Although I have been suggesting that science is unavoidably dependent on man's subjectivity, most scientists remain confident that they can do away with the subjectivity if they try hard enough. To them, subjectivity is a convenience and not essential to the practise of science.
Well, if subjectivity is merely a convenient tool to help scientists explain things to laypeople (and possibly to themselves), we should be able to remove it from formal science and still end up with a coherent scientific system. It does not seem possible to do this, particularly in the case of biological evolution. The metaphors and anthropomorphisms that permeate evolutionary theory appear to be essential to that theory.
I mentioned earlier Darwin's use of 'numerous' and 'slight' to describe the adaptations that precede the appearance of a new species. Strictly speaking (and strict speaking is needed), 'numerous' and 'slight' should not be used in a scientific context, because those words are subjective. Even the word 'small' should not be used. We can say 'smaller' - that is objective - but 'small' implies a value judgement.
The subjectivity implied by the word 'slight' is obvious too. Ideally we should delete this word and its synonyms from evolutionary theory altogether. But then we would be forced to describe evolution's adaptations merely as 'changes', without any judgements as to the significance of the changes. That would not result in a satisfactory theory. Man could then arise in one gigantic change, for instance. We might suppose that plausibility considerations would rule out a gigantic change of that nature, but what has plausibility got to do with science? Plausibility is a subjective notion no more permitted than the subjective notions of 'numerous' and 'slight'.
Richard Dawkins takes Charles Darwin's use of subjective language to an extreme. The following are some of the subjective words, mainly adjectives, that Dawkins uses in his books:
about, abrupt, abstract, acceptable, accidental, accurate, acquainted, adequate, advanced, advantageous, almost, analogous, anomalous, apparent, appreciable, approaching, appropriate, approximate, arbitrary, artificial, awkward, awry, basic, beneficial, better, brief, broad, circumstantial, cleanly, clear, close to, coherent, commonly, compelling, competent, complex, considerably, contrived, convenient, convincing, cool, co-operative, crucial, deep, definite, delicate, dense, detailed, difficult, distinct, doubtful, early, effectively, elemental, enough, essentially, evident, expected, extraordinary, faint, farfetched, fast, featureless, few, fine, flexible, frequently, fundamental, gradual, hard, heavy, high, hot, identifiable, implying, important, improve, inconceivable, inefficient, infinitesimal, intended, intense, interesting, intuitive, justified, large, late, legitimate, light, likely, local, long, low, macroscopic, major, many, moderately, much, narrow, natural, nearly, negligible, neighbourhood, noticeable, numerous, obscure, obvious, occasionally, oddly, often, old, optimal, order, ordinary, organized, overt, overwhelming, particular, patterned, plausible, pliable, practical, precise, properly, quickly, random, rapid, rare, reasonable, recent, recognized, relevant, reliable, representative, rich, robust, rough, salient, satisfactory, scarce, self-evident, sensitive, serious, shallow, significant, similar, simple, slight, slowly, small, smooth, soft, soon, sophisticated, sparingly, special, spontaneous, straightforward, strong, structured, substantial, subtle, succinct, sudden, sufficiently, suitable, superficial, tacit, tall, think, too, trivial, ubiquitous, ugly, unconventional, unexpected, unlikely, unpredictable, unusual, useful, vague, versatile, very, warm, warranted, weak, wide
Each of these 200-odd words has an element of subjectivity and a physicist would readily recognise that. Most biologists would not recognise it, though. They are too dependent on subjective words giving them a plausible evolutionary theory.
On this web site I am concerned with a physics' perspective, so we need to take the physicist's side on this issue and be rigorous about words. We also need to be rigorous about assumptions, definitions, and other things that biologists take for granted. Things taken for granted are un-physical - or even 'mystical', if taken for granted forever.
So we need to delete all the above subjective words from evolutionary theory (and their synonyms). This deletion is something that evolutionary biologists ought to go along with. They claim that evolution is a physical process and ultimately can be explained in terms acceptable to physicists. Therefore they should be as keen as physicists to expunge the offending words. Additionally, intelligent biologists know that there is no hope of explaining man's subjectivity if our reasoning assumes it.
Evolutionary theory has a similar subjectivity problem with the verbs - as opposed to adjectives and adverbs - that are used to describe it. Here are some of the verbs used by Richard Dawkins. In each case the agent undertaking the 'doing' action, believe it or not, is an inanimate molecule (or collection of such molecules).
appreciate, compete, simulate, discover, imagine, dictate, persuade, avoid, seem, collaborate, intend, build, co-operate, exploit, influence, control, effect, modify, predict, desire, believe, judge, mimic, seek, lure, foster mutual benefit, attack, run away, want, recognize, learn, be nice to, estimate, trust, value, care for, be sure of, do everything in its power, try to maximize, take a risk, put effort into, expect, threaten, remember, groom, bear a grudge, refuse, adopt, favour, manipulate, behave, shift resources away from, subvert, resist, prefer, invest.
