Notes for: Guide to Life in a Dying Universe
Allan Ralph Andrews, born September 13th 1939, Long Beach California, Saint Mary’s Hospital at 4:03 AM Pacific Time to Jean Thompson Andrews Colaluca and Ralph B. Andrews of Long Beach, California. This written in Oildale California, Bakersfield, Kern County, August 14th 2015
The key to life in a dying universe is understanding the laws of thermodynamics. First, mass energy, the stuff of existence, is neither created nor destroyed, this is the first law of thermodynamics, furthermore, as explained by Brian Swimme in “the Universe is a Green Dragon, Bear, 1984, what we know as energy from the outside is only the allurement, the attraction and repulsion that we experience from the inside as feeling, passion, emotion. When the energy predominates over the structure and information we call it feeling, and when the information predominates we call in consciousness, thought, reason, knowledge, observation. Existence is a battlefield between the energy aspect and the information and structure aspect of nature, but both are eternal, do not die or disappear.
So what is at stake is not the immortality of the information potential and the passion potential and the energy that creates it. That survives regardless. Furthermore, the very energy expenditure that is killing the universe is the energy expenditure that feeds us and our children and has brought us into existence and created us.
Because the physicists and astronomers study this universe it is in their interest to have us pay attention to what they have discovered about our cosmos. But, we are energy and form and passion and thought generated within that form. How can we know that all of this does not reappear when our universe dies as a universe only to become a particle in another greater universe and that this process has been going on forever and will continue forever constantly recreating us and our world in a new set of relationships and perturbations.
After all universes of one kind or another are constantly dying and passing away, the universe of the horse, of the water mill, of the steam boat, of the steam engine, of the small farm, of the feudal lord, of the medieval village, of the guild, of the craftsman, of the shoemaker, of the local baker, of the portrait painter, of the tailor, of the milkman, of the country doctor, of the cowboy, of the hunter-gather, of the aboriginal, of the Cro-magnon, etc..
We do not understand that our life is aboriginal, that they day will come when the right to be who we are and live as we do when some of the wild is still wild will be considered a priceless gift.
The universe must die to drive the energy expansion that creates us. This is explained in detail in Evolution as Entropy, 2nd Edition, 1988, Daniel R. Brooks and E. O. Wiley, University of Chicago Press, and has come up again recently in “A New Physics Theory of Life” in Scientific American, from Quanta magazine, January 28, 2014, by Natalie Wolchover.
This involves work by Jeremy England at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a mathematical formula that explains heat dissipation effects in clumps of carbon atoms. All of the above depends upon the work of IlyaPriogogine and open energy systems. Recently, Chris Jarzynski and Gavin Crooks have shown that increased entropy production also increases the occurrence of irreversible conditions.
Life is characterized by these irreversible conditions of complex heat dispersion that can be reproduced over and over again once a particular threshold has been crossed. The details of this process are explained in works like “Evolution as Entropy,” cited above.
Basically what happens is the endurance of energy flux predicted by the 1st Law of thermodynamics, creates, in endless space time, an infinite flux that makes the improbable probable. This infinite flux generates chaos, which, when compounded with order, can generate complex systems according to the principles of “complexity theory,” see references elsewhere in my writings. Energy dissipative structures will compete for energy and generate natural selection for those structures which conserve the energy and generate the complex states that can maintain energy stores long enough to survive competition with other structures.
Eventually simple feed back systems will emerge to sustain this energy conservation characterized by set points and homeostatic feedback, properties that can be analyzed and compared to adaptive set points. In the evolution of life, these set points emerge as genetic systems that are self replicating and maintain adaptive phenotypes and are protected by speciation from intrusion by foreign gene systems. Mutation generates new genes for new set points and the resulting phenotypic expression must compete with their rivals resulting in natural selection and the extinction of maladaptive expressions. Finally, complex reproductive systems emerge involving population genetics, sexual reproduction, hybridization and phenomena like adaptive polymorphism.
Human systems have an additional level of complexity as the result of the emergence of language and the development of philosophical and scientific language that has allowed the development of mathematical and logical models of these very processes.
The problem that we face in the review of the results of these models is the natural attempt of the reviewer to try to create a science of science, a model of models that functions in the same way that the mathematics and science that is being review functions. This metascience is not possible. It is not possible to lift the coherent notion of truth used for mathematic and logic and the correspondence notion of truth used for science to a meta level. The only possible standard must be a pragmatic one, a notion of a higher truth that works rather than one that corresponds to the actual world, or the actual facts.
