Rational Philosophy

(Or, the beauty of non-conformism.)

In one of the many magnificent set pieces of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Yossarian, a Second World War B52 bombadier, proposes to another character (Doc Daneeka, I think) that he should be allowed to return home. “Where would we be if everyone thought that way?” he is asked, “Then I’d be crazy not to,” Yossarian replies. A valid point.

In the world of science, examples of unorthodox thought that ultimately sweeps away a whole body of ill-formed ideas abound, as do examples of the hard road that the non-conformist must often trek — Galileo Galilei, for instance, found himself under indefinite house arrest for supporting Copernicus’s heliocentric view of the solar system. These days, a proposal that the sun revolves around the earth would be so ridiculous that it wouldn’t even draw ridicule, never mind the attention of the Inquisition.

In a lovely, scathing testament to his burning disdain for orthodoxy, Arthur Schopenhauer subtitled his essay On The Basis of Morality “not awarded a prize by the Royal Danish Society of Scientific Studies.” (His was the only entry to the competition.)

And just yesterday, MIT sued Frank Gehry’s architecture firm claiming design and construction failures in its Stata Center which has developed cracks, leaks and other problems. “These things are complicated,” Gehry said, “and they involved a lot of people, and you never quite know where they went wrong. A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue. The chances of it getting done ever without something colliding or some misstep are small.”

Many at MIT are happy with Gehry’s construction, as the NY Times reports: “It is a joy to work in this building,” said Rodney Brooks, a professor of robotics, “and I know that many of its occupants feel the same as I do about it. We asked Frank to give us a building that fostered communication, and he delivered.”

But it seems that Gehry is no stranger to disgruntled clients. Sometimes the very isolation of the lone voice speaks to the depth of its insight.

There’s an important philosophical aspect of non-conformism that I think we do well as a society and as individuals to remember. Human understanding works through three important processes:

1. Direct, immediate understanding. (A baby knows instinctively to reach for its mother’s nipple when hungry.)

2. Received understanding.  (What we know or think we know from being told or from reading or otherwise learning about how things work.)

3. Deduced, rational understanding. (What we piece together rationally from what we observe.)

The rational non-conformist then works from the third kind of understanding to debunk flawed examples of the second kind. Galileo used scientific observation to unseat the non-scientific theories of the geocentric worldview. When someone speaks out against an established understanding, then, we should ask ourselves whether that established understanding is something that we have simply accepted as fact, or whether we have arrived at it ourselves through a process of rational examination. If our answer is that we have no reason to believe it other than that everyone else seems to believe it, we should consider giving the non-conformist view our diligent attention.

This is, I think, what the Buddha had in mind when he said the following:

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find anything that agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” — Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha), 563-483 B.C.

It’s perhaps not immediately obvious how this applies to Gehry; but I think it does. Implicit in Gehry’s architecture is the debunking of our expected ideas of what a building should look like. Apart from some very creative and aesthetically adventurous designs, his work says, “you don’t need to start with four walls at right angles.”

The wonderful thing about non-conformists of course is that they break the mold not just for themselves but for all future generations. We’ll never go back to believing that the sun revolves around the earth (well, most of us won’t). And, post-Gehry, innovative architects will never be afraid to make buildings look like we don’t expect them to look.

My daughter just started high school and has a course called physics. Her grandmother made the comment: “Oh, how wonderful, physics is the best; you’ll learn how everything works.” Which is true. Physics pursues an ever more sophisticated explanation for the way things work. Philosophy seems sometimes to give ground as physics rolls on, but I prefer to think that physics provides a great tool for the philosopher.

Fundamental physics can be a particularly fine-pointed tool. The more we know about the most original and smallest parts of existence, the more we can build up a fully consistent picture of the whole.

Physicists pursue evidence to support their hypotheses, but the best physicists expect to have to refine or throw out their hypotheses. Good physics is a process. A never-ending process.

The title of this blog is misleading for that reason. What’s fundamental today won’t be fundamental tomorrow. Before we knew about atoms, solid matter was considered just that, solid. And the atomic view was replaced by a perspective that included electrons, protons, and neutrons. Which in turn was replaced by a view that allowed for whole families of hadrons and baryons.

