Mind and ScienceMind
By Dana Wilde
During an excursion into the world of twentieth century
science some years ago, I ran across Stephen Jay Gould's
brief essay "Mind and Supermind," originally published
in 1985 in his third collection of essays, The Flamingo's
Smile. In the essay, Gould attacks the proponents of
modern cosmology's anthropic principle, mentioning
Freeman Dyson and, strangely, Alfred Russel Wallace,
whose 1903 book Man's Place in the Universe seems to
have chafed one of Gould's professional sores.
Gould contends the arguments of the anthropic principle
and all related ideas boil down to the following simple, or
naive, line of reasoning: that the physical world is
constructed to very precise parameters, and that if these
parameters were different, life as we understand it would
be impossible; therefore, the universe was designed
specifically for us to live in.
Gould's main objection to this line of reasoning is that the
idea of "design" does not follow logically from the
previous facts. It is not logically necessary to conclude
that since the world is suited to life, it was therefore
designed for life. This is obvious enough, and as
Gould later acknowledges, Wallace himself admitted it.
Gould also claims that Wallace, Dyson, and other
proponents of the anthropic principle are engaged in
nothing more than "raw hope," although he makes no
logical case for this claim. A third point, though one not
made explicit in the essay, is that Gould thinks these
people are sort of silly. Let's take up the last point first.
Gould displays his disdain for the teleological argument
in two ways -- by reference to a satiric essay by Mark
Twain and by his general tone. The very idea of a general
design for the universe is considered laughable by Gould,
and his authprity on this is Twain. In the highly ironic
essay "The Damned Human Race," Twain makes a joke
about Wallace's contention that God spent the whole
prodigious age of the universe preparing things for the
advent of humanity: if all time is the length of the Eiffel
Tower, and humanity's habitation of it is the skin of paint
at the top, then, Twain reckons, the whole tower must
have been built for the purpose of that skin of paint.
We get the joke, because we are coached by Twain to
doubt the puffed-up, self-aggrandizing behavior of
human beings in general, and not because we necessarily
doubt Wallace's reasoning. Dyson or Wallace might
modestly respond to such a criticism by saying, "Yes,
let's keep things in perspective. Human beings are tiny
and the universe is immense." However, neither citing
Twain nor laughing at Wallace's and Dyson's ideas
refutes their argument.
In an essay of less than eight pages, Gould devotes almost
two pages to Wallace's facts. Since Wallace's book was
published in 1903, naturally most of his facts are unlike
those now used to construct cosmologies. Gould's implicit
argument is that Wallace's teleological argument is shaky
because his facts are mostly "wrong." Now this is a
peculiar attitude to take, and it is couched in ironic and
subtly disparaging language.
For example; Gould says: " Wallace's cosmos was a
transient product of what his contemporaries proudly
labeled the 'New Astronomy,' the first, and ultimately
faulty, inferences made from the spectrographic
examination of stars" (p.185).
Using such words as "transient" and "faulty," Gould
suggests that Wallace founded his ideas on false
information, and that this scientifically proves that his
whole argument must be false.
Now this is a strange way to attack an idea proposed at
the turn of the century. Wallace's argument in 1903 was
based on the best information available at the time -- as is
Dyson's, and as is Gould's. If Wallace's information was
"transient," and if this should have prevented him from
speculating, then Gould has introduced a serious
epistemological problem for science: all scientific
knowledge, whether gleaned in 1900, 1984, or 1994, is
likely to be transient. If we should therefore be required
to wait until "the final facts" are in before we begin to
theorize, then all theorizing should cease immediately.
This is the logical inference to be drawn from Gould's
essay.
Or is Gould just being funny, in anticipation of citing
Twain? His words "transient" and "faulty" are, after all, in
the same context with the phrase "proudly labeled the
New Astronomy," which is tinged with irony. What silly
fools, he seems to be saying, for calling their astronomy
"new" when Harlow Shapley, Edwin Hubble, and Albert
Einstein were just over the horizon, and the Hubble Space
Telescope only a few generations in the future.
In fact, Gould implies in his lengthy summary of
Wallace's facts that most of those facts were faulty
because the so-called "New Astronomy" was so primitive.
With such primitive information, what possessed Alfred
Russel Wallace to make the outlandish claim that the
universe might have been designed by a higher
intelligence?
Thankfully, our cosmology was in a much steadier state
in the 1980s, with a much more stable set of facts, and we
could speculate about origins and possibilities more
freely than they should have back in 1903. I am being
ironic. Present-day cosmological theories are based on a
lot more (apparently) accurate information than was
available in 1900, but that information is also a lot more
confusing. For example, the oldest stars in the universe
are thought, logically, to be about 16 billion years old,
while it is generally accepted (c. 2007) that the whole
universe is only about 13.7 billion years old. The Stephen
Jay Gould of 2066 will have something to say about this, I
imagine.
Freeman Dyson seems to be found guilty mainly by
association and by the one point that his conclusion
about a designed universe does not necessarily follow
from the facts. The same for the anthropic principle,
which is, generally speaking, that the world is one in
which observers can exist, or further, exists because
observers exist. Gould omits the fact that some lines of
reasoning derived from quantum theory support the idea
that nothing happens until some consciousness is
involved in the happening.