Chapter 13            Part C

      And now we come to a subtler insight. The value which society instills or programs into its young to make them seek out, meet, and conquer adversity must be balanced or tempered with a second value which will cause the energies put into the challenge-seeking exercises to be focused, so that those energies will deal with challenges efficiently. There is nothing to be gained by teaching young people blind aggression; it will only run amok in the society which instilled that value to begin with. Driven, but directionless, young people end up damaging themselves and each other in car crashes, daredevil stunts, and street fights, while accomplishing little to nothing for their society in useful, material terms. 

               

        The courage-tempering value in the West is usually called “wisdom”, but “intelligence" and “judgement” are also terms for this same values cluster, and there are many more. In all of its forms, wisdom has the effect of directing humans to identify, and then achieve, useful objectives by behavior patterns which will efficiently employ the energies being expended.



The Education of Achilles by the Centaur, Chiron (Regnault) 

               

       Not surprisingly, there are echoes of this balancing of courage and wisdom in mythology. Jason, Achilles, Perseus, Theseus, and Aeneas needed Chiron, the wise, kind, moderate teacher of them all.  The ancient Greeks embedded in their myths the deepest of their moral insights. Arthur needed Merlin, Luke Skywalker needed Yoda, etc..

               



     Thomas Carlyle 

        The most familiar value that is a hybrid of courage and wisdom is the one that is known as "work". “Diligence” and “conscientiousness” are two of its other names, as we are all wearily aware. But the dreary, tedious, shopworn cliché feel of this values cluster should not discourage us. Reiterate: clichés, like the one about the nobleness of work, get to be clichés because they express something that is true. Courage is good. Intelligence is good. Added together, they produce the synthesis called "work".  Thomas Carlyle, with his complex and subtle style of both thought and expression, distilled the idea well:

              

               

"For there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair. Work, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication with Nature; the real desire to get Work done will itself lead one more and more to truth, to Nature's appointments and regulations, which are truth." (3.)

    Notes 

   3.http://www.online-literature.com/thomas-carlyle/past-and-       present/34/

Special Note to visitors to this blog: 

I have re-written Chapter 12 of the book being posted here in substantial ways, especially Part C. The changes and additions have, I think, strengthened the force of the overall argument. 

Authors of traditional books typically put thank-yous and disclaimers at the starts of their works. Usually, they will say that any shortcomings in the book are their own fault, not the responsibility of any of their advisers or editors. 

Authors online, on the other hand, have to show at least some flaws and false starts to the world, along with, if they are honest, the efforts they have made to amend the parts of their work that they are unhappy with. 

I was not satisfied with my 12th chapter. I have fixed it, I think, so that it is more comprehensive and rigorous. 

Now we can get on with our journey to theism. Thank you for bearing with me. 

             Dwight  

Special Note 

For visitors to this blog: 

I haven't posted anything in a few days because I have gotten sidelined by some new thoughts about chaos theory and complexity and how they interface with quantum uncertainty and, in turn, its effect on human cultures.

I am going to read some more on chaos theory and then integrate what I conclude with what I have been saying about human values and how they grow out of the forces that make physical reality. 

In short, I am going to re-write a few bits of my chapters from Chapter 12 up to this point. Please stay tuned. The edits I am planning to make will be modest, and they will affect the logic that leads to my conclusion only by strengthening it. 

I'll post again shortly. 


________________________________________________________________ 

         Chapter 13                     Part B 

     Over millions of people and thousands of years, values enable survival of a human society if and only if they complement the forces underlying physical reality, or, to be more precise, successful values must cause humans to behave in ways that complement and accommodate the physical forces that underlie reality, usually for the individual in the short term, but especially for the whole society over the long term. 

       Our values in modern democracies have been fairly effective at guiding us to survive and spread, though admittedly not always in humanitarian ways. But the demands of survival in a hazardous reality have caused us, over millennia, to work out a set of values, morés, and behavior patterns that is (mostly) consistent with the forces of reality. If we and our forebears had not learned our lessons at least moderately well, and then implemented them at least moderately well, we would not be here. Having children is hereditary: if your parents didn't have any, you won't have any.

