Paul Davies: Are We Alone?

• The Adaptive Gap and the Future of Civilization by Mike Hall, 7/3/98
  • Flexibility and Adaptive Gaps by John Fentress, 9/23/98
    
    

Thanks, John. Here's an extract from an email I sent Jim following his summary of Complexity Theory. Colloquors please forgive me if (a) this is all old hat to you and (b) it's rubbish - despite my years as a psychiatrist, all this is still fairly new to me. I'd really welcome some feedback. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The email was for me timely because I was then reading a little book by the physicist Paul Davies, "Are We Alone?: Implications of the discovery of extraterrestrial life", Penguin Books, 1995, ISBN 0-14-024585-5.

In a nutshell, he puts forward an argument that, far from the origin of life being an almost infinitely unlikely event that may have occurred only once (i.e. on Earth), it is, he believes, a very likely, even inevitable result of the inherent property of matter to form increasingly complex organisational wholes.

He gives a popular account of the physical principles which, according to him, make it likely, furthermore, that -intelligent- life exists elsewhere in the universe.

He gives very nice simple illustrations of the concept of emergent phenomena, starting with "the often cited ... wetness of water". "We all agree that water is wet. It has a certain quality that we recognize, and it's a real quality, not something we just imagine. But it's not a quality which we would attach to an individual molecule of water: a single water molecule can't be said to be wet in any sense. However, a large collection of such molecules does have the quality of wetness." (P 64/65, paperback). I.e. it's an emergent phenomenon.

Another example - "(i)s the so-called arrow of time problem ... (A)t the level of individual atoms and molecules there is no sense of past and future. The laws of physics... seem to be symmetric as far as past and future is (sic) concerned... (I)ndividual molecules ... can't tell which way time is going."

Imagine a bottle of perfume (he continues). He opens it in a room, soon you smell the perfume. It diffuses as a result of collisions of air & perfume molecules, a process said to be irreversible, to have an arrow of time attached to it. "You'd have to wait an awfully long time", even if you could seal off the room to trap all the molecules, to wait til all the random motions got all the molecules back inside the bottle. "So the evaporation of perfume is something that has a definite arrow of time - it is practically irreversible. But any individual perfume molecule just gets knocked this way and that at random and has no temporal directionality. It's only when you look at the way the whole assemblage of molecules behaves that the arrow emerges. Thus the arrow of time is an emergent phenomenon."

His "third example is life itself. I like to suppose that I am a living organism. I'm quite sure it's meaningful to say that somebody is alive as opposed to being not alive or inanimate (like a rock). Yet no atom of my body is living. If we consider, say, a carbon atom in my toe, that atom can't be described as a 'living' carbon atom. It doesn't have some sort of quality called 'life' infused into it. It's no different from a carbon atom anywhere else ... So what counts is not what I'm made of but how I'm put together. ... (This) real quality of 'being alive' emerges only when matter reaches a certain level of complexity".

He then proceeds to discuss 'the self-organizing universe'.

... ...

In other writing, Davies has been much exercised by what he also discusses here, namely, for example, why did a creature developing in the jungle or savannah &c come to get a brain that could (eventually) do advanced mathematics, create complex music, or develop rich language structures. He asks when these abilities were selected for. The orthodox position would be that they were selected for long ago, but in fact they have lain dormant "until recently".

"Yet if these functions were not explicitly manifested at the time they were selected, why were they selected? How can natural selection operate on a hidden ability? Attempts to explain this by supposing that, say, mathematical ability simply piggy-backs on a more obviously useful trait are unconvincing in my view." (He doesn't elaborate on why but refers the reader to his "The Mind of God".)

He refers to the Australian Aborigines, isolated for 40,000 years until Europeans arrived. Today they are indistinguishable in the above-mentioned abilities from Europeans, including, "when educated, in their mathematical ability too". "(E)ither the 'maths' gene & others were selected for more than 40,000 years ago, and have remained hidden and 'unexpressed' for countless generations, or ... these higher abilities have developed in parallel with the rest of humanity as a bizarre form of biological convergence with no apparent use. Either way, there is a mystery as far as orthodox Darwinism is concerned."

Davies then states: "(I)f we do detect the presence of an alien intelligence (elsewhere in the universe), it would certainly undermine the spirit, if not the letter. of orthodox Darwinism, for it would suggest that there is a progressive evolutionary trend outside the mechanism of natural selection." (P 58)

(The book has 100 pages.)

Towards the end he is writing: "(C)onsciousness, far from being a trivial accident, is a fundamental feature of the universe, a natural product of the outworking of the laws of nature to which they are connected in a deep and still mysterious way. ... I don't mean that Homo sapiens is written into the laws of nature. The world hasn't been created for our benefit; we're not at the centre of creation. We are not the most significant thing. But that's not to say that we are totally insignificant either. One of the depressing things about the last 300 years of science is the way it has tended to marginalize, even trivialize, human beings and thus alienate them from the universe in which they live. I think we do have a place in the universe - not a central place but a significant place nevertheless." (P 84/85)

He quotes Freeman Dyson: "I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming".

"(T)he search for (intelligent) alien beings can therefore be seen as a test of the world view that we live in a universe that is progressive, not only in the way that life & consciousness emerge from primeval chaos, but also in the way that mind plays a fundamental role." Discovery of extraterrestrial life would (Davies believes) restore to human beings something of the dignity of which science has robbed them. "(T)he certain existence of alien beings would give us cause to believe that we, in our humble way, are part of a larger, majestic process of cosmic self-knowledge."

[End Quote.] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jim, I long to know what Dawkins would make of that! I know it's outside the frame of reference of your posting, but it seemed relevant. Forgive me if you've already read the book!

I admire greatly the writings of Dawkins (I should read more Gould than I have), but I've never seen anything by him on how he thinks ordinary people might find meaning for their lives if they're to think of themselves only as carriers for selfish genes. I think the view he popularizes may be right, but if so it's just what Davies is talking about in his reference to alienation from the universe we live in.

Mind you, even Davies here doesn't give us humans much hope. If you read a book like "The Mind of God", it turns out that the "god" he's talking about is not much more than the laws of physics - eternal, universal, uncreated(?). Doesn't remove the pitiless indifference ...!

I'm going to stop there because I'm in danger of writing the sort of rubbish that's all too easy when - as here now in the UK - it's late at night after a hard day's work trying to help others not to think it!

• Alien Math by John Fentress, 9/27/98
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