Eleven Things that Fill Me with Awe
The unimaginable vastness of what exists.
Our visible universe has about ten billion galaxies, and those galaxies have an average of about ten billion stars each. But according to theories gaining support from reputable cosmologists, this looks like just a vanishingly small fraction of what exists. If Andrei Linde is correct, the visible universe is just a tiny bubble within our overall universe, and it's even possible that subregions of inflating bubbles could themselves inflate, ad infinitum. If M Theory is correct, our universe has 10 spatial dimensions and our visible universe might be just a 3-D membrane in this meta-space. If Lee Smolin's cosmological natural selection theory is correct, our universe could be one member of an evolving and exponentially growing lineage of universes which proliferate through a process analogous to biological evolution through natural selection. If Hugh Everett's Many Worlds Hypothesis is correct, then reality continually branches, with every alternative allowed by quantum laws occurring in some branch or another, giving rise to an unimaginable plurality of worlds. As strange as it sounds, this is not science fiction, and I believe it's quite likely that at least one of the above theories, and possibly more than one, is true.
That the properties of the universe are conducive (perhaps even almost optimally conducive) to life.
Several scientists and philosophers, from Fred Hoyle to Martin Rees, have observed that the physical properties of our universe are what would be needed for life to emerge. From the strengths of gravity and the strong nuclear force, to the values for carbon resonance and the proton-neutron mass difference, to the existence of supernovae and water, most other universes we can imagine would be devoid of life. (Or at least devoid of life as we know it; just as we wouldn't have expected, a priori, for a cold dead universe like ours to give rise to intelligent life, it would be overly anthropocentric to assume that life couldn't exist in other imagined worlds.) Such cosmic fine-tuning seems too coincidental to not have an explanation, and Lee Smolin and others are trying to piece together the clues. Some would accuse me of falling prey to an anthropic bias, correctly observing that if our universe wasn't able to support life that I wouldn't be here to observe that this was the case. I agree with John Leslie's response to this objection: if you suddenly woke up and found that you were in front of a firing squad which had fired at you and all missed, you would consider it remarkable, and deserving of an explanation, that you were alive. I think that James Gardner is on the right track with his Biocosm theory, an attempt to construct a scientifically plausible version of the strong anthropic principle. Our universe seems to be more than just tolerant of life, it seems downright biophilic, to the extent that it appears to have been designed to maximize the likelihood that intelligent life would emerge.
That the apparently mindless process of evolution can, and even tends to, result in forms of increasing complexity, beauty, and value.
Evolution (the accumulated change in a lineage of living things through the inheritance of new variations), operating through natural selection (the differential reproductive success resulting from those variations), has led to increases in complexity, diversity, quantity, and specialization on this planet. Wondrous examples abound in nature: the gecko's ability to use van der Waals forces to walk along a vertical wall, the democratic dance honeybees perform to choose new nest locations, plants developing flowers to bribe pollinators with nectar to get them to pollinate nearby flowers, bats and dolphins with their sophisticated echo-ranging systems, ants as mushroom farmers, snakes with infrared heat-detectors, and countless other examples, most yet to be discovered. And of course, you and I and the thousands of amazing micromachines in our bodies were crafted by the same seemingly mindless force, using only atoms which are individually no different from the ones that comprise cold, inanimate matter. Richard Dawkins has even suggested the possibility that evolution itself evolves, and it seems clear to me that in some respects evolution is genuinely progressive, in its use of ratchets, co-escalation, and other techniques that drive it, by a miraculous bootstrapping, toward ever more complex, beautiful, and useful forms. Similarly, Robert Wright argued persuasively in Nonzero that both biological and cultural evolution appear to be moving toward some goal.
That there is something rather than nothing.
Why does anything exist? This is what Martin Heidegger called the fundamental question of metaphysics. Awe can arise out of a deep understanding or out of complete ignorance; this question is an example of the latter. Not only do I not know the answer, but I don't even know what form an adequate answer would take. It's possible that this question is incomprehensible to human-level intelligence. Complexity arising out of simplicity, as in the case of evolution, is at least plausible even if miraculous. But simplicity out of nothing? This question may be within the ontological realm (what is true) but still outside the epistemological realm (what can be known). I am not impressed by philosophical attempts to explain existence by invoking a logical or metaphysical necessity, nor do I find claims that the question is meaningless to be persuasive. If an answer is found, I expect it to come from science rather than philosophy. Thomas Tryon's observation that the mass-energy content of universe appears to be zero and so the universe may have arisen as a quantum fluctuation seems like a promising step in the right direction, but even if true this is only a partial explanation, since a vacuum is not nothingness and has physical properties that allow the particles to appear out of "thin air".
