Chapter 15 – A Summing Up of the Case So Far

At this stage of my argument, then, a summing up is needed before I attempt to move on. In order to finish the argument and bring all the threads together, it is necessary to go backward and more carefully review some of the assumptions that are implicit in any argument that is based on science.

What are we committing to if we agree with the points argued so far and especially with what the entire argument assumes and builds on? Three ideas are essential.

                                   Martian sunset, as photographed by the NASA probe, Spirit Rover

In the first place, a basic assumption—for many modern thinkers, an implicit assumption they are not consciously aware of and do not examine—is that the universe is a single, integrated system. Every one of its parts connects to all of its other parts: one set of laws, each of which is consistent with all the others, rules the universe. We don’t understand the full system of natural laws yet, but in doing science, we implicitly believe that the laws of science apply on Mars and Gliese 581g just as precisely as those laws apply here on earth. (Dennis Overbye sums up the debate in a 2007 New York Times article.¹)

To some readers this assumption may seem so self-evident that stating it seems silly. But such a reaction is a hasty, careless one. Accepting this basic assumption of science—in conjunction with a few of the other conclusions reached so far in this book—has implications for all that we think and do.

To be even plainer, let’s consider this idea that our universe is all one system compared with the idea’s alternatives. In short, let’s ask, “As opposed to what?”

                                                    Artist’s conception of the Gliese 581 system

The alternative view of our universe sees it as being made up of areas or dimensions or epochs in which different sets of rules apply or once did apply. This was the view of many of our forebears. They saw the universe as being run by many varied and mutually hostile gods, each with his or her own realm. For example, for the ancient Greeks, Poseidon ruled the sea; he could make storms at will and bring them down on any group of luckless mariners. Hades ruled the underworld, Zeus, the skies. Hades took Persephone down to his realm, and even Zeus could only negotiate to get her back for half the year. From this quarrel came the seasons. Two bellicose brats, who happened to be supernatural beings, and who could not get along. A universe run by caprice, lust, cruelty, and revenge.

 

                                                 artist's conception of Hades, Zeus, and Poseidon 

The classical Greeks also implicitly accepted that their ancestors had been much stronger than they were. Repeatedly in The Iliad, heroes hoist rocks that “no man today could lift,” and they do it with ease.² In such a universe, certain systems of ideas that were right in one area or era might be quite different from those that were right (in both senses of right) in some other distant land or era.

In the modern view, under science, we assume that the strong force, the weak force, and the laws of electromagnetism and gravity apply everywhere and always have done so. It is true that we have not yet found a way to translate our model of gravity into the system of ideas and equations that describes the other three, but we are confident that a unified field theory does exist. Ours is a single coherent universe, we assume.

Do most people in our modern society truly believe the universe is a single, coherent system? Yes. That is what science is about. The alternative, superstition, is simply not palatable for most people in the West today. Whatever the flaws in the current scientific world view—and it is not logically airtight, as we have seen—we’ve nevertheless seen it achieve far too many successes to gamble on any of the superstitious alternatives. People today, by and large, do not turn a sick child over to a shaman for treatment. Who today would try to fix his vehicle by casting pennies or lighting incense sticks or chanting? In today’s world, for better or worse, we in the West especially are citizens of the Age of Science. The evidence says that is a solid Bayesian choice, therefore, a fully rational one.

Let’s keep this first implicit assumption of science in mind. All is connected to all else in a coherent, systematic way. (Nicholas Maxwell discusses this view and its problems at length in his book From Knowledge to Wisdom, pp. 107–109.³)

  

                                                            Artist’s impression of entangled particles

However, and in the second place, we also now know that this universe is a kind of aware. Changes in one part of the universe produce changes in another, distant part—instantly. Like a neck jerking when a dust mote enters an eye or the kidney-shaped halves of a Venus flytrap snapping shut when a tiny insect lands between them or even a grove of trees detecting airborne chemical signals from other trees that are being attacked by insects and the uninfected trees promptly beginning to exude chemicals that repel the insects before the first of them even arrive, parts of the universe are connected in amazing ways.⁴ How the parts are connected is still a mystery to physicists, but that they are connected is no longer in doubt.  

