the boundaries of the earth.

I assert that this is a conceptual leap of the first importance because what we have with astrobiology is the formulation of the first truly Copernican science; astrobiology includes eobiology but it is not exhausted by eobiology; it is supplemented by exobiology. The earth, for obvious reasons, remains important to us, but it no longer dictates the center of our science. All mature sciences will eventually need to take this Copernican turn and dethrone the earth from the center of its concern.

We can take a further step beyond this conceptual formulation of Copernican sciences by observing that traditional earth sciences began as local enterprises, and it has only been in recent decades that truly global sciences have emerged. These global sciences have culminated in objects of scientific study that take the world entire as their object. Thus biology has converged upon study of the biosphere; hydrology has converged on study of the hydrosphere; glaciology has culminated in the study of the cryosphere. Copernican sciences based on the model of astrobiology can go one better than this, transcending earth-defined “-spheres” in favor of more comprehensive concepts.

When I spoke last year on “The Moral Imperative of Human Spaceflight” at the NASA/DARPA 100 Year Starship Study symposium it was my intention to spend some time on the emergence of Copernican sciences, but I didn’t have enough time to elaborate. I cut most of that material out and still was rushed. The point that I wanted to make there was that the concepts of the biosphere, the lithosphere, the geosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, atmosphere, anthrosphere, sociosphere, noösphere, and technosphere are essentially Ptolemaic concepts. (If the proceedings of the symposium are published, and if my paper is included, this contains my first sketch of Copernican sciences as transcending these earth-defined “-spheres.”) The Copernican Revolution entails the formulation of Copernican concepts to supersede Ptolemaic concepts, and this work is as yet unfinished. In some spheres of human thought, it has scarcely begun.

One way to transcend our Ptolemaic concepts and to replace them with Copernican concepts, and thus to extend the ongoing shift to a truly Copernican perspective, is to substitute for the earth-defined “-spheres” a conception of the object of the sciences not dependent upon the earth, and this can be done by defining, respectfully, biospace (in place of the biosphere), lithospace, geospace, hydrospace, cryospace, atmospace, anthrospace, sociospace, noöspace, and technospace. In so far as we can facilitate the emergence of Copernican sciences, we can contribute to the ongoing Copernican Revolution, which will someday culminate in a Copernican civilization (if we do not first destroy ourselves).

We can pass beyond the earth sciences and the natural sciences and similarly extend our conceptions of a the social and political sciences. Although concepts from the social sciences are not usually expressed in geocentric terms — except for the above-mentioned anthrosphere, sociosphere, noösphere, and technosphere (which are not employed very often) — our social and political thought is usually even more tied to planetary prejudices than the concepts of the natural sciences. Thus we can extend our conception of politics by distinguishing between eopolitics and exopolitics, both of which are subsumed under astropolitics. Similarly, we can formulate eoeconomics and exoeconomics, subsumed by astroeconomics, eostrategy and exostrategy, subsumed by astrostrategy, and so forth.

As a final note, it is ironic that the breakthrough to a Copernican science should occur first with biology, because biology was among the latest of the sciences to actually attain a scientific status. Prior to Darwin, biological theories were essentially theological theories with but a few exceptions. Darwin put biology on a firm biological footing and created the discipline in its modern scientific form. Thus biology was among the last of the sciences to attain a modern scientific form, though it was the first to attain to a Copernican form.

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Darwin’s Cosmology

Sunday

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Today is Darwin’s birthday, and therefore an appropriate time to celebrate Darwin by a mediation upon his work. No one has influenced me more than Darwin, and I always find the study of his works to be intellectually rewarding. I also read (and listen to) quite a number of books about Darwin. Recently I listened to Darwin, Darwinism, and the Modern World, 14 lectures by Dr. Chandak Sengoopta. While I enjoyed the lectures, I sharply differed from many of Dr. Sengoopta’s interpretations of Darwin’s thought. One theme that Dr. Sengoopta returned to several times was a denial that Darwin had anything to say about the ultimate origins of life. Each time that Dr. Sengoopta made this point I found myself grow more and more irritated.

To say that Darwin had nothing to say about the ultimate origins of life may be technically correct in a narrow sense, but I do not think that it is an accurate expression of Darwin’s vision of life, which was sweeping and comprehensive. While it may be a little much to say that Darwin ever entertained ideas that could accurately be called “Darwin’s cosmology,” it is obvious in reading Darwin’s notebooks, in which he recorded thoughts that never made it into his published books, his mind ranged far and wide. It is almost as though, once Darwin made the conceptual breakthrough of natural selection he had discovered a new world.

In characterizing Darwin’s thought in this way I am immediately reminded of a famous letter that Janos Bolyai wrote to his father after having independently arrived at the idea of non-Euclidean geometry:

“…I have discovered such wonderful things that I was amazed, and it would be an everlasting piece of bad fortune if they were lost. When you, my dear Father, see them, you will understand; at present I can say nothing except this: that out of nothing I have created a strange new universe. All that I have sent you previously is like a house of cards in comparison with a tower. I am no less convinced that these discoveries will bring me honor than I would be if they were complete.”

