Letter #64: Follow the Science!

The very stones cry out.

Father Klavan,

I’m gratified to see you’re following the science. There’s a lot of dangerous misinformation out there. For instance, well-known spindly gremlin Yuval Harari asserts that “intelligence is decoupling from consciousness,” leading to a world in which reality is described more perfectly by unfeeling computer code than by living souls. This is fake news!

“Decoupling” intelligence from consciousness is like decoupling flavor from the sense of taste. It’s a contradiction in terms: flavor is, in essence, something someone tastes. Knowledge is, in essence, something someone knows. I think when people like Harari picture machines surpassing humans in intelligence, they’re inadvertently picturing the world as seen “from the perspective” of machines, which they vaguely imagine as similar to the human perspective, but sharper and more complex. The whole point, though, is that machines don’t have a perspective. Only we do.

So when you write that “the issue is never really outward forms. It’s always the life within,” you’re not just hitting on an important spiritual insight. You’re also getting at the heart of our problems in science, the reason why a system for understanding the physical world has mutated into a bottomless well of political resentment and a threat to the survival of the species. As usual, we can blame the French.

Pierre-Simon Laplace, an expert astrophysicist in the generation just after Isaac Newton, helped crystallize the idea that the purest form of truth is the kind that doesn’t depend on human perception at all. He imagined that a perfectly detached mind—little more than a cosmic calculator—could watch the machinery of the universe grinding dully along according to its mindless logic.

It’s my belief that the latest developments in physics are proving Laplace totally wrong about this. When men like Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and Erwin Schrödinger tried to work out the movement of the smallest particles we can conceivably measure, they found that even objects only have absolutely definite location and motion when they enter into relationship with an observing consciousness. It was their colleague Niels Bohr that drove the point home: there’s no factoring the human mind out of the world. The mind helps make the world what it is.

What’s really eerie is how exactly Jesus seems to have anticipated this moment. In image after image, he insisted that our humanity makes the universe complete: we are light that lights up the world. We are salt, giving it flavor. Without the living experience of a human soul, reality unravels.

I think we need this insight to rescue our science, our politics, our religion—everything—from madness. The problem is that it goes against all the deep-set instincts of modernity. When St. Augustine examined the natural world, he found it testified to the mind that made it: the stones themselves seemed to cry, “we are not your God. Look higher!” We’re in a similar position now. The merest particles of less than dust are crying out that matter is born of mind. Can we hear them?

Love,
Spencer

Image: https://pixel17.com, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.