The reason for that is simple, the presence of an observer and a dialogue between observers makes any other approach fail. Julius Kovesi, in “Moral Notions,” show that our “material elements” of truth come out of a language system that generates “moral notions,” and “formal element,” or values. These non-factual elements cannot be kept out of language systems. In “Dilemmas,” Gilbert Ryle, shows how competing language system problems arise from category mistakes where ideas belonging in one category are falsely transferred to another. Much of what goes for metaphysical discussion is nothing but a series of these category mistakes confounded by appeals to authority, special pleading, argument by intimidation, circular reasoning, hasty generalization, appeal to emotion, and appeal to numbers. Science does not have special status and scientific arguments cannot automatically trump other systems.
A good example might be my personal experience. Astrology has done a better job of explaining incidents in my personal life in the last month than science has. From a practical point of view I must assume that astrology and astronomy share a larger metaphysical structure that must, somehow, allow for both to coexist, because both are useful in the functional aspects of my life. Books like, “Cosmos and Psyche,” by Richard Tarnas, Viking, 2006 and “The Cosmic Influence,” by Francis King, Danbury Press, 1976, Aldus Press, are examples of this.
Naturally the skeptical community will not even listen to this approach because of the presence of Uri Geller as one of the consultants for the Aldus Press work. Anything Geller says is automatically false because he is labeled as a fraud, but this is a logical fallacy known as the Ad Hominem, a fallacy very popular with the skeptical community.
The works of William James provide a welcome alternative to the nonsense generated by the wars of believers and skeptics in search of a fundamentalist truth of pure correspondence that is not available in a world shot through with the observer aspect of all quantum mechanical events. As Alfred North Whitehead noted in Process and Reality, in the new world of quantum events, you no longer have “observations,” you have “prehensions.”
In his classical work, “The Principles of Psychology,” 1891, William James discusses the problems of consciousness and observation at great length. These same ideas are taken up in great detail in a modern work titled “Anxious,” by Joseph LeDoux, Viking, 2015
More than a hundred years of psychology do not seem to have solved the problems which James brings up in his “Principles.” Science is able to comment on the locations in the brain and the brain functions that generate these problems, but Joseph LeDoux seems to accuse his fellow psychologists and neurologists and behaviorist with the “fallacy of hasty generalization” in respect to the conclusions they often jump to that would appear to solve some riddles discussed by James in his review of thought and consciousness and self in his 1891 work “Principles.”
The philosopher Gilbert Ryle is famous for his review of some of these hasty generalizations and their implications in his “The Concept of Mind,” Barnes and Noble, 1949. Ryle traces some of these problems to “Category Mistakes” in Dilemmas, Cambridge, 1964.
The problem here is rooted in distinctions as to what truth is, singular, correspondence, coherence, or plural and pragmatic as the later philosophy of William James and John Dewey. If we examine this situations presented by the examples above, it seems clear that a correspondence theory of truth and a simple notion of what the truth is will work only within a particular category of investigation.
LeDoux points out that most of what we call consciousness is only that part of brain activity that is reviewed by the verbal left frontal lobe and its working memory version of hippocampal and medial temporal “What” and “Where” and “When.” The frontal lobe “Who” gives the stamp of consciousness on any “When” transferred from the hippocampus and “What” and “Where” that the hippocampus and temporal lobe have rescued from association areas in the parietal and occipital lobes in the process of naming things and developing speech recognition for these names. Language is a key factor in consciousness and the language function of consciousness is biased toward the more verbal left hemisphere focus on facts.
Any public approach to thought will necessarily focus on its unique human characteristics because only humans have language.
But, William James is correct in his emphasis on the pragmatic aspect of truth because these relationships are too complex to ever be able to trust human reason, human cognition, human language, debate to develop a real correspondence and coherent truth. All is necessarily tainted with numerous fallacies, nothing comes out of the frontal lobes, nothing comes out of any form of human socialization, free of appeals to special pleading, circular reasoning, emotion, numbers, authority, argument by intimidation, appeals to ignorance, hasty generalization, ad hominem, it is impossible to be free of this logical friction and one grain of these bits of sand is enough to corrode the whole.
Only pragmatic estimations of truth can be trusted. If it seems to cohere and correspond but does not spin, does not provide useful predictions, or attempts to discourage us from trusting useful predictions, toss it out.
There are lots of indications from psychology and science indicating that I should not trust my intuitionalist ethics and my astrological predictions which have served me far better than any of the manure delivered by sociology, anthropology, psychology that are all seeking more grants, to sell magazines like Scientific American and Skeptical Inquirer, it is money that is influencing their game, They do not like the competition from astrologers and, thus, discourage their use.
