What is existence?
Can we capture it in a word?
An ever-flowing presence
replete in its transformations,
particular to everything?
But where is this everything?
Is it more than our universe
– too big to be seen at once
spanning all pasts and futures,
the seeming we cannot see without?
Mike Laidler
Is explanation the final factual frontier? When we come round to thinking that something ‘requires’ an explanation we base the project on our idea about what might count as such. But once we assume that we have our explanation we are inclined to forget that the idea of it is grounded in the hypothetical. Consequently, we move away from the fact that we are relying upon assumption by assuming that we are not, because the fact is now ‘explained’. And without doubt, the prevailing assumption of our scientific age is that ‘hard facts’ provide the real explanations – that causal explanations rationalise those facts and a joined-up knowledge puts things in their place – with scientific proofs standing at the summit of the known. In other words, we assume that a real knowledge of the world seeks to explain it and anything ‘known’ in the absence of an explanation is inferior and incomplete. It follows logically that our knowledge of ourselves, reality, life, the universe and indeed existence in general, must remain incomplete until we find the ‘final’ explanation? But in what way might we expect it to finalise things?
Despite all our scientific advances and achievements we still can’t account for the ‘isness’ of being. Then how do we explain ourselves? All we can do is refer one state of being to another – so life is basically chemistry and everything is bound up with comings and goings that symbolise the impermanence of the ‘power to be’ within the overwhelming embrace of the ‘law of entropy’. However this generalisation is more apparent than real and its logical premise merely adds to the confusion. Confused means ‘fused with’ – for instance, the logic of explanation equates the mind to the brain as if their entirely different states of being are scientifically and, by implication, factually irrelevant. This resembles the premise of the now defunct ‘hylozoism’ hypothesis: that life is an intrinsic property of matter since there is nowhere else for it to be. Undaunted, science remains bent on explaining everything into-existence from some primal state – certified as the original cause of any change. But when the child asks about life and death – that is, really asks – we find ourselves juggling with these conceptual confusions – hoping that our bodies and brains might hold the ‘material’ answers, somewhere.
Mike Laidler
It is said that ‘time and tide wait for no man’. Then what is the extent of our reputed ‘God-given’ dominion over and ethical responsibility for the planet? Do we actually know? For decades it was largely thought that the facts on climate change were ambiguous and independent of human activity. There is still ambiguity – because that is the nature of the facts. And what is reason’s purview when so much of perception is tied to the image of what we want to see? Indeed, despite the growing consensus that something needs to be done, plus the acknowledgement that actions speak louder than words, the notion of ‘necessary and sufficient action’ still remains a source of controversy. Nevertheless, it is possible to cut through all the ideation and procrastination to test the true sentiment behind our stated wish to do something – bearing in mind that there is no scope for ‘doing a deal’ or reaching a compromise with the forces of nature. In reality, climate change may be a symptom of a bigger problem and it is not nature that needs to be fixed.
Doesn’t ‘globalism’ mean that China’s emissions are also our emissions? What if the time for making comparisons and apportioning blame is over? Even the checked advance of climate change could mean that the ordinary and the everyday are destined to become the exceptional and occasional. Or is it just a matter of hanging on until science and technology find the solution? But isn’t our predicament also due to our insatiable desire for more technology? Perhaps we need to be honest with ourselves. If we are to be serious about climate change and its threat to civilisation, then is it not time to re-evaluate the social and economic priorities of the ‘good life’ with its rude incarnations in our vain and excessive indulgences in wasteful luxury and lazy convenience? If we can’t rise to that challenge and begin to moderate our extravagances right now then all other measures, adjustments and innovations could be compromised. This problem beggars the imagination and demands a radical redefinition of our civil responsibilities. Something needs to be done, but it may be the one thing that we can’t expect the authorities to do for us?
