Kantian Critters

Tuesday

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The Transcendental Aesthetic and the Finding of

Other Minds in Other Species

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An extrapolation of the “problem of other minds” to other species

What philosophers call “the problem of other minds” is closely related to what philosophers call the “mind-body problem” (both fall within philosophy of mind), and both are paradigmatic metaphysical questions that have been with philosophy from the beginning. Lately I’ve written a good deal about the mind-body problem on my other blog (e.g., in Naturalism and the Mind, Of Distinctions Weak and Strong, Of Distinctions, Principled and Otherwise, Cartesian Formalism, etc.), and this has got me to thinking about the problem of other minds.

I have never found the idea of other minds in other species to be in the least problematic. When you look into the eyes of another living being, whether human being or other being, you are well aware of the moment of mutual recognition, and you are equally well aware at that moment of mutual recognition that you are sharing that moment with another consciousness (that is to say, you experience a social temporality).

In The Eye of the Other I wrote:

It is when we look into the eye of the other that we recognize the consciousness of the other. Even if we feel that the reality of other minds is beyond philosophical demonstration, even if we are skeptics of other minds, it would be extraordinarily difficult to look into the eyes of another and not experience that immediate reaction of recognition of another mind. When we look not only into the eyes of another being but also into the eyes of another species, there is simultaneously the recognition of the awareness of the other and of the alien nature of that awareness.

Some people feel obliged to deny this inter-species recognition of common consciousness on ideological grounds, although few ever think of speciesism as a ideology. As I have recently observed in relationship to geopolitics, which I characterized as an ideology that does not know itself to be an ideology, so too with speciesism: for many it is simply an unexamined presupposition and is never formalized as an explicit article of belief.

While I myself don’t find anything in the least problematic about consciousness in other species, and I think that anyone that takes a naturalistic point of view would be hard-pressed to deny it, I cannot deny that there are some persons who feel a real sense of moral horror in recognizing the consciousness of other species. I am fully aware of this moral horror, and I am utterly unsympathetic to it. To paraphrase Freud on the “oceanic” feeling, I am unable to discover this moral horror in myself.

Some of those who are uncomfortable with the ascription of consciousness to other species simply don’t like animals, and some of those similarly disposed are just completely uninterested in animals and find it peculiar that some human beings seem to be closer to their dogs and cats than they are to other human beings. Such persons sometimes become visibly discomfited at any mention of Johnson’s Hodge or Greyfriars Bobby or Hachikō, all memorialized by statues. I have personally heard individuals of this particular temperament indignantly lecture others (myself included) on the dangers of anthropomorphizing our companion animals. If I were to be so lectured today, I would lecture right back on anthropic bias in the philosophy of mind, which is utterly out of place and unbecoming of a philosopher (which in this instance includes anyone who makes, or who implies, philosophical assertions about mind, specifically, denying mind to certain classes of existents).

Such persons often live in an exclusively human world, and to them the animal world seems inexplicably alien. This in itself is an implicit recognition of an animal world, that is to say, a world constituted by animal consciousness. But, of course, not all who deny consciousness to other species can be so pigeon-holed. Some who have completely succumbed to anthropic bias in the philosophy of mind are in no sense living in an exclusively human world, and certainly when the dogma of human exceptionalism in consciousness gained currency, long before our industrial-technological civilization freed us from animal muscle power as the motive force of civilization, almost everyone lived intimately with animals.

In this latter context, prior to industrialization, there was always a theological overlay to the denial of consciousness to other species. Indeed, it is very likely that, if the terms of the philosophical problem of other minds were carefully explained, those with a theological world view might well without hesitation grant consciousness of other species, and simply deny they other species possess a “soul,” which is simply a theologically-legitimized devalorization. In practice, it comes to much the same as the denial of consciousness to other species and a sedulous distinction between the human and the animal realms.

I observed in The Origins of Physicalism that Cartesianism was the original “mechanical philosophy,” and while Cartesianism in the time of Descartes and immediately afterward incorporated human exceptionalism into the philosophy (i.e., it institutionalized anthropic bias in the philosophy of mind), the logical extrapolation of the theory was evident, and what the Cartesians practised upon other species later philosophers in the mechanistic tradition came to practise also upon human beings: the denial of consciousness.

Today we have a school of thought that is not exactly the denial of consciousness but rather the revaluation, or, better, the devaluation of consciousness, which latter is called a “user illusion” — at least, in techno-philosophy the denial of consciousness is called the “user illusion.” In traditional philosophy, the denial of the existence of consciousness is called “eliminativism,” since instead of seeking to reduce consciousness to something else that is not consciousness (and thereby exemplifying reductivism), eliminativism cuts the Gordian Knot and simply denies that there is any such thing as consciousness — meaning that there is nothing to be “explained away.” I am sure that I am not the only one who finds this to be a thoroughly unsatisfying “solution” to a perennial philosophical problem.

How then are we to understand the minds of other species, i.e., the problem of other minds as generalized to include non-human species? What philosophical framework exists that can provide a conceptual infrastructure for such an understanding? There are many possibilities, but today I would like to consider a Kantian approach.

If we take as the lesson of Kant’s transcendental aesthetic that the mind is being continually bombarded by a riot of sensations from all the various bodily sensory organs, and that the mind then constitutes a kind of conceptual sieve that shapes, channels and directs the mass of sensory experience into something coherent upon which an organism can act, we can recognize that much the same process occurs in other species. All mammals have more or less similar bodies and similar sensory endowments, so that all living mammals are constantly being bombarded by a riot of sensations which each creature must sort into coherent experience. The fact that we can play fetch with a dog, and both successfully interact in one and the same world, simultaneously recognizing the stick at the center of the game as an object that passes between two or more organism involved in a game of fetch, suggests that we and the dog constitute and cognize the world in a remarkably similar fashion.

The dog, like us, is receiving sensory signals from his eyes, ears, nose, and so forth, as well as experiencing kinesthetic sensations from the movement of his body as he exerts himself in lunging after the stick. From all of this sensation the dog successfully distills a world, and that world is remarkably similar to our world.

A few years ago I had an interesting experience that bears directly on games of fetch and shared experience, when I had an opportunity to feel what it was like to be a dog among dogs. I was at a vacation house on a river, and had brought my wetsuit along so I could swim. The river is fed by snow melt from Mt. Hood and it is one of the coldest rivers in which I have ever been swimming. I put on my wetsuit and got into the water just as others were beginning to play fetch with a large black lab that they had brought along. They threw a stick into the frigid waters of the river, and the lab plunged into to fetch the stick. The next time the stick was thrown I started swimming toward it the same time that the lab started swimming toward it. The lab looked at me and instantly saw me as a competitor for the stick. He swam all the harder and made it to the stick before me with an obvious sense of triumphalism.

Of course, most people have had experiences like this in life, and some people will dismiss such experiences as readily as Descartes dismissed his correspondent’s stories attempting to prove that animals are not mere mechanisms. However we interpret such experiences, we share and interact in a common world. Although this is utterly contrary to the spirit of Kant, I have to observe that any animal that could not distill coherent experience of the world out of its mass of sensation would never survive. Evolution selects for those organisms that can best hunt or avoid being prey in the common world in which predator and prey interact. This is a naturalistic point of view, whereas Kant’s point of view was decidedly that of idealism.

Even if one rejects Kant’s idealism, as I do, there seems to me to be some residual value in the idea of the mind being involved in the constitution of experience. I think that Kant was right that we have certain a priori intuitions that order our experience, but I think that this was much more fluid and pluralistic than Kant’s exposition of the transcendental aesthetic allows. While I wrote above that mammals all have a relatively similarly experience of the world, a function of a similar sensory and cognitive endowments, I would allow that there is some important variation. Sight plays a very large role in how human beings cognize the world; smell plays a disproportionate role in how dogs cognize the world; sound plays a disproportionate role in how dolphins cognize the world.

All terrestrial critters of a given level of cognitive complexity have to distill coherent experience of one and the same world out of a mass of sensation, but that mass of sensation differs among different species. I suspect that this sensory difference means that different species also have different a priori conceptions that help them to organize their experience into a coherent whole, and that, just sensory experience differs from species to species, but admits of degrees of greater or less, so too the a priori ideas of distinct species different from species to species but also admit of greater or less similarity. That is to say, smell may shape the world of a dog far more than it shapes our world, but we probably share far more in terms of sensory experience and organizing ideas with a dog than with a marine mammal, and probably we share much more with a marine mammal than with an octopus or other cephalopod. This is a function and an illustration of a point I recently tried to make about the relationship between mind and embodiment.

I tried to make this point in my above referenced post, The Eye of the Other, since when I unexpectedly looked into the eyes of a sealion, a marine mammal, we immediately recognized each other, and in the same moment of recognition also recognized the profound differences between the two of us. Common mammalian minds, differently embodied and living in profoundly different environments, will involve different sensory stimulation, different kinesthetic sensations, and different a priori concepts for organizing experience. But not too different. A shark, with a mind very different from a mammalian mind, can predate marine mammals, so that both sharks and marine mammals interact in the same marine environment just as human beings and tigers interact in the same terrestrial environment.

I suspect that, at least in some senses, the tiger’s mind and the human mind share concepts derived from their common terrestrial environment, while the shark and the marine mammal share concepts derived from the common marine environment, so that a tiger’s mind is more like a human mind than a sea lion’s mind is like a human mind, and, vice versa, a sea lion’s mind is more like a shark’s mind than it is like a human mind. Nevertheless, the human mind and the sea lion mind will share some concepts due to their common mammalian constitution. To employ a Wittgensteinian turn of phrase, the different sensations, concepts, and minds of distinct species overlap and intersect.

The recognition of consciousness in other species is no marginal and recondite inquiry; if, in the fullness of time, we encounter other intelligent species in the universe of extraterrestrial origin, we will need a philosophical framework in which we can integrate the idea of consciousness among other organic species, and if research into artificial intelligence and machine consciousness ever issues in a self-aware mechanism, fashioned by human hands in the same way that we might build a car or a house, we will again require a philosophical framework in which we can integrate the idea of consciousness even more generally, comprehending both naturally-emergent consciousness from organic substrates and artificially emergent consciousness of non-organic substrates.

