Error and Loss E-Book

Ashley Curtis

• Herausgeber: Kommode Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 128

Beschreibung

Error and Loss digs out and exposes a fundamental assumption deeply buried both in common thought and in materialist philosophy: that reason transcends its evolutionary pedigree, allowing us to speak coherently of a reality divorced from all experience. As we have moved from a religious to a scientific explanation of our cosmos this error has led directly to a terrible loss—the disenchantment that pervades our age. Yet when we dare to stare the error in the face all variants of materialism self-destruct, and the world we live in, the world of trees and rocks and stars and animals and other human beings, receives its once unquestioned magic back. Error and Loss is a philosophical work of play and parable and paradox, a detective story that uncovers what has deadened our connection to our universe, then offers up both restoration and a reconciliation with the thought of ages past.

Leseprobe

© 2018 Kommode Verlag Zürich

Text: Ashley Curtis

Proofreader: Christine O’Neill

Cover Illustration: Patric Sandri

Typesetting and Layout: Anneka Beatty

eISBN: 978-3-9524626-9-0

ERROR AND LOSS

A LICENCE TO ENCHANTMENT

by Ashley Curtis

But our lot crawls between dry ribs

To keep our metaphysics warm.

— T.S. Eliot, Whispers of Immortality

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1Scientific Materialism

Chapter 2Five Objections to Scientific Materialism

Chapter 3Loss

Chapter 4Error (I)

Chapter 5Error (II)

Chapter 6Error (III)

Chapter 7Unnatural Selection

Chapter 8Truths

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Preface

This book is written out of the conviction that most of us, by virtue of living in the time we do, suffer under a default world-view whose basic assumptions are so deeply buried in us that we are not even minimally aware of them. Furthermore, these assumptions radically distinguish the intellectual and spiritual life of our time from that of previous eras.

In order to unearth these assumptions and show up their error, it is necessary to dig deep. The tool used for this must, of necessity, be the tool of our time—of our default world-view. This necessitates a delicate balancing act, one in which materialistic science is used to overthrow scientific materialism, in which reason leads us in march-step to the brink of the formless and incoherent. It is my hope that this balancing act can succeed; I find in our time no other way to arrive at a place which, in other times, was the place of origin.

The individual ideas in this book are not original but have been developed and plumbed for centuries and, in some cases, millennia by thinkers far more talented than I. Their combination in this form, however, I have not seen elsewhere, and it is my hope that this may be of some value. I have refrained in general from stating the original sources of ideas by now well in the public domain in the hope of keeping this book less cumbersome and pedantic than it would be if loaded with references and footnotes. When I have borrowed an idea from a contemporary writer, however, I have noted this.

I will often refer to Darwinism, though without differentiating between the different strands of thought that go by this name or a slightly modified version of it (e.g. neo-Darwinism), nor have I delved into the controversies still raging between evolutionary biologists and philosophers of biology over exactly which strand is most coherent. For me it is enough that natural selection be seen as an indifferent, purposeless algorithm that favours the development and retention of those characteristics of organisms that promote reproductive advantage in the environment in which they find themselves, and that it be understood as the vehicle which produces the ‘designs’ found in the natural world. It seems to me that any view that goes by the name of Darwinism must see natural selection in this manner and so I believe I am justified in using the term in this rather undifferentiated way.

Ashley Curtis

May 2018

Introduction

It is a commonplace that we live today in a disenchanted world, a world devoid of mystery and magic, a world in which meaning is our own creation, something that we invent rather than discover. Without mystery, without a meaning ‘out there’ for us to discover, our sense of wonder atrophies. We either go about our pointless existence due to inertia or a remnant of the instinct to survive or else, courageously, we forge a point for ourselves, we create value—in relationships, in creative projects, in pleasure, in work, in the struggle for justice or the search for beauty. Or perhaps we merely revel in the absurdity and freedom of a meaningless existence.

