In my last essay, I decided that I understood ancient Platonism. In this post, though, I will not pretend to understand modern physics. I will, however, say some things about a recent book from an eminent theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Lee Smolin (who also happens to be my uncle), that I recently read: Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe.
Many of my posts on here are notable for their sheer cheek in tackling topics, but this one, as they say, takes the cake. If you happen to know about this topic, then please accept this humble disclaimer that I emphatically not a physicist, and take this as what it is: some hopefully interesting comments from a non-expert.
What is the Trouble?
Lee Smolin's task over the last decade or so has been to argue that (1) modern physics and cosmology has reached a crisis point that threatens the bases of the entire field, and (2) only a radical paradigm shift can save it. The former point was argued at most length in his previous book The Trouble with Physics, while Time Reborn attempts to provide a way forward and a sketch of the necessary paradigm shift: an effort that he has more recently followed up on with several other volumes along the same lines.
This, I think, is the best sort of book to gain some measure of understanding of a field: not a textbook or popularization, both of which typically present caricatured versions of research from decades ago without interpretation or explanation, but a interpretation of a field by an acknowledged master with a clear and obvious angle.
Of course, such interpretation of a whole field, especially a field as abstract and analytical as theoretical cosmology, cannot help but be philosophy.
I won't defend this claim, which would drive many physicists crazy, but I will, as stated above, comment on the book's conclusions and arguments from the perspective of someone well-versed in ancient and medieval philosophy.
Physics is Weird
The first part of the book offers a narrative of the development of modern physics, beginning with Galileo and going to the latest proposals of the last decade.
The bulk of my own engagement with the author's argument will come in later sections, so I will attempt to do nothing more here than quickly (and therefore inevitably inaccurately) summarize his argument. If this is totally illegible to you, I promise that I will aim to make later sections more clear.
Put simply, the author argues that the major changes or "paradigm shifts" in physics have generally gone in the direction of (1) further mathematicizing nature, (2) reducing previous physical systems to approximations or subsystems of larger structures, and (3) eliminating absolute structures in favor of relational ones. All these moves have led to the gradual elimination of any sense of the reality of time, because (1) mathematical structures and laws are timeless "Platonic" constructs, (2) because the changes catalogued by equations in physic involve symmetries and balances and can be run either way in many cases without change, and (3) because the theory of relativity depends on light-speed-limited observers and thus militates against an observer-independent time. In the course of these sections, the author gives some of the best and clearest and most helpfully contextualized descriptions I have heard of Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics. The book would be worth reading for this alone.
In the second, and by far most incisive, part of the book, the author argues that physics has made an enormous wrong turn and reached a crisis point. At the core of his case is the brilliantly set out argument that, by their very nature, none of the great theories of physics are actually or conceivably generalizable to the level of the universe itself. As he did at greater length in The Trouble with Physics, the author catalogs the fundamental problem with most cosmological theories of the past few decades, including especially string theories, in that they fail to make any testable predictions whatsoever. His criticism of a "parallel universe" multiverse theory where other universes are posited despite having no causal relationship with our universe at all is likewise straightforward and excellent.
At the heart of his critique, however, is a much more fundamental issue with the underlying concepts of modern physics, which he sees as leading to an almost inevitable bind approaching a logical contradiction. On the one hand, physics is allegedly an outgrowth of empirical science, which is supposed to be a study based on generating theories that make falsifiable claims which are tested by repeatable experiments (though see the many philosophical critiques of Popperian falsification for being impracticable and/or not actually descriptive of how science works). For our author, this scientific structure is ultimately justified by an underlying Leibnizian rationalism premised upon the principle of sufficient reason, by which every fact about nature must have sufficient reasons to account for its existence and nature.
And yet...by its very nature the universe is a singular entity, which cannot be repeated or tested. And yet the vast majority of theories in modern cosmology are different mathematical ways to describe or conceptualize that entity which do not make any claims that could be tested or falsified. And most troubling of all, it is difficult to see how it could possibly be otherwise, given that modern physics rests on a fundamental assumption that the universe can be modeled as a system of "initial conditions" unfolding deterministically and symmetrically via "physical laws," all describable and exhaustible ultimately by way a single n-dimensional mathematical object or "block universe" encompassing space and time. It is difficult to find any contingent "fact" about the universe that any particular mathematical model cannot account for with some adjustment to a variable.
Per the author, these assumptions have led to a fundamental roadblock where, on the one hand, no attempt to produce cosmological theories can possibly produce any model that could be empirically confirmed; and, on the other hand, these models all fail to do the one fundamental thing that Leibnizian rationalism would demand they do: give a sufficient reason why our universe in fact has the laws it has and started with the initial conditions it started with.
Lee Smolin describes the latter puzzle as the "why these laws" question. The goal of physics since quantum mechanics, as he efficiently describes it, has been a Theory of Everything, a unification of all natural laws into a single, timeless equation all of whose parts, spatial, metaphysical, or temporal, flow necessarily and deterministically from itself. Yet as these theories have progressed, the "fine-tuning problem" has emerged: that in every model numerous variables exist which have to possess arbitrary and highly specific values or take arbitrary and highly specific shapes in order to actually produce our universe or anything remotely like it.