We need a robust philosophy of mind that does not stagnate in questions of whether there is mind or whether minds can be reduced to other phenomena or eliminated altogether. Such doctrines are — would be — utterly unhelpful in coming to understand what Husserl called the “structures of consciousness.” It is likely that the structures of consciousness vary incrementally among individuals of the same species, vary a little more across distinct species, and will vary even more among minds derived from different sources — different ecosystems and biospheres in the case of organically-originating extraterrestrial minds, and different mechanisms of implementation in the case of inorganically-originating minds of machine consciousness.

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Existential Risk and the Death Event

Friday

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Fourth in a Series on Existential Risk

I traveled to Palermo specifically to see this great fresco of the Triumph of Death.

“The human race’s prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today, when we have become defenceless against ourselves.” Arnold Toynbee, “Man and Hunger” (Speech to the World Food Congress, 04 January 1963, quoted on the Anthropocene Blog)

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Readers, I trust, will be aware of existential risks (as well as global catastrophic risks) since I’ve recently written several recent posts on this topic, including Research Questions on Existential Risk, Six Theses on Existential Risk, Existential Risk Reminder, Moral Imperatives Posed by Existential Risk, Existential Risk and Existential Uncertainty, and Addendum on Existential Risk and Existential Uncertainty. The idea of the “Death Event” is likely to be much less familiar, so I will try to sketch out the idea itself and its relationship to existential risk.

Edith Wyschogrod

The idea of the “death event” is due to philosopher Edith Wyschogrod, and given exposition in her book Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death. Wyschogrod took the title of her book from an aphorism of Wittgenstein’s from 1930: “I once said, perhaps rightly: The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes.”

In defining the scope of the “death event” Wyschogrod wrote:

“I shall define the scope of the event to include three characteristic expressions: recent wars which deploy weapons in the interest of maximum destruction of persons, annihilation of persons, through techniques designed for this purpose (for example, famine, scorched earth, deportation), after the aims of war have been achieved or without reference to war, and the creation of death-worlds, a new and unique form of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life simulating imagined conditions of death, conferring upon their inhabitants the status of the living dead.”

Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985, p. 15.

Wyschogrod’s conception of the “death world,” also given exposition in the text, is introduced in conscious contradistinction to the late Husserlian conception of the “Lifeworld” (Lebenswelt). (Cf. Chapter 1, Kingdoms of Death) I cannot do justice to Wyschogrod’s excellent book in a few quotes, so I will simply encourage the reader to look up the book for himself, but I will give a couple more quotes to locate the “death event” in relation to the larger picture of our civilization. Wyschogrod sees a relation between the “death event” and the peculiar character of industrial-technological civilization:

“The procedures and instruments of death which depend upon the quantification of the qualitied world are innovations deriving from technological society and, to that extent, extend its point of view.”

Op. cit., p. 25

And again,

“…the world of the camps is both distinct from and tied to technological society, so too the nuclear void is embedded in the matrix of technological society but not related to it in simple cause and effect fashion.”

Op. cit., p. 29

Perhaps at some future time I will consider Wyschogrod’s “death event” thesis in relation to what I have called Agriculture and the Macabre, which is the particular relationship between agricultural civilization and death, but whether or not the reader agrees with me or not (or with Wyschogrod, for that matter) I will acknowledge without hesitation that the character of the macabre in agricultural civilization is very different from the place of the death event and the death world in industrial-technological civilization.

Wyschogrod focuses on death camps and industrialized warfare, but of course what shocked the world more than anything were the nuclear bombs that ended the war. A considerable bibliography could be devoted to the books exclusively devoted to the anguished reflection that followed the atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many of them written by and about the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project and made the bomb possible. Many of the most eminent philosophers of the time immediately began to think about the consequences — both contemporaneously and for the longer term human future — of human beings being in possession of nuclear weapons.

Bertrand Russell wrote two books on the possibility of nuclear war, Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare (1959) and Has Man a Future? (1961) Recently in Bertrand Russell as Futurist I discussed Russell’s views on the need for world government in order to prevent the annihilation of human life due to nuclear weapons — a view shared by Albert Einstein.

Karl Jaspers

In 1958 Karl Jaspers published Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen, later translated into English as The Future of Mankind. What all of these works have in common is struggling with what Jaspers called “the new fact.” Of this new fact Jaspers wrote:

“The atom bomb of today is a fact novel in essence, for it leads mankind to the brink of self-destruction.”

Karl Jaspers, The Future of Mankind, Chap. I, p. 1

And…

“the atom bomb is today the greatest of all menaces to the future of mankind… The possible reality which we must henceforth reckon with — and reckon with, at the increasing pace of developments, in the near future — is no longer a fictitious end of the world. It is no world’s end at all, but the extinction of life on the surface of the planet.”

Op. cit., p. 4

The fact that fear of nuclear Armageddon was felt viscerally as an all-too-real possibility for our world points to the fact that this was not merely the appearance of a new idea in human history — new ideas appear every day — but a fundamental shift in feeling. When the awful reality of the Second World War, which saw man-made mass death on an unprecedented scale, received its finale in the form of the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we had acquired a new object for our instinctual fear of annihilation.

The larger meaning of the “death event” — testified not only in Edith Wyschogrod’s explicit formulation, but also in the work of Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, and a hundred others — is that of formal, reflexive consciousness of anthropogenic existential risk. We not only know that we are vulnerable to existential risk, we also know that we know. It is this formal, reflexive self-consciousness of existential risk that is the differentia between human history before the “death event” and human history after the “death event.” The “death event” was a crystallizing event, a particular moment in history that was a watershed for human suffering that placed that suffering in the naturalistic context.

Earlier catastrophes in human experience did not have this character — or, if they did have this character for a few individuals who realized the larger meaning of events, this formal, reflexive consciousness of human vulnerability did not achieve general recognition. Partly this was a consequence of the non-naturalistic and teleological assumptions that were integral with the outlook of earlier epochs of human civilization, before science made a naturalistic conception of the world entire conceivable. If one believes that a supernatural force will intervene to continue to maintain human beings in existence, there is no reason to be concerned with the possibility of human extinction.

The eschatological conception of history is predicated upon the efficacy of supernatural agents.

Prior to industrial-technological civilization (made possible by the scientific revolution, which is particularly relevant in this context), the “end of the world” could only be understood in eschatological terms because eschatologies derived from theological cosmogonies were the only “big picture” accounts of the cosmos that had been formulated and which had achieved any degree of currency. (There have always been non-theological philosophical cosmogonies, but these have remained marginal throughout human history.)

Until science provided an alternative, the only big picture conceptions of the world were traditional cosmogonies, to which the least imaginative among us still recur.

The situation in regard to “big picture” conceptions of the world is closely parallel to that of biology prior to Darwin’s theory of natural selection: there were no strictly biological theories of biology prior to Darwin, only theological theories that were employed to “explain” biological facts. With no alternative to a theological account of biology, it is to be expected that this sole point of view was the universal point of reference, just as where there is no alternative to the theological account of history, this theological account is the sole point of reference in history.

Charles Darwin, in formulating a thorough-going scientific biology, gave the world its first non-theological formulation of biology.

In regard to traditional eschatologies, it would be just as apposite to point out that a supernatural agent might intervene to bring about the end of civilization or the extinction of all human beings (in contradistinction to supernatural interventions intended to be to our benefit), regardless of all human efforts made to preserve themselves and their civilization in existence. The point here is that once we recognize the efficacy of supernatural agents in human history, human agency in shaping the human future cannot be assumed, and in fact the idea of “destiny” (especially in the form of predestination) may come to prevail over conceptions of the future that allow a greater scope to human agency. This is why, in my post The Naturalistic Conception of History, I defined naturalism as “non-human non-agency,” i.e., the absence of supernatural agency.

Four conceptions of history, political, eschatology, cataclysmic, and naturalistic.

To formulate this from the opposite point of view, we could say that it was only the essentially naturalistic assumptions of our own time, assumptions built into the structure of industrial-technological civilization (because it is dependent upon science, and science cannot systematically expand in the way that science has expanded in recent history without the working philosophical presupposition of methodological naturalism), that made it possible for human beings to understand that no deus ex machina was going to emerge at the end of the human drama to save us in spite of our failure to secure our own future.

We once thought that Atlas carried the weight of the world on his shoulders; now we know that we are the ones who carry the world on our shoulders.

Once human beings realized with fearful clarity that they possessed the power to annihilate civilization and possibly also all human life, it is only a small step from this consciousness of human vulnerability to come to a similar consciousness of human vulnerability whether or not the existential threat is anthropogenic or non-anthropogenic. A sufficient number of ill-advised and irreversible choices (choices that result in action or inaction, as the case may be) could mean the extinction of human beings, or the reduction of human activity to a level of insignificance. That is what we now know to be the case, and it shifts a heavy burden of responsibility onto human beings for their own future — a burden that had once been carried on the shoulders of gods.

It is only in the past few decades of contemporary science that we have begun to look at the long antiquity of man with the thought of our existential vulnerability in mind, retrospectively placing our fingers at the nodal points of our past, for there have been many times when we might have all been extirpated before any of the many thresholds of development that have brought us to our present state at which we can adequately conceptualize our existential risk came about.

In this way, existential risk mitigation efforts not only provide a kind of clarity in conceptualizing the human future, especially in so far as we abide by the moral imperatives imposed by existential risk, but also by giving us a novel perspective on the human past.

One of the guiding principles of contemporary thought on existential risk is to focus on those risks that human beings have no record of surviving. In order to make good on this principle, we need to understand what existential risks human beings have survived in the past, and to this end we must acquire a better knowledge of human evolution in a cosmological context, which is, in a sense, the particular concern of astrobiology.

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Grand Strategy and Existential Risk: A Series:

1. Moral Imperatives Posed by Existential Risk

2. Existential Risk and Existential Uncertainty

3. Addendum on Existential Risk and Existential Uncertainty

4. Existential Risk and the Death Event

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Fusion and Consciousness: Technologies of Nature

Saturday

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Fusion: nature got there first

Fusion came very early in the history of the universe, and consciousness came very late in the history of the universe — this pair of natural technologies come so early and so late, respectively, that one could say that they “bookend” cosmological history as the Alpha and Omega of cosmic evolution.

