NPR This I Believe: Hope in the Black Void of the Unknowable
Update: This essay can now be found on the NPR "This I Believe" website.
Recently, I wrote an essay for This I Believe, an NPR radio series that asks Americans to answer this simple question. My essay has not yet been reviewed; however I doubt my chances of getting selected on the radio program. It is a bit too impersonal, too “what I don’t believe,” and not nearly as eloquent as many of the best essays (for the absolute best – see below mine). My essay is actually a shorter and reworked version of another essay I wrote on the same subject.
Note: If you find that you believe in something strongly and have a story to tell around that belief, I highly recommend you submit your own essay to NPR This I Believe.
This I Believe: Hope in the Black Void of the Unknowable
As a scientist studying the development of the brain and as a student of all scientific knowledge, I find it highly probable that all life and human experience is devoid of inherent meaning or purpose. The Universe seems nothing more than an enormous cosmic accident – an accident that will be corrected in due course as the Universe and its inhabitants are eventually destroyed in an equally pointless cataclysm. At least this is the view of my Universe as seen through the eyes of empiricism, the only eyes through which I know how to look. My morals, my accomplishments, my feelings and thoughts, and my connections to others and to the world in which I live are apparently no more than blips of energy in an inconsequential cosmic blink. However, underlying all of my knowledge and all of science I hold one major faith, one prime assumption. This is the assumption that my senses and experiences are relating real information about reality. That I am not merely in “The Matrix.” There is simply no philosophical workaround to this argument – it is impossible for me to absolutely know anything.
Thus, I cannot conclude anything definitively about my ultimate creator. I cannot absolutely believe in anything. I can only think from within the pragmatic view of science – that my senses work and my experiences along with the collected experiences of my brethren explain my reality better than any other means of purported knowledge. I can only decide to educate my future children about where we as a species come from, though I cannot guess where we may be going. I must make them understand that our science, our knowledge, is the closest thing to an explanation of our Universe we will likely ever have. However, just as importantly, I must admit where this knowledge can never reach, and allow that place to be inhabited with hope – a hope that maybe, just maybe, in that dark void of unknowability lies a meaning to my existence, a meaning I can never know or comprehend.
I must make them understand that although the fables passed down from our ancestors are no longer useful as a defining belief, the true possibilities of our meaning and our worth may be infinitely larger than I ever imagined. I believe that if we take into consideration the grandness of nature, the mind-boggling array of galaxies in our Universe, and the insanely complex biology and chemistry within ourselves, the unknowable creation of our Universe will seem only that much bigger and infinitely more awe-inspiring. I have seen but a glimpse of this awe in the intricate networks of neurons speaking to each other in unintelligible chemical languages, and I can almost fathom an entity setting it all in motion with a mere equation.
Almost.
As the philosopher Karl Popper once said, “Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.” I believe that it is in this infinite ignorance where my only hope for greater cosmic meaning may lie.
The Best "This I Believe" Essay Ever:
NPR This I Believe: I Am Evolution
by Holly Dunsworth, a physical anthropologist at Penn State.
I believe evolution. It's easy. It's my life. I'm a paleoanthropologist. I study fossils of humans, apes and monkeys, and I teach college students about their place in nature.
Of course I believe evolution.
But that is different from believing in evolution.
To believe in something takes faith, trust, effort, strength. I need none of these things to believe evolution. It just is. My health is better because of medical research based on evolution. My genetic code is practically the same as a chimpanzee's. My bipedal feet walk on an earth full of fossil missing links. And when my feet tire, those fossils fuel my car.
To believe in something also implies hope. Hope of happiness, reward, forgiveness, eternal life. There is no hope wrapped up in my belief. Unless you count the hope that one day I'll discover the most beautifully complete fossil human skeleton ever found, with a label attached saying exactly what species it belonged to, what food it ate, how much it hunted, if it could speak, if it could laugh, if it could love and if it could throw a curveball. But this fantasy is not why I believe evolution — as if evolution is something I hope comes true.
After all the backyard bone collecting I did as a child, I managed to carve out a career where I get to ask the ultimate question on a daily basis: "Where did I come from and how?"
If our beliefs are important enough, we live our lives in service to them. That's how I feel about evolution. My role as a female Homo sapiens is to return each summer to Kenya, dig up fossils, and piece together our evolutionary history. Scanning the ground for weeks, hoping to find a single molar, or gouging out the side of a hill, one bucket of dirt at a time, I'm always in search of answers to questions shared by the whole human species. The experience deepens my understanding not just about what drives my life, but all our lives, where we came from. And the deeper I go, the more I understand that everything is connected. A bullfrog to a gorilla, a hummingbird to me, to you.
