Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (2 page)

LIKE I SAY, this book is a book of science, but it is also one of philosophy. They are in a kind of odd balance, watching each other, holding hands. I admit it is a weird couple. I’m not sure it’s possible, but it would be cool if there were a television show that entered deeply into philosophy. Perhaps this is not so easy, least of all in the present political climate. Even two thousand years ago Socrates, the great inaugurator of Western philosophy, created problems, both for himself and for the state. Plato calls him a “gadfly” in the
Apology,
suggesting that his turpitude may have been innocent but was dealt with by the state with an automatism comparable with the lash of a horsetail. (“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito”—Dalai Lama.) Socrates was sentenced to death for the crime of corrupting the minds of youth and not believing in the gods of the state. It seems incredible, but less so than Giordano Bruno’s tongue and palate being spiked and Bruno himself burned nude and alive for diverging too loudly from the ecclesiastical authorities. I talk about this in
chapter 11
, and more about water in
chapter 9
.

PHILOSOPHY TODAY, not taught in grade school in the United States, is too often merely an academic pursuit, a handmaiden or apologetics of science, or else a kind of existential protest, a trendy avocation of grad students and the dark-clad coffeehouse set. But philosophy, although it historically gives rise to experimental science, sometimes preserves a distinct mode of sustained questioning that sharply distinguishes it from modern science, which can be too quick to provide answers.

Science and religion, as scientism and fundamentalism, so often at each other’s throats, share more than their oppositionality. When Sam Harris, for example, a “new atheist” with a degree in neuroscience, in his defense of what he sees as a scientifically hard-minded critique of an unsupportable belief in free will, writes, “There is not a person on earth who chose his genome, or the country of his birth,”
1
I am tempted to agree with him. Why should there be a special bubble of freedom, free from science’s universal realm of mechanical causality (and/or quantum indeterminacy) that coincides, improbably, with those wrinkly pink lobes, the human brain? (I explore this more in
chapter 13
.) But how close is his apodictic tone to that of Pastor Rick Warren, who presided over ecumenical services at President Barack Obama’s inauguration, and who writes, “God was thinking of you long before you ever thought of him. He planned it before you existed,
without your input.
You may choose your career, your spouse, your hobbies, and many other parts of your life, but you don’t get to choose your purpose.”
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According to Warren, you are part of God’s plan. You were in his mind long before you or even your parents were born. He chose not only the day you were born but the exact DNA that needed to be coupled through your parents’ sexual intercourse. It is not clear how wide a berth Warren gives to free will. Clearly, he gives some, as he suggests that if you don’t let Jesus into your heart as your personal savior—an act of free will—then you will burn eternally in hell, which is certainly not part of God’s master plan, but your own doing. On the other hand, he tells us that God chose your genetic composition. But if your mother chose your father, or if your father chose your mother—and most people would agree that they have some role in whom they mate with—then how does God decide your genetic composition? It looks like, from a logical standpoint anyway, if your parents had free will enough to choose their religious persuasion, they also had free will enough to sleep together, and therefore your genetic composition owes as much to their mundane choice as it does to divine matchmaking.

It is this sort of ad hockery typical of religious thinking that probably made the lens maker Baruch Spinoza lose patience with it and adopt a mathematical, “geometric” interpretation of reality, tossing out the inconsistency of a get-out-of-causality-free card for God’s chosen species. Extending Cartesian mechanism to the human mind, Spinoza speaks of God as overlapping and extending beyond the visible universe, completing itself in an eternal causal necessity from which neither itself nor humanity was excluded. This is God as nature
and
as perfect as the mathematical imagination of humanity. God as the universe, seen and unseen, a universe that does not stoop to human emotions or inanities. A universe in which “miracles”—deviations from eternal physical laws and relationships—could happen was for Spinoza a mark not of divine (or cosmic) omnipotence but of impotence. All of reality, including humanity, was complicit, intercalated in a single causal nexus. It is, moreover, infinite, and not in just one but in an infinite number of ways, only two of which infinities, however—René Descartes’s
res extensa
and
res cogitans,
thinking and space—are accessible to humans.

