Was Alvy Right? Does the Universe’s Fate Affect Purpose?

 

By Keith Tidman

In the 1977 movie “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen played the role of a fictional protagonist Alvy Singer, who iconically portrayed a nebbish character: timid, anxious, insecure. All in all, vintage Woody Allen. But equally, these less-than-stellar traits were apparent in Alvy as a young boy. Which is why, when Alvy and his mother went to the doctor’s, she reported that her son was depressed and refusing to do his homework. She thought that Alvy’s unease stemmed from “something he read.”

 

In response to the doctor’s inquiries, Alvy gingerly elaborated on the whys and wherefores of his disquiet: “The universe is expanding…. Well, the universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart, and that would be the end of everything.” At which point, Alvy’s mother interjects, “Why is that your business? What has the universe got to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!” To which Alvy, perhaps channeling Albert Camus’s absurdism, concludes dejectedly, “What is the point?”

 

The way in which this dialog unfolds has been dubbed “Alvy’s error”. That is to say, Alvy — along with the philosophers and scientists who similarly argue over the meaninglessness of life in a universe seemingly on track to die leading to the extinction of our species and civilization — have been accused of “assessing purpose at the wrong level of analysis”.

 

As the ‘errors’ reasoning goes, instead of focusing on a timescale involving billions, or even trillions, of years, we should keep the temporal context within the frame of our own lifespans, spanning days to years to decades. That being said, one might reasonably ask why timescales, cosmic or otherwise, should matter at all in calculating the purpose of human life; the two are untethered.

 

On balance, I suggest Alvy actually got it right, and his mom got it wrong. It’s a conclusion, however, that requires context — the kind provided by the astrophysicists who reported on a recent study’s stunning new insights into the universe’s life cycle. At the center of the issue is what’s called “dark energy,” a mysterious substance that astrophysicists believe exists based on its cosmological effects. It’s a repulsive force that pushes apart the lumpy bits of the universe — the galaxies, stars, and planets — incidentally setting off Alvy’s bout of handwringing by causing the universe to expand ever faster.

 

To be clear, dark energy is no trifle. It is estimated to compose seventy percent of the universe. (In addition, equally unseen dark matter composes another twenty-five percent of the universe. By comparison, what we experience around us everyday as observable matter — when we agonizingly stub our toe on the table or gaze excitedly upon vast cosmic swaths, star nurseries, and black holes — composes just a tiny five-percent sliver of cosmic reality.)

 

That our species is able to persistently ponder alternative models of cosmology, adjusting as new evidence comes in, is remarkable. That our species can apply methods to rigorously confirm, revise, or refute alternative models is similarly remarkable. The paradox is that three of the four models now in play by astrophysicists will lead to humankind’s extinction, along with that of all other sophisticated intelligent species and their civilizations ever to inhabit the universe. How can this be so?

 

For starters, the universe’s expansion has consequences. That said, recent observations and research has added a new twist to what we understand regarding issues of cosmology — from how the universe’s initial spark happened 13.8 billion years ago, and especially how things might end sometime in the future. Alvy was gripped by angst over one such consequence: he contemplated that the increasing acceleration might continue until the universe experiences a so-called Big Rip. Which is when everything, from galaxy clusters to atomic nuclei, fatally “breaks apart,” to borrow Alvy’s words, leading to a grand-scale extinction.

 

But, according to the most recent studies of the standard cosmological model, and of the increasingly understood role of dark energy, there’s a paradox as to a possible cosmic end state other than a Big Rip. Because there is an alternative outcome of accelerating expansion, in which the distance between stars and galaxies greatly increases, such that the universe eventually goes cold and dark. This is sometimes called the thermodynamic death of the universe, moved along by the destructive role of entropy, which increases the universe’s (net) state of disorder. No less fearful, surely, from the standpoint of an already-timorous Alvy.

 

The third possibility that dark energy creates is that its pushing (repulsive) effects on the cosmic lumps start to weaken, in turn causing the universe’s expansion to slow down and reverse, eventually leading to contraction and a so-called Big Crunch. Whether the crunch segues to another Big Bang is hypothesized, but the recent cosmological and dark-energy research doesn’t yet speak to this point about a cosmic bounce. Either way, extinction of our species and of all other intelligent life forms and civilizations remains inevitable as our full cosmic history plays out.

 

The fourth and last option is less existentially nihilistic than the preceding three possibilities — and is one that might be expected to have had a calming effect on Alvy, if he only knew. In this less-likely cosmological model, dark energy’s effect on cosmic expansion might slow but stabilize rather than implode. In averting the fate of a Big Rip, or a heat death, or a Big Crunch, there would be no extinction event occurring. Rather, circumstances would lead to a universe existing stably into infinity.

 

No matter how one dices reality, the existentialism and nihilism espoused by, for example, Schopenhauer, Sartre, and Nagel, as well as ideas about will-to-power advanced by Nietzsche, hang over the inconvenient realities of a universe fated to reach an all-encompassing expiry date, depending on the longer-term influences of dark energy.

 

From a theist’s standpoint, striving to live Aquinas’s “beatific vision,” one might wonder why a god would create a highly intelligent, conscious species like ours — along with innumerable cosmic neighbors (extraterrestrials) of unimaginably greater intelligence and sophistication because of earlier starts — when every species is assured to go poof. There will be no exceptions; the scale of annihilation will be cosmic. 

So, what’s the meaning and intent, if any, of such teasing capriciousness? "What's the point?," as Alvy muttered with deep resignation. And how realistic can a transcendental force be, purportedly serving as a prime first cause of us and of our cosmic co-inhabitants subject to such conditions? Besides, contrary to some assumptions, even the existence of a god does not vouchsafe purpose for our species; nor does it vouchsafe purpose for the universe itself. 

 

On the other hand, from a secular, naturalistic viewpoint, life might be imagined as meaningful in the sense of “purpose in life.” That is, where we make decisions and perform deeds as moral, empathic individuals and community members — not on the scale of an entire species. By definition, these secular events occur in the absence of a divine plan, such that we emerge from the physical laws of nature, to go on to create personal value, purpose, and social norms. As to purpose in life, where meaning is defined on the scale of a single personal, the prospect of “the end of everything” might be seen as less vexing, as meaning is acquired on the level of a single person.