It thus appears that our universe, far from being summarizable as a single unified necessary mathematical object, has in fact been "fine-tuned" by something outside itself to produce a universe containing stars, Galaxies, black holes, and the other conditions necessary for life. Still, for the author the fundamental problem with all these Theories of Everything is that they can ultimately only describe, and cannot provide any sufficient reason for, not just a few arbitrary variables, but all the laws and regularities of nature.
Law and Platonism
According to our author, then, something about the standard modern physics model of laws of nature operating on initial conditions must be rejected. The part of this he chooses to reject most fundamentally are the "laws of nature," which he treats as un-empirical, timeless Platonic forms existing outside of and apart from any actual universe and its internal causal and temporal structures.
I will now take a tangent and explain why, despite our author's claims, "laws of nature," including even a Theory of Everything, are not and cannot be Platonic forms. Faithful readers who read my last post will know where I'm going with this: that in fact, Platonism provides no basis whatsoever for simply asserting the existence and priority of idealized, mathematicized versions of the objects of our experience--and in fact in its major ancient versions fundamentally rejected the idea that the world of our experience could ever be describable in terms of, let alone simply identified with, such object(s).
Recall that in the creation account of the Timaeus, the world is crafted in imitation of a model usually identified with the forms--but that it is not these forms and indeed can only imperfectly reflect them thanks to the matter in which it is created. It thus possesses numerous "participations" and "reflections" of the forms, including most fundamentally that imperfect, cyclical attempt to imitate the eternity of the forms that we call time. For Platonists as much as for Lee Smolin, time is real.
As I explained in that post also, the forms most fully justified by Plato and ancient Platonists are (1) mathematical forms, and (2) transcendental (sometimes called ethical) forms. This has to do with the fundamental nature of mathematical objects, which, while they may be transformed or derived from each other or from simpler forms, cannot (by this theory) be either brought into existence or go out of existence. This makes them fundamentally other than any object of our empirical experience, and justifies the unqualified assertion of their timelessness and necessity.
Let us return, then, to the concept of "laws of nature" in the modern sense. While Plato describes the regularities within the universe and justifies them as an attempt to imperfectly capture or reflect or participate in the forms, he emphatically does not treat all these regularities as forms themselves. The reasons for this fundamental divide are almost too many and basic to summarize, but has to do with the fundamental structure of Plato's thought. For Plato, a form is an eternal, necessary object of thought derivable from simpler and more fundamental forms. It may be described by systems like the Euclidian or Pythagorean, axiomatic systems of deduction.
On the other hand, laws of nature are descriptions of regularities and recurrences within the world of our experience. They are fundamentally defined by time and change. However describable they may be in mathematical terms or by mathematical structures, such objects are not deductively and simply derivable from more basic forms. Plato in the Timaeus attempts to show how the Demiurge produced the world of our experience out of base, mathematical forms or by objects corresponding to them, but his account is as much defined by the disjunct between the world and the forms as by their participation or correspondence. His assumption, and that of practically every other ancient philosopher, is simply that the world of change of our experience is defined as such by change and contingency, and cannot be fully described any changeless, necessary structure. For Plato, there are such changeless, necessary structures, but our universe is not one of them, nor is it fully describable by such a structure.
It is this, I think, which has led most fundamentally to the "initial-condition problem" as well as the falsifiability problem and the issues with various theories of everything. By its very nature, no description of a non-changeless, non-eternal, non-necessary object can be a fully eternal, deductive, necessary mathematical object; because it must include, at some point, inputs that are not derived from itself but from observation of the object. Where precisely these appear in the structure, whether as arbitrary "initial conditions" or as arbitrary "forces" or "laws" or "constants" or "variables" strikes me as somewhat immaterial.
Here, the divide between Plato and modern physicists is not at all what many modern thinkers would expect. As Lee Smolin sets out in great detail, modern physicists have more or less sought to banish change and contingency entirely from reality in favor of the spatial structure of a singular mathematical object encompassing both space and time as dimensions. Far from postulating a timeless, necessary world, Plato is (as we might expect from someone responding to the Parmenidean challenge) absolutely committed to the reality of contingency and change. Like other ancient philosophers, he attempts to provide a sufficient reason for the existence of these things by way of their relationship with timeless, necessary things. But he does not treat the universe as one of them.
(As a very small side-note, this is I think more or less the answer to his question why Galileo was the first to recognize that objects fell in a mathematical form called a parabola. The reason for this is not Galileo was the first empirical observer--Medieval philosophers often carried out empirical observations. Rather, what defines the early period of Modern Science is a new faith in mathematics, a new belief that we might expect our world of time and contingency, and especially our non-heavenly world, to correspond totally to, or even merely to be, a mathematical form. Any number of empirical studies of falling might have been carried out without identifying that motion with a motionless, mathematical description of a shape. And this move was made on the one hand out of a preference for Platonic mathematics over time and change, and on the other hand because it was useful.)
Sufficient Reasons For the Universe?
From describing the problem, our author moves to sketching possible solutions. This solution, he argues, will be a new cosmological theory which he cannot presently defend or create, but which he believes will have to possess certain features. Here it is easier to merely quote:
"It should contain what we already know about nature, but as approximations.
It should be scientific; that is, it has to make testable predictions for doable experiments.
It should solve the 'Why these laws?' problem.
