In the beginning

I took the opportunity over the weekend to catch up on some reading and try to do some thinking. At least I was somewhat successful with the first project. The new Scientific American -- it's here, but you can't read the full articles unless you have a subscription -- is organized around a theme of "origins." It's kind of bogus as a frame -- the issues don't really have a lot in common -- but there is something about the Big Three that hangs together for me.

The Big Three are of course the origin of the universe, of life on earth, and the human mind, which are addressed respectively by Michael S. Turner, Alonso Ricardo and Jack W. Szostak, and Marc Hauser. They're big only because they happen to be important to us, but that's what matters to me because I'm one of us. I'm sorry to have to say that I found all three essays rather unsatisfying -- not because I was expecting them to have the answers, but because the discussions were limited to reprocessing the already well-known (to the scientific literati) wonkery around the details of these processes without acknowledging the problems of meaning which seem deeper to most people.

It seems pretty obvious that one of the reasons people are drawn to religion is because they can't be satisfied with the mystery that still surrounds these questions. Of course "God did it" isn't really an answer, because you would still need to explain the origin of God and there isn't any evidence for God anyway, unless you simply define God as "whatever it is that made these things happen," which obviously isn't getting you anywhere.

But it nevertheless feels better to many people to attribute the universe and whatever there is in it that matters to us to some sort of sentience or ultimate purpose, even if we don't have any idea what that is. Apparently it feels even better to some people just to decide that it's a big Daddy sort of superperson that lives in the sky and is going to show us what it's all about after we die.

Alas, this sort of comforting nonsense isn't harmless, because once you start believing in something that is illogical and without evidence, you can believe anything; and you'll end up believing whatever the people tell you who you depend on to feed you the original comforting nonsense.

Of the Big Three questions, I find the origin of life on earth actually the least interesting and the least problematic. You just need to get some sort of self-replicating molecular system happening. It's not a problem if the requisite events have a low probability, because it only has to happen once, and you can sit around and wait for millions of years. I actually think it would be surprising if it didn't happen. Since nobody can go back and observe what was going on 3 billion years ago, the best investigators can do is muck around until they get something to work, which will constitute a proof of principle but it will be forever impossible to prove that is what actually did happen. So it seems rather feckless to me.

But the origins of the universe and of the human mind are more puzzling, and also offer more opportunity for real discovery and revelation. The curse of cosmology, as a cultural artifact, is that the more we learn about the universe, the more pointless it seems from our own point of view, and the harder it gets even to formulate the question of "Why?" As for the science of mind, even if we're willing to live with its unavoidable circularity, it seems to diminish us, compared with our intuition of ourselves as miraculous and transcendent. I think any discussion of the science surrounding these questions needs to acknowledge the discomfort they cause, and that it is as essential to confront the problem of meaning as it is to explore the problem of what is.