Philosophy

Naturalism, Theism, and the Origin of Life1 Published in Process Studies, 27:3-4, 1998, 267-279 ABSTRACT Alvin Plantinga and Phillip E. Johnson strongly attack "metaphysical naturalism", a doctrine based, in part, on Darwinian concepts. They claim that this doctrine dominates American academic, educational, and legal thought, and that it is both erroneous and pernicious. Stuart Kauffman claims that currently accepted versions of Darwinian evolutionary theory are radically incomplete, that they should be supplemented by explicit recognition of the importance of coherent structures - the prevalence of "order for free". Both of these developments are here interpreted in relation to some contemporary theistic notions of "creation", including those of Lewis Ford, Robert Neville, and Robert Sokolowski. Kaufmann's approach is consistent with the approach of process theism, and is not invalidated by the attacks of Plantinga and Johnson. (End of Abstract.) In Warrant and Proper Function, (WPF) Alvin Plantinga argues that the probability of human cognitive faculties "being reliable (producing mostly true beliefs)" must be regarded as quite low, if "metaphysical naturalism" is taken as valid and "human cognitive faculties arose by the mechanisms to which contemporary evolutionary thought directs our attention" (WPF 219). Since the reliability (proper function) of human cognitive faculties is a precondition of any warranted belief whatsoever, Plantinga concludes that it would be intrinsically irrational to adhere to naturalism and also to the generally accepted evolutionary account of origins. He advocates replacing evolutionary naturalism with a "theistic" approach.2 In Darwin on Trial3, Phillip E. Johnson, a professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on the use of evidence in legal proceedings, examine the evidentiary basis for the currently accepted interpretation of biological evolution, "the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis". He finds that basis decidedly deficient. Among his strongest points is that observations that demonstrate gradual evolutionary changes in specific characteristics (beak shape of finches, color of forest moths, for instance) do not establish how gradual changes could bring about major evolutionary transitions that require concerted functioning of many specialized organs-such as the change from arboreal mammals to night-flying bats, or the origin of life. In a more recent work, Reason in the Balance: The Case Against NATURALISM in Science, Law & Education (RB), Johnson continues his argument, and makes clear what was implicit in the earlier work. That is that one of the main reasons for his attack on Darwinism is his conclusion that insufficiently critical adoption of evolutionary modes of thought by the majority of scientists, and also by educational (e.g., John Dewey) and legal (e.g., Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.) leaders, has led to a highly unsatisfactory cultural situation, and to many evil consequences. Johnson styles himself a"theistic realist"- while distancing his positions from that of the "fundamentalists" and "creation scientists", he accepts the name "creationist"` A creationist is simply a person who believes that God creates-meaning that the living world is the product of an intelligent and purposeful Creator rather than merely a combination of chance events and impersonal natural laws. (RB, 74) Johnson define naturalism as "the doctrine that nature is `all there is`" (RB, 7) and distinguishes pernicious "metaphysical" naturalism from relatively benign "methodological" naturalism (the strategy of proceeding as if naturalism were true).Johnson contends that the metaphysical disagreement between naturalists and theists-the clash of two incompatible "creation stories"(RB, 12)- is a central issue in a "culture war" now raging in the United States. Naturalism and theism appear to many thoughtful people as contraries-mutually-exclusive ways of dealing with questions of great significance4. But from some points of view, the opposition between these modes of thought, and perhaps even their sharp distinction, may be less clear. Specific notions of deity, and of divine action, that have figured in theistic conceptual systems of long-past civilizations have certainly been influenced by then-prevailing technology-the ways in which people made their living5. In our own time, recent developments in science have had major influence on how the object of religion is conceived, at least for some theists6. Whitehead wrote: "....Faith in reason is the trust that the ultimate nature of things lie together in a harmony which excludes mere arbitrariness. It is the faith that at the base of things we shall not find mere arbitrary mystery. The faith in the order of things which has made possible the growth of science is a particular example of a deeper faith. ..." (SMW, 18) To the extent that this is the case, serious investigators, of whatever sort, employ modes of thought that can be considered to have "theistic" overtones. Both naturalistic and theistic approaches are in continual change and development-greatly complicating comparison of the two points of view. In particular, the science and technology of the last decades of this century differ in important ways from the science and technology that went just before. In recent decades, theoretical developments and widespread availability of powerful computers have drastically changed the sorts of problems that scientists and 3 technologists can tackle, greatly altered the methods they use - and brought about major upheaval in rather fundamental concepts used in scientific work. Major re-conceptualization of causality has occurred.7 It seems at least possible that some formerly-serious conflicts between theistic and naturalistic outlooks may well have become moot. This paper reviews a novel approach to the scientific understanding of the origin of life-and to development of biological order and diversity in general-and explores, in a preliminary way, possible relationship between this new approach and some contemporary philosophical theologies of creation. * * * Richard Dawkins has been engaged in an extended polemic against standard theistic interpretations. Even though he did make what might be called a "theological" contribution8 regarding "God's Utility Function", clearly he should be counted as a "naturalist" rather than a "theist". Climbing Mount Improbable, Dawkins' most recent popular work9, is mainly a refutation of arguments put forward, over many years, by a number of distinguished physical scientists, who have claimed that biological evolutionary change by natural selection is intrinsically unreasonable, using arguments from probability theory. Dawkins holds that those objections falsely assume that evolution necessarily involves major, abrupt, alteration of a preexisting situation-analogous to a foolhardy mountain-climber essaying an assent straight up the face of a sharp precipice. Dawkins claims that what actually occurs in natural evolution is incremental change, analogous to a more cautious climber's slow assent up a long, but gentle, slope around the back of that steep cliff. For Dawkins, by far the most important aspect of biological nature is the ability of certain stretches of DNA ("genes") to engender faithful copies of themselves, under conditions that prevail. In earlier works, Dawkins noted that there are other entities in the world, in addition to genes, that have the property of self-replication-units of cultural transmission ("memes") are also "replicators". Recently, Dawkins has re-narrowed his focus to the level of the gene. John Maynard Smith and Eörs Sazthmáry considered five major evolutionary transitions, ranging from the origin of life to the beginnings of human language, using an approach similar to that of Dawkins.10 Curiously, Dawkins does not much discuss the work of Stuart Kauffman who, in 1993, published a major work, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, (OOSSE) dealing with basic mechanisms of evolutionary change. (Dawkins does include brief reference to Kauffman's more popular 1995 work, At Home in the Universe (HU).) Kauffman, like the eminent physicists Dawkins quotes, regards the standard understanding of evolutionary change by natural selection as radically unsatisfactory, but his argument has a quite different structure from the ones that Climbing Mount Improbable rebuts. Kauffman was trained as a physician. He gave up medical practice to study fundamental questions in biology. "I entered biology because the magnificent wonder of cell differentiation overwhelmed me. (HU, p. 94)." To better understand biological morphogenesis, Kauffman took up computer-modeling of abstract systems designed to mimic important features of biological nature. OOSSE contains rather detailed accounts of computer simulations designed to illuminate a wide range of problems of fundamental biological interest: origin of life, development of mammalian embryos, ecosystem dynamics, etc. HU covers much the same ground as OOSEE, but in a less-technical manner, and it extends arguments based in biology to questions of wider interest, such as the place of humans in the cosmos. As the title of the work indicates, Kauffman concludes that humans are integral parts of evolutionary nature, rather than intrinsically outsiders, as some others - both theists and naturalists - have held. Kauffman states the opinion that the present general understanding of evolution by natural selection is inadequate. 