After an initial period of big bang nucleosynthesis in the first twenty minutes of the life of the cosmos, the universe did little in the way of producing more baryonic matter until gravity took over, and the baryonic matter condensed into early stars. Stars began to “light up” about 100 million years after the big bang, which in cosmological terms is not a terribly long time. This “lighting up” of the stars has been said to mark the advent of the stelliferous era.

In the almost 14 billion years of the universe’s history, stars have been shining for all but the first 100 million years — the vast majority of the age of the universe. What this means is that fusion has been around for the vast majority of the history of the universe. Nature innovated fusion technology early on, and fusion has continued to be central to the natural processes of the universe up to the present time and for the foreseeable future.

It has been said that human beings are a solar species. I wrote about this in my post Human Beings: A Solar Species. To say that human beings are a solar species is to say that we are a species dependent upon fusion. All life, and not only our species, is dependent upon the energy generated by fusion, so that fusion is responsible for all (or almost all) subsequent emergent complexity.

Fusion is a basic technology of the universe, a conditio sine qua non of cosmological order and its history. As such, fusion is a robust and durable technology proved over billions of years. Fusion as a natural source of energy is achieved through gravitational containment, and while human technology is not yet in a position to exploit the technology of gravitational containment, we have a very clear idea of its mechanism, as we have sophisticated physical theories to account for it. In other words, we have a good understanding of a technology that is one of the early building blocks of the universe.

Other technologies of nature

It is interesting, in this context, to consider other natural technologies and their place in cosmological natural history. We know, for example, from a 1972 discovery at Gabon, Africa, that fission, like fusion, is a natural technology. At Oklo in Gabon, about 1.7 billion years ago, just the right elements came together with a critical mass of fissionables to produce self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions.

Fissionables are relatively rare, and we know that these heavier elements are created by supernovae, so that natural fission reactors cannot come about until after (at very minimum) generation III stars have gone supernovae and flung their radioactive remnants into the universe. The date of the natural reactor at Gabon makes it quite old, but still not half as old as the earth itself, and nowhere nearly as old as fusion. It has been proposed that there was a “paleo-reactor” on Mars in the distant past, and it is interesting to speculate how widely spread, or how rare, fission technology is in the universe. We will not know until we explore in detail.

Another natural technology of note is life itself. Current biological thought suggests that life emerged on earth not long after the planet began to cool. The Earth is thought to be about 4.54 billion years old, and life may have arisen as much as 3.9 billion years ago. In other words, the Earth has hosted life for much longer than its initial sterility. The earth has, in turn, existed for almost a third as long as the entire universe, so that means that life (at very least on earth, if nowhere else) has been around for a quarter of the age of the known universe. That makes life a well-established and robust natural technology.

A recent paper, Life Before Earth by Alexei A. Sharov and Richard Gordon, suggests that if the complexity of life is extrapolated backward in time we must posit an origin of life at about 9.7 billion years ago, which is almost twice as old as the earth, which suggests in turn that earth was “seeded” with life as soon as its was cool enough to support life, rather than independently arising on Earth. While this thesis is, in my judgment, rather tenuous, its cannot be dismissed out of hand, and if it is correct, it shows life to be an even longer-lived and more durable technology than we now suspect it to be.

Just as we are curious if there have been other naturally occurring fission reactors in the universe, we are intensely interested in the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe: the robust and durable technology of life on earth suggests that this technology may well be replicated elsewhere, as pervasive in the universe, where conditions are right, as fusion technology is pervasive in the universe. The existence of life elsewhere is the cosmos is one of the great scientific questions of our time.

Consciousness: nature got there first, too

In contradistinction to fusion, the technology of consciousness arrives late in the history of the universe. While there were likely rudimentary forms of consciousness prior to the particular forms of mammalian consciousness familiar to us both in ourselves and in the other mammals with whom we often share our lives, and mammalian consciousness is a robust natural technology about 160 million years old (interestingly, not so much more distant from the present as the lighting up of stars was distant from big bang), the intelligent, self-reflective consciousness of human beings seems to be even younger than the bodies of anatomically modern human beings.

The late emergence of consciousness in the history of the universe is interesting in so far as it demonstrates that the universe, even at its present advanced age, is still capable of technological innovation.

In regard to consciousness, we are closing in on the mechanisms of the brain that enable the emergence of consciousness from a material substrate, but, unlike the case with fusion, we have no idea whatsoever what consciousness is and have no theory to account for it. Of course I am aware that many will disagree with me on this — even, if not especially, those scientifically-oriented readers who found themselves nodding over what I wrote above about fusion, and who have convinced themselves of the truth of some reductivist or eliminativist theory of consciousness.

Hugo de Garis, who appeared in the film about Ray Kurzweil, Transcendent Man, said in an interview (Interview with Hugo de Garis: Approaches to AI, Neuroscience, Engineering, Intelligence Theory, Cyborgs interviewed, filmed and edited by Adam A. Ford) that, “…we have ourselves as the existence proof that nature has found a way to [build] a conscious, intelligent creature.” (We could, in the same spirit, say that stars are the existence proof of fusion energy.) This is a perfect evocation of the weak anthropic principle as applied to consciousness and intelligence: we’re here, and we’re conscious, therefore consciousness is possible and the universe is consistent with the emergence of conscious life.

The possibility of conscious knowledge of consciousness

These natural technologies are not just randomly jumbled together, but are in fact closely related. The fusion technology of stars enabled energy production that was exploited by life, which latter grew in complexity until it made possible the even more subtle and complex technology of conscious intelligence. The earliest of these technologies, fusion, we understand well; the latest of these technologies, not surprisingly, still eludes us.

And in saying that a full understanding of consciousness still eludes us, what we are saying is that consciousness so far understands the natural technologies that made itself possible, but it does not yet understand itself in the same way. We may yet attain the full measure of reflexive self-awareness of consciousness when consciousness knows itself in the same way that it understands fusion technology. This will take time, since, as we have noted, consciousness is a youthful technology of nature.

Consciousness may, too, someday become as pervasive in the universe as fusion. Indeed, the fact that we know, that we can see, that fusion is operating everywhere in the known universe, is the first precondition of life, and if life too has been made pervasive by pervasive fusion energy sources, the technology of life may, in the fullness of time, give rise to the technology of conscious intelligence. But consciousness is a late-comer in cosmological order, and has not yet shown itself to be a technology of nature as robust and as durable as fusion. Only the test of time can demonstrate this.

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Philosophy of History in Our Time, Revisited

Friday

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Much of what I write here, whether commenting on current affairs to delving into the depths of prehistory, could be classed under the general rubric of philosophy of history. One of my early posts to this forum was Of What Use is Philosophy of History in Our Time? (An echo of the title of Hans Meyerhoff’s widely available anthology Philosophy of History in Our Time.) It could be argued that my subsequent posts have been attempts to answer this question (that is to say, to answer the question what is the use of philosophy of history in our time), to demonstrate the usefulness of bringing a philosophical perspective to history, contemporary and otherwise. The reader is left to judge whether this attempt has been a success (partial or otherwise) or a failure (partial or otherwise).

In several recent posts — as, for example in The Science of Time, Addendum on Big History as the Science of Time, and Human Agency and the Exaptation of Selection, inter alia — I have been writing a lot about the philosophy of history from the perspective of big history, which is a contemporary historiographical school that comes to history from the perspective of the big picture and primarily proceeds according to scientific naturalism. This latter condition makes of big history a particular species of naturalism.

In many posts to this forum I have emphasized my own naturalistic perspective both in philosophy generally speaking as well as more specifically in the philosophy of history. For example, in posts such as Natural History and Human History, The Continuity of Civilization and Natural History, and An Existentialist Philosophy of History, I have emphasized the continuity of human history and natural history, especially making the attempt to place civilization in a natural historical context.

This emphasis on big history and naturalism has meant that I have spent very little time writing about alternatives to naturalistic historical thought — with a certain exception, which the reader may well not immediately recognize, so I will point it out explicitly. In several posts — The Ethos of Formal Thought, Foucault’s Formalism, Cartesian Formalism, and Formal Strategy and Philosophical Logic: Work in Progress among them — I have discussed the possibility of formal thought in relation to historical understanding, i.e., topics not usually discussed from a formal perspective (which is usually confined to logic, mathematics, and some branches of science). Formalism represents a certain kind of countervailing intellectual influence to naturalism, and it has probably served roughly that function in my thought.

I have previously mentioned Darren Staloff’s lectures on the philosophy of history, The Search for a Meaningful Past: Philosophies, Theories and Interpretations of Human History. One of the motifs running through Staloff’s lectures is a contrast between what he calls naturalism and idealism. He sums up this motif in the final lecture, in which he adopts the perspectives of naturalism and idealism in turn, trying give the listener a sense of the claims of each tradition. I found Staloff’s exposition of idealism less persuasive that his exposition of naturalism, and so I found the motif of a contrast between naturalism and idealism a bit strained, since it seemed to me that idealism really couldn’t carry its own weight in the way that it might have been able to in the past.

Recently I’ve encountered an approach to the philosophy of history that could be called “idealist” (at least in a certain sense), and this is much more persuasive to me that Staloff’s analytical representatives of the idealist tradition, like R. G. Collingwood. I have found this idealist perspective in the work of Ludwig Landgrebe, who was one of Husserl’s research assistants.

The casual reader of this blog might well have picked up on the amount of contemporary continental philosophy that I have read, but it unlikely to have realized the extent to which Edmund Husserl and phenomenology have been an influence on my thought. Nevertheless, that influence has been profound, to the point that many of Husserl’s expositors and commentators have also influenced my thinking. Recently I have been reading some essays by Ludwig Landgrebe, and this has started to give me another perspective on the philosophy of history.