Darwin, too, discovered wonderful things and created the strange new universe of evolutionary biology, though it came on him rather slowly — not in a youthful moment that could be recorded to a letter in his father, and not in a fit of fever, as the idea of natural selection came to Wallace — as the result of many years of ruminating on his observations. But the slowness with which Darwin’s mind worked was repaid with thoroughness. Even though Darwin was the first evolutionist in the modern sense of the term, he must also be accounted among the most complete of all evolutionary thinkers, having spent decades thinking through his idea with a Platonic will to follow the argument wherever it leads.

Given that Darwin himself thought that making the idea of natural selection public was like “confessing to a murder,” the fragments of Darwin’s cosmology must be sought in his latter and notebooks as much as in his published works. As for the origins of life, narrowly considered, apart from the cosmological implications of life, Darwin openly speculated on a purely naturalistic origin of life in a letter to Joseph Hooker:

“It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, — light, heat, electricity &c. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.”

Darwin’s 1871 letter to Joseph Hooker

What has widely come to be known as “Darwin’s warm little pond” sounds like nothing so much as the famous Stanley L. Miller electrical discharge experiment.

Darwin revealed his consistent naturalism in his rejection of teleology in a letter to Julia Wedgwood, where he indirectly refers to his slow, steady, cumulative mode of thinking (quite the opposite of revelation):

“The mind refuses to look at this universe, being what it is, without having been designed; yet, where would one most expect design, viz. in the structure of a sentient being, the more I think on the subject, the less I can see proof of design.”

Darwin’s letter of 11 July 1861 to Miss Julia Wedgwood

This same refusal continues to a sticking point to the present day, since, like so much that we learn from contemporary science, appearances are deceiving, and the reality behind the appearance can be so alien to the natural constitution of thue human mind that it is rejected as incomprehensible or unthinkable. That Darwin was able to think the unthinkable, and to so with a unparalleled completeness at a time when no one else was doing so, is testimony to the cosmological scope of his thought.

One of the most memorable passages in all of Darwin’s writings is the last page or so of the Origin of Species, which touches not a little on cosmological themes. Take, for instance, the “tangled bank” passage:

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”

Besides anticipating the evolutionary study of ecology and complex adaptive systems long before these disciplines became explicit and constituted their own sciences, Darwin here subtly invokes a law-like naturalism that both suggests Lyell’s uniformitarianism while going beyond it.

Darwin places this law-governed naturalism in cosmological context in the last two sentences of the book, here also implicitly invoking Malthus, whose influence was central to his making the breakthrough to the idea of natural selection:

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

This famous passage from Darwin reminds me of a perhaps equally famous passage from Immanuel Kant, who concluded The Critique of Practical Reason with this thought:

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence. The first starts at the place that I occupy in the external world of the senses, and extends the connection in which I stand into the limitless magnitude of worlds upon worlds, systems upon systems, as well as into the boundless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and continuation. The second begins with my invisible self, my personality, and displays to me a world that has true infinity, but which can only be detected through the understanding, and with which . . . I know myself to be in not, as in the first case, merely contingent, but universal and necessary connection. The first perspective of a countless multitude of worlds as it were annihilates my importance as an animal creature, which must give the matter out of which it has grown back to the planet (a mere speck in the cosmos) after it has been (one knows not how) furnished with life-force for a short time.”

Both Darwin and Kant invoke both the laws of the natural world (and both, again, do so by appealing to grandeur of the heavens) and a humanistic ideal. For Kant, the humanistic ideal is morality; for Darwin, the humanistic ideal is beauty, but what Kant said of morality and the moral law is equally applicable, mutatis mutandis, to beauty. Darwin might equally well have said of “the fixed law of gravity” and of “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” that he saw them before himself and connected them immediately with the consciousness of his existence. Kant might equally well have said that there is “grandeur in this view of life” that embraces both the starry heavens above and the moral law within.

Darwin did not express himself (and would not have expressed himself) in these philosophical terms; he was a naturalist and a biologist, not a philosopher. But Darwin’s naturalism and biology were so comprehensive to have spanned the universe and to have converged on an entire cosmology — a cosmology, for the most part, not even suspected before Darwin had done his work.

There is a sense in which Darwin fulfilled Marx’s famous pronouncement, from this Theses on Feuerbach, such that: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Darwin, however, did not change the world by fomenting a revolution; Darwin changed the world by thinking, like a philosopher. In this sense, at least, Darwin must be counted among the greatest philosophers.

I would be a rewarding project to devote an entire book to the idea of Darwin’s Cosmology. I know that I have not even scratched the surface here, and have not come near to doing justice to the idea. It would be a rewarding project to think through this idea as carefully as Darwin thought through his ideas.

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Happy Birthday Charles Darwin!

