The Becoming and the magic that'll re-enchant us

Lent 2018, Day 1 - Ash Wednesday

As I wrote yesterday, this Lent I will be drawing on Stuart A. Kauffman's book Humanity in a Creative Universe. The book's basic premise is that scientific reductionism has killed off mankind's capacity for wonder, by reducing everything to a series of mathematical equations which prove that things are as they are because that's how they are. He considers Isaac Newton (1643-1727) as the father of this revolution, tying together the mathematics of Pythagoras and Euclid with the astronomical observations of Copernicus and Galileo.

From man's ability to predict the elliptical paths of the planets, to the 'equal and opposite' reaction about which we learnt at school, Newton's thinking brought on the Enlightenment, the end of alchemy and the beginnings of modern science. The Church lost influence as science began to rationally explain more and more natural phenomena. At the same time, John Locke was arguing that governance was about checks and balances and not the divine right of kings; Adam Smith then explained economics, while 83 years later Darwin gave us evolution. These four great thinkers brought about the End of Magic, suggests Kauffman.

Everything around us could be explained, and if it couldn't, it would only be a matter of time before it could - scientifically. Reductive materialism reigned.

But then along came quantum mechanics. The position of the electron in an atom's shell. Hardly something worth being curious about, one would think - not something that remotely impinges on our day-to-day life.

From 1909 to 1927, physicists and mathematicians had cracked the theory behind it - as Kauffman points out - to eleven decimal places. Using scientific method, examining the results of experiments repeated over and over in many different labs, it was proved that the strange world of quantum mechanics is not a flaky theory, but an incontrovertible fact. An electron can indeed be in two places at one time, until someone detects its actual position - pinning it down by observation. Until an observer has observed it, the electron is said to be in 'superposition' - this is Schroedinger's famous cat - alive and dead at the same time until someone peers into the box.

Quantum mechanics has overturned Newton's neat world of atoms bouncing off one another equally and oppositely, like billiard balls. Suddenly, an event that happens in one place (an electron moves from one shell to another), can happen somewhere else at the same time - simultaneously, faster than the speed of light. Suddenly, the presence of a conscious observer is needed to determine the outcome.

So cause and effect are no longer necessarily linked, and with that change, the determinism that had reduced us to the status of meat robots in a steady-state universe, is starting to change...

But many people still consider that life, consciousness, is a mere accident of chance, caused by random atoms bumping into one another over billions of years. For them, God is dead, the magic has gone and will not return.

Even more people, however, are still living with a pre-Enlightenment mindset, that an omnipotent, omnipresent God reigns over the world and is here to punish or reward us. Some people stumble between the two, subscribing to a religion because one ought to, while not really believing in anything. A post-post-modern world view is emerging, one in which our presence is central to a Universe that is fulfilling itself.

Kauffman's book is spiritually optimistic yet based on firm scientific grounding. He asks us not to be over-reliant on reason, not to be materialistically driven by a desire for endlessly growing GDP, and to be aware of our role as a creative part of a Universe that is Becoming.

More tomorrow...

This time last year
Short-haul musings 

This time two years ago:
Mind, matter and life

This time three years ago:
Compositions in blue and white

This time six years ago:
Waiting for the change to come

This time seven years ago
A wetter Poland?

This time nine years ago:
Heavy overnight snow

This time ten years ago:
Changing Jeziorki skyline