4 .....Where, then, does this order come from, this teeming life I see from my window: urgent spider making her living with her pre-nylon web, coyote crafty across the ridge-top, muddy Rio Grande aswarm with nosee-ems (an invisible insect peculiar to early evenings)? Since Darwin, we turn to a single, singular force, Natural Selection, which we might as well capitalize as though it were the new deity. Random variation, selection-sifting. Without it, we reason, there would be nothing but incoherent disorder. I shall argue in this book that this idea is wrong. For, as we shall see, the emerging sciences of complexity begin to suggest that the order is not all accidental, that vast veins of spontaneous order lie at hand. Laws of complexity spontaneously generate much of the order of the natural world. It is only then that selection comes into play.......(HU, .7-8) Kauffman holds that, in addition to dealing with natural selection, any adequate theory of evolution must also account for the spontaneous generation of coherence, what he calls "order for free" (HU, 71-92) His emphasis on this point is a major point of contrast between Kauffman and most other contemporary writers on evolutionary topics The novelty of Kauffman's approach may be illustrated by considering his discussion of the origin of life. The best known researchers in the field of proto-biology have focused on the currently-prevalent apparatus of biological organization and reproduction - the complex networks of DNA, RNAs, and proteins that constitute present-day biological organisms. They have attempted to infer (or imagine) what simpler states of affairs might have preceded what we now observe. Manfred Eigen's approach11 envisions self-reproducing cycles of catalytic and autocatalytic chemical reactions (hypercycles) that undergo modifications that lead to other more-complicated self-reproducing networks of interaction (larger hypercycles). In this view, the predominant direction of evolutionary development is from simpler states of affairs to more complex ones. Enlargement of a hypercycle to produce a larger hypercycle requires that a number of new chemical species come into play. In order for the new hypercycle to function well enough to replace a former hypercycle, these new molecules must each possess quite specific catalytic and autocatalytic functions. Functional constraints of this sort put severe restrictions on the structure and composition that the required new molecules must have This stringency seems to provide some grounds for the type of probability-based anti-evolutionary argument that Dawkins sets out to refute in Climbing Mount Improbable, and also provides some support that the arguments Johnson makes in RB concerning the unlikelihood of major evolutionary transitions occurring solely by Darwinian mechanisms. At least in part to deal with such points, Eigen more-recently pointed out that each biological genome is not a single sequence of bases on DNA (a unique "point in sequence space") but rather a fairly large number of variant sequences that have quite similar - even indistinguishable - biological functions 11 b, 11 c. Most of these functionally similar sequences differ from the "wild-type" sequence in only one or a few locations, but some have fairly large discrepancies. Rather than being a point in sequence-space, each such "quasi-species" may be regarded as a cloud of such points, with high density in the region of the wild-type but with significant long extensions in several directions. Eigen also points out that biological systems generally operate near what Kauffman calls "the edge of chaos" - that is it usually happens that certain small changes will lead to disintegration of a quasi-species. On this basis, Eigen maintains that abrupt changes of a quite major sort are to be expected in the normal course of events, as a quasi-species centered on one sequence is rapidly replaced by a rather different successor quasi-species centered on one of the extensions of the former species. A formally-similar argument has recently been shown 11d to provide a satisfactory account of the occurrance of major structural changes on binding of a small molecule to an antibody binding site. (In the absence of the small molecule, the antibody has a range 5 of possible structures giving rise to a specific consensus sructure: binding the small molecule shifts the probabilities of all those configurations, producing a new consensus structure vastly different from the original one.) In the case of the origin of life, Eigen's main interest, and also the other major transitions considered by Maynard Smith and Sazthmáry, the closure of cycles of relationships is of central importance - and each such closed cycle has one or more component with the property of self-enhancement known as autocatalysis. A typical autocatalytic change is one in which the product of the change enhances the speed of the process, so that the change keeps getting faster and faster, unless controlled by some other interaction. * * * Kauffman has an alternative and quite non-standard approach to the question of the origin of life that does not seem to be subject to objections that can be made against prior suggestions. Kauffman rejects the assumption that life began with simple catalytic cycles, such as Eigen originally envisioned. He consider the sort of chemical mélange that is likely to have arisen from spontaneous, garden-variety chemistry on the primitive Earth, prior to the origin of life. Any aqueous solution that contains a large number of chemicals must necessarily give rise to an even more complicated set of chemical reactions between and among those molecules, producing yet more chemical types. On the pre-biotic Earth, it seems likely that there were vast numbers of locations, including many energy-rich ones, where such complex reaction-systems existed. Kauffman argues that, given a sufficiently complex network of reactions, eventually a self-replicating cycle of chemical reactions must necessarily arise. That is, if enough different chemical changes are going on, sooner or later some collection of chemicals must undergo a series of alterations that generates a set of conditions much like the original situation. Once that occurs, that cyclical process will continue indefinitely so long as the conditions do not change greatly. Laboratory experience with chemical networks of this type ( such as the Belousov-Zhabotinski reaction) have shown that such oscillatory reactions are often remarkable tolerant of changes in reaction conditions, within rather wide limits. Closure of such a autocatalytic network of reactions is made more likely, rather than less likely, by increase in complexity of the mixture. Such a self-replicating cycle would resemble Eigen's hypercycle, in that it would be a closed network of catalytic and autocatalytic processes, but the kind of cycle that Kauffman envisions as the origin of replication is highly complicated- not at all initially simple, as prior workers in the origin-of-life field have tended to assume. The new view holds that the initial closure of a self-replicating cycle was a necessary consequence of the complexity of the situation produced by prior strictly chemical processes, and the cycle that was thus produced was surely large and ungainly. For Kauffman, an important part of evolutionary advance must have been simplification of such initially complex cycles- gradual elimination of ineffective and redundant steps. On this view there once, before the origin of life, there existed fairly concentrated solutions of molecules-including many carbon-containing ones. Many of these molecules were catalysts, each one facilitating one or more reactions of a wide variety of types. Each of those reactions yielded still other molecules-some catalytically effective in novel ways. Eventually (and necessarily) it happened that some large set of these reactions produced a closed cycle that had the property of regenerating (more or less) the original catalysts and reactants. Such a cycle would keep on going (since it generated its own starting conditions) while other reaction sequences that were not cyclical would play themselves out rather rapidly. Over time, the compounds that were parts of the successful cycle would come to make up larger and larger fractions of the chemicals in the solution. Once established, such a cycle could change by simplification - taking shortcuts around unnecessary steps. By the same reasoning as used previously, the slightly simpler cycle would persist and 6 spread, at the expense of the more-complex progenitor. The conditions for simplification of a complex cycle (while maintaining closure) are much less stringent than the requirements for expanding a smaller cycle to produce a larger one. Kauffman proposes that larger cycles may readily be formed by combination of smaller cycles. The prevailing view holds the plethora of biological forms that now exist have evolved through transitions from simpler autocatalytic reaction-networks to more complex ones. According to Kauffman; the origin of life - and other major evolutionary change - should be envisioned to start from a relatively confused and disorderly state, involving entities of many types, each one a result of previous processes. Since there were many entities in interaction, there were very many ways in which they interacted, and all those interactions had consequences leading to yet further changes. If the situation became sufficiently complicated, the probability that networks of autocatalytic interactions closed - that some novel "dissipative structures" (a term due to Ilya Prigogine) came into existence - became so large as to approach certainty. All of the changes mentioned depend on the availability of energy, either from a heat-source such as a deepocean hot-spring or from weakly-bonded large molecules produced by prior chemical processes. Once produced, the closed autocatalytic sets of inter-connected changes persisted and expanded their influence, crowding out non-cyclical processes. The origin of chemical coherence envisioned by Kauffman is related to the origin of coherence of molecular motion in heat-driven