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This could go somewhere, or it could go absolutely nowhere…

Friday

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The Further Pleasures of Model Drift Revealed

In the Emergence of Novel Anomalies

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More than a year ago in The Pleasures of Model Drift I discussed how the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe constituted an anomaly in contemporary models of cosmology. Predictably, attempts have been made the tamper with the existing model to accommodate this accelerating expansion, but these attempts are largely dissatisfying. In Kuhnian philosophy of science, this is the first stage of departure from “normal science,” and “model drift” is followed by “model crisis,” “model revolution,” and “paradigm change.” After the paradigm shift, a new era of normal science begins, and the process repeats itself.

Since I wrote the above-mentioned post, a couple of new anomalies have emerged that are of great interest. Just yesterday it was reported that CERN researchers had publicized data that suggests some subatomic particles may have traveled faster than the speed of light (cf. Speed-of-light results under scrutiny at Cern). Just prior to that, there was Dwarf galaxies suggest dark matter theory may be wrong, in which it was announced that the formation of dwarf galaxies may defy the cosmological standard model as it exists today.

Now, these interesting anomalies could go somewhere, or they could go absolutely nowhere. We don’t know yet. There isn’t yet enough data, independently arrived at, and it hasn’t yet be subject to sufficient scrutiny to determine whether or not these are the true and verifiable deliverances of the natural world, or whether they are, on the contrary, artifacts of the instruments or the methodology of experimentation. These latter scenarios are entirely possible, as earlier anomalies have been shown to be flukes. But they can’t be dismissed out of hand. They may be shown to be flukes, but they must be shown; we cannot simply decide that the cosmological standard model is just fine as it is.

However, it ought to be pointed out that the cosmological standard model is quite young, in relative historical terms. We sometimes lose sight of that, because of the breadth of its explanatory power and the rapidity at which revisions have been absorbed into the model and improved it in the process. The Ptolemaic cosmological model served Western civilization for a thousand years; the cosmological standard model has not even been in place for a hundred years, even by the most charitable estimate of its beginnings.

The emergence of the Cosmological Standard Model also coincides with the emergence of what has been called “Big Science” — large research projects administered by universities, staffed with professors, and funded by government grants. This has resulted a systematic application of the most advanced technology to scientific problems. It is to be expected that the higher energies continuously being employed in high energy physics will result in the emergence of profound anomalies, but some researchers seem to be genuinely surprised that things have not quite gone as planned with the gradual and seamless revelation of the truth of the subatomic world as well as the world of cosmological times and distances.

The date at which the cosmological standard model begins is an interesting question that points to important presuppositions. Are we to date it from Einstein, or from the advent of quantum theory, or from the emergence of the standard model in particle physics, or from some more recent date of scientific synthesis? The question is not irrelevant. For those within the community, developments that appear to be epochal revolutions appear to outsiders as subtle shifts in theoretical models that can only be understood by initiates. There is a real theoretical question here at stake as to what constitutes gradualism and what constitutes a theoretical revolution.

This is important because it speaks to the role of uniformitarianism in science. In several recent posts in which I have discussed the philosophical presuppositions of science, I always mention uniformitarianism, but uniformitarianism, while it still has some normative role to play in science, has been under siege both in terms of theory and practice.

On the theoretical side, there is the great interest in revolutionary science that has emerged since the publication of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It would be difficult to overestimate the influence that this book has had on the philosophy and history of science. In fact, its influence as been such that it may have changed the practice of science itself by changing the philosophical presuppositions of science. This would be an interesting line of research that I will not pursue at present.

On the side of scientific practice, the emergence of punctuated equilibrium in paleontology has also had a profound influence that has reverberated far beyond the bones of dinosaurs and fossils of trilobites. S. J. Gould, who with Niles Eldridge, was a pioneer of punctuated equilibrium, wrote an early essay carefully parsing four different senses of uniformitarianism. I have been meaning to get a copy of this essay in order to study is carefully (“Is Uniformitarianism Necessary?”), but I haven’t done this yet.

Uniformitarianism, of course, was disproportionately influential and geology and related sciences, because it was the basis of Lyell’s Principles of Geology, and Lyell was a major influence on Darwin in turn. Darwin’s gradualism is an expression of uniformitarianism, and this is one reason that punctuated equilibrium made such a splash when it was first proposed. It looked like a revolutionary development in evolutionary systematics. Was it? Or was it a minor adjustment in the overall model of evolution as laid down by Darwin, so that we can say that evolution since 1859 has been “normal science,” and at no point interrupted by a revolutionary development?

It could similarly be argued that physics has been “normal science” since Einstein, or it could be plausibly argued that the discipline has been rocked by one revolution after another.

Darwin and Einstein both perfectly exemplify several important features of science that stand out in particularly sharp outline because of the revolutionary influence of their own work. Both were aware of the revolutionary character of their work and downplayed it in order to minimize the challenge to the normal science of their day. I discussed this in Radical Theories, Modest formulations.