It should solve the initial-conditions problem.
It will posit neither symmetries nor conservation laws.
It should be causally and explanatorily closed. Nothing outside the universe should be required to explain anything inside the universe.
It should satisfy the principle of sufficient reason, the principle of no unreciprocated action, and the principle of the identity of the indiscernibles.
Its physical variables should describe evolving relationships between dynamical entities. There should be no fixed-background structures, including fixed laws of nature. Hence the laws of nature evolve, which implies that time is real."
I will not attempt to engage with every part of this proposal; nor indeed could I, as large parts of it depend on highly-specific physics debates.
However, I will attempt to respond to some of the underlying philosophical issues with this description, and how it seems, on the face of it, to contain contradictions that are no less impossible to resolve than the systems our author is attempting to destroy.
The most trivial is perhaps Lee Smolin's insistence on the absence of fixed-background structures and fixed-laws of nature while at the same time demanding an absolutely fixed, observer-independent structure of time observing total simultaneity across the universe and possibly beyond. One of the key achievements of modern physics was the modeling of time, by changeless mathematical models and structures--despite in the philosophical sense indicating precisely a contingently unfolding process of change. Our author is attempting to undo this revolution, but there seems on the face of it little reason why his absolute time could not be as easily mathematicized as Newton's or Descartes'. He has (I believe correct) arguments for why this identification is wrong and should not be made, but these are fundamentally philosophical arguments, dependant on philosophical reasoning and not empirical falsification or mathematical deduction. They could be (and have been) rejected by other physicists averse to philosophy, and with non-trivial reason: for if time is real, then change and contingency are real, and mathematicized physics is not a complete description of nature. This (as the author acknowledges) is a major revolution.
There are other, more fundamental issues with Lee Smolin's attempt to account for the cosmos, though.
The first and most fundamental, I believe, is what I will call the problem of sufficient reason or the problem of necessity.
Our author commits himself to the Leibnizian principle of sufficient reason, which is all well and good, as I believe some version of this thesis is necessary for any rationalism. However, in making use of this principle, he comes up against some rather extreme problems with his own version of rationality and sufficiency.
Most fundamentally, and put simply, there is a reason why Leibniz was a theist. Postulating that there are reasons operative at the level of the universe, reasons for the universe itself, requires positing some transcendental sense of reason beyond the physical system of the universe. This is not a problem for Leibniz because his idea of rationality is undergirded by a theistic divine reason--it is a problem for our author because his own principles deny both any fixed background structure and any explanatory principle beyond the universe. In a sense our author acknowledges this problem by his concession, in his last chapter, that physics provides absolutely no resolution to the questions of "why there is something rather than nothing" and "what the universe actually is" (as opposed to the relationships that can be ascribed to it and modeled with physics). Yet if his system can provide no sufficient reason either for the universe's existence or for its nature, it would seem to fail his own tests for a cosmological theory.
Less important but flowing from this, Lee Smolin explicitly argues against the mathematicizing idea that there is no contingency and therefore that everything that happens within the cosmos happens necessarily. This argument, however, is present mostly at a theoretical level, and rarely makes its way into his reasoning, which in practice seems to operate based on an assumption that anything that is rationally explicable must be necessary. The reason for this apparent conflict, I believe, is that despite being theoretically committed to the existence of the contingent, our author has no actual contingent, rational explanatory mechanisms to appeal to. To the degree he attempts to explain physical systems, he explains them in mathematical terms--or, as we will see in a moment, by analogy to biological systems, yet without any analogous biological mechanisms.
Evolutionary Explanation
This is an enormous problem, however, since ultimately our author's solution is to attempt to resolve modern physics' problems by appeal to an infinite regress of contingent temporal causes:
"Since there are many alternatives, no principle specifies the precise laws we see. If there's no necessary reason for the choice, then there must be some reason that falls short of logical necessity. There could be, or could have been, cases in which the choice was made differently. How do we explain how the choice was made in our universe's case?
If there really is just the one case, ipso facto, there will never be a sufficient reason, because, ipso facto, there's no logical principle that determines the choice. A sufficient explanation requires there to have been other universes initially endowed with laws. That is, there must have been more than one event like our Big Bang in which laws of nature were chosen.
[...]
We can now invoke the principle that the universe must be explanatorally and causally closed. That is, we assume that the universe contains all the chains of causes necessary to explain anything within it. If we want to explain how the effective laws were chosen at our Big Bang, we can invoke only events in the past of the Big Bang. And we can apply the same logic to the causes of the choices of laws made at Bangs prior to ours. There must thus be a sequence of Bangs extending endlessly back into the past."
In other words, Lee Smolin ultimately explains the seeming arbitrariness of the laws and initial conditions of the universe by postulating an infinite regress of universes each of which possesses slightly different laws and initial conditions.
One might be forgiven if one considered this to be simply not an explanation at all, and certainly not a sufficient reason in Leibniz's strong sense. The answer to the question "why these laws" is apparently: "because a former universe with different laws caused this universe." If one then asks the question again, one receives precisely the same answer.
Our author gets to this solution by appeal to an analogy with biology and an appeal to an (apparently unsupported) argument put forward by Charles Sanders Pierce, namely that "The only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution."