Particles in all corners of the universe are entangled, physicists say. Quantum experiments have proved that such is the case as surely as Newton’s laws of motion have been shown by generations of engineers to be accurate, human-scale approximations of relativistic mechanics. (Joshua Roebke describes this research in an article published in 2008.⁵)

Particles found in matched pairs in the subatomic world can be separated and steered apart as they travel. But if the spin of one of the two particles is reversed, its former partner—unacted upon in any way—will undergo a complementary, mirror-image change of its own. And the signal by which the first tells the second to reverse its spin travels from one to the other instantly, in no time, which is a violation of Einstein’s relativity theory, and thus of all the models that predated the quantum theory. (Roebke summarizes this well.⁶)

Can we then call the coherent system of particles and forces “self-aware”?

Here again, we must make a cognitive choice between which model to use as we interpret the most recent data from physics. In light of all of the evidence and reasoning currently available, belief in the quantum model appears to be our most rational choice.

But belief in this model further implies that the universe is its own kind of aware. Or let’s take the big leap and say conscious. This view too is a choice. So why would we choose to think, even provisionally, that the universe has awareness? There are at least four good reasons.

First, the evidence says so. If we touch a living entity in one part and we then detect a reaction in another part, a reaction that can be replicated and studied over and over, we describe that entity as being aware. Amoeba move away from strong light. As they germinate, plant seeds send a shoot upward, away from gravity, and a root downward, toward gravity. Higher organisms in which a stimulus occurring at one location produces a response somewhere else are assumed in biology to have a controller of some sort between the two sites. The entanglement of particles in the universe fits this basic model of awareness.

Second, the choice to view the universe as being aware also makes more scientific sense than choosing the alternative view, that is, to see the universe as an unfeeling machine, as Laplace did. The idea of an aware universe enables us, at least in part, to account for findings in other branches of science, like the synchronous behaviours found in the movements of schools of fish and flocks of birds, and the flashes in swarms of fireflies. Presently, how the individual animals in these collectives know what their fellows are about has defied explanation by the best modelling and experimentation of the best scientists in several specialized branches of both physics and biology. But in their research, the scientists continue to observe this kind of synchronous movement in collectives of separate organisms. It’s real.

Third, seeing the universe as an aware entity fosters in us an inclination to engage with whatever moral conclusions our worldview then leads us to in a way that is personal. Stand up for your values because the universe is watching. History has shown us repeatedly that only a moral code that is heartfelt stands up to the kinds of pressures tyrants bring to bear on citizens in their societies. Moral codes that are only cerebral don’t motivate their adherents. Cerebral morals can be rationalized and pushed in any direction a tyrant desires. In Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, even the scientists were co-opted by the tyrants. A worldview that sees the universe as aware reduces our human tendency to rationalize our way into moral laziness. An aware universe is watching us, and judging us, second by second.

Finally, taking a larger, more global view, seeing the universe as quantum theory models it rather than as the Newtonian paradigm models it commits us to the concept of free will. If, as we flow into the future, there are many possible paths before us rather than only one that is inescapable, then by cleverly chosen actions we can influence the probabilities of which path we will land on. We have a degree of free will.

In other words, the quantum view feels like life the way we live it. I do hold people responsible for their actions. In fact, no one I know lives daily life as if the cars around them in traffic are particles driven by unchangeable forces toward inescapable outcomes. Cars contain drivers who are responsible human beings. If they aren’t, they shouldn’t be driving. If your car’s path crosses my car’s path and I have to steer sharply left and almost swerve my car into a lane of oncoming traffic, I’m going to be mad at you, not your car. Similarly, I reject outright any moral code that excuses rapists, pedophiles and murderers as being not responsible for their actions, and so does every other person I’ve ever met. Quantum theory fits how life feels. We have free will; we can be held responsible, to a fair degree, for the events in which we are involved.