 

In the sense, however, that’s conveyed by the slightly altered phrase “purpose of life” — where the one-word change shifts the focus from the individual and to the species — cosmic extinction looms more consequentially in terms of the lack of purpose and meaning. Given the prospect of such cosmic annihilation, Alvy might be excused his existential musings.

 

The Omnipotence Paradox

Averroes was the first philosopher to address the omnipotence paradox in the 12th century.

By Keith Tidman

People of faith, in defining their god, credit god with some extraordinary characteristsics: omnipotence  omniscience, omnipresence, omnibenevolence, and omnisapience (being ‘all wise’). However, the first of these properties, omnipotence, for centuries has bumped up against a particularly curious paradox, with consequences for theists seeking to reason logically about their god.

 

The paradox has been posed in multiple ways. Here’s the version, inspired by the 12th-century polymath Averroes (Ibn Rushd), that people are perhaps most familiar with: 

 

Could a god create a boulder so heavy that even he could not lift it? 

 

Because if god cannot create such a boulder, then he’s not all powerful; and if he cannot lift the boulder he created, he’s likewise not all powerful. It’s a lose-lose scenario. Here’s another: Could an omnipotent god build a safe so impenetrable that even he cannot break into it? There are innumerable similar cases, another being this one, which has implications for whether or not we have free will: Can an omnipotent god create a person he could not control? And, as philosopher E.J. Mackie additionally asked, can a god ‘make rules which bind himself?’

 

The crux of such paradoxes is that a god, if all powerful, should be able to do things simultaneously possible and impossible. So, for instance, contrary to Euclidean axioms, an all-powerful being should be capable of creating a situation where things equal to the same thing can be unequal to one another. Another thought experiment involves an all-powerful god who’s the universe’s best player at the complicated Oriental game of Go (a bit like draughts/checkers or chess, but played with many more white and black counters), while also creating an opponent able to beat him. One other example includes arranging for an irresistible force to successfully overpower an immovable object. 

 

To the point of such paradoxes, it’s rational and fair to define the word ‘omnipotence’ as a god possessing limitless abilities. That is, his being a maximally powerful god unconstrained by seeming illogic or by arbitrarily redefining the word for our convenience. What we might call strong omnipotence. There should not be exceptions made to the meaning of omnipotence that compromise the word. We might call such a redefinition weak omnipotence.

 

Supposed degrees of power, rather than an all-powerful being, further complicate the picture. One reason is that the phrase ‘degrees of power’ leads to the claim that omnipotence is reduceable to mere semantics — that is, the meaning we assign to words, subject to interpretation and change. After all, we know that language is highly bendable. Depending on the effects of context upon natural language, such meanings can prove vague, subjective, and contentious.

 

By extension, unmodified power — where the word omnipotence has not been self-servingly tinkered with — can accommodate what we might regard as two mutually exclusive situations. That is to say, strong omnipotence likely eclipses the (known) laws of logic, where we regard those recognized laws as still both incomplete and imperfect.

 

So, in terms of the usefulness of the literal definition of the word omnipotence, all outcomes — including potentially contradictory ones — are possible, despite gaps in our understanding. But we cannot, based on such gaps alone, perfunctorily dismiss the paradox. Over time, these holes in our comprehension will be filled, and the paradoxes duly resolved. 

This, despite literary scholar C.S. Lewis’s attempt to narrow the definition of omnipotence, saying the following: ‘Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible.’ The term again being subjected to dilution — to something much less than literal omnipotence, despite Lewis trying to make up for it by contending counterintuitively that ‘this is no limit to [god’s] power.’

 

Meantime, unconditional (strong) omnipotence implies a god ought to be morally impeccable. Yet, the study of theodicy — why and how there’s natural and behavioral evil in the world, despite a supposedly all-powerful and all-kind divinity — challenges this notion of moral perfection. The incongruity stems from the expectation that an all-powerful god has the ability to proscribe all evil, if so willing.

 

So, there’s either a divine being gifted with all-capable power or there’s not; it’s binary. If there’s not, we should discard the term omnipotence on grounds it’s inherently meaningless. Among other things, there cannot be random situations where absolute omnipotence applies and other situations where it doesn’t. We shouldn’t, then, opportunistically conspire to match up definitions and applications of all-inclusive omnipotence to accommodate our comfort levels.

 

Even theists who subscribe to a transcendental being’s all-embracing power face the same conundrums. Some theists allow, as an example, that according to the so-called ‘ontological argument’ for a god’s existence, even an all-knowing being cannot create something greater than himself, as the argument provided by St. Anselm in the 11th century defines god as that which nothing greater can be conceived (meaning imagined or thought). That is, a ‘necessary being.’

 

This line strikes me as unsupportable, however. In part that’s because the argument depends exclusively on semantics, absent the empirical validation or refutation that’s provided, for example, by the argument of design offered by the complexities and intricacies of the material world. It’s also unsupportable in part because the ontological argument capriciously limits god’s power, even though something greater is indeed imaginable and thinkable.

 

The omnipotence paradox manacles the term with redefinitions that bring us to what we have called weak omnipotence (degrees of power short of absolute), and suggests that power unencumbered by checks cannot and does not exist. Because of the paradox, the unqualified version of the term ‘omnipotence’ may have interesting applications in mythology and lore — but flounders in reality.

Can Free Will Exist in an Otherwise Deterministic World?

By Keith Tidman

It’s probably fair to say that most people believe free will and determinism cannot exist side by side. The notion is counterintuitive, even a little odd. Why? Well, the argument is that these two notions of how things happen in the world necessarily cancel out one another. The thinking goes that out of commonsense, you’ve got to pick one or the other.

 

But there’s a different way to look at it that says “not so fast,” and instead argues that free will and determinism are mutually compatible. According to this approach, free will and determinism coexist, interlaced with one another — a school of thought referred to as compatibilism, or soft determinism.

