Posted on 10/28/2010 10:49:08 AM PDT by betty boop
An Open Letter to My Physicist Friend RE: Darwinism and the Problem of Free Will
By Jean F. Drew
Dear A —
Regarding the discussion of “free will” at www.naturalism.org, you wrote: “I am surprised to find a ‘scientific naturalism’ so similar to the utmost banality, shallowness and false superficiality of the ‘scientific materialism’ that I [had] to learn in … school [during] the communist regime.”
I think this is a very striking statement; and I understand what you mean. I read in your Book of the Living Universe long ago that you were aware of the problem of “tampering” with human consciousness, by people and institutions with social and/or political agendas to be carried out, usually without consideration of what is good and true in the real world of human experience.
Once upon a time, the natural sciences were understood to be above all else engaged in the search for the truth of reality. Nowadays, it seems people don’t want to do such searches anymore, they just want to protect and defend their personal investments in this or that ideological orthodoxy….
Speaking of a powerful orthodoxy, it seems pretty clear to me that Darwin’s theory, as it has come to be widely understood and accepted, is entirely premised on the doctrine of “scientific materialism.” As such, I regard it as an epistemological and ontological nightmare!!!
Moreover, the account of “free will” at naturalism.org can be true only if Darwin’s theory is true. But I believe it is not. For it holds that everything in biology “supervenes on the physical”; everything that happens is “determined” on the basis of Newtonian mechanics. There is only matter in the universe, nothing else; only that which is directly observed/measured is real. [Already such a view casts doubt on the reality of the universal laws of nature, which are never directly observed: They are “non-phenomenal,” intangible, immaterial. Not to mention that so is all of mathematics, logic, reasoning.] And this non-living, dumb matter, via an evolutionary process driven by random mutation and natural selection, somehow manages to become alive and — more — to develop some form of psyche.
But HOW does one get to this result by means of a random process??? In only ~14 or so billion years?
How does low algorithmic complexity (i.e., of the physical laws) generate the astonishing complexity of living systems, not to mention of the universe at large? My “trial” answer: It doesn’t; and can’t.
Darwinism, moreover, doesn’t even have an explanation of what life IS. All of it is, to me, a “just-so” story, a myth. It is riddled with self-contradictions. Not a word of its fundamental tenets can be tested by means of real-world investigations/experiments, let alone “proved.” It is an “historical” science, like archeology, not a “hard” science, like physics. It seeks to tell us what life does, but cannot tell us what life is.
But how can we be sure that our impressions of what life does are truthful, if we don’t know what life is? Don’t we have to understand what life is, first — before we can produce a reliable understanding of the how and why of its behavior? It’s like saying, “Birds fly” without bothering to elucidate what a bird is….
But the “Cartesian split” is manifestly being defended by most Darwinists nowadays. To them, the “purity” of science somehow depends on its sticking to the “objective” physical, material, phenomenal. Thus they prohibit any discussion of, for instance, final causes in nature — even though the very term “survival of the fittest” necessarily implies a final cause: “fitness” for survival! (As do all biological functions, by the way.) Yet the Darwinist says “survival of the fittest” is the very goal and purpose of evolution! But you cannot “call a spade a spade” and say that this is a final cause; it’s just an illusion…. It only “looks like” a final cause, but it isn’t really one. Such equivocation is, to me, indefensible.
But let’s look at what the article at naturalism.org has to say. “As strictly physical beings, we don’t exist as immaterial selves, either mental or spiritual, that control behavior. Thought, desires, intentions, feelings, and actions all arise on their own without the benefit of a supervisory self, and they are all the products of a physical system, the brain and the body. The self is constituted by more or less consistent sets of personal characteristics, beliefs, and actions; it doesn’t exist apart from those complex physical processes that make up the individual. It may strongly seem as if there is a self sitting behind experience, witnessing it, and behind behavior, controlling it, but this impression is strongly disconfirmed by a scientific understanding of human behavior.”
What “scientific understanding of human behavior???” I don’t see any understanding here at all! Just the deliberate elimination of certain kinds of intractable, non-conforming evidence….
If “science can’t address the problem, then there is no problem” seems to be the motto of the day.
In short, the “self” must be a fiction; it is really only an epiphenomenon of physical processes proceeding more or less in a random, linear, irreversible (past to present to future) manner that itself has no “objective” reality (or purpose of goal) and thus cannot serve as a cause of anything in the physical world. That is, the self has zero ontological status: It is simply defined away as not really existing.
