Chapter 16                   Modern World Views

A short review of what’s been said so far.

We must have some sort of code in place in order just to operate our bodies, make choices, and move through our lives in our environments. Furthermore, most of the values that enable humans to prioritize actions, and then do them, are learned from our cultures, not programmed by our genes.

The values codes that we in the West have lived by for centuries had their uses and enabled us to live effectively – as individuals and as nations. They produced material wealth and social order, but also sexism, racism, homophobia, and a host of other ills. Our moral codes are due for some major updating.

It is also the case that our best source of guidance in these times is Science. It isn’t perfect, but its record of empowering us to get more and more control over our lives is extremely impressive. It is also self-regulating. Scientists design models or, to put it another way, formulate theories, and then think of practical, real-world ways to test their models and theories. They don’t rely on sacred texts, personally witnessed miracles, or gurus. Even when they get an idea from one of these sources, they test it. Evidence that is demonstrable in the real, material world and well-reasoned models for understanding that evidence – these are the hallmarks of Science. And the tests must be replicable, i.e. it must be possible for researchers to repeat them at any reasonable time.

Thus, Science can correct itself. Models and theories can be tested and revised by each new generation of researchers.

Does it work? It has proved itself in more than half of all the fields of study, and its number of followers keeps growing. Why? Because Science gets results.

Science is the view of reality that most people in this time trust most completely. Implicitly. About every question that comes up in our lives, we want to know what research in the field says. We long to know that what we feel is right is materially right. We seek a code to live by that will fit the ways by which the universe works and that puts us into a set of behavior patterns that will lead us to health and joy, and past injury, illness, pain, and early death.

So? What basic principles of the real, material world itself are relevant to how we are going to build a modern moral code for the modern age?

At last. We begin to discuss the heart of the matter.

Science is founded on a number of basic beliefs about reality. The strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, and gravity. Light, heat, chemical valences of atoms and molecules, the mechanism by which species evolve, etc.. However, as is the case in biological evolution, a few giant forces of the universe can be seen as being so ubiquitous that we must keep them always in mind as we do our research and theorizing in cultural evolution. The most morally relevant of Science’s basic ideas about reality are just two: entropy and quantum uncertainty.  

The First Law of Thermodynamics says energy can’t be created or destroyed. It can only be changed in form. When chemical energy in a liter of gasoline is converted to heat energy (when the gasoline is burned), it can then be converted into mechanical energy (when the released heat energy causes a mass of gas and air to expand suddenly). The expanding gases then push pistons up and down. Gears and shafts translate the mechanical energy in the driven piston into the turning of the wheels and of the tires on the road. In very simple terms, this law of Science tells us that the total amount of energy in the universe (with matter simply being viewed as a concentrated form of energy) always remains the same. It can’t be decreased or increased; it can only be changed in form. 

But it’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics which has big ramifications for our moral code-building project. This law tells us that while the total amount of energy in the universe remains constant, that energy is always flowing from areas where it is more concentrated to areas in which it is less so. The stars in the universe – and our sun is just one more star – are constantly burning out. More and more. All the planets, moons, comets, asteroids, etc. are gradually getting colder and more broken up and scattered into ever tinier, colder bits. One day the universe will be burned down to completely dark and frozen. A vast volume of evenly scattered particles sitting completely still. That time is many billions of years from now, but it will come. At least, it sure looks that way. Serious scientists hardly ever attempt to propose a way out of this one.

The degree to which any system in the universe, of any size right up to the size of the whole universe itself, is burnt out, dissipated, scattered, and cold is called its entropy. The entropy of the universe is always increasing.

If a system in some small area of the universe seems to be getting more concentrated and organized, reducing its degree of burnt-outness, this can only be accomplished if energy from other systems nearby are used up to an even greater degree. Living things on this planet are organized, self-regulating hunks of matter and energy. They defy entropy …for a while. But they borrow energy from physical and chemical sources around them, which all get their energy from our sun. And it’s burning out. Overall, entropy is always increasing.

Entropy is a basic concept in all branches of Science and it is present in every aspect of our lives all the time. Thus, it shapes our moral codes profoundly. 

The second principle of Science that should inform how we design a moral code for this age is quantum uncertainty.

Quantum theory can be translated into a worldview and then into a major part of the base for a new moral code. So let’s talk a bit about quantum theory. 

Quantum theory, which was first proposed in the 1920’s, is the most complete model we have of reality. It correctly predicts nearly all our observations of the physical world. It has solved many problems in Science which had stymied scientists for generations. But the worldview quantum theory offers is a strange one, especially to Western thinking.