Darwin and Einstein also both exemplify something that has almost become extinct. In a couple of posts I made a distinction between The Heroic Conception of Civilization and The Iterative Conception of Civilization. Civilizations are the context in which science is pursued, and so there is a heroic conception of science and an iterative conception of science. Darwin and Einstein perfectly exemplify the heroic conception of science — working alone, essentially isolated from the larger scientific community, because their work was so radically different than that which preceded it, but managing despite this isolation to complete a theoretical masterpiece that would transform human thought.

In the past, before the industrial revolution, even “normal science” was practiced as heroic science, and it is a credit to Western history that many of the greatest men of European history have been scientists. Even those without any knowledge of the history of science can name Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, among others.

Today, almost all science is practiced according to the iterative conception of science. And a great deal is at stake: millions of dollars, thousands of scientists, hundreds of universities, scores of nation-states. It is no wonder that people think twice before presenting theories or data that contravene this institution (or, rather, institutions). Foucault once wrote that physicians are the strategists of life and death, and that is why they play the role that they do in contemporary life. We could also say that scientists are the strategists of the life and death of industrial-technological civilization…

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Addendum on the Fermi Paradox

Saturday

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A few days ago in Why the Fermi paradox must be taken seriously I attempted to demonstrate that the technology of any peer civilizations extant in the Milky Way would have singled out the earth as an interesting place to visit and thus would likely have made us the target of alien exploration if advanced peer civilizations existed in the Milky Way.

I neglected to mention that, to a certain extent, this applies even to nearby galaxies, although the farther away the galaxy we reference, the more difficult it would be to obtain the scientific knowledge of the earth at a distance, and the more difficult it would be to travel. But difficulty is not impossibility, and if we contemplate the possibility of very old peer civilizations in the universe, their technology would be so advanced that the difficulties would be reduced.

It is one of my dissatisfactions with most books on astrobiology, exobiology, SETI, and space travel that they implicitly confine their scope to the Milky Way galaxy without explicitly acknowledging this restriction. Of course, the Milky Way galaxy is a very big place, but in the several posts in which I have referenced the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image (which has been called “the most important image you will ever see”), when we consider the universe on a very large scale, galaxies fill the sky like the familiar stars filling our night sky. The Milky Way is a very big place, but the universe is a much bigger place, and we must understand the Milky Way in the context of the universe.

The nearest large galaxy to us (excepting the Magellanic Clouds) is the Andromeda Galaxy, which is an elegant spiral galaxy larger than the Milky Way. In the fullness of time, the Andromeda spiral galaxy and the Milky way galaxy will collide, the supermassive black holes at the center of each galaxy will eventually merge, and a new and even larger galaxy will be born from the collision. But that will be a very long time from now.

In the meantime, the Andromeda galaxy is about two and half million light years from us. That means that any observation of the earth from Andromeda would be two and a half million years old. While this is a long time ago for us, in geologic terms it is not all that long ago. While a peer civilization in the Milky Way would experience a lookback time of not more than 100,000 years, bringing observations to the time of the emergence of homo sapiens, the lookback time from the Andromeda galaxy would bring the observer back to a time when several hominid species were ranging around Africa. This corresponds roughly to the time of the emergence of homo habilis and the beginning of tool use among hominids. While this time scale means a lot to us, the biosphere then and now is almost identical, and to an advanced peer civilization then and now on the earth would look pretty much the same. The earth would still be positively brimming with life and therefore a very interesting place to visit.

Assuming only advanced technology and no exceptions to the laws of physics, a starship launched from the Andromeda galaxy would take at least two and a half million years to arrive, but due to time dilation at relativistic velocities, hardy explorers could make the trip in a single lifetime. Somewhere I read (I can’t recall exactly where) that a starship accelerating at the relatively modest rate of 32 feet per second (which has the added value of providing artificial gravity onboard) would only experience about 24 years of elapsed time on the ship during a voyage between Andromeda and the Milky Way. If we were to combine this sort of feasible travel technology with induced hibernation, it is entirely plausible that a group of explorers could travel between galaxies. And the closer one approximates the speed of light, the greater the time dilation, so for explorers there would be a strong incentive to “push the envelope” as it were.

Again, this involves some very advanced engineering, but it doesn’t violate any known laws of physics, and the technology involved is at least comprehensible to us, even if we aren’t in a position to build it ourselves any time soon.

Now, you might ask why anyone would leave behind their world by two and a half million years in order to go to another galaxy. In the books I have been reading lately I have found that several authors are remarkably sanguine about this, and confidently predict that robotic exploration would be so much more preferable to actual exploration by conscious agents that the latter possibly is simply set aside. For example, I have found this more or less to be the implicit viewpoint of Timothy Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way, of Michio Kaku in The Physics of the Future, and of Paul Davies in The Eerie Silence.