convection. When a viscous liquid is heated from below, random motion of molecules transfers heat across the layer. But as the heating continues, eventually a closed loop of molecular movement develops in some region - a column of rising molecules happens to be next to a stack of sinking units - so that a more-or less circular path becomes available. Once that happens, in one small region, the motion of molecules in neighboring regions will be influenced so that the coherent, organized mode of motion spreads - and eventually the whole liquid is covered with hexagonal "convection cells". The spontaneously-organized joint activity transfers heat across the liquid layer much more rapidly than did the original, random motion. A homely example12 may clarify how networks (of chemical reactions, say) would be expected to become simpler with the passage of time, as unnecessary steps drop out. If a sugar-cup is placed near an ant-hill, eventually a roaming ant will stumble onto it. To get back to the nest, the happy explorer will retrace the route used to make the discovery; this route will be a long and winding one. Additional ants will join to exploit the newly-discovered resource - by following the trail of the first ant. Each subsequent ant will follow the path taken by the ant ahead of it, but each will cut corners in doing so. After a fairly short time, the trail from the ant-hill to the food will be as straight as if it had been laid out with a ruler. The final path is quite different from the tortuous route the initial insect had used. In Kauffman's view, the first achievement of any new coherence is likely to be messy; simplicity will only be approached over time - as efficiencies, such as the ant shortcuts, are stumbled upon. Kauffman's thesis is that growth in complexity eventually, and ineluctably, leads to a situation where coherence on a new level emerges, through closure of a network of catalytic and autocatalytic processes. Once this new type of organization has come into being, progressive simplification is to be expected. Kauffman provides results of experiments - done with computer-models of various types-dealing with biological structure-generation on many diverse levels to support this conclusion. * * * In Personal Knowledge13. Michael Polanyi writes: 7 ..the ordering principle which originated life is the potentiality of a stable open system; while the inanimate matter on which life feeds is merely a condition which sustains life, and the accidental configuration from which life had started had merely released the operations of life. And evolution, like life itself, will be said to have been originated by the action of an ordering principle, an action released by random fluctuations and sustained by fortunate environmental conditions. (emphasis in original) From Kauffman's point of view, the "ordering principle" involved in the origin of life is the closure of appropriate selfreplicating chemical networks14. Strictly speaking, there is no scientific point at issue between Dawkins and Kauffman, the question is one of emphasis. But as Whitehead pointed out, "emphasis is valuation" (PR 313/477). The issue should be understood as "which is more important, the individual replicator (the gene), or the patterns generated by interactions of a myriad of replicators with a complex environment?" To explain the gaudy colors of certain male maniken birds of the tropics, Dawkins would point to the efficacy of replication of the genes. Kauffman might well observe that it as true to say that the pattern of reproductive behavior ("lekking") characteristic of that species of tropical bird "causes" the set of genes that bird carries, as it is true to say that the nature of those genes "causes" that pattern of behavior14. Kauffman would claim that the coherence and efficacy of the macroscopic behavior-pattern (lekking) needs to be taken into account in any adequate understanding of the behavior of those birds, or of their genetic composition. The pattern of behavior that is effective in a lekking bird species is the important "ordering principle", in Polanyi's terminology. The difference of opinion between Dawkins and Kauffman may be understood as a contemporary version of medieval nominalist-realist controversies15. The whole process of spontaneous generation of organization is described by Kauffman as "order for free". Kauffman joins in the proclamation of post-modern science-Nature is selforganizing16. * * * Howard J. Van Till17 recently discussed the relationship of scientific doctrines of "self-organization" to the Christian tradition, particularly to the writings of St. Basil of Caesarea (330-379) and St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Van Till's conclusion is that those ancient authors clearly understood that nature has the intrinsic capability to generate novel forms of coherence: both of these ancient churchmen were well able to incorporate this understanding into their theistic philosophies. Van Till describes their view as 'the doctrine of creations's functional integrity". If this is so, why do many find that the notion that nature is self-organizing is somehow contrary to theistic commitments? The doctrine (widely held until recently) that "matter" itself is fully real (rather than an abstraction, derived from intellectual analysis of concrete really-existing things, as Aristotle held), and that such self-subsistent "matter" is intrinsically inert (as opposed to self-organizing), arguably reached its full flower in the late Renaissance18. Part of contemporary divergence between theistic and naturalistic approaches may be understood to arise from overly-complete internalization (by both naturalists and theists) of the cosmology that emerged from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century-the cosmology in which "matter" was full real, but intrinsically inert. As I have argued elsewhere, this cosmology that is now rapidly being replaced by a rather different one that draws attention to the form-generating capabilities of concrete entities19. 8 * * * Brief consideration of some recent contributions to the theology of creation may suggest that the divergence between the approaches of Dawkins and of Kauffman to biological questions are at least tangentially related to the naturalism/theism tension. As part of a larger work, Robert Sokolowski20 presented a concise summary of "the Christian understanding of the world as created and God as Creator". He points out a major difference between Christian and "pagan" or "natural" ideas of God. For the later, God is "part of the world" - in contrast, for the Christian; "God is hidden not just because of human psychological limitations, but because he is not one of the things of the world" (p 52). Joseph Bracken, S.J, John Cobb, Lewis Ford, Charles Hartshorne, Schubert Ogden, Marjorie Suchocki, David Tracy, and others, have developed theological approaches influenced by the thought of Alfred North Whitehead21. For Whitehead, God is involved in each event, in the concrescence of every actual entity. God is the source of the "form of definiteness", the "subjective aim", of each occasion. Lewis Ford develops this idea: ....Our freedom lies in the power of the present to select and organize that which we receive from the past. In the absence of direction, however, such freedom would merely effectuate random combinations of the past. Freedom is responsibly exercised in the light of future possibilities, which become lures in so far as they are valued. Thus we may describe free actualization as the bringing the past into the present by the power of the present responding to the lure of the future. The future is just as causally effective as the past, though each in its own way....... The particular valued possibilities which shape our actions come from many sources, but ultimately, Whitehead argues, they derive from the creative activity of God. God is the ultimate power of the future, rescuing the world from degeneration into chaos by the relentless provision of everlasting new creative possibilities for the world to actualize.......(LG p 36) Robert Neville22 find much of process theology unsatisfactory: My own alternative is that God is the creator of everything determinate, creator of all things actual as well as of things possible Apart from the relative nature the divinity gives itself as creator in creating the world, God is utterly transcendent.... God is the immediate creator of the novel values or patterns by which an event is constituted as the harmonizing of a multiplicity. Since the real being of an occasion is the becoming of a harmonized integration of the multiplicity, its components stem either immediately from God or from what it prehends; since what it prehends are other occasions, themselves analyzable into novel and prehended features, it can be suggested that every feature at some time in the present or past is or was a spontaneous novel pattern or value immediately created by God. Thus God is the creator of every determinate thing, each in its own occasion of spontaneous appearance. ( CG p. 8)... On the basis of such considerations, Neville describes his approach as creation ex nihilo. Neville maintains that God transcends the world but is related to each and every created thing as the creator of that thing: Another kind of relation, however, obtains between two things, one of which is the creator of the whole being of the other... The created thing would have no integrity over against the creator, since against the 9 creator it would have no being, but it would have the integrity of being exactly what the creator creates it to be... (CG p 82.) Although Neville differs from traditional Christian theistic doctrine in important ways (such as dealing with the personal nature of God), he asserts transcendence in a way that Ford does not seem to do, Kauffman's understanding