| Friday, January 6, 2006 |  |
| Dangerous Ideas? |
 Edge asks the Annual Question to a bunch of smart people. Last year they asked "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" Here is what I wrote about that. A great question. But, in short, it was a bit surprising how narrow-minded a lot of the answers were. This year the question is "What is your dangerous idea?" An equally great question, trying to inspire people to give their outside-the-box thinking, their most potent ideas that might change everything. At least that's how I would like to define "dangerous" in this context. Something that can upset the status quo catastrophically, but in a good and interesting way. Not all of them use it like that.
A lot of the answers are interesting in various ways. But most of them are not very dangerous. They stay within very safe territory for scientists. And, actually, the underlying subtext is the same as last year for a lot of them. It is obvious that for a lot of these guys THE most dangerous ideas in the world are Religion, God and Consciousness. Meaning, they bend over backwards to insist that it is insane to believe in a God, and that it is a hopeless fantasy to imagine that you actually exist, as anything other than some chemical processes in a brain. And that what we really ought to accept, if we thought it through properly, is that everything is the result of unconscious evolutionary processes, we have no free will, and life is without meaning. Great. There's a certain kind of circular reasoning that many materialist scientists suffer from, which is similar to religious reasoning like "God exists because the Bible says so, and the Bible is true because God wrote it." But here you find it in versions like John Horgan mentions in connection with his idea "We Have No Souls": "In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, the late, great Francis Crick argued that the soul is an illusion perpetuated, like Tinkerbell, only by our belief in it."You know, like, "You don't really exist, you just think you do!". To some people that sounds really clever, and there's no Logic 101 that will make apparent the craziness of such argumentation. Who's the "we" who have beliefs? Who's the agency that wonders whether it exists or not? Who is it that is unsure whether it has free will or not? It is just an illusion? Just a chemical reaction in a brain? Who's concluding that? Is it just turtles all the way down? There are, however, some nice entries from people who don't just fall into the same circular reasoning trap. Like, Rudy Rucker, with the idea "Mind is a universally distributed quality" Panpsychism. Each object has a mind. Stars, hills, chairs, rocks, scraps of paper, flakes of skin, molecules — each of them possesses the same inner glow as a human, each of them has singular inner experiences and sensations.There are some folks who actually can engage in a bit of self-criticism as scientists, and think about where scientific beliefs really come from. Like Marcelo Gleiser in "Can Science Explain Itself?": What if this is all bogus? What if we look at science as a narrative, a description of the world that has limitations based on its structure? The constants of Nature are the letters of the alphabet, the laws are the grammar rules and we build these descriptions through the guiding hand of the so-called scientific method. Period. To say things are this way because otherwise we wouldn't be here to ask the question is to miss the point altogether: things are this way because this is the story we humans tell based on the way we see the world and explain it.Or, Thomas Metzinger, in "The Forbidden Fruit Intuition": Is there a set of questions which are dangerous not on grounds of ideology or political correctness, but because the most obvious answers to them could ultimately make our conscious self-models disintegrate? Can one really believe in determinism without going insane?Some present the revolutionary idea that scientists might just need to actually catch up to what science already has established, like "Carlo Rovelli" in "What the physics of the 20th century says about the world might in fact be true". You know, if quantum mechanics actually were how we experienced the world to work, rather than just some bizarre math equations. Stephen Kosslyn goes the furthest in "A Science of the Divine", to present a way to reconcile science and religion: Here's an idea that many academics may find unsettling and dangerous: God exists. And here's another idea that many religious people may find unsettling and dangerous: God is not supernatural, but rather part of the natural order. Simply stating these ideas in the same breath invites them to scrape against each other, and sparks begin to fly. To avoid such conflict, Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that we should separate religion and science, treating them as distinct "magisteria." But science leads many of us to try to understand all that we encounter with a single, grand and glorious overarching framework. In this spirit, let me try to suggest one way in which the idea of a "supreme being" can fit into a scientific worldview.There's a surprising entry from Michael Nesmith, you know, from "The Monkees", who eloquently argues that "Existence is Non-Time, Non-Sequential, and Non-Objective", and I think I agree. Several people talk along the lines of Andy Clark's "The quick-thinking zombies inside us" about how most of our decision making, our "free will", really happens at a sub-conscious level, in ways we don't at all understand, so we fool ourselves concerning how much in control we are. Several people argue for free market economies. Get governments out of the way, and let the invisible hand of the free market sort things out. Which is an underlying theme here. Humans having figured out that there are complex mechanisms that make things happen. Complex mechanisms that make our decisions. Complex mechanisms that carry on the evolution of life. Complex mechanisms that make economies work. More complex than we simple humans easily can understand. More smart and efficient than any of us consciously can be. But at the same time we here have a number of well-respected big names in science who claim that they've understood all of that well enough to conclude decisively that these complex mechanisms that are smarter than us aren't intelligent at all. They're just simple random processes with no meaning or purpose or intelligence, that came together completely randomly for no good reason. Confused? Well, you should be. You need to become good at circular reasoning to explain that away. The real dangerous idea, which most people with scientific credentials apparently are afraid of thinking, is, in my words: Life the universe and everything is all one system, which is self-organizing, intelligent and eternal. There's no outside to it. Nothing is separate from it. Whatever happens inside of it happens because it is in its nature to happen. It has no outside meaning, but it can create meaning. Its latent qualities might or might not get expressed, but when they do, it is because they're there. So, if something finds itself having self-reflective consciousness, it is because the whole system possesses the potential quality of self-reflective consciousness. Duh. If oxygen and hydrogen mix and become water, that's because they already had the property of being able to do so. If something evolves, it is because the system knows how to evolve. If something is alive, it is because the system is alive. If somewhere in the system time and space exists, and at some "time" a scientist evolves and he decides that he has understood it all and it is all really dumb and random and meaningless and consciousness only exists in brains, except for that it doesn't really exist, well, he's right, makes no difference. It is all natural. Luckily it isn't that scientist, or some guy with a grey beard on a mountain, who's responsible for keeping the whole system working, or it really wouldn't last long. The whole system is much smarter than any brain that comes along at some point and has a short-lived fit of self-importance. Doesn't matter what you call it. You can call it God, or Universe, or Physics, or Nature, Evolution or Mind or Consciousness. It is you, buddy! If you think not, you've become a bit confused by derivatives of your own abstract thoughts. Take a step back and touch Reality. Be conscious. Be very conscious! But don't get cocky. That little point of self-reflective awareness that you identify with, and which is enough to spin yourself into circles, is way, way, way smaller and more ephemeral than the big you who is all of existence, all of evolving spacetime, any dimension, any physical phenomenon, any potential phenomenon, all simultaneously, all forever. It is a lot smarter at running things than your little localized conscious focal point. You're not in control. But if you catch a ride on natural law, and go with the flows, you can go far, very quickly. Because the system works really well. It is self-regenerating. It is open source. Well, that was my rant. But that maybe doesn't give you anything very practical to do with it. A truly dangerous worldchanging idea would be a meme you let loose, and it just breaks down the old fixed structures, and it guides the self-organization of something new and better. They don't come along all that often, but when they do, it doesn't really matter much what you think about it, as it pretty much happens by itself. It might be time for some ideas that actually change how we perceive ourselves and the world, where nothing will be the same again. Lots of people have commented on the Edge dangerous ideas thing. Like, I just noticed Dave Pollard's Blinded by Science. He wasn't very impressed either with the dangerousness of those ideas, and he has some alternative suggestions. [ Knowledge | 2006-01-06 00:49 | 12 comments | PermaLink ] More > |