John O. Campbell
This is an excerpt from an upcoming book: The Knowing Universe.
Religious belief is a defining characteristic of our species
and the cultures that we have formed, including those at the hunter-gatherer
level (1) . Anthropologists
generally understand that the existence of these kinds of universal characteristics
imply that they are grounded in the human genome. The evolutionary history of
these genetically based characteristics is studied by evolutionary
psychologists. As some leading biological
anthropologists have noted (2) :
Recent studies of the evolution of
religion have revealed the cognitive underpinnings of belief in supernatural
agents, the role of ritual in promoting cooperation, and the contribution of
morally punishing high gods to the growth and stabilization of human society.
The universality of religion across human society points to a deep evolutionary
past.
In other words, the underpinnings of religion have evolved
through the process of natural selection for at least hundreds of thousands of
years. We must ask, ‘did natural selection get this right, is the religious
perspective useful in the sense of conferring greater fitness?’ After all fitness
is the only ‘goal’ of a Darwinian process. The quote above notes a couple of avenues
of research pursued by anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists suggesting
indirect forms of fitness that religion may confer such as promoting cultural
cooperation and the enforcement of moral stability.
However, these may only be by-products of religious belief,
what about the content of religious beliefs, our predisposition to believe in
supernatural agents? Did natural selection get that right or does our
predisposition for religion only confer fitness through indirect means?
It is tempting, in this scientific age, to dismiss belief in
supernatural agents as clearly mistaken and incapable of providing fitness. In fact,
science is based upon naturalism, the belief that only natural processes take
place in the universe (3) . In this view ‘supernatural’
is an oxymoron as everything is part of nature and nothing is outside of it.
But, before dismissing the existence of supernatural agents out
of hand we might consider that natural selection very rarely gets things wrong:
it is a powerful method of inference (4; 5) which almost always
gets things right. As Daniel Dennett wrote (6) :
Getting
it right, not making mistakes, has been of paramount importance to every living
thing on this planet for more than three billion years, and so these organisms
have evolved thousands of different ways of finding out about the world they
live in
How can this conundrum be solved, how can belief in
supernatural agents be consistent with our scientific understanding? The
solution suggested here is that natural selection has provided us with the
propensity to believe not only in supernatural agents but also in natural
agents. Supernatural agents are an oxymoron in the sense that if one were
discovered it would then be part of nature so instead, we can think in terms of
natural agents or agents who operate within the laws of nature.
In any case, our natural propensity towards belief in powerful
agents acting in the world is woefully lacking in specifics and we have little
easily available evidence as to these agents’ identities. Cultures have
imagined a huge variety of specific agents including ghosts, witches, spirits
and Gods but given a lack of evidence that could select among the
possibilities, our imaginations are free to roam. Clearly our intuitions about
agents in control of the universe do not rule out natural agents. As we will
see, what evidence we do have concerning agents operating in the world is
evidence of natural rather than supernatural agents.
In a religious context then, the agents which created and
run this universe may be natural agents. This approach to religion has already
been developed by philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza (1622 to 1677) and
scientist such as Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) who considered that God is
equivalent to nature as it is understood by science. According to Spinoza’s
biographer, this equivalency was the primary point of his philosophy (7) :
Above
all Spinoza’s God is numerically identical with nature. God is nature.
Einstein confirmed Spinoza’s vision (8) :
I
believe in Spinoza's God who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of what
exists,
Einstein’s awesome scientific insights told him that science
provided our best route to knowing God. In fact, he thought the very purpose of
science is to provide us with what he called cosmic religiosity (9) :
The
most beautiful thing we can experience is the Mysterious — the knowledge of the
existence of something unfathomable to us, the manifestation of the most
profound reason coupled with the most brilliant beauty… This is the basics of
cosmic religiosity, and it appears to me that the most important function of
art and science is to awaken this feeling among the receptive and keep it
alive.
Beliefs about God in the tradition of Spinoza and Einstein, that
science can reveal God in a form equivalent to nature, is quite common among
leading scientists. As Stephen Hawking put it (10) :
If we do discover a theory of everything...it would be
the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would truly know the mind of God.
Unfortunately, neither Einstein’s nor Hawking’s genius was able
to describe the specifics of scientific religiosity. Einstein was hampered by
the scientific concepts of his time that were in terms of clockwork mechanistic
metaphors sometimes called the Newtonian paradigm. Einstein played a major role
in the revolution which would sweep away Newton’s paradigm, but he was in the
final years of his life before a key component of that revolution was
contributed by Claude Shannon (1916 - 2001) in the form of information theory (11) .
Information theory is just a perspective on the mathematics
of probability theory. It focuses on a function of a probability -log2(p),
where p is a probability and names this function ‘information’. Information is
the surprise which an agent experiences when it assigns the probability p to
some possible outcome and then discovers that outcome has actually occurred. If
the agent had previously assigned a high probability to the actual outcome then
there is little surprise, if it assigned a small probability then it is greatly
surprised. The surprise has units of bits of information.
For instance, if the agent
initially assigned the probability 1/8 or 2-3, to what turned out to
be the actual outcome, then the surprise or information experienced by the
agent is 3 bits. Crucially the very concept of information presupposes an agent,
mind or model which assigns a probability to something occurring in the world
around it and then is surprised when it receives evidence of the actual
outcome.
