So I've fallen into a Stanley Kubrick fetish as of late and came across a few delicious quotations by the iconic director, in particular this one from Playboy:
I don't believe in any of Earth's monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe. Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of a sun's energy on the planet's chemicals, it's fairly certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. It's reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high. Now, the sun is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still where it is hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.
These are very interesting words from the Kubrick. What makes it of particular interest to me is that this worldview appears to be something of an ambitious correlate to a worldview put forth by another man some thirty odd years later, Stuart Kauffman.
In his book, Reinventing The Sacred, Kauffman makes the argument that science and religion can be reconciled, but both sides have to make a concession. Scientists must move beyond -- though not necessarily give up -- reductionism and religious folk must embrace the concept of a God that is not supernatural, but exists as the natural and ceaseless creativity of the universe. This argument takes as its case study the complexity of the universe and its remarkable ability to self-organize emergent behaviors and properties into the cosmos as we know them. Kubrick, in a small sense, mirrors these assumptions in his belief that a God can be defined as the understanding that the universe can endogenously create life forms and wonders that we can only begin to imagine -- isolated as we are from the rest of the universe. So perhaps Kauffman shares something unexpected with Kubrick; I'm not sure if this makes them strange bedfellows: Kauffman doesn't talk much about his taste in movies, and Kubrick hardly ever discussed his religious beliefs in depth.
I suppose this struck me particularly because I only recently fished reading Kauffman's book. Its is a most wonderful exposition of Kauffman's worldview, and reads like more of a guide than a doctrine. In a world where the study of complexity is changing the way many of us think about science, a new way of thinking about the world is required. What Kauffman asks in this book is for us to consider the complex systems of the universe, which he describes in robust and sometimes tedious detail, and consider another view which can account for these advances in science unlike, say, reductionism which in some cases may leave us wanting.
For some, the reductionist worldview is enough. Since the Enlightenment the reductionist worldview has been the dominant game in town. This fact isn't unwarranted however. With the reductionist approach, science moved in leaps and bounds on the backs of Descartes, Newton, and Einstein. However a number of physicists, according to Kauffman, have begun abandoning this worldview in favor of another that explains the world. This worldview is called emergence.
There are two views of emergence that people are familiar with. There's something that oddly sounds a lot like a concept from intelligent design epistemological emergence which holds that systems are too complex to be explained by reductionism, and ontological emergence, which holds that complex systems are still bound by the laws of physics, though they are not reducible to them. Kauffman strongly advocates the latter of these two and makes the case for it in his book. Kauffman skillfully elucidates on various ideas in physics, biology, and at times psychology and the role that emergence might play in those contexts that should come as no surprise to those familiar with complex systems; those not familiar with complex systems will not find him hard to follow.
What's interesting is his assertion that reductionist science for the most part does not capture the value of its subjects. You wouldn't well expect a particle, a molecule, or cell to show its value by itself. If one reduces all the way down to the turtles, they'll find that though they may have learned a lot about the cell or molecule in question, they will be left woefully in the dark about its function in the system as a whole. Here the old adage about some things not equalling the sum of their parts rings true, and its not until one looks at the system as a whole that they may find the value of the cell or molecule. Even still, the system may exhibit emergent properties.
Take the heart, if I may elaborate upon Kauffman's example with a flourish of my own, which makes an obvious thumping noise. Its purpose isn't to thump, but to pump blood, the thumping is another property of the heart that just so happened to emerge with its primary function. We people cannot see the heart pump blood, but its thump is something we can hear -- and use. Say one were to lay with a lover one starry night in Santa Fe and look up at the stars, with said lover's head resting tenderly on one's chest. The lover, from the sounds of the heart beating would be able to infer if one were excited, frightened, calm, or even dead all by the, or lack of, their heart thumping away inside of one's chest. Though the heart was did not evolve to become a mood measurer, it is uniquely pre-adapted to doing this kind of measurement. This little extra emerged during the same time the heart's primary function did. The notion of emergence is a powerful one, and many scientists who do not hold this view of the universe reserve judgement on it because... Well it make about as much sense as reductionism does in many cases.
To be honest, the scientific bits were not the point of dissent in this book for me, and apparently most of the readers on amazon. Kauffman, in the second half of the book, after using his signature Kauffmanian mind trick to wow his audience with ideas and concepts that make a lot of sense dives into murky waters. He begins talking about an evolutionary origin of ethics and morality, one that can explain why we seem to have overlapping but diverse morals. Using a mathematical concept called "global Pareto optimality" he asserts that given a morality space, there might exist a set of optimal morals that are globally good and not dominated by other morals. Though he is quick to point out that we have no way of measuring this theoretical morality space, at least not yet. Also we have to deal with the little fact that our morals evolve over time. The United States, in its short history, has accepted slavery, sweatshops, jim crow, and other institutions that today we find appalling and quite frankly immoral. Honestly, the evolutionary aspects of morality are not hard to disagree with. His model may be a little ambitious, but it makes sense. That's the problem with Kauffman, he makes sense. That's why many scientists reserve judgement on his theories because, though his ideas are outside of the mainstream, they make sense.
A friend of mine said he was not quite convinced that Kauffman's argument that our inability, even in principle, to predict many natural phenomena (ex. evolution) means they are not-quite-only-physical. The thing is, I can't really recall that argument being made. The worldview presented in Reinventing The Sacred, in my opinion, was strictly materialist and that everything that happened in this universe (or multiple universes) was strictly endogenous. Considering what we already know about the universe, we should not seek an omnipotent God to explain away natural phenomena and fulfill our spiritual needs. The awe of the universe and its ceaseless creativity should be God enough. When we go outside and stand in awe of the ceaseless creativity of the universe, much like how devout might stand in awe of a strong anthropic God and His creation, we should get the same spiritual fulfillment. In essence, I took away three main points of this book.
1. This is how the universe works: from the adaptation to
2. This is how we see it now: through the lens of Galilean reductionism(science) or teleological intuition(religion). My words, not his, much of the book is in dialog with the former.
3. Here is a new way of thinking about science and religion, a worldview that will prepare you and future generations to think about life, the biosphere, and the cosmos.
In conclusion, I would suggest reading this book along with Melanie Mitchell's excellent, Complexity: A Guided Tour. While Mitchell presents a wonderful introduction to what complexity is, Kauffman comes behind her to deliver the heavy philosophical and robust way of thinking about complex systems, and the creativity in the universe. What I took away from Kauffman's book, was just that. I don't really look at trees the same way I did before when I walk down the street. I've grown a sense of being at home in the universe, and my religious and scientific thinking have never been in more harmony. Though I can't give credit to the book entirely for that, I can't say it didn't help... Which probably means I'm under the sway of a Kuaffmanian mind trick that compels me to go back and read his other treatises on complexity, the origin of life, and science in general.