I don’t buy this at all. Just as there are, in our contemporary civilization, many people who enjoy the comforts of home, there are always a few people who climb mountains. And, similarly, when the technology is available, many people will continue to enjoy the comforts of home, but there will always be those who are so driven by the need to explore that they will leave behind home and family and indeed the entire world that they know in order see to what lies beyond the horizon. It is perfectly reasonable to me that a group of explorers might choose to leave behind the Andromeda galaxy merely for the purpose of investigating an interesting planet in the Milky Way. In fact, I might choose to do this myself, were it a viable option.

As we consider galaxies and possible peer civilizations at a further reach, beyond the local group and the local cluster of galaxies, the possibilities of relativistic time dilation continue to make exploration possible on an inter-galactic scale, but it would become much more difficult to find interesting planets at this distance, even with techniques like gravitational lensing. However, as we have seen, difficulty is not the same thing as impossibility.

However, another factor comes into play as we move further away from the Milky Way. While those on board a very fast intergalactic starship (approximating while never achieving the speed of light) would experience very little time, time outside this starship would elapse at the accustomed rate, and that means that the more distant the galaxy, the longer ago in time a ship would have to have been launched.

The problem with this, and the problem with much SETI research, is a failure to engage with the anthropic cosmological principle, which seems to be concerned with human existence, but is equally valid (in its valid forms, that is) for any organic conscious agents that emerge according to the laws of nature and natural selection. The farther away we consider, the further back we go in time, and the further back we go in time, the less the universe has evolved toward its present state. At much earlier states of cosmic evolution the elements requisite for peer life, and most especially for peer industrial-technological civilizations, simply do not exist.

A solar system that could support peer industrial-technological civilization would have to have formed after the heavier elements had been formed inside stars from earlier stellar populations, since the only way you can get elements like iron and uranium from an initial stage of hydrogen is, over the course of galactic evolution, for these elements to be cooked up inside successive generations to stars, and then ejected into the universe by way of supernovas. These elements then go on to form solar systems that include the kind of metals that are required for industrial-technological civilization. This takes many generations of stars. As a result, if you have far enough back in time, you arrive at a time before these generations of stars have elapsed, and therefore the conditions for peer civilizations do not exist.

There is a cosmological window in the natural history of the universe for industrial-technological civilizations to emerge. We cannot yet state with any precision how long this window persists, or when it starts. Almost certainly there could be peer civilizations a million or more years old in the universe, but somewhere there is a limit older than which a civilization in our universe could not be. Thus when SETI researchers confidently speak of civilizations millions years old, I am immediately skeptical. It is not impossible, but the further back in time you go, the less possible it becomes.

It is worthwhile to think about this in more detail, as it also has consequences for the Fermi paradox. If we regard it as a mere matter of chance when an industrial-technological civilization emerges from its organic origins — which, it seems to me, is something we must acknowledge in the spirit of methodological naturalism — then it is just as likely that our civilization just happens to be to first such to emerge in the Milky Way, on perhaps even in the local group of galaxies, as it is that we are not the first. Of course, this is not a function or mere chance — it is chance constrained by the anthropic cosmological principle, as well as chance constrained by natural selection. But this is only a rough formulation. An adequate formulation would take more time and more thought.

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Why the Fermi paradox must be taken seriously

Wednesday

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Recently in several discussions of futurism I have discussed the disappointments of failed futurology, and in Synchronicities of Futurism I touched on the ways in which some futurologists themselves see their predictions in unrealistically rosy hindsight even while the rest of us are laughing at how utterly wrong they have been.

Retro-futurism has become a source of camp humor. In its steampunk and tubepunk forms it is a force in popular culture.

Futurology often takes the form of extrapolating particular technologies (this is especially Michio Kaku’s method in The Physics of the Future), and what is most dissatisfying in this is that a linear extrapolation of existing technologies usually gives a very wrong impression of the future by emphasizing technologies that stalled or never reached a mass market, while failing to anticipate technologies that emerged rapidly and changed the ordinary business of life.

The futue that hasn't happened... yet.

Everyone snickers about failed predictions of jet packs and flying cars for everyone; just as significant was the failure to predict the emergence of high technology during the same period that was supposed to have jet packs and flying cars. Another failed prediction — though really only an implicit prediction, so it would perhaps be more accurate to call it a failed assumption — was less tied to the economics of the mass market, and that was the failure to predict the rapid increase in scientific knowledge of the universe while simultaneously predicting space travel scenarios that did not come to pass. (We might call this epistemic futurism.)

No one predicted the unbiquity of the cell phone, much less the iPhone.

Last November in Conformal Cyclic Cosmology I made the following observations:

In several of my posts on cosmology I have called attention to the ingenious methods employed by astronomers to find and to learn about exoplanets, i.e., planets outside our solar system, orbiting other stars. Most recently this ingenuity has even revealed a planet of extra-galactic origin, which is an exciting development. If you read science fiction novels or watch science fiction films, the idea was always that we would never know anything about exoplanets until we could eventually go there, either ourselves or with a probe. But astronomers have found ways to see things far beyond our solar system, and we can only expect this knowledge to increase with time. By the time we make it out among the stars, we will know well in advance what is out there.

