Читать книгу God Does Not Play Dice: The Fulfillment of Einstein's Quest for Law and Order in Nature - David Ph.D. Shiang - Страница 5

Everything you know is wrong.

The Firesign Theatre

More than thirty-seven years ago, I began my undergraduate studies at MIT with thoughts of someday unlocking nature’s secrets through the methods of science. Having been raised in an environment where science reigned supreme, I was eager to join a community that was unified in the pursuit of fundamental truths. Like many of my fellow students, I thought that a scientific career would be a sure route towards understanding the mysteries of the universe. I could think of nothing that was more important, and I relished the idea of contributing to an ever-growing body of knowledge.

As I progressed through my freshman year, however, I developed the uneasy feeling that something was missing amid all the math and formulas. It had seemed to me even before entering the citadel of science and technology that there were important areas of inquiry beyond the scope of the sciences, and I began to find my educational experience to be very limiting. As I got to know the atmosphere at MIT, where “hard” sciences like physics and chemistry were deified and everything else was considered second-rate at best, I became increasingly convinced that the scientific method was somehow inadequate as a means of fully understanding reality. Huston Smith, a former philosophy professor of mine, once told a story that will give you an idea of the atmosphere in existence at the time. One day during lunch at the MIT Faculty Club, Smith sat down next to a physicist. Deciding to engage in conversation, Smith asked, “What do you think of us humanists?” The physicist replied, “Think of you? We don’t even bother to ignore you.” I am not sure that much has changed since then.

I couldn’t put my finger on any specific problem with my studies, but the more I learned about science and how it approached nature, the less I wanted to restrict myself to memorizing theories and manipulating mathematical equations. I don’t mean to imply that my formal class work in calculus and physics wasn’t valuable to me, for I found it extremely useful. I was tested and challenged in many ways, and MIT’s reputation for teaching students how to use their analytical powers is, for the most part, well-deserved. (An MIT education is, by the way, often described as drinking water through a fire hose.)

On the other hand, I experienced an underlying discomfort because I didn’t feel that I was allowed to do any original thinking in my science courses. I realized, of course, that students in the elementary stages of scientific study were supposed to learn an indisputable body of core knowledge and build from there. The foundations that we were being taught had stood the test of time, and supposedly there was nothing about them that needed questioning. Almost everything that we were expected to know could be gotten out of a textbook, often a very old one (or a new, more expensive one containing essentially the same ideas, but please don’t get me started on the textbook market and why books that have little new material cost upwards of $100), and few fresh ideas were presented in classes.

As a result, many of us found that classroom affairs had a dull, repetitive feel to them. Nothing new seemed to be going on. Students could practically skip the lectures as long as they kept up with the text. The primary method of education focused on our obediently absorbing so-called “facts” and applying them mathematically under different circumstances. Problem solving was the order of the day. Our homework seemed to be an endless series of exercises dealing with artificial numerical problems. Correct answers to the puzzles that we tackled always existed, so there was little need for debate or discussion. We were simply mastering, in a step-by-step fashion, fundamental principles that had been established and accepted long ago. Challenging scientific authority was the last thing we freshmen were expected to do; our role at the bottom of the totem pole was to learn what we were taught with a minimum of commotion. Creative thinking would have to come later.

As a result of feeling as though I was being forced into a scientific straitjacket, I decided to carry out a search for knowledge as something of an extracurricular activity. I didn’t have any specific goal in mind, but I knew that I wanted to enlarge my horizons and probe beyond the confines of science. I began reading dozens of books in a variety of other subjects, often spending hours on end at various bookstores in Cambridge and Boston. Among the disciplines I immersed myself in were philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, history, literature, and religion. While researching in these areas, I felt that I could formulate my own thoughts rather than simply learn a body of unquestioned knowledge. There was room for dialogue and inquiry of a kind that was wholly absent from my work in the sciences. My courses in math and physics were making me very good at coming up with solutions to all kinds of routine and insignificant problems, but I found such pursuits to be mundane and often tedious. I knew that I was gaining important grounding, but I really didn’t care very much about calculating variable masses, inverse ratios, and angular velocities.

On the other hand, I recall the tremendous excitement of coming across Norman O. Brown’s pioneering analysis in Life Against Death and Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. I remember examining Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Lao Tzu, and other philosophers who thought about notions of reality and the absolute. Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, which I had read before coming to MIT, played an important role in my ongoing reflections of themes such as alienation and redemption. The work of T. S. Eliot also captivated me, especially the early poems that express a haunting vision of a human race at odds with itself.

As I continued to read practically anything I could get my hands on about the mind and various ways of approaching truth, I found myself making a kind of progress in my explorations. I slowly developed the feeling that I was onto something really important. I became increasingly confident that my search was leading somewhere. The more I worked at it over the months, the more it seemed that unrelated things fell into place. I had no inkling where this unfamiliar and at times intensely unsettling journey was going to end up, of course; I was simply taking in as much as I could from a wide range of sources. (I showed my reading list to Noam Chomsky, one of my professors, and he said something to the effect that it was a life’s work.) Some of the material that I came upon would prove to be of no lasting value, but I wasn’t about to rule out anything in advance. My general area of investigation was the unknown, and I was more or less prepared to follow any avenue that showed promise, no matter where it might lead.