My belief is not immutable. It is constantly evolving with accumulating evidence, new knowledge and breakthrough discoveries. For example, within my lifetime, our history has expanded from being rooted 3 million years ago with the famous Lucy skeleton, to actually beginning over 6 million years ago with a cranium from Chad. The metamorphic nature of my belief is not at all like a traditional religious one; it's more like seeing is believing.
So I believe evolution.
I feel it. I breathe it. I listen to evolution, I observe it and I do evolution. I write, study, analyze, scrutinize and collect evolution. I am evolution.
Amazing, no? If you enjoyed this beautiful and poignant essay, I highly recommend you read the interview with Holly Dunsworth on the excellent Forms Most Beautiful blog (one of my favorite blogs on the internets).
Neuroscience Disproves The “Self”-Containing Soul
Most people who believe in the presence of a soul, also believe that that soul contains some sort of information about who “you” are. They believe that it contains some essence of your self, your memories, your personality.
However, there now exists within the realms of neuroscience, a plenitude of evidence that such a soul does not – cannot – exist (Note: this does not exclude other definitions of soul).
Claim 1: My soul contains the essence of my core personality.
Evidence against it: This one is quite simple. All we have to do to see that this is unlikely is look at brain injury patients. It is irrefutable fact that brain injury can lead to profound changes in personality. Therefore, if one’s personality can be fundamentally changed by brain injury, then one must argue that if a soul exists and contains your personality, then it is also damaged by brain injury. The corollary to this is that if your brain is destroyed, then the soul that contains your personality is also destroyed.
Claim 2: When I die, my soul retains my memories.
Evidence against it: Similarly, many many things can kill the cells (and their network of synaptic connections) that store your memories. Alcohol and substance abuse, brain trauma, etc. Furthermore, there are mountains of evidence that your memories are not static, that they can be changed by suggestion, or changed by time. We have all experienced change of our own memories over time, whether by repetition of embellished stories or simply by memory loss. Our memories lie solely in the physical makeup of the cells in which they are stored, much like digital data on a hard drive (though our own memory storage is much more complex and still being deciphered). Essentially the same argument as above indicates that if a soul exists, it cannot contain our memories, or alternatively, when memories are lost, so too are those parts of the soul.
More Evidence: Everything about what makes “you” you comes from an entire life’s worth of experiences – smells, laughs, people, conversations, traumatic events, feelings, etc. These are all incorporated into your memories, and they help determine your personality. You are not born exactly as you exist today. Your neural pathways, your memories, your reactions, and your emotions are all developed over time, and encoded into the unimaginably complex connections within the 100 thousand million neurons in your brain. Injury can change or erase all of this. Thus, again, if your personality and memory changes, so must the thing which holds them. If your memories and personality die, then so does that which defines them.
All of this does not and cannot rule out the possibility of the existence of some other definition of the soul. But one must wonder: if the soul does not contain my memories, personality or any other characteristics that define my “self”, then in what capacity can I say that any immortal soul is really “me”? Even if your soul lives forever, “you” as you define yourself will be as nonexistent as the brain structures that held “you.”
If brain injury could only delete parts of your personality or delete memories instead of actually changing them, then one might argue that the brain has merely lost access to those parts of the soul – that those parts of “you” are still in there. Many people make this argument - that the soul can only work through the biological machinery that exists, but it still exists independently. But the fact that both personality and memories can be changed suggests that the soul either does not exist, or that it the soul is changed in the same way that the personality or memories are. And if the soul itself is changed, that implies that it is changed similarly by complete destruction of the brain.
It seems that modern neuroscience suggests that any “soul” we contain has no real meaning in regards to containing the “self” as we define it. Thus, any immortal soul we may contain is about as significant as the immortal matter of which we consist. Sure, my energy and atoms might remain for all eternity, but is that “me?”
No.
Hope in the Black Void of the Unknowable
All life and human experience is devoid of meaning. The Universe is nothing more than an enormous cosmic accident. It is an accident that will be corrected in due course, as the Universe and its inhabitants are fated to be destroyed in an equally pointless cataclysm of some kind or another - whether it be through a Universal collapse to a singularity or a dissipation of all energy in an entropic heat death. At least this is the view of our Universe as seen through the eyes of empiricism. Is it really any wonder then that 40-50% of the American public, depending on which poll you’re looking at, prefers the idea of creationism to the theory of evolution? Our morals, our accomplishments, our feelings and thoughts, our connections to others and to the world in which we live – all the things we as a species hold dear – are apparently no more than blips of energy in an inconsequential cosmic blink.