They demand that I come up with some correspondence and coherence related truth, facts that I can use that will justify my use of astrological predictions. But, they have no right to make that claim. Claims like that spoil science, make it into a new form of the ancient inquisition, a branch of government and a business that feathers its own nest rather than seeks real truth. Would you have seen Darwin making public claims against astrology? William James in his Principles of Psychology,considers the dogma of the soul, even though he feels forced to dismiss it for his purposes.
For my part, I have a system that is one part Buddhist, one part Jain, one part Japanese Folk, and one part Chinese Folk, one part agnostic physics, one part materialist chemistry, one part reductionist biochemistry, one part naturalistic biology, one part socialistic psychology, one part ecological geography, one part futurist geology, one part fantasy astronomy, one part medieval Catholic cosmology, one part imaginative Protestant mythology, one part Muslim Sufi religion, and one part Hindu theology. All of which works quite well together if you leave each in its proper place, the skeptical and material forms of thought for the finite and measurable here and now and the rest governed by the infinite flux that makes the improbable probable and is the creative origin of all lesser things, including this world and its events.
The world is too impressed with what science and technology can do and not aware enough of their limitations. There are areas where there has been no progress at all, in fact what we have is regression. The mythology of the Greeks is superior to that of the Christians, the philosophy of Socrates and Confucius is superior to that of their students. There has been no real progress since Socrates, Pythagoras, Confucius, Buddha in the area of basic truths, since the Axial Age there is only regression. No current work matches the Central Harmony of Confucius, the Apology and Symposium of Plato, the Dhammapada of Buddhism, the Book of Dao, the I Ching. Now, It is all a poor imitation, a senseless scribble of fundamentalist misstatements.
The packaging is much improved and the labels and weights are very accurate, but the packages are empty and contain no fresh or worthy food for the hunger of the soul.
My system is a modified three dimensional I Ching flattened on to a wheel with the information system in the eldest daughter core, the hippocampus of the human brain and the spin of information on the opposite pole, now flattened in to the rim of eldest son yang energy.
At the top, Heaven Trigram generates the infinite flux that make the improbable probable out of the conservation of energy in the first law of thermodynamics and the endless and boundless space time flux that is its product, spilling over into countless systems of cosmos and quantum creation. This Heaven Trigram source generates improbable set points out of its multiple mutations that are the genes and memes, the set points and ideals, the virtue ethics of Wind Trigram.
These set points arise out of the complexity theory implications and competition within the Chaos of Flame Trigram and evolution as entropy in the resulting natural selection between competing energy dissipative structure systems. Emerging from the resulting complexity are various forms of population genetics and hybrid formation in Lake Trigram and homeostatic feedback systems and order in Water Well Trigram generating properties and structures in Earth Trigram that generate analysis and speciation and genetic isolation in Mountain Trigram and application of monitoring of results to the set points and feedback operations of Wind and Water Well Trigram.
The emerging world appears in Heaven Trigram as source, Flame as competitive exclusion and Thunder as evolution as entropy, generating the natural systems of the visible world, and the mental systems of the internal world. Mental systems turn energy and information inward upon themselves creating passion and knowledge, forming pleasure and joy from integration and suffering and pain from disintegration, generating values from self reflection and surface expressions and behavior and the associated products of the above systems.
Astrology and birth and rebirth occur in the larger complex generated by the integration of all things in the set points of Wind, the order of Water Well and the complex interaction and synchronicity of Lake Trigram and manifestations of the infinite flux that makes the improbable probable in Heaven Trigram.
This creates a complex system in which Buddhist Nirvana, Jainistmonadology, Chinese and Japanese folk religion, Hinduism and Sufi Islam, transcendental Christianity and Catholicism, can coexist with the known scientific and rationally interpreted world.
The tremendous control that science gives us over the physical aspects of our world causes us to expect too much from it and to ask too much from it. We are aware just how complex the engineering of a machine or a computer can be, how complex the anatomy of an organic system can be, but in our modern world we have ceased to believe that such complexity is possible in the unseen and in the larger system that links the seen to the unseen. This is a huge mistake. We know just how much damage the fallacies used by religious institutions have done to us with argument based on special pleading, appeal to emotion, appeal to authority. Why is it so hard to understand that the same fallacies in the hands of the materialists are just as dangerous, just as unreliable. Popes and materialist dictators are equally capable of being vicious and irrational. It is worship of naked power and influence that is problem. When the Church has the power we yield to the Church and when Science demonstrates the power we yield to Science.