Premise
I will attempt a defence of “meaning” and “free will” – and will suggest that the prevailing doctrine of strict physicalism is a limited and outdated theory of reality.
I intend to outline briefly the argument for (among other related and supportive theories) strong emergentism, a rival theory of reality, which may prove a more accurate description of how the cosmos works.
In a nutshell, the sum is more than its parts. And thus meaning can arise, and with it, free will. Without which there can be no meaning.
I somewhat grandiloquently describe this blog as a Weltanschauung – a worldview. My worldview.
Not everyone has an interest in the big questions of life, but that interest has been my preoccupation since childhood.
Who and what are we? Where do we come from, why are we here? How should we live our short lives, how should we treat our fellow man, our planet and the flora and fauna we share it with.
Is there any purpose or meaning to our existence, or indeed our universe. What is death.
Do we have freedom, the ability to choose what we think and how we act.
Is there any importance to art, beauty, or music. How do you define or describe these phenomena.
How should we organise our society.
And above all, what is consciousness.
My blog has been a catharsis – a way of explaining to my satisfaction how to answer all of these questions so far as I have been able.
In a great measure it has forced me to examine my own life and my attitude to all around me. How can I lead a good life unless I have reflected on what part I play here. Unless I have examined and understood my emotions, behaviour and motives.
I have reached a stage where my worldview has more or less crystallised. I feel comfortable in my own skin, having spent much of my life very uncomfortable indeed.
My journey has led me deep into philosophy and science and far away from religion and supernatural belief.
Much as I may couch my thoughts in poetic terms, much as my language is informed by my immersion in the culture of religion and spirituality, my beliefs lie elsewhere. I am a rational man not prone to blind faith, and I find traditional belief systems, although sometimes not without great beauty, outdated and untenable.
What then do I believe, if not in the god of my ancestors. And that brings me to the purpose of this post.
Some will be offended by what I have to say, some disappointed. Many will disagree with some or all of my beliefs, and some may find them ridiculous and ill conceived . No matter, they are my beliefs and I share them in the hope that they may make sense to some. I have adopted my worldview to console myself for a world which has long appeared to me to be an arid and cruel desert.
Perhaps there may be a little truth in what I say. And if so, some may even find some comfort.
I will start with the worst construction of reality and do my best to persuade you that it can be improved. That our scientists have boxed themselves into a corner and can’t see their way out. That they need to start asking themselves about the intrinsic nature of our reality rather than simply measure it.
The Clockwork Universe
Since Newton, science has insisted we inhabit a purely deterministic world where every event is entirely predictable and follows the rigid rule of absolute cause and effect. Worse, Einstein lumbered us with the Block Universe: the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously as a static, four-dimensional “block” of spacetime.
The result is that we are mere spectators in a cinema, if that. We have no agency in the world, no ability to act upon physical matter, no choice as to what we think or do. Our sense of self is an illusion.
The discovery of quantum mechanics seemed to promise a different order of reality at the sub atomic realm – one where randomness rules. But even here, scientists soon found that quantum events could be described in the round by probability and have a limited effect on the macro world of people and stars and planets. At the smallest scales we see randomness but this washes out at the larger scale of the world we humans live in.
We thus continue our macabre robotic dance. Or so scientists would have us believe.
The Clockwork Universe destroys the very meaning of our lives – even our thoughts are written in a tablet of stone and turn out to be not ours at all.
There are however cogent arguments against the existence of the Block Universe which may help to free us from the lifeless desert of pure physicalism.
Presentism is one such theory: Only the present is real. The past is gone, and the future has not happened yet. The Growing Block is another: The past and present are real, but the future is an empty void. Reality “grows” as each new moment is added to the block. And then there is the Branching Future concept: The past is a single fixed line, but the future consists of many possible paths that only become one “real” timeline once they happen. Such arguments are based in quantum mechanics, information theory, thermodynamics and various other lines of thought.
So perhaps our universe is not so clockwork after all.
Chaos
Chaos theory sounds good, but properly understood, many argue it offers no way out of the clockwork prison.
Here is how it goes. You may imagine the weather is unpredictable. Or stock markets. Or the events of a human life. It certainly seems that way.
Not so say the scientists. If you understand with enough precision the initial state of the universe and every single variable then you can calculate the movement of every single atom and subatomic particle from the time of the Big Bang through to the end of the universe.
The weather is chaotic and may look unpredictable, but we are assured that given enough information and computing power, it is as regular as clockwork, as is everything else in this nightmare scenario science has foisted on us.
But you may be able to see a glimmer of hope in all this chaos.