 American children reciting pledge of allegiance

           

            Chinese children saluting flag

            children saluting flag in Belarus 

  Boy scouts in Iran at celebration of 1979 revolution

           But we don't yet comprehend the biggest of these truths in a conscious and self-aware way. Most people in all countries still see their values as being exempt from analysis because in a deep way - via early childhood imprinting - we have been taught to be unquestioningly loyal to those values. This style of programming has made the vast majorities of people in most societies, both historical and modern, into unwitting pawns of their society's "way of life". A major purpose of this book is to try to make values conscious and turn them into concepts that are available for analysis and discussion by circles of thoughtful people in this twenty-first century.

        First, then, what are the values that enable humans to respond to the main consequence of entropy, the unceasing, hazardous struggle of life, the quality of life that we know as “adversity”?   

  

         A whole array of values should be taught to young people to enable them to deal with adversity. In order to deal well with adversity, a society needs large numbers of people willing and even eager to face constant struggle, exertion, exhaustion, and pain. A society proves most effective, in fact, if its citizens take up the offensive against the relentless decay of the universe. In short, a society proves most durable if its children are taught to like challenge. These children become adults who seek to bring new territories (planets?) under their tribe's control, and to devise new ways of growing/storing more food, building shelters, etc. - ways of accomplishing more work with less human exertion (i.e. by new technologies) - and, in general, constantly performing the tasks of survival more efficiently.

       When we generalize about what these entropy-driven behavior clusters have in common, we derive two giant values; they are, in English, the ones called "courage" and "wisdom".

         Under different names, courage is instilled in the young in societies all over the world, which is what we would expect if it really does work. Bergson spoke of "élan", Nietzsche of the "will to power"(1.) Japanese samurai lived by bushido, their code of discipline, and European nations lived by a similar code, chivalry, right into modern times. But beyond the difficulties of translation from culture to culture and era to era, we see in all these values a common motif: they all direct their disciples to train themselves to persevere through challenges and obstacles of all kinds, even to seek challenge out. Achilles chose a brief, hard life of honor over a longer, easier one of obscurity. For centuries, the ancient Greeks considered him to be a model of a man, as do some people in all nations that have absorbed ancient Greek culture to this day. Many cultures have similar heroes.   

   Brad Pitt as Achilles in the movie "Troy" (2004)

     Apache leader Crazy Horse (c.1881) 

  Henry Cele as Shaka in t.v. series "Shaka Zulu" (1986) 

       If entropy/adversity is in all parts of reality in all eras - and it is - then if we're rational, we ought to learn the values that equip us to handle it and make those values universal in our way of life. History supports this conclusion. 

         19th century English writer K. H. Digby put it this way: "Chivalry is only a name for that general spirit or state of mind which disposes men to heroic actions, and keeps them conversant with all that is beautiful and sublime in the intellectual and moral world." (2.)

         The exhortation to meet, and even seek, adversity echoes through all societies. We can most conveniently sum up the gist of all of these values by saying that they are built around the principle that in English is called “courage”. 

         Yes, it is familiar and cliché to exhort people to aspire to courage. Clichés get to be clichés because they express something true. Amid the chaotic background of the physical universe, life creates stable, growing pockets of order. In the case of humans, it does so by cultural programming into young people of the whole constellation of values around the prime value called "courage". From it, behaviors that meet and overcome adversities of all kinds naturally flow, and societies that believe in courage survive better and better because of that belief, which is all our values ever were created to do. 


Notes 

1.http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-    h.htm#link2H_4_0004; especially part XXXIV "Self-Surpassing".

2. https://archive.org/details/broadstoneofhono02digbiala   

Chapter 13      The Morally Crucial Characteristics Of Modern Physics                

Part A

         At last. We are ready to tackle the moral challenge. The question now is: "What are the characteristics of the real universe, according to our best scientific undersanding of that universe, that bear on how we should design our new moral code?" The answer is: "The two most morally relevant characteristics of the scientific worldview are quantum uncertainty and entropy." Each of these needs a bit more elaboration in order for us to see, first, how it works in human lives materially and, second, what its significance is morally.

