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We have two goals in front of us. One is to explain the story of our universe and why we think it’s true, the big picture as we currently understand it.
The other goal is to offer a bit of existential therapy. I want to argue that, though we are part of a universe that runs according
to impersonal underlying laws, we nevertheless matter.
it’s not the only way of thinking about what we are.
We are collections of atoms, operating independently of any immaterial spirits or influences, and we are thinking and feeling people who bring meaning into existence by the way we live our lives.
poetic naturalism.
“Poetic” reminds us that there is more than one way of talking about the world.
our best approach to describing the universe is not a single, unified story but an interconnected series of models appropriate at different levels. Each model has a domain in which it is applicable, and the ideas that appear as essential parts of each story have every right to be thought of as “real.”
the triumph of the Core Theory, the enormously successful model of the particles and forces that
Poetic naturalism strikes a middle ground, accepting that values are human constructs, but denying that they are therefore illusory or meaningless.
As we understand the world better, the idea that it has a transcendent purpose seems increasingly untenable. The old picture has been replaced by a wondrous new one—one that is breathtaking and exhilarating in many ways, challenging and vexing in others.
the ground has disappeared beneath us, and we are just beginning to work up the courage to look down.
The broader ontology typically associated with atheism is naturalism—
We will ultimately understand the world as a single, unified reality,
Naturalism presents a hugely grandiose claim, and we have every right to be skeptical. When we look into the eyes of another person, it doesn’t seem like what we’re seeing is simply a collection of atoms, some sort of immensely complicated chemical reaction.
Naturalism isn’t an obvious, default way to think about the world. The case in its favor has built up gradually over the years, a consequence of our relentless quest to improve our understanding of how things work at a deep level, but there is still work to be done. We don’t know how the universe began, or if it’s the only universe. We don’t know the ultimate, complete laws of physics. We don’t know how life began, or how consciousness arose.
The naturalist needs to make the case that, even without actually having these answers yet, their worldview is still by far the most likely framework in which we will eventually find them.
Should categories like “persons” and “ships” be part of our fundamental ontology at all?
the notion of a ship is a derived category in our ontology, not a fundamental one. It is a useful way of talking about certain subsets of the basic stuff of the universe. We invent the concept of a ship because it is useful to us, not because it’s already there at the deepest level of reality.
eliminativism,
our fundamental ontology, the best way we have of talking about the world at the deepest level, is extremely sparse. But many concepts that are part of non-fundamental ways we have of talking about the world—useful ideas describing higher-level, macroscopic reality—deserve to be called “real.”
we refer to such non-useful ways as “wrong” or “false.”
The strategy I’m advocating here can be called poetic naturalism. The poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” The world is what exists and what happens, but we gain enormous insight by talking about it—telling its story—in different ways.
There are many ways of talking about the world. 2. All good ways of talking must be consistent with one another and with the world.
Our purposes in the moment determine the best way of talking.
Within poetic naturalism we can distinguish among three different kinds of stories we can tell about the world. There is the deepest, most fundamental description we can imagine—the whole universe, exactly described in every microscopic detail. Modern science doesn’t know what that description actually is right now, but we presume that there at least is such an underlying reality. Then there are “emergent” or “effective” descriptions, valid within some limited domain. That’s where we talk about ships and people, macroscopic collections of stuff that we group into individual entities as part of
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The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. The world exists; beauty and goodness are things that we bring to it.
some of the ideas that helped set humanity on the road to naturalism.
Physics is, by far, the simplest science. It doesn’t seem that way, because we know so much about it, and the required knowledge often seems esoteric and technical. But it is blessed by this amazing feature: we can very often make ludicrous simplifications—frictionless surfaces, perfectly spherical bodies—ignoring all manner of ancillary effects, and nevertheless get results that are unreasonably good. For most interesting problems in other sciences, from biology to psychology to economics, if you modeled one tiny aspect of a system while pretending all the others didn’t exist, you would just
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conservation of momentum. It might not sound like a principle of such dramatic import, but momentum is at the very heart of a shift in how we view the world, from an ancient cosmos of causes and purposes to a modern one of patterns and laws.
The four kinds were material cause, the stuff of which an object is made; formal cause, the essential property that makes an object what it is; efficient cause, the thing that brings the object about (closest to our informal notion of “cause”); and final cause, the purpose for which an object exists.
For Aristotle, physics was a story of natures and causes.
The universe doesn’t need a push; it can just keep going.
Pierre-Simon Laplace,
“I had no need of that hypothesis.”
Laplace was one of the first thinkers to truly understand classical (Newtonian) mechanics, deep in his bones—better than Newton himself.
Newtonian gravity could be thought of as a field theory,
He realized that there was a simple answer to the question “What determines what will happen next?” And the answer is “The state of the universe right now.”
When we talk about simple Newtonian systems, like the planets moving through the solar system, determinism is part of the picture. When we talk about enormously more complex things like people, there’s no way for us to have enough information to make ironclad predictions. Our best theories of people, presented on their own terms and without reference to underlying particles and forces, leave plenty of room for human choice.
The universe is resolutely focused on the current moment; it marches forward, instant to instant, under the grip of unbreakable physical laws, with no heed paid to its glorious accomplishments or to its hopeful prospects.
Laplace’s Demon.
By the “state” of the universe, or any subsystem thereof, we mean the position and the velocity of every particle within it.
can use the laws of physics to integrate forward (or backward) and get the state of the universe at any other time.
conservation of information implies that each moment contains precisely the right amount of information to determine every other moment.
To simulate the entire universe with good accuracy, you basically have to be the universe.
Chaos theory says that slightly imperfect information leads to very imperfect prediction.
There is one way of talking about the universe that describes it as elementary particles or quantum states, in which Laplace holds sway and what happens next depends only on the state of the system right now. There is also another way of talking about it, where we zoom out a bit and introduce categories like “people” and “choices.” Unlike our best theory of planets or pendulums, our best theories of
human behavior are not deterministic.
abduction, or “inference to the best explanation.”
The “reasons” and “causes” why things happen, in other words, aren’t fundamental; they are emergent.