In the world today, only a very few can do the math involved in quantum theory, but its fundamental principle is easy to state: reality is flux. However, grasping what those words mean is more difficult. To say that everything is in constant flux is inadequate. Rather, we must say that flux is reality. For example, the things we see, with their surfaces, masses and colours, are illusions. According to quantum physicists, an object, for example, is only an area in space-time where waves in electro-magnetic and gravitational fields cause impressions of solidness, weight, shape, colors, etc. to our senses and, via them, in our brains.¹

But according to quantum theory, these things that I think I’m seeing are temporary. They are made mostly of empty space. If they are given enough time, they will collapse. Exactly how any object or particle will collapse and what it will become next we cannot ever say with certainty. We can make predictions, some with high degrees of probability (I’m pretty sure my laptop computer is not going to vanish from under my hands anytime soon), but we cannot “know” any event with certainty no matter how clever or well-supplied with data we are.

A power surge could cause my computer to lose big portions of the stuff in my hard drive. Or a virus that got into my computer from the internet could wipe out all of the material on my hard drive. (Yipe!) Even weirder things I’ve never envisioned, and therefore, never written about, could occur. A colony of some new, plastic-eating bacteria could erode my computer into bits of crumbled plastic overnight. I could wake up to a toxic mess that contains not one of my files. Or a few key molecules in my computer might even begin to break down into gases that dissipate into the atmosphere in my condo. Cause and effect do not always connect in the ways that we thought they did in the past. Odd, totally unforeseeable things, external and internal, sometimes intervene.

                                      

   

                                  Artist’s conception of a giant meteor hitting Earth 

                                       (credit: Don Davis, via Wikimedia Commons)

I can’t know when I try to stretch out my arm that my arm will stretch out. One day it may not. When that day will come, I can’t say. I can’t know whether the sun will rise tomorrow or whether the pen I bumped off of my desk will fall to the floor. A giant meteor could strike the earth. My pen could get caught in a kind of anti-gravity field that, until today, I knew nothing about. My pen could conceivably hover two feet from my face or soar out of my window. 

I can’t know anything for certain, ever. I can only calculate probabilities that I will experience some familiar events and objects. I base my estimates of these probabilities on my memories of past experiences, generalizations formed by studying those memories, and beliefs and habits acquired from my culture. My estimates are accurate - usually. But I can’t know anything for certain ever.

In the terms of everyday human experience, “reality is flux” means that change one can plan for is not real change. There is only one rule, which is the rule that says that there are no rules, or at least not any hard and fast ones. Or, as the old saying has it, life is full of rude awakenings. This is what quantum theory says to ordinary people living ordinary lives.

The point of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that even in Science, the most rigorously logical, real-world-grounded of fields, there are no certainties. All the models of reality ever constructed by the human mind have eventually been heavily revised or else tossed out altogether. There is absolutely no reason for us to assume that any of our culture’s current models of reality at any level of resolution – from the subatomic, to the human-scaled, to the cosmic – will be used to guide everyday thinking or scientific research a century from now. There is nothing in the idea of an electron that is immune to being replaced by another, more useful, scientifically effective idea, any more than there was in the ideas of the ether or élan vital or phlogiston – three concepts once thought to be scientific that are now obsolete.

   

                                     

                                  Artist’s conception of an atom 

        (credit: Pearson Scott Foresman, via Wikimedia Commons)

And electrons themselves? Will they cease to exist? “That’s absurd”, you say. No, it isn’t at all. Quantum physicists are investigating something much more radical – the idea that electrons were never there in the first place. Previous generations of high school students were taught to draw the atom as a graphic that resembled our solar system; at the time, it was a useful model of subatomic reality. But new models of the atom developed recently can’t be drawn at all.

Waves of light that enable humans to see are longer than the dimensions of an atom. “What does an atom look like?” is an incoherent query. Electrons don’t “look” like anything we can imagine, even if we could pool all the seeing and imagining that our species has ever done. That solar system–like model of the atom is just a picture that has allowed scientists to do calculations and make predictions about the reactions these hypothetical atoms will go through if we prod them in ways that are available to us in our labs. 

Even those events at the sub-atomic level that we can predict before we do an experiment have to be watched by instruments that make the events visible to us at our gross, macroscopic, human level. We can’t actually see what’s going on down there. The model is theoretical, and there are lots of assumptions made about what is going on between our prodding and an atom’s reaction to it.

But no physicists today really think clouds of tiny bullets are whirling around down at the subatomic level. That model has had its uses, but we must not become attached to it. Its day is all but up, and new results are defying many of the related ideas that it, for so long, has implied.

What matters for the purposes of this book is that the quantum model of reality works, even if we can’t “picture” the reality it describes. The formulas enable scientists to predict upcoming events and to build powerful technologies. Nuclear power plants and weapons. The important point for our purposes here is that quantum theory has profound implications for our world view, and thus for our moral concepts, values, morés, and patterns of behavior.