of evolution seems much more conducive to theistic understanding than is Dawkins' approach. The dipolar deity of process theology, as developed, for instance, by Lewis Ford, appears to fit rather well with Kauffman's "order for free". Intrinsically new coherences arise from chaotic antecedents at many levels in the course of the development of every biological organism, and ecological community. Kauffman calls attention to the importance of understanding this sort of spontaneous order-generation and its causes. Much of what Ford says about "the lure of God" could be transferred into Kauffman's conceptual scheme. Sokolowski clearly would regard Ford's approach as excessively "naturalistic" ( a characterization that Neville also employs). Neville claims that his system preserves both the divine transcendence that Sokolowski insists upon, and also the intimate relationship between creature and creator that Ford's system provides. Each of these three theistic authors is engaged in a difficult but necessary task, the attempt to craft a conceptual scheme adequate to the full range of contemporary human experience, giving appropriate attention to the valuable insights of venerable theistic traditions.. Both Dawkins and Kauffman, as scientists, focus more sharply on their biological and modeling data - but they both claim that their work is relevant to more general human concerns. Plantinga and Johnson aim to defend theism by attack on evolutionary naturalism, which they consider to be antithetical to their notions of God and divine action in the world. In so doing they tend to emphasize God's involvement in the major evolutionary transitions - changes that, by any account, are wonders and marvels - but they seem to neglect God's action in more mundane matters, such as the arrival of Spring in the woods, or a toddler's rapid mastery of language23 - events that many find to be fit sources of wonder and marvel. Neville takes pains to make clear that while God is necessarily involved in each natural event (remarkable or not), but that God is, as Sokolowski requires, "not one of the things of the world." In a sense, this approach falls under Johnson's definition of metaphysical naturalism, since it turns out that nature is all there is in the world, since God is not. A deity that mainly operated in major transitions (as seems to be tacitly assumed by Johnson) seems to be "one of the things of the world" more than does the deity envisioned either by Neville or by Ford. Johnson is surely correct that the scientific evidence for the current understanding of the origin of life - and other major evolutionary transitions - is incomplete, at best. From a legal point of view, the Scotch verdict "not proven" surely seems appropriate-as it would be for very many other major items in current science. The wide and growing acceptance of the evolutionary outlook indicates that it is a highly suitable platform for "stories scientists tell". Those stories, even if few reach even close to certain and irreformable knowledge, are in our day, adding up to a highly coherent account of the world and its functioning. Even if not quite all of the deleterious societal consequences that Johnson recounts can be laid solely at the feet of "Darwinism", it is surely true that some of them can. As might be expected, religious, educational, and other social institutions require time to adjust to intellectual changes, such as the vast increase both in human understanding and in the scope for human action (for both good and ill) that modern science and technology have made possible. Theists quite properly see the hand of God at work in major evolutionary changes such as the origin of life, but also in such every-day occurrences as the development of a fertilized egg into a cocker pup, and also in the social turmoil-including very real moral and physical evil that accompanies economic, technological, and intellectual change. Process theism, such as that 10 of Lewis Ford and his colleagues seems the best present means to provide interpretation (at once theistic and naturalistic) that extends to all events, including major evolutionary developments-and might even provide an adequate theological and philosophical basis to moderate some culture-war hostilities. References Ford, Lewis. The Lure of God: A Biblical Background for Process Theism, Fortress, 1978.(LG) Johnson, Phillip E.Reason in the Balance: The Case Against NATURALISM in Science, Law & Education (Downers Grove, Ill: Intervarsity Press, 1995.)(RB) Kauffman, Stuart. The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). (OOSEE) Kauffman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) (HU) Neville, Robert. Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology, New Edition (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995) (CG) Notes 1) An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference: Naturalism, Theism, and the Scientific Enterprise (NTSE) held at Austin, Texas, March 20-23, 1997 under the title "A New Approach to Biological Evolution and Some Concepts of Creation". Papers presented at the NTSE conference are available for downloading at http:// www. dla. utexas. edu/ depts/ philosophty/ faculty/ koons/ ntse/ main.html. 2) See also: Plantinga, Alvin. Warrant: The Current Debate. (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993.) 3) Johnson.Phillip E. Darwin on Trial (revised ed., Downers Grove, Ill: Intervaristy Press, 1993). 4) Many of the papers at the NTSE Conference (note 1) illustrate this point. 5) Levi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques translated by J. and D. Weightman. (NY: Atheneum, 1974) 5) Renfrew, Colin "The Archaeology of Religion" in Renfrew and Zubrow, eds. The ancient mind; elements of cognitive archaeology. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994). 6) Haught, John, Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation. (NY, Paulist Press, 1995). 7) Theological implications of developments of this sort have been discussed in a recent Vatican Observatory publication: Russell, Robert; Murphy, Nancy; Peacocke, Arthur, eds Chaos and Complexity, Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, (Notre Dame, Indiana: Vatican Observatory Publications, 1995) 8) Dawkins, Richard. River Out of Eden. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1995) 9) Dawkins, Richard. Climbing Mount Improbable (NY: Norton, 1996.) 10) Maynard Smith, John and Sazthmáry, Eörs. The Major Transitions in Evolution, (New York. Freeman, 1995). 11) a) Eigen, Manfred with Winkler-Ostwatisch, Ruthild (trans. Paul Wooley), Steps Towards Life: A Perspective on Evolution. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). b) Eigen, Manfred. "Viral Quasispecies". Scientific American, 269, 42-49, (July) 1993. c) Eigen,Manfred. "The Origin of Genetic Information: Viruses as Models", Gene, 135 (1993), 37-47. 11 d) Wedemayer, Gary J.; Patten, Phillip A.; Wang, Leo H.; Schultz, Peter; Stevens, Raymond C. "Structural Insights into the Evolution of an Antibody Combining Site", Science 276, 1997, 1665-1669 12) Bruckstein, Alfred M. "Why the Ant Trails Look So Straight and Nice", The Mathematical Intelligencer, 15#2 (Spring) 1993, 59-62. 13) a) Polanyi. Michael Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958b) b) Haught J. F. and Yeager,D. M.. "Polanyi's Finalism", forthcoming in Zygon (personal communication from J. F. H.) 14) McDonald, David B and. Potts, Wayne K."Cooperative Display and Relatedness Among Males in a Lek-Mating Bird". Science 266 1030-1032, 1994 (11 November) 15) Wilson, Edward O., "Biological and Human Determinants of the Survival of Species", in Joseph. E. Earley, ed. Individuality and Cooperative Action. (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1990). 16) Randall, John H., Jr.. The Making of the Modern Mind, New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1926, pp 101-102. 17) Van Till, Howard J."Basil, Augustine, and the Doctrine of Creation's Functional Integrity", Science and Christian Belief, 8, 21-38, 1996. 18) a) Leclerc, Ivor The Nature of Physical Existence, (New York: Humanities Press, 1972) b) Ferré, Frederick. The Matter with Matter. (Nobel Conference XXXI, October , 1995). c) Ferré, Frederick. Being and Value: Toward a Constructive Postmodern Metaphysics. (Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 1996) 19) a) Earley, Joseph ) "Collingwood's Third Transition: Replacement of Renaissance Cosmology by an Ontology of Evolutionary Self-Organization" in With Darwin beyond Descartes-The Historical Concept of Nature and Overcoming "the Two Cultures". L. Zanzi, ed, Pavia Italy, forthcoming. b) Earley, Joseph "How Do Chemists Know When 'Many' Become 'One'? Can Others Do It Too?"Philosophy of Chemistry and Biochemistry, N. Psarros , ed,(Wuerzburg: Koenigshausen and Neumann, forthcoming 1997). 20) Sokolowski, Robert, Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure, Washington, Catholic University Press, 1993. 21) a) Cobb, John B. Jr. and Griffin, David Ray. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition.(Philadelphia. Westminister Press, 1976. b) Sia, Santiago, Ed. Process Theology and the Christian Doctrine of God,(Petersham, Ma., St. Bede's Publications, 1986) (Word & Spirit, vol.8) c) Bracken, Joseph, S.J. and Suchocki, Marjorie eds Trinity in Process 22) Neville is influenced by Paul Weiss, by Eastern thought, and by John Smith and the American pragmatist tradition. 23) Rom Harré and Daniel Robinson. "What Makes Language Possible. Ethological Foundationalism in Reid and Wittgenstein", Rev. Metaphys.,50.3, 483-483 (1997). In this view human language is connected, in its origin with "natural signs" (facial expressions, postures, etc.). To the extent that this is the case, the reliability of human communication, and hence the reliability of beliefs, is itself a result of a long evolution.