Philosophy is less cocksure, less already-knowing, or should be, than the pundits’ diatribes that relieve us of the difficulties of not knowing, of carefully weighing, of looking at the other side, of having to think things through for ourselves. Dwell in possibility, wrote Emily Dickinson: Philosophy at its best seems a kind of poetry, not an informational delivery but a dwelling, an opening of our thoughts to the world.

Consider, for example, Martin Heidegger. In lectures during the summer of 1930, delivered at the University of Freiburg—on, not uncoincidentally, this same question—Heidegger says that inquiring after the question of freedom is not really a discrete problem. “We ourselves began by indicating that freedom is a particular property of man and that man is a particular being within the totality of beings.
Perhaps
that is correct” (my italics).
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Citing a mystic, Meister Eckhart, Heidegger develops the notion of a “negative freedom,” that is, a “freedom from” nature and God. “But,” he says, “world and God together constitute the totality of what is. If freedom becomes a problem, albeit initially only as negative freedom, then we are
necessarily inquiring into the totality of what is.
The problem of freedom, accordingly, is not a particular problem but clearly a universal problem!” Not only does “the question of the essence of human freedom not limit our considerations to a particular domain, it
removes limits
; instead of limiting the inquiry it
broadens
it. But in this way we are not setting out from a particular to arrive at its universality. . . . The removal of limits leads us into the totality of beings. . . . It thus becomes completely clear:
the question concerning the essence of human freedom relates neither to a particular nor to a universal.
This question is completely different to [
sic
] every kind of
scientific
question, which is always confined to a particular domain and inquires into the particularity of a universal. With the question of freedom we leave behind us, or better, we do not at all enter into, everything and anything of a regional character.”
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Whether or not one believes, or even understands, him, it is clear that this dwelling in the question, staying with it and seeing where it leads, exemplifies a spirit of inquiry often missing in popular presentations of science, which swing between authoritative pronouncements and journalistic deference. Many hours later Heidegger will conclude that “causality is grounded in freedom. The problem of causality is a problem of freedom and not vice versa. . . . This fundamental thesis and its proof is not the concern of a theoretical scientific discussion, but of a grasping which always necessarily includes the one who does the grasping, claiming him in the root of his existence, and so that he may become essential in the actual willing of his ownmost essence.”
5

RELIGION HAS NO MONOPOLY on determinism or dogma. A televangelist or president blessing troops in the name of God somehow is reminiscent of a neo-Darwinist laying the blame for genocides on irrational religion, smugly sure of being inured from the same while claiming a kind of amoral immortality for the gene, that veritable Platonic abstraction, that chemical instantiation of eternal life going on indefinitely as the real world of life, which it produces, dies around it. Compare the spokesman for God and science on The Way Things Are with Charles Darwin’s line, which, however, seemed to frighten him so much that he confined it to his private notebook: “Thought, however unintelligible it may be, seems as much a function of organ as bile of liver. This view should teach one profound humility, no one deserves credit for anything. [N]or ought one to blame others.”
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The difference I am trying to remark (and I could be off here) is that the former tries to persuade, whereas the latter stays with the question. For Darwin, it seems not a matter of publicity or acclaim but of knowledge, always provisional. Darwin displays the courage not of his convictions but to challenge those convictions in the light both of fact and of more coherent theories. This is science, and it is also philosophy.

IT IS TRUE that science requires analysis and that it has fractured into microdisciplines. But because of this, more than ever, it requires synthesis. Science is about connections. Nature no more obeys the territorial divisions of scientific academic disciplines than do continents appear from space to be colored to reflect the national divisions of their human inhabitants. For me, the great scientific satoris, epiphanies, eurekas, and
aha!
moments are characterized by their ability to connect. As Darwin poignantly wrote, “Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of facts will certainly reject my theory.”
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The theory that has become a religion for some, in the past a political apologetics with which to excuse child labor, social inequities, and even Nazism, and which continues to be an ideological bludgeon with which to make intellectual mincemeat out of creationists, ironically continues, bless its philosophico-scientific heart, to be itself a higher thing, an intellectual gift, a productive research program, and an object worthy of secular reverence.