That qualia exist.
Qualia (singular, quale) is the term philosophers give to introspectively accessible aspects of our mental lives. Qualia include perceptual experiences (such as seeing the color green or tasting chocolate), bodily sensations (such as hunger or dizziness), and emotions (such as fear or love) and other mental states (such as ecstasy, or the awe I feel from this list). When you experience qualia, you are the subject of a certain mental state that has a distinctive subjective character or phenomenology. As an outsider observing our universe I would believe that it didn't feel like anything to be a living creature; how could it, given that the physical structure and function of neurons follow the same soulless laws that inanimate matter does? But as an insider I know that qualia are real, even if I don't know quite what they are or how they can arise out of a mass of swirling atoms. Philosophers call the problem of reducing subjective experience to physical brain states the "hard problem" of consciousness. Some progress toward solving this problem is being made, as philosophers, experimental psychologists, and neurophysiologists learn to speak the same new language. But I'm not confident that human-level intelligence is sufficient to truly understand how qualia arise and why we happen to live in a universe in which they can and do arise.
That some form of freedom invades our deterministic world.
Our universe appears to follow deterministic physical laws, and mental processes are subject to these laws no less than matter is. (The possible exception of quantum indeterminacy seems wholly unrelated to free will.) But some form of free will seems to sneak in, somehow. Philosophers much smarter than myself have yet to reach consensus about what the terms free will and determinism mean, so I think it would be hubris to believe that we understand these concepts well enough to claim that they don't and can't exist. I do think one route to a kind of freedom worth wanting is through what Harry Frankfurt called higher-order desires, preferences, and volitions; that is, not just wanting things, but choosing what you want to want. I believe that free will is spectral, and I believe that most people have far less free will than they realize. Their decisions are largely determined by their genes and memes, and they live most of their lives on autopilot. But through systematic reflective self-evaluation we have at least some ability to redefine ourselves and change our behavior in ways we choose. It's possible that my pro-free will stance is partially a result of my own genes and memes, and/or my hope that free will is real due to its implications for dignity, identity, morality, and responsibility. But I have actively worked at eliminating these biases and am fairly confident that my position is objective: we have a little freedom, and with effort we can get a lot more.
The unreasonable tenacity of life.
Life ceaselessly infiltrates and animates matter toward its own ends. And once it gets started, it appears to persist regardless of any obstacles. Some bacteria can eat metal, stone, and glass. Thiobacillus concretivorans can live in sulfuric acid. Deinococcus radiodurans can withstand 1.5 million rads of gamma radiation, so it would likely survive a nuclear holocaust. Tardigrades can survive temperatures as high as 125 C and as low as almost absolute zero (-273 C) and can even survive in a vacuum. And as hospital workers know, it is very difficult to eliminate bacteria from a single room. There have been five massive extinctions in the earth's history, each of which eliminated about 75% of the existing species. Individual organisms are designed to die, and entire species often go extinct, but life on earth has persisted in an unbroken chain for 3.8 billion years. And these are all examples taken from just one planet in a vast universe, and all descended from a common ancestor, so these examples probably greatly understate the diversity of life. Those who objected to my use of the anthropic principle above would also object here, correctly observing that if life on earth hadn't been so persistent that I wouldn't be here to point out its lack of tenacity, but I feel that the firing squad analogy mentioned above applies equally well in this case.
That our universe seems to be a computation.
There is no clear evidence yet, but there are numerous recent clues pointing to the possibility that our universe is a computer process. Every physical phenomenon scientists have been able to measure precisely enough has been found to be quantized, including light, energy, electric charge, momentum, and spin. Space and time (or equivalently, position and momentum) remain undetermined, but it's possible that they too will eventually be found to be discrete rather than continuous. The seemingly solid matter surrounding you (and even your body) is almost completely empty space, and the closer scientists look at reality the less it seems physical and the more it seems mathematical. And it's only a small step to go from "the universe acts as if it were a computer" to "the universe IS a computer". In computer simulations of cellular automata such as John Conway's Game of Life, exceedingly simple rules can result in surprisingly rich complexity and functionality (including even universal Turing machines). If Ed Fredkin is correct, the universe is a manifestation of the calculations of a computer program following cellular automata rules, and the passage of time is just a recursive function being applied to nature, where the state at the next point in time is deterministically dependent upon the immediately previous state. Fredkin's theory doesn't yet accord well with quantum mechanics or relativity (for example, although the physical laws of our universe appear to be the same everywhere, no grid pattern has net been found that enables these laws to be the same in every direction), but these issues may eventually be resolved. Although the idea that our universe is a computation is startling, more disturbing is the possibility that our universe is a simulation. Within a hundred years it seems likely that virtual reality simulations will be sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from reality, which will be evidence that what we perceive to be reality could also be a simulation. And under the assumption that there can be only one reality but an unlimited quantity of simulations, it seems that we're vastly more likely to be in a simulation than the real thing. Common sense tells me this is absurd, but common sense is often wrong.