The Physics of Mind and Thought

Philosophy

Regular physics is unsatisfactory in that it fails to take into consideration phenomena relating to mind and meaning, whereas on the other side of the cultural divide such constructs have been studied in detail.  This paper discusses a possible synthesis of the two perspectives.  Crucial is the way systems realising mental function can develop step by step on the basis of the scaffolding mechanisms of Hoffmeyer, in a way that can be clarified by consideration of the phenomenon of language.  Taking into account such constructs, aspects of which are apparent even with simple systems such as acoustically excited water (as with cymatics), potentially opens up a window into a world of mentality excluded from conventional physics as a result of the primary focus of the latter on the matter-like aspect of reality.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE The Physics of Mind and Thought Brian D. Josephson1 Received: 13 March 2019 /Accepted: 28 March 2019 # The Author(s) 2019 Abstract Regular physics is unsatisfactory in that it fails to take into consideration phenomena relating to mind and meaning, whereas on the other side of the cultural divide such constructs have been studied in detail. This paper discusses a possible synthesis of the two perspectives. Crucial is the way systems realising mental function can develop step by step on the basis of the scaffolding mechanisms of Hoffmeyer, in a way that can be clarified by consideration of the phenomenon of language. Taking into account such constructs, aspects of which are apparent even with simple systems such as acoustically excited water, as with cymatics, potentially opens up a window into a world of mentality excluded from conventional physics as a result of the primary focus of the latter on the matter-like aspect of reality. Keywords Mind .Meaning . Semiotics . Semiotic scaffolding . Coordination . Fabrication of form . Two cultures Introduction: the Problem of Mind Henry Stapp (Stapp 2016) is one of a number of scientists who have felt quantum mechanics to be an incomplete account of nature, failing to give a satisfactory account of observation, in which context it appears that an aspect of mind, namely the intention and attention of the observer, is a factor relevant to the outcome. Wheeler (1983) took this concept further, proposing that over time quantum observation, carried out in an appropriate manner, might lead to what he referred to as the 'fabrication of form'. He did not however offer a detailed analysis. The whole question of quantum observation is a confused one, suggesting the need for a new approach, based on some kind of unification involving phenomena of mind, not covered by current approaches, on the one hand, and matter, which is so covered, on the other. Similar situations have been encountered before in physics. For example, at one time it was assumed that transmutation of elements was impossible, but then radioactivity was discovered and, as a result, a whole new landscape became accessible to physics. In the case of mind, while it is accepted that phenomena involving mind, such as problem solving, do occur, such phenomena are generally considered irrelevant to physics, with the result that a similar extension in the scope of physics has not occurred. There is a kind of 'two cultures' divide, where people who are interested in the mechanisms of mind are generally unconcerned with its possible relevance to physics. There have been exceptions, such as Bohm (1985), but the writings of such people are typically dismissed by the mainstream. The fact that mentality, meaning productive information processing, is something very different to anything regular physics has to offer can be clearly illustrated by considering questions such as 'what is a lecture', which cannot be addressed at all within the conventional frameworks. From this, it would seem that words have, in some way, meaning, which meaning is extracted, and used fruitfully, by associated structures. Bohm suggested, with his concept of soma-significance, that matter may be associated with indefinite depths of meaning while again Barad (2007) discussed, in connection with a picture involving a concept known as agential realism, 'the entanglement of matter and meaning'. In the following, a somewhat different approach is taken, perhaps more appropriate to the task of integration into physics, that hopefully will have the capacity to transform radically our understanding of nature in the same way that our understanding of the details of biology transformed our understanding of life. This approach involves a synthesis of a number of existing approaches. In celebration of the ninetieth birthday of Henry Stapp * Brian D. Josephson firstname.lastname@example.com 1 Cavendish Laboratory, 19 J J Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0HE, UK Activitas Nervosa Superior https://doi.org/10.1007/s41470-019-00049-w Signs, Semiotic Scaffolding, and Stepping Stones On the other side of the cultural divide referred to above, there is the fundamental idea of a sign, the study of which originated in the semiotic concepts developed in the nineteenth century by Charles Sanders Peirce, more recently taken up by biologists, thereby founding the subject of biosemiotics (Hoffmeyer 2008a, 2008b). Semiotics emphasises the role of interpretation, a process connecting signs with corresponding objects, or more generally mediation, a process involving situations where a third entity influences the relationship between two others. Such mechanisms play a key role in biology, and one that is essential for effective biological function. This points to something missing from the physical scientists' approach to biology (cf. Josephson 1988), namely that biology involves not only component systems but also the interrelationships between the component systems, which are not fixed in advance, but themselves develop through the mediation of a range of mechanisms. Thus, Hoffmeyer cites the example of the movement of an organism in response to a chemical stimulus (chemotaxis), which behaviour depends on 'a sophisticated interaction of some fifty different proteins'. He introduces, in this connection, the concept of the semiotic scaffolding for a biological process, applied to whatever influence it is that acts upon such a system for it to be able to produce the orderly behaviour necessary for the successful execution of the given process.1 Such an influence involves the processing of information relevant to that process (and accordingly meaningful in that context), leading to the outputting of the code needed to select the action appropriate at the given time. Computer routines and biological systems both work in this way, with biological systems using chemical reactions or neural mechanisms to perform the required computations. Hoffmeyer also introduces stepping stones as a metaphor for describing how systems develop, a stone being related to the knowledge a system has at a particular stage of development of some skill (equivalently, to a particular domain within a space of actions involving that skill). The advance in knowledge associated with stepping from one stone to an adjacent one is supported by scaffolding relevant to advancing in that specific direction. To take the metaphor further, some stones are less reliable than others, so that over time a steadily increasing collection of reliable stones emerges. These concepts collectively provide a picture of how skills advance, which will now be related to a different metaphor, that of a game. Knowing the Game We return now to the question, what is a lecture? According to Foucault (Gutting and Oksala 2018), such questions need to be addressed in historical or archaeological terms (and biosemiotics similarly notes the relevance of history to the understanding of the behaviour of a developing system). Thus, a lecture involves a particular set of practices that originated in the past, continuing because people 'know the game', an idea implicit in Wittgenstein's 'language games', and in the words of the ABBA song: we know the start, we know the end Masters of the scene We've done it all before and now we're back to get some more Thus, participants in games such as these, with lectures as an example of such a 'game', follow procedures previously acquired, resulting in the achievement of some specific end. A number of points can be made in this connection. In the case of language generally, a successful computer model involving a collection of specified procedures has been created byWinograd (1972), simply by realising in computer software theories as to what is involved in linguistic activity. Its success, exemplified by its ability to respond correctly, in the context of a simulated blocks world, to complicated input such as the question 'is there anything which is bigger than every pyramid but is not as wide as the thing that supports it?' supports a view of the structure of mind proposed here, and related to Minsky's 'society of mind' (Minsky 1986), that the diverse capacities of mental activity result simply from the workings of a hierarchy of specialised systems, each related to a range of needs arising in connection with the process as a whole consisting in effective communication. In the case of Winograd's program, the details of the procedures implementing the specialisations concerned were put in by hand, but linguistic activity generally can be interpreted in terms of the stepping stone model, hypothesising the progressive incorporation into the system of such new possibilities as happen to be effective in particular situations. Such incorporation can be expected to be assisted by scaffolding embodying specific concepts, for example the idea that words may relate to objects or relationships in the environment. To this particular principle there can be expected to correspond a scaffolding mechanism that will look for such relationships, and reconfigure itself so as to respond appropriately in the future. Similar scaffolding mechanisms can be expected to exist regarding other aspects of language, their joint activities serving to develop particular languages over time, as well as leading to the acquisition of languages by individuals. Communication through language exemplifies another general aspect of mind, the 'oppositional dynamics' of 1 Subsequent to the submission of this paper, the author became aware of an approach to understanding the complexities of biological systems known as coordination dynamics (Kelso 2013), based