 

Yet, according to the first group — those who assert incompatibility — hard determinism necessarily precludes free will of any kind or any degree. Where free will is purported to be an illusion. Such that, in reality, if any action transpires, it is impossible it could not have happened; nor could it have happened any differently than it did.

 

Such arguments attempt to have one’s cake — unbridled free choice — and eat it too. Meaning to keep hard determinism. For me, however, they are unconvincing. Thomas Hobbes’ comment that free will is “the liberty of the man [to do] what he has the will, desire, or inclination to do” seems to shed little to no light. Nor does the approach embraced by Immanuel Kant, contending that we are free when we exercise reason. 

 

Unenlightening, too, is John Stuart Mill’s proposal that a person is free when “his habits or his temptations are not his masters, but he theirs.” The line may be catchy, but offers little to support free will. The same could be said about A.J. Ayer, for circularly proclaiming that “to say I could have acted otherwise is to say I should have acted otherwise if I had so chosen.” These are just some of many instances of the so-called weakening of free will, to opportunistically fit the case that free will and determinism can unify.

 

So what is at the nub of such thinking? Well, start by remembering that the concept of personal agency says that when a person acts of his own free will, he or she could readily have acted otherwise. So, for example, if he takes his dog for a walk or eats a fig or invests in tech stocks, such a person could instead have lounged with their dog on the sofa or baked themselves fresh bread or invested in cryptocurrency.

 

Yet, are we really so free in our daily choices? What if, instead, all our decisions and all our actions are baked into our lives by two consequential factors: the sequence and paths of all past happenings, taking in the whole universe, back to its beginning, where one thing follows another; plus the irresistible laws of physics and other natural laws that animate and describe the universe? Here, decisions and deeds are determined by a river of ceaselessly branching causes and effects.

 

With that river in mind, let’s return to Hobbes’ support of compatibilism. The English philosopher ventured, metaphorically, that: 

“Liberty and necessity are consistent: as in the water [a river] that hath not only liberty, but a necessity of descending by the channel.” 

However, the picture Hobbes paints seems woefully incomplete. After all, the river’s flow is determined not only by channel banks, which Hobbes pointed out, but also by tree roots, rocks, tributaries entering the river, erosion over time, floods and droughts, dams, gradient of the slope, climate, soil type, industrial activity — and more. In short, the river’s flow is determined by many influences.

 

The same complex dynamic applies to the flow of human decisions and deeds. The flow of behaviors becomes deterministically set in myriad ways — chiseled in time (the when), place (the where), and manner (the how) — whereby whatever happens at this moment in time or happens later become unalterable. The paradox is that the past, present, and future are equally explainable in deterministic terms. That is, even if we were to attempt changing events to ostensibly exercise free choice, such behavioral change would itself happen deterministically.

 

Let’s look at an example. Given that natural law impinges upon probability — such as, for instance, with the rolling of dice — the outcome of each toss is predetermined. It depends on the uncountable variables and constants, subtle and blatant, that describe the initial conditions and the paths along which the caste dice travel. These cause-and-effect conditions deterministically impinge on the toss’s result.

 

To be specific, the interplaying conditions include the force with which the dice are thrown, the material the dice are made from, the effects of gravity and air resistance, the weight distribution, the release angle, the friction of the table surface, the centrifugal force, sweat on the palm, and other factors that perturb the roll. In short, many predetermining elements ungovernably affect the toss, even though we remain largely oblivious to them.

 

Yet, societies’ institutions need at least the illusion of free will out of expediency, to hold citizens accountable for behaviors that breach legal norms. Retributive justice requires laws, calibrated to align with belief in free will, for two reasons: to hold people responsible for their adjudged deeds, and by extension to prevent society unraveling into disorder. Both are noble goals on behalf of accountability and justice.

 

There’s also moral, not just legal, accountability — again aimed to marshal order. To these ends, individuals and communities (social, cultural, religious institutions) establish codes of ethics and social standards. Our language includes words like ‘benevolence,’ to capture behavioral expectations. All the while, determinism puts moral responsibility in peril. Duly, even just a degree of free choice serves the purpose of compatibilists (those who believe free will and determinism coexist). Their purpose is this: to be behaviorally free enough to have done otherwise, at least in some instances.

 

The preceding phrase, ‘at least in some instances,’ is tellingly how some compatibilists specify why marrying free will to determinism might work. However, calculatedly tinkering with free will so as to link it to determinism invariably dilutes commonsense notions of free will — as the writings of Hobbes, Mill, Kant, and Ayer, to mention just a few, show.

 

The takeaway is that compatibilism — no matter how free will may offhandedly be redefined and weakened to compel a partnership with determinism — seems not to work. Instead, it appears that determinism alone defines destiny.

 

What’s Next for Artificial Intelligence?

By Keith Tidman

For many years now people have been sounding the clarion call of Artificial Intelligence, buying into its everyday promise in ways we’ve grown accustomed to, as it scrapes the internet trove for usable information while focusing on largely single tasks. But the call of what’s being referred to as Artificial General Intelligence, also known as ‘strong AI’ or simply AGI, has fallen on less-attentive ears. Often, its potentially vast abilities, acting as a proxy for the human brain’s rich neural network, have been relegated by popular culture’s narrow vision to the realm of science fiction. 

Yet, the more likely impacts of strong AI will manifest themselves in the form of major shifts in how we model reality across all aspects of civilization, from the natural sciences to the social sciences and the full breadth of the humanities, where ultimately very few if any domains of human intellectualism and other activity will be left untouched. In some cases, adjustments to theories of knowledge will accrete like coral — reflecting vast paradigm shifts, as such fundamental change was termed by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. These sweeping, forward-leaping shifts in knowledge and understanding will serve in turn as the fertile seedbeds of what’s designated AGI superintelligence.