 Quantum uncertainty requires that humans, and especially human societies, survive in reality by learning to calculate probabilities of events, probabilities ranging from the likelihood that it is going to rain this afternoon, to the likelihood that I'll get a stomach ache if I eat these fried onions, to the likelihood that a leopard is hiding in that field of grass ahead, to the likelihood that a war will come if we tell the tribe that regularly cross our rope bridge that they can't use it anymore, to the likelihood that Germany will attack Russia, given Hitler's words in "Mein Kampf" about Germany's need for living space to the east.

   

    

probability density for an 

electron orbiting an atom 

in the state: 

n=4, l=4, m=0

   

   The second morally relevant feature of physical reality is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and it is more familiar and easier to explain than quantum uncertainty. This law tells us that energy always flows downhill, from areas of greater concentration to areas of lesser concentration. If matter and energy are getting more concentrated or organized in one area of space, that fact only means there will be an even greater dissipation of energy in all nearby areas. 

   An area of matter-energy organization and concentration (like the biosphere of our planet or the mass of my body) must always be maintained at the expense of even greater rates of energy dissipation in nearby spaces. I get energy by eating plants or animals, which also depend ultimately on eating plants, and plants get their energy from the sun as it burns. Fossil fuels when they are burned are also only releasing stored solar energy, as are hydro-electric dams and wood pellets. The sun is our source, and it burns and dissipates energy much more intensely than the creatures in the biosphere of the Earth burn or store second-hand sun energy.

dying star at edge of universe (13 billion light years away)

    Stars are burning out. The universe is heading toward a final state in which more than 10 to the 79^th instances of some kind of elemental particle will be spread uniformly across it at a temperature of absolute zero. We really don't understand numbers that big, but that doesn't matter. The heat death of the universe, as far as we can see right now, is inevitable. The heat death of the universe isn't due for at least another five billion years or so, but the human-scale effect of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is seen every day in the way that things keep falling apart; decay is built into the fabric of daily life.

          To humans, who are complex, energy-concentrated, subtly organized, living entities, this means that we, like all living things, must live against the natural flow of the physical universe. The ever-increasing “disorganizedness” or “burnt-outness” of the universe is called “entropy”, and overall in the universe, entropy must always be increasing. 

          

           Thus, our present worldview is telling us, at least at this stage of our evolution, that the universe is made of large masses of particles governed by what we recognize as two main inherent principles: adversity and uncertainty.

          Of course, this worldview may be superseded someday in a way that overrules our current picture of reality. However, in order to grow beyond our current worldview, we are probably going to have to work out its implications for these times in order to make it possible for some future generations to envision subtler models of the universe and then some better, more efficacious values and morés to go with their improved worldview. For now, then, let's focus on whether the worldview given to us by our scientists in these times clearly points to any particular values and morés.     

Chapter 12       Part C 

This is a good point at which to insert a few further remarks on the roots of the uncertainty that we observe at the human level of experience. I have focused on the uncertainty that originates at the quantum level of reality, the level of photons, hadrons, electrons, and photons because the actions of hadrons, electrons, and photons form the base for the actions of all particles larger than themselves.

But there are also other sources of uncertainty. The molecular level, according to our best current models, is also probabilistic and uncertain - at least to us. Strictly speaking, the molecular level of reality does, in fact, contain determined sequences of events because the forces that act on particles at this level are ruled by classical physics and are, therefore, in principle - if quantum events do not intervene - determined. Under this view, if we could measure and process all of the data for all of the particles involved in a given initial state, we could accurately predict how that state would evolve over the next minute or millennium. The weather is a good example.

But tiny differences in the initial states of such systems can lead to radically different outcomes. In other words, practically speaking, for us at the macro level of resolution, these systems are only comprehensible by statistical models. At the everyday human level, there is simply far too much measuring and calculating to ever do in any practical way. The bottom line for us in the human scale is that many classically determined real systems in the world present the same problems of having as huge a range of possible outcomes as the quantum level does. We navigate through both by building probabilistic models and then calculating probabilities, minute by minute, year by year, from sense data.