Landgrebe wrote at least two papers on the philosophy of history, as well as one chapter of his book, Major Problems in Contemporary European Philosophy, from Dilthey to Heidegger. No doubt there is more material, but this is what I have found translated into English. (Landgrebe wrote an entire book on the phenomenological philosophy of history, Phänomenologie und Geschichte, but this has not been translated into English.) The two papers are “Phenomenology as Transcendental Theory of History” (which can be found in the collection of essays Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, edited by Elliston and McCormick, University of Notre Dame Press, 1977. pp. 101-113) and “A Meditation on Husserl’s Statement: ‘History is the grand fact of absolute Being’” (The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 5, Issue 3, Fall 1974, pp. 111-125).

It is well known that Husserl’s last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, assembled posthumously from his papers, is the work in which Husserl placed phenomenology in historical context (for all practical purposes, for the first time), and considered the emergence of Western scientific thought in historical context. As such, this has been the point of departure of much historically-oriented phenomenological research, and the Crisis (as it has come to be known) and its supplementary texts were clearly influential for Landgrebe.

Landgrebe, however, as Husserl’s research assistant, was more than conversant with Husserl’s logical thought also. Husserl’s Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic was a text assembled by Landgrebe from Husserl’s notes. Landgrebe consulted with Husserl throughout this project, and the original texts are all due to Husserl, but the structure of the book is entirely Landgrebe’s doing. Landgrebe brings the kind of rigor one learns in studying logic to his very compact essays on the philosophy of history. In this way, Landgrebe’s formulations have a formal character that makes them very congenial to me. Landgrebe’s approach is essentially that of a formal phenomenological theory of history, and this perspective allows me to assimilate Landgrebe’s insights both to idealistic historiography as well as my long-standing interest in formal thought.

If I were now to revise my speculative syllabus If I Lectured on the Philosophy of History (lecture 13 of which I had already assigned to phenomenology), I would definitely showcase Landgrebe’s philosophy of history as the most sophisticated phenomenological contribution to the philosophy of history.

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The Transplanetary Perspective

Saturday

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Though I’ve already written a longish post on the relationships among earth sciences, planetary sciences, and space sciences, and I feel that a definitive formulation of this relationship continues to elude me, so I continue to write about it and think about it, in the hope that this exercise in self-clarification will eventually culminate in a more-or-less satisfying account. Or maybe not. But I will continue to think about it nonetheless, and I take a keen interest in the steady stream of new findings in planetary sciences, such as in Newborn Star Study Reveals Never-Before-Seen Stage Of Planet Birth and The Primordial Star at the Edge of the Milky Way that Shouldn’t Exist Challenges Theories of Star Formation.

Part of the difficulty is that the earth sciences, planetary sciences, and space sciences, while all having roots that go back to the very beginnings of human scientific inquiry, are relatively recent in their current incarnations, and any distinctions among them are similarly recent. Also, all sciences begin on the earth (what I will below call “earth-originating”), and all natural sciences begin, in a sense, as earth sciences, because human civilization and the science it produces originates on the earth, so that there is an inherent ambiguity once these earth-originating sciences are extrapolated beyond the earth to other celestial bodies (moons, planetesimals, etc.), other planets in our solar systems, other solar systems around other stars, other star systems in other galaxies, and so on.

What does Michel Foucault have to do with planetary science?

There is a quote from Foucault that I have cited on several occasions that is (partially) relevant here:

Each of my works is a part of my own biography. For one or another reason I had the occasion to feel and live those things. To take a simple example, I used to work in a psychiatric hospital in the 1950s. After having studied philosophy, I wanted to see what madness was: I had been mad enough to study reason; I was reasonable enough to study madness. I was free to move from the patients to the attendants, for I had no precise role. It was the time of the blooming of neurosurgery, the beginning of psychopharmacology, the reign of the traditional institution. At first I accepted things as necessary, but then after three months (I am slow-minded!), I asked, “What is the necessity of these things?” After three years I left the job and went to Sweden in great personal discomfort and started to write a history of these practices. Madness and Civilization was intended to be a first volume. I like to write first volumes, and I hate to write second ones. It was perceived as a psychiatricide, but it was a description from history. You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from the lazar house, he becomes infuriated.

Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault — October 25th, 1982, Martin, L. H. et al (1988) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, London: Tavistock. pp.9-15

The portion of the above most often quoted out of context is this:

You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked.

Far from the earth sciences, planetary sciences, and space sciences (or, rather, their predecessors) constituting pseudo-sciences, they are the very standard by which we ought to judge “hard” natural sciences, but as earth-originating sciences are extrapolated beyond the earth there may be an intellectual tension (hopefully, a creative tension) between the earth-specific forms of earth-originating sciences, and the generalized forms that these sciences take when earth-originating sciences are applied to other planets. I don’t think that planetary sciences and space sciences will feel “attacked” by their earth-originating predecessors, but the tendency to specialization in the most advanced natural sciences may well lead to territoriality among disciplines. This would be regrettable.

The generalization of earth-originating sciences into non-earth-specific planetary sciences and space science will be a necessary prerequisite to the long term growth of human civilization. A future interstellar civilization will be intensely interested in where in the galaxy valuable resources are to be found, in the same way that our planetary-based (and, currently, planetary-bound) civilization is intensely interested in the distribution of mineral resources under the surface of the earth. Much of the contemporary relationship between science and industry stems from this need for resources to fuel the fires of industry. (In this connection I urge the reader to consult the excellent book by Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, which traces the development of the first geophysical map of England to the search for coal seams.)

What coal and oil have been to planetary civilization, titanium and fissionables (inter alia) will be to interplanetary and interstellar civilization; and the role that coal and petroleum geology have played in the exploitation of coal and oil for planetary civilization will have their parallel in the role that planetary sciences and space sciences will have in the exploitation of resources necessary to interplanetary and interstellar civilization. To grow as a civilization, therefore, we need to adopt a transplanetary perspective in our sciences. This is already occurring.

Planetary formation must ultimately be understood in the context of stellar formation, since stars and planets ultimately coalesce from the same disc of gas and dust, and stellar formation must ultimately be understood in the context of galactic formation, since stars coalesce from the matter that swirls together as galaxies, and galactic formation must ultimately be understood in the context of the formation of galactic clouds, clusters, and superclusters, etc. In short, the entire structure of the universe is implicated in the formation of planets, and how we are to distinguish kinds of planets or generations of planets.

Astronomers distinguish between population I stars, population II stars, and population III stars (from youngest to oldest, respectively), based on their generation of enrichment with heavier elements (called the metallicity, or Z, of a star, i.e., its composition in terms of chemical elements other than hydrogen and helium) as a result of the nucleosynthesis of earlier generations of stars. To date, population III stars, hypothetically extremely metal-poor stars from the earliest ages of the universe (coincident with the advent of the stelliferous age and the universe “lighting up” with star light), have been postulated but not observed. However, some recently reported observations (The First Stars of the Universe — Major Discovery Announced by MIT) may be of a population III star.

It is to be expected that each of these populations of stars will have planetary systems typical of for these particular stellar populations (if they have planetary systems at all). If, then, we can refine the astrophysics and cosmology of stellar and planetary formation, breaking down population I stars into a more finely-grained account, perhaps even tracing back individual stars to individual stellar nurseries, it may be possible to determine the likely composition of solar systems (and therefore their resources available for commercial and industrial exploitation) derived from a given stellar nursery. Stars and their planetary systems, where these planetary systems exist, formed from one and the same concentration of gas and dust, so that there is a systematic correlation between the chemical composition of stars and their planetary systems, both in the case of our own solar system and in other solar and planetary systems that science has only recently begun to study. While stars and planets may form at different times and from different portions of a proto-planetary disc, the whole process of stellar and planetary formation constitutes a single natural history of a solar system.

As I noted above, this kind of research is already underway. Robert McGown has directed by attention to the paper Enhanced lithium depletion in Sun-like stars with orbiting planets published in Nature, which the authors conclude with this paragraph:

“It is known that solar-type stars with high metallicity have a high probability of hosting planets. Those solar analogues with low Li content (which is extremely easy to detect with simple spectroscopy) have an even higher probability of hosting exoplanets. Understanding the long-lasting mystery of the low Li abundance in the Sun appears to require proper modelling of the impact of planetary systems on the early evolution of solar analogue stars.”

“Enhanced lithium depletion in Sun-like stars with orbiting planets,” Garik Israelian, Elisa Delgado Mena1, Nuno Santos, Sergio Sousa, Michel Mayor, Stephane Udry, Carolina Domínguez Cerdeña1, Rafael Rebolo1, & Sofia Randich, Nature 462, 189-191 (12 November 2009)

The lithium-planetary system correlation suggests a range of research questions, such as the following: Is the sun especially rich or poor in any other element that might point to the existence or composition of a proto-planetary disc during stellar or planetary formation? Does the chemical composition of the planets of our solar system stand in any systemic or predictive relationship to the chemical composition of our sun as revealed by its spectrum? Does the spectrum of a star predict not only the presence or absence of a planetary system, but also the chemical composition of any planets? Does the chemical composition of planets predict the chemical composition of the stars they orbit?

The lithium-planetary system correlation also suggests research questions bearing upon stars that have no planetary system associated with them. While the technology does not yet exist to study in detail stars without planetary systems, improved telescopy and imaging techniques may provide data for such questions in the not distant future. The most obvious hypotheses to account for stars without associated planetary systems would include isolated stars formed from a proto-stellar mass with nothing left over for planets to form, and solar systems with asteroid belts as large as an entire solar system, such the the matter for planetary formation was available but no planets formed despite the existence of a proto-planetary disc. It is an especially interesting question whether lithium had any role to play in the planetary formation or the lack thereof in either of these cases.

However, lithium-planetary system correlation relies on our very sketchy knowledge of exoplanet systems at present. All of this knowledge is strongly skewed toward large planets that tug their stars around. Astronomers have been able to figure out the planetary system around Alpha Centauri because it is close enough to detect the smaller wiggles that would betray smaller planets, but even here we don’t have any information about what surrounds the star other than a few planets. Stars without any large planets at all might have many smaller planets, or they might have a solar system sized asteroid belt. There are probably also a few stars in which all the precursor materials managed to get into the star with very little left over for planets or asteroids.

