Diego Rivera
Michael Polanyi College
Semester Two Synthesis Essay
May 27th, 2013
Michael Polanyi College
Semester Two Synthesis Essay
May 27th, 2013
The Growth of Human Beings and their Search for Truth: Sit, Relax, and Look at the Stars?
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
- Stephen Hawking
I remember many times, when I was with my family at the beach, that sometimes we stayed very late at night watching a movie in my parents’ bedroom. When the movie ended, at about 2 or 3 a.m., I walked to my bedroom and in the distance separating both rooms, there was a space that didn’t had roof so you could clearly see the sky. Although it was late and I was tired, there was always something that caught my attention and made me stay there for a while. It was dark, since almost all the light nearby where turned off, and it made the sky look so clear and majestic that you couldn’t resist staying there, contemplating the beauty of it. I used to stay in awe for some minutes and wonder the hugeness of the universe. I have always found the stars fascinating, but my knowledge of them was very limited to recognizing a few constellations and knowing superficially the stages of life of them. I have thought of some of our fundamental questions regarding our existence in this universe, but most of the time I dropped those questions thinking, without arguments that supported my view, that they didn’t have a solution, so it was a waste of time to keep wondering them. I was caught in thinking, like most of human beings, that questions like that were not so useful for our existence and that we should stay with the answers given by religion and the knowledge acquired by science. What else could you need? Religion gives you the word of God of why things are the way they are, and scientists give you knowledge of how everything works in our universe, such as the laws that governs it. We barely stop and question the word of God, because that’s not moral, or so I have been told that. We are not used to look for deeper answers to theological or why? questions. And neither we question if science is providing us with theories that truly represent reality. For example, I’m sure that most of us didn’t question our physics teacher in school about why the force of gravity is approximately 9.8 m/s2. It wasn’t needed, because we think of science as a method for reaching truths, mostly in our physical world. We don’t live in an era where people question and think for themselves, at least not about the so-called fundamental questions. We prefer practical answers, something that would be useful for our daily life. We tend to forget that is of great importance in our life the way we see things, through what theories we build our knowledge, how we understand something and believe it to be true or false, and how we attach meaning and concepts to the things around us. We are also not very familiar with the problem in the verification of sciences, and that, contrary to common understanding, we cannot prove that a given theory is true, but we can only non-disconfirm it, i.e. we can only say that it’s not false. The understanding and inquiry of these problems change the paradigm of how we see things and how we perceive the world around us, and as a result we tend to question more often the validity of the conjectures we have formed. But, is this attitude of questioning be a never-ending process of human beings? Can we ever stop and say with no margin of error, “This is it, this is truth!”?
Throughout our history as human beings, we have tried to answer the things we don’t understand and science has been generally accepted to be a good method of achieving this purpose. We have developed a magnificent characteristic through the process of evolution called the human eye, and this has allowed us to observe the world around us in a detailed way so we could build theories and conjectures to help us gain understanding of the universe and how things work. At the same time, the new understanding has helped us progress and become a better civilization. We value science because it’s useful; it works and contributes to the growth and development of mankind. Without the capacity to see, we wouldn’t have science. Seeing gives us the capacity to gather information in many ways, and although this has been an advantage to advance our knowledge, it has also limited us. This is well exemplified at the beginning of The Fire in the Equations, where Kitty Ferguson explains the difference between how a normal person and a physicist would only see an object, in her example, a chair. She says that a normal person would probably only have a common sense view of the object, that is the chair, but the physicist is more probably to see it also as an object made up of atoms moving fuzzily and leaving a lot of emptiness. Different perceptions can change the meaning of what appears to be the exact same thing, and when we realize this, we can only imagine a nearly infinite number of approaches to everything in this world. So how can we know the things-as-they-are? How can we know which one is more accurate? We can say this is not an irreconcilable problem since we have to take into account that there are different levels of knowledge and we should use the one that is more useful. But still, the problem is there. Another approach of how we see things is the one of Henry David Thoreau and specially Annie Dillard, which tells us that you have to become one with the nature, to allow a flow, as in a dialogue, to go between you two in order to form one. That way you are truly seeing. Maybe, our different perceptions of how we see things have helped us go on with the process of science, and without these differences, we could hardly be able create something new.