To deal with this philosophically, we have to understand what is meant by an evolutionary explanation of a phenomenon--not, as this might have you believe, a fundamental philosophical form of reasoning, but a law derived from the field of biology. Put simply, an evolutionary explanation explains a phenomenon by showing how it is fundamentally an unfolding of a more fundamental phenomenon. This unfolding is a lower kind of explanation than mathematical deduction, but can be described by a law in the sense of a described regularity in nature.
In the case of primitive Darwinian evolution, the theory explains how (at least some) variation in species can be explained as the unfolding of the potentials inherent in (depending on if one takes the original limited or later more elaborate versions of the theory) either some set of particular animal reproductive communities or animal life as such. In Darwin's initial thesis, the existence of a set of animal reproductive communities plus the existence of scarce resources and other threats in an environment plus the mechanisms of sexual reproduction plus a postulated but undefined randomness or at least wide field of variation contained within that physical mechanism can explain the actual observed variation of animal species.
Generalized philosophically, then, an evolutionary explanation consists of a law by which observed variation can be explained as an unfolding of more fundamental mechanisms within a sufficiently large community or communities of objects related by naturally-varying reproductive mechanisms within a given constrained environment.
Put in this form, we can see why an evolutionary explanation is an exceptionally poor candidate for the explanation of the laws of the universe. To take a leaf from Lee Smolin's book, here we have yet another theory that is self-evidently designed to be applied to a small subset within the universe (and indeed unlike many other such systems makes explicit appeal to a broader constrained environment) and which seems impossible to generalize to the level of absolutely everything.
The situation is actually worse than this, though, since evolutionary explanations by their very nature not only rely on a background constrained environment, but by their very nature cannot explain their own fundamental features. To get evolutionary theory, Darwin had to simply postulate the existence of a sufficiently-large community or communities of animals with a set of possible and observable variations and a fundamental reproductive mechanism. His theory provides no explanation for any of these things, and indeed it cannot do so. There is a reason why 19th century evolutionary biologists tended to either accept some act of direct divine creation of at least the original origin species or species or some analogous act of abiogenesis or simply postulate the eternal existence of animal species.
Applied to the level of the universe, then, we have no choice but to simply postulate the existence of a sufficiently-large population of universes with a set of possible and observable variations and a fundamental reproductive mechanism. And indeed, this is what Lee Smolin does, appealing at some points explicitly to his own (decades-old) theory of "cosmological natural selection" where black holes give birth to universes in such a way as to be analogous to reproductive mechanisms, and these universes are "selected for life" through mechanisms by which universes that produce more complex structures last longer and so are more common. As he acknowledges, though, he has no actual mechanism to explain how this reproduction takes place, where the great bulk of laws of nature that are the same for every universe come from, and how variations are produced.
The enormous irony is that biology in the past decades has made enormous strides in discovering these mechanisms for biological reproduction, including not only the discovery of the fundamental physical encoding of DNA and genetics, but also particular biochemical mechanisms by which organisms alter or reread their own DNA and/or epigenetics in response to environmental stimuli. Given the causal closure implied by successive Big Bangs, are we supposed to imagine that, somewhere out there in the universe, there is some physical encoding of the laws of a universe that is then passed on to a child universe? If not, we are back in a universe of laws speaking to each other, existing independently, and independently governing universes. True, the author insists that these laws must change with time and be in some way causally impacted by the universes they govern, but it's hard to see why this should be the case.
Yet things are even worse than this. The author himself seems to tacitly acknowledge that his postulated system would not be in itself a sufficient explanation for itself. At least, he believes it is necessary to construct a broader mathematicized physics model of precisely how this occurs, a la modern cosmology. Yet, remember, the entire point of his theory is to deny any fundamental fixed-background laws of nature in the modern sense. To give a fully evolutionary theory of absolutely everything, we would be in effect constructing a (mathematicized) law of cosmic evolution describing and governing the regularities in universes and their variation. This theory would seem to fall prey to precisely the same problems with modern Theories of Everything, at best succeeding where they failed by (in contradiction to the author's entire project) resulting in a single mathematical object unfolding necessarily, or it would run up against the same fundamental problem of the arbitrariness of the laws and initial conditions of the system. We would thus appear to be back where we started, having explained very little.
To his credit, Lee Smolin acknowledges this basic problem, even if he makes it seem much less fundamental than it is. As he argues, the problem of the evolution of laws leads naturally to the problem of "meta-laws," laws governing the formation and variation of laws. This would seem to lead to a vicious infinite explanatory regress, where the variation and formation of meta-laws would be explained by meta-meta laws, and so on; one that our author believes could be avoided. It is hard to see how.
In this book, the author again quotes Charles Sanders Pierce as saying that "Uniformities are precisely the sort of facts that need to be accounted...Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason." To alter this quote, the existence of an infinite population of causally-connected universes giving birth to each other and each governed by a set of arbitrary laws somehow causally passed on or altered by the universe before it would seem to be par excellence a thing that wants a reason. And any meta-laws purporting to provide this explanation would seem to be par excellence a thing that wants a reason too.
Cosmology and the Problem of Explanation
What could possibly lead to this paradoxical state of affairs? I would be so bold as to say the problem is fundamental and philosophical in nature.