Perhaps it could be said that lithium deficiency correlates with the absence of large planets, because we have no idea what may be surrounding stars with no detectable large planets — not until we have a very large telescope in orbit or on the moon. This too suggests interesting questions. How might the formation of large planets be correlated with lithium deficiency in a star? Also, it has been theorized that large planets clear debris out of a solar system, thereby making it possible for smallish, rocky planets to exist in a more stable planetary environment, and a more stable planetary environment likely correlates with the emergence of life and eventually industrial-technological civilization. Thus lithium-planetary system correlation could extend all the way to being a predictor of industrial-technological civilizations.

It might be fruitful to compare the lithium spectra from double (and triple) star systems with known systems including hot Jupiter exoplanets (some of which are just short of being companion stars) and stars that show no evidence of large planet formation. Also, it is worth considering whether double stars or hot Jupiters play a role in the formation of other planets, e.g., such a large gravitational mass might upset the proto planetary disc just enough that the disc congeals into (large) planets, whereas the absence of such a gravitational “trigger” might result in greater uniformity in the proto-planetary disc and therefore its failure to congeal into discrete planets.

Such inquiries are now only in their infancy, and we can both expect and look forward to a flowering of knowledge in the fields of planetary science and space science as the technology to image distant stars and planetary systems rapidly improves, and as access to earth orbit becomes routine, allowing for a robust multiplicity of telescopes in earth orbit outside the atmosphere.

Not only will science on the whole be stimulated by this research, but, as I have often argued, it is the intrinsic nature of industrial-technological civilization to be spurred on by scientific innovations that result in new technologies, and new technologies are engineered into new industries that go on to create new scientific instruments that increase and improve scientific knowledge. Thus the cycle that defines and drives industrial-technological civilization escalates. This cycle is nowhere even close to being exhausted; as I have just pointed out above, instead of a handful of telescopes in orbit, the next decades may see hundreds if not thousands of telescopes in orbit, as there are now thousands of telescopes on the surface of the earth.

Civilization itself will be the beneficiary of these developments, as it continues its spiral of technological progress with its unexpected and unpredicted advantages for human life and commercial opportunity. There is also the sheer joy of better understanding the world in which we live. All of these factors will continue to fuel the growth and diversification of civilization in the future, thus at least partially mitigating against the existential risk of permanent stagnation.

The transplanetary perspective resulting from the extrapolation and generalization of earth sciences into planetary science and space sciences is to be welcomed for these far-reaching benefits both practical and intellectual.

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Biology Recapitulates Cosmology

Monday

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An idea that has had a great influence despite being at very least misleading and more often completely wrong is that of recapitulation — also called embryological parallelism or the biogenetic law (the latter by Ernst Haeckel, who was also the originator of ecology). Recapitulation was most famously summed up in the phrase:

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

The idea here is that the development of the individual organism recapitulates, or reproduces in miniature, the phylogenetic history of the species to which the individual belongs. The often mistaken idea of recapitulation as it has been applied to biology, however, did have fortunate although unintended benefits, because in looking for evidence of recapitulation biologists began seriously studying developmental processes. Early on this primarily took the form of experimental embryology, but later become more sophisticated. This developmental interest eventually led to the study of evolutionary developmental biology, which is now usually referred to as evo-devo.

Quine took up the theme of recapitulation in order to cleverly skewer metaphysics in the best tradition of Post-Positivist Thought, which he formulated as follows:

Ontology recapitulates philology.

In other words, ontology, in presuming to detail the structure of reality, just gives us back again the structure of language by which we have attempted to describe the world, however imperfectly. The implied corollary here is that different languages with different philologies will yield different ontologies (an idea better known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis).

So what has evo-devo and Quinean post-positivism to do with biology in relation to cosmology? We can understand the traditional recapitulation idea as a variation on another ancient human idea, that of the microcosm as a mirror of the macrocosm: the development of the individual as the microcosm mirrors the development of the species as the macrocosm. Similarly, terrestrial biology, as a complex ecological system on Earth, can be understood as the microcosm of the complex ecological system of cosmology, which here becomes the macrocosm. Thus as biology is the microcosm and cosmology the macrocosm, is it the case the biology recapitulates cosmology?

But do we even know, can be even say, what biology is or what cosmology is? Is it possible to make any generalization as sweeping as this without falling into incoherency? Generalizations are made, of course, but there is a question as to the legitimacy of any such generalization. The most common generalization about the whole of biology or cosmology is that they exhibit progress. Because this is one of the most common overall interpretations, it is only the interpretation that has been most refuted and has come under the heaviest attacks.

Stephen J. Gould has most memorably be associated with a consistent refusal to see progress in the history of life, and he expressed this forcefully in one of his later books, Full House: the Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, in which he returns time and again to the theme that life is overwhelmingly simple, and the human tendency (which we would now call anthropic bias, following Nick Bostrom) to see progress in this history of life is to distort the history of life by interpreting the whole of life in terms of a thin tail of complexity that emerges merely because life has a minimal bound of complexity. Since life cannot become less complex and still remain life, the essential variability of life will, with time, eventually blunder onto greater complexity because there is nowhere else for life to go. But that does not make greater complexity a trend, much less a driving force that results in ever more complex and sophisticated life forms.

Gould wrote:

“…I can marshal an impressive array of arguments, both theoretical (the nature of the Darwinian mechanism) and factual (the overwhelming predominance of bacteria among living creatures), for denying that progress characterizes the history of life as a whole, or even represents an orienting force in evolution at all…”

Stephen J. Gould, Full House: the Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin

Gould writes a bit like Darwin, who called his own Origin of Species “one long argument,” so it can be difficult to get just the right quote from Gould to illustrate his argument and his point of view, so the quote above should not be considered definitive. Thus the following quote also cannot be called definitive, but it does give a sense of Gould’s “big picture” conception of his work, and even suggests an approach to cosmology consistent with Gould’s ideas:

“…this book does have broader ambitions, for the central argument of Full House does make a claim about the nature of reality… I am making my plea by gentle example, rather than by tendentious frontal assault in the empyrean realm of philosophical abstraction (the usual way to attack the nature of reality, and to guarantee limited attention for want of anchoring). I am asking my readers finally and truly to cash out the deepest meaning of the Darwinian revolution and to view natural reality as composed of varying individuals in populations — that is, to understand variation itself as irreducible, as ‘real’ in the sense of ‘what the world is made of.’ To do this, we must abandon a habit of thought as old as Plato and recognize the central fallacy in our tendency to depict populations either as average values (usually conceived as ‘typical’ and therefore representing the abstract essence or type of the system) or as extreme examples…”

Stephen J. Gould, Full House: the Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin

Gould, as the great enemy of progressivism (and, as we see in the above passage, a passionate advocate of nominalism), may be contrasted with Kevin Kelly’s explicit defense of progress in his recent book What Technology Wants (which I have written about in Civilization and the Technium and The Genealogy of the Technium). In Chapter 5 of his book, “Deep Progress,” Kelly takes the bull by the horns and against much recent thought and much well-justified cynicism, argues that progress is real. Aware of the difficulties his argument faces, Kelly states up from the expected objections:

“Any claim for progressive change over time must be viewed against the realities of inequality for billions, deteriorating regional environments, local war, genocide, and poverty. Nor can any rational person ignore the steady stream of new ills bred by our inventions and activities, including new problems generated by our well-intentioned attempts to heal old problems. The steady destruction of good things and people seems relentless. And it is.”

Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants, Chapter 5

Despite these difficulties, Kelly soldiers on finishes his chapter on progress as follows:

“…there will be problems tomorrow because progress is not Utopia. It is easy to mistake progressivism as utopianism because where else does increasing and everlasting improvement point to except Utopia? Sadly, that confuses a direction with a destination. The future as unsoiled technological perfection is unattainable; the future as a territory of continuously expanding possibilities is not only attainable but also exactly the road we are on now.”

Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants, Chapter 5

It is admirable that Kelly makes a distinction between progress as a direction of development and progress as an end or aim. What Kelly is doing here is to posit non-teleological progress, and this is an idea that deserves attention. Non-teleological progress only partially blunts the force of Gould’s determined opposition to finding progress in history, because Gould often assumes without stating that progress implies a goal toward which a progress of development is developing, but whether or not it answers all of Gould’s objections, it deserves attention if for no other reason than that it confounds expectations and assumptions about historical thought.

Kelly, in arguing for increasing complexity against a tradition denying historical progress or trends as anthropocentric, is himself part of another emerging tradition, that is the growing discipline of Big History. In the works of David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Fred Spier, inter alia, the central theme of history conceived as a whole from the big bang to the present day is the theme of increasing complexity.

Does the universe, on the whole, exhibit increasing complexity? We could bring to cosmology essentially the same arguments that Gould used in biology, especially since Gould wrote that he had wider ambitions for his ideas. It would be easy to argue that the universe is overwhelmingly composed of hydrogen and helium, in the same way that life is overwhelmingly composed of bacteria. Just as life has a minimal bound of complexity, and only blunders into higher complexity because it has nowhere else to go, so too matter has a lower bound of complexity — ordinary baryonic matter composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons doesn’t get any simpler than hydrogen — and it could be said that it is only with accidental variation over time that complexity emerges in the universe because matter has nowhere else to go except in the direction of greater complexity.

Thus we can admit the existence of greater complexity in biology or cosmology, but it would be a mistake to argue that this complexity is the telos of the whole, or that it is a trend, or that it is even predominant. In fact, we know that bacteria predominate in life and that hydrogen predominates in cosmology. The later emergence of complexity does not alter the overwhelming predominance of the simple, and to judge of the whole by a long and very narrow tail of complexity is to allow the tail to wag the dog.

Between the inner intimacies of biology that transpire unnoticed within our bodies, and the distant and impersonal life cycles of stars and galaxies and the cosmos, unnoticed by us because it is too large and too slow to play a role in human perception, there lies the broad ground of human history. Even if biology and cosmology can be interpreted in terms of overwhelming simplicity and the absence of any trend or progress, does this have any relevance for human affairs?

It should be evident that human history, the macroscopic doings of human beings on a human scale of time, can be interpreted either according to the Gould model or according to the model of progress that one finds in Kevin Kelly and Big History.

