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| 3 Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
In my previous two postings I contended that (1) both biological and cultural evolution are directional in the sense that they have a strong tendency to create more complex structures over time (animals and human societies, respectively); and (2) in the case of biological evolution, at least, this directionality is suggestive of purpose (particularly given the role that information processing plays in sustaining the direction).
But to say that evolution may serve a "higher" purpose in the sense of a "larger" purpose isn't to say it serves a "higher" purpose in the sense of a "divine" purpose. Even if you accept my contention that the evolutionary process has some hallmarks of design, the question remains: does the design seem to embody the values that religious people associate with God?
In one sense, the answer has to be no. The kind of God that is hardest to find evidence of is the kind most people seem to believe in: a God that is infinitely powerful and infinitely good. After all, presumably that kind of God wouldn't permit the various forms of cruelty and suffering that afflict the world (including those inherent in organic evolution, and thus in our creation).
Still, even if we acknowledge the problem of evil, and acknowledge that we can't solve it, we can at least ask: Are there signs of any divinely imparted meaning in the evolutionary process? Granted directionality in the sense of growing complexity, is there any directionality along what you might call a spiritual or moral dimension? For that matter, is there anything you might call a spiritual or moral dimension? I think the answer to these questions is yes, and I'll spend my final two postings explaining this position.
The first part of my argument has to do with what I consider the mystery of consciousness, or of sentience--the mystery surrounding the fact that we are capable of feeling pleasure and pain; that, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously put it, it is "like something" to be alive.
Let me stress that the "mystery" I'm talking about isn't the mystery of how the brain generates consciousness (the question Daniel Dennett addresses in Consciousness Explained).Rather, I'm asking why the brain generates consciousness. And the point I'm trying to make is that, according to what is the closest thing to a consensual view of consciousness in the modern behavioral sciences, this "why" question is wholly baffling. The reason is that, according to this mainstream view, consciousness--subjective experience--has no behavioral manifestations; it doesn't do anything.
Sure, you may feel as if your feelings do things. Isn't it the sensation of heat, after all, that causes you to withdraw your hand from the surprisingly hot stove? The answer presupposed by mainstream behavioral science is: no. Corresponding to the subjective sensation of heat is an objective, physical flow of biological information. Physical impulses signifying heat travel up your arm and are processed by your equally physical brain. The output is a physical signal that coerces your muscles into withdrawing your hand. Here, at the sheerly physical level, is where the real action is. Your sensation of pain bears roughly the relation to the real action that your shadow bears to you. In technical terms: consciousness, subjective experience, is "epiphenomenal"--it is always an effect, never a cause.
But if this is true--if consciousness doesn't do anything-- then its existence becomes quite the unfathomable mystery. If subjective experience is superfluous to the day-to-day business of living and eating and getting our genes into the next generation, then why would it have ever arisen in the course of natural selection? Why would life acquire a major property that has no function?
People who claim to have an answer usually turn out to have misunderstood the question. For example, some people say that consciousness arose so that people could process language. And it's true, of course, that we're conscious of language. As we speak, we have the subjective experience of turning our thoughts into words. It even feels as if our inner, conscious self is causing the words to be formed. But, whatever it may feel like, the (often unspoken) premise of mainstream behavioral science is that when you are in conversation with someone, all the causing happens at a physical level. That someone flaps his or her tongue, generating physical sound waves that enter your ear, triggering a sequence of physical processes in your brain that ultimately result in the flapping of your own tongue, and so on. In short: the experience of assimilating someone's words and formulating a reply is superfluous to the assimilation and the reply, both of which are just intricate mechanical processes.
Besides, if conscious experience arose to abet human language, then why does it also accompany such things as getting our fingers smashed by rocks--things that existed long before human language?
The mystery of consciousness has lately been underscored by computer science. Though artificial intelligence hasn't advanced at breathtaking speed, there has been measured progress in automating sensory and cognitive tasks. There are robots that "feel" things and recoil from them, or "see" things and identify them; there are computers that "analyze" chess strategies. And, clearly, everything these robots do can be explained in wholly physical terms, via electronic blips and the like. "Feeling" and "seeing" and "analyzing," these machines suggest, needn't involve sentience . Yet they do--in our species at least.
So what is my point? Why do I attach such philosophical, even theological, significance to the mystery of consciousness?
In answering that question, it is helpful to imagine a world without consciousness. Consider planet X, on which life evolves. Little bits of self-replicating material (call them genes) encase themselves (by a process we'll call natural selection) in protective armor that exhibits behavioral flexibility. One species in particular--a brainy, two-legged organism--exhibits lots of behavioral flexibility. These organisms are capable of great feats: communicating with subtlety, creating art, watching TV.
But these organisms have no trace of sentience; it isn't like anything to be them. Yes, fire burns their skin, so, yes, they're designed to withdraw their hands from fire, but, no, they don't feel pain. Or happiness, or anything.
