Postmodern attempts to restore meaning in our relation to Nature1 Håkan Snellman Department of Theoretical Physics, School of Engineering Sciences KTH, Stockholm, Sweden Abstract: Postmodern attempts to reintroduce meaning into the Scientific Project are discussed. Although potentially effective to restore meaning into our relation to nature, they are probably not radical enough to help us out of the present crisis, in which man and his interaction with nature through a technology based upon this Project is seen as the most dangerous threat to the planet and his own future. 1. The Scientific Project has been one of the major projects of western society for the last 400 years, and is now a global enterprise. Yet it seems to have come to a critical state in its evolution. Although it has been greatly successful in several areas, many of its technological fruits have also shown to be extremely dangerous for human life. The interaction between man and his environment through the widespread use of science-based technology has become a threat for our future: The ozon layer has been damaged, pollutants of various kinds lead to extinction of species and our use of fossile carbon increases the CO2 content in the atmosphere and leads to global heating of the Earth. The polar caps may melt and cause floods, that might eventually drive masses of people into severe difficulty. And on top of that, the possibility a nuclear war is not yet over, and the techno-military industry is still larger that all the other scientific projects together. This dilemma can be seen as a consequence of the metaphysical structure of the Scientific Project that goes back to its foundation in the 17th century. Modern science is based on a view upon nature as if it is devoid of meaning, thereby avoiding the final causes of Aristotle. The first sucess of this view came with Newtons theory of gravitation. This theory is the beginning of classical mechanics, and after that mechanics became the way of describing nature. This prevails straigt through modern history as classical, celestial, solid, fluid, statistical and finally quantum mechanics. This mechanistic viewpoint has been taken as a basis for studies even in biology by emphasising function instead of purpose.

This trend became enorously enhanced after the invention in 1859 to use chance as a model for natural scientific processes, starting with Darwins theory of the origin of species and Maxwells theory of gases. From then on this type of modelling has become more and more proliferent, and even turned into a dogma by scientists like Jaques Monod in molecular biology.

In the late 20th century we have then begun to hear statements to the effect that there is no meaning seen in nature. Scientist like Steven Weinberg (Weinberg 1977), Jacques Monod (Monod 1970), William Provine (Provine 1989), Richard Dawkins (Dawkins 1986) and others say that nature is meaningless. Looking at the foundations of the Scientific project, we can easily trace this to the error of mistaking the map for the reality. The usefulness of maps is that they do not give the whole picture, but only certain relevant parts of it; relevant for the underlying aim of the scientific project: to get power over nature. We can now see, that this myopy is becoming seriously dangerous for us to cope with the situation when technology based upon this project has 1 Contribution to the conference LINNAEUS &HOMO RELIGIOUSUS May 30 – June 2, 2007 in Uppsala, Sweden, 3) Theories of human nature and Purpose after Darwin in a Post-modern World. become an integral part of human interaction with nature. And as it denies any values in nature, it dismisses them consequently as aberrations in the human psyche or ego. The religious experience is reduced to a psychological state.

Nevertheless some few attempts to go beyond this mechanistic vision of nature from the side of scientists has been advanced in recent years. These include various uses of the anthropic cosmological principle, suggested in modern times by Brandon Carter, the suggestion of a new order, the theory of implicate order, in nature by David Bohm, and consiousness present at the level of elementary particles by Freeman Dyson, as well as a participatory universe by John Wheeler. Other attempts suggest reintroduction of goals and purpose in biology like those of Stanley N Salthe, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. I will in what follows limit myself to discuss three of these attempts: The implicate order by David Bohm, the Anthropic cosmological prinicple by Brandon Carter, and the Gaia theory, by James Lovelock.