As already stated, Leibniz' concept of sufficient reason relied on a transcendent background concept of reason identified ultimately with God, who is self-explanatory and who serves in turn to explain the contingent facts of the universe, including its overall existence. Lee Smolin, however, is committed not only to Leibniz' principle of sufficient reason, but also to the total explanatory closure of the universe. This, I believe, is the fundamental conflict and tension in his account, and the source of all other tensions and conflicts.
To see how this solution comes to appear the only possible one for our author, note the seeming tension between the statements above that since there is no necessary reason for the laws and initial conditions of the universe, there must be a reason falling short of logical necessity, and the statement immediately thereafter that for an initial-case universe there is no conceivable logical principle that could determine the choice of laws. If multiple universes can have their laws and initial conditions chosen or caused in a fundamentally non-necessary, non-deterministic way, then there seems no reason why a single-case universe could not also have its laws chosen or caused non-necessarily and non-deterministically as well. Yet here, Lee Smolin's commitment to the absolute closure of the universe, not only causally, but explanatorialy, comes in. An explanation outside the universe need not operate necessarily any more than an explanation within the universe: but, as it turns out, the only non-deterministic explanation he has that comes within the universe is time.
Driven by these contrary commitments, then, our author proposes an essentially temporal kind of explanation for all the contingent facts of the world of our experience. If the initial conditions of our universe would seem to require explanation, then they can be explained by some causal phenomenon farther back in time; and that causal phenomenon can be explained by a phenomenon farther back in time; and so on and so forth. On the face of it, this is simply infinite explanatory regress, and so not an explanation at all. Indeed, it is precisely the kind of infinite explanatory regress which the laws of nature were invented to explain in early modern physics, which tended to posit a spatially and temporally infinite universe. The infinite temporality of the universe did not suffice to explain its features; rather, these should be explained by higher rational mathematical principles which governed and explained the regularities in this temporally-eternal succession of nature--and in the view of practically every actual early-modern physicist, these regularities were in turn explained by God.
Let's abstract for a moment to a totally philosophical space. In any philosophical argument, there is something(s) that is treated as fundamental, the explanans, and something that is to be explained, the explanandum. At least for the purposes of the argument, the former is treated as not in need of explanation. In a broader field of reason, it may not be in need of explanation because it is in turn explained by something else, or because it is fundamentally self-explaining. Practically all systems of reason do not accept an infinite regress of explanantes as rationally explanatory (even if they do accept the possibility of an infinite causal regress), since explanations are not self-contained but comprehensive, such that the explanatory power of each explanans derives entirely from previous links in the chain and from the global explanation as a whole, and therefore such a regress would seem to lead to a situation where therefore nothing is ever in fact explained. Likewise, while there are philosophers who argue that these arguments may terminate in something that is truly and intrinsically inexplicable, a so-called "brute fact," most acknowledge that this would also result in an ultimately unexplainable and irrational universe.
Every cosmological system and argument ever existing, of which there have been many and of which I have encountered quite a few over the years, can be reduced likewise to a fundamental explanans and a series of explananda. For a cosmological argument, the fundamental explanandum is the cosmos. There are more or less three ways to deal with the explanans, however: (1) one can treat the cosmos itself taken as a whole as the explanans, or in other words provide an argument for why the cosmos as a whole is ultimately self-explaining; (2) one can treat a particular part or feature of the cosmos as the explanans, at which point one has to provide some argument for why this feature of the cosmos is self-explaining or explained by something that is, which often leads to (1); or (3) one can posit an explanans other or apart from the cosmos which is either self-explaining or explained ultimately by something that is.
Modern cosmology as described by Lee Smolin generally falls into (1) or (2); or rather, falls into it by insistent principle. In Theories of Everything, the ultimate simple mathematical object of the cosmos is imagined to be ultimately self-explaining; and yet as our author points out, it has again and again become clear that even if this postulated entity could be described (and so far it has not been), it cannot actually explain itself.
Where, though, does our author's own solution fall within this picture?
To make any sense of what the author is proposing, I am forced to understand him as treating time in an absolute sense as his fundamental explanans. Indeed, upon reading the book first I was puzzled by the seeming confusion between the claim that time is real (which is a fairly minimal claim), and the claim that time is the most fundamental and basic aspect of reality. As his argument emerges, it becomes clear that he is in fact committed not just to the former but the latter claim, that he does not merely want time to be another real or approximate explanandum, but the fundamental nexus of explanation for every other physical phenomenon, including ultimately the universe itself. Indeed, at certain points Lee Smolin suggests both that by the nature of time it is anti-entropic, leading to an increase in energy and complexity over time, and is also free, leading to new, unpredictable events rather than merely unfolding a contingent process. This makes time something like Leibnizian reason, a transcendental phenomenon that exists within but in a sense transcends the cosmos and serves to explain both individual features of the universe and its overall structure.
Of course, by making time the only seemingly absolute thing and fixed-background structure in a cosmos defined otherwise by contingency and change, it would seem possible to accuse our author of in fact appealing to an explanatory principle beyond the universe after all. I believe the author would indignantly deny the charge, but a time that contains and arranges by way of simultaneity and succession only one universe, but an infinity of universes would certainly appear to transcend both any single universe and the set of universes as a whole.