Instead, we find that the cause of human willing is simply what “arises out of the interaction between individuals and their environment, not from a freely willing self that produces behavior independently of causal connections…. Therefore individuals don’t bear ultimate originative responsibility for their actions, in the sense of being their first cause. Given the circumstances both inside and outside the body, they couldn’t have done other than what they did.” [So human beings just can’t help what they do; their behavior is utterly determined. I.e., they are programmable robots and nothing more.]
So it seems rather cruel (and unjust) that under this set of circumstances, “Nevertheless, we must still hold individuals responsible, in the sense of applying rewards and sanctions, so that their behavior stays more or less within the range of what we deem acceptable. This is, partially, how people learn to act ethically.”
Question: Who is this “we” in the above statement?
Another question: If individuals don’t bear “ultimate originative responsibility for their actions,” then what is the cause of suicide? Does brain function and/or the “environment” cause this ultimate act of self-destruction? If so, then why aren’t there more suicides? Or how about acts of heroism, where a person puts his own physical survival at risk to come to the aid of another person in danger? What is the “naturalist” explanation of a man who throws his body onto a live grenade, so to spare his fellow soldiers from being blown to smithereens, well knowing that his own death would be the likely price of his decision? Did not his self-sacrifice “cause” (or at least permit) his mates to continue living, when otherwise they may likely all have been killed?
Then there is this pièce de résistence [with my comments in brackets]:
The source of value: Because naturalism doubts the existence of ultimate purposes either inherent in nature or imposed by a creator [final causes either way], values derive from human needs and desires [oh, for instance the desire to kill one’s self, which desire must arise in nature/environment according to Darwinist theory, as in the above?], not supernatural absolutes. Basic human values are widely shared by virtue of being rooted in our common evolved nature. [That wipes out all individuality right there.] We need not appeal to a supernatural standard of ethical conduct to know that in general it’s wrong to lie, cheat, steal, rape, murder, torture, or otherwise treat people in ways we’d rather not be treated [Oh? HOW do we know this? As I said earlier, Darwinist orthodoxy is an epistemological nightmare!]. Our naturally endowed empathetic concern for others [as alleged —in face of the fact that people frequently choose to conduct themselves evilly towards others — and if that is not “naturally endowed,” then where did that come from?] and our hard-wired penchant for cooperation and reciprocity [how did that get to be “hard-wired???”] get us what we most want as social creatures: to flourish as individuals within a community. [Tell that to the person who intends to commit suicide! He could care less for “flourishing as an individual,” let alone in a community]. Naturalism may show the ultimate contingency of some values, in that human nature might have evolved differently and human societies and political arrangements might have turned out otherwise. [Well they might have; but what’s the point? Reality is what we have. All else is pure speculation.] But, given who and what we are as natural creatures [please define “natural creatures” — the statement seems oxymoronic to me], we necessarily [???] find ourselves with shared basic values [??? — which ones? And tell me how did they become “shared” when Darwinist theory itself is premised on conflict and competition for the available finite environmental resources necessary for survival?] which serve as the criteria for assessing moral dilemmas, even if these assessments are sometimes fiercely contested and in some cases never quite resolved. [The very fact that there can be conflict, contestation, suggests that the uniformity of “natural creatures” that we would expect to see on Darwin’s theory is a total fiction, something simply not borne out by the facts on the ground of real experience, as contrasted with the reductionist abstractions of naturalistic evolution theory.]
It seems to me that Darwinist orthodoxy really doesn’t explain very much. The problem seems to be its utter rejection, in principle, of any immaterial component of reality. Although might I point out that a “principle” is itself “immaterial?” Even the concept of Reality is immaterial. These people routinely, blithely shoot themselves in the foot; and then blithely pretend that it didn’t happen.
In any case, we’re NOT supposed to notice this. Indeed, to notice this is “forbidden.”
Shades of Karl Marx here — and also I imagine your school experience back in the day of Soviet domination of your country. Marx absolutely forbade all questions about his “system.” You either bought it whole cloth, or you didn’t. What you couldn’t do was question it in any way. But if you didn’t buy it, then you were probably some kind of “enemy”….
Is seems to me the biological sciences need a restoration of sanity! Today, all the truly interesting work on life problems is being done by physicists (like you, dear friend!) and mathematicians….