Even as I write this innovative ways are being pursued that increase our scientific knowledge of the wider universe even as we remain a planet-bound species. This development of scientific knowledge beyond what we expected in the recent past (by which I mean the late twentieth century) has interesting implications for SETI and the Fermi paradox.

An exoplanet discovered orbiting a star in the Helmi stream -- stars now associated with the Milky Way, but which formerly were an independent galaxy -- has demonstrated and planetary systems are not unique to the stars of the Milky Way.

We must assume that any peer civilization — and by “peer civilization” I mean some other civilization that has raised itself to a level of industrial-technological development, such that if it is older than human civilization it will be more advanced in its industrial-technological development — has experienced similar developments. What this means in this context is that not only will we know a lot about any extrasolar planets we might explore long before we get to them, but also that any alien species (belonging to a peer civilization) will know a lot about any extrasolar planets that they will explore, and they will know this long before they engage in exploration.

The easiet extrasolar planets to find are 'hot Jupiters' -- gas giants very close to a star -- but discovering smaller, rocky planets will become practical as technology and instrumentation improves.

Since the conception of SETI as a process of elimination is demonstrating to us a gradual unrolling of the unlikelihood of peer civilizations nearby us in the Milky Way, the longer this process continues, and the larger the human electromagnetic footprint in the Milky Way becomes, the more industrial-technological peer civilizations begin to appear rare. It will be the next step in the technology of discovering extrasolar planets to be able to say whether or not they are likely to host life. Once we reach this level of scientific investigation, the process of elimination can not only eliminate peer industrial-technological civilization, but also peer life.

Though the films featuring the 'predator' alien make an effort to exhibit the otherness of the other, the predator alien represents a peer civilization, recognizable as such to us.

Any advanced peer civilization in the Milky Way will have a surprisingly thorough knowledge of the galaxy before it has the technological means to explore the galaxy in a similarly thorough fashion. Since a peer civilization would be the result of peer or near-peer life, and would therefore be subject to similar (though not identical) ambitions and motivations, we must suppose that such representatives of a peer civilization would have singled out our earth as a place to visit that would likely enjoy a high degree of priority in exploration.

Gravitational lensing can be used to view extremely distant objects.

The Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years in diameter, means that if it were possible for an alien peer civilization within the Milky Way to view the earth by means of some long-distance technique like gravitational lensing, the information that they obtain would be no more than 100,000 years old. That is to say, at the outside, they would be able to see the earth at about the same time that homo sapiens branched off from our next-nearest hominid ancestor. That is an outside figure. Any closer observations would yield more recent data. In any case, the earth within the last 100,000 years would betray itself as an island in space positively brimming with life, therefore an interesting place to visit, therefore likely to be an early priority for a peer civilization in its exploration of the Milky Way.

Thus we come to the paradoxicality of the Fermi paradox: if there are aliens, where are they? If there are no aliens at all, there is no paradox, but if there are aliens, one must provide some explanation as to why there is no evidence of them. Because of the growth of scientific knowledge that we have experienced in our own civilization, and which would presumably hold for peer industrial-technological species and their civilizations, the burden of explanation increases. If one does not resolve the paradox by denying other industrial-technological civilizations, one must explain why an advanced civilization would not make a priority of exploring a world as brimming with life as the earth.

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Please see the continuation of this line of thought in Addendum on the Fermi Paradox.

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Methodological Naturalism and the Eerie Silence

Sunday

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Recently in Silent Worlds, Empty Worlds I mentioned that I was listening to Paul Davies’ book The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, and this is the “eerie silence” to which I refer in the title of this post. Since that earlier post, I’ve listened through Davies’ a couple of times and also consulted the print version.

While listening to Davies’ book it occurred to me that a skeptical SETI argument could be formulated on the basis of the methodological naturalism that is the working presupposition of science — and presumably the presupposition of SETI also, if indeed SETI is a science.

The argument would run like this: the remarkable success of science in describing and explaining the world from the scientific revolution of the early modern period to today is predicated upon methodological naturalism. If this methodological naturalism was an invalid presupposition, then science so predicated would never have been the wildly successful enterprise that it has been. But Science has been successful, and methodological naturalism has therefore proved itself.

Given the power of the intelligence to completely transform the environment in which it lives, as human beings have transformed the surface of the earth, an advanced extraterrestrial civilization that had managed to survive in the long term and to propagate itself at least within the confines of its solar system (as we have done to a limited extent) or perhaps also across interstellar distances, it would be the case that such an alien civilization would have transformed the environment throughout the region of space in which its influence held sway.

If any alien intelligence were to make a careful scientific study of our solar system, from the point of view of methodological naturalism certain anomalies would arise that could not be explained by purely naturalistic processes. The more detailed the study, the more anomalies would emerge. If the vast and cool and unsympathetic alien scientist got around to studying the surface of the earth, this scientist would eventually have to conclude that intelligence was at work, because natural processes could not plausibly account for cities, radio communications, and the other manifestations of technological civilization.