It is important to note also that the possibility is always there that some event at the quantum level will break through to influence events at the higher levels of resolution. This is the "Butterfly Effect" and no science, in dealing with real situations, can ever rule it out. And the import of all of these models, as far as we are concerned, is that life is ruled by probabilities.

It is important to re-iterate here that quantum theory is not talking about this molecular kind of variability, which is an approximation that we are forced to when dealing with systems like the weather by practical limits on our measuring abilities. Such systems are, in principle, deterministic. On the other hand, quantum theory says that the processes going on at the sub-atomic level are always popping in what appear to us to be strange, uncaused ways. What Einstein called "spooky action at a distance". (He did not like the very idea of it.) But the point for my purposes in trying to find a basis in physical reality for a moral code is not affected by these distinctions. Probability, as an overriding quality of reality, is ubiquitous and, as far as we can tell, eternal. We must live with uncertainty and adapt to it as a fact of life.

Physicists are unclear about how or even whether quantum uncertainty and non-quantum uncertainty interact and enhance one another. The huge range of outcomes in complex systems may be influenced by both non-quantum and quantum events. Currently, we just don't know. The exact nature of what is going on down there is still being debated.

However, our moral models are not affected by these distinctions. In daily life, where most of our choices are made and our actions are measured, we experience reality as being made of events that are probabilistic. And in those chains of events, guided, chosen human actions can effectively intervene and alter the likelihoods of at least some outcomes. This is all that really matters for moral philosophy.

Therefore, in all that follows, I will speak of quantum uncertainy as being one of the crucial and basic characteristics that we humans - via our moral codes and the behaviors that they imply - must deal with. When I speak of "quantum uncertainty", I will be referring to the total uncertainty of reality that human beings have to learn to accommodate and react effectively to.

 

   Charles S. Peirce 

Quantum theory breaks the backbone of classical determinism. At the tiniest level that we have so far been able to study, events are not connected by single paths of direct cause and effect. They are connected by forces that do not obey exact laws of cause and effect, but instead can only be described by laws of probability. The consequence for humans at the human level is that life is made of uncertainty, or to be exact, probabilities. Reality is a stochastic system. Most of the time we know with a high degree of probability what is going to happen next, and with a fair degree of reliability, how we can influence what is going to happen next; but we never know for certain what is going to happen about anything. This view was anticipated by Peirce in the 1890's and has been further developed by many thinkers right into the twenty-first century. (4.) (5.)

We can act, and we do act, in bold, informed, calculated, and skilful ways, and our actions alter the probabilities of the various events that may happen in the next few seconds or decades, but it is also true that we can't ever act so intelligently or skillfully that we can be one hundred percent sure of any outcome, good or bad. The elements of surprise and risk are built into reality.           

If the true picture of reality and our place in it is that uncertain, or to put it more accurately, that probabilistic, one begins to wonder how we manage to get anything done. What mental models can guide us to effective action in such an environment? The answer lies in viewing the human mind itself in a way that is consistent with quantum theory. 

No one would really engage in everyday life as if she or he were not free. In my ordinary dealings in everyday life, of course I believe in free will. I get out of the way of oncoming buses or landslides, I go to work to earn my pay, and I hold people responsible for their actions. I expect other rational adults to do the same. I applaud decent actions and reprimand mean ones. I calculate odds on the material "rightness" and moral "rightness" of nearly everything I do.  

  

The Bayesian model of the human mind is an appropriate one to fit inside of the quantum model of the universe because it portrays the human mind in a way that is consistent with quantum uncertainty. A sense-data-processing, probability-calculating, action-planning program - designed by trial and error through centuries of cultural evolution - is going to be more likely to enable the organism that runs by it to survive than any other program for surviving that we could propose.

At least so far in human history, the mind-software that runs on the brain hardware is defying all of the computer simulations and other models that we have devised to try to imitate it or explain it. In other words, the details of the programs that run on the brain's protoplasmic hardware are even more of a mystery than the enormously complex neuron-hardware itself. The mind, which is only an evolved variation of the larger phenomenon of life itself, spots patterns in sense data, sometimes only over generations. 