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Let us first try to understand what many people feel has been left out. Why do several scientists say that there is no meaning in the Universe or in Nature or in biological life? What is the meaning of “lack of meaning” here, so to say? Obviously a mechanistic description in terms of function does not seem to relate to our sense of purpose in life. Man is an intentional being, much more than animals are perceived to be. Animals are probably mainly driven by instincts and desires, whereas we feel that the essense of our lives are beyond that, that it is in some sense “higher” and “richer”, expressed e.g. in culture, art and other activities not found elsewhere in the biological realm. In the end most of our cultural undertakings can be seen as attempts at answering the eternal questions: "From where do we come? Who are we? Where are we going?" And modern science, that originally was developed with the utilistic aim described above, actually seems to answer these questions, but in a way that we are unsatisfied with: We come by an accident out of nowhere, out of a quantum fluctuation resulting in a Big Bang. We are molecular machines that self-reproduce: a rattling in the atoms, without direction, born from “chance and necessity”. We are going nowhere, probably towards the death in fire by an exploding star.

In view of the above I will therefore take it that “meaningless” here does in fact mean that there is too little or too weak connections between the scientific description of the world and our exisential experience of meaning, purpose, intention, significance and values in our personal lives. Somehow these aspects do not get a proper description in the world picture. This tendency has of course been enormously enhanced by the introduction of chance in scientific modelling. I wish, however to point out that also the fully deterministic description of nature implies a lack of meaning, since total determinism makes our intentions meaningless: what happens is anyhow predetermined and our sense of having a choice by free will is an illusion. Furthermore all these attempts at map-making are self-referential. If we claim that a map is giving us a true picture of reality, then the map-maker himself is in the picture. What does it then mean to say that the picture is meaningless?

Let us ponder a while on what the situation looks like. Due to certain limitations in the scientific method and modelling, we do not preceive meaning in nature. It seems without purpose. Now, that is stricly speaking not possible, because the way we preceive nature is its purpose for us. Thus, for many scientists, at present the universe is preceived only from the limited point of view of function, it is reduced to a resource. It therefore does not look to have any further intrinsic value.

To sum up: there is no meaning in the universe. It does not make truly sense. It is not significant. It seems without purpose. It embraces no values. It is entirely mechanical, and that is obviously not easy to live by.

- How should the universe be, then?

For most of us it should: be intentional, fill ourselves with meanings, enrich us, be creative etc. These expressions reveal how our meanings enfold. We could perhaps say that we as beings, in essense, are the meanings we encompass. But as the universe appears accidental and mechanical it is impoverishing us, i.e. taking values away from us. We are ourselves are reduced to machines.

Also the loss of correspondance between the world view of modern man and his life view is one of the difficulties of contemporary religious man. Many people can no longer relate their spiritual evolution to the structures of the universe in modern cosmology. The great religions offer us no guidance in this. Christianity was fighting for the geocentric world view which supported a life view with a spritual hierarchy. This is lost since the time of Galileo, and I belive we are getting more and more frustrated by this divergence.

Now, function and purpose are separated in our language, even if we often connect them. This is due to the fact that objects can have several functions, depending on the various purposes with which they are used. We can therefore not ascribe a fixed function to an object: its function depends on the purpose. Even the heart, that has the function to pump blood through the veins and arteries, can also function as food for some hungry beast etc.

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David Bohm (Bohm 1980) has during several decades until his death in 1992 worked to understand our way of thinking and perceiving the world. He suggested in the early 1980s the adaption of a new order in nature, different from the Cartesian order, that he coined the implicate order. This implicate order describes a subtle structure, that contains a structured wholeness, under the explicate order of the visible reality. To make this more easy to understand he suggests that we can perceivew it through two reciprocal flows: the soma-significant and the signa- somatic processes (Bohm 1985). These flows act as an unbroken chain in two directions. Any matter has some form which acts on the level of meaning for us, and any meaning reacts back on the material level as informing it in new ways from the intention that goes with the meaning. Our environment can be seen as the response to the meanings that we have percieved during the ages as we have realised it in houses, villages, infrastructure etc and this meaning is what reality is for us. This flow also takes place on lower levels, and as I see it it is closely connected to e.g. the new disciplin of bio-semiotics that has attracted some attention lately.

The implicate order and soma significance is an attempt at an encompassing attitude to reality on a general level, of potentially high importance. However, if we se it from the point of view of science, it is less clear what it can do. Of course it is a criticism of the limited scheme that denies finality or purpose in the description of Nature. Or rather to limit this purpose to function, and to the purpose of the Scientific Project as such.