The problem of observation in science is hardly going away, but we can explore the advantages it has brought to the evolution of knowledge. David Bohm, in his book On Dialogue, explains the meaning of “to communicate” as “to create something in common”. He makes the analogy of a dialogue with people and the one that a scientist has with nature. When people share different meanings, these differences are what enable the group to create something new and in common. The scientist goes through a similar process. When the scientist believes in some theory and observes the nature, it might be that the results are different to what he expected, so now he is in the position to create something new with the contributions of nature. It is by the differences in our thinking with what we see in nature that enable us to create something in common, something new. These differences not only occur between a scientist and nature, but between scientists and their theories. A clear example of this is the Copernican Revolution. We tend to say, without much thinking but remembering, that Copernicus came up with the theory of our currently accepted solar system, which is not entirely true because if it wasn’t for many thinkers and astronomers such as Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, this theory wouldn’t have worked. Besides not knowing the history of the formation of this theory, we also don’t know what theories were behind this new movement and what made Copernicus wonder if the Earth could be like the other wanderers. Without the Ptolemaic system and its continuous growth of complexity, maybe Copernicus wouldn’t have searched for a new system that was more economically efficient and more beautiful. He was able to do this because of previous theories that allowed him to have a dialogue with them, have differences, and create something new. This example also illustrates the power of our minds to change what was previously believed as truth. The role of revolutions, specifically of scientific revolutions, has had a great impact in the change of paradigms and our beliefs. This has led us to a different understanding and knowledge of the universe and of our daily lives. These revolutions have an impact not only in science, but also in many areas such as religion and philosophy. Usually, these start by changing one small thing and then develop into huge changes in other apparently unrelated areas. It’s similar to the butterfly effect by how one small change affect the grounds of other areas and mold the development of a civilization. The beauty about scientific revolutions is that it’s not about changing a theory by putting something entirely new, but about how small changes start shifting things by questioning how they are and that leads to something new, which we are capable of doing by learning from experience and history. The reason why these revolutions are adopted have a great significance in believing we have improved our state of knowledge, and we are willing to believe that these new understandings are a steps that get us closer to reaching an objective truth of the universe.
Of course, there are many more factors in trying to reach an understanding of an objective truth or reality. One of them is the human mind and the way we perceive the universe. In trying to understand the universe, first we need to understand how our mind works. A good approach to understanding our mind is Douglas Hofstadter’s book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I like to understand one of Hofstadter’s points of understanding our mind as a system through this personal experience. Two of my favorite hobbies used to be playing with a Rubik’s cube and playing Tetris. I was really good at both and I still play sometimes, but it’s substantially less than I used to play. One of the main reasons why I decided to stop playing these games was because they tend to be very addictive, and what happened to me was that I was thinking in both games all day long. Seriously, I woke up and there I was imagining solutions for the Rubik’s cube, playing it in my mind. I was eating lunch… Boom! Mr. Tetris appeared in my plate. I took a break of my homework and I imagined that little multicolored, bastard cube. I went to sleep… Hello again, Mr. Tetris! I’m not trying to convince anyone to avoid those games; they are actually a lot of fun. The idea of this story is that sometimes, we can get into a loop. Being in a loop means that you can’t get out of the system, you are caught in an intellectual circle. It’s like when you make a bad code and your computer can’t stop processing information until they ran out of a resource, e.g. memory or energy. So, humans can be caught into that cycle too, only that it happens at a different level, one that is more abstract and that we are still trying to figure it out. This restriction of not being able to get out of our system, whatever that means, if it’s the body, soul, wholeness with the world… I really don’t know; it’s a limitation for knowing things that go beyond our reach. We can’t avoid the fact that we, humans, have limitations. Of course, we have built computers and other machines that allow us to see things beyond our senses, e.g. x-rays, gamma, other galaxies, etc., but that doesn’t mean that we have overcome those limitations that make us humans. The machines and computers and everything that we are able to build is in some sense biased by human knowledge, for example, if we want to build a machine that illustrates how dogs see, that machine would be constructed by humans, for humans, and with the understanding of humans about how dogs see. So, can we ever remove these limitations, maybe by building something as intelligent as we are? This is the great dilemma with artificial intelligence. Some say we are going to be able to build something, usually a computer that simulates the human brain. A computer as intelligent as any human. Within the ones in favor of this idea, is Hofstadter. What he says is that we are not so different from other formal system. The human body, with the network of neurons and everything physical that composes it, is like the hardware, whereas our mind works as the software that arises from this hardware. This hardware can be seen as a formal system that can be replicated, but our mind is an informal system that arises as a product of different things that can’t be replicated. Although we can replicate our hardware, we can’t control the product of it, since it’s not programmable. Bottom line, we could be able to create artificial intelligence, but it won’t be the same as our intelligence.
