In Search of a Road to Reality

The new cosmologies are not shedding much light, except on the sheer power of the human imagination. Whatever they were supposed to explain has been rendered by their own rules unexplainable. What follows?

In a 2012 triumph, the Large Hadron Collider detected the previously theoretical Higgs boson (the "God particle," thought to give everything in the universe mass). But the boson did not support any radical new cosmologies. Its lightness suggests the existence of other similar particles. That's promising for research but little more than that. Indeed, the Higgs's feast of data "seems to match the standard model's predictions perfectly" and leaves "usurpers of 'standard model' [with] little to chew on, as Nature put the matter in 2012. Science writer John Horgan says, "The Higgs doesn't take us any closer to a unified theory than climbing a tree would take me to the Moon."

Meanwhile researchers are finding greater structure in the universe than they anticipated. Spiral galaxies are "pin-ups of the cosmos" and thus "something of a headache" if chaos and disorder are expected. Much of the vast array of proposed life-friendly exoplanets, that would show Earth to be just average, could mainly be gas and dust.

Britain's Guardian asks, thinking about the multiverse, "Has physics gone too far?" Perhaps a better question would be, is New Atheist cosmology failing as physics? Because, make no mistake, an admitted motive for seeking alternatives to the Big Bang and the fine-tuning of our universe is getting rid of their theistic implications.

Worse, for some, the hateful Big Bang bangs on, oblivious of its critics. Cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, resigned to the Big Bang's reality, theorizes that it was "merely one of a series of big bangs creating an endless number of bubble universes." Another scheme to get rid of the Big Bang as a singularity involves a rainbow universe where time has no beginning, a model that, as Scientific American tells us, "is not widely accepted." No wonder because, as one critic put it, the scheme must get rid of the singularity within the Standard Model of physics. Similarly, another new cosmology accounts for the apparent acceleration of the universe -- but only if there is no Big Bang: "This universe has no beginning or end, just alternating periods of expansion and contraction." It also has no cosmic microwave background, which our universe inconveniently does have.

Still others propose that the Big Bang was a "mirage from [a] collapsing higher-dimensional star," a thesis with which the new Planck data apparently disagree. In general, experimental findings continue to support the Standard Model. As New Scientist's editors put it in a 2012 editorial titled "The Genesis problem":

Cosmologists thought they had a workaround. Over the years, they have tried on several different models of the universe that dodge the need for a beginning while still requiring a big bang. But recent research has shot them full of holes. It now seems certain that the universe did have a beginning.But does that mean evidence matters again? Not clear. Some say we now have the tools to examine the beginning of the universe scientifically; others that we may never know what it was like. And there's always the option of declaring stubborn facts off limits. Steven Weinberg reflects:

Here's an alternative: On the road to reality, evidence must matter again. The weight of the evidence must count. And when it does count, if our cosmos is orderly, new approaches will emerge. They may be emerging now.

Intriguingly, a recent article in Scientific American noted, "Some researchers think that the world, at root, does not consist of material things but of relations or of properties, such as mass, charge and spin." But information, not matter, is fundamentally relational.

So, is the basic substance of the universe information? In that case, the ID theorists are right.

Editor's note: Here is the "Science Fictions" series to date at your fingertips.

...How will studying biology teach you astrophysics, or metallurgy, or plate tectonics? ... I use an initial premise that material precedes Life. Do you know anyone who does not?

I did not suggest that "studying biology" will teach you "astrophysics, or metallurgy, or plate tectonics." We were "merely" entertaining the idea that a change in the initial premise of science from the materialist, mechanistic, "building blocks" presupposition to a presupposition of a living universe might enable us to end what appears to be a stalemate or road block in the conduct of the life sciences, and might even shed some light on plate techtonics. Plate techtonics, after all, involves a process unfolding in time. You can't "explain" that process on the basis of materialist presuppositions, which claim that everything that happens in the universe is the result of material and efficient causes only. It seems to me that anything which exhibits the nature of a process cannot be fully understood without the reintroduction of formal and final causes.