But finding and exploiting patterns in the flows of matter and energy, and calculating ways to exploit them, is what minds, especially human minds, do. Exactly how they do this, so far, we have not been able to pin down. But, in spite of our difficulties with comprehending what we are doing when we are comprehending, the Bayesian model of the mind is still useful and workable. With it, we can do some serious reasoning. 

The point as far as this book is concerned is that we have now integrated the Bayesian model of the human mind with the socio-cultural model of human evolution and the quantum model of the physical universe. We are ready to draw some really powerful conclusions.

Notes 

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminism#Robert_Kane

5.http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/bycsp/

  necessity/necessity.html

Chapter 12         Part B 

Under the quantum worldview, events in reality cannot be pictured as coming in predetermined connected sequences of cause and effect, but they aren’t random either. All events can now be seen as governed by rules of probability. Which objects in reality will collide or jump to other energy levels at any given nanosecond can be described only by laws of probability. 

Normally what we see at our level of reality is the average of quintillions of tiny events. Most of the time, these events are the high probability ones, and they fit together to create the classical, Newtonian pictures and patterns that we have seen over and over and have come to expect of everyday life.

  asternut butterfly beside a strange attractor graph

But quantum theory leaves open the possibility that once in a while, when enough unusual events at the atomic level coincide, they cause some observable event at our level – a hurricane, a supernova, a tornado, an avalanche, a failed bolt in one aileron of an airplane, or a sillytumble. None of these events is "uncaused". They all result from chains of other events. Our problem is that in principle we can't predict these outcomes in advance because we can't calculate the sums of all of the influencing links in the causal chain. 

And it's not just that there are too many factors involved. Even simple systems with only two or three objects and forces acting in them defy our best computer models. The possible ways in which the system may turn out depend on initial conditions of all parts of the system, and miniscule changes, some of them quantum changes, in any of these parts at any time during the unfolding can lead to any one of zillions of very different outcomes. The possibilities rapidly become, in practical terms, mathematically incalculable. 

 Hurricane Dennis approaching Pensacola, Florida

We can only say after the hurricane has passed that some of the predictors that we observed began to indicate near-certainty levels of the hurricane's making landfall about five days before the hurricane hit. Then, the evolving odds that it was going to hit a specific site, for example, Pensacola, began to approach 60% on Friday or 95 or 99% by Sunday. Tiny jumps by particles, sometimes even sub-atomic ones (the famous "Butterfly Effect"), way back in the hurricane's genesis off the coast of Africa, favored the likelihood of one outcome over all of the other possible outcomes. (3.) 

Gradually, a winning outcome-candidate emerges. But which candidate outcome that will be is not just unknown; in advance, it is unknowable. Unlike the Newtonian/Enlightenment worldview, the worldview of the New Physics is telling us that the outcomes in real life sequences of events are, in principle, unpredictable, in the exact sense of that word.

The key thing to see under this worldview is that, though this worldview, under its own terms, can't be proven true or false, it is looking more and more likely, and it has opened the further possibility that we can influence probabilities by our skillfully executed physical actions in the real world. The odds that the flap of a butterfly's wing will cause a hurricane are extremely remote. The odds that I will not get hit by a rock slide if I hear a roaring and duck beneath an overhanging shelf of basalt are much better. The odds that a field in April, left alone, will be full of sweet corn ripening by September are extremely remote. The odds that the same field will contain harvestable corn plants in large numbers if I seed it with corn now in April, and fence and water and weed it for the next five months, are much higher.

     planaria swimming away from a flashlight 

     

The programming in planaria enables them to swim to the side of the petri dish out of the direct light. To use their "intelligence", in other words, to alter the odds surrounding the possible outcomes associated with their interaction with incoming beams of light. How much more empowering is human programming? This is a view of ourselves that deeply resonates with our daily view of the daily actions of our daily selves. 

We are, within certain human, physical limits, free. We can take measures and do actions that alter the odds of some of the possible future's events happening. I may not be able to stop the hurricane, but I can fund research and then listen to the predictions of the experts on t.v., and then get out of the way. I can board up the windows on my home. I can choose to do so if I think there's time. The trees have much less choice; the beaches, none at all. 

We work, via our choices and actions, to increase the odds of our encountering events that will support our survival, health, and comfort, and to decrease the odds of our becoming enmeshed in the events that would lead us to pain and death. This is the nature of human freedom.