About nine or ten months into my odyssey, I suddenly reached what I recognized at once as a major breakthrough. I experienced a momentous intellectual and emotional turning point that completely transformed my life. It was a shattering event in more ways than one. The many pieces of knowledge that I had been accumulating along the way were, figuratively speaking, abruptly turned upside down and inside out in a rush of definitive insight. All the assorted and often unrelated avenues that I had been following over my year-long search came together in a totally unanticipated fashion. I discovered, much to my surprise, that the world view that I had been embracing all along was full of illusion and error.

A new and unprecedented picture of reality forced itself on me, one that was all-encompassing, coherent, and perfectly logical. It was also preposterous, bizarre, outlandish, and seemingly impossible. I found it extraordinarily difficult to abandon a lifetime of beliefs in favor of conclusions reached almost overnight, but I knew that I had achieved a new and uncommon knowledge that was certain and final. It was as if I had found a higher level of consciousness or, to put it in another manner, a way out of the mental labyrinth of uncertainty and confusion. I was no longer in the position of grasping for answers; I knew that I had achieved them.

The experience of piercing what was in retrospect a veil of untruth involved a profound and terrifying exhilaration unlike any I had ever felt. Everything that I had taken for granted prior to that point needed to be reevaluated and put into another perspective, to say nothing of the scientific “facts” that I was in the process of learning. In no way could I have predicted my final destination in advance, as it involved a series of stunning cognitive and emotional reversals. At many points throughout the journey, I was “sure” that something was finally correct, but everything needed to be reconsidered at the ultimate breakthrough. A permanent sanctuary of peace and fulfillment awaited me, one free of philosophical doubt and uncertainty.

Given the peculiar nature of my findings, where many of our “common sense” perceptions about reality are in need of radical rethinking, the feelings of shock and astonishment I experienced were perhaps like those that Werner Heisenberg felt in the early days of quantum theory. In speaking of the tremendous difficulty he and other physicists had in accepting the results of new atomic experiments, he recalled a solitary walk he made in which he kept asking himself over and over if nature were really as “absurd” as seemed to be the case.

One purpose of God Does Not Play Dice is to convey something of the unique and penetrating experience that I went through many years ago. A similar journey is available to all of us, and I want to share the essence of my quest. My discussion may be of interest to those of you in the midst of your own search (and given the tremendous success of Google, it appears that everyone is searching for something); it may also engage those who are completely unaware that such experiences are even possible. Scientific types tend to fall into the latter category; they generally dismiss as inconsequential and trivial (a word often heard at MIT) anything that doesn’t fit into their preconceived notions of how nature works. I must confess to being amazed at how narrow-minded some of them are when they insist that science (materialism) is the only road to reality and that other means of acquiring knowledge are irrelevant.

A second and equally significant purpose of this book is to discuss the various findings about nature and reality that result from the experience. The notion of ascertaining deep truths through the mind may sound far-fetched, but it is the revolutionary nature of the experience that makes this kind of knowledge possible. The human mind has the capacity to understand fundamental reality, and as we explore questions about what kind of knowledge we can and cannot possess, I will argue that many of our deepest insights are a result of experience, not mathematics, measurement, or experiment. There is, of course, a long list of important thinkers who trusted in the primacy of the mind, including Einstein, Max Planck, and Erwin Schrödinger.

But I do not simply want to criticize the scientific method and show its limitations; I intend to go much further and challenge the fundamentals of science itself. It may seem heretical to question principles that go back more than three hundred years, but I am going to suggest, quite seriously, that the modern scientific framework has been constructed upon a partially-faulty foundation. Perhaps it is presumptuous to challenge ideas that have been spoon-fed to generations of students, but I will maintain that scientists have made many false assumptions about nature and that as a consequence, the laws of physics are full of unreality. The so-called “success” of quantum theory has given us many useful inventions, but it does not imply an actual understanding of nature.

Many of you are undoubtedly accustomed to the ubiquitous ideas put forth by scientists and mathematicians that probability governs the world and that nature inexorably progresses towards increasing randomness and disorder. The second law of thermodynamics may have found its way into all of the sciences and even many aspects of popular culture, but I will allege that the mathematical abstraction that the scientists call “disorder” is a figment of their imagination. To be more precise, I will claim that “disorder” has a constant value of zero (0). Since we are dealing with ideas that are deeply ingrained into our thinking (often perhaps without our knowledge), deconstructing them in order to show their true origins will take some doing.

In Descartes’ Dream: The World According to Mathematics, Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh write that “the stochastization of the world (forgive this tongue-twister) means the adoption of a point of view wherein randomness or chance or probability is perceived as a real, objective and fundamental aspect of the world.” It turns out that randomness, chance, and probability are not real, despite what Davis and Hersh claim. I will show in no uncertain terms that the scientists start with a very questionable assumption about nature that is by its very definition unscientific. In no way can their fundamental starting point be considered “objective,” although it may well be logical and reasonable. Once we have leveled the playing field, so to speak, by showing that the scientist’s world is based on presupposition rather than evidence, we will be in a better position to judge how well scientists follow their own rules. Ironically, we will find that the “hardest” of the “hard” sciences contains nothing but a metaphysical assertion at its core.