But it seems to me the entire point of materialism is to avoid having to deal with formal and final cause, to utterly deny their relevance in scientific investigation.

You asked if I "knew" anybody who rejects the materialist premise, in favor of the premise of a living universe. As a matter of fact, I do. In fact, several.

Let's start out with Aristotle, the "father of the natural sciences." As David Bohm reminds us (in Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980):

...Aristotle considered the universe as a single organism in which each part grows and develops in its relationship to the whole and in which it has its proper place and function.

Aristotle distinguished four kinds of causes that operate in the world: Formal, Material, Efficient, and Final. As already pointed out, modern science has expunged two of these causes from its assumptions and practice.

But I wouldn't know how to understand plate techtonics as a sustained process absent the notions of formal and final cause.

To Aristotle,

the word form means, in the first instance, an inner forming activity which is the cause of the growth of things, and of the development and differentiation of their various essential forms. For example, in the case of an oak tree, what is indicated by the term "formal cause" is the whole inner movement of sap, cell growth, articulation of branches, leaves, etc., which is characteristic of that kind of tree and different from that taking place in other kinds of trees. In more modern language, it would be better to describe this as a formative cause, to emphasize that what is involved is not a mere form imposed from without, but rather an ordered and structured inner movement that is essential to what things are.

Any such formative cause must evidently have an end or product which is at least implicit. Thus, it is not possible to refer to the inner movement from the acorn to the oak tree, without simultaneously referring to the oak tree that is going to result from this movement. So formative cause always implies final cause.
Nevertheless, in most of the work that is being done in physics today the notions of formative and final cause are not regarded as having primary significance. Rather, law is still generally conceived as a self-determined system of efficient causes operating in an ultimate set of material constituents of the universe (e.g. elementary particles subject to forces of interaction between them). These constituents are not regarded as formed in an overall process, and thus they are not considered to be anything like organs adapted to their place and function in the whole (i.e. to the ends which they would serve in this whole). Rather, they tend to be conceived as separately existent mechanical elements of a fixed nature. The prevailing trend in modern physics is thus much against any sort of view giving primacy to formative activity in undivided wholeness of flowing movement. Indeed, those aspects of relativity theory and quantum theory which do suggest the need for such a view tend to be de-emphasized and in fact hardly noticed by most physicists, because they are regarded largely as features of the mathematical calculus and not as indications of the real nature of things. When it comes to the informal language and mode of thought in physics, which infuses the imagination and provokes the sense of what is real and substantial, most physicists still speak and think, with an utter conviction of truth, in terms of the traditional atomistic notion that the universe is constituted of elementary particles which are "basic building blocks" out of which everything is made. In other sciences, such as biology, the strength of this conviction is even greater, because among workers in these fields there is little awareness of the revolutionary character of development in modern physics. For example, modern molecular biologists generally believe that the whole of life and mind can ultimately be understood in more or less mechanical terms, through some kind of extension of the work that has been done on the structure and function of DNA molecules.... Thus we arrive at the very odd result that in the study of life and mind, which are just the fields in which formative cause is acting in undivided and unbroken flowing movement is most evident to experience and observation, there is now the strongest belief in the fragmentary atomistic approach to reality. — ibid.

Go figure.

Anyhoot, besides Aristotle, other scientists working on something like the "living universe" model include for example Menas Kafatos; Robert Rosen; Attila Grandpierre; Rupert Sheldrake — and David Bohm himself.

Thank you so much for writing, dear tacticalogic!

P.S.: I think it was I who originally pinged you to this thread. I did so because you are a long-time friend here at FR who is interested in science. It certainly wasn't because I was building a trap for you.... It wasn't because I want to make you look like a fool, or whatever other nefarious motive you care to impute to me.

Lighten up, my friend!

Thanks dear for bringing the thread back on track.

I do not believe if we want to discuss the issue in a scientific form we can make the mistake of pre-supposing some kind of causality.

In fact it seems like it is a very short leap from the start to determining that SOME KIND of causality exists, it is an element that is more part of our (living humans) nature than any type of raw force in physics or cosmology.