Scrooge on his own grave begs for a chance 
to go back to life and mend his ways

     

      (Alistair Sim in "A Christmas Carol", 1951) 

We gain a better understanding of how profoundly different this world view is when we contrast it with the old Newtonian one. Philosophers who understood the old Newtonian one believed absolutely that laws like Newton's laws of motion would eventually explain phenomena in the realms of Physics, then Chemistry, then Biology, Psychology, and History. In this model, every event, and even every action performed by animals or humans, is seen as being governed by rigorous laws that in each case lead to only one possible result. 

If a scientist could know all of the scientific laws of the cosmos, then also know the momentum and position of every particle in the universe at just one moment, she could apply scientific laws to the data, predict all of the future, and retrodict all of the past. This is the view called "determinism": it says that there is no such thing as free will because the future is already set, even if no human being will ever be able to know all of the natural laws and the positions of all of the particles. In principle, under the Newtonian view, there is no free will for humans or anything in this universe because the future is already fixed.


Notes 

3. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chaos/

Chapter   12       World Views, New         Part A

    The new worldview that can be used as a base for a new moral code begins in the most difficult branch of modern Science, i.e. quantum theory. Quantum theory can be translated into a worldview and then into a base for a moral code. And the moral code that can be derived from it is not really that far from one that, at least in theory, we should already be familiar with.

          C. S. Lewis 

The problem for centuries has been that the kind of behavior that most people in the West felt was "morally right" could not be integrated with what Science said was physically right. The universe that the scientists have described for hundreds of years seems to contain no free will. Thus, it implies no moral code at all. Science and Moral Philosophy have long been at loggerheads. 

Descartes' solution was to posit two realms, one of mind/spirit and one of matter/body, and assign Moral Philosophy to govern the first and Science to govern the second. Even some fairly recent thinkers - for example, C.S. Lewis - have argued that since our sense of right and wrong is so deeply ingrained in all of us that it must be real and so it must come from some source other than the material world, and therefore our deep sense of right and wrong, i.e. morality,  proves the existence of, a spiritual realm. (1.) 

But most people in the West today do not reach Lewis' same heartening conclusion. This view of Science and Religion as being incommensurable and irreconcilable - a view being advocated by many scientists and moral philosophers alike - is not an encouraging view for most people. (This view has been dubbed "NOMA" for "non-overlapping magisteria", a term first coined by Stephen Jay Gould in 1997.) The influence of Science and the scientific way of thinking have kept rising in the public consciousness, and as they have, most people in the West have felt more and more that if, first, there is only one reality, and second, only Science can describe it, then, because Science has been silent about what right and wrong are, there really are no such things as "right" and "wrong". 

     All of the signs indicate that if we continue to follow our old values systems - the ones that grew up in the Roman world or the medieval world or the ones that grew up in the Enlightenment (out of the Newtonian worldview) - the hypocritical codes that let us march over other nations and even Nature herself - then we are going to destroy our world.

    But there is hope. We have a new worldview. The question is: "Can it provide us with a base for a new code of values?" Let's see what we can do with the worldview of the New Physics.

          Quantum theory is the most complete explanation that we have of reality. It correctly predicts whole areas of data drawn from all of our observations of the universe, some of which, until well into the twentieth century, had stymied all of our scientists. But the world view which quantum theory offers is a strange one, especially for the Western style of mind. In the world today, only a very few can do the math involved in quantum theory, but its most fundamental principle is not hard to state.

        The overarching principle of quantum theory can be stated very easily: reality is flux. But grasping what those words mean is another matter. To say that everything is in a constant state of flux is inadequate. Rather we must say that change is reality. For example, the "things" we think we see, with their surfaces and masses and colors, are illusions. An “object” is only an area in space-time where interfering waves of sub-atomic fields (according to physicists) are accessible, via the data we can detect by our senses, to our consciousness. These temporary arrangements of particles and fields act on our (temporarily stable) sense organs in such a way as to produce impressions of solidness, weight, shape, and colors and so on in our (temporarily stable) brains. (2.) 