Although we have limitations in our mind and it’s very difficult if not impossible to overcome them, there’s something we are doing good in how we perceive the universe. If not, we wouldn’t be the most intelligent species in our planet, if not in the universe. We have developed the capacity to see the meaning of things, but is this meaning something inherent in the universe or are we the ones that put meaning to the things around us? Our mind tells us it’s out there. We have this system we call universe, which serves as the input for the creation of our concepts that helps us create the isomorphic relation with reality. The process of evolution has made us develop the capacity to see patterns, and by recognizing what we believe are patterns, we were able to build concepts that seem to be consistent with nature. An argument that supports this notion is mathematics. If we see the history of math, we can see it as a formal system that started with the axioms of addition and subtraction and from there, it was built to the complex theories we know now. Some of these theories have been discovered through this system and not by observation, but by the passing of time we had got to know they were isomorphic to the nature. It’s hard to refute such a powerful system as math, but still, this system started as an interpretation of how we saw the universe, so saying that mathematics is inherent in the universe is a premature conclusion. Nevertheless, some believe that mathematical and logical consistency as the First Cause of the universe. The creation of concepts like time makes us think more deeply about the universe. Questions such as the beginning of the universe and the search for the First Cause start to arise, and that leads us again to the forming of theories that try to explain how the universe is. For example, Stephen Hawking, referring his theory about the beginning of the universe said, “So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?” Another First Cause, and one that has had a great influence in our civilization, is God. In trying to find the truth, we have seen the apparent problem between science and religion, and in trying to prove one against the other we have found little utility in trying to refute one another. The real problem is that all attempts to explain our universe have to start with a leap of faith, whether religion or science, we must assume certain things to be true in order to continue our quest for knowledge and truth. This quest, of course, relies on different aspects such as the reliability of public and private evidence, simplicity, economical and psychological value, and beauty.
We think of beauty as a strong indicator of truth. But, what is beauty? Can it be “measured” objectively? Is any kind of objective beauty? There’s a mythical character in Guatemala called, La Siguanaba. According to the legend, she appears during the night and is especially seen by the late nighters. It is also said that she hunts for the Don Juanes or Casanovas, which find her in a pond or river or any other water source, washing her hair with a golden bowl and combing it with a golden comb. The men get immediately fascinated with her, instantly falling in love, so she proceeds by calling them and walking to a cliff. They follow. Finally, when they are up in the cliff, she turns and shows her true face. The face of a horse or, sometimes, of a dead woman. She is no longer beautiful, but so ugly and terrifying that her preys, paralyzed by terror, drop dead.
Were these unfortunate men wrong about what beauty is? They believed they had seen this beautiful woman, but appearances may deceive. Was she truly ugly or truly beautiful? Or both? How was her beauty changing over time? Was she inherently beautiful or ugly? If so, according to what standards and to whom? “Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.” Some attribute this quote to Plato and some others say it’s from Margaret Wolfe Hungerford. Who said it, is not important right now, but the validity of the statement. Is beauty subjective, then?
There are two things we should take into account about beauty. Beauty is both objective and subjective in human terms. Let’s first discover why it’s objective. As mentioned above, humans have the capacity to “discover” or “recognize” patterns in nature. This has been developed through the process of evolution, making us appreciate more the things in which we can find patterns than those that we can’t. For example, if we are trying to figure out what is beautiful in humans, one of the most important (or the most important) variables is symmetry. Symmetry is appealing to the eye, to us, and we think of that as something beautiful. That would be the objective part of beauty. It’s something that can be applied to all humans, since evolution made us that way. The subjective part is not applicable to all humans, but is something that varies according to the context in which we are. This explains why some people find something more beautiful than others, and the differences through time of the perception of beauty. Benjamin Franklin said, “Beauty, like supreme dominion, is but supported by opinion.” So, in human perspective, beauty is both objective and subjective.
Beauty plays a very important role in our conception of truth. In our theories and models of the universe, we have seen great value of truth in something perceived as beautiful. For example, Copernicanism was successful in great part because of its aesthetic and not economic value. We think of truth and beauty as something linked. Something that appears to be beautiful is worth pursuing by the possibility of reaching the truth, as Kitty Ferguson constantly reminds us. And when pursuing truth, guided by aesthetics, we tend to believe it’s valid because we think of it as coherent with our view of the world. But, have we reached true truth? We are sometimes too willing to believe something is the way it is because we have been taught that these “things” don’t change, so it becomes very hard to change that paradigm. We know that the universe is governed by physical laws, specifically the forces of gravity, electromagnetic, strong, and weak. In some sense, we have reached some bedrock conclusion about how something works. So far, so good. But, when challenged by something out of our understanding, such as the existence of God and His possible interventions in our world, it makes our whole structure of knowledge and truth tremble. We are not going to talk about the many possibilities of the implications of this happening, but we are going to talk about one. That is the possibility of God intervening and we, thinking of His intervention as something breaking the laws of the universe and thus, His laws. This would make Him incoherent and irrational. But would it? If we have the premise that we can have a perfect and thus, coherent isomorphism of reality with our perception, then maybe God is incoherent and irrational. Unfortunately, that premise is of no use because it’s impossible since we are limited human beings. Beings that have created abstract concepts in order to understand the world around them, with a fairly good isomorphism with reality, or so we believe that.