The other day I came across some highly interesting passages in The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library [by Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie, David Fideler, editor; 1987, Phanes Press] that go straight to the point of what I believe is needed for science to renew itself, to rededicate itself to its ancient mission, the quest for Truth. What is principally involved is the “healing” of the artificial and unnatural “Cartesian split”:
Pythagoras, no doubt, would have disapproved of the radical split which occurred between the sciences and philosophy during the 17th century “enlightenment” and which haunts the intellectual and social fabric of Western civilization to this day. In retrospect perhaps we can see that man is most happily at home in the universe as long as he can relate his experiences to both the universal and the particular, the eternal and temporal levels of being.
Natural science takes an Aristotelian approach to the universe, delighting in the multiplicity of the phenomenal web. It is concerned with the individual parts as opposed to the whole, and its method is one of particularizing the universal. Natural science attempts to quantify the universal, through the reduction of living form and qualitative relations to mathematical and statistical formulations based on the classification of material artifacts.
By contrast, natural philosophy is primarily Platonic in that it is concerned with the whole as opposed to the part. Realizing that all things are essentially related to certain eternal forms and principles, the approach of the natural philosopher strives to understand the relation that the particular has with the universal. Through the language of natural philosophy, and through the Pythagorean approach to whole systems, it is possible to relate the temporal with the eternal and to know the organic relation between multiplicity and unity.
If the scientific spirit is seen as a desire to study the universe in its totality, it will be seen that both approaches are complementary and necessary in scientific inquiry, for an inclusive cosmology must be equally at home in dealing with the part or the whole. The great scientists of Western civilization — Kepler, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, and those before and after — were able to combine both approaches in a valuable and fruitful way.
It is interesting that the split between science and philosophy coincides roughly with the industrial revolution — for once freed from the philosophical element, which anchors scientific inquiry to the whole of life and human values, science ceases to be science in a traditional sense, and is transformed into a servile nursemaid of technology, the development and employment of mechanization. Now machines are quite useful as long as they are subservient to human good, in all the ramifications of that word — but as it turned out, the industrial revolution also coincided with a mechanistic conceptualization of the natural order, which sought to increase material profit at the expense of the human spirit….
Today, in many circles, to a large part fueled by the desire for economic reward, science has nearly become confused with and subservient to technology, and from this perspective it might be said that the ideal of a universal or inclusive science has been lost…. [p. 43f]
Still I know that you have not lost this ideal! Yours is an “integrative science” approach, integrating not only the natural sciences themselves, but also integrating them with the natural philosophy approach; i.e., of whole systems.
You wrote:
“I realized the importance of our mail exchange about God and the Universe. Indeed, … free will is not explained by present day science, not by physics, of course. As far as I understand it, it is not explained by the mechanical application of the biological principle. It requires more: a deeper understanding of the biological principle, and even more, a deeper understanding of the Universe as a whole. I wrote you that even the laws and principles of Nature can have a ‘soul-like’, animate aspect. Ultimately, our free will dwells in ‘the Universe as a whole’, and as such, [is] omnipresent, as far as I understand it. If so, the question of free will is a deep question, going beyond the present conceptual framework of science. Free will is rooted in the animate and animating biological principle, in [the] eternal Life of the Universe.”
Oh, A — I so agree!!!
And I’m so looking forward to reading your new article, “The Logic of Reality: a model-independent approach towards the self-contained logic of the Universe”!
May God ever bless you, dear friend, and your labors!
©2010 by Jean F. Drew.
Just trying to light off some fireworks here! :^)
Rocks collected on the Moon - not subject to wind, rain, and erosion - tell us that it's been 4.6 billion years since "... the Earth was spun from dust and rock around the sun." Ref: "Darwin's Ghost," Steve Jones, pg 195
Thanks for the article.
And you OldNavyVet replied: "Rocks collected on the Moon — not subject to wind, rain, and erosion — tell us that it's been 4.6 billion years since"... the Earth was spun from dust and rock around the sun." ...
Okay, OldNavyVet. But tell me: How is your statement responsive to the question of how order — and particularly of biological order — can arise in a "random" system?
This goes to my dearest sister in Christ, Alamo-Girl's observation that we cannot possibly know what is "random" in a system, if we don't know what the system "is." And unless you are going to take a "whole system" approach to the natural world, how can you find out?
Contemporary science seems to be taking the position that the "whole system" is simply an additive "piling up of its parts." Thus, if you get down into the weeds, and study the parts, you can figure out what the whole is. Stochastic methods help us do this.