          But according to quantum theory, and even some parts of pre-quantum science, these phenomena that I think I am seeing are temporary. If they are given enough time, they will collapse. Exactly how any one object, or particle, will do so and what it will become next we cannot ever say with certainty. We can make predictions, some with very high degrees of probability to them, but we cannot “pre-know” any event with certainty no matter how clever or well-supplied with data we are. Cause and effect don't always connect. Odd things, external and internal, can, and sometimes do, interfere.  

artist's view of giant meteorite entering Earth's atmosphere

          I can't know when I go to stretch out my arm that my arm will stretch out. One day it won't. I can't know that the sun will rise tomorrow or that the pen that I just bumped off of my desk will fall to the floor. A giant meteor may strike the Earth tonight. My pen may get caught in a kind of anti-gravity field which, until today, I knew nothing about.

      I can't know anything for certain, ever, period. I can only calculate the probabilities that these events will happen. In usual, everyday life, I base my estimates of events' probabilities on my memories of past experiences, on generalizations formed by studying those memories, and on habits acquired from my culture. My estimates are very accurate most of the time. But I can't know anything for certain.

     In the terms of everyday human experience, this means change that one can plan for is not real change. There is only one rule and that is the rule which says that there are no rules, or at least not any hard and fast ones. And, as the old saying goes, life is full of rude awakenings.

    This point is important enough to deserve a special digression of its own. We live in an age in which many people, especially in the West, people of education and experience, have grown smug and complacent. Many in the West today comfort themselves with the deluded thought that in the West, we do understand the workings of politics and Economics and Biology and even physical science so well that we need no longer fear catastrophes such as those which befell our forebears. This sort of self-delusion is merely another example of cognitive dissonance reduction. People have fallen prey by the millions to complacency because they are drawn to believing something that they deeply want to believe – not because they have adequate grounds for the beliefs that give them this confidence, but because they want right into their deepest subconscious levels to hide from their totally rational fear of the unknown.

   The point of Thomas Kuhn's famous book from 1962, titled "The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions", one of the seminal books of our time, is that even in the most rigorously logical and real, material world-grounded of fields, namely Science, there are no certainties. All of the models of reality that have ever been constructed by the human mind have undergone major revisions or even total overthrow in the past. There is absolutely no reason for us to assume that any of our culture’s mental models of reality at any level of resolution – from the sub-atomic, to the human-scaled, to the cosmic – will be used to guide research by anyone a century from now. There is nothing in the idea of an electron that is immune to being superseded by another, more useful, effective idea, any more than there was in the idea of the ether or the idea of phlogiston - two scientific ideas that are now obsolete.

  artist's conception of atoms inside a strontium clock 

    And electrons themselves? Am I saying they will cease to exist? Why, that's absurd. Actually, it isn't at all. Quantum physicists are saying something much more radical. Electrons aren't there in the first place. The way we were taught to draw a solar system-styled sketch of the atom in high school is only a useful model of sub-atomic reality. What is really down there cannot be drawn at all.

    The waves of light that enable human beings to do what we call "seeing" are longer than the dimensions of this so-called "electron". "What does an electron look like?" is a meaningless question. An electron doesn't "look" like anything humans can relate to, even if we could pool all of the seeing and imagining that the whole human species has ever done. That solar system-like model of the atom is merely a useful model that has enabled some scientists to do calculations and then make predictions about the phenomena that these supposed particles will produce at the level that is observable to us if we prod them in certain ways that are available to us in our labs.

   But no physicists really think there are a bunch of little bullets whirling around down at the sub-atomic level. That model has had its uses, but we must not get attached to it. Its day is all but up. New results are defying many of the ideas and assumptions implied by that model.

    However, what matters for the purposes of this book is that the quantum model of reality, even if we can't "picture" it, has profound implications for our worldview. Therefore, it also has profound implications for our ethical beliefs, values, cultural morés, and patterns of survival-oriented behavior.

Notes 

1.http://www.truthaccordingtoscripture.com/documents/apologetics/ mere-christianity/Book1/ 
cs-lewis-mere-christianitybook1.php#.U1gQFo1OVLM

2. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0811/0811.3696.pdf