In the quantum world view, events in reality are not pictured as coming in predetermined sequences of cause and effect. But they aren’t random either. All events can now be seen as governed by probabilities. Which subatomic particles will jump to other energy levels at any given instant can be described only by laws of probability, not chains of causes and effects. Then, all larger events are shaped by those subatomic events.

Normally, an event or an object at our level of reality is a kind of average of quintillions of subatomic events. Most of the time, the events we see at our level of reality are high-probability events, and they fit together to create the familiar Newtonian pictures and patterns we have come to expect in everyday life.

But quantum theory leaves open the possibility that occasionally, when enough unusual events at the subatomic level coincide, they cause an event at our level – a hurricane, a supernova, a tornado, an avalanche, a failed bolt in an airplane, a mutation in a bacterium, or a sillytumble (I made that up). All these events have causes; none of them is “uncaused”. The problem is that causes aren’t neat parts of sequences of earlier events. In principle, we can’t perfectly predict these chancy outcomes in advance because we can’t ever have access to all the data we’d need. Some of that data is behind the curtain of quantum uncertainty. Weird things – things outside of the old Newtonian model – sometimes happen.

And the problem is not just that too many variables are involved. Even some simple systems with only two or three objects and forces acting on them evolve in ways that defy the best of the old cause-effect rules. 

The possible outcomes for a system depend on initial conditions of all parts of the system. But tiny changes, some of them quantum changes, in any of these parts at any stage during the unfolding of the events, also may lead to very unexpected outcomes.

                           

Inside the eye of Hurricane Katrina (credit: NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons)

For example, we can only say after a hurricane has passed that five days before it hit, some of our models had been indicating near-certainty levels of the hurricane’s making landfall on the Gulf Coast. Then, models based on past data indicated that the odds that it was going to hit a specific site – New Orleans, for example – began to approach 60 percent on Friday and 95 or 99 percent by Sunday. Tiny jumps by particles, even some subatomic ones, right back to the hurricane’s beginnings off the coast of Africa, favoured and eventually selected one outcome over all the other possible outcomes.²

In this hurricane scenario, gradually, one outcome emerged. But before it hit, which outcome that would be was not just unknown; it was unknowable.

Unlike the Newtonian world view, the quantum one says that outcomes in real-life sequences of events are – in principle, never certain. But they are, to some degree of probability, predictable.

On a more positive note, we can say that unlike the Newtonian paradigm, the quantum one has also opened up the possibility that we humans can influence probabilities by skillfully executed actions in the real world. To a degree that varies from situation to situation, we are free. In our daily reality, of course, we have known this view, assumed it, and lived by it, for millennia.

We can act at our level of reality and increase the odds of some of the possible future scenarios occurring and some of the others not occurring. We can act in ways that we think will enhance the odds of futures that will make us healthier and happier while decreasing the odds of the futures that lead to us getting hurt, sick, or killed.

The odds that the flap of a butterfly’s wing will cause a hurricane or a rockslide are very tiny. The odds that I can avoid getting hit by a rockslide if I hear a roar and duck beneath an overhanging shelf of basalt are much better. In short, given a bit of warning, I can react successfully to the unforeseen. I can preserve my molecular structure. Rocks and pools of water can’t do that.  

The odds that a field in April, left alone, will be full of ripe corn by October are extremely remote. The odds are much higher that the same field will contain a good corn crop if I seed it in April, then water and weed it for the next four months. Human knowledge and skill enable us to intervene in the flows of events around us. At present, we can’t stop the hurricane, but our computer models, when fed enough data, can tell us when we need to get people out of the hurricane’s path if we want them to have reasonable odds of going on with their lives. And we have learned to plant, grow, and harvest crops as a way of life.

It is worth noting again that this capacity to act in physical reality to alter the odds of future events at our scale of resolution is a capacity we share with all other living things. We’re just better at it than most other life forms are.  

                     

   

                                        Planaria (average size 1 – 2 cm. long)

                                   (credit: Planmine, via Wikimedia Commons)

The programming in life forms as humble as planaria enables them to swim across a petri dish to the side that is out of the direct light. They use their instincts, knowledge, and/or intelligence, to improve their odds of survival by avoiding beams of light. Bits of rock the same size as the planaria do not do this. This ability to dodge hazards and seek opportunities is what marks life.

Even planaria can recognize physical changes around them and act in ways that improve their survival odds in this uncertain, probabilistic world. How much more empowering is a frog’s programming? Or a cat’s? Or a human’s?

Thus, we can emphasize again that the quantum view opens up the possibility of free will. Living things can acquire knowledge which guides their actions and sometimes even pass it on, by genes or memes, to their descendants.

We humans are, within human limits, especially free. Using the programs and data in our heads, we can learn, think, and act to increase the odds of our having futures that will support our survival, health, and comfort, and decrease the odds of our experiencing futures that will lead us to pain, illness, injury, and death. We try to think, learn, and act in ways that make it more likely that we will keep on being able to think, learn, and act. 