Yet this is the Universe that we face if we look at it only through the lenses of logic and reason. How much blame can we really place on our Earthly brothers and sisters for rejecting such a worldview? No doubt, within certain psyches such a view might inevitably lead to depression, apathy, and a callousness toward humankind and existence. Do we as scientists wish for every other person on this planet to truly see and understand our world through sensory perception and evidential experience alone?
The media is currently awash with the pontifications of atheist personalities such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, both of which claim that faith and religion are the downfall of humanity and the yoke holding us back from true existential accomplishment. According to them, if only people could truly understand the awe and wonder brought forth by an intimate inspection of existence, from the microscopic to the astronomical – if only they could see that faith is unnecessary – the world would reach a new height of enlightenment and elevated existence. I believe their motives are noble, and I find the essence of their arguments to be true – that is until they cross the line of reason into their own forms of faith. For both of these now famous authors have fallen into the pitfalls of their own arrogance. Through one word alone they have both done a disservice to the endeavors of science, while providing fodder for those who wish to remain blind to the forces of nature. The word is “atheism.”
The error is a small one, yet profoundly significant in its effects. Both men claim to be atheists. Their position is that there is no God. There is no evidence for a God and even entertaining the notion of one is foolishness. Perhaps it is. However, neither of them seem to grasp, or at least to express their understanding, that underlying all knowledge and all science is one major faith, one assumption. This is the assumption that our senses and experiences are relating real information about reality. That we are not merely in “The Matrix.” There is simply no philosophical workaround to this argument – it is impossible to absolutely know anything. Thus, even if science can tell us exactly how the Big Bang began, we can never know what if anything came before that moment or whether it was orchestrated by some deistic entity. So by definition, any scientist who claims to shape all of his or her worldviews around empiricism and logic, must declare themselves agnostic: the view that the existence of a God is unknown or unknowable. Or they should at least qualify themselves as “agnostic atheists”, which takes a more probabilistic view claiming that there is no evidence for or against a God, but that the Universe as we know it seems to suggest that there is not one.
I agree with the supposition that all orthodox religions and dogma as we know them are farce. The genesis stories throughout the religious world have been disproved as far as it is possible to do so, given the above inherent unknowability of all knowledge and the limitations of our ability to measure history. Evolution is not even a debate within the world of science. Every month it seems a new “transition fossil” is found to plug another hole in the fossil record. A steady stream of hominid fossils have traced our own evolution back about seven million years, and 85 million years for all primates. The only debates of this are micro-debates about which species begat which. As for the fossil record, one must understand that by its very nature, every time we fill one hole, two more arise on either side of it. Our understanding of molecular biology and genetics has only cemented our theories of evolution and natural selection. Natural evolution is irrefutable, insofar as the above prime assumption is acknowledged. The world is not a paltry six thousand years old. The Earth and the solar system we inhabit all formed about four and a half billion years ago, over nine billion year after the formation of the Universe itself as we know it. Thus, I agree with the self-branded atheists that it is foolishness to believe that a single man and a woman talked to a demonic snake six thousand years ago and bred to yield our current population. This story, along with all other religious dogmas, appear to be nothing more than fables – parables that helped us once cope with and explain our own existence.
But that brings us back to the original question: do we really want all of humanity to live as if our existence is a meaningless accident? It is my view that we in the science community should embrace the idea, from a philosophical standpoint, that there very well may be an unknowable entity – Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” - that crafted the laws of physics as we know them, that set the ball in motion. We can never even attempt to discover what underlies the laws of our system, for we are within the system, a part of the system, are the system. I personally have no problem admitting that this existence is likely as ethereal and meaningless as a flake of dead skin. However I am not so sure that I have faith that the rest of humanity could cope with such a prospect. Perhaps this is arrogance on my part. The evidence, though, seems to support my lack of faith in human mental well-being: how many of the worlds problems and crimes are caused by individuals feeling lost and unimportant in this world?
Thus, I suggest that we push our science, which is everyone’s science, as strongly as we can. We must educate our children about where we as a species come from. We must make them understand that we use science because it is the only proven method of obtaining anything close to actual knowledge about our Universe and existence. However, just as importantly, we must admit where our knowledge cannot reach, and allow that place to be inhabited with hope – a hope that maybe, just maybe, in that dark void of unknowability lies a meaning to our existence, a meaning we can never know or understand. We must make them understand that although the fables passed down from our ancestors are untrue and no longer useful as a defining belief, the true possibilities of our meaning and our worth may be infinitely larger than they ever imagined. I believe that if we take into consideration the grandness of nature, the mind-boggling array of galaxies in our Universe, and the insanely complex biology and chemistry within ourselves, the unknowable creation of our Universe will seem only that much bigger and infinitely more awe-inspiring. As the philosopher Karl Popper once said, “Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.” It is in this infinite ignorance where our only hope for greater meaning may lie.