 

We can expect, in the coming years, a steady stream of eureka moments, as physicists, neuroscientists, biologists, chemists, computer scientists, philosophers of mind, and others working on aspects of strong AI’s development explore the frontiers of what’s possible. Even to this extent, there’s still a way to go in order to grasp the full vision, where the precise timeline is the subject of earnest debate. This, despite the fact that Nobel prizes were chalked up in 2024 for investigations into this field, including for the development of machine-learning technology using artificial neural networks. (Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the ‘godfather of AI’, and physicist John Hopfield were among these awardees.)

Deep questions and much learning remain, however, around what’s necessary for even approximating the complexities of the human mind and consciousness, ranging from thinking about thinking and the insatiability of wide-eyed curiosity. After all, unlike the relatively more brute-force-like tactics of today’s narrower, so-called ‘weak AI’, the robustness of Artificial General Intelligence at its pinnacle will allow it to do all sorts of things: truly think, understand, ideate, experience, solve problems in unheard-of ways, experiment, deconstruct and reconstruct, intuit, engage in what-if thought experimentation, critically analyze, and innovate and create on grand scales.

 

Increasingly, the preceding abilities will be the stuff of science fact, not science fiction. And eventually, through the ensuing possibility of AGI’s self-optimization — that is, absent intervention by biased human algorithm-builders — Artificial General Intelligence will be able to do all that, and more, much better than humans can. Self-optimization translates to the technology managing its own evolutionary journey. That tipping point in the dash toward superintelligence will likely become a matter for irrepressibly curious, enterprising humans and strong AI itself to figure out how to accommodate and catalyze each other, for the best outcome.

Within the philosophy of science, the posture of scientific observation that is rooted in the acceptance that knowledge of the world is always interpreted, structured, and filtered by the observer and that, consequently, pronouncements need to be built on the recognition of how hard it is to grasp the world, is called epistemic humility. The approach has implications in the heady sprint toward superintelligence. Epistemic humility refers to the limits on what we know or think we know (provisional knowledge); the degrees of certainty or uncertainty with which we know it; what we don’t know but later might with further investigation; and what’s deemed, at least for now, as flat-out unknowable. In other words, don’t just assume; instead, rationally, empirically verify or falsify, and then verify or falsify again, with our minds open to new information and calls for changed models. Artificial General Intelligence will be a critical piece of that humbling puzzle.

 

Other links between AGI and things, events, and conditions in the world will include, in the longer term, consciousness-like abilities such as awareness, perception, sentience, identity, presence in time and space, visions of alternative futures, anchors to history, pondering, volition, imagination, adaptation, innovation, sense of agency, memory — and more. To know that itself purposely exists. Just as the whole range of human cognitive capabilities emerge from the neurophysiological activity of a person’s brain, similarly they will emerge from the inner network of Artificial General Intelligence, its nonbiological foundation notwithstanding. Certainly, the future commercially scaling up of quantum computers, with their stunningly ultra-fast processing compared even with today’s supercomputers (quantum computing is projected to be many millions of times faster), will help fast-track AGI’s reach. The international race is on.

 

Critics warn, though, that the technology could lead to civilizational and human extinction. Two years ago, one advocacy organization hyperbolically framed humanity’s challenge in the arena of Artificial Intelligence as equivalent to mitigating the risk posed by the trajectory of climate change, the prospect of future pandemics, and the world’s bristling nuclear arsenals. I suspect such apocalyptic anxieties, although admittedly palpable, will ultimately prove to be unhelpful miscues and distractions on the upcoming AGI stage. Ridding ourselves more and more of what today’s AI industry daintily refers to as ‘hallucinations,’ or in everyday parlance errors, will prove a critical early step in moving along toward strong AI. ‘Red teaming’ AGI models in structured environments, while such models evolve in capability and complexity, will test for flaws, harms, vulnerabilities, and misbehaviors, in order to continually inform remediation strategies.

Guardrails are, of course, necessary, but they must not unduly hinder progress. It won’t be enough for even thoughtful protagonists and antagonists of AGI to contest ideas. Rather, the intellectual capital invested in ideas needs to be wide-ranging and inclusive. Humanity will therefore be best served if it allows informed, clear-minded multidisciplinary teams of specialists — ethicists, physicists, legal scholars, anthropologists, philosophers, technologists, neuroscientists, historians, sociologists, psychologists, government policymakers — along with the public at large to share their respective expertise and opinions in contemplating prudent ways forward, and for what purposes. Even, perhaps, to consider the potential rights and responsibilities of such stellarly smart systems.

 

In those contexts, we might expect that future development of Artificial General Intelligence will help enrich our understanding of what it means for us to be us in such a world of superintelligent, creative, expert systems. It will irrepressibly bring us to a place where human learning and machine learning transect in mutually force-multiplying ways. As the technology evolves, the real challenge will be, in the long run, to fathom the world-altering, pan-visionary promise of what AGI can know, understand, innovate, and do as part of our common enterprises. 

Humanity- version 2.0

By Chengde Chen*

Never before has humanity faced such a prospect of destruction,

As if unsure whether tomorrow will bring the sun or a mushroom cloud.

Never before has humanity been so torn apart by an information war,

As if internet users are more ruthless than hawkish politicians. 

Never before has humanity merged so closely with machines,

As if big data dictates when and what professions will be finished.

Never before has humanity been so ready to gamble everything,

As if, post-Trump revolution, everyone follows Musk to Mars…

This is Humanity 2.0. 

Look at what they’re busy with please— 
Debating the parallels between now and the eve of World War II, 
Calculating the yield of new nukes, hundreds of times Hiroshima’s.

Assessing the death rate of Pandemic 2, far surpassing COVID,
Analyzing the limits of humanity’s tolerance under AI enslavement,
Rushing to design survival plans for a frenzied climate,
And building Starlink as a Noah’s Ark to navigate space.  

Clearly, they’re preparing for tomorrow like someone writing a will…
For tomorrow, the Sword of Damocles is poised ready to end all history!

---

* Chengde is a philosopher-poet and the author of Five Themes of Today – philosophical poems (Open Gate Press, London, 2001)

Towards a New Ecological Paradigm

The medieval world was oriented to devotion as creatures of God and, in a parallel hierarchy, to submission to kings.

