The mere undertaking of this project of reconciling the mechanistic and teleological worldviews is already chock-a-block with tacit assumptions. I am assuming that you, my readers, actually exist. I am rejecting solipsism. By choosing writing as my medium I am assuming that you know how to read and that you understand English. But publishing on-line I am assuming that you have access to computers and the internet. These seem like pretty innocuous assumptions, but those last two assumptions would (again, obviously) not have been true 100 years ago. At that time, the word "computer" existed, but it was a job title, not a kind of machine. In fact, 100 years ago, in 1926, the whole idea that a machine could do what a computer does would have been widely considered a ridiculous notion. It would not be for another ten years that Alan Turing would first lay down the theoretical foundations that showed how a machine could do what a computer did.
There are a lot of things that modern humans take for granted that would have been considered utterly absurd just a few generations ago. There are things at the cutting edge of science that seem absurd to us today, but which will probably be considered obvious by future generations.
How can we explain this fluidity in what is considered "obviously true" from one generation to the next? One possibility is that reality is actually changing. Maybe Newton's discovery of the laws of gravity is actually what created gravity. How could we possibly prove otherwise? There actually is an answer to that question, but I want to set that aside (consider it an exercise) and instead just accept it on faith for now that there is some kind of unchanging underlying reality "out there" and that the changes in what is considered "obviously true" between generations reflects changes in our understanding of that objective reality rather than actual changes in that objective reality itself. But put a pin in this assumption because later we will have to circle back and discharge it.
The question I want to ask here is, if reality is unchanging, how is it possible for our understanding of it to change so radically? Why are so many things that are obviously true for us so obviously false for our ancestors? Again, one possible answer is that our ancestors were just stupid, but that also cries out for an explanation that is not forthcoming: what happened to make our generation so much smarter than previous ones? Providing a proper answer to this question is a deep, deep rabbit hole that I don't want to go down right now, so again I'm just going to ask you to take it on faith for now that our ancestors were not stupid, and that the answer to the question of how they got things wrong is that they simply didn't have access to the data that we have access to today because of technological limitations of their era. Today we have the James Web space telescope. 500 years ago they had their naked eyes.
Also, 500 years ago, the mechanistic and teleological worldviews had not yet diverged. It was obvious that there was a supernatural realm. It was obvious that the heavens were governed by very different laws than applied here on earth. It was obvious that there were deities of various stripes that meddled in the affairs of men and had to be appeased by worship and sacrifice. The idea that, say, the heavens were governed by the same laws that applied here on earth would have gotten you laughed out the room at best, labeled as mentally defective at worst. All you had to do to see that this was a ridiculous notion was to observe that the moon and stars were somehow suspended above the earth with no visible means of support and shone with eternal fire without any apparent source of fuel. Of course there was something radically different going on up there than down here.
All that changed in 1698 when Isaac Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). In it he showed that the heavens actually are governed by the same laws that apply here on earth. The moon actually does fall towards the earth (but it also moves sideways just fast enough that it keeps missing the earth).
Today most people take this for granted. There are still some gravity-deniers a.k.a. flat-earthers, and they will actually come back to play a significant role in this story, but that is also something I want to set aside for now. (BTW, if any of you reading this are flat-earthers please let me know!)
Principia is widely considered to be the advent of modern science, what ultimately turned out to be the leading edge of the wedge between mechanism and teleology. Newton didn't know this. In fact, he would have been appalled to learn that this was his legacy. Newton, like virtually everyone in Europe at the time, was a devout Christian, and he thought he was working to glorify God by discovering the secrets of His handwork. Newton surely would have been horrified to see that what he ultimately accomplished was the ushering in of the (so-called) Enlightenment
But my point here is not to speculate about Newton's cognitive dissonance. My point is that things modern people, both religious and not, take for granted today were considered self-evidently absurd less than 400 years ago. And it's not just the idea that the moon and sun and stars are made of the same stuff that we are.
Richard Feynman in 1964 opened his famous Lectures on Physics with this quote:
If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.One of the reasons Feynman chose the atomic theory is because at the time, in 1964, that theory had only recently been accepted after a scientific debate that lasted over two thousand years. The earliest speculation that atoms might exist dates back to an ancient Greek philosopher named Democritus. Democritus has no actual evidence for the existence of atoms. It was just a guess on this part. It turned out to be correct, but it took over 2000 years for the matter to be definitively settled, and it took no less a luminary that Albert Einstein to provide the argument that finally convinced the scientific community.
Today we are at the midst of two similar radical conceptual revolutions regarding quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence. It is just obvious that there is something special about human brains, and yet the list of things that we can do that machines can't gets shorter by the day. It is just obvious that a cat in a box is either alive or dead, and yet quantum effects are being demonstrated on larger and larger objects. Still nowhere near an actual cat, of course, but an experimental demonstration of where quantum effects actually stop happening remains elusive.
