The Turbulent Universe by Paul Kurtz

The Turbulent Universe by Paul Kurtz, Prometheus Books, 2013. 

Foreword

Somebody once said to me with a smile---although I would swear it was more like a sneer, okay, a sneering smile then---and a rich baritone voice while placing his hand on my shoulder in an avuncular manner "Roberto, mi querido, I suggest you get out of Dodge quickly. Say, like tomorrow. There's a funeral pending if you elect to stay.¿ Entiendes?" . I looked at his eyes, my throat went dry, my knees went weak, and a slight tremor involuntarily went through my body. I was frightened and mad at the same time. Words came out of my mouth with difficulty, "Sí...Sí...Sí...". I then turned around and walked out of his office like a drunkard who had been bar hopping all night. 

Since that meeting, my world has been turbulent. Conflicting feelings about honor and survival have been raging inside me. So last week when my eyes fell upon the book "The Turbulent Universe" on a bookshelf in the library, I grabbed it without thinking. I came home and tried to digest it by taking notes while reading. The following are mostly verbatim notes taken from the book. The notes at the end are of most relevance to the perpetual war inside me. 

Notes

Wishful thinking: Christian and Muslim belief, scientifically uncorroborated, in salvation after death and transportation to a heavenly abode.

Earlier in the 20th century, analytic philosophers agreed with Wittgenstein's view that philosophy was not one of the natural sciences and that its main task was the "logical clarification of language." Today many analytic philosophers are prepared to go beyond this to a naturalized epistemology based on science. 

Logician-philosopher Q.V. Quinn's naturalism:

- "the recognition that it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described." 
-no metaphysical truths independent of science 
-all scientific knowledge is empirical 

Physicalist reductionism: 

Reality at root is basically physical (or physical-chemical). All other entities, such as gods, spirits, souls, minds, consciousness, do not exist as independent entities. (p. 93) 

Kurtz thinks physicalism is traditional materialism. He thinks the above statement is not "scientific" in a full sense, because it has not been verified experimentally. 

Murray Gell-Mann, the co-discoverer of the quark, thinks that nature involves more than physics and chemistry and the four forces of gravity, electromagnetism, strong force (binding quarks together in clusters to make subatomic particles, neutrons, and protons), and weak force (responsible for some nuclear phenomena such as bets decay and radioactivity). We need to make allowance for chance events in the history of any heavenly body. In regard to Earth, it would include natural selection and evolution. Specifically, he says that life on Earth involves more than just physics and chemistry. It involves the emergence of new levels. "Life," he says, "can perfectly well emerge from the laws of physics plus accidents , and mind, and neurobiology" (p. 85). He further says that although the "reduction" of one level of organization to a previous one is possible in principle, it is not by itself an adequate strategy for understanding nature. New laws and new phenomena appear, and need to be accounted for in their own terms. 

Kurtz thinks the best illustration of the limits of reductionism is in biology. E.O. Wilson maintains that there are two fundamental laws of biology: "The first is that all the known properties of lifer are obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry....(The second law says that) all biological processes and all the differences that distinguish species have evolved by natural selection." He illustrates this by reference this to the division of cells, which, he says, are "emergents." "They arise from the interactions of the molecules." And, he says, "the movements cannot be readily deduced from principles of physics and chemistry." (p.86)

The closest relation between biology and the physical sciences is DNA, the molecule that encodes heredity. This has given birth to molecular biology and cellular biology, beyond which is the rest of biological research. This includes the principles of natural selection, where we have seen that many macro factors are included: differential reproduction, mutations, adaptations, the struggles for a survival of species, and more. Evolution involves changes of a species through time, and this involves meticulously discovering and arranging fossils and bones in sequences of descent. Paleontology is thus related to evolutionary biology. Although genetic mutations occur, understanding these  is insufficient for understanding the competition between males in an effort to mate with females of a species, or the selective role of females in choosing mates, and these factors do not relate to micro events on the level of particles. Nor do physics and chemistry help scientists to understand the decline of biodiversity and the extinction of species.

Over and beyond this is the examination within organismic biology of the functions and networks of the organs of the body on the level of homeostasis, and similarly, in dealing with the invasion of the body by pathogens or of threats from the external  world. Nor do particle physics and chemistry enable us to understand how ecosystem exist in nature. There are higher-order qualities that emerge---psychological phenomena, such as "consciousness" and "mind," for example---which cannot ipso facto easily be reduced to neurological states of energy, though they do not exist separate and distinct from them. There are still other newer fields of medicine that have emerged, such as epidemiology and immunology. Whether these in toto can be deduced from the laws of physics and chemistry still remain to be seen. Thus we may conclude that physicalist reductionism is mistaken, and that some form of nonreductive naturalism seems a more appropriate account of the contingent-random universe in which we live. 

Historicity

An essential source of understanding anything in nature is knowledge of history.
Change over time involves two kinds of explanations: first, the origin or beginning of an object or event, person or country; second, ther process by which each changed, was developed, grew, and was modified, or, conversely, how it fell apart and was destroyed.

Natural sciences also deal with historicity and individuation. They attempt to understand the origins and historical changes in the planets and moons in our solar system. Thus, the history of the planets and their relationship to the Sun and also to the entire solar system within the Milky Way and its relationship to other galaxies in the universe is essential if we are to understand nature. Similar applications apply in the biosphere in understanding our natural selection operates in explaining the evolutionary descent of species. 