Similarly, when our scientists study other regions of the galaxy, methodological naturalism has proved to be a sure guide in understanding what we see. If large regions of space had been transformed under the influence of alien technology, anomalies would emerge in naturalistic explanations, and the more we looked, the more anomalies we would find. In fact, we do not find anomalies that can only be explained by recourse to explanations based upon intelligent intervention.

Michio Kaku wrote in his Physics of the Future how Kurzweil told him that he hoped to see the evidence of the technological singularity in the night sky:

“Kurzweil once told me that when he gazes at the distant stars at night, perhaps one should be able to see some cosmic evidence of the singularity happening in some distant galaxy. With the ability to devour or rearrange whole star systems, there should be come footprint left behind by this rapidly expanding singularity.”

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100, Michio Kaku, 2011, Chapter 2, Future of AI: Rise of the Machines, p. 102

I have been rather critical of Kurzweil in other posts, but in this, he is correct: if anything like the technological singularity took place in the form that its expositors have given to it, we should be able to see portions of the cosmos transformed under the aspect of intelligence — sub specie intellectus.

Since this is precisely what we do not see, this constitutes a further example of what I recently called SETI as a Process of Elimination: as the scope and sophistication of our search for extraterrestrial intelligence increases over time and we continue to fail to find evidence of the same, in true inductive fashion this does not mean that we have proved that extraterrestrial intelligence and civilization does not exist, but we can exclude it from certain areas that have been searched, and the more we search the more regions of the cosmos can be declared free of peer civilizations.

In the case of the technological singularity, with its ability to reproduce itself and improve itself with each generation, thus issuing in escalating and even exponential growth, the “footprint” of obvious intelligent order wherever a technological singularity has emerged in the universe ought to be prominent and rapidly growing. We can say of intelligent machines as Fermi said of aliens: Where are they?

In the formulations of the some of the expositors of the technological singularity the effects of the singularity sound frighteningly similar to Stalinist gigantism, and if this is the case then the footprint of a technological singularity ought to be as visible as an enormous and vulgar Palace of the Soviets — a beacon to the cosmos of the paradise of the machines. Of course, machines may have better taste than earth-bound tyrannies.

An important note: in the bigger picture, the emergence of intelligence as the result of natural processes (as has happened on the earth) is itself a natural process, and the order the intelligence imposes upon its environment as as “natural” as that intelligence itself. However, we know that naturally occurring forms of order differ strikingly from forms of order imposed by intelligence. We know this intuitively, but it is extraordinarily difficult to give an explicit account of it.

If you travel to an unfamiliar place and look out over the landscape, you will likely know immediately whether or not other human beings make their home there: the presence of human habitation alters the landscape. Also, most of us are familiar with what wilderness looks like, and it does look anything like civilization.

Exactly what the difference is between what we might call organic forms of order on the one hand, and on the other hand mechanistic forms of order, however obvious it may be on an intuitive level, is something that we might reasonably expect from a philosophy of technology.

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Beyond the Big Bang

Saturday

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The cover story on this month’s issue of Scientific American is Does the Multiverse Really Exist?, and the BBC has also had a story on the same, ‘Multiverse’ theory suggested by microwave background. Here is the opening paragraph of the Scientific American story:

“In the past decade an extraordinary claim has captivated cosmologists: that the expanding universe we see around us is not the only one; that billions of other universes are out there, too. There is not one universe—there is a multiverse. In Scientific American articles and books such as Brian Greene’s latest, The Hidden Reality, leading scientists have spoken of a super-Copernican revolution. In this view, not only is our planet one among many, but even our entire universe is insignificant on the cosmic scale of things. It is just one of countless universes, each doing its own thing”

It is typical for contemporary scientific thought to present this as a new idea, notwithstanding several thousand years of philosophical tradition investigating the infinity of worlds, as it is equally typical to cite a recent book on the topic rather than to acknowledge the theoretical underpinnings of the idea that go back to the earliest works of the Western tradition. I mentioned similar considerations not long ago in a post about Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.

The BBC story ‘Multiverse’ theory suggested by microwave background by Jason Palmer references the paper First Observational Tests of Eternal Inflation by Feeney, Johnson, Mortlock, and Peiris. Here’s the abstract of the paper:

The eternal inflation scenario predicts that our observable universe resides inside a single bubble embedded in a vast inflating multiverse. We present the first observational tests of eternal inflation, performing a search for cosmological signatures of collisions with other bubble universes in cosmic microwave background data from the WMAP satellite. We conclude that the WMAP 7-year data do not warrant augmenting ACDM with bubble collisions, constraining the average number of detectable bubble collisions on the full sky N_s < 1:6 at 68% CL. Data from the Planck satellite can be used to more definitively test the bubble collision hypothesis.