By Andrew Porter 

At crucial junctures in human life, old ways of thinking become inadequate or even intolerable and new models are needed to guide the possibilities of human life. Plato’s Republic, which advances the rule of experts, was partly written in reaction to the failures blamed on Athens’ partial democracy after the Peloponnesian War. Rousseau’s Emile sought a new framing of education completely in contrast to the norms of the eighteenth century. Today, to develop a new sweeping paradigm may seem presumptuous or unrealistic, but fresh ideas are vital – and increasingly imperative.

The validity of a well-crafted and well-articulated paradigm acts like the sun in late spring, leaving little room for rational opposition. There is not, of course, only one possible winning paradigm; however, one envisioned by, say, the writers Wendell Berry or Andreas Malm, seems to offer the kind that underpins a viable and non-dystopian future.

But, as the American historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn warned, ruling ideas refuse to budge even when they should since many of their adherents are highly invested in their predominance. And yet, if ever there were a time both ripe and desperate for a new paradigm, this current juncture would seem to be it. Various looming catastrophes – climate change, regional conflict, rainforest loss, and political upheaval – threaten us like ever higher waves behind the already dismaying ones.

Each era has its own ruling paradigm. The medieval world was oriented to devotion as creatures of God and, in a parallel hierarchy, to submission to kings. The Renaissance advanced humanism and secularism with a flourish. The Enlightenment sprouted recognition of natural rights and democratic principles as the basis of society. Post-Enlightenment centuries have seemed convoluted and fragmented, unsure about humankind’s relation either to nature or to itself. A sound and successful paradigm, in acting as a clarion call, both taps and inspires human capacity. It continues to deliver on its promise of fulfilling human potential. We are rapidly learning that this potential is interdependent, with one another and with the natural world.

Today, the ruling paradigms of scientific materialism and growing income disparity capitalism tend to work off a strange set of ideas that tolerate social injustice, large-scale damage to the planet, and the growing wealth and influence of oligarchs. At the same time, counter to this, it seems that an undermining of too-long-held worldviews is also taking place in many novel forms, whether in physics, culture, politics, and understandings of nature. One fresh approach that seems most propitious is human ecology, an approach long shelved but in certain key areas making significant inroads. This might be called the Natural Life Paradigm.

The key component of a ‘natural life’ or ‘human ecology’ paradigm is an acceptance of and eagerness for integration with the limits and opportunities of whatever bioregion a community is in. The need for limits is obvious; less obvious is the opportunities for well-being and long-term sustainability this entails. The pursuit of happiness tends to reside in these ways of being, whether recognised or not.

The Natural Life Paradigm could solve many problems at once. What would an outline of such a paradigm look like? One way to approach this is to let ecological thinking engage in dialogue with social justice and metaphysics. Efforts and vision to improve anti-racism, human rights, climate change melioration, and gun control benefit as they enter into conversation with novel conceptualising about the nature of reality – to underpin the direction of betterment.

For instance, if education were oriented towards deep ecology, then it would have a real possibility of transforming economics and societal systems around a sustainable future. Education could be the springboard that develops new mindsets that value sanity, longevity, justice, and simplicity.

Such an ecological framework for human life nationally and globally would likely start by defining the optimal ways of being for individual and communal life. This might include abolishing industry other than small-scale manufacturing and reining in the excesses of agribusiness. Tribal communities worldwide have had a harmonious relationship with their natural environments and it is to be hoped that they will outlive industrialised humankind. Were citizens and leaders of other societal types to view nature, not as a larder of resources, but as fitting limits and opportunities, their core philosophies would have legitimacy. Such a revamped world would have a seven-generations mentality, acting with care for those seven generations ahead because they strive for the sanction of ecosystems and the Earth as a whole.

Such a world would have its own problems, but that is the nature of human existence. The future of humankind depends on the quality and accuracy of the theories we choose.

Above all, this new way of viewing things would need to be buttressed by a growing comprehension that the physical world is not material; rather, it would be understood as a mode of something that has variously been called Consciousness, Mind, Spirit, or more recently, ‘Non-physicality’. Quantum physics suggests something tending toward this in its reconstruction of matter into energy and fields. A new understanding of natural reality spurs a conception of ecology, including human ecology, as offspring of a larger ‘purpose’.

Likewise, social justice solutions could go beyond current wrangling and instead ground themselves in ecological principles that controvert overexploitation, unfairness, imbalance, and power used wrongly. Think of what might happen to industries, guns, cars, marginalised people, and corporations in light of Natural Life as a common value. There are, of course, downward and upward societal forces in any age, but crossing the threshold into sustainability holds the promise of a world that has fairness and integration as its watchwords.

Such new paradigm-development is all the more pressing in a world with higher and higher stakes. Some thinkers are eager to retool governing ideas and develop more conscious systems to frame human life, however diverse. Lance Newey, of the University of Queensland in Australia, says: “A number of countries are moving to the adoption of a wellbeing governance and performance framework….Many of these frameworks aim to measure the economic, social, environmental, and cultural wellbeing of the country.” He defines wellbeing as “the capacity of an entity (an individual, a community, an organisation, a society, the globe) to resiliently flourish”. 

Likewise, the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States presents human ecology as the pursuit that “touches us and everything that we touch to improve the quality of life”.  This is an approach that draws on science and the humanities equally.

Imagination is the first step to betterment. We need not be victims of unworkable, entrenched paradigms whose only claim to fame is that they cling on with a death-grip. A thorough and carefully conceived ecological paradigm can serve as the basis for a better quality of life, individually and societally. All the past models for how to govern or institute or act have had philosophical underpinnings. Today, it is time we refresh our perspective to prioritise human ecology – a strategy more worthy both of our intellect and our situation.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: And the Deception of Perception

By Keith Tidman

 

It is a tribute to the timelessness of Plato’s ideas that his philosophical stories still echo powerfully in the contemporary world. People still do live in the flickering shadows of Plato’s cave, mistaking myths for reality and surmising evidence. We are metaphorically bound, for example, to watch and assent to the shadows cast by social media, influencing our notions of reality. An increasingly subjective and debatable reality, shaped by the passing of gossamer shadows flung onto the wall (today the computer screen) by puppeteers. Today, there’s clearly a risk of deception by partial perception, of information exploited for political ends.