Shannon’s information theory raises the sceptre of agents inhabiting
the world wherever information is found. The original use of Shannon’s theory was
to describe electronic communication systems operated by human agents, but his
theory applies equally well to any agent that can assign a probability or anticipate
the likelihood of an outcome. For example, biological organisms are adapted to
or anticipate a specific environment; fish expect to find themselves in water. Extreme
surprise for an organism is, in this case, death. Many prominent biologists now
view the core processes of biology in terms of information and information
processing (12) .
In general, since Einstein’s day human culture and the human
conception of the world have undergone an ‘information revolution’ which has
replaced the Newtonian paradigm involving clockwork industrial mechanisms with the
concepts of information and information processing. The information revolution
has transformed most cultural processes and is often thought of in terms of
computation.
Critically, the new information metaphor has been adopted
and championed by nearly every branch of scientific study. It has been found
that practically all the domains of reality studied by science are readily
described in terms of information theory. Quantum theory, at the basis of all
physics[1],
is described in terms of quantum information and quantum information
processing. Genetic information is a central concept in biology. Neural based
behaviour is understood in terms of brains which gather, process and act on
information. And finally, human culture is understood to have emerged into an
‘Information Age’ (13) .
In short, information is now a key component of all
scientific understanding and some physicists understand information to be even more
fundamental to our understanding of the universe than are physical entities
such as mass or energy (14) . This is a radical revolution in our conception
of the universe and our place in it, one that holds radical spiritual implications.
I have written extensively about these implications and have suggested they be named
‘Einstein’s Enlightenment’ (15) .
The information revolution allows us to scientifically
consider that all of reality is inhabited by agents having their own expectations
and agendas. In this view natural selection has been exonerated; the agents it
has placed in our intuitions actually exist and it provides fitness by preparing
us to understand reality on a new, deeper level.
On a religious level these scientific advances may allow us
to better glimpse the mind of God. At a stroke we are taken from a state of
great ignorance as to the specifics of religious agents, such as supernatural Gods,
to a state of relative knowledge backed by hard scientific evidence. Thus, the
religious enterprise becomes evolutionary; as our scientific knowledge expands,
we may glimpse deeper into the mind of God.
This book will not focus on these important religious
implications but will leave it to the reader to come to their own conclusion on
that count. Here we will instead focus on the unifying role which the information revolution plays in portraying all areas of science in terms of a common metaphor.
I suggest a slightly different central metaphor than information
as information may only exist within an ecosystem of associated concepts and processes
such as probabilistic models and Bayesian inference, which we will explore
later. Instead I will suggest the central metaphor of knowledge as knowledge is
the output of information processing and as I will argue, the foundation of
existence.
This book will develop the argument that knowledge is necessary
for existence of any sort; that the laws of nature are extremely hostile to
existence and existing forms must develop knowledge of autopoietic (self-creating
and self-maintaining) strategies in order to overcome these challenges and to evolve
new existing forms. This view may go some way in providing an answer to the obvious
question ‘Why does science find information and information processing to be
fundamental to all existing entities?’ The short answer it suggests is that
information and information processing accumulate knowledge and knowledge is
essential to all forms of existence.
Chapter 1 will review scientific understanding of the dynamic
relationship between existence and knowledge. Chapter 2 will discuss the general
nature of the autopoietic knowledge required to overcome the many challenges
posed to existence. Chapter 3 will discuss how this general strategy to achieve
existence has played out in the creation and evolution of each of the domains
composing reality.
Obviously, this paradigm has deep spiritual implications
which I attempted to survey in my earlier book Einstein’s Enlightenment (15) :
- Knowledge is the creator and sustainer of all things;
- There is but one universal source of
knowledge;
- Humans were created by this universal source
and are the most advanced form of knowledge yet found in the universe.
References
1. Hunter-Gatherers and
the Origins of Religion. Peoples, Hervey C., Duda, Pavel and Marlowe,
Frank W. 3, Hawthorne, New York : Human Nature, Vols. 27,3.
doi:10.1007/s12110-016-9260-0.
2. Temporal Naturalism. Smolin, Lee. s.l. :
http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.8539, 2013, Preprint.
3. Universal Darwinism as a process of Bayesian
inference. Campbell, John O. s.l. : Front. Syst. Neurosci.,
2016, System Neuroscience. doi: 10.3389/fnsys.2016.00049.
4. Simple unity among the fundamental equations of
science. Frank, Steven A. s.l. : arXiv preprint, 2019.
5. Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea. New
York : Touchstone Publishing, 1995.
6. Nadler, Steven. Einstein's God - Prof Nadler
on Spinoza, pt 1. YouTube, 2007.
7. Einstein, Albert. telegram response to New York
rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein. New York : s.n., 1924.
8. —. An Ideal of Service to Our Fellow Man. NPR radio
'This I believe'.
9. Hawking, Stephen. A brief history of time:
from the big bang to black holes. s.l. : Bantam Dell Publishing
Group, 1988. 978-0-553-10953-5.
10. A mathematical theory of communications. Shannon,
Claude. 1948, Bell System Technical Journal.
11. Theoretical bilogy in the third millenium. Brenner,
Sydney. 1999, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
12. Wikipedia. Information Age. Wikipedia. [Online]
[Cited: May 2, 2019.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Age.
13. Information in the holographic universe. Bekenstein,
Jacob. August 2003, Scientific American.
14. Campbell, John O. Einstein's Enlightenment. s.l. :
Createspace, 2017. ASIN: B06XNZDGCS.
[1]
The three forces of nature
composing the standard model of particle physics are quantum forces and the
fourth force found in nature, gravity, is probably emergent from quantum
entanglement(189).