All of these considerations (historicity and individuation) apply as well to human affairs, where historical reconstructions of individuals, communities, nation-states, cultures, and civilizations are especially relevant. It is to this area of inquiry that we now turn. 

Contingency and Conflict in Human Affairs:

-"Bad" versus "Good":

The view of Man, by nature, as nasty, brutish, and self-seeking is outlined by Thrasymachus in Book I of The Republic. 
Socrates disagreed with this view of human nature, and in the rest of The Republic to elaborate n ethical theory that allows the idea of the good, justice, and beauty to serve as beacons for the life of reason and justice.

-Humans are androgynous (on a bell curve) and thus it is not possible to draw sharp line between male and female in terms of behavior. 

-Moderating forces on emotions:

*Reason
*Social conditioning 
*Same-sex bonding (team spirit) (pp 151-152)

-Factors that led to the collapse of civilizations:

*Overpopulation
*Climate changes
*Invaders with superior technology
*For Jared Diamond, geography is a key factor in ther supremacy of a civilization: location, climate, natural resources (fresh water, fertile soil, potential food supply, minerals) and whether it is located in coastal regions so it can engage in commerce and trade. 
*Karl Marx maintained that the economic forces and relationships of production were the basic causal factors in social change.

According to this interpretation, the political , religious, moral, intellectual, and cultural characteristics of a society are part of the "superstructure"and are a result of the economic base. The economic fundamentals include the key role of the relationships of production---the way society is organized to produce and distribute goods and services. Marx also postulated the surplus theory of value in the form of wages, rent, interest, or profits. He said that although human labor power provides value, it was not equitably distributed. This class analysis overstated the role of classes in causality, for factors in the so-called superstructure---may at times supersede economic causes. Nevertheless, the Marxist emphasis on economic causes is a powerful insight in explaining societies of the past. 

* Actually there are many causal factors at work in the rise or decline of societies or civilizations: contingent events in history, role of "impact-making" individuals (Genghis Khan, St. Paul, Muhammad, Mao), innovative technological discoveries, and ideologies

Moral Choices in a Random Universe

-Coevolution: 

Human cultural heritage is added to Homo sapiens' biogenetic endowment. The biological framework of a species is transmitted by genes. The sociocultural traditions are conveyed by memes: the patterns of belief and practice adopted in a society and transmitted to future generations. What are considered to be the proper modes of conduct are enforced by priests, warriors, teachers, and through social rulers.

-Role of Individuals: 

Sidney Hook in "Hero in History "pointed out that many decisive historical events were due to charismatic individuals who used the power of the state to fulfill their ambitious, sometimes idiosyncratic goals, and not because of of underlying historical causes and trends (p. 195).

-Freedom of Choice:

There is an emergent property within an argument and inquiry on the level of human discourse that cannot be reduced simply by the suspicion that there must be hidden and ultimate causes for all psychological behavior---including the process of argument and inquiry. An argument is an argument. It is not simply a set of neurological firings, and a scientific (or philosophical) inquiry is an inquiry that goes on involving persons, writings, publications, discussions, and controversies,which cannot be reduced ipso facto to the physicalist atomic hypothesis, because these are epistemological criteria, principles or inferences, standards of confirmation and corroboration, which have their own internal integrity and rationale, as understood by logicians, scientists, and ordinary of common sense. And the attempt to explain them away by insisting that there must be some underlying cause(s) for human choice and that a person does not make up his mind freely is sheer nonsense. 

Choices are caused and conditioned by a whole range of contingencies, but nonetheless it is the person who makes a choice, and this act of choosing is a form of behavior of a human being, including his body, brain, and nervous system. We are held responsible for our choices, and in many cases we can be persuaded or convinced to change our choices in the light of reasons or evidence on the level of cognitive and emotive behavior. 

Human beings can learn from experience. They can change the way they behave (within limits). We are not blind automata, simply responding to hidden stimuli and acting in the light of conditioned responses. 

Granted, what we often decide to do as individuals depends on our propensities and habits. Who or what we are is a result of a wide range of social and environmental forces that have conditioned us. Moreover, a person's genetic tendencies and ingrained psychological passions are so powerful that it often requires tremendous efforts to resist them. Our choices are constrained or impelled by these basic causes. On the other hand, we are occasionally able to act contrary to our deep-seated psycho-bio-social personality traits and proclivities. We can respond to arguments and be persuaded by reasons,and we can act contrary to what is normally expected. We can master our destiny, provided we do not live in a rigid society that constrains freedom of choice. 

Where there is choice, there is still some measure of freedom. "Soft" as distinct from"hard" determinism affirms that the behaviors of human beings, including their decisions, are conditioned by a wide range of causal factors on many levels---genetic, biological, psychogenic, and sociogenic---yet freedom of choice is a creative dimension of human behavior, and it can and does add something to the equation of human behaviors. Hard determinism is akin to a religious faith, worshipped at the altar of hidden causes. It is contrary to who and what we are as resolute and responsible human beings. It is also a false doctrine promoted by malevolent fools who wish to control other people's behavior. 

Wissai
August 7, 2013