It was in his most-read work, The Republic, written about 380 BCE, that Plato recounted an exchange between Glaucon and Socrates, sometimes called the Allegory of the Cave. Socrates describes how in this cave, seated in a line, are prisoners who have been there since birth, entirely cut off from the outside world. Tightly restrained by chains such that they cannot move, their lived experience is limited to staring at the cave wall in front of them. 

 

What they cannot know is that just behind where they sit is a parapet and fire, in front of which other people carry variously shaped objects, and it is these that cast the strange shadows. The shadows on the wall, and not the fire or the objects themselves, are the prisoners’ only visible reality — the only world they can know. Of the causes of the moving shadows, of the distinction between the abstract and the real, they can know nothing. 

 

Plato asks us to consider what might happen if one of the prisoners is then unchained and forced reluctantly to leave the cave, into the glaring light of the sun. At first, he says, the brightness must obscure the freed prisoner’s vision,  so that he can see only shadows and reflections, similar to being in the cave. However, after a while, his eyes would grow accustomed to the light, and eventually he would be able to see other people and objects themselves, not just their shadows. As the former prisoner adjusts, he begins to believe the outside world offers what he construes as a very different, even better reality than the shadows in the dusky cave.

 

But now suppose, Plato asks, that this prisoner decides to return to the cave to share his experience — to try to convince the prisoners to follow his lead to the sunlight and the ‘forms’ of the outside world. Would they willingly seize the chance? But no, quite the contrary, Plato warns. Far from seizing the opportunity to see more clearly, he thinks the other prisoners would defiantly resist, believing the outside world to be harmful and dangerous and not wanting to leave the security of their cave with the shadows they have become so familiar with, even so expert at interpreting. 

 

The allegory of the cave is part of Plato’s larger theory of knowledge — of ideals and forms. The cave and shadows are representative of how people usually live, often ensconced within the one reality they’re comfortable with and assume to be of greatest good. All the while, they are confronted by having to interpret, adjust to, and live in a wholly dissimilar world. The so-called truth that people meet up with is shaped by contextual circumstances they happened to have been exposed to (their upbringing, education, and experiences, for example), in turn swaying their interpretations, judgments, beliefs, and norms. All often cherished. Change requires overcoming inertia and myopia, which proves arduous, given prevailing human nature.

 

People may wonder which is in fact the most authentic reality. And they may wonder how they might ultimately overcome trepidation, choosing whether or not to turn their backs to their former reality, and understanding and embracing the alternative truth. A process that perhaps happens again and again. The undertaking, or journey, from one state of consciousness to another entails conflict and requires parsing the differences in awareness of one truth over another, to be edified of the supposed higher levels of reality and to overcome what one might call the deception of perception: the unreal world of blurry appearances..

 

Some two and a half millennia after Plato crafted his allegory of the cave, popular culture has borrowed the core storyline, in both literature as well as movies. For example, the pilots of both Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, and Country of the Blind, by H.G. Wells, concern eventual enlightened awareness, where key characters come to grips with the shallowness of the world with which they’re familiar every day. 

Similarly, in the movie The Matrix, the lead character, Neo, is asked to make a difficult choice: to either take a blue pill and continue living his current existence of comfort but obscurity and ignorance, or take a red pill and learn the hard truth. He opts for the red pill, and in doing so becomes aware that the world he has been living in is merely a contrivance, a computer-generated simulation of reality intended to pacify people.

 

Or take the movie The Truman Show. In this, the lead character, Truman Burbank, lives a suburban, family life as an insurance agent for some thirty years, before the illusion starts to crumble and he suspects his family is made up of actors and everything else is counterfeit. It even turns out that he is living on a set that comprises several thousand hidden cameras producing a TV show for the entertainment of spectators worldwide. It is all a duplicitous manipulation of reality — a deception of perception, again — creating a struggle for freedom. And in this movie, after increasingly questioning the unfathomable goings-on around him, Truman (like the prisoner who leaves Plato’s cave) manages to escape the TV set and to enter the real world.

 

Perhaps, then, what is most remarkable about the Allegory of the Cave is there is nothing about it that anchors it exclusively to the ancient world in which it was first imagined. Instead, Plato’s cave is, if anything, even more pertinent in the technological world of today, split as it is between spectral appearances and physical reality. Being surrounded today with the illusory shadows of digital technology, with our attention guided by algorithm-steering, belief-reinforcing social media, strikes a warning note. That today, more than ever, it is our responsibility to continually question our assumptions.

 

The Distressed Spider and Intervention: A Thought Experiment

By Keith Tidman

To intervene, or not to intervene?

 

Philosopher Thomas Nagel set the stage for a curious thought experiment. Nagel described how, while a university professor, he noticed what he considered a puzzling scene play out. It was a spider trapped in … let us say, a sink ... in the building housing the philosophy department. The spider, despite defensively scurrying around its tightly limited terrain, seemed condemned throughout the day to becoming doused with water, incapable of altering its fate — if altering its fate was what it even wanted to do. Weeks passed.

 

As Nagel portrayed the scene, the spider’s “life seemed miserable and exhausting,” which led him to conclude he should “liberate” it, in a dash to freedom and a better life. Seemingly the morally right thing to do, despite the relative insignificance of a single spider. Nagel finally justified intervention on the presumption that the spider could readily find its way back to its spot in the sink if it “didn’t like it on the outside.”

 

That is, could Nagel’s well-intentioned rescue afford the spider a more meaningful, happier life — assuming, for the sake of argument, the spider could think in such abstract terms? Or was such interventionism haughty and presumptuous? Nagel, pondering higher-level causes and effects, humbly confessed that his emancipation of the spider was therefore done with “much uncertainty and hesitation.”