Science: the death of God or corroborative evidence for Him?
I've recently been reading "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a nineteenth-century Russian novelist, and I came across the following quote:
"Remember always, young man… that science which has become a great power in the last century, has analyzed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of this world have nothing left of all that was sacred. But they have only analyzed the parts and overlooked the whole, and indeed their blindness is marvelous. Yet the whole still stands steadfast before their eyes…" p. 171
It struck me as a statement in fitting with much of the sentiment of those who think that science is incompatible with religion. Many believe that science is simply trying to explain and thus take away many things and events that could previously only be attributed to God. Of course, science is completely incompatible with a literal interpretation of the bible, but if it is interpreted a little more loosely - keeping in mind that it HAS been altered through the centuries by translation - then NOTHING that has been learned by science is in direct contradiction with the bible. I should also note before I get going that I am not Christian myself, and I believe that if there is a God he is infinitely more complex and powerful than any God we have yet imagined. OK, that being said… back to the topic at hand.
The point of the quotation is that science analyzes only the individual aspects of physical reality, i.e. physics, astronomy, physiology, evolution, geology, etc. Science looks at all these parts and fails to look at the whole of reality and creation, and thus it is blinded to the divine nature of this reality. I think that I can safely say that I both agree and disagree with those sentiments. When I say that I agree, however, what I mean is that I can understand why one might say that, standing from a highly religious or spiritual position. Most science as seen from the public's eye, seems very cold and removed from any spiritual awareness of reality. In fact, virtually the only science that the public sees are those aspects of science that end up being applied in consumer technologies and medicine. We see on the news everyday articles dealing with some new genetic discovery that might save lives or some new property of some alloy that will make faster computers. Even the science in space, i.e. the International Space Station or Mars exploration, is reported to the public as something that will lead to new consumer products or give us another place to live in the coming centuries. There is no focus on the underlying meaning of any of these discoveries and thus very little in the way of religiosity, awe, wonder, or spirituality - that is from the perspective of the public and media.
However, when you look at the actual science being conducted through the eyes of the researchers you see the discoveries in a different light. This is where I disagree with the quote. Almost every major scientific discovery has shown one thing: reality is way more complex, ordered, and awe-inspiring than seems intuitively possible. Think about quantum physics (not that that is easy to do), or recent discoveries in genetics, or discoveries about the past of Mars, or some of the recent pictures of entire planetary nebulae taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. I promise you that when those researchers are sitting there thinking about the implications of their results, they are experiencing a kind of spiritual epiphany. Imagine being Robert Hooke in the 1600's and looking at a piece of cork through a microscope. There's no way of knowing what he expected, but when he saw that it was made of millions of smaller units, which he termed cells, he had to be overcome with excitement and awe. What I'm trying to say is that science does not offhandedly dispel the mysteries of life and reality and it does not try to make anything less sacred. On the contrary, for every question answered ten more arise. There is still plenty for God to do. We may be able to explain how a planet orbits or an apple falls based on gravity, but where did gravity come from, what causes it, why does gravity work with exactly the right force necessary to sustain an orbit at a precise distance from the sun, and why do the laws of nature allow for the exact chemical reactions necessary for thousands of process, which are themselves necessary for the existence of a living organism. Ask any physicist what gravity is or the strong and weak nuclear forces that hold atoms together. All he/she can do is explain what these forces do. No one on this earth has the faintest inkling of what gravity actually is. It's a force. But what does that mean. We have all these mathematical laws of physics, but no one understand why they are the way they are or what makes them like that. Did you know that if the gravity constant (force of gravity) was altered in the slightest bit, by something like 0.000000000000000000001 or many factors less, then matter would not be able to hold together like it does, stars wouldn't exist, planets wouldn't exist, and life would be impossible. There is much that God can still do in our scientific world and the powers science is leaving to him are much more elegant and complex than the powers that most current religions want to give him (not that we could ever prove or know there was a God involved - but this article should be taken to heart by those with "faith")
What seems more powerful and awe-inspiring to you: a God that says "poof" and has created the heavens and earth and living creatures in seven days, or a God who can slowly orchestrate the evolution of an entire universe, complete with trillions of galaxies, each filled with hundreds of billions of stars, many with hundreds of orbiting smaller bodies. He can orchestrate it for billions of years with stars dying out and giving rise to new stars all the time, obliterating all planets of the old star. He can control it so precisely that fifteen billion years after the first explosion of matter, on one of these ultramicroscopic grains of sand (probably millions more in the universe - but one for sure) actually evolves an extremely simple life form that evolves over the course of 4 billion years into a being that has the ability to look out from that grain of sand and wonder how the rest of the rocks got there? You can read my article on determinism that explains how a God could possibly orchestrate this entire existence of the universe by simply laying down the laws of physics, taking a ball of matter, and throwing it into the mix in a specific way. Now that is an all-powerful God!! All science does is show us how incredibly intricate and complex this "plan" is and how infinitely intelligent this God (should he exist) would have to be to accomplish it all.