Footnote
‘Philosophy Alive’ examines the relationship between our thinking and the facts. This involves questioning our assumptions about what the facts mean. For instance, if climate change poses an immanent threat of global disaster, then there is no doubt that we will need to take urgent and drastic action. Some critics might point out that the ‘Armageddon scenario’ is still hypothetical, even in the long term, but there is a double consideration here – if the potential consequences are so daunting then we can’t afford to play ‘Russian roulette’ with the lives of our children, so to be pragmatic, we might need to treat the possibility as an inevitability and act accordingly. Then, even if science has over-estimated the impact of climate change, the error is a good thing if it acts as a spur to positive reform. Meanwhile, given that science is not infallible, let us hope that we have not already passed some unforeseen point of ‘no return’.
Mike Laidler
In the nature of things, if everything is constituted of something else, then is nothing fundamentally itself – but if everything is essentially itself, then what is explanation?
It is now ‘evident’ that the laws of physics had a beginning, as with the fact of life, although we don’t know how since both beginnings remain unexplained; but it is also evident that there are unknown beginnings ‘hidden’ within the regressions of our causal definitions – because causes introduce something else to be explained: namely the source of their originality.
Does consciousness defy explanation because we know of no cause that is similarly aware? (Tweet pub. March 23, 2019)
In theory, explanation links the ‘facts of life’ to their evolution, but there is a missing link: the origin of that evolution is linked to a fact of life it doesn’t explain – the origin of life.
If the ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ then science and religion may be seen to hold a belief in common – in the unverified presence of the ‘knowable fact’.
Without a superstructure of belief, can the fact that ‘speaks for itself’ be validated by the supposition to have found it?
If, the emergence of an ‘objective universe’ introduced a real difference into existence – a new reality defined by the laws of physics – then the emergence of a ‘subjective universe’ may have yet to make its mark – to be defined by a parallel nature yet to be fully realised.
Can a cause explain an effect without the uncanny intervention of a thing called ‘explanation’?
Of all the strange things in the universe, the presence of a questioner is stranger by far than any ‘answer’ to be singled-out from an original cause in the ‘hard’ (insensible) facts.
The day organisms began to think was an equally transformative event for nature and the universe at large – even when confined to those organisms thinking about themselves.
Aside from all the bogey-man stories, there is real evidence for a supernatural level of activity that emerges by way of the capacity for some things in nature to be self-aware.
Time passes: there was a time when ‘the truth’ was the exclusive province of religion and its revelations; now science offers-up a truth we cannot see beyond.
Is science struggling explain the basic fact of life because there is a world of difference between the physical world gaining and giving life – because there are no tiny seeds of life and consciousness to be found in the laws of physics?
Does the causality in existence prove that existence is caused – if not, then is the discovery of a ‘God particle’ any less of an abstraction than that of the ‘God notion’?
Beyond the ivory towers of AI, is it not evident that intelligence becomes of consciousness and not the converse?
Just because virtual reality has become a real experience for us, does it mean that the virtual consciousness and intelligence of AI is a real experience for the machine?
We live in at least two worlds, one of them being ‘a world of our own’, namely the world of thought; however, if that isn’t so, then the reality is even stranger than we picture it – because it is one in which nature is also thinking for us.
Mike Laidler
Extracts from “Defining democracy” (first published Sept 9, 2018)
It is said that actions speak louder than words …. In the event, democracy is legitimated by the idea of it, which doesn’t necessarily translate into bowing to the voter’s express wishes. ….Voters in ‘proper’ elections are …. required to assent to a raft of issues loosely held together by manifesto pledges that ‘their’ elected government will deliver on its promises. But governments are subject to their own internal politics …. The occasional referendum appears to give voters exactly what they vote for. The UK’s ‘Brexit’ referendum asked people if they wanted to ‘remain’ in the European Union, or ‘leave’. The choice was clear cut, but …. issues were shrouded in dubious delineations from the start …. The ‘apple cart’ was really upset when the unprecedented skirmishing continued after the vote …. it was rumoured that Brexit could become Brino (Brexit-in-name-only). …. Throughout this political wrangling the electorate had been assured that ‘Brexit means Brexit’. Of course the word was absent from the dictionary, but then the dictionary has yet to be written in which every word simply means itself. Meanwhile …. ‘the right thing to do’ is, by definition, the right thing to do – implying they don’t need to be asked to vote on it.