First Observational Tests of Eternal Inflation by Feeney, Johnson, Mortlock, and Peiris

This is from the second paragraph of the paper:

Eternal inflation is ubiquitous in theories with extra dimensions (string theory being the primary example) and positive vacuum energy. However, testing this scenario is extremely difficult since eternal inflation is a pre-inflationary epoch: any signals from outside of our bubble would naively appear to be stretched to unobservable super-horizon scales. While this is in general true, one prospect for probing this epoch lies in the observation of the collisions between vacuum bubbles. These collisions produce inhomogeneities in the inner-bubble cosmology, raising the possibility that their effects are imprinted in the cosmic microwave background

I find these recent developments in cosmology both welcome and troubling. It is welcome because the time in long overdue to give serious consideration to theories that do not limit the universe to that generated from the Big Bang (as cosmologists once limited the universe only to the Milky Way galaxy, and before that to our solar system), and it is troubling because the way in which these developments are presented confirms much that I have written recently about Fashionable Anti-Philosophy in science.

From the origins of the Big Bang model up until very recently, it was commonplace among scientists to assert that space and time began with the big bang, and that it was meaningless to speak of the big bang singularity as existing in space or time (this was called the “container theory” of space and time), since space and time (actually, spacetime) was generated by the big bang. To insist upon any other account marked you out as a philosopher and a fool who simply couldn’t understand the scientific concepts involved and the mathematics behind them.

Truly enough, from the point of view of observational cosmology it is meaningless to develop theories of things that can’t be observed, like the interior of singularities, what lies outside the light cone, or what happened before the big bang. But cosmology is not limited to observational cosmology, and physicists routinely theorize about things that can’t be observed, on the hope that they might someday be observed. The “standard model” of particle physics has been looking for the Higgs boson for years, and is hopeful that it will be found soon. But this is why we formulate hypotheses: so we have a research program that can focus on finding mechanisms that might explain the things that we can see.

The great scientific and mathematical revolution that supposedly made all this both possible and rational was the idea of the finite and unbounded universe that was bent around on itself, like the surface of the earth, so that even though there is no edge to the cosmos, that does not mean that it is infinite. There is no edge because there is no boundary, and there is no boundary because the universe is finite and unbounded. The elliptical geometry of Reimann, adapted by Einstein as the setting for General Relativity, gave a precise mathematical expression to this idea. But the advocates of the finite and unbounded universe carefully avoided explaining the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic curvature, and with a little bit of ambiguity they were able to pretend that the universe was expanding into nothingness without giving an account of this nothingness.

A typical expression of this attitude, in the form of an aside, comes from J. J. Callahan, in discussing his motivation for writing his frequently cited paper, “The Curvature of Space in a Finite Universe” (Scientific American, Volume 235, Number 2, August, 1976). Callahan said the paper grew:

“…out of an attempt to explain Einstein’s concept of a finite but unbounded space to my nonscientific colleagues at Smith. They found it tough going, and some simply dismissed a finite universe as impossible, because Kant had done so when he studied the question 300 years ago.”

Apart from a misrepresentation of Kant, Callahan’s “non-scientific colleagues” are caricatured as mere simpletons who can’t hack mathematical and scientific ideas (it was “tough going” for them), and not people who had genuine intuitions of the how the universe is put together but were unable to express them with the same blinding simplicity of the big bang model producing a finite and unbounded universe.

I am not the only one to have noticed this systematic ambiguity in recent cosmology. I found this amusingly acerbic quote in The Ontology and Cosmology of Non-Euclidean Geometry:

“The closest we seem to have come to a more open consideration of these matters is when both Stephen Hawking and Karl Popper [Karl Popper, Unended Quest, Open Court, 1990; p.16] point out that Einstein, whether or not he successfully answered Kant’s Antinomy of Space, did not answer the Antinomy of Time: despite decades of everyone glorifying in the philosophical revelation of a finite but unbounded universe, they simply didn’t notice that the solution proposed for space didn’t work with time. It is to Hawking’s great philosophical credit that he faces this question squarely.”

The author here has been more charitable to Hawking than I would be, as Hawking has been prominent among those who have ridiculed what he sees as the simple-mindedness of philosophers in insisting upon answers to their questions about a universe with this geometrical structure. Morevoer, I would maintain that the “philosophical revelation of a finite but unbounded universe” doesn’t even offer a solution to the problem of space, much less time, much less spacetime.

So I am happy to see cosmologists extending their scope and trying to get outside the confines of the big bang model, but I continue to be distressed that they continue to ridicule the philosophical underpinnings of their own ideas, and that they will go through a lot of needless duplication of labor in coming up with ideas that have been worked through time and again. But, if you’re aiming at research dollars to build the latest, greatest superconducting supercollider, or the biggest and most sensitive radio telescope, it isn’t going to pull much weight with the grant writing committees or the grant granting institutions themselves to tell them you’ll be spending the next few years in a library reading old books in order to refine your concepts to the point that they might suggest a research program.

Physicists and cosmologists seem to belong to the Field of Dreams school of thought, pursuing a “if we build it, they will come” strategy in research, with “they” being discoveries, suitably celebrated in the headlines of newspapers.

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