Some writers suggest that our sense of wonder has not disappeared at all but has merely taken up a new abode. Douglas Hofstadter puts it as follows:

[There are those who] have an instinctive horror of any ‘explaining away’ of the soul. I don’t know why certain people have this horror while others, like me, find in reductionism the ultimate religion. Perhaps my lifelong training in physics and science in general has given me a deep awe at seeing how the most substantial and familiar of objects or experiences fades away, as one approaches the infinitely small scale, into an eerily insubstantial ether, a myriad of ephemeral swirling vortices of nearly incomprehensible mathematical activity. This in me evokes a cosmic awe. To me, reductionism doesn’t ‘explain away’; rather, it adds mystery.1

Lorraine Daston2, in a similar vein, suggests that our sense of wonder has moved from phenomena themselves to how we have come to explain them—wonder at such a varied world emerging from so few parts, wonder at the power of the human mind to solve mysteries so convincingly and elegantly, wonder at the explanations themselves—wonder, for example, at a blind and meaningless algorithm (natural selection) ‘designing’ such a plethora of life forms, including one that creates its own meaning and value. Einstein expresses wonder when he exclaims, ‘The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.’ And when we think things through we may recognise that, beneath all the hard-wrung explanations of the natural sciences, there still lurk ultimate, unanswered questions—Why is there something rather than nothing?—questions that probably lead all of us to wonder from time to time.

We may also wonder at our own creations, be they artistic or technological. A sense of awe at a brilliant musical performance or a painting or a poem that takes our breath away is a kind of wonder. And we wonder, certainly, at moonshots, at 3-D printing, and at the array of miracles our latest smart phones can perform.

Such a surviving sense of wonder would seem to argue for a residual, perhaps essential, ‘enchantment’ persisting in our world. But these are examples of what one might call a ‘meta-wonder’—a wonder directed not at natural phenomena but at our own understanding or manipulation of them, or at the conditions we have discovered for their existence.

And while the conditions of existence, or existence itself, or the things we ourselves have brought into existence, all often do command such a sense of meta-wonder, actual natural phenomena are often dead for us in a way that for most of our ancestors they were not. There is something missing—we have lost something along the way.

Even the most impressive natural displays—lightning, a solar eclipse—have faded for us. We shoot them a glance, to be sure, but generally while going about our business at the same time. Lightning is no longer terrifying—unless we are on a mountain ridge—and it is usually not paid much attention, either. A display goes on outside that puts any fireworks to shame; the sky is ripped apart with streaks and sheets of otherworldly light; horrific crashes shake the ground we stand on—and yet it is all, as it were, optional. Watching a solar eclipse at a school last winter, I could not but be struck by the lack of attention it was paid. People milled about outside—some glancing here and there through special lenses at the disappearing sun—and talked and played basketball and told jokes and socialised while the sun was being blotted out of the sky! I thought, yes, that’s it: the eclipse is optional.

It is possible to see this loss as a positive development. Wondering at mystery reveals a lack of knowledge or understanding. Understanding is good: with its attainment we not only gain control and power but also a kind of wisdom, a knowing that is of great use. We are enlightened about the phenomenon in question, no longer ‘living in the dark ages’. A call for a return to wonder, from this perspective, is a call for a return to ignorance. The ‘deadening’ of understood phenomena is not really a loss at all—rather, it is an awakening from delusion to reality. Whatever ‘aliveness’ lodged in the phenomenon previously was but the result of a misperception—it was a faux aliveness, its loss therefore only a pseudo-loss.

The assumption behind this outlook is, of course, that our understanding is both coherent and sufficiently complete to truly dispel the mystery that once adhered to the phenomenon. This book will take issue with both of these claims. It readily accepts the explanations and predictions of our materialistic natural sciences but rejects as both incoherent and incomplete the claims of the world-view I will call scientific materialism—the world-view that I take to be the default world-view of our age, by which I mean the world-view we really hold when we are not thinking about world-views.

Chapter One describes in more detail what I mean by scientific materialism and what I mean by a default world-view. For the purposes of this introduction, I will only point out that scientific materialism, in contrast to materialistic science, represents a philosophy and a cosmology, a view of ‘how things really are’—a metaphysics rather than a physics.

The confusion of materialistic science, which is both a method (select, predict, test, measure, build model, retest, correct model etc.) and a body of knowledge (in the form of provisional physical and/or mathematical models for selected aspects of phenomena), with scientific materialism, which is a world-view making ultimate pronouncements about what does and does not exist, is so thoroughgoing that it is very difficult to disentangle. One of the goals of this book is to do so. But I wish, also, to go further. I will argue not only that the claims of materialistic science and scientific materialism are completely different but also that while materialistic science works, scientific materialism is incoherent. Further, this incoherence is actually predicted by materialistic science. Specifically, I will argue that materialistic science sheds a damning light on an assumption so deeply embedded not only in scientific materialism but in almost all of our thinking that it does not appear to us to be an assumption at all.