Then, how can we think we have the standards to evaluate God? That would mean that our standards are superior to God, but those standards were created by us. Are we superior to God? After all, maybe the anthropic principle applies. I have a hard time believing this. Through the process of evolution, humans have had developed the capacity to gain a better understanding of the world and universe around them. This was possible because of the ability to make abstract concepts of the things that were observed. By doing this, humans have set a standard, a scale of values, that define something as good, beautiful, or truthful, but all of these are none but human made. These are creations by humans, which they and only they, make use of. The universe is; it’s real and not something we have created. The universe is what is, and it’s part of the reality. We perceive it through our senses and mental process, which exists because of the abstract concepts we have created. These standards exist nowhere, but in our minds.
Is this search for truth and God ever end? Will we ever going to reach a complete knowledge of reality? Saying we could be able to do it, implies that we could get out of our system and see the whole. We would stop seeing the parts as humans, nature, and the universe in order to become one, very much like Zen Buddhism. Or we can also rely on something else, like superior intelligence and maybe created by us. This reminds me of the story of Gödy. It goes like this.
Let’s say we are able to build a machine as complex as humans, and we would name it Gödy. Does this change our limitations and how we see the world? Maybe, I’m sure this would expand our capacity to understand the universe. Is this going to change reality or objective truth? Definitely not. Again, Gödy would be human-made, and we are able to change the environment in which we live, but not the things-as-they-are. Can we, as humans, know the objective truth of the universe? I’m convinced that we can’t do that, because we are limited by our senses and by everything that is human-made, as explained before. We can be able to expand our cone of vision of time and space, but that would still be limited; no matter how much we expand it, we would never have a full spectrum of the universe or multiuniverses. So, in order to know if we have reached an objective truth, we would need something more complex, of a higher order, than ourselves. Let’s add one more factor, the process of evolution. Having Gödy as intelligent as ourselves and being able to evolve by some cyber reproducing process of I-don’t-know-what, we would have the possibility that Gödy be superior to humans. They would be more intelligent and have a cone of vision of the universe bigger than ours. They might even get to the point of controlling us, and that would really suck. We may even be their pets. But let’s not digress on that, that’s another topic. Let’s say the evolved Gödy and his cyber friends would be friendly with us and we would still be able to control them somehow. Now, are Gödy and friends going to help us reach that truth? I hardly think so, since they would only be able to tell us a higher level of truth than ours. But, does that imply that we would be able to reach an objective truth? Unfortunately, no. Gödy would suffer the same problem we have by only being on a higher level of knowledge, since it is not God, but only Gödy. This could go on ad infinitum.
I’m sorry for the long digression, but explaining how Gödy or some other AI is not going to help us, is worth taking some time. Returning to the question of whether we would find truth and God, let’s suppose we reach that knowledge. Then, how can we know we have reached it? How can we know that we know? Can we know anything? Can we ever unify everything and know the Mind of God? In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking wrote, “Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him?” If we can’t know the why questions, why should we bother in trying to answer them? Maybe, it’s better to just sit there, look at the sky, and be able to recognize the Orion constellation but not more. Or, is there something else that we can achieve to be worthwhile of pursuing it?
“It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Its a crazy world out there. Be curious.”
- Stephen Hawking
Changing the default state of mind of believing everything people and in general, public opinion tell how things are and should be, it’s what I called awakening. It’s an essential factor of being truly alive to question everything that surrounds us and really try to figure out what is happening and what is around us. Get together with people which you can share ideas. Create groups where this exchange can become easier, like Benjamin Franklin created The Junto, or some pioneers that created something called The MPC. Environments where people can freely share ideas, without assumptions dominating the dialogue, are the places where great things can happen and great ideas can arise. Human being have the capacity to ask this type of questions, and we also have the capacity to understand, construct, and build something as a group. That’s one of the most important things humans have achieved. Cultivate the attitude of Socrates of tying to find answers to the questions we think but drop. Approach everything as a stranger and you may find the guidance to create something new. Question religion and science, and choose what you think is best for you and the values and principles by which you live. Search for answers of the world around you, of the universe, of science, of our existence! Dare to discover and be a pioneer, because only you are responsible of your life and the way you reason.
Maybe, all of the above can help us in our inquiry towards truth. But maybe not, and we would just be living an illusion of knowledge by believing we had overcome our limitations as humans, and would never be able to answer the deeper questions about why do we exist, where does life come from, and the universe, and planet Earth, and other universes, and how could all of these be different. If that were the case, I wouldn’t worry, since we can gain a lot in trying. I think it’s even more important than reaching some bedrock conclusions. Some say that the process is more important than the final result. In this case, I agree. Even though we would not be able to reach the objective truth, we would gain understanding of the universe and in return we could progress as a civilization. Not being able to find the objective truth, the theory of everything, or the Mind of God, is something positive that enables us to keep pursuing a better state that would improve our experience as human being and that would move our civilization forward.