Determinism
Update: 8/2/2008 - I wrote this stuff many years ago - please note, that modern quantum machanics seems to support the idea that true randomness does in fact exist, which renders all possibility of a deterministic Universe impossible. I am still not so certain that I believe that deterministic laws do not underlie the apparent randomness in quantum physics, but I am no physicist. All of the following rests on the assumption that even at the quantum level, nature is ruled by static laws.
What is determinism, cosmically speaking? Do we even care? Determinism is embodied by a famous quotation which is often referred to as "LaPlace's Demon:"
"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."
-Marquis Pierre Simon de LaPlace
Assuming that all reality is determined by non-random natural laws (which I admit is a very unsolid assumption but for this argument I'm using it), regardless of whether we as beings know or understand the laws, then that means every action and reaction of every particle in the universe must happen in a predetermined fashion. These actions are determined by the initial conditions laid out by whatever created the matter. If particle X is heading at A velocity in B direction, it must collide with particle Y and bounce in BLAH direction, etc. All these near infinite interactions add up to create the illusion of choice, when in fact, the actions of every single particle and subatomic particle involved in that last thought of yours about my sanity were predetermined by the actions immediately before them, which were themselves determined by the previous actions....etc....to creation or infinity.
Now a weird question arises: did I choose to write this line? It sure feels like it to me. I can remember actually thinking "hey, this sentence doesn't strike me as entirely uninteresting." In fact I must argue for free will's sake that I indeed did choose to
write it. However, with the above argument's assumptions of reality, I must also argue that I was predetermined by the laws of physics to think "I should write this".
Now we must ask: is there really a difference between us making a choice based on free will and the laws of physics pre-determining a set of thoughts and reasoning that leads to a choice. And the answer is no (at least from our perspective). Because in both instances, that choice and the thoughts that caused it are the same and our perception of the event remains the same.
Therefore, if the universe is predetermined, it doesn't really matter. As far as we are concerned we have choices. I can decide to eat peanut butter and jelly or kalamari for lunch. It just so happens that the thoughts that lead to each choice were predetermined by the previous events, which were determined by the initial conditions of creation (unless time is infinite, in which case there are no initial conditions and the philosophy falls into a soggy heap wrapped around a lemon).
Note: this letter was written to me in response to the article above
Dear Mr. Brown,
This letter is in reference to your article on determinism. As a mathematician working in chaos theory, I feel the idea of a completely deterministic world without any random variables is very unbecoming of someone pretending to be a scientist, not to mention that determinism doesn't sit well with my particular ideological paradigm of reality. Haven't you ever heard of the butterfly effect (a butterfly flapping in Brazil affects the weather in New York)? There are literally trillions of tiny random fluctuations of the variables affecting weather, and the particular outcome of the weather is completely unpredictable because of these factors. If you place a drop of water at the top of your wrist 100 times in a row, it will travel a slightly different path each time. That is chaos theory. You are not at all a smart person, and I refuse to believe that I am pre-determined to refuse to believe that I am pre-determined to refuse to believe.....
I hate you.
Yours truly,
Brigadier Gen. Arthur C. Puty (Mrs.)
Daniel responds:
Dear Mr. Puty (Mrs.),
Each one of those "random" variables affecting the weather interact in very defined ways. From the perspective of an outside observer the weather may seem random, but from the perspective of each particle involved every action and reaction is caused by a specific set of previous conditions, and is thus not at all random from that perspective. If we knew every single factor involved in this planets meteorological system, we would, in fact, be able to predict the weather. Of course there are way more factors involved than we will ever have the computing power to calculate. And as for your drop of water example, each time you drop a drop of water, the tiny variables affecting the water's path changes. The tiny hairs are moved and the angle of the hand is changed ever so slightly. But, again everything that occurs with each drop, occurs because of the precise conditions of the environment beforehand. Thus chaos theory sucks and is simply an attempt to place "randomness" on events that have way too many interacting factors for your feeble little mathematical mind to calculate.