Just because something is obvious does not mean that it is actually true. And it gets even crazier than that. It can be the case that a statement like "X is true" to be legitimately considered true even though X is actually false! An example of this is, "Gravity is a force that pulls objects towards the center of the earth." Strictly speaking, that is false. Gravity is not a force. What actually causes object to fall towards the center of the earth is curved spacetime. But pointing this out seems absurdly pedantic in any context other than a physics class.
The problem runs much, much deeper than that. Consider "the earth is flat." This is often taken as the canonical example of a false statement, but even that assessment is laden with tacit assumptions. What does "flat" actually mean? It can't possibly mean perfectly flat like the surface of a mirror because obviously there are mountains and valleys which deviate from flat by thousands of meters. "Not flat" doesn't mean "not lumpy", it means "curved". More to the point, it means (roughly) spherical. But the difference between spherical and flat is just the difference between a finite radius and an infinite one. The actual radius of the earth is about 4000 miles, which is pretty big on a human scale. To actually notice the difference between 4000 miles and an infinite radius that is bigger than the inherent lumpiness of mountains and valleys requires that you make measurements that span hundreds or even thousands of miles. If all you care about is you immediate vicinity, being flat is a pretty good approximation to the truth.
So is there anything we can say that all non-mentally-ill humans, including the pedantic ones, will agree on? It depends on how much pedantry you are willing to tolerate, but here is my best shot:
Things exist.
To hopefully head the pedants off at the pass I want to stipulate that when I say "things" I mean physical objects like chairs and tables and cows and human beings. I am not taking a stand on what it actually means for a thing to be a "physical object" or for it to "exist", only that the words "things exist" denotes an idea that is a plausible explanation for my subjective experience that things seem to exist. I can see and touch chairs and tables and cows and other human beings (OK, I confess, I have never actually touched a cow, but I have seen and heard and smelled them.) I've heard other people profess to be able to see and touch chairs and tables and other people. The milk in my grocery store comes from somewhere. I'm told it comes from cows, and I have no reason to doubt this.
Again, I want to be clear that I am not arguing that it is a slam-dunk that milk comes from cows, only that it is plausible, because it is plausible that cows actually exist and that they and the milk on my grocery store shelves are not just a collective delusion. There are things whose existence is highly debatable, like bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. It might turn out that these don't exist (I think that's quite likely). It might turn out that cows and chairs and tables don't exist (less likely). But it is plausible that they do exist, and anyone who argues that none of these things exist (for some reasonable interpretation of the word "exist") can be dismissed out of hand.
That's it. That is going to be my starting assumption. Not to leave you in suspense, here is a ridiculously oversimplified version of where this is going to lead. It will turn out that things that exist are made of parts called "atoms" which come in 92 naturally occurring varieties. Atoms are in turn made up of smaller parts called electrons, neutrons, and protons (and a few other things which can be safely ignore for our purposes). Electrons and protons have a property called "electric charge" which causes them to push and pull on each other from a distance. In addition, there is this thing called "gravity" which causes things to pull (only pull, not push) on each other from a distance. And all of this pushing and pulling can explain a lot of the things we observe.
The $64,000 question will, of course, be: can this pushing and pulling explain everything we observe? In particular, can it explain things like life, the origin of the universe, emotions, morality, and consciousness? The answer will turn out to be "yes.... but". The "but" will turn out to be a fundamentally different understanding of what it means for things to exist, so our foundational assumption will ultimately circle back to bite itself in the ass, so to speak, when we get to quantum mechanics. (This is what makes quantum mechanics weird.)
The other Big Question will turn out to be: can we accept the truth of mere pushing and pulling being able to explain everything without sinking into a nihilistic pit of despair? If all we are, at root, is electrons and protons pushing and pulling on each other, what is the point? Is there a reason to get up in the morning? Here again, the answer will turn out to be "yes", this time without a "but".
This is one of the most challenging blog posts I have ever written. Grappling with the problem of the ambiguity of words using words as my only tool turns out to be quite the little challenge. I've been wrestling with it for over a week now, and discarded at least half a dozen drafts. I decided today to just bully on through and publish whatever I ended up with when I ran out of steam. This is the product of that resolution. If this post felt like a garbled mess, that's why.
Another reason for publishing this now is that I have signed up to participate in a [debate on evolution](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJHhNe-LhA0) this Saturday, Feb 28, at 9PM Eastern time on Modern Day Debate, and I need to take some time to prepare for that. So I won't be publishing anything else here until after that.
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