However, as we refine our measurements and take more and more aspects into account, from the subtle interconnections in the implicate order, more and more aspects become relevant for the outcome of an experiment. With this, it becomes gradually more and more difficult to actualise conditions under which the refined experiments can be realised and repeated. In fact, from the project itself we learn the universe is expanding in every second and the situation is therefore never the same tomorrow as it is today. To the extent that this expansion and its consequences are relevant for the subtle fabric of implications we will gradually lose the scientific method. This possibility points therefore to an inbuilt limitation in what can be known with scientific methods (Bohm 1984).

The main aspect of Bohm’s investigation might therefore be its criticism of the scientific method as way to understand the universe. The scientific knowledge is only strengthening the meaning that nature has for us, as in the Scientific project, namely a subject for exerting our power over. And this leads to us seeing Nature mainly as a resource: its value lies in what we can take out from it.

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Another approach, at present perhaps the most advanced attempt to introduce meaning, is the Gaia theory, elaborated by James Lovelock (Lovelock 1979) and Lynn Margulis since the 70s.

To understand Gaia, Lovelock suggests that the goal of Gaia, the self-regulating Earth, is to sustain habitability. This leads Lovelock to discuss a chain of encapsulated structures, from “the selfish gene” that urges itself to reproduce, to the evolving ecosystem of the Earth, to sustain its habitability. If generalized this could become the beginning of a theory of final causes for the encapsulated systems stretching form the galaxy to the elementary particle that might even reconnect to the religious experience of human beings. The reason is that the processes in Gaia are dependent not only on being fed by the sun, but must have come about by several generations of star-burning in a spiral galaxy, starting from 75% hydrogen and 24% helium. Gaia can therefore only appear in a galaxy. I do not suggest of course any inevitability of this at the present time. But if the purpose to sustain biological life was there, it required a galaxy for Gaia to be formed. Once Gaia is formed, the processes described by the Gaia theory can take place, and life evolves in its entirety as a global process where all parts interact and collaborate to form the conditions we have today. In a self-regulating structure the parts are there for a purpose: to maintain the whole structure in a certain state, and the parts (e.g. the organs in an animal) are collaborating for this purpose, which gives meaning to their functions. For example Harvey’s discovery of the blood circulation, was based on the discovery of valves in the blood vessels that impled a purpose to him. Often the functional aspect of such a purpose is described by organization. However, the organization must be appropriate to the purpose.

Thus when James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis suggests us to look upon the Earth with its biosphere as a livling being, that immediately changes the meaning of the Earth for us. At first it was therefore violently oppsed by many scientists, and the authors were careful in trying to emphasize the functional apsects more. Step by step Lovelock has become more open and discussed Gaia in term of purpose (Lovelock 1988, 2006). This opens up new meaning for us and this meaning leads to a modifed behaviour on our part as it penetrates the consciousness of human society.

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Yet a third approach to meaning, that has roots far down in antiquity, is the anthropic cosmological principle (Barrow and Tippler 1986), brought up in a modern form first by Brandon Carter (Carter 1974) in 1974. Modern precursors, from a slightly different view, can be found in e.g. Erwin Schroedinger’s book “What is life” from 1948.

There are at least three versions of this principle: the weak (W), the strong (S) and the final (F) anthropic principle (AP). The WAP states approximately that the world looks as it does since we human beings are here to observe it. It therefore has to be compatible with our existence: living conscious beings in biologial bodies. This requirement of compatibility sets severe constraints on the constants of nature in a universe that can habit us, such as the magnitude of the electric charge, and the strength of the strong interaction, etc. Even the age of the universe and its size etc, which is a prerequisite for the heavy elements like iron and magnesium in our bodies to be formed, can be viewed as a consequence of this principle. The anthropic principle has especially been used in physics and cosmology to try to fix the values of the physical constants of nature, that otherwise seem arbitrary, especially to get an understanding of the so called cosmological constant, that is related to the recently discovered Dark Energy of the universe.