This is the problem that Darwinism refuses to engage: They want, they require, that everything that exists "supervenes on the physical" — than is, on simple matter in its motions, as determined by Newtonian mechanics. And that somehow matter presumably is able to bootstrap itself into life and consciousness, via a process of random mutation and natural selection. (Selection for what? Selection itself implies the existence of a final cause. See more below.)
It might be said "random" is virtually undistinguishable in meaning from "chaos".... If so, what is the natural propensity of chaos to organize itself? On any time scale???
"Random" is also the way to eliminate the problem of final cause. Rather than having natural evolution working towards and for a purpose or goal, purposes and goals are stipulated to be emergent from purely material processes (i.e., they are epiphenomena or by-products of something else). But even then you can't call them purposes or goals!
Contemporary science does not want to deal with final causes, period. Evidently on the basis that if you admit a purpose or goal, then the next question becomes: Whose purpose? And then quite possibly, God "gets a foot in the door," and we cannot allow that! [according to Richard Lewontin]
But with or without God, there are final causes in nature. Biological functions depend on final causes, as the mathematician Robert Rosen has pointed out.
“Final cause” in the phenomenal sense does not invoke the idea of telos [purpose, goal, end, limit] on cosmic scale. It only invokes the idea of finality of a process in nature. Such as a biological function — you know, those little things like metabolism, respiration, cell repair, etc., etc.
Finality in this sense pertains to the necessary causal closure for efficient causation to depend solely on the resources of the “isolated” system in which it operates. A further indispensable insight is, from the standpoint of the biological Whole, there are no isolated systems; there are only a multiplicity of particular systems, each of which produces its “desired” effect in contribution to the already elaborate, multifarious multiplicity of other effects which altogether are necessary to sustain the integrated biological Whole.
Which I gather is why Rosen thought he ought to seek out complex systems theory for guiding helps. (Simple systems are not biological ones as a rule)…. Stochastic methods having already shown their shortcomings….
It seems to me that one cannot speak of a “function” absent the idea of system closure, which can be described at the causal level if the idea of final cause can be admitted to the table.
If these ideas seem overly abstruse, we can easily simplify them just by taking a hint from Robert Rosen. He suggested that the entire idea of “final cause” is exactly equivalent to positing the natural human question, “Why?” Anytime we ask the question, “Why?” about anything in natural experience, we are invoking — or soliciting — a final cause explanation.
Aristotle explained final cause this way:
Further, the final cause is an end, and that sort of end which is not for the sake of something else, but for whose sake everything else is; so that if there is to be a last term of this sort, the process will not be infinite; but if there is no such term, there will be no final cause, but those who maintain the infinite series eliminate the Good without knowing it (yet no one would try to do anything if he were not going to come to a limit); nor would there be reason in the world; the reasonable man, at least, always acts for a purpose, and this is a limit; for the end is a limit. — Aristotle Metaphysics Book II, Part 2In sum, the fact that the physical earth "was spun from dust and rock around the sun," while most likely valid, does not even engage the possibility that this process was merely a step, or a way station, on the road to an end (purpose, goal, telos) in nature. In this case, a preparatory stage necessary for the emergence of life on this planet. In short, a movement towards a final cause.
About which the dust and rock are totally silent, nor can they be otherwise.
Well, JMHO FWIW.
Thank you so much for writing, OldNavyVet!
DAWKINS: (snip)"…But yet we have this gathering together of genes into individual organisms. And that reminds me of the illusion of one mind, when actually there are lots of little mindlets in there, and the illusion of the soul of the white ant in the termite mound, where you have lots of little entities all pulling together to create an illusion of one. Am I right to think that the feeling that I have that I'm a single entity, who makes decisions, and loves and hates and has political views and things, that this is a kind of illusion that has come about because Darwinian selection found it expedient to create that illusion of unitariness rather than let us be a kind of society of mind?"http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dawkins_pinker/debate_p10.htmlPINKER: "It's a very interesting question. Yes, there is a sense in which the whole brain has interests in common in the way that say a whole body composed of genes with their own selfish motives has a single agenda. In the case of the genes the fact that their fates all depend on the survival of the body forces them to cooperate. In the case of the different parts of the brain, the fact that the brain ultimately controls a body that has to be in one place at one time may impose the need for some kind of circuit, presumably in the frontal lobes, that coordinates the different agendas of the different parts of the brain to ensure that the whole body goes in one direction. In How the Mind Works I alluded to a scene in the comedy movie All of Me in which Lily Tomlin's soul inhabits the left half of Steve Martin's body and he takes a few steps in one direction under his own control and then lurches in another direction with his pinkie extended while under the control of Lily Tomlin's spirit. That is what would happen if you had nothing but completely autonomous modules of the brain, each with its own goal. Since the body has to be in one place at one time, there might be a circuit that suppresses the conflicting motives…"(end snip)
You know this guy? ? Catholic, Thomist, funny, smart.