As scientists, we pretend that these subjective words can be eliminated if need be, but our continued use of them suggests otherwise. For instance, most of us are inclined to accept 'natural' as a neutral scientific word. But 'natural' depends on what we judge to be natural, and therefore it depends on our judgement. We contrast 'natural' with 'artificial', the meanings of both words being a matter of our subjective judgement.
We are also fooled by sufficient. A physicist might say that reduction of the state vector occurs when 'sufficient' interaction with the environment occurs. He or she will keep monitoring the vector in question until they see that it has reduced, and use the word 'sufficient' to describe the amount of environmental interaction that they see has occurred. (This also commits the retrospection error - the present assignment of past reality.) 'Sufficient' is a subjective notion. Physicists tacitly recognise this in their profession by conducting intense research into when a quantum measurement occurs objectively. This effort would not be necessary if 'sufficient' were already a sufficient explanation.
The word 'emerge' is very troublesome in science, seeming to be independent of man when it is not. We say that birds 'emerged' from reptiles, for instance. This looks like a fact independent of man's subjectivity. But we have to ask what it is that is doing the emerging. What is it that exists and is doing something to bring about an emergence? We cannot say that such-and-such reptile species is emerging a bird. We can only say that the bird, after it is seen to exist, has emerged from that reptile species. So emerge is a looking-back-in-retrospect sort of word. We see something, then look back and concoct a plausible history for it. Then we link that history with the present by saying that the latter 'emerges' from the former. Is that an explanation? I don't think so. The chain of explanation starts with us seeing something. It is this seeing that is the important thing. We use 'emerge' to hide this important fact.
Why is it a problem to start with the present and look backwards? Because looking backwards presupposes the existence of a platform that can look backwards. Scientists are not allowed to assume platforms. They must derive them or explain them. Even if they possess a legitimate platform for looking backwards, they must on no account use it to assign reality values to the past. Reality is supposed to be independent of our assignments, particularly past reality.
Neither are scientists allowed to take the viewpoint of non-existent objects, such as objects that will exist but currently do not. (We know they will exist because we have seen them, but we are considering the time before they arrive.) Taking the viewpoint of yet-to-exist objects assumes the existence of what we are trying to explain. We must only take the viewpoint of already-existing objects, the viewpoint of reality. When we do that, there is a legitimate procedure for scientists to determine how future reality comes about.
Does 'emerge' take the viewpoint of currently existing real objects and tell us how they evolve into future real objects? No, it does not. It assumes a present reality then determines the past, not the future. Thus emergence is not a scientifically acceptable notion for explaining evolution. This conclusion is reinforced by the intense scientific effort going on to express emergence in terms of deterministic processes. This effort would not be necessary if emergence were already a satisfactory explanation. Similar effort is going on to eliminate emergence from the explanation of galaxies and other self-forming physical objects. Again, this effort would not be necessary if emergence were already the correct explanation. The idea of emergence should be deleted from science.
Logic demands that a judging platform exist before judgements are made from it. This is a truth that we all accept in theory, but don't accept in practice. Many of us slip into the illogicality of making judgements from a platform, then using those judgements to derive the platform! Evolutionary theory is a prime example of us doing that. From an assumed platform, we judge that a plausible evolutionary theory of how animals came to exist can be obtained if we assign certain truth-values to certain variables in the past. So we assign those truth-values. Then, after a decent interval of time, we accept that that those truth values are actually how reality is constituted. We tell ourselves that we didn't assign those truth values after all - they were presented to us by reality. To make matters worse, we then commit the logical error of assuming that the reality we have judged to exist is able to evolve into us and our judgements. We assume that we can 'emerge' from the reality that we have decided shall exist. [Ref. 16]
Man does indeed assign truth values to the past. He doesn't just muse about what might have happened in distant times. He wants a real past, one that is capable of being the real cause of real things in the present. He is thus obliged to treat the values he assigns to past events as being true. Having done that and obtained a plausible theory of the past, he deletes himself from the scene to make it 'objective'. Then he comes back into the scene, bringing other people with him. 'Look,' he says to the others. 'The variables of the world seem to have these values!' The others look and see that he is right. Reality is indeed constituted that way, they conclude.