Obviously, such a world would lack the kinds of things many people cite as key sources of life's meaning: such feelings as undying love, devout allegiance, the thrill of victory, and so on. But there is something else, too. Such a world would lack moral meaning. After all, these so-called "organisms" are just machines, as devoid of feeling as a computer (or at least, as devoid of feeling as we presume a computer to be). Is there anything immoral about unplugging a computer for good? And if not, then how could there be anything immoral about killing one of these insensate organisms on this emotionally barren planet, where there was never any potential for fulfillment in the first place? This is what a world truly without meaning would look like: it would offer no context in which words such as "right" and "wrong" made sense.
In this light, it seems to me that the mystery of consciousness takes on genuine theological significance. I'm not saying it proves the existence of God. But certainly the fact that the one feature of human existence that is of mysterious, even inexplicable, origin is also the central source of life's meaning doesn't exactly discourage speculation about divine beings and higher purpose.
And this fact renders odd the tendency of people convinced of life's meaninglessness to cite, as support, science's having "explained away" the mysteries of life. After all, it isn't just that science hasn't managed to solve the mystery of consciousness. In a sense, science created the mystery of consciousness; the mystery emerges from a hard-nosed, scientific view of behavior and causality.
Faced with the mystery of consciousness, some people--including such philosophers as David Chalmers--have suggested that the explanation must lie in a kind of metaphysical law: consciousness accompanies particular kinds of information processing (perhaps only organic kinds, perhaps information processing in general).
This notion that sentience naturally accompanies complex data-processing strikes me as the most plausible explanation of consciousness around. And in its light, organic history acquires an interesting kind of significance. Because, as I argue in my book, organic evolution pretty much ensures extremely complex data-processing. Over time, we see more and more complex animals that process information more and more elaborately.
And it isn't just that natural selection favors behavioral complexity, and thus deft data processing. Complexity of biological structure itself, from the very beginning, entailed information processing. Forget about your brain and its ability to plan vacations, wondrous though this is. Just think about your lungs or kidneys, about breathing or urinating. These things, too, are data-rich--not just via involvement with the nervous system, but via hormonal control, via all kinds of minor bits of cellular crosstalk. For that matter, a single cell--any one of yours or any one bacterium--has at its heart an information processor of no meager sophistication, DNA.
Granted, when it comes to our most sublime, most meaningful moments--feeling love or empathy, joy or epiphany, even abject but profound remorse--kidneys and bacteria just won't get the job done. Brains are where the action is. So it's fortunate that large multicellular animals with great behavioral complexity seem to have been in the cards. My point is just that these brains are a continuous outgrowth of something at life's very essence: a primordial imperative to process information. Given the connection among information processing, sentience, and meaning, it is fair to say that evolution by natural selection was from the beginning a veritable machine for making meaning.
(In my book Nonzero, I argue that the logic by which complexity, hence data-processing, hence meaning, grows is the logic of "non-zero-sumness". The genes along a strand of DNA have a non-zero-sum relationship with one another, as do the organelles within a cell, the cells within a body. In all of these cases, the cause of the non-zero-sumness is shared Darwinian interest--being in the same boat in one sense or another--and the result is transmitted information. For, as I also note in the book, the successful playing of non-zero-sum games--cooperative coordination--generally involves communication.)
That biological evolution has an arrow--the invention of more structurally and informationally complex forms of life--and that this arrow points toward meaning, isn't, of course, proof of the existence of God. But it's more suggestive of divinity than an alternative world would be: a world in which evolution had no direction, or a world with directional evolution but no consciousness. If more scientists appreciated the weirdness of consciousness--understood that a world without sentience, hence without meaning, is exactly the world that a modern behavioral scientist should expect to exist--then reality might inspire more awe than it does.
Of course, a world full of meaning isn't a world full of goodness. After all, sentience brings equally the capacity for joy and for suffering, for good and for bad. It is the existence of meaning that allowed Pol Pot to be a person of consequence. On Planet X, that imaginary world of zombies, devoid of sentience and thus of meaning, the Pol Pots and Hitlers and Stalins would be incapable of evil; however destructive, they could inflict no suffering, prevent no happiness, affront no dignity.
In short, the existence of meaning is morally neutral; it creates the potential for good, but doesn't, by itself, tip the scales in that direction. In this light we might hope for more from a divine architect than mere meaning, the mere capacity for good things. We might hope for the *realization* of good things--every now and then, at least, and the more often, the better.
Is there any reason to think that the evolutionary process, in addition to naturally creating and expanding meaning, naturally creates and expands goodness? This will be the subject of my next and final posting.
Thanks for reading this far.
Bob Wright Author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny http://www.nonzero.org
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Bob Wright is the author of "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny" http://www.nonzero.org
Published 2000.01.28
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