Mike Laidler
Mike Laidler
Part 1
Extracts from “Goldilocks retold”
(first published July 11, 2016)
Once upon a time Goldilocks chanced upon a baby bear’s bowl of porridge that was just right for the eating. Sometime later, scientists took a fresh look at the fact of a universe that happened to be just right for the emergence of life, and recognised that the necessary fine tuning of the manifold preconditions, the ‘physical constants’, seems more like a contrivance than a coincidence – a conspiracy of coincidences – so named the “Goldilocks enigma” † …And though we see life as a novel possibility, it is explained as an effect of causes that subsist within existing boundaries of possibility. Yet the effect causes profound changes. It looks like non-living causes determine the mix of possible preconditions, but, ultimately, it is the potential for life that sets the limits. Furthermore, that potential remains a defiant mystery, regardless of how much we learn about the preconditions for life on earth, or indeed the preconditions for different types of life on different kinds of planet. Moreover, no amount of causal analysis explains how effects ratchet up the course of change, beginning in the observable differences between cause and effect. Indeed the paradox at the heart of existence is the pre-existence of its possibilities, despite their probable absence in certain forms at certain times – subsequently to ‘emerge’ in the times and events an observer chances upon, in the form of co-incidence called ‘reality’.
† Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life? Pub. Allen Lane 2006
Part 2
The demon of the pixels
According to one convention in physics, everything boils down to the presence of a fixed amount of information in the universe. Information is said to be everything because everything exists as a version of that information. And the flow of information represents the active nature of existence. Even a body at rest relative to another has an operational status. So everything exists as a form of activity with the differences between things being represented as different patterns of organisation. It means that, at a material level, we are stardust but behave differently because of its particular arrangement as us. The accepted explanation is that everything has a cause – that causes make the difference. But there is a gap in this explanation that is proving difficult to fill: How does the organisation get organised – that is, what is the cause and what enables it to organise the elements? In short, how does the stardust begin to behave differently?
Scientifically, life is describable as the form of organisation particular to the cell, but this falls short of an explanation because we “still can’t tell the fundamental difference between animate and inanimate matter – often still described as the ‘magic spark’.” ‡
So what might be the source (cause?) of this ‘magic’? Could the answer be that “hidden webs of information are solving the mystery of life”? ‡‡
Paul Davies: “Well, in spite of what you hear, I think nobody knows what life is or how it started. If you look at the level of an atom, then it’s just basic physics, but if you look at the level of a cell – well it seems like magic. It’s just amazing what life does. …We can’t even distinguish between something that was once alive and is now dead or something that’s almost alive or something that is living now. We don’t have a criterion that can do that. ….I think the secret of life lies with organised patterns of information. ….in trying to understand how information couples to matter. …how information can gain leverage over matter – and I’m convinced after thinking about this for decades that the existing laws of physics are not up to the job. We need some new laws – not only new laws, but new type of physical law in order to explain how information comes into the picture. … we need to look beyond known physics and have some new physics. …Life is not really so much about chemistry, it’s not the stuff of which we’re made, it’s the way it’s put together and the patterns of information. …and I have always felt that this informational signature is very distinctive for life on earth, and that they should be universal.”‡‡‡
However, can this “manifesto” for a new approach begin to resolve the question of how things diversify to become alive, since if life is due to “organised patterns of information” then the same basic unknowns attach to them about how they organise, stabilise or become metabolic and purposive? And what does it prove if the web patterns (qua “hidden webs”) happen to carry the ‘mysterious’ stamp’ or ‘magic spark’ of life – are we not merely recasting the same old questions into a different narrative, not knowing what makes the difference; for instance: how do the patterns bridge the difference between the ‘animate and inanimate’ or undergo the necessary transitions to feature that difference as ‘themselves’?
