More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Altruism is common among animals of all kinds, and cannot always be explained away as kin selection: numerous species are known to take life-threatening risks to rescue other animals, not even those of their own species.
The only reason we don’t acknowledge all this more readily is that we have been taught to think of nature as merely a blood-drenched battle, rather than a narrative in which co-operation and competition play important roles together. Humans are intuitively co-operative, as well as competitive. When we act intuitively we are most often gracious and generous – it is further reflection that makes us selfish and greedy.
These observations suggest that our understanding of prosociality should be revised to include the possibility that, in many cases, prosocial behavior – instead of requiring active control over our impulses – represents an impulse of its own.
found to his surprise that people’s default position is honesty, not deception; and that honesty is not a matter of exercising will-power but of being effortlessly disposed to behave honestly.
Cynicism, the negative belief that self-interest drives human behaviour, is associated with worse health outcomes, poorer psychological well-being and poorer economic well-being.83 According to a survey of several hundred thousand people, most people believe the stereotype that cynics are smarter.
Intelligence and education help detect and avoid deceit in the first place, contributing to a more positive view of human nature, and a greater inclination to trust.
This acknowledges the fact that every decision we make is not just a response to a known and certain world, but is part of co-creating that world for what it is.
It seems to me that we need a better approach, one that takes seriously enough the inner perspective of the doer, not just the externally observed deed; and the whole of the doer’s inner self, not just their attachment to principles or calculations.
Devoid of procedures that could ideally lead to the one correct answer, the left hemisphere is lost.
The price of certainty is absurdity; the prize of uncertainty is wisdom.
All preach personal humility, and all teach what the Buddhists call compassion and Jesus called love. I suggest that these two – personal humility and compassion (and particularly compassion) – are indeed the most fundamental notions or feelings that underpin all moral codes, of everyone, whether they deem themselves to be ‘religious’ or not. We could (and I believe should) add a third: the sense of reverence towards all life and towards the universe as a whole.
In the last chapter I supported the view that it is more rational, and better in keeping with science, to suppose that matter arose out of consciousness than consciousness out of matter, and that what we experience is the way in which the cosmos becomes not only aware of itself, but becomes
And he points out that ‘it was often the stimulus of non-practical motives, such as aesthetics, intellectual curiosity, magic and religion, pride and status, or entertainment’, that led to functional developments ‘that they would never have thought of in the ordinary work of daily life, or in relation to material needs.’
Marcus Aurelius said that ‘anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself, and asks nothing beyond itself’.
And, though it is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that is only half the story: the eye must also discover the beauty that it could never create.
For it seems that beauty alone, though it addresses itself to the soul like little else, is not enough to sustain the soul, which requires also goodness and truth.
The more we know the less we know; getting deeper our horizon becomes narrower. Art enriches man’s own spiritual capabilities, and he can then rise above himself
One of the reasons is that nowadays we ask science to answer questions it is not equipped to answer, and its answer to the question whether there is purpose in the world is a resounding ‘no’ – which is hardly surprising, since it excludes purpose from its considerations from the outset.
These three distinctions map, in the same order, onto each other: extrinsic, deterministic and narrowly focussed according to one view; intrinsic, free and attending to the broad Gestalt according to the other.
Here one sees the first and most obvious hemispheric distinction: that between a strategic purpose, as the left hemisphere sees it, designed to issue in utility; and purpose as the celebration of life, creativity, difference and uniqueness, as the right hemisphere takes it to be.
That Y is the effect of cause X does not make Y the purpose of the whole in which the cause and effect chain operate.
Everything that exists could be seen as an unfolding of the potential within being, and a re-enfolding of it again into a now enriched whole. At the local level there are only what look like extrinsic purposes. At a larger level one sees a picture that modifies the value and purpose of the detail.
‘The mechanistic view is applicable to some fragments which we artificially cut out from the world for practical purposes: it can be applied neither to the universe as a whole nor to the phenomenon of life.’
All creatures and their environment together are interdependent. Interdependence means not just interaction, but mutual constitution.
On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.