And that to me is ultimately the question!

We have discussed in the past the idea that life has at least a few properties that plain old physics or math does not recognize, such as stimulus-response.

We all agree that man is dust. We would all agree that there is no way two pile of dust could ever, under the current understanding of physics, do something like send an email to each other!

That’s a pretty astounding though when you reflect on it.

So if man and life itself is the C, atoms and quarks and energy is the A, then what is the B? A+B=C

Whatever would prompt one pile of dust to send an email to another pile, that is the essence, THAT PART is the causality we are searching for.

And I cannot see anything in regular physics or math that explains it.

It’s interesting because I watched a BBC vid on Youtube about cells. Very informative.
The cells have a certain construction, and have millions (or even billions) of these little molecular machines that wander around. Building things up, tearing things down, transporting items from one place to another.

And not a single one of these machines, NOT ONE, can be said to have anything resembling “an intent” or “a purpose” or “self awareness”!

The cells have a certain construction, and have millions (or even billions) of these little molecular machines that wander around. Building things up, tearing things down, transporting items from one place to another.... And not a single one of these machines, NOT ONE, can be said to have anything resembling “an intent” or “a purpose” or “self awareness”!

Certainly not, djf. Still, cells "seem to know what to do" as parts in order to articulate a "whole" living organism. Material and efficient causation alone do not, and cannot, explain this.

Some thoughts on this question, sourced to Attila Grandpierre's article, "Fundamental Complexity Measures of Life," in Divine Action and Natural Selection: Science, Faith, and Evolution, J. Seckback & R. Gordon, eds, 2009:

The difference between the machine and the living organism is like the difference between numbers and mathematical rules. The complexity of the machine is phenomenological, static, and passive, while that of the living organism is organizational, dynamic, and active.

Let us approach the distinctions between machines and living organisms in light of the difference between physical "organization" (termed as "self-organization") and biological organization. As the root of the world "organization"("organ") tells, organization belongs to the realm of biology. Physical "organization" is present in the order of crystals, of magnets, of snowflake patterns, of convection patters, of reaction-diffusion patterns, etc. Physical "organization" represents actually not organizational, but ordering processes.
Actually, ordering and organization are two fundamentally different processes.... In physical ordering, patterns of elements can be generated, and in man-made machines they follow prescribed rules. In living organisms, biological organization generates new rules from time-step to time-step....
A living organism follows the continuously changing internal and external contexts, and reacts to them on the basis of its own principle [formal cause] driving its biological organization towards the optimization of life's conditions. Biological organization is like writing, while physical ordering is mechanical repetition of words following merely syntactical rules, if any. It is these syntactic rules that represent algorithmic complexity. In contrast, the semiotic principles correspond to a deeper, principal level of complexity. This is why machines cannot rebuild themselves from time-step to time-step. At the same time, this is the most fundamental property of organisms.

Denbigh (1975...) emphasizes that "one cannot speak of an entity as being organized without at once raising the question: What is it organized for [final cause]? ... A machine is not explainable by the laws of physics and chemistry (even though the material of which it is composed obeys these laws); machines have always to be understood in terms of their own specific operational principles laid down by those who design them."

...The central thesis of physicalism proclaims the causal closure of the physical. Ashby's Law ... and Kahre's Law of Diminishing Information ... stated that physical systems cannot produce more information at their output than was present at their input. This means that for physical systems, complexity jumps are simply not possible....

Yes, we all agree that "man is dust." But he ain't "just dust." Dust has not got a clue about how to organize a living, self-conscious human being.

I know you have a keen interest in artificial intelligence/artificial life, which theoretically can be manifested by means of mechanical simulation of "the real thing" — i.e., living, conscious human beings. But how can one "simulate" what one does not understand in the first place?.

Well, the questions are lively ones for sure. We have more fun than cats!

Thank you so very much for writing, dear djf!

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In Search of a Road to Reality

Denyse O'Leary January 13, 2014 5:33 AM | Permalink