Fundamental physics is always in transition. But the philosophy of fundamental physics, the way we use the tool of physics, is a well established conceptual process. Philosophy seeks to know “what can this new insight tell me about our condition.”

Unfortunately, whereas philosophers and physicists were once indivisible (Newton, Galileo, Copernicus and many more were both philosophers and physicists) these days, philosophy and physics have moved ever more deeply into the deep grass at the ends of their respective fields. They no longer speak the same language. They no longer understand one another.

What we end up with is pop philosophy based on some apparently trendy new scientific premise or discovery. (Superstrings, for instance.) Or random conjecture on meaning from the brilliant scientists of the day. To continue to make philosophical progress, the two fields need to be brought back together.

Even some of the now more established scientific findings of recent years can produce quite revealing insight into the philosophy of our existence. One particularly compelling example of this caused me to spend three years analyzing and writing about its implications (the product of which is LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive). It’s this:

What can we discern about the fundamental principles of space and time by observing the evolution of the material universe?

To answer this question we must know enough about the physics of the early universe and the development of particles and star systems over time to be able to discern the pattern. If I hadn’t had a grounding in physics (my original field of study) this pattern probably would have eluded me.

The pattern or principle itself is quite simple. As a thing (particle, particle cluster, dust cloud, etc.) comes into being, it will be more likely to remain in existence if it is stable.

This very humble observation explains why, even though there are dozens of particles that can exist in the material universe, all of the matter in the universe consists of electrons, protons and neutrons clustered together as atoms. The atomic form is the only stable material form and therefore the only one that persisted.

Here is an excerpt from LIFE!

[T]he form of existence we have taken, and the form of existence that predominates in the world we know and interact with (our world: our solar system and the rest of the visible universe, every rock and tree, every cereal box on the supermarket shelf), consists not of lambda or omega nuclei orbited by neutrinos, but of protons and neutrons orbited by electrons. But we need to answer why this is so. It is not, as was once thought, that these are the only possible types of particles. Although they have cornered the market on atomic existence, electrons, protons, and neutrons come from quite large families of particles known as leptons and hadrons. And although leptons seem to be truly fundamental particles, hadrons result from combinations of still smaller particles known as quarks. The electron (which is a lepton) has six brothers and sisters—the muon, the tau, the neutrino, the muon neutrino, and the tau neutrino. (Each lepton also has an antimatter twin, known as an antilepton.) Quarks, which come in six types, don’t exist as free particles but combine in pairs or triplets to form mesons and baryons, collectively known as hadrons. (The proton and the neutron each consist of three quarks.) There are dozens of hadrons.We begin to understand why atoms are ubiquitous when we look at the properties of the members of these particle families: the electron and the proton are the lightest and therefore the most stable of the lepton and hadron families. The more massive leptons and quark combinations don’t last very long before breaking up into lighter particles. Of the leptons and quark combinations that do remain stable, only electrons, protons, and neutrons group together into naturally stable structures. In an atom, electromagnetism keeps the negatively charged electrons tightly bound to the positively charged protons. Nuclear forces bind protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus.

Although the neutrino (a lepton quite similar to an electron but with no electromagnetic charge) is also a stable particle, and although the universe produces neutrinos in great numbers, their lack of an electromagnetic charge means that neutrinos can’t bind electromagnetically with protons as electrons do, and therefore they don’t form atomlike structures. Instead, neutrons fly through space, unbound and disconnected from the physical structures of stars and planets.

The proton has an effectively infinite life span. It is the only hadron that doesn’t spontaneously degenerate into another hadron plus radiation. By comparison, the neutron, when not bound, has an expected life span of less than eleven minutes. But when bound with a proton in an atom’s nucleus, the neutron can last indefinitely. Therefore, despite the dozens of fundamental particles and the many ways in which they could (statistically) be combined with one another in atomlike structures, atoms consist entirely of electrons, protons, and neutrons because other particles either quickly decompose or can’t combine into stable structures.

From this straightforward analysis of the particles that make up the universe and why these particles and not other particles give rise to material existence, we suddenly have an insight into a principle that guides the development of everything that exists in space and time…