Theories are not only practical, and wielded like intellectual swords to the death (not by the weapons but by their wielders, who die of natural causes), but beautiful. A good one is worth more than all the ill-gotten hedge fund scraps in the world. A good scientific theory shines its light, revealing the world’s fearful symmetry. And its failure is also a success, as it shows us where to look next.

In her essay “The Beauty of the World,” Sharon Kingsland argues that for G. Evelyn Hutchinson, a philosophico-scientific polymath and one of the founders of modern ecology, “The danger of modern society . . . [is] to think that the conquest of nature was an end and to conclude that contemplative values need not be nurtured. . . . His idea [was] that we were meant to experience beauty. . . . But what did Hutchinson mean by ‘beauty’? He explained by relating an anecdote about an experience he had while walking down the drive of his house. On that occasion he spied a brilliant patch of red, which drew his attention and puzzled him: ‘In a second or two I realized that a pair of scarlet tanagers was mating on a piece of broken root conveniently left by a neighbor’s somewhat inconsequential bulldozer; the female was sitting inconspicuously on the root, the male maintaining his position on her by a rapid fluttering of his black and hardly visible wings which tended to vibrate his entire body.’ He reflected that the sight was strikingly beautiful and that it gave him a sense of pleasure to realize this.”
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The sight of the red patch that turned out to be a pair of mating tanagers spurred Hutchinson to think of “an amorous and beautiful seventeenth-century song”; it conjured forth “religious and psychoanalytic connections,” and the “color itself reminded him of specimens of Central American tanagers that he had seen in a museum, which caused him to think about the evolution of these birds.” Although I have just criticized Harris and Richard Dawkins for unwittingly investing religious-like sentiment in the ideas, respectively, of universal causality and genetic immortality, I think we can agree that if anything deserves to be appreciated in the ways formerly reserved for religious adoration, it is the subject matter of science itself.

When I think of Hutchinson’s tanagers, I think of briefly meeting him at the Great Hall of Dinosaurs at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale in the early eighties; I think of the color red and how the eye alights to it in art, where it should be used judiciously; I think of the ecstatic intensity of the sex act, a kind of ellipsis in the life sentence of human identity; I think of Georges Bataille’s quote to the effect that the tiger is to space what the sex act is to time, of the poetic power of a catachresis that gives the lie to linear formulations. I think of Heidegger returning in 1938 to the question of freedom, partly in response to Friedrich Schelling, who was himself responding to the dense, articulate, multifaceted dismissal of post-Cartesian deconstruction of free will by Spinoza three centuries before Harris. Spinoza did not believe in freedom as volition but he did believe in freedom, strongly, as political necessity as well as a kind of intellectual love of the cosmos, a widening of the contemplative spirit. Inspired by his friend Rebecca West’s essay “The Strange Necessity” on art, Hutchinson’s red tanagers “illustrate how the seemingly simple and direct experience” is “conceptually enriched by so many kinds of association that . . . it . . . is ‘essentially an art form.’”
9

Connecting humanity with other species in a single process was Darwin’s great natural historical accomplishment. It showed that some of the issues relegated to religion really came under the purview of science. More than just a research program for technoscience, it provides a eureka moment, a subject of contemplation open in principle to all thinking minds. Beyond the squabbles over its mechanisms and modes, evolution’s epiphany derives from its widening of vista, its showing of the depths of our connections to others from whom we’d thought we were separate. Philosophy, too, I would argue, in its ancient, scientifico-genic spirit of inquiry so different from a mere, let alone peevish, recounting of facts, needs to be reconnected to science for the latter to fulfill its potential not just as something useful but as a source of numinous moments, deep understanding, and indeed, religious-like epiphanies of cosmic comprehension and aesthetic contemplation.