Still, while this may be in tension with his stated principles, it is not necessarily irrational or incoherent in itself. I will, then, try to sketch out a brief argument for how the author's system might be said to explain the cosmos as a whole in a manner satisfying the principle of sufficient reason. I do not claim that this is in fact what our author would consciously agree with.
If there is a fundamental background infinite simultaneous absolute time that requires no explanation, and if placing things on a timeline showing them evolve is sufficient to explain anything within that timeline, then all that is necessary to explain any phenomenon is (1) the overall structure of time itself and (2) some particular actual succession of moments where that phenomenon can be placed in time. By postulating that the actual structure of time consists of an infinity of moments, (2) is largely folded into (1). We might call this concept the idea of explanation by temporal succession, or perhaps in the broadest and most colloquial sense evolutionary explanation.
The one phenomenon that cannot be explained by the above method is, of course, time itself. After all, if every explanation of a phenomenon will ultimately consist of a sketch of an asymmetrical process unfolding within time, then it seems clear that time itself cannot be explained by being charted onto such a process. While one might imagine a system of meta-time whereby times are explained by being placed on a meta-timeline timeline, this would seem to lead to infinite regress, and is clearly not our author's preferred belief.
We are left, then, with time: the one thing that explains everything else. For this argument to meet the principle of sufficient reason, time must be fundamentally self-explaining. That is, an a-symmetric infinite space involving total simultaneity for all things within a single moment but such that only the present moment actually exists while the past has existed and the future will exist, fully explains and accounts for itself.
One could imagine (and indeed such arguments exist) a philosophical argument for this position, that temporal explanation is the most fundamental possible and underlies all other things, including human reason. I do not think it would or has ever succeeded, however: for the simple reason that it brings us back once again to our dear friend Parmenides and Zeno, and their fundamental statement of the existential problems and paradoxes involved with change and time, which would seem to lead at the very least to the position that time is not obviously or trivially self-explaining.
It is in response to the Parmenidean challenge that Socratic and Platonic and Aristotelean philosophy emerged, as an attempt to acknowledge the problem while still asserting the reality of time and change and contingency.
In a very real sense, however, modern physics would seem to be in a rather pre-Parmenidean place.
Ancient and Medieval Resolutions to Physics
Ancient mythology largely began where Lee Smolin's book ends, explaining the features of the universe merely with a temporal narration of changes over time. In the Theogony, Hesiod explains the universe by positing a chain of deities with the power of divine reproduction, an unexplained mechanism which, as the author proposes speculatively in later chapters in regards to his concept of time, leads not to entropic decrease but to a perpetual increase in power and complexity and whose results cannot be predicted or determined wholly in advance. It is certainly a notable coincidence that both Lee Smolin and Hesiod come to center their systems of cosmic order on an unexplained, practically supernatural, quasi-biological mechanism of reproduction--or rather, not a coincidence at all, but a reflection of the fact that, at least in our experience, reproduction is the primary observed way in which objects of our experience (see Hilary of Poitiers) extend their existence within a world of change and contingency.
While for our author, however, this principle is largely the solution, for Hesiod it is also an enormous problem. After all, any anti-entropic mechanism of sufficient power can be as much destructive of order as creative of it, as bombs and the sun show in their different ways. For Hesiod, the multiplying, continually-more-powerful gods produced by divine reproduction are ultimately incompatible with a stable cosmic order that would allow human beings or other more fragile entities to come into existence and remain there. Likewise, as discussed above, a fundamental problem of modern physics is how the features of the universe, entropic and anti-entropic, can be limited and balanced in such a way as to allow the stable universe of our experience to exist and remain in existence for sufficient time for life (and human beings) to come into existence and remain there.
For Hesiod, the answer to these forces is the monarchy of Zeus, who checks and channels divine reproductive power to prevent other gods from reproducing in any way that could threaten his power while himself procreating with gods and mortals a multiplicity of weaker children who look to him as father and king, thus creating a stable, if rather harsh and arbitrary, regime. For modern physics, the answer has generally been some complex mathematical fine-tuning of laws and conditions, and/or as for Lee Smolin some evolutionary theory appealing to a mix of fundamental nature, environment, reproductive mechanism, and/or natural selection to explain how, as for animals struggling for life among scarce resources, the overall system leads the population of universes to select for stable features rather than unstable ones.
What both systems have in common, though, is that neither appears capable of explaining the fundamental features of their own systems. For Hesiod, the existence of an indefinite class of divinities existing within time and capable of a mechanism of reproduction leading to a perpetual increase in complexity and power is merely posited; it is the most fundamental causal and explanatory layer, beyond which there is nothing. Likewise, as I have argued, for Lee Smolin the existence of some temporal domain and/or an evolutionary complex of universes, environment, and reproduction existing within this domain, would appear to be the most fundamental causal and explanatory layer, beyond which there is nothing.
It is here, though, where ancient philosophy fundamentally begins: with an attempt to explain these fundamental features left untouched by mythological and other merely evolutionary-temporal systems. For many pre-Socratic philosophers, this was done by portraying the features of universe as mere transformations within some physical or quasi-physical substance itself requiring no explanation. This, however, led naturally to explanatory conundrums not entirely dissimilar to those with modern physics chronicled by our author.