The teleological and the mechanical views of nature are not, necessarily, mutually exclusive.
I would love to build a bridge to Richard Dawkins and those of his mind here: would they be willing to consider a description of Nature as something that discovers what it is in the process of becoming what it is, and the point and purpose of which lies in itself: a free, exuberant creation, not a micro-controlled one? No algorithm, no programme, no robots: just an endless self-discovering act of creation?
Randomness is the limit case of order (one that is strictly speaking impossible fully to achieve); not order the limit case of randomness.
Creative self-organisation implies both a degree of constraint and a degree of freedom.
According to Noble, ‘so far as we know, the mutations occur randomly. But the location in the genome is certainly not random. The functionality in this case lies precisely in the targeting of the relevant part of the genome.’
The evolutionary process teems with dead ends, failures, half-baked projects, and circuitous routes; nature proceeds somewhat gropingly, often trying several roads before it finds the right one. But it is driven constantly by an inherent tendency, and to uncover this tendency would be to understand the life of the universe.
The existence of life, in the absence of purposiveness – in fact, in the absence of tendencies in the cosmos to overwhelmingly unlikely ends – takes improbability to a whole new level.
in order to attain the minimal complexity required for a biological system to get on the Darwin-Eigen spiral, a system of a far greater complexity appears to be required. How such a system could evolve, is a puzzle that defeats conventional evolutionary thinking, all of which is about biological systems moving along the spiral …
According to Koonin, despite adopting a model in which he ‘assumes a deliberately inflated rate of RNA production’, the probability that a coupled translation–replication emerges by chance in a single observable universe is < 10-1018 – that is, less than 1 in a number expressed as 1 followed by 1,018 zeros.34 Impossible to imagine; but to put it in context, the entire number of subatomic particles in the observable universe is estimated to be a mere 1086 – by comparison, so infinitesimally small as to be practically non-existent. Thus, effectively, if chance alone is allowed to operate, the
...more
obviously, in an infinite number of universes everything happens, not because of any purpose, but by exhausting all the possibilities.
First, there is no ‘destination’ to an infinite game, which does not thereby become pointless, but whose purpose lies, not in a heretofore describable end, but, precisely in the continued process itself, wherever it leads.
The system is open not closed: it must be flexible, not rigidly pre-planned. Creation is always like this, and life is one huge act of creation.
In Newtonian probability, the uncertainty lies in our knowledge; in quantum probability the uncertainty lies in the world we aim to know, and is an objective aspect of it.
Life is a dance – a celebration; and it has the nature of a gift. It is neither a mechanism to be exploited nor a problem to be solved.
If life, after disturbance from outside, had simply returned to the so-called homeostatic equilibrium, it would never have progressed beyond the amoeba which, after all, is the best adapted creature in the world – it has survived billions of years from the primaeval ocean to the present day.
In fact the art of life is first to be alive, secondly to be alive in a satisfactory way, and thirdly to acquire an increase in satisfaction.’
specifying the goal is vastly more likely to produce the desired result than specifying the individual actions to be taken to get to the shop.
Teleology in nature, then, is not just a matter of purposing solutions to local problems, but a tendency towards greater complexity and higher levels of awareness.
‘The universe is not to be narrowed down to the limits of the understanding, which has been men’s practice up to now, but the understanding must be stretched and enlarged to take in the image of the universe as it is discovered.’
The first gulp from the beaker of knowledge estranges us from God, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for him who seeks.
Any love, goodness and beauty we can bring come out of Nature and out of the cosmos in the first place: where else can they possibly come from?
In what follows I have of course no final answers to any of the big questions. But I believe we must not, under any circumstances, cease to be mindful of these questions, even while we know there can be no definite answers.
I am merely indicating that, whatever we choose to call it, there is almost certainly more here than we have words for, or can expect ever to understand using reason alone.
Nothing is less true than that we understand something only when we express it in language.
Things that can be understood only by direct experience can be spoken of only indirectly: and conversely what is talked about directly is usually experienced only indirectly, because in the process of articulation it has inevitably become a re-presentation – something other than what we experience.