And certainly I remember the piece of it from which you quoted, "The Soul of the White Ant."
To say that Dawkins and Pinker are reductionists of the first order would be the grossest understatement. They "quantize" man down to the level of an ant, and then start blathering about man as if he were an ant.
Am I the only person here who sees there's something intrinsically dishonest about their entire approach to science — and to reality?
Just gave it a quick gloss — and can't wait to give it a more substantial read!
Thank you ever so much for your introduction of Edward Feser!
Please note the use of the word “phenomenal” in the following.
“Final cause” in the phenomenal sense does not invoke the idea of telos [purpose, goal, end, limit] on cosmic scale. It only invokes the idea of finality of a process in nature. Such as a biological function — you know, those little things like metabolism, respiration, cell repair, etc., etc.
Given that, and then reading your Aristotle quote carefully … To wit:
“Further, the final cause is an end, and that sort of end which is not for the sake of something else, but for whose sake everything else is; so that if there is to be a last term of this sort, the process will not be infinite; but if there is no such term, there will be no final cause, but those who maintain the infinite series eliminate the Good without knowing it (yet no one would try to do anything if he were not going to come to a limit); nor would there be reason in the world; the reasonable man, at least, always acts for a purpose, and this is a limit; for the end is a limit. — Aristotle Metaphysics Book II, Part 2
… I’d say that Aristotle was looking at practical reality in explaining the phenomenal aspect in “infinity,” while saying that looking at things “infinite” is not reasonable.
Given that, I went to Ayn Rand for her thoughts on causality and found this.
”Only a process of final causation – i.e., the process of choosing a goal, then taking the steps to achieve it – can you give logical continuity, coherence and meaning to a man’s actions.
Thank you for your patience … it is one of Aristotle’s “virtues.”
The bold italics were added by you. But with this term, Aristotle indicates a logical transition. He is moving from the more general, to the more specific human case. He is qualifying his opening statement, about what is necessary in logic and reason — which he considers to be universal — and the way things are perceived by a human observer not fully conversant with natural truth.
With the bolds — possibly you should have supplied them earlier, at the line, "so that if there is to be a last term of this sort" — he is questioning man, asking him to reason about the significance of this "last term," and its import for the intelligibility of the natural world, of the universe, to the human mind.
Aristotle was right — it seems unquestionably the case in my mind — to assert the absolute necessity of a first uncaused case, of a Prime Mover, in order for a universe to occur in a way that is intelligible to the human mind.
Make of that what you will. The problem of first cause is not preeminently, nor exclusively a scientific problem. Still, science itself utterly depends on it for its own foundation in reason and logic.
As far as infinity is concerned, I can't speak for Aristotle. But I do know that great minds now agree on the proposition that the mathematical term infinity is not constructible in physics. Nor is it anything that a human mind can reach, let alone comprehend.
From DNA analysis; Steve Jones, in Darwin's Ghost (pg 284), tells us that ...
"About a thousand genes are shared by every organism, however simple or complicated. Although their common ancestor must have lived more than a billion years ago, their shared structure can still be glimpsed. It shows how the grand plan of life has been modified through the course of evolution."
So big deal, OldNavyVet. I read recently that humans and daffodils share some 24% of a common genetic heritage — whatever that is. But to notice as much is not to explain WHY this is so.
Darwin's theory is no help here.
Perhaps you might consider reading other than Steve Jones; assuming you really want to get a grip on this problem.
Darwin's "common ancestor" is, in my view, an anthropogenic construct and nothing more.
But if you want to talk about the "genome," I'm all ears.
You may have heard about the Human Genome Project. Evidently, it crashed and burned. But folks don't want to talk about that....
Thanks for the ping.
Probably heading to bed early tonight.
LUB
Truly, you've touched on every aspect of the debate. I look forward to the comments to see where the interests might be. For now, I only have two points to raise.
First is qualia - love, hate, joy, pain and so on - which can be experienced but not conveyed. A computer cannot be programmed to experience qualia. It is a phenomenon of autonomy in nature that has no materialistic explanation and thus the naturalist's defense is to deny qualia exists in the first place.