Consider this analogy: a densely pixelated screen is capable of reproducing any image – therefore, any image appears as a sub-set of the screen’s capacity, yet that capacity doesn’t “control or manage” what can be depicted on the physical array (“how information comes into the picture”) – something else, other than the pixels (qua elements) determines the emergent pattern, especially if it is an actively self-maintaining pattern – only, in this case, we know what that something else is (us). But even this fact remains unexplained at the level of the physical fundamentals. Indeed, the questions (gaps in explanation) begin at a much lower level than that of the emergence of life, namely: how does an essential randomness at the level of the elementary particles turn into a developmental gradient that paves the way for further organisations and events amounting to settled radical changes – firstly material states, then life?
So, although the digital image is just pixels it is also more than that – and it is this additional factor – the organised “coherence” – that isn’t explicable in terms of its diffuse elements. Likewise, life can be depicted as a self-maintaining pattern that isn’t explicable in terms of the chemical and cellular elements alone – even though it is nothing without them. Remember, we have already discovered that genes carry ‘the information of life’, though perhaps not all of it because they have not crossed ‘the divide’ – genes are agents of change, they form a ‘vital’ part of each living cell, except the DNA (the much larger organised pattern of this information) is not alive, despite being “coupled” to life, with “leverage” over it. Therefore, whether or not there are “hidden webs of information” corresponding to a nascent “lifeness”, and even if a putative “lifeness” is attributable to them, it is actually the explanation that remains hidden – and the same problem transfers to explaining the origin (organisation) of the so-called “hidden webs”. That’s because, the effect (life) behaves differently to its causes – otherwise there would be nothing to compare and no difference to explain.
In sum, does the web hypothesis contribute anything to the explanation of where the change-to-life comes from, or is it just another doomed attempt to explain one thing in terms of another? That is, does the representation of everything as a pattern of information, manifested of something else (presumably another pattern of information), make ‘the reality’ more explicable in terms of these nominal (sometimes hidden) causes – or is it just because we wantonly assume that there must be a cause to explain the phenomenon of change – so to expound the mysterious organisational principal that will plug the persisting gaps in our explanations – even when the emergent features (in this case, new patterns of information) dramatically exceed the behavioural repertoire of those causes?
Mike Laidler
‡ BBC Interviewer, Martha Kearney, introducing physicist, Professor Paul Davies (BBC’s Radio 4 ‘Today Programme’ broadcast at 08.41 on February 12, 2019)
‡‡ Professor Davies’ new book is entitled: ‘The Demon in the Machine: how hidden webs of information are solving the mystery of life’. Pub. Allen Lane 2018
‡‡‡ Quotes from Professor Paul Davies
Traditionally, our place in existence has been framed by beliefs in the world as created out of ‘the void’. Then it was thought that we might explain ‘life, the universe and everything’ by pruning it all down to a primordial ‘next-to-nothing’. Now we are prepared to consider a wider array of alternative or ‘parallel’ universes with wholly different natures and outcomes – to the extent that, by comparison, nothing is something and vice versa. Of course, our words fail to describe natural phenomena extending beyond everything that counts as natural for us. Even our ideas of ‘quantum leaps’ or ‘shifts’ fail to explicate the magnitude of the changes that colonise the possibilities left vacant in our physical world. And perhaps, after all, origins aren’t everything. Nevertheless, we continue to impose on the facts the same constraints that we impose on our explanations: namely that they remain logically consistent – as if the omnipotent and omnipresent laws of physics said to be the cause everything, must, therefore, of necessity, explain the vector of possibility leading to a game of football or a nature capable of evaluating itself.