I have mentioned in an earlier post, Taking Responsibility for Our Interpretations, how I came to realize that history can be a powerful method of conveying an interpretation, and it is wrong to understand history in the sense of a list of names, dates, and places in the spirit of what might be called histoire vérité.

This is a sense of historiography most famously attributed to Leopold van Ranke, who wrote:

“History has had assigned to it the office of judging the past and of instructing the account for the benefit of future ages. To show high offices the present work does not presume; it seeks only to show what actually happened [wie es eigentlich gewesen].”

Later historians have endlessly debated what exactly Ranke had in mind when he mentioned showing that actually happened; even if Ranke thought (as he is usually interpreted) that there is a single unique and correct account of history, there is no single and unique account of Ranke.

There is an Hegelian interpretation of Ranke’s much-discussed aside on showing what actually happened (“wie es eigentlich gewesen,” which has, of course, been translated in varying ways), according to which “gewesen” must be understood in an essentialist sense, so that to say what really happened is to give the essence of what happened — and this, I hope you will agree, can be very different from giving “the facts, just the facts.”

This Hegelian-essentialist interpretation of Ranke is illuminated by a famous aphorism of Hegel’s such that, “The real is the rational and the rational is the real.” When this is read through contemporary spectacles it doesn’t make any sense at all, because we tend to think of the “real” as that which really is or really happened, and we know very well that the world as it is has no end of irrationality in it, so that to say that for Hegel to say that the real is the rational makes Hegel look like a fool or worse. If, however, we understand the “real” to be the essentially true, or even the genuine — so that Hegel’s aphorism can be rendered, “The genuine is the rational and the rational is the genuine” — it suddenly becomes clear how the real and the rational might be systematically interrelated.

Here we encounter the deeper ontological substratum of these divergent interpretations of history, whether natural, human, or cosmological. The difference between the orientation of Gould and the orientation of Kelly and others is the difference between nominalism and essentialism. Nominalist historiography can give us all the facts, but ultimately cannot do anything more than sum up the facts. If you sum up the totality of life or the totality of matter in the universe, you are forced to acknowledge that life is overwhelmingly bacteriological in nature, and the universe is overwhelmingly composed of hydrogen and helium.

There is, for the nominalist, nothing to say beyond this. The essentialist, however, finds a narrative buried within the mountain of facts, but there are many essentialists, and they all have their own narratives. And essentialism is weakened by the one thing that can never touch nominalism: underdetermination. All essentialist accounts are underdetermined by the evidence. Nominalist accounts on principle never go beyond the evidence, and for that reason they are not underdetermined by the evidence, but they are also unable to say anything relevant about the meanings and values that constitute the daily bread and butter of human life. And so our strict conscience may suggest to us that we ought to stop with nominalism, but our less-than-strict human conscience suggests to us that there is something more than an undifferentiated mountain of facts.

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Earth Science, Planetary Science, Space Science

Wednesday

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Earth and the moon in one frame as seen from the Galileo spacecraft 6.2 million kilometers away. (from Picture of Earth from Space by Fraser Cain)

It is ironic, though not particularly paradoxical, that the earth sciences as we known them today only came into being as the result of the emergence of space science, and space science was a consequence of the advent of the Space Age. We had to leave the Earth and travel into space in order to see the Earth for what it is. Why was this the case, and what do I mean by this?

It has often been commented that we had to go into space in order to discover the earth, which is to say, to understand that the earth is a blue oasis in the blackness of space. The early images of the space program had a profound effect on human self-understanding. Photographs (as much or more than any theory) provided the theoretical context that allowed us to have a unified perspective on the Earth as part of a system of worlds in space. Once we saw the Earth for what it was, What Carl Sagan called a “pale blue dot” in the blackness of space, drove home a new perspective on the human condition that could not be forgotten once it had been glimpsed.

To learn that our sun was a star among stars, and that the stars were suns in their own right, that the Earth is a planet among planets, and perhaps other planets are other Earths, has been a long epistemic struggle for humanity. That the Milky Way is a galaxy among galaxies, a point that has been particularly driven home by recent observational cosmology as with the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (UDF) image (and now the Hubble eXtreme-Deep Field (XDF) image), is an idea that we still today struggle to comprehend. The planethood of the Earth, the stellarhood of the sun, the galaxyhood of the Milky Way are all exercises in contextualizing our place in the universe, and therefore an exercise in Copernicanism.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I wanted to discuss the earth sciences, and to try to understand what they are and how they have become what they are. What are the Earth sciences? The Biology Online website has this brief and concise definition of the earth sciences:

The Earth Sciences, investigating the way our planet works and the mechanisms of nature that drive it.

The geology.com website has a more detailed definition of the earth sciences that already hints at their relation to the space sciences:

Earth Science is the study of the Earth and its neighbors in space… Many different sciences are used to learn about the earth, however, the four basic areas of Earth science study are: geology, meteorology, oceanography and astronomy.

For a more detailed overview of the earth sciences, the Earth Science Literacy Initiative (ESLI), funded by the National Science Foundation, has formulated nine “big ideas” of earth science that it has published in its pamphlet Earth Science Literacy Principles. Here are the nine big ideas taken from their pamphlet:

1. Earth scientists use repeatable observations and testable ideas to understand and explain our planet.

2. Earth is 4.6 billion years old.

3. Earth is a complex system of interacting rock, water, air, and life.

4. Earth is continuously changing.

5. Earth is the water planet.

6. Life evolves on a dynamic Earth and continuously modifies Earth.

7. Humans depend on Earth for resources.

8. Natural hazards pose risks to humans.

9. Humans significantly alter the Earth.

Each of these “big ideas” is further elaborated in subheadings that frequently bring out the planethood of the Earth. For example, section 2.2 reads:

Our Solar System formed from a vast cloud of gas and dust 4.6 billion years ago. Some of this gas and dust was the remains of the supernova explosion of a previous star; our bodies are therefore made of “stardust.” This age of 4.6 billion years is well established from the decay rates of radioactive elements found in meteorites and rocks from the Moon.

Intuitively, we would say that the earth sciences are those sciences that study the Earth and its natural processes, but the rapid expansion of scientific knowledge has made us realize that the Earth is not a closed system that can be studied in isolation. The Earth is part of a system — the solar system, and beyond that a galactic system, etc. — and must be studied as part of this system. But we didn’t always know this, and this comprehensive conception of earth science is still in the process of formulation.

The realization that the processes of the Earth and the sciences that study these processes must ultimately be placed in a cosmological context means that contemporary earth science is now, like astrobiology, which seeks to place biology in a cosmological context, a fully Copernican science, though not perhaps quite as explicitly as in the case of astrobiology. The very idea of Earth science as it is understood today, like planetary science and space science, is essentially Copernican; Copernicanism is now the telos of all the sciences. Copernican civilization needs Copernican sciences. As I said in my presentation to this year’s 100YSS symposium, the scope of an industrial-technological civilization corresponds to the scope of the science that enables this civilization.

What this means is that the sciences that generations of Earth-bound scientists have labored to create in order to describe the planet upon which they have lived, which was the only planet that they could know prior to the advent of space science, are all planetary sciences in embryo — all potentially Copernican sciences that can be extended beyond the Earth that was their inspiration and origin. Before space science, all science was geocentric and therefore essentially Ptolemaic. Space science changed that, and now all the sciences are gradually becoming Copernican.

In the case of earth science, this is a powerful scientific model because the earth sciences have been, by definition, geocentric. That even geocentric sciences can become Copernican is a powerful lesson and provides a model for other sciences to follow. I have often quoted Foucault as saying that “A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked.” I think it can be honestly said that the geosciences recognize and accept their history as geocentric sciences and this in no way inhibits their ability to transcend their geocentric origins and become Copernican sciences no longer exclusively tied to the Earth. I find this rather hopeful for the future of science.

Another way to conceptualize earth science is to think of the earth sciences as those sciences that have come to recognize the planethood of the Earth. This places the Earth in its planetary context among other planets of our solar system, and it also places these planets (as well as the growing roster of exoplanets) in the context of planetary history that we have learned first-hand from the Earth.

To a certain extent, earth science and planetary science (or planetology) are convertible: each is increasingly formulated and refined in reference to the other. What is planetary science? Here is the Wikipedia definition of planetary science:

Planetary science (rarely planetology) is the scientific study of planets (including Earth), moons, and planetary systems, in particular those of the Solar System and the processes that form them. It studies objects ranging in size from micrometeoroids to gas giants, aiming to determine their composition, dynamics, formation, interrelations and history. It is a strongly interdisciplinary field, originally growing from astronomy and earth science, but which now incorporates many disciplines, including planetary astronomy, planetary geology (together with geochemistry and geophysics), atmospheric science, oceanography, hydrology, theoretical planetary science, glaciology, and the study of extrasolar planets.[1] Allied disciplines include space physics, when concerned with the effects of the Sun on the bodies of the Solar System, and astrobiology.

The Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society doesn’t give us the convenience of a definition for planetary science, but in its offerings on A Planet Orbiting Two Suns, A Thousand New Planets, Buried Mars Carbonates, The Lunar Core, Propeller Moons of Saturn, A Six-Planet System, Carbon Dioxide Gullies on Mars, and many others, give us concrete examples of planetary science which examples may, in certain ways, be more helpful than an explicit definition.

Jupiter’s moon Europa may have liquid water beneath its icy surface, kept warm inside by the enormous gravitational forces of Jupiter. Planet science is endlessly fascinating, and we learn new things about planetology almost every day.

The “aims and scope” of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters also give something of a sense of what planetary science is:

Earth and Planetary Science Letters (EPSL) is the journal for researchers, policymakers and practitioners from the broad Earth and planetary sciences community. It publishes concise, highly cited articles (“Letters”) focusing on physical, chemical and mechanical processes as well as general properties of the Earth and planets — from their deep interiors to their atmospheres. Extensive data sets are included as electronic supplements and contribute to the short publication times. EPSL also includes a Frontiers section, featuring high-profile synthesis articles by leading experts to bring cutting-edge topics to the broader community.