 

Regardless, Nagel went ahead and reached out with a paper towel in the spider’s direction, which the spider, intentionally or instinctively, grabbed on to with its gangly legs, to be hoisted onto the floor. Thus carefully deposited, however, the spider remained still, even while prodded gently with the paper towel. “Playing dead,” perhaps — and afraid of carelessly being stomped on by people walking around? The next day, Nagel “found it in the same place, his legs shriveled in that way characteristic of dead spiders.”

 

Nagel’s experience, and the thought experiment derived from it, tees up at least two inferences regarding the ground rules governing intervention in others’ lives. On the one hand, no matter how benevolently intended our deeds, intervention might exact unanticipated outcomes. Some ugly. On the other hand, indecisiveness and inaction might likewise result in harm — as the renowned “trolley problem” demonstrates, in which choices, including the option not to redirect the trolley, still lead to some loss of life. In short, indecision is a decision — with repercussions.

 

We therefore have to parse the circumstances and priorities as best we can, deciding to intercede or stay removed from the scene. Either choice is swayed by our conspicuous biases as to meaningfulness in life, despite the choices’ innate subjectivity. Both choices — intervene or leave alone — are entrapped in the unavoidable moral morass and practical implications of their respective consequences.

 

Nagel’s spider incident was, of course, also metaphorical of the lives of people — and whether we should judge the merits or demerits of someone’s stage-managed life circumstances, going so far as to urge change. We might perceive such advice as prudent and empowering, even morally right; but maybe in reality the advice is none of those things, and instead is tantamount to the wrong-headed extraction of the “ailing” spider. The next two paragraphs provide examples of everyday, real-world circumstances that might spur intervention. That is, let's ask this: In these and other real-world cases, of which the count is endless, does the proverbial spider warrant extrication?

 

For instance, do we regard someone’s work life as mundane, a dead-end, as beneath the person’s talents? Do we regard someone’s choices regarding nutrition and exercise and other behavioral habits as impairing the person’s health? Or what if we see someone’s level of education as too scant and misfocused relative to modern society’s fast-paced, high-tech needs? Do we fault-findingly regard someone’s choice of a partner to be unfavorable and not life enhancing? Do we consider someone’s activities as embodying calculable risks, to be evaded? Do we deem someone’s financial decisions to be imprudently impulsive?

 

Maybe those “someones,” in being judged, begrudge what they view as the superciliousness of such intercession. Who has the right (the moral authority) to arbitrate, after all, people’s definition of happiness and the meaningfulness of life, and thus choices to make, where there may be few universal truths? Where do resolute biases contaminate decision-making? One possible answer is that we ought to leave the proverbial spider to its fate — to its natural course.

 

But let’s also look at possible, real-world interventionism on a more expansive scale. Do we properly consider both the pragmatic and moral consequences of interceding in matters of the environment, biodiversity, and ecosystems, where life in general has inherent value and decisions are morally freighted? How about, in international relations, the promotion of humanitarian standards, the maintenance of security, and cultural, civilizational affairs? And what about in other nations’ domestic and foreign policy decision-making that bear ubiquitously across the interconnected, globalised planet?

 

Even the sunniest of intentions, instilled with empathy and wistful introspection, may turn out ill-informed — absent a full understanding of someone else’s situation, where the setting is key to the person’s happiness and sense of meaningfulness. Perhaps that particular someone did not need to be removed from the fabled appliance, so to speak, in order that he might scurry off toward safety.

 

Nagel assumed the spider might feel forlorn; but perhaps it didn’t. Maybe it was a case of infelicitous projection or a desire simply to assuage raw instincts. Let’s not forget, the spider died — and did so as the consequence of intervention. Lessons applicable to all frames of reference, from the globe to the community and individual, whom we might assume needs rescuing.

 

The thought experiment prods us to go beyond shallow, short-term consequentialism — beyond what happens right off the bat as the result of intervention — instead to dig into primary principles guiding the verdicts we render. Foundational moral values, personal and societal — even  universal — matter greatly in these presumptive decisions.

 

Are We Alone in the Universe, or Not? And Does It Matter?

Peering through Saturn’s rings, the Cassini probe caught a glimpse of a faraway planet and its moon. At a distance of just under 900 million miles, Earth shines bright among the many stars in the sky, distinguished by its bluish tint.

By Keith Tidman

The writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke once wrote: “Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” 

But are the two alternatives really terrifying? And even if they were, then what might be the upshot?

 

In exploring the possible consequences of Clarke’s thought experiment, I’ll avoid enmeshing us in a discussion of whether extraterrestrials have already visited Earth, or whether we will get to visit their planets in the near term. For the foreseeable future, the distances are too large for that to happen, where suspected extraterrestrial civilisations are thousands, millions, or billions of light-years away. Those distances hamper hunts for signals engaged in by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, which metaphorically dips only an infinitesimally small scoop into the vast cosmic ocean. And such distances hamper interstellar travel.

 

Accordingly, we are currently in no position to respond definitively to the challenge Enrico Fermi, also known as “the architect of the nuclear age,” raised with his lunchtime colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in 1950, referring to extraterrestrials: “Where is everybody?”

 

One piece of crucial context for our conversation here is that of scale: the known universe is currently thought to be some 93 billion light-years in diameter. Recall that a light-year is a measurement of distance, not time, so that in Earthly ‘miles,’ the cosmic diameter is an easy, but boggling, calculation: 93 billion multiplied by 5.8 trillion miles. Add that, in the case of travel or electromagnetic communications (beamed signals) between us and extraterrestrials, the velocity of light is the fixed upper limit — as far as current science is concerned, anyway. All of which is problematic for detecting aliens and their biomarkers or technomarkers, quite apart from anyone engaging in neighbourly interstellar space visitation.