upon study of the way component parts of unified entities coordinate with each other through the exchange of meaningful information. Such analyses are likely to clarify the scaffolding concept considerably, leading to more detailed insight into mechanisms of mind. Act Nerv Super Yardley (2010), a reference to the strongly constraining influence of the need for systems to be able to work together, a necessity familiar in the way web servers and web browsers need to follow a specific protocol in order for information transfer to be effective. Pairs of systems in such a situation, such as those of speaker and listener in the case of language, or specification in code and what is specified by that code, need to establish how to achieve coordination, in general with the support of appropriate scaffolding. Once techniques relevant to a skill such as language have been established by a group of people, others can copy these techniques and take advantage of them. Abstractions, Symbolic Processes, and Truth Sign use, as originally argued by Peirce and subsequently developed by Deacon (1998) and by Favareau (2015), is of three types, iconic, indexical, and symbolic. The first two types of sign involve entities in the immediate environment, but symbolic use, which use appears to be confined to human beings, can involve manipulations concerning entities absent from the immediate environment, which faculty is attributed by Deacon to a human ability to avoid being too involved in the current situation during mental activity. This can be understood in terms of memory mechanisms that can, as it were, hold on to signs so as to be able to act systematically with them, and thereby develop 'games' such as mathematics. Thus, it can be argued (Josephson 2012) that geometry originated on the basis of activities involving physical lines and points, facts about which were idealised by Euclid, whose thinking led to a set of axioms and to derivative theorems, as a result of the step by step advances in competence of the kind discussed. The fact that signs, though originating in concrete reality, can subsequently be manipulated in ways not connected with the situation that an individual is in at the time makes possible 'symbolic fantasies'. This raises the question of what constrains such abstractions to make them meaningful. In the earlier indexical use of signs, involving relationships, consistency (related to oppositional dynamics) between symbolic activity and what is present in the environment is important, and this may apply equally to symbolic abstraction: for example, a mathematician may fantasise that minus one has a square root and then try to erect a consistent scheme at the level of symbolic activity, thereby creating a synthetic reality that others can act in. This is what conversation is about; individuals develop tools for creating a synthetic reality on the basis of their past experience (compare this with building real objects with a construction kit, on the basis of descriptions in language) and can cooperate in their use. Which Physics? The discussion so far has largely featured an informationprocessing perspective, ignoring the question of the underlying physics. Its motivation was the idea (cf. Josephson 2002; Barad 2007) that mind processes are relevant at levels other than familiar ones such as brains and are involved in contexts such as quantum observation. Thus, the question arises of what circumstances might give rise to mind-like phenomena. The little-known subject of cymatics (Reid 2017) is of interest in that it shows that phenomena related to those of mind can occur even in apparently simple systems such as water. The field of study involves the use of an instrument known as the cymascope, used to observe the surface of water being excited acoustically with a signal that may for example be one at a specific frequency (Sheldrake and Sheldrake 2017), or one derived from music (Buchanan 2012). As the amplitude of the signal is increased, at some point an instability occurs, accompanied initially by chaos but, under certain conditions, the system settles down to a specific spatial pattern dependent upon the signal, with a superimposed oscillation. We have here in effect a system 'discovering' a stable response to a signal. More surprisingly, applying to the water a signal derived from an echo-locating dolphin is found to regenerate the shape of the object that was the source of the echo, which ability may depend on the formation of structure in the water. It remains to be seen exactly what underlies such phenomena, and whether higher levels of complexity, involving mind-like behaviour, can originate by similar means. In the above, we have situations where two physical entities (e.g. oscillation of the water and its spatial pattern) each influence the other with, in some cases, a stable situation ultimately developing, while in other cases the systems remain effectively uncorrelated. This would seem to be an important physical mechanism underlying semiotic behaviour, a third system providing the background mechanism underlying the mutual influence while, in cases such as discussed in connection with language, units may come to combine in more and more complex ways, with configurations emerging possessed with overall stability, 'stepping' from one configuration to another as new potentially stable combinations emerge through chance encounters. Links with Quantum Mechanics The question remains to what extent a unified approach, combining the above analyses with those of conventional physics, may be possible, involving for example the discovery of parallels between quantum phenomena and mind such as those discussed in Josephson (2002). Ideas as to how the two domains are related have also been discussed by Barad (2007), who for example discusses the 'apparatus' referred to by Bohr Act Nerv Super in connection with quantum observation in ways paralleling the semiotic scaffolding of Hoffmeyer, both of which have the effect of directing development in specific ways. Barad introduces also a concept of 'intra-actions' (interactions within a unitary system) that parallels both entanglement and oppositional dynamics in the way they involve two or more systems acting as one. Another potential connection is one with 'reverse causation', a concept presuming an influence backwards in time (e.g. Aharonov and Gruss 2005), though in the current approach the backwards in time influence is merely apparent. Sutherland (2016) for example argues that specifying a state in terms of some future situation as well as the past enables one to restore locality in the case of entangled states and to replace statistical descriptions by ontological ones. But, to a large extent, the same applies in situations governed by mind-like processes, in which context reverse causation need not be assumed. To see this, consider the fact that if we know where a person is at the present time, then many factors need to be taken into account in predicting the future, and the conclusion may have to be expressed in statistical terms. If however we know where a person is going to be some time in the future, then the uncertainty may be removed, making it possible to predict the intermediate activity. Summary The basic problem with quantum mechanics is that a person's decision as to what aspect of nature to observe can have real consequences, and it is unclear how such mental activity can be integrated with traditional physics; we cannot simply leave out the observer. A thesis in the above has been that semiotics (sign theory) will play a central role in such a future integrated physics, a basic task for such a future physics being that of bridging the gap between signs and the phenomena addressed by current physics, thereby arriving at an integrated point of view. A similar situation arises in conventional science, where a gap of this kind exists between fundamental physics and biology, one that can be bridged taking due account of a succession of levels, utilising a range of specialised approaches to deal with these. In the present case, the basic concept is that of the semiotic triad, where one entity influences the relationships between two others. Under suitable circumstances, such relationships emerge spontaneously. From such a starting point, functional complexity can build up as has been discussed in connection with language. Further, language can evolve so as to be able to symbolise abstractions including mathematics, potentially leading, in line with Wheeler's 'fabrication of form', to the origination of universes subject to mathematical laws, and the possible influence of mind mechanisms on life processes in such a universe, and on the course of evolution. In principle, it should be possible for a detailed picture along such lines to be built up over the course of time, following traditional methodologies for evaluating ideas in physics such as that of constructing and testing suitable models. This will not be a straightforward process, but there may be no other way to advance beyond the unavoidable limitations associated with the outdated idea that the complexities of reality can be reduced to a formula.2 Compliance with Ethical Standards Conflict of Interest The author declares no conflicts of interest. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons At t r ibut ion 4 .0 In te rna t ional License (h t tp : / / creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. References Aharonov, Y. and Eyal Y. Gruss (2005). Two-time interpretation of quantum mechanics. https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0507269.pdf Barad, K. (2007).Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-3917-5. Bohm, D. (1985) Soma-significance: a new notion of the relationship between the physical and the mental, http://www.rebprotocol.net/ somasig.pdf. Buchanan, Gary Robert (2012). Moonlight Sonata cymatics. https:// youtu.be/dv9UMJbU1kI Deacon, T. (1998). The symbolic species: the co-evolution of language and the brain. New York: W W Norton and Co. Favareau, D. (2015). Symbols are grounded not in things, but in scaffolded relations and their semiotic constraints (or how the referential generality of symbol scaffolding grows minds). Biosemiotics, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-015-9234-3 https://www. researchgate.net/publication/277607766_Symbols_are_Grounded_ not_in_Things_but_in_Scaffolded_Relations_and_their_Semiotic_ Constraints_Or_How_the_Referential_Generality_of_Symbol_ Scaffolding_Grows_Minds. Gutting, Gary and Oksala, Johanna (2018), Michel Foucault, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.) https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/foucault/ Hankey, A. (2015). A complexity basis for phenomenology: how information states at criticality offer a new approach to understanding experience of self, being and time. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 119, 288–302 https://philarchive.org/rec/ HANACB-4. Hoffmeyer, J. (2008a). Semiotic scaffolding of living systems. In M. Barbieri (Ed.), Introduction to biosemiotics: the new biological 2 Note that, for practical reasons, not all relevant research areas could be discussed in the above analysis, examples of such additional research being the neurosciences and neural networks, complexity biology (Hankey 2015), Kastner's version of the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics involving 'the reality of possibility' (Kastner 2012) which, as in the present formulation, does not invoke reverse causation, and finally meaning associated with musical forms (Josephson and Carpenter 1996). Act Nerv Super synthesis (Vol. 2008, pp. 149–166). Dordrecht: Springer http:// jhoffmeyer.dk/One/scientific-writings/semiotic-scaffolding.pdf. Hoffmeyer, J. (2008b) Biosemiotics: an examination into the signs of life and the life of signs. University of Chicago Press. Josephson, B. D. (1988). Limits to the universality of quantum mechanics. Found Phys., 1195-204(1988), 18 https://philpapers.org/rec/ JOSLTT-2. Josephson, B. D. (2002). Beyond quantum theory: a realist psychobiological interpretation of reality' revisited. Biosystems, 64(1–3), 43–45, Jan. 2002. arXiv:quant-ph/0105027. Josephson, Brian D. (2012). Biological observer-participation and Wheeler's 'law without law'. Integral Biomathics: tracing the road to reality', Proceedings of iBioMath 2011, Paris and ACIB '11, Stirling UK, P. L. Simeonov, L. S. Smith, A. C. Ehresmann (Eds.), Springer-Verlag, 2012. arXiv:1108.4860 Josephson, Brian D. and Tethys Carpenter (1996).What can music tell us about the nature of the mind? A platonic model. Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak & Alwyn C. Scott (eds.), Toward a Science of Consciousness, MIT Press. 1996. https://philpapers.org/rec/ JOSWCM Kastner, R.E. (2012). The possibilist transactional interpretation and relativity. arXiv:1204.5227 Kelso, Scott (2013),Coordination dynamics. Encyclopedia of complexity and systems science. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ 301949127_Coordination_Dynamics Minsky, M. (1986). The society of mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. Reid, John Stuart (2017). Secrets of cymatics. https://youtu.be/ uMK3OVBjx2Q Sheldrake and Sheldrake. (2017). Determinants of Faraday wave-patterns in water samples oscillated vertically at a range of frequencies from 50-200 Hz. Water, 9, 1–27, October 25, 2017. http://www. waterjournal.org/uploads/vol9/sheldrake/WATER.2017.10. Sheldrake.pdf. Stapp, H.P. (2016). Solutions to the mind-body problem? https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=vcfKKxFLDUY Sutherland, Roderick (2016). How retrocausality helps. arXiv:1706. 02290. Wheeler, J.A. (1983). Law without law. Quantum theory and measurement, ed. Wheeler, J.A. and Zurek W.H.,182–213. https:// what-buddha-said.net/library/pdfs/wheeler_law_without_law.pdf. Winograd, T. (1972). Understanding natural language. Cognitive Psychology, 3, 1–191. Yardley, I. (2010) The circular theory. https://www.circular-reality.com Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Act Nerv Super


Carnap on Quantum Mechanics

Philosophy

This entry reviews Rudolf Carnap's philosophical views on the quantum mechanics of his time. It also offers some thoughts on how Carnap might have reacted to some recent developments in the foundations of quantum mechanics.

ar X iv :2 30 4. 09 03 7v 1 [ ph ys ic s. hi st -p h] 1 8 A pr 2 02 3 Carnap on Quantum Mechanics Sebastian Horvat∗ Iulian D. Toader† Central to Carnap's view on quantum mechanics (QM), as expressed in his 1966 book, Philosophical Foundations of Physics, is the somewhat cautious claim that philosophical questions about the nature and implications of QM, but especially questions about its language and logic, cannot be properly addressed until after the theory has been presented as a formalized axiomatic system, which he took to be still a work in progress of the scientific community. This might suggest that, unlike his reflections on other theories, Carnap's thoughts on QM were not entirely up to date, which is what the editors of a recent anthology emphasize (Lutz and Tuboly 2021, 5). To be sure, Carnap seems to have implied that, for example, John von Neumann's treatment of the theory, in his 1932 book, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, is insufficient as a basis for answering philosophical questions of the kind Carnap thought should be asked about QM. Furthermore, although his 1966 book is based on lectures given in the 1950s, he did not take into account other rigorous approaches, like George W. Mackey's 1963 book, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, which would arguably have satisfied to a larger extent Carnap's conditions for proper philosophical analysis. Indeed, he also appears to have ignored what would become foundational milestones of QM (e.g., the theorems proved in Gleason 1957 and Bell 1964). That Carnap, nevertheless, had a sound understanding of the basic principles of QM is beyond doubt, and claims to the effect that he was only "familiar with relativity theory" and not with quantum theory (Faye and Jaksland 2021, 118) are simply false. ∗Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna †Institute Vienna Circle, University of Vienna Invited contribution forthcoming for The Carnap Handbook, Springer, edited by Georg Schiemer and Christian Damböck. 1 We start by briefly describing Carnap's own presentation of these principles, and the answers that he thought they suggested to some philosophical questions like the nature of scientific explanation and fundamental ontology, the meaning of theoretical terms, and the existence of free will. Then we turn to the issues that Carnap thought could not yet be properly addressed by philosophers, like the nature of the language and logic of QM, and to the metaphilosophy that made him believe that that was the case. We end by drawing on his work on the semantics of classical logic and on the epistemology of rational reconstruction in order to formulate some questions that Carnap would have probably addressed concerning some contemporary approaches to QM. "Indeterminism in Quantum Physics" – the very last chapter of (Carnap 1966) – starts by presenting some basic principles of QM. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is characterized as "a fundamental law that must hold as long as the laws of quantum theory are maintained in their present form" (op. cit., 284). Carnap duly noted that the limitations entailed by this principle cannot be reduced through any possible improvements of our measuring techniques, since they are not due to the imperfections of our measuring instruments. The mathematical representation of a quantum state by means of a wave function defined on an abstract higherdimensional space, i.e. on configuration space, is carefully presented. Carnap described the deterministic dynamics of quantum-mechanical systems, governed by the Schrödinger equation, and the probabilistic character of all predictions of the results of any measurements performed on such systems, briefly touching on the QM of macroscopic objects (like satellites) as well. On the basis of his understanding of the basic principles of QM, Carnap offered, throughout the book, his answers to some important philosophical questions, which he obviously thought could already be addressed on that basis. Thus, on Carnap's view, the necessarily statistical character of quantum-mechanical explanations cannot be regarded as a manifestation of our ignorance, but as an expression of the basic structure of the world, which entails that all physical explanations can only be statistical, under the assumption that all laws of physics reduce to the fundamental principles of 2 QM (such as the Uncertainty Principle) (op. cit., 9). Relatedly, Carnap reported as an "interesting speculation" that QM might indicate that this very structure, and thus presumably its fundamental ontology, including space and time, is all discrete, rather than continuous (op. cit., 89). Furthermore, according to Carnap, QM clearly suggests that there can be no explicit definitions of quantum-theoretical concepts in terms of empirical concepts. But he noted that a more satisfactory answer to the question about the empirical meaning of quantum properties like spin, for instance, would require "an elaborate theory" (op. cit., 221), by which he meant a formalized axiomatization of QM, i.e., what he had called a physical calculus together with a set of semantic or correspondence rules that connect this calculus to its empirical interpretations (Carnap 1939, 60). Carnap also argued that QM is irrelevant to philosophical debates on the existence of free will. This is because, on his view, indeterminate quantum jumps, though random, cannot play any role in decision making since "it is not likely that these are points at which human decisions are made" (Carnap 1966, 221). But even if they were, that would only make our decisions equally random, and so they would simply not be choices at all, but chances. And even if the range of quantum randomness were much greater than in the actual world, as described by QM, that would only decrease the possibility of free choices. This issue has been since reconsidered, of course, especially by defenders of libertarianism (see, e.g., Kane 2014). There are, according to Carnap, also questions that cannot be addressed properly on the basis of the formulations of QM that Carnap was aware of. These include questions about the logic and language of the theory. He wrote: "The revolutionary nature of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle has led some philosophers and physicists to suggest that certain basic changes be made in the language of physics. [...] The most extreme proposals for such modification concern a change in the form of logic used in physics." (Carnap 1966, 288) Among these proposals, he recalled Martin Strauss' revision of the formation rules in the language of QM, motivated by the meaninglessness of classical conjunctions of statements about conjugate observables, like momentum and position (for discussion of Carnap's reply to Strauss and his 3 exchanges with Bohr, see Faye and Jaksland 2021). Carnap further mentioned Garrett Birkhoff and von Neumann's (1936) change of the transformation rules, by the replacement of the law of distribution (of conjunction over disjunction) by that of modularity, as well as Reichenbach's (1944) replacement of the law of the excluded third by that of the excluded fourth. However, unlike Putnam (1968), Carnap was not ready to take lessons in logic from QM. Rather, he was inclined to think that it was not a change in logic, but the change in the causality structure implied by quantum-mechanical laws (i.e. indeterminism), that made QM revolutionary. The question whether the logic of physics ought to be revised is not one that could be addressed properly without first presenting "the entire field of physics stated in a systematic form that would include formal logic." (Carnap 1966, 290) Even though he is not fully explicit about it, it is quite clear that Carnap, in accord with the tendencies that manifested throughout his philosophy starting with his work the 1920s (e.g., Carnap 1928), demanded a rational reconstruction of modern physics (for discussions on Carnap's notion of rational reconstruction, see e.g. Demopoulos 2007; Beaney 2013). A rational reconstruction would require modern physics to be couched in terms of a partially interpreted syntactic structure that includes, along with the logico-mathematical axioms, theoretical sentences and correspondence rules that partially endow that structure with empirical meaning by relating theoretical sentences to observation sentences. As things stood at the time when Carnap wrote and published his 1966 book, he did not think that such a rational reconstruction of modern physics had been given: "[Its] language is still, except for its mathematical part, largely a natural language; that is, its rules are learned implicitly in practice and seldom formulated explicitly." (op. cit., 291) This tacitly implies that even von Neumann's (1932) and Mackey's (1963) rigorous formulations of QM – widely regarded as mathematical axiomatizations of QM par excellence – fail to qualify as rational reconstructions of modern physics, despite their mathematical clarity and their transparent use of the axiomatic method. We think that there are two main reasons that underlie this negative assessment. First, as mentioned above, a rational reconstruction requires not only the logico-mathematical struc4 tures of a scientific theory to be couched in a formal language, but its empirical aspects as well: a formal language should be introduced, whose terms are split into theoretical and observational ones, and the theory should be formulated as a conjunction of theoretical sentences and correspondence rules. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, note that Carnap did not refer to the lack of systematization of QM in particular, but of modern physics as a whole: thus, even a complete rational reconstruction of QM alone, would still not provide Carnap with a proper basis for discussing alternative logico-linguistic frameworks, as that would not comprise gravitational and/or spacetime physics. Therefore, Carnap's unwillingness to take lessons in logic from modern physics is caused not only by the absence of a fully formalized axiomatization of the latter, but also by its disunity, which is still manifest today in the tensions between quantum and gravitational physics. Nevertheless, although Carnap considered the applications of logical methods to modern physics to be still in their infancy, while recalling the vast success that such methods enjoyed in the foundations of mathematics, he expressed himself rather optimistically: "I am convinced that two tendencies ... will prove equally effective in sharpening and clarifying the language of physics: the application of modern logic and set theory, and the adoption of the axiomatic method in its modern form, which presupposes a formalized language system." (op. cit., 291) Since Carnap's 1966 book, not only has the range of applications of QM been significantly widened, including developments in particle physics, condensed matter theory and quantum information technologies, but there have been important advances in our philosophical understanding of QM as well. The space of viable ways of interpreting its formalism has been extensively explored, bringing about novel theories and interpretations ranging from purportedly realist-friendly hidden variables and many-worlds theories to anti-realist ones such as QBism (e.g., Freire Jr et al. 2022). As Gleason (1957), Bell (1964), Kochen and Specker (1967), and others taught us, classical-like models of certain empirical phenomena must violate some (arguably) desirable features such as locality and non-contextuality, hence causing problems for "naive" realist construals of quantum phenomena. Even though some of these seminal results 5 were already produced during the times when Carnap was active, their significance has been recognized by the broader philosophical and scientific community only later, which partly explains why there is no reference to them in his writings. But what would Carnap have thought about these results, had he been aware of them? What would he have to tell us today about QM? Carnap's views on realism in science, as presented in his works in the 50s and 60s (e.g., Carnap 1950), indicate quite clearly that he would take disputes over which account of QM provides the correct description of what is "really out there" (be it particles, flashes, many worlds, etc.) as meaningless pseudo-disputes, since they ask "external questions", i.e., questions that are not posed within a certain linguistic framework, but which concern the framework itself. Still, we think he would find the debates over current interpretations of QM as fruitful, if understood as non-metaphysical disputes over the best way of formulating the theory, where alternatives are evaluated on pragmatic criteria such as simplicity and amenability to unification with other areas of physics. Carnap would not interpret the no-go results of Bell, Kochen and Specker, and others, as signaling obstacles to extending realism to the microscopic domain. Rather, he would most likely see them as indicating metasemantic limitations to providing a representationalist semantics for the formalism of QM. Incidentally, Richard Healey has recently defended a view along such lines, which takes QM to require an inferentialist semantics (Healey, 2017). On this view, it is neither logic, nor ontology that makes QM revolutionary, but rather the metasemantic consideration that the rules of the theory more exactly, the circumstances and consequences of their applications determine the meaning assigned to its basic non-logical terms, e.g. quantum states and observables. How would Carnap have reacted to this proposal? As discussed in other entries of this Handbook, whereas Carnap endorsed a representationalist semantics for non-logical, descriptive terms, he did endorse an inferentialist semantics for logical constants, as can be seen most clearly in his Logical Syntax : "let any postulates and any rules of inference be chosen arbitrarily; then this choice, whatever it may be, will determine what meaning is to be assigned to the fundamental logical symbols." (Car6 nap 1937, xv, emphasis removed) Famously, after considering classical logic as a formalized axiomatic system, he realized that its rules fail to univocally determine the meaning of logical terms (Carnap 1943). He proved the existence of non-normal interpretations of the classical logical calculus, i.e. interpretations which make the connectives non-truth-functional, e.g. by allowing true classical disjunctions with false disjuncts. Since such interpretations are not isomorphic to the normal truth-tables, this came to be considered as a categoricity problem for inferentialism about classical logic (Raatikainen 2008), to which Carnap himself already attempted to provide a solution (Carnap, 1943). Relating this back to Healey, even if Carnap were indeed to follow him in taking the metasemantic restrictions suggested by the no-go theorems to provide a sufficient reason for extending inferentialism to the non-logical terms of QM, he would have probably applied to QM the same test that he applied to classical logic: namely, he would have wanted to find out whether the rules of the theory, as understood by Healey, or more exactly the physical rules (i.e., Carnap's P-rules) of its rational reconstruction, are categorical, and if they turn out to be otherwise, he might have urged one to find a solution to this new categoricity problem. In closing, recall that Carnap was rather cautious in drawing conclusions about logic from the physics of his time, as he deemed the latter's axiomatizations to be still work in progress. Would his assessment of today's physics be any different? Are there any axiomatizations of QM, of the type he demanded as a precondition for a proper philosophical analysis of its logic and language, and have they led, as he had expected, to the creation of new concepts that helped "rebuild the theory" in ways that further developed it (Carnap 1966, 291)? There are certainly no complete rational reconstructions of modern physics, in Carnap's sense (again, the unification of quantum and spacetime theory is an ongoing research program), nor of QM alone for that matter, so he would most likely still not be convinced to consider revising logic due to the peculiarities of QM. Nevertheless, there have been some recently developed axiomatizations of QM that Carnap might have been interested in, namely those axiomatizations that derive certain structural features of QM (e.g., its state space) from information-theoretic 7 principles, i.e. principles concerning the (im)possibilities of encoding, transmitting and decoding information with physical systems (e.g., Hardy 2001; Chiribella et al. 2011). Even though these axiomatizations in their present form do not come even close to a full Carnapian rational reconstruction of QM, as they are not even couched in a formal language, they might still pave the way towards one. References Beaney, Michael: Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy: The Development of the Idea of Rational Reconstruction. In Erich H. Reck (ed.), The Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013, 231-260 Bell, John S.: On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox. 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