That we can understand our universe and that such understanding enables control.
We know within a few percent how much time has passed since the Big Bang, and we can measure the speed of light even though it travels about a million times faster than sound. I am stunned that scientists have been able to learn these and countless other facts about the nature of physical reality. What amazes me is not merely that our universe is understandable, but that it is understandable by humans. We were designed by evolution to survive long enough to reproduce, not to be able to detect and decipher patterns and thereby comprehend the nature of reality. And even more amazing is that this understanding enables control: we can speculate about the nature of reality, then subject it to experimental verification or falsification, gradually amassing collective knowledge, which can then be used as a source of power to bring about whatever changes we choose. Eugene Wigner described the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences. With the coming age of nanotechnology and its promise of manipulating matter at the atomic level, I think we will soon marvel at the unreasonable effectiveness of our ability to reshape the world as we see fit and define the future of the universe (in partnership with intelligent life elsewhere in our universe, if it exists).
That the future is boundless.
Scientists consistently underestimate what can and will be understood and controlled. In 1844, August Comte said we'd never know what stars are composed of. A few years later, the spectroscope gave us the answer. In 1901, Wilbur Wright said, "The secrets of flight will not be mastered within our lifetime -- not within a thousand years." 68 years later, humans safely travelled a quarter of a million miles to the moon and back. In 1933 Ernest Rutherford said, "We cannot control atomic energy to an extent which would be of any value commercially, and I believe we are not likely ever to be able to do so." Nine years later, the first atomic pile worked. It's difficult to find anything that can safely be considered impossible. What's more, as Ray Kurzweil and others have described, technological progress has been increasing exponentially, with some fields advancing more each decade than in all prior decades combined. If humanity is able to avoid self-destruction (a big "if" in light of the increasing existential risks these advanced technologies bring with them), advancements in fields such as nanotechnology will, over the next several hundred years, bring about a level of collective intelligence that our brains simply aren't (yet) equipped to comprehend.
That my existence required miracles so unimaginably unlikely as to boggle the mind.
First, as described above, our universe has very specific properties enabling intelligent life to arise, persist, and thrive. Second, humans happened to arise our on planet, but this was an exceedingly unlikely event. Numerous evolutionary ancestor species of humans came close to extinction, from the chordates to the limbed fishes to the synapsid tetrapods to the primates to the apes. Any such ancestral extinction would've prevented humans from ever existing. Third, although there are over six billion humans on the planet, there are more than 10^30th non-human living creatures on the planet. Why do you and I happen to be humans? And six billion is just a tiny fraction of the number of possible people. If you define yourself in terms of your genes, then the likelihood of your existence was vanishingly small. Even just your parent's genes could've mixed in about 64 trillion different ways. And the number of possible human DNA combinations is vastly greater than the number of atoms in the universe. However, multiple people can have the same DNA, as any identical twin can tell you. So in calculating the likelihood of my existence, the sample size from which probability calculations should be done is not the number of DNA combinations, but rather (it seems to me) infinite. Another approach is to look at ancestral lineage. Over 90% of all the creatures that have ever lived died childless, but this was not the case for a single one of the approximately 50 billion parents along my or your 3.8 billion year ancestral lineage. By this definition of identity (and making the simplifying if incorrect assumption of no correlation between survivability of parent and child), your a priori chance of having such a fortunate ancestry was 1 in 10 to the 50 billionth power. Most philosophers would say that there's no coincidence in need of explanation; a conscious entity exists, it was going to be someone and it happened to be me. But I find that explanation unsatisfying, and keep returning to the question: why me? The fact that I was one of the "chosen" people astonishes me. You exist; Rejoice!
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