We gain a better understanding of how profoundly different this worldview is when we contrast it with the old Newtonian one. People who thought under the old Newtonian paradigm believed natural laws like Newton’s laws of motion governed all events in all the realms of Physics, then Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, and History. Under this model, every event and every action done by animals or humans is seen as being controlled by rigorous natural laws that in each case must lead to only one outcome. Thus, only one history for the entire universe is possible, from the start of everything to its eventual end. Humans’ beliefs about their our own freedom are illusions. Under Newton.

This view is called determinism: it says 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 the natural laws, nor the positions of, and forces acting on, all of the particles. In principle, under the Newtonian view, there is no free will. 

The quantum view, by contrast, allows for the possibility that living things can learn to spot patterns in the events they see in the world around them, recognize the patterns that tell of hazards and opportunities, then act in ways that alter the probabilities of the various possible futures so that the living things’ odds of dying early decrease and the odds of their reproducing and surviving go up. 

That picture resonates with our habitual, intuitive view of ourselves. We know we can shape future events. We are, to a degree that varies from situation to situation, free. At least to some degree, free. Able to act in any of a number of possible ways, some of which will enhance the odds of events that will make my life better or reduce the odds of a bad thing (for me) happening.

                                  

                           defying odds: climber on Spud Boy, California, USA

                                   (credit: Rsriprac, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                       

                      

                Albert Einstein (credit: Lucien Chavan, via Wikimedia Commons) 

It is important to reiterate here that quantum theory is not talking only about the uncertainty of events at the sub-atomic level. Quantum theory says that the processes taking place at the subatomic level are always occurring in ways that appear to us to be uncaused – what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” (he hated the very idea of it). But that is not its big point. 

What really matters is that it also opens up the possibility that all events – both sub-atomic and macro – are not inescapably determined by other earlier events as Newton, Laplace, and their followers claimed. All events are always only more or less probable and their probabilities may be influenced by actions done by living things. This is the essence of the freedom of living things. They have the ability to enhance or lessen probabilities of future events.

Note how profoundly this view affirms ordinary life. I am, to a moderate degree, free. My belief that I am free is not some pathetic, unscientific delusion. I can’t stop a solar eclipse, but I can jump out of the path of a rockslide.   

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

However, our moral models in the rest of this book are not affected by these distinctions. In the level of resolution at which our choices are made and our actions are done, we experience reality as being made of probabilities in which wise human actions can intervene and alter the likelihoods of some outcomes.

This is one of several ways in which quantum theory informs Moral Philosophy: it tells us that, at least at some level, which varies from situation to situation, our freedom is real. We really can influence the probabilities of future events.

Therefore, in all that follows, I will speak of the probabilistic quality of reality as being one of the crucial and basic facts that we humans must deal with. When I speak of uncertainty, I will be referring to the uncertainty of all of reality, quantum and non-quantum.

And on the subject of human freedom, we can say in a more mundane way that none of us would engage in everyday life if we did not see ourselves as being free. In my dealings in everyday life, of course I believe in free will. I get out of the way of oncoming buses. I hold people responsible for their actions. I expect other rational adults to do the same. I applaud/reward decent actions and reprimand/punish mean, immoral ones.

I calculate odds of both the material rightness and the moral rightness of nearly everything I do. The Bayesian view of the mind, combined with the quantum picture of reality, affirms my everyday picture of myself: free and responsible, navigating as best I can in this uncertain, but probabilistic, universe.

The Bayesian model of the human mind fits the quantum model of the universe because Bayesianism lets us see the mind as an adaptation to the uncertainty of physical reality. Living things that have senses and detect changes in the world around them, and also have probability-calculating, action-planning programs installed in their brains – ones that they can update – are going to be more likely to survive in a probabilistic world than any other kinds of things imaginable. Living things contain proven, durable technology. And humans appear, so far, to be the best of the lot. We contain some excellent technology in both hardware and software, as is shown by how well we’re doing right now.

The point of this chapter then is this: the Bayesian model of the human mind integrated with the socio-cultural model of human evolution, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the quantum model of physical reality enables us to build a new Moral Philosophy.

We are thinking beings, learning, over centuries, as individuals and as nations, to update how we deal with our world. Why? Because we want to live. That is what Moral Philosophy is about. 

With this new model built on Bayesianism, Physics, and Cultural Evolution, we are ready to draw some powerful conclusions.

And once again, I’ll say that how my case bears on the question of whether God exists will have to wait till the Moral Philosophy work is done.

Notes

1. Vassilios Karakostas, “Nonseparability, Potentiality and the Context-Dependence of Quantum Objects,” Journal for General Philosophy of Science, Vol. 38 (2007), pp. 279–297.

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

2. Robert Bishop, “Chaos,” Edward N. Zalta, ed., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 edition, first published July 2008). 

http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/chaos/.