 

Yet, in a universe kickstarted some 13.8 billion years ago — with hundreds of billions of galaxies, and trillions of stars and planets (many of those exoplanets conceivably habitable, even if not twins of our world) — it’s surely arguable that extraterrestrial civilisations, carbon-based or differently constituted physically, are out there, similarly staring toward the skies, quizzically pondering. Alien cosmologists asking, “Where is everybody?,” making great strides developing their own technology, and calculating probabilities for sundry constants and variables assumed necessary for technologically advanced life to prosper elsewhere.

 

There are two key assumption in asking whether we are alone in the universe or we are among teeming alien life strewn throughout the universe. The first assumption, of a general nature, is to define ourselves as a conscious, intelligent, sophisticated species; the second is to assume the extraterrestrials we envision in our discussion are likewise conscious and intelligent and sophisticated — at least equally or maybe considerably more so, options we’ll explore.

 

A third assumption is an evolutionary process, transitioning from physics to chemistry to biology to consciousness. Higher-order consciousness is presumed to be the evolutionary apex both for our species — what it is like to be us — and for extraterrestrials — what it is like to be them. Consciousness may end up the evolutionary apex for our and their machine technology, too. Given that higher-order consciousness is central, we need a baseline for what we mean by the term. Taking a physicalist or materialist point of view, the mind and consciousness are rooted in the neurophysiological activity of the brain, reducible to one and the same. This, rather than existing dualistically in some ethereal, transcendental state separate from the brain, as has sometimes been mythologized.

 

As a placeholder here, consciousness is assumed to be fundamentally similar in its range of domains both for our species and for extraterrestrials, comprising variations of these features: experience, awareness, perception, identity, sentience, thought experimentation, emotion, imagination, innovation, curiosity, memory, chronicled past, projected future, executive function, curation, normative idealism, knowledge, understanding, cognition, metacognition — among others. On these important fronts, the features’ levels of development between us and extraterrestrials may well differ in form and magnitude.

 

As for one of Arthur C. Clarke’s alternative scenarios — that our species is alone in the universe — I can’t help but wonder why, then, the universe is so old, big, and still rapidly growing, if the cosmic carnival is experienced by us alone. We might scratch our heads over the seeming lack of sense in that, whereby the imposing panorama captured by space-based telescopes dwarfs us. We might, therefore, construe that particular scenario as favouring an exceptional place for our species in the otherwise unoccupied cosmic wonderment, or in a different (and more terrifying?) vein suggesting our presence is inconsequential.

 

That is, neither aloneness nor uniqueness necessarily equates to the specialness of a species, but to the contrary a trifling one-off situation. Where we have to come to grips with the indeterminacy of why this majestic display of light-years-sized star nurseries, galaxies rushing toward or away from one another, the insatiability of hungry supermassive black holes, supernovas sending ripples through the faraway reaches of spacetime, and so much more.

 

As for the possibility of sophisticated other life in the universe, we might turn to the so-called anthropic principle for the possible how and why of such occurrences. The principle posits that many constants of the Earth, of the solar system, of the Milky Way, and of the universe are so extraordinarily fine-tuned that only in those ways might conscious, intelligent, advanced life like ours ever to have evolutionarily come into being.

 

The universe would be unstable, as the anthropic principle says, if any of those parameters would shift even a minuscule amount, the cosmos being like a pencil balanced precariously on its pointed tip. It’s likely, therefore, that our species is not floating alone in an unimaginably vast, roiling but barren cosmic sea; according to a more expansive view of the error-less anthropic principle, the latter makes the creation and sustenance of extraterrestrial life possible, too, as fellow players in the cosmic froth. Fine-tuned, after all, doesn't necessarily equate to rare. 

 

We might thus wonder about the consequences for our self-identity and image if some among these teeming numbers of higher-order intelligent extraterrestrials inhabiting the universe got a developmental jumpstart on our species’ civilisation of a million or more years. It’s reasonable to assume that those species would have experienced many-orders-of-magnitude advances biologically, scientifically, technologically, culturally, and institutionally, fundamentally skewing how humanity perceives itself.

 

The impact of these realities on human self-perception might lead some to worry over the glaring inequality and possibly perceived menace, resulting in dents in the armour of our persistent self-exceptionalism, raising larger questions about our purpose. These are profoundly philosophical considerations. We might thereby opt to capitulate, grasping at straws of self-indulgent excuses. Yet, extraterrestrials capable of interstellar travel might choose — whether for benign purposes (e.g., development, enlightenment, resource sharing), or for malign ones (e.g., hegemonism, hubris, manifest destiny, self-exceptionalism, colonisation), or for a hybrid of reasons — that interventionism, with its mix of calculated and unpremeditated consequences, might seem the natural course.

 

Our reactions to gargantuan inter-species differences might range from giddy exceptionalism at one end to dimmed significance at the other. On a religious front, a crisis might ensue in the presence of remarkably advanced extraterrestrials, influencing factors surrounding faith, creeds, dicta, values, patriarchy. Some of our religious constructs — scriptures, symbology, philosophies — might collapse as shallow affectations. For example, in light of hyper-advanced extraterrestrials, our history of expressing religious imagery in anthropomorphic terms (our species described doctrinally as being “in God’s image,” for example) may no longer make sense, fundamentally altering belief systems.

 

We would have to revisit the principles of ethics, including the degree that ethics are culturally and societally contingent. Or the impact might lead to our being elated that life has advanced to such a remarkable degree, covetous for what it might mean for benefits for our species — to model what seems to have worked magnificently for a cutting-edge alien civilisation. The potential for learning vastly advanced natural science and technology and societal paradigms would be immense, where, for instance, extraterrestrials might be hybrids of the best of biology and the best of machines.

 

As potentially confounding either of Clarke’s scenarios might prove, neither need be terrifying; instead, both scenarios have the potential of being exhilarating. But let me toss one last unavoidable constant into the cosmic cauldron. And this is the concept of entropy — the irreversibly increasing (net) disorder within a closed, isolated system like the universe, with its expanding galactic and stellar separation accelerating toward a thermodynamic demise. Entropy is a fact of life of the universe: providing an expiry date, and eventually rendering everything extinct. The end of history, the end of physics — and the end of metaphysics.