Second is the term "random" which as you have pointed out is inappropriate to use with reference to a system when one does not know what the system "is." Since the number and types of dimensions are both unknown and unknowable, it is inappropriate to say a phenomenon is random in nature. The proper term is "unpredictable."
The word "unpredictable" does not preclude as yet unknown causation and can be applied without reference to what the system "is."
Sadly, the term "random" has been misused in science for so long it would be difficult to correct. Nevertheless as we discussed on another thread recently, ideologues must not control the dictionary.
snip: This goes to my dearest sister in Christ, Alamo-Girl’s observation that we cannot possibly know what is “random” in a system, if we don’t know what the system “is.” And unless you are going to take a “whole system” approach to the natural world, how can you find out?
Spirited: The questions being asked cannot be logically answered within the larger context of “naturalism” for the reason that naturalism subsumes everything within itself.
In other words, naturalism is monism, which means that the cosmos and everything within it are parts of something else-—a One Thing.
Naturalism is like a coin. One side is materialism and the other is pantheism.
Materialist monism says that this One Thing is Brute Matter hence all things spiritual, ie., God the Father, mind, souls,conscience, free will, angels, and demons are excluded.
Using Eastern pantheism as the example, this type of monism says that the One Thing is impersonal, nonliving but divine spirit and everything is part of this spirit. By extension, everything from cancer to bedbugs and dung, from cows to trees and men are god because they are parts of the One Thing which is divine spirit.
In this view, not only are all things material an illusion, but so too are individual souls-spirits, mind, free will, and conscience, all of which are concepts unique to the Biblical worldview.
In short, the Biblical view says man is both material (body, brain) and spiritual (mind, conscience, free will). In that his mind transcends the material, man is uniquely enabled to be an objective observer of the material dimension. He can know something about the material dimension precisely because his mind, which is spiritual, transcends and is therefore free of the material.
Naturalism effectively nihilizes man’s spiritual endowments by making him a part of something else in the way that grains of sand are merely parts of a beach (materialism) or drops of water are merely parts of a cosmic ocean (pantheism). Because we are parts of the system, we cannnot logically “know what the system “is” anymore than a drop of water can know about the ocean of which it is a fractional part.
In the name of evolutionism and progress, we have marched backwards in time. Though the terminolgy is changed, the underlying arguments are the same, tired arguments made by naturalistic Greek philosophers. We stand once more in the Greek aeropagus with Paul as he is mocked and scoffed at by proud, arrogant Epicureans (materialists) and Stoics (pantheists).
Cordially,
To the contrary, A simple Google search shows that the Human Genome Project is going strong …
Ref: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=hts&oq=&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4ACAW_enUS351US351&q=Human+Genome+Project
Another similar catch is on pages 213 and 214 of Steve Jones' "Darwin's Ghost," where Jones writes:
Streams evolve through a balance of forces. The bed shifts as it erodes one bank and dumps its remains on the other. It returns when its loops are cut off as the water finds a more direct route downhill. Complexity – meandering – is opposed by simplicity, the shortest path to the sea. Raindrop, Meander and Mississippi follow the same rules. Measurements of dozens of real rivers, and computer simulations of many more, reveal that the relationship between their shortest possible path across a plain and their actual length is always the same. It is pi, the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter. Each river, whatever its size, goes a little more than three times farther than it needs on its way to the sea.
Great observation, spirited irish!
I've noticed that many physicists working in theoretical biology are attracted to Eastern philosophical ideas, e.g., pantheism. For example, Ervin Schrodinger attached an epilog to his famous (and fascinating) essay "What Is Life?" (1944) that mentioned the following:
...let us see whether we cannot draw the correct, non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises: (i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature. (ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I — I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' — am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature. Within a cultural milieu (Kulturkreis) where certain conceptions (which once had or still have a wider meaning amongst other peoples) have been limited and specialized, it is daring to give to this conclusion the simple wording that it requires. In Christian terminology to say: 'Hence I am God Almighty' sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving also their God and immortality at one stroke. In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN upheld in (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts. Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God). To Western ideology the thought has remained a stranger, in spite of Schopenhauer and others who stood for it and in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other's eyes, become aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one — not merely similar or identical; but they, as a rule, are emotionally too busy to indulge in clear thinking, [in] which respect they very much resemble the mystic....Thus there is a fundamental worldview at work. And of course our worldview definitely informs and affects our science....
Thank you so much for your insightful essay/post, dear spirited!
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