Perhaps there is more to a fact than its causes. Also, the fact that a game of football cannot proceed without the ball doesn’t mean that the ball provides the explanation. And it might seem narcissistic, but the possibility of a universe hatching ideas about itself, albeit in the form of our ideas, marks an event as profoundly significant as that of the birth of the universe itself. It indicates that a new kind of possibility attends the laws of physics which cannot be predicted from those laws. Even so, that fact isn’t enough to justify our presence in existence, either at an individual or species level. Yet it is more profound than that, it means that we are participants in possibilities bigger than us, in a conscious dimension that doesn’t demand an evolutionary explanation. So we can start with the fact that our existence is sufficient to demonstrate, albeit within our own minds, a feature of existence that is significant for the very reason that we might otherwise choose to reject as a figment of the imagination – that mental space is a presence in a parallel ‘world of its own’.
The dynamics of change also promote shifts and leaps in the nature of thinking, with the scientific mind denouncing the ‘why’ question as a fanciful attempt to reify the link between fact and imagination – as if imagining fairies makes them real. However, there is a growing controversy over the ‘how’ of existence because beginnings feature changes that we cannot equate to things as they were without begging the question. Moreover, we reify our perceptions in supposing that causes give us answers by revealing more of themselves – such as, by showing us that the mind must be explicable as a physical effect in organic reality. But this doesn’t explain the shift that leads to living entities representing reality in cognitive space. Nor do the operations of the brain resemble thoughts or the imaginative frontiers of knowledge which exist as a functional necessity for our ensuing conceptual explorations. Consequently, it might be just as realistic for us to consider that existence, and what we know of it, exists for what is to follow. When all is said and done, isn’t that why we exist?
Mike Laidler
Philosophy asks questions in pursuit of truths – a principle that is also the driving-force of science. Divisions arise over which questions are potentially answerable; although answers don’t stem the flow of questions, nor does a recognised truth come with a full-stop, as if to put our questions to rest – as if the truth is definable by its defiance of contradiction. In fact, reality greets us with an avalanche of contradictions: the earth is and isn’t solid, the universe is and isn’t infinite, gravity is and isn’t a force, life is and isn’t just chemical activity, we are and are not merely stardust, a thought is and is not the same thing as a brain process, causes do and do not explain effects, change is and is not more of the same, the present does and does not shape the future, the governing constants and absolutes do and do not control what happens next. Furthermore, change proves to be more fundamental than any ruling truth. It means that the truth-content of our answers doesn’t negate the fact that change can be radical, that there can be wholly different answers in different contexts, that those contexts stand out as different dimensions of existence which we partially understand as energy, matter, life, consciousness and thought. And doesn’t life show us that the facts can defy reason? Indeed, there is more to existence than we can reduce to the axioms of our logical explanations. Then if there is to be a resolution that applies to everyone, might it not be this: don’t dismiss ‘the impossible’ simply because it contradicts your aspirations to countenance possibility on your terms – don’t dismiss as impossible the truth that changes to become more than it was.
Mike Laidler
It is said that where there is a will there is a way, but where does the will get us without a way? That is, how can ‘the will’ make a real difference in a universe where matter is seen to be more real than morality – in which the future is not an open book or the past a closed chapter? Then what can be so special about our lives in ‘the now’ to make the present seem more real than the past and future? It would seem that we judge reality, including ourselves, on the basis of appearances in a universe that changes around the unchanging. And in our lives the past can be seen to be more real than the future inasmuch as we know it existed. Indeed, spectres of the past can be seen to haunt the present in a sea of consequences. But where might it all lead?
In our rationalised reality of the present, in a universe that doesn’t need a moral compass, there are no benevolent or malevolent states of nature and no errant influences emanating from an insidious past. Be that as it may, our descendants might not look kindly upon the decadence of our selfish consumerism, especially if they have to live with its crippling legacies manifesting in forms of environmental or economic collapse. Then might the spectre of the future be beckoning us now, to indulge less, not more, for the sake of the unborn? Or do we suppose that science will somehow cure our blindness and save humanity from its excesses? Meanwhile, Nobel prizes continue to be dished out to economists who extol the virtues of macro-economic growth as the mainstay of our wealth which, so it is believed, can also pass on and consequently ameliorate our debt to posterity.
Mike Laidler
Philosophy Alive 