Our recent thoughts about Thomas Nagel's (failed, I think) pronouncement against materialistic reductionism have led me down the path of musing on the connections among nature "in itself"--whatever that may be--scientific models, and comprehensibility.
To return to Nagel for a moment, much of his disdain for the schema of materialism rides on the purported strength of his assertion that Darwinian evolution as an explanation for the emergence of mind is radically implausible, and therefore our quest for a purely physical description of the cosmos as a whole misguided. The heart of his dense, often eloquently stated broadside against GUT comes down to noting that minds and reason and values exist (true enough; though the first two have been debated, and it takes a philosopher to regard "value" as being a relevant entity in a discussion of cosmological models), and such things wouldn't be possible in a reductive material cosmos. Something is missing in science, Nagel feels--"feels" being the element that catches my attention--and that something undergirds everything:
"My target is a comprehensive, speculative world picture that is reached by extrapolation from some of the discoveries of biology, chemistry, and physics--a particular naturalistic Weltanschauung that postulates a hierarchical relation among the subjects of those sciences, and the completeness in principle of an explanation of everything in the universe through their unification."
Fully reductive materialism; the random nature of evolutionary change; minds as epiphenomenal to complexifying brains; a mathematical-materialist GUT--and all of it, rather than the teleological cosmos in which humanity plays some central role. For Nagel, as for many, it all just seems impossible to swallow.
A good question, though, might be: Should we expect it to seem otherwise?
Evolution, safe to say, is not easily understood. It's not that, at this point in the intellectual growth of our species, we don't get the basic idea--genetic drift, changing environment, chemical replicators--it's that we don't, and perhaps can't, really get our minds around what "a million years" means . . . to say nothing of ten million, or seventy five million, or one point one billion. The 10,000 year age of earth asserted by some fundamentalists is scientifically illiterate, but certainly *feels* more likely. Without education in modern geology, radiometric dating, and the like, some type of flat-earther position on foundational questions is to be expected. Of course the sun is in motion. Of course human beings are special. Of course our minds aren't part of the material world. Do you *feel* material?
But a scant few centuries of science have shown us how wrong this "right in front of you" thinking can be. Who would have thought a drop of water was full of animals, before Van Leeuwenhoek? (No one; this is why, as Richard Dawkins notes in his wonderful book "The Magic of Reality," there are no myths about dust mites.) Who could believe that some rocks fall out of the sky? (Jefferson couldn't.) Or that everything that exists was once compressed into a volume smaller than a pencil tip? Nature is radically counterintuitive. Anyone who feels the facts will seem sensible to humanity has not taken in the lesson of Copenhagen.
Which is exactly as it should be. We *are* evolved organisms, and there is no evolutionary pressure to turn us into Surveyors of the Universe, intuiting its grand activities at a glance. That we can discern as much as we can has struck some as a marvel (more on that in another blog). But the fact that we don't *feel* psychophysical reductionism can possibly be right is both irrelevant to its truth or falsity and . . . in a way . . . in keeping with a Darwinian view. You wouldn't expect a brain evolved like ours to have an immediate grasp of "a very long time ago, our ancestors were a kind of slime mold." Such claims, in human terms, are nonsense. Yet evidence, not intuition, gets the final word.
Einstein, of course, was famously turned away from Quantum Mechanics because it was so non-sensical. He spent the latter years of his life fruitlessly (unless the Cosmological Constant turns out to have been prescient) trying to discover the key to a universe that behaved in a more respectable way. How frustrating, how maddening for us if the GUT is something less like GR and more like QM: workable, fascinating, but never really sensible, never satisfying to the kind of minds which are ours.
It may well be. We humans think mythologically, and symbolically: if the GUT revealed a Tree of Life or the mind of God or a tremendous cosmic egg, all of which have been imagined by various cultures, it would make sense more than what may be awaiting us at the end of the physics road.
I admit to a bit of a chill at the thought: I would prefer an infinite and beautiful Tree of Life to a sterile knot of mathematics (String Theory, I would submit, is decidedly unbeautiful). I won't, of course, twist my reason out of shape in order to convince myself a Tree of Life is somehow "really" there, if it is not. I know how prone humans are to confabulating in order to arrive at conclusions that feel good.
And yet as far as Einstein was from Nagel, and as far as I am from either man, we do share a certain longing for satisfaction at the ways of nature. I can't help hoping the deepest answers will be, in some sense, human answers.