It is my fundamental belief that Socratic and Platonic philosophy, and everything that emerges from them, can only be understood as a response to the Parmenidean challenge--such that it would make nearly as much sense to refer to pre- and post-Parmenidean philosophy as pre- and post-Socratic. Parmenides seems to have been among the first thinkers to center his explanatory account, not on any quasi-physical substance(s) or set of reproductive deities, but on the concept of being. As he argued, being is the one object which is fully rationally self-explanatory, since it cannot not exist without a contradiction in terms. For this being to be fully self-explanatory, however, it must be being in the fullest sense, contradicting, not just absolute non-being, but every form of partial non-being constituting the world of our experience, the world of doxa or illusion: change, contingency, temporality, and multiplicity, and, in short, every relationship involving non-identity. While fully self-identical, unified, necessary being explains itself, every move away from this demands explanation.
For Parmenides himself, the preferred explanation would seem to be that these things do not exist and therefore are illusions. In this, Parmenides anticipated by many centuries the tendency of modern physics to deny the reality of time, change, and contingency--though as pointed out above, he would certainly consider their own supposedly necessary models and laws as intrinsically bound up with non-identity and change therefore impossible to identify with being in the proper sense.
Socratic and Platonic and Aristotelean philosophy can best be understood, then, as a set of mostly complimentary pathways by which the Parmenidean concept of being can be affirmed while at the same time ascribing true being in a lesser sense to the world of our experience, including time, change, contingency, and multiplicity. The advantage of all such system is that they reap the rewards of Parmenides' identification of one definitely and fully self-explanatory reality--making the task of philosophy merely the connection of this reality with the world of our experience. This leads in varying configurations to pictures of the universe that are at least in broad strokes and in theory fully rational and fully rationalized, even if not without complexity and problems in the details.
I would not be so bold as to say that all the problems our author attests in modern physics can be simply solved by pre-modern philosophy. Indeed, in comparison to ancient philosophy modern physics has made enormous strides in understanding and harnessing precisely the details and mechanisms of our world of contingency and change. They do, however, provide various robust paradigms for solving the fundamental problem of modern cosmology as our author constructs it: namely how to affirm the reality of contingency and change while at the same time providing sufficient rational reasons for the contingent and seemingly arbitrary features of the universe. I won't go over all these various theories, but focus in on only a few ideas and their potential impact on these problems:
(1) Substantial form and laws of nature
As stated above, Lee Smolin's main problem is with "laws of nature" in their seeming arbitrariness and their strange existential status, descriptions of regularities in nature that claim the status of timeless Platonic forms standing apart from nature and used to explain it.
As stated above, these "laws of nature" are very poor candidates for Forms in the Platonic sense. Nonetheless, there can be little doubt that many modern physicists essentially treat them as such: as totally timeless, necessary beings pre-existing any actual universe or else identified with it.
Our author quite correctly concludes that this is a bizarre concept: and so strives to assert both the reality of time and change and contingency and the necessarily non-timeless, non-eternal status of laws of nature.
Aristotle had a similar issue with Plato's system, and especially for the lack of a proper connection between his mathematical/transcendental forms and the actual world of nature. While for Plato no mere description of a regularity or individual object within nature and change could in itself be a necessary, eternal form, this left the actual world of our experience as at best a shadow realm of insubstantial shadows and reflections of the Forms distantly "participating" in them. This struck Aristotle as highly contrary to our own lived experience of the being and rational comprehensibility of the objects of our experience, especially living things. These entities grew and changed, but seemed to do so in a rational, goal-directed way such that their being emerged only through their processes of change and growth over time.
He thus developed the concept of "substance" or ousia--a concept that, while developed in part as a challenge to Plato's theory of the forms, became a feature of most later Platonic systems in addition to these forms. "Ousia" in Greek merely means "being"; in using this term for the individual "being" of animals and plants and other living things, however, Aristotle aimed a double blow against the Parmenidean and Platonic systems that confined being in the proper sense to an intellectual or transcendent realm. Each individual animal or plant or person possessed a true "substance" governing its stable existence through time and linking it to other creatures of the same natural kind. This "being" was not transcendental, existing apart or above the world of experience as a universal, timeless mathematical object derived deductively from simpler forms, but imminent in the world of change and contingency and ultimately the source of both the being and the comprehensibility of that world.
Still, the system remains in a real sense a response to the Parmenidean challenge. Being is still in itself, in its fullest sense, what Parmenides said it was. The individual beings or substances of objects of our experience, though, show way(s) in which being in this sense can be partially and imperfectly present in and across time and change and contingent existence. This comes first and foremost through the concept of telos or final cause, but also through a whole host of other ways in which even objects subject to change can exist in and through time while remaining relatively stable and so relatively comprehensible.
Insofar as our author is trying to construct an alternate construction of "laws of nature" that makes them imminent to the world of experience and existentially united with it, the Aristotelean concept of substance would seem to respond effectively to his concerns. There are, incidentally, many modern philosophers of science who have done excellent work setting out ways to understand laws of nature in terms of imminent substance.
(2) Potential being, probability, and quantum mechanics
Another fundamental aspect of Aristotle's theory is the concept of potential being. It is this more than anything else that allows him to surmount the Parmenidean challenge of the contradiction between being and change.