Once this assumption has been outed, what kind of world-view can be left to us? If materialistic science gets it right and at the same time scientific materialism is incoherent, what kind of ‘world-view’ is even possible? And how does this impact the ‘disenchantment’ of natural phenomena? These are the questions to which this book will offer a response.

1From Douglas Hofstadter, Reductionism and Religion, in Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 3, 1980.

2Lorraine Daston. (2014)‘Wonder and the Ends of Inquiry’, in Examined Life, Point Magazine. Retrieved from https://thepointmag.com/2014/examined-life/wonder-ends-inquiry.

Chapter 1

SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM

A blanker whiteness of benighted snowWith no expression, nothing to express.

— Robert Frost, Desert Places

By scientific materialism I understand any conception of the cosmos as an indifferent, value-free physical reality that can exist, and has existed, independently of any consciousness. This cosmos is described increasingly accurately by models of the physical sciences which currently see it as composed, at its most basic level, of particles interacting in space-time via a small number of fundamental forces. These forces and particles have, in the course of vast amounts of time, given rise to circumstances in which life, including conscious and human life, has emerged and developed via a purposeless algorithm (natural selection) that, at base, involves nothing more than the particles moving and reacting as prescribed by fundamental forces. Scientific materialism accordingly sees the cosmos as devoid of any meaning or value except that which conscious living creatures (most notably ourselves) create for it and sees the very tendency to create meaning or value as itself a result of the neutral algorithm which has produced us and our consciousnesses out of inert matter.3

This brief precis has, of course, left out almost all of the details of the materialistic science that scientific materialism purports to represent. This is because scientific materialism is not materialistic science but a statement on a meta-level about materialistic science. It says that, whatever the details of the current version of materialistic science are (and these will change as we come closer and closer to the complete truth, a ‘Theory of Everything’), materialistic science can, or will, give a complete description of the universe in the sense that everything, from love to lightning, muons to music, religion to racing cars and creation to consciousness, may ultimately be derived from nothing more than the interactions of particles in an indifferent, independent, meaningless universe. It does not claim that the social sciences or studies in the humanities or economic theory are invalid; nor does it claim that the most fruitful explanation for rush-hour traffic is to be found by looking at the quarks and leptons in the drivers and the cars. It does, however, claim that whatever the relevant level of explanation, it is hierarchically reducible to a next lower one, and so on, all the way down to the quarks. Meaning, value, beauty, consciousness, life—none of these require any more ‘ingredients’ for their making than basic particles interacting according to basic forces, and basic particles and basic forces are indifferent, value-free and in themselves meaningless.

These are very strong statements that are to be found nowhere in materialistic science. Materialistic science does not make these kinds of statements; instead it creates physical and/or mathematical models with which to explain and predict phenomena. These models are sometimes physical and visible—as with, say, the workings of the solar system; sometimes physical and invisible, as with the model of an electric current as the flow of electrons within conductors; sometimes they are neither, as with the mathematical models of quantum mechanics or in theories requiring fabrics of more than three dimensions. With these latter the ‘explanation’ side comes up a bit short perhaps—I cannot ‘picture’ what is happening—but at least the mathematical models provide a means for getting from certain initial conditions to certain verifiable results (including probabilistic results).

Materialistic science is, by definition, materialistic—that is, it explains and predicts phenomena on the basis of models ultimately composed of particles and physical forces. It makes no claim, however, to completeness. It does not claim that it does, will or can explain everything. It is, in fact, profoundly uninterested in hypotheses that are not testable by its methods. Is the universe in itself value-free? Does consciousness continue after death? Is the Bach Chaconne in itself beautiful? Does God exist? Science has no opinion on these matters because science is in the business of testing hypotheses empirically and none of the hypotheses just mentioned can be tested empirically.

Scientific materialism, on the other hand, is interested. It holds that God does not exist, that the universe is in itself value-free, that the Bach Chaconne is beautiful insofar as human beings find it so but no further and that consciousness does not continue after death. One could give an endless list of such questions in which science has no interest but to which scientific materialism provides strong answers.