In some sense the principle is rather passive and is at present not very controversial, even if not accepted to be used in physics by all parties. In modern cosmology based on string theory it has again recently come up as a possibility to understand the selection of our universe as opposed to all possible types of universes that could be consistent with string theories.

The strong anthropic principle (SAP) says that the universe has such properties that life and consiousness must develop in it at some stage in its history. And the final anthropic principle (FAP) says that life and consiousness (or intelligent information processing) is part of the fabric of the universe and will evolve and once it has appeared it will never die out. These principles are of course rather different from the weak one and are more speculative. Their further history will depend on how predicitve they will turn out to be.

A simliar point of view is taken by Freeman Dyson (Dyson 1978), in his book “Disturbing the Universe”. Dyson argues that there is no reason to belive that even an electron, in making the quantum transitions, is not doing this from a conscious point of view, even if the level of consciousness is much lower and more restricted that ours. “The universe must have known that we were coming” is his popularized conclusion of the situation. This implies that there was a plan. A plan is not a deterministic structure; it is a an aim or a goal that brings in finality. Dysons cosmological work fits into the structure of the SAP.

A proponent of FAP is Christian de Duve (de Duve 1968), who says in Vital Dust, Life as a cosmic imperative, "Life and consciousness do not emerge from a capriscious chance, but as natural formations of matter and are intervowen in the fabric of the universe."

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The common denominator of these ideas is that they are reconnecting in modern terminology to the Pythgorean view on matter, that is the hylozoic view: all matter is alive and conscious, only in different degrees, and all consciousness has a material basis. In other words: materiality and consciousness are simply two different properties of reality.

Since Einstein we are of course inclined to think of matter as a form of enclosed energy, and therefore to see energy and consciousness as two different properties of reality. However, it is important here to understand that consciousness and energy are not enough to take as a basis for a world view. The localization and scale of matter has to be set by something: the extension of a material particle or the length (or mass) of a superstring etc. Otherwise we have no structure and no evolution in the the universe and in fact no information, since the localized form informs matter. "Information is a difference that makes a difference", as Gregory Bateson coins it.

Let us try now to consider these attempts to modify or ammend the Scientific Project from a more general perspective. There are several ways that deeper meanings (than follows from its own purpose) could be either grafted onto science, or amalgamated with it, so to speak. Some of these ways are: 1. We try to associate purpose with function in a hiearchically nested way. (Gaia, AP ) 2. We could try to make all knowledge into one whole system, thereby incorporating the human value system, since we are part of nature, with the scientific process. (Bohm) 3. We try to reformulate the purpose of the knowledge system by replacing "knowledge is power" with something less harmful, like "knowledge is responsibility". (Snellman 1995) 4. We try to subject the scientific project to a higher purpose altogether, that would impress a different value system onto it. (Nasr 1997, 1993), (Okada 1984).

At the present time probably none of these positions is radical enough to redirect the Scientific Project to respond to the present crisis in our relation to Nature. I think our only way out is simply to embark on another project altogether. As we look around in the world, I think it has to be directed towards ourselves, since according to the Gaia theory and the Green Movement, man himself is now the most severe threat to Gaia. We should therefore try to get power over our selves, in the sense of “spiritualisation of man”. In many religions this exists as a latent possibility, that has so far not been realised. The medieval theologist Duns Scotus talkes about it as “synergy”, the strive for cooperation between God and man. This project ought to be the next step in the civilization process, in the light of which the Scientific Project should step back in a natural way and align itself.

Some people will most probably object to this and say we cannot possibly risk to loose what we have acheived by the Scientific Project. I am sure, however, that the same has been said about all previous projects, that are today mere history. I am also sure that nothing really useful would get lost. We once built large pryamids; we hardly remember how it was done, but we don’t even care any longer. We also don’t any longer build Gothic Cathedrals, even if we could. We feel that we have more important things to do: we are swept in by the spirit to develop power over nature by the Scientific Project. It is this dangerous spirit that in the first place should be abandoned in favor of the new project.

If we could launch this other new project, I am sure that in a hundred years from now we will sit back and say about our time: What did they think about? How could they just go on like that? Were they really that mad?

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