Unpredictability “emerges” as an inherent feature of a chaotic system’s complexity. In practice we can never know all the necessary variables for prediction and even if we could, we could never calculate the end result. Thus what at first seems deterministic becomes unknowable in practice. Unpredictability becomes an emergent reality and predictability becomes a mathematical fiction.
And even if predictability were not a fiction, the computational irreducibility of chaotic systems mean there is no shortcut to find the eventual answer. The only way to find out how a chaotic system pans out over time is to watch the system itself to see what it does.
So far so good, but no actual breach of the materialist world view. Chaos sounds refreshing and less of a prison, but it’s still clockwork deep down.
Unless.
Remember the butterfly, which, flapping its wings creates a hurricane over the other side of the world? Perhaps after all, quantum randomness can leap up into the macro world of an ultra sensitive complex system and thus such a system ceases to be mechanical and predictable.
Or take a look at the Mandelbrot set. Or Conway’s Game of Life. We move away from mathematical determinism to mathematical realism. Knowing the rule is not the same as knowing the result. The rule is finite, the result infinite. If there is no mathematical short cut to the result, the future of that result is new information which didn’t exist before it was calculated.
New information? It’s beginning to look like a gap might be opening in the deterministic jail.
The rules are set, but the book of the future hasn’t been written yet; it is being “written” by the math as it executes.
Structural Realism
Let us shift the conversation from “what we can calculate” to “what actually exists”.
Physics seems to be leading us inexorably forward to the conclusion that nothing “exists” in any common sense way. Matter doesn’t exist – it’s empty space and force fields.
Some are leaning towards the theory that all that exists is the structure. Information, mathematics, the relationships themselves.
Patterns are the most fundamental and “real” basis of the universe, not underlying objects or forces.
Related concepts can be seen in Max Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe, John Archibald Wheeler’s “it from bit”, Penrose’s mathematical platonic realm.
So in the Mandelbrot set, the mathematical rule isn’t the primary thing: the fractal structure it produces is the objective reality.
The complex chaotic patterns we see all around us are just as real as the rules that created them. The complexity isn’t a by-product of simple rules: the infinitely complex fractal structures become an emergent reality. Unpredictability becomes a real ontological feature of the universe.
Emergent Autonomy
Chaotic systems are structurally real but computationally autonomous. The initial equation becomes irrelevant to the reality of the system’s behaviour.
Complexity is fundamental not derivative: The “outcome” of the Mandelbrot equation is a new piece of reality that is not contained within the seed of the equation.
And so for all complexity evolving from the roots of simple atoms. Including consciousness.
This leads towards a view of Strong Emergence—the idea that these chaotic patterns actually have causal power of their own, independent of the math that started them.
We may veer towards a startling conclusion: the universe is not a machine where the smallest laws dictate everything, but a reality where new levels of existence constantly assert their own autonomy.
Once a chaotic pattern reaches a certain level of complexity (a “real pattern” ), it begins to exercise downward causation. And these apparently random and chaotic patterns begin to author stability, to move from mere unpredictability towards self derived meaning and purpose.
Conclusion
I am are arguing for a “Creative Universe.” Predictability fails not because our tools are weak, but because the future of a chaotic system actually hasn’t been decided yet—it is authored by the emergence of the structure itself.
Time and the laws of nature are dynamic and evolving. Physical laws are more like habits which become strongly embedded over time but these habits evolve, making the future genuinely unpredictable and allowing for true novelty, rather consigning us to a pre-written block. Evolution becomes a creative force, and a universe which seems to have arisen ex-nihilo is in reality in the process of becoming, rather than existing as a finished static four dimensional object.
We humans are the mechanism by which the universe explores itself. Our creativity, biological evolution, and technological progress aren’t just “happening” inside the universe—they are part of the universe growing and increasing in complexity and interest.
Nor is there the slightest reason to limit this ability to humans. Any pattern of sufficient complexity to achieve similarly advanced sentience would, on the same grounds, become capable of the same feats. And this would certainly include artificial intelligence, should it ever achieve awareness and the ability to ponder its own existence.
Through science, art, and daily perception, humans extract meaning from the chaos. By naming things, measuring them, and observing them, we “firm up” the universe. The world takes on high-definition detail where we turn our attention.
We are autonomous agents whose internal processes are woven into the fabric of reality.
We are not just characters in a book which has already been written. When we think, learn, and choose, we are a part of the universe deciding what it wants to become next.
Perhaps we are “just” information or structure but we have real autonomous agency with causal power of our own. We are a new piece of reality which has emerged from the simple beginnings of hydrogen and helium.