In addition to calling into question various claims of physicists and mathematicians, we must also challenge Darwinian theory and the views of evolutionary biologists. If you follow in the footsteps of Darwinian defenders such as Richard Dawkins and Jared Diamond, you may be entirely comfortable with the idea that our very existence is due to assorted happy and fortuitous accidents of cosmic architecture as well as wildly improbable evolutionary happenings on earth. Staples of science such as chance, accident, serendipity, odds, and blind luck may form integral parts of your belief system, but I will contend that they have exactly and precisely nothing (zero) to do with reality.

Ernst Mayr tells us in What Evolution Is that “there is indeed a great deal of randomness (‘chance’) in evolution” and that “chance reigns supreme” at the first step of the selection process. Unfortunately for Mayr and his colleagues (but perhaps not the rest of us), this view of evolution happens to be wrong. We can know with certainty that variation (and everything else that follows) occurs by design, not by chance.

Whatever your viewpoint, I am going to invite you to think again. Much of our so-called “conventional wisdom” will be set on its head in the world that you are about to enter, where the unexpected, the bizarre, and the outlandish will be in abundance. If I can summon any defense for my contrarian outlook, it is that I did not ask to be put in the position of challenging an entire tradition. I may be a revolutionary, but I am a reluctant one. I have no desire to offend anyone (or everyone) ⎜I am simply interested in understanding the world as it really is, no matter where things may lead. If it turns out that the laws of nature and the laws of physics have no relation to one another at times, then the discrepancies should be illuminated and brought into the open. If it turns out that the Darwinian theorists have led us down a false path, I should think they would want to know. In any case, much of our understanding of nature needs to be fundamentally revised, and what may appear to be crazy needs to be considered seriously.

You are of course entirely welcome to disagree with the radical solutions that I propose to various problems, but I think you will find that many of my arguments, such as those dealing with hidden beliefs and assumptions in physics and evolutionary biology, are unassailable. I will examine the foundations underlying the rationalist world view and will point out that much of their presumed solidity is about as solid as the space between galaxies. Scientists may have convinced themselves and many of the rest of us that they are impartial and dispassionate observers in search of nature’s deepest secrets (and to some extent this is the case), but their theoretical model has been biased from the start. (The fact that the model is incorrect is another issue altogether. It should be obvious that bias does not necessarily mean incorrect.)

For the most part, scientists are wholly unaware that the foundation of their world view rests upon assumption and conjecture, not experimental result. Far from approaching nature with a neutral and unprejudiced attitude, scientists begin with largely-unquestioned presumptions that completely color their perspective. Let me use the following metaphor: the scientist approaches nature wearing “chance-colored” eyeglasses prior to conducting any experiments whatsoever. These glasses define how the scientist looks at the world, but the scientist does not realize that he or she has them on. We will see that scientific claims of “objectivity” when it comes to characterizing nature are at times little more than a fabrication, even in the context of classical physics. As is well known, quantum mechanics has thrown the concept of objectivity at the atomic level into serious doubt.

In my four years at MIT, not once did we consider the underlying ground rules that form the basis of the scientific world view. I am not even sure that most of my professors were aware of their preconceived notions, as these notions are part and parcel of the traditional, unspoken outlook. Rigorous impartiality on their part was taken for granted, and assumptions dating back centuries were left unexamined and untaught.

It is curious, but some scientific biases have a distinctly Western quality, and their origins can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. For example, Chaos, the Goddess of Emptiness and Confusion, arises from Greek mythology; no self-respecting Taoist would embrace such a concept. Democritus is credited with introducing the interplay between chance and necessity, a concept that survives largely unchanged to this day. And Aristotle discussed “potentia,” or potential, paving the way for the still- continuing debate about the possible versus the actual.

Despite what some scientists may claim, the scientific method is not even capable of dealing with many fundamental issues that must be addressed in any comprehensive understanding of nature. As you read through this book, I expect that you will come away with the realization that a lot, an awful lot, of what passes for “fact” in the world view of the scientist is nothing more than unsupported and unsupportable assumption.

Given the nature of recent advances in physics, the kind of “craziness” that I am proposing is perhaps exactly what physicists, following the line of argument of Niels Bohr, should be expecting. Shortly before his death in 1962, Bohr is reported to have said the following about a new proposal: “We seem to all agree that the theory is crazy. The question is, is it crazy enough to have a chance of being right? My own feeling is that it is not quite that crazy” (emphasis his). There is much more than an element of humor here, as anyone familiar with the history of science knows. Regarding my own views, I contend that what I have to say is “crazy enough” to be right and also provides exactly the kind of weird simplicity that might have been anticipated. Although nature is under no obligation to have in place laws that we should find acceptable, I think you will agree that in the world view that I set forth, she can be viewed as entirely reasonable and extraordinarily coherent. We may not like the picture I am painting, but we cannot say that it is illogical or irrational.