A recent (2006) controversy over the status of Pluto as a planet led to an attempt by The International Astronomical Union (IAU) to formulate a more precise definition of what a planet is. The definition upon which they settled demoted Pluto from being a planet to being a dwarf planet. While this decision does not have complete unanimity, it is gaining ground in the literature. Here is the IAU of planets, dwarf planets, and small solar system bodies:

(1) A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
(2) A “dwarf planet” is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.
(3) All other objects, except satellites, orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as “Small Solar System Bodies.”

With this greater precision of definition than had previously been the case in regard to planets, we could easily define planetary science as the study of celestial bodies that (a) are in orbit around the Sun, (b) have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) have cleared the neighbourhood around their orbits. Of course, this ultimately won’t do, because a comprehensive planetary science will want to study all three classes of celestial bodies detailed above, and will especially want to study the mechanisms of planet formation, dwarf planet formation, and small object formation for the light that each shines on the other. Like the Earth, that is part of a larger system, all the planets are also part of a larger system, and how they relate to that system will have much to teach us about solar system formation.

This more comprehensive perspective brings us to the space sciences. What is space science? The Wikipedia entry on space sciences characterizes them in this way:

The term space science may mean:

●The study of issues specifically related to space travel and space exploration, including space medicine.

●Science performed in outer space (see space research).

●The study of everything in outer space; this is sometimes called astronomy, but more recently astronomy can also be regarded as a division of broader space science, which has grown to include other related fields.

It is interesting that this definition of space science does not mention cosmology, which is more and more coming to assume the role of the master category of the sciences, since it is ultimately cosmology that is the context for everything else, but we could easily modify that last of the above three stipulations to read “cosmology” in place of “astronomy.” As the definition notes, the space sciences have grown to include other related fields, and in the future it may well be that the space sciences become the most comprehensive scientific category, providing the conceptual infrastructure in which all other scientific enterprises must be contextualized.

Since the Earth is a planet, and planets are to be found in space, one might readily assume that the Earth sciences, planetary sciences, and space sciences might be arranged in a nested hierarchy as follows:

Conceptually this is correct, but genetically, i.e., in terms of historical descent, it is obvious that the sciences that we have created to study our home planet are the sciences that, when generalized and applied beyond the surface of the Earth, are the sciences that become planetary science and space science.

Before space science and planetary science, there were of course the familiar sciences of geology (later geomorphology), atmospheric science or meteorology (later climatology), oceanography, paleontology, and so forth, but it was only when the emergence of space science and planetary science placed these terrestrial sciences into a cosmological context that we came to see that our sciences that study the planet that we call our home together constitute the Earth sciences in contrast to, and really in the context of, space science and planetary science. Great strides have been made in this direction, but further work remains to be done.

Geologic timescales for Earth and Mars with rocks plotted at the age of their emplacement. The age of soil samples analyzed by landed missions to Mars are too uncertain to plot on Fig. 4, and since no rocks were analyzed at the Viking 1 landing site in Chryse Planitia, that site is not shown. Martian geologic timescale of Hartmann and Neukum (2001), with subdivisions indicating the early, middle, and late Noachian, early and late Hesperian, and early, middle, and late Amazonian.

We know that the Earth and its solar system is about 4.6 billion years old, and most recent estimates for the age of the known universe put it at about 13.7 billion years. This means that the Earth has been around for almost exactly a third of age of the entire universe, which is not an inconsiderable length of time. Our sun and its solar system stands in relation to other stars of a similar age, and these stars and solar systems with significant traces of heavier elements stand in certain relationships to earlier populations of stars. The whole history of the universe is present in the rocks of the Earth, and we have to keep this in mind in the expanding knowledge base of the earth sciences.

While geological time scales are essentially geocentric, it would be possible to formulate an astrogeography and an astrogeographical time scale, extrapolating earth science to planetary science and thence to space science, that not only placed Earth’s geological history into cosmological context but also placed all planetary bodies and planetary systems and their geology in a cosmological context. For such an undertaking the generations of stars and planetary formation would be of central concern, and we could expect to see patterns across stars and solar systems of the same generations, and across planets within a given solar system.

This work has already begun, as can be seen in the above table laying out the geological histories of the Earth, the Moon, and Mars in parallel. Since one of the major theories for the formation of the Moon is that most of its substance was ripped out of the Earth by an enormous collision, the geological histories of the Earth and the Moon may ultimately be shown to coincide.

Stars and planets formed from the same dust and debris clouds filled with the remnants of the nucleosynthesis of earlier poulations of stars. This is now familiar to everyone. Galaxies, in turn, formed from stars, and thus also reflect a generational index reflecting a galaxy’s position in the natural history of the universe.

Since we now also believe that all or almost all spiral galaxies (and perhaps also other non-spiral or irregular galaxies) have a supermassive black hole at their centers, I have lately come of think of entire galaxies as the vast “solar systems” of supermassive black holes. In other words, a supermassive black hole is to a galaxy as a star is to a solar system. As planetary systems formed around newly born stars, galaxies formed around newly born black holes (if their gravity was sufficiently strong to form such a system). This way of thinking about galaxies introduces another parallelism between the microcosm of the solar system and the macrocosm of the universe at large, the structure of which is defined by galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and super clusters.

All of this falls within a single natural history of which we are a part.

Our history and the history of the universe are one and the same.

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The Terrestrial Eocivilization Thesis

Wednesday

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A Thesis in the Theory of Civilization

Not long ago in Eo-, Eso-, Exo-, Astro- I discussed how Joshua Lederberg’s distinctions between eobiology, esobiology, and exobiology can be used as a model for the concepts of eocivilization, esocivilization, and exocivilization, all of which are anterior to the more comprehensive conception of astrocivilization (like the more comprehensive conception of astrobiology).

My post on Eo-, Eso-, Exo-, Astro- was in part a correction to my earlier post Eo-, Eso-, Astro-, in which I had contrasted eobiology to exobiology, when I should have been contrasting esobiology to exobiology.

I had derived the contrast of eobiology and exobiology from Steven J. Dick and James E. Strick’s excellent book The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of Astrobiology, in which they cite Lederberg’s contrast of these terms. I had initially drawn the wrong contrast between the two concepts. When I started to read Lederberg’s writings, I realized that Lederberg was making a dramatic contrast between the scientific study of origins and the scientific study of destiny, rather than the contrast I expected. However, the contrast I originally drew remains a valid schema for understanding the comprehensive conception of astrobiology — and, by extension, the comprehensive conception of astrocivilization.

Astrobiology may be understood as the integration of esobiology — our biology, terrestrial biology — and exobiology — biology not of the Earth — into a comprehensive whole that places life in a cosmological context. Parallel to this, I define astrocivilization as the integration of esocivilization — our civilization, terrestrial civilization — and exocivilization — civilization not of the Earth — into a comprehensive whole that places civilization in a cosmological context. These concepts are not merely parallel, but the parallel between concepts of biology and concepts of civilization follows from a naturalistic conception of civilization as an extension of biology.

Civilization can be understood as a greatly elaborated result of behavioral adaptation. Just as evolutionary gradualism takes us imperceptibly over countless generations from the simple origins of life to the complexity of life we know today, so too evolutionary gradualism in the development of civilization takes us imperceptibly over countless generations from the simplest behavioral adaptations to the complexity of behavioral adaptation that culminates in civilization — and which may well culminate in some further post-civilizational social institution. (We must add this last proviso so as not to be mistaken for advocating some kind of teleological conception of civilization, as one might expect, for example, from strong formulations of the anthropic cosmological principle.)

In reformulating my contrast of eocivilization and exocivilization as the contrast between esocivilization and exocivilization, the term “eocivilization” is freed up to assume its more etymologically accurate meaning, which properly should be “early civilization” (“eo-” coming from the Greek means “early”). This turns out to be a very useful concept, but it always points to an additional thesis in the theory of civilization.

As in astrobiology, in which we study life on Earth as a clue to life in the cosmos, so too in astrocivilization we study civilization on Earth as a clue to civilization in the universe. Life on Earth is the only life that we know of, and civilization on the Earth is the only civilization that we know of, but in so far as we approach life and civilization from the scientific perspective of methodological naturalism, we do not assume that these are necessarily the only instances of life or of civilization in the cosmos. There may be other instances of life and civilization of which we simply know nothing.

In light of the possibility of life and civilization elsewhere in the universe, but our only knowledge of civilization being terrestrial civilization, I will call the terrestrial eocivilization thesis the position that identifies early civilization, i.e., eocivilization, with terrestrial civilization. In other words, our terrestrial civilization is the earliest civilization to emerge in the cosmos. Thus the terrestrial eocivilization thesis is the civilizational parallel to the rare earth hypothesis, which maintains, contrary to the Copernican principle, that life on earth is rare. I could call it the “rare civilization hypothesis” but I prefer “terrestrial eocivilization thesis.”

It is possible to further distinguish between the position that terrestrial civilization is the first and earliest civilization in the cosmos, and the position that terrestrial civilization is unique and the sole source of civilization in the cosmos. There may be exocivilizations that have and will emerge after terrestrial civilization, meaning that there are several sources of civilization in the cosmos, but that terrestrial civilization is the earliest to emerge. Thus the terrestrial eocivilization thesis can be distinguished from the uniqueness of terrestrial civilization. We might call the non-uniqueness of industrial-technological civilization on the Earth the “multi-regional hypothesis” in astrocivilization (to borrow a term from hominid evolutionary biology), but I would prefer to simply call it the “Non-Uniqueness Thesis.”

In the event that human civilization expands cosmologically and is ultimately the source of civilization on exoplanets that are part of other solar systems and perhaps even other galaxies, the terrestrial eocivilization thesis will have more substantive content than it does now at present, when (if the thesis is true) eocivilization is simply identical to all civilization in the cosmos. All we can say at present, however, is that terrestrial civilization is identical to all known civilization in the cosmos. To assert more than this is to assert the terrestrial eocivilization thesis, which is underdetermined and goes well beyond available evidence.