But logic demands a correct sequence of events. The start of the sequence is our seeing the present. It then progresses to judging the past, to the assignment of truth-values to past variables. This procedure can only be legitimate if there is a seeing/judging platform at the start. For various reasons, not least because it conflicts with the theory of evolution, we do not like to acknowledge the necessary existence of a platform at the start. But we ought to make this acknowledgement. As I have pointed out, when there is a conflict between logic and dogmatic realism, logic must win.
A serious problem also arises with scientists' use of the concept of plausibility in their work. Again, evolutionary biologists are the worst offenders. Richard Dawkins devotes a whole chapter to plausibility in his most popular book, The Blind Watchmaker (chapter 4). He says, in effect, that if some biological object, such as the human eye, cannot plausibly have arisen in one darwinian step, then we should break its evolution down into smaller darwinian steps. We should keep breaking things down until we get to steps that we consider plausible; and at that point we should stop. At that point we should accept that that is how things probably happened.
But such plausibility judgements are grossly unscientific and should never be used in science - not unless the concept of plausibility has been properly accommodated in the system. In conventional science, proper accommodation of plausibility has not been made. That is why a physicist would cringe at Dawkins' advice. A physicist would see it as a blatant example of man making up reality to suit himself.
Plausibility is an appeal to belief. In the theory I am advocating here, there is no problem with making an appeal to belief, because belief has been given proper accommodation in science. It is an aspect of logic, the determiner of what objects shall exist. But in conventional science, appealing to what we believe must be totally rejected.
The reliance-on-belief problem is widespread in science. We rely on belief when we choose our axioms, when we select objects for scientific study, in the meanings we give to words, in our judgements to dismiss 'contrived' arguments, in our choice of hypotheses and definitions, in our reliance on principles of elegance, simplicity (Ockham's Razor), symmetry, and aesthetic appeal, and so on. Even the well-accepted principle 'Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof' is loaded with subjectivity. 'Extraordinary' is not an objective notion. Neither is there any objective justification for the principle as a whole. Extraordinary claims might well be correct.
Since subjectivity plays such a significant role in present-day science, it is to be expected that if we fail to make proper scientific accommodation of it, there will be some serious holes in our scientific worldview. The incorporation of belief along the lines I am describing is intended to rectify this situation.
People sometimes object to the theory of evolution as being anti- the second law of thermodynamics, the law that says disorder will tend to increase in any closed system. The objectors point to the existence of exquisitely ordered objects - animals such as man - and ask how such things can arise and persist instead of tending to disorder.
It is a reasonable question, and one that scientists have not answered satisfactorily. Intelligent people agree that the evolution of man is compatible with the second law of thermodynamics, but compatibility is not the same as explanation. The question the objectors are asking, whether framed this way or not, is why do exquisitely-ordered objects exist? Why do any objects exist?
The conventional explanation is that the order of Nature is an accident of the big bang. The big bang happened to have a lot of order and this has been percolating down into the world's objects ever since. As to the origin of the big bang's order, apparently it was selected by the mere existence of you and me. This is the so-called anthropic explanation. It is not an explanation that satisfies us. We want to know why there should exist the particular order that we see. Why, in particular, should there be the order represented by remote planetary systems? The existence of that order doesn't seem to be required for our existence, and therefore cannot have been selected by the anthropic principle.
The problem of order's appearance and persistence can be seen most clearly in the evolution of life. Life is assumed to have begun with the accidental assembly of a self-reproducing thing (perhaps a molecule). This thing is presumed to have been a complex object containing carbon and other atoms. As soon as it formed accidentally, it had two choices as to what to do next: copy itself, or degrade. Making a copy of itself would have been be an act of 'order', whereas degradation would have been a lazy slide back into the nothingness from which the molecule arose. For some reason, the molecule chose the option of 'order'; it chose to make a copy of itself. It avoided the 'degrade' option that one would expect from the second law of thermodynamics. Why did it do this? Why did it continue to do this, going on to make multiple copies...?
We could give the same reply as earlier, that it's all caused by the anthropic principle. We wouldn't be here if the molecule had taken the quick and dirty route to nothingness. But it is not a satisfactory answer. It is a kind of 'God of the gaps' answer - something we appeal to only when desperate.
I believe the proper answer is this. The molecule made a copy of itself because it was the sort of object that did such things. The molecule was defined in terms of reproduction, and had no choice but to reproduce. Logically, every object has to obey its definition.
