Hospitable Universe

Rodolfo Gambini

Description

This book argues that new developments in the sciences, in particular twentieth-century physics and twenty-first-century biology, suggest revising several pessimistic outlooks for the development of a scientific understanding of the relationship of humans with the universe - in particular, implications for the development of a natural religiousness. In the new vision a universe which is friendly to life and consciousness naturally emerges.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy of science

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 25 avril 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845409760
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Hospitable Universe
Addressing Ethical and Spiritual Concerns in Light of Recent Scientific Discoveries
By Rodolfo Gambini
with the collaboration of Jorge Pullin




2018 digital version converted and published by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © Rodolfo Gambini and Jorge Pullin, 2018
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK



Preface
The advances in the natural sciences of the last century have reconfigured our vision of the world. Of particular importance were the changes produced in 20th century physics: special and general relativity and quantum mechanics and more recently cosmology on one hand and biology, in particular the recent developments in genetics - in particular genomics - on the other.
This book attends to a growing need to reexamine various pessimist outlooks resulting from outdated ways of understanding the world. In particular, forms of nihilism that arose as criticisms of the traditional beliefs based on the discoveries of the natural sciences, mainly physics and biology of the 18th and 19th century in light of the mentioned recent advances.
The approach we choose is the following: we first present an introduction to the developments in physics. This introduction is essential if one intends to understand in detail the concepts that serve as a basis for the ontology elaborated in the text. The latter is based in an analysis of the basic objects of the quantum formalism. As is well known, quantum mechanics does not offer at the moment univocal answers to many questions of metaphysical character. Due to this we will choose a series of interpretations of quantum mechanics that admit an ontology of events and states that appears particularly suited to reshape the traditional philosophical systems based on classical physics.
In the second part we lay the basis of the quantum ontology and we observe that it leads to a renewed vision of the notion of emergence in complex systems and of top-down causation of the wholes on its constituent parts. The core of the third part of the book consists in extracting certain consequences of developments in biology and cosmology that highlight the centrality of life and the existence of a cosmos more hospitable to life than previously thought. In the fourth part we focus on the development of a new form of natural religiousness.
The general spirit of the presentation is to lay out the problems from a vision where the scientific takes precedence over the philosophical. But also admitting that some form of philosophical reflection is key if one wishes to recover a unified vision of the world where human beings are part of a bigger unity and manifest in exceptional ways characteristics that are already present in the rest of the Universe.
Our intention is to foster a dialogue and to introduce the topics so expert philosophers could eventually propose more rigorous treatments or alternative approaches. The book is self-contained in that it introduces the basic physical notions required for the discussion. Since some of the issues in question are rather sophisticated, it requires a little bit of detail in the description of the physics, in particular the use of some elementary equations.
Montevideo, March 25th 2017



Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Fundamental Questions Institute (FQXi), Agencia Nacional de Investigación e Innovación (ANII), Programa de Desarrollo de las Ciencias Basicas (PEDECIBA), the Hearne Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Center for Computation and Technology at the Louisiana State University.



1 Introduction
“The breeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: there is nothing to be proud of. Yes there is: this sun, this sea my heart leaping with youth the salt taste of my body and the vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow” Albert Camus in ‘Nuptials at Tipasa’.
We have all shared feelings of this kind towards nature and the Universe. We travel thousands of miles to visit places where these experiences are more powerful. They are not restricted to a particular kind of sensitivity, of the religious person, the scientist or the artist. They leave powerfully rooted memories in our spirit and they flame our love for life. According to our sensitivity, we will be more impacted by a sunny day or contemplating the starry sky in a summer night.
The meaning of these experiences changes from person to person. Camus was an existentialist, and he shared with them the belief in the “death of God” and of the human experience in a meaningless world. He recognized the intensity of his experiences without attributing them any further meaning that the one that arose in the moment, without preconceiving or conceptualizing it. These kinds of feelings are accessible to all men, but their interpretation depends on our upbringing and our natural tendencies and they lead us to react in different ways. In scientists like Carl Sagan, they left a feeling of admiration for the Universe that manifests repeatedly in their work. People like him are religious men exalted by a religion without God, motivated by the love of nature. Others react by interpreting those experiences like the works of a God responsible for the Creation. In his article “Wonder and Skepticism” (1995), Sagan describes how that intense admiration for the night sky led him to science. He remarks that there does not exist science without such admiration, but at the same time he recognizes that there is no scientific quest without skepticism: “I was a child in a time of hope. I grew up when the expectations for science were very high: in the thirties and forties. I went to college in the early fifties, got my Ph.D. in 1960. There was a sense of optimism about science and the future. ... there was one aspect of that environment that, for some reason, struck me as different, and that was the stars. So I asked my friends what they were. They said, ‘They’re lights in the sky, kid.’ [But] What were they? [Finally] My mother said to me, ‘Look, we’ve just got you a library card..., get out a book and find the answer.’ ... The answer was that the Sun was a star, except very far away. The stars were suns; if you were close to them, they would look just like our sun. I tried to imagine how far away from the Sun you’d have to be for it to be as dim as a star. Of course I didn’t know the inverse square law of light propagation; I hadn’t a ghost of a chance of figuring it out. But it was clear to me that you’d have to be very far away. Farther away, probably, than New Jersey. The dazzling idea of a universe vast beyond imagining swept over me. It has stayed with me ever since. I sensed awe. And later on (it took me several years to find this), I realized that we were on a planet - a little, non-self-luminous world going around our star. And so all those other stars might have planets going around them. If planets, then life, intelligence, other Brooklyns. - who knew? The diversity of those possible worlds struck me ... [Some years later I discovered that it was possible to become a professional scientist, that] you could spend all your time learning about the universe. It was a glorious day. [But soon I discovered that] Science involves a seemingly self-contradictory mix of attitudes: On the one hand it requires an almost complete openness to all ideas, no matter how bizarre and weird they sound, a propensity to wonder. As I walk along, my time slows down; I shrink in the direction of motion, and I get more massive. That’s crazy! On the scale of the very small, the molecule can be in this position, in that position, but it is prohibited from being in any intermediate position. That’s wild! But the first is a statement of special relativity, and the second is a consequence of quantum mechanics. Like it or not, that’s the way the world is. If you insist that it’s ridiculous, you will be forever closed to the major findings of science. But at the same time, science requires the most vigorous and uncompromising skepticism, because the vast majority of ideas are simply wrong, and the only way you can distinguish the right from the wrong, the wheat from the chaff, is by critical experiment and analysis. Too much openness and you accept every notion, idea, and hypothesis - which is tantamount to knowing nothing. Too much skepticism - especially rejection of new ideas before they are adequately tested - and you’re not only unpleasantly grumpy, but also closed to the advance of science. A judicious mix is what we need.”
The religious person, or at least the theist, feels the same admiration as the scientist and in the same sense mistrusts it, not in order to moderate it with a certain dose of skepticism, but to go beyond it as a distraction in the admiration of God. A well known passage in St. Augustine’s Confessions (Burke 2012) says: “Too late loved I You, O You Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late I loved you! And behold, You were within, and I abroad, and there I searched for you; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which You had made. You were with me, but I was not with You. Things held me far from You, which, unless they were in You, were not at all. You called, and shouted, and burst my deafness. You flashed, shone, and scattered my blindness. You breathed odours, and I drew in breath and panted for You. I tasted, and hunger and thirst. You touched me, and