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Quantum Model Drift

Friday

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Some time ago in The Pleasures of Model Drift I discussed how contemporary cosmology is challenged by the accelerating expansion of the universe, and that there are no really good explanations of this yet in terms of the the received cosmological models. The resulting state of cosmological theories, then, is called model drift. This is a Kuhnian term. Almost exactly a year ago, when it was reported that some neutrinos may have traveled faster than light, it looked like we might also have had to face model drift in particle physics. Since these results haven’t been replicated, the standard model not only continues to stand, but has recently been fortified by the announcement of the discovery (sort of discovery) of the Higgs Boson.

But theoretical physics isn’t over yet. Some time ago in The limits of my language are the limits of my world I took up Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism from the perspective of recent work in particle physics that had “bent” the rules of quantum theory. Further work by at least of of the same scientific team at Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control and Institute for Optical Sciences, Department of Physics, University of Toronto, Aephraim M. Steinberg, has continued this line of research, which has been reported by the same BBC Science and technology reporter, Jason Palmer, who wrote up the earlier results (cf. Quantum test pricks uncertainty). This story covers research reported in Physical Review Letters, “Violation of Heisenberg’s Measurement-Disturbance Relationship by Weak Measurements.”

The abstract of this most recent research reads as follows:

While there is a rigorously proven relationship about uncertainties intrinsic to any quantum system, often referred to as “Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle,” Heisenberg originally formulated his ideas in terms of a relationship between the precision of a measurement and the disturbance it must create. Although this latter relationship is not rigorously proven, it is commonly believed (and taught) as an aspect of the broader uncertainty principle. Here, we experimentally observe a violation of Heisenberg’s “measurement-disturbance relationship”, using weak measurements to characterize a quantum system before and after it interacts with a measurement apparatus. Our experiment implements a 2010 proposal of Lund and Wiseman to confirm a revised measurement-disturbance relationship derived by Ozawa in 2003. Its results have broad implications for the foundations of quantum mechanics and for practical issues in quantum measurement.

Experimentalists are chipping away at Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. They aren’t presenting their research as something especially radical — one might even think of this recent work as an instantiation of radical theories, modest formulations — but this is theoretically and even philosophically quite important.

We recall that despite himself making crucial early contributions to quantum theory, Einstein eventually came reject quantum theory, offering searching and subtle critiques of the theory. In his time Einstein was isolated among physicists for coming to reject quantum theory at the very time of its greatest triumphs. Quantum theory has gone on to become one of the most verified theories — and verified to the most exacting standards — in the history of physics, notwithstanding Einstein’s criticisms. Einstein primarily fell out with quantum theory over the notion of quantum entanglement, though Einstein, himself a staunch determinism, was also greatly troubled by Heisenberg’s uncertainly principle. Many, perhaps including Einstein himself, conflated physical determinism with scientific realism, so that a denial of determinism came to be associated with a rejection of realism. Heisenberg’s uncertainly principle is Exhibit “A” when it comes to the denial of determinism. So I think that if Einstein had lived to see this most recent work, he would have been both fascinated and intrigued by its implications for the uncertainty principle, and indeed its philosophical implications for physics.

Einstein was a uniquely philosophical physicist — the very antithesis of what recent physics has become, and which I have called Fashionable Anti-Philosophy (and which I elaborated in Further Fasionable Anti-Philosophy). From his earliest years, Einstein carefully studied philosophical works. He is said to have read Kant’s three critiques in his early teens. And Einstein’s rejection of quantum theory, which he modestly and humorously characterized as saying that something in his little finger told him that it couldn’t be right, was a philosophical rejection of quantum theory.

The recent research into Heisenberg’s uncertainly principle is not couched in philosophical terms, but it is philosophically significant. The very fact that this research is going on suggests that others, not only Einstein, have been dissatisfied with the uncertainly principle as it is usually interpreted, and that scientists have continued to think critically about it even as the uncertainty principle has been taught for decades as orthodox physics. This is a perfect example of what I have called Science Behind the Scenes.

The uncertainty of quantum theory, given formal expression in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, came to be interpreted not only epistemically, as placing limits on what we can know, but it was also interpreted ontologically, as placing limits on the constituents of the world. In so far as Heisenberg encouraged an ontological interpretation of the uncertainty principle, which I believe to be the case, he was advancing an underdetermined theory, i.e., an ontological interpretation of the uncertainty principle goes beyond — I think it goes far beyond — the epistemic uncertainty that we must posit in order to do quantum theory.

It seems to me that it is pretty easy to interpret the recent research cited above as questioning the ontological interpretation of the uncertainty principle while leaving an epistemic interpretation untouched. The limits of human knowledge are often poignantly brought home to us in our daily lives in a thousand ways, but we need not make the unnecessary leap from limitations on human knowledge to limitations on the world. On the other hand, we also need not make any connection between realism and determinism. It is entirely consistent (even if it seems odd to some of us) that there should be an objective world existing apart from human experience of and knowledge of that world, and that that objective world should not be deterministic. It may well be that it is essentially random and only stochastically defined, when a given radioactive substance decays, but the radioactive substance and the event of decay are as real as Einstein’s little finger. If I could have a conversation with Einstein, I would try to convince him of precisely this.

Indeterminate realism is also an underdetermined theory, and it is to be expected that there are non-realistic theories that are empirically equivalent to indeterminate realism. It is for this reason that I believe there are other arguments, distinct from those above, that favor realism over anti-realism, or even realism over some of the more extravagant interpretations of quantum theory. But I won’t go into that now.

We aren’t about to return to classical theories and their assumptions of continuity such as we had prior to quantum theory, any more than we are about to give up relativistic physics and return to strictly Newtonian physics. That much is clear. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that we are not saddled with any one interpretation of relativity or quantum theory, and we are especially not limited to the philosophical theories formulated by those scientists who originally formulated these physical theories, even if the philosophical theories were part of the “original intent” (if you will forgive me) of the physical theory. Another way to put this is that we are not limited to the original model of a theory, hence model drift.

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A Meditation upon the Petroglyphs of Ausevik

Saturday

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On the drive today inland from Florø toward the fjord country of Sogn and Fjordane, my sister and I detoured from the main road to see a group of petroglyphs at Ausevik. This was not at all far from Florø, and well worth the detour. There is a large, flat rock sloping down toward the fjord that is covered with a variety of carvings in the rock, some of them recognizably representative of familiar objects, and some of them not representative at all. I often marvel how the oldest art works of human beings are the most robust and likely to outlast the civilizations that superseded them. The petroglyphs, geoglyphs, and megaliths to be found around the world have been exposed to wind and weather for thousands of years longer than civilization has existed, and they remain today a vivid reminder of our prehistoric past. Similar considerations hold for the earliest monuments of human beings: the pyramids are likely to outlast anything that came, and is still to come, after them.

To mention other forms of robust ancient art like the petroglyphs at Ausevik reminds me of seeing the Nazca lines in January of this year — another perfect example of aesthetic simplicity and mystery likely to far outlast any subsequent constructions of civilization. The petroglyphs at Ausevik and the geoglyphs at Nazca remind me of each other for other reasons besides their robust character: the hypnotic patterns of lines is similar between the two, and the difficult of interpreting that which is not naturalistically representative poses the same dilemma in both cases, and in many other cases as well. Perhaps there is no better proof of ideas in the Kantian sense (as Husserl called them) than non-naturalistic, non-representative art. Such works of art have not correlate in nature; they spring from the mind of man, and are natural only to the degree that the mind is natural (and this is a matter of some disagreement).

It has been an invariant feature of the human mind since the advent of cogntive modernity that the mind of productive of non-naturalistic, non-representative ideas. This is a reminder to us of the conceptual sophistication of our prehistoric ancestors, and of the similarity to us. In other words, we are right to recognize ourselves in them, as they would be right to recognize themselves in us, their descendents. Of course, there are limits to this identification over time, but as I tried to show in my discussion of our intimacy with the past, it is partly a matter of perspective.

In thinking about these petroglyphs at Ausevik I realized that there is both a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic aspect to our intimacy with the past, i.e., there is also a personal version of the historical quest to understand the past. This is precisely what I was getting at in describing my pilgrimage to Kinn, where my fraternal grandmother came from. Personal pilgrimages to discover one’s own origins are the ontogenetic correlate of phylogenetic inquiries into history that privilege the impersonal, the universal, the objective, and the abstract — that is to say, the traditional ideal of history as a rigorous intellectual discipline.

My visit to Kinn recontextualized my personal history in a greater expanse of time than that I had previously understood; the life of my fraternal grandmother, whom I never met, is real to me in a way that it was not previously real to me. I have been to her home and walked in her footsteps and to a limited extent seen the world from her point of view. This is the first step in recontextualizing one’s past in ever greater expanses of history. The more we can expand our concepts to a generalization of our life that eventually coincides with the lives of our ancestors, the greater our intimacy with the past and the greater our understanding of the past. If we continue to extrapolate this process backward through history, the entire universe becomes implicated in our personal existence. In this way, we come to live the interconnectedness of all things. One’s personal history becomes impersonal and ultimately indistinguishable from the history of the world entire.

I see this effort as a way toward formulating a philosophy of history that is as personal as conventional philosophies of history — be they Augustinian, Kantian, Hegelian, Marxist, positivist, or anything else — have striven toward being impersonal, objective, universal, and abstract. I am not suggesting that philosophy or historiography abandon the pursuit of these admirable intellectual ideas, but what I am suggesting is that a personal conception of the world need not be unrigorous. While it is true that most personal visions of life are parochial in the extreme, this is not necessarily true, and it strikes me as an equally admirable intellectual ideal to formulation a personal philosophy of history.

One obvious question that follows from this intellectual exercise, and the question that demonstrates the profound practicality of the philosophy of history, is whether this coincidence of personal and universal history extrapolated into the past also holds when extrapolated into the future. I can intuitively see how this might be the case, or how it might fail to be the case. It would be a further intellectual exercise to try to answer to this question in a rigorous and still personal way. Such an answer — if indeed such an answer is even possible — would point the way to a naturalistic eschatology that might be sufficiently vivid as to supplant the supernatural eschatologies that have fascinating human beings since the beginning of time (and which have probably constituted the greater part of the non-naturalistic, non-representative ideas that human beings have entertained).

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