This is intuitively the correct answer, but it implies a platform outside the system, a platform from which definitions are made. This must be outside the system because if it were inside, we would get into the logical tangle of having the platform for defining things a product of the things that it defines. All definitions need to be made from outside the thing defined. When I define a table, for instance (use my free will to make it), I am certainly outside the table. And defining the first self-reproducing molecule is hardly different from defining a table. In the case of the molecule, we are highly prejudiced against recognising ourselves as the outside platform. The outside platform is indeed us, but we want 'us' to be a product of the thing defined, so we have to fudge things. We fudge by saying that the molecule in question 'just happened' to assemble itself 'somehow'; that 'it happened' to avoid the slide into nothingness; and that man 'just happened' to 'emerge' later down the track. It is all most unsatisfactory.
In the theory I am presenting here, we do indeed have a platform outside the system. It is the platform of logic, now augmented with the ability to select a world from all possible worlds. This outside platform is ideal for establishing a coherent objective explanation of how life started.
The reason that the origin of life is so elusive in conventional science can be traced directly to the reluctance of scientists to recognise a platform outside the world. From time to time the scientists come up with would-be explanations of life, but the explanations are clearly contrived. The scientists know it, and don't like it. They acknowledge that their explanations need to be plausible, so they will keep looking until a plausible explanation presents itself. If only they would recognise that making plausibility a criterion for reality means that plausibility itself needs to be accommodated in science...
Why are scientists reluctant to consider platforms outside the world? The answer could fill a book, but briefly, the reason is this. Each one of us secretly asserts reality i.e., we unconsciously believe things to exist. (We also assert the ability to assert, which is equivalent to asserting ourselves.) We value the freedom to assert more than anything else. One of the things we assert is the universe, a thing outside ourselves but definitely asserted by us.
Now, suppose someone comes along and says that the universe is asserted by some outside platform. Immediately we go on the defensive. Whatever the 'outside platform' might be, it is not us. If it existed, it would take away some of our own precious freedom to assert.
So that is why intelligent people - people who know full-well the pitfalls of dogma - make dogmatic assertions of reality. (We must keep in mind that these 'assertions' are all done unconsciously.) Basically, we are selfish. We do not want some other agent or other people deciding what reality shall be - we want to do it ourselves.
Although we want to have supreme power to determine reality, in fact there can be no reality without other people participating. Reality is that which is confirmed to exist by other people. So if we want reality, other people had better exist. If there were only one person in the world, he or she would have no way of telling a physical thing apart from a mental idea of the thing. Nothing would be real. And once we have conceded the necessity of having one other person - of having somebody whose beliefs differ from ours - it is but a small step to permitting many such people. [Ref. 17]
If we agree that logic is the objective world's outside defining platform, we can move on to consider how the creation process might work from it. The general idea is natural selection. We know that natural selection creates biological objects, and since our general thesis is that all of the world's objects are created the same way, we must consider that natural selection is the process by which everything is created. We can drop the word 'natural' and just see it as selection. The selection is done from the platform of logic. Fundamentally, it is the choosing of one world from an infinity of possible worlds. According to the theory here, we choose this one world by believing it to exist (and science is the discipline of finding out what we have unconsciously chosen).
The process for creating objects is selection. If space and time are similar (both having the character of 'dimension'), then selection-in-time (the normal way that natural selection is considered to operate in the case of biological evolution) may also be pictured as selection-in-space. So let us consider the following analogy based on selection-in-space.
We are to imagine the world as an infinite plain of up-turned Scrabble tiles, each tile carrying a letter of the English alphabet as per the board-game. Looking down on this infinite plain from outside the system, we can see words in the random tiles. (The letters comprising a word do not have to be adjacent to each other or oriented correctly, but we see the word nonetheless.) In this analogy, the words that we see represent the objects of our world. The letters comprising a word represent an object's parts.
The key idea is this. When we look down on the plain of tiles and see a word to exist, this represents the creation of that word. (In the real world, it represents the creation of an object.) Although I said that the plain of tiles represents 'the world', in fact the great plain of tiles represents the great ensemble of all possible worlds. A sentence in the plain of tiles - i.e., a logical sequence of words - is a single world within the ensemble. Since the plain is infinite, all possible words and sentences exist on the plain somewhere. These sentences, or worlds, are equal in their 'reality', but their degree of reality, prior to any of them being seen to exist, is zero. The worlds are all virtual. However, we can promote one of these worlds to reality by seeing it to exist. We do that by selecting it. I repeat that the selecting is nothing other than seeing it to exist.
But our selecting needs to be unconscious. We cannot 'pre-select' a range of worlds, and then 'select' one of them 'for real'. The number of possible worlds is infinite, and it doesn't make sense to consider an infinite number of candidates in a pre-selection process. Instead, whatever word we see when we look down on the plain of tiles, that word is selected for real the first time we see it to be there (i.e., believe it to be there). We cannot 'un-select' a word. Once an object of the world is real, we cannot make it go away by deciding that it shall not exist. To go out of existence, the object must be believed to not exist i.e., it must no longer play any part in the logic of the world. But once it exists, it's not possible to decide to believe it doesn't. (Well, we can decide, but here we are talking about achieving what we decide.)
When we look down on the plain of tiles, at first all we see is chaos (randomness).
(It is an interesting question as to whether this randomness is 'real' or not. On the one hand, it should be real because we believe it to be there. On the other hand, what we call 'real' could be what we choose from the randomness, and in that case the randomness itself would not be real. The next page considers randomness in more detail.)
When trying to make sense out of the randomness, we will tend to see words that we have seen before. After seeing the first instance of a word, thereafter that word can be a building block and be seen again. In this way we obtain 'atoms' which we can use in the assembly of other objects. Why do we want more objects? Our unconscious aim is to create a 'reality' that can be the cause of us i.e., to explain us who are looking down. (It seems a hopeless cause, but there we have it.)
This process of replication-by-repeated instance works well in the case of building blocks that are identical. The quarks of our real world are like that. If you've seen one, you've seen them all. (Except that there are two types, 'up' and 'down'.) All electrons are identical too. (Again there is a minor qualification.) [Ref. 18]
The fact that all quarks are the same is very useful to scientists. It means that we can use science to explain them, something that would not be possible if every quark were unique. Science can only explain things that are in principle predictable from what we have already explained. We can imagine the difficulties if all the quarks in the world were as different as pieces of dirt.
But suppose we need objects in our world that are not identical - such as biological objects. How do we obtain these? How do we obtain things that are unique, i.e., where there is only one real-world instance of them? Biological objects (animals and plants) have that unique character. Each individual body in the biological world is unique. We need some way of seeing unique objects in our plain of Scrabble tiles. We might think that we can choose random words for this purpose, e.g. YEVRAH, or NAMRON. Unfortunately, there are an infinite number of random words in the plain of tiles. None will stand out and we will not notice any of them. We will not believe any particular random word to really exist in the tiles; and it's a particular word we are looking for if we are to represent a particular body.
There is a clever solution to this problem. Instead of relying on us to notice the word YEVRAH, for example, we can have the word notice itself! That is, we can give the word a 'self' to do the job. And that is how the first self-replicating molecule appeared on Earth. We wanted a unique internal determinant for each unique animal. Since unique things are invisible to science (i.e., they cannot be predicted), we settled on unique hardware in our world that was visible only to itself. This hardware had a first instance, the first self-reproducing molecule on Earth. It was unpredictable by science and therefore scientifically 'invisible', but we brought it into science by arranging for it to be visible to itself. From that point on it was real. We defined it by one key rule: the collection of atoms, whatever it was, had the ability to reproduce itself.
Of course, there are other unique objects besides biological ones. (For instance, the chair that I am sitting on.) These objects equally have 'selves' to express their unique identity. But the selfhood of these objects is presumed to be explicable in terms of the object's parts. The parts (quarks) are identical to each other and subject to physical laws. The existence of these objects therefore is predictable in principle. There is no problem with seeing them in the plain of Scrabble tiles. The problem with biological objects is that they are defined to be unique, and cannot be observed in the plain of tiles in principle. They need the trick of self-observation that I have just described. [Ref. 19]
So the first self-reproducing molecule, although totally un-seeable (unpredictable) by science, nevertheless could see itself. It therefore existed and was a scientific object. It had one characteristic that was unique, the ability to self-reproduce. But along with every other object in the world, it had a 'self' that made it a 'thing in itself', giving it the ability to 'act' on the world i.e., the molecule had rudimentary free will. As with every other object (i.e., everything with a 'self'), the first self-reproducing molecule was immortal by default. It would continue to exist forever unless caused not to. In this way the 'immortal coil' of the selfish gene came to exist.
And so, by looking down on the plain of Scrabble tiles - or rather, their real-world equivalent - we build up a world of self-existing objects that we might eventually see to be the cause of us who are looking down. As I said, I believe this to be a hopeless quest. The real world is our creation, and it is not logical to suppose that something we create can determine us. Since this is an obvious truth, something must give. What gives is that we decide that the real world shall not be our creation but somebody else's. We contrive an external agent to exist that is totally independent of us and therefore has the logical ability to be the determinant of us and our world. The external agent that we invent for this purpose is called 'randomness'. It is the subject of the next page.
Back to beginning of Page 1 ('A solution to the problem of free will')