As Parmenides had argued, change (and therefore time) implied an existential break between different states or moments, such that what had not existed at one state or moment then existed at another state or moment and then did not exist at a third. To Parmenides this was simply contradictory, with either contradictory things being ascribed to one and the same object and/or a succession of contradictory objects--or at the very least irrational, since no existential principle seemingly governed these contradictory fluctuations in being.
Aristotle's way out of this bind was to propose the concept of potential being as an intermediary between actual being and non-being, thus reconciling the existential demands of time, change, and contingency with Parmenidean being. The seeming existential gaps in the world of our experience were in fact "filled in" with this potential being, which provided particular possible fields within which actual existence could work. That which actually existed at moment 2 had already existed potentially at moment 1, making the actual transition from the latter to the former not a miraculous jump from non-being to being, but merely a limited jump from potential to actual being, itself actualized by some actual being.
Potential being, it seems, could be equally useful for our author's system and others that try to affirm the reality of time and therefore of change without completely rejecting being in a broader sense. Potential being is not contradictory to actual being: it flows from it and is existentially rooted in it, yet it allows for a robust concept of time and change and causation that is not merely a necessary, deductive block universe.
Similarly, it is the nexus of potential to actual being, in particular, that underlies Aristotle's and other later theorists' concept of telos or final cause, by which potential being gives rise to actual being in a goal-directed but not wholly deterministic way. In particular, it has always struck me that the subatomic world described by quantum mechanics would seem to conform closely to an Aristotelean picture of potential being (which he associates with matter) falling short of full determination and being actualized in a goal-directed and therefore probabilistic, but not wholly deterministic way, by the tester probing a quantum system.
This is quite sketchy, naturally, and possibly completely off-base.
(3) Creative choice and contingency
The most directly impactful aspect of ancient thought for cosmology as a whole, though, are the Platonic and Christian theologies set out in my last post. Indeed, the main pre-modern set of cosmology and cosmological arguments are in fact arguments for the existence of God and/or his properties. While our author in a brief aside rejects theism as failing to explain why God himself exists, this shows an almost complete misunderstanding of the theistic tradition, which by identifying God with being or actuality in the fullest possible sense provided a bevy of different arguments for his nature as the one necessarily self-explaining entity.
All these different philosophical theologies, though, emerge logically out of the basic nexus of Platonic and Aristotelean philosophy discussed above. Given a Parmenidean concept of being as self-explanatory, and given a Platonic and Aristotelean modification of this system to ascribe being in a lesser or participatory sense to the world of our existence, the fundamental problem of philosophy becomes how it is possible for being in the contingent, cosmic sense to arise out of and/or be explained by being in the fullest sense.
As discussed in my last post, there are a number of distinct ways to go about this. I am, speaking personally, a Christian Trinitarian, with all the views on the relationship of the summit of being to the cosmos that that implies. Nevertheless, my purpose here is not so much as to argue for the correctness of any particular position with this field as to set forward a few of the ways by which ancient philosophers sought to explain contingency by way of being.
In the Timaeus, the existence of the world is explained as the result of divine beneficence or generosity, but its falling short of being in its fullness is explained by its being implemented in a material, which limits the ability of the Craftsman to fully instantiate his model. He is thus brought to imitate eternity and fullness and unity by means of various imperfect images or likenesses of these qualities, producing a mix of similarity and difference, conformity and imperfection.
From the opposite end, in his Metaphysics Aristotle explains the structure of the world by way of desire for being in its fullness, as well as through the active moving of the world
Perhaps the most important concept for explaining merely contingent facts about the world, however, is certainly present in the Platonic corpus, but more fully in Jewish and Christian theologies.
In the Timaeus, the model is imitated in matter by a Craftsman or Demiurge, who, due to his inability to completely and perfectly replicate that model, is thus brought into a field of contingent and creative choice. Put simply, there are many different ways to image being in itself and/or the forms (just as there are many different initial conditions and configurations of laws within the mathematical structures of modern physics). In crafting the world, then, just like any craftsman working on a particular item, he is brought to make creative choices about the exact structure and qualities of the world and objects within it. These creative choices are not irrational or arbitrary, but essentially rational and aimed at a true imitation of and participation in being--and yet, to paraphrase Lee Smolin, there is no logical principle fully determining or necessitating their precise shape.
In appealing to this concept, Plato is naturally referencing our immediate, human experience of our own choices, and especially our creative choices. In creating a work of art, even a very specific and goal-directed work of art, we possess a wide area of freedom to express different things and achieve the same end in different ways. And in our everyday experience, we do not, in fact, regard this as either irrational or merely arbitrary: we instead accept that it is these creative choices that explain the precise shape of our creative products. This is, in fact, the main instance in our experience in which a clear, rational, goal-directed process can nonetheless be varied in numerous ways while still rationally achieving its end, and is appealed to by Plato as such.
While present in the Platonic tradition, this fundamental sense of the universe and its contingent features as explained by creative choices is far stronger in the Jewish and Christian traditions. In the creation account in Genesis, God does not create in an irrational or arbitrary manner: he creates out of a chaotic substance compared to water and in later authors identified with Platonic matter, and he creates, if not by Platonic forms in the strong sense, at least by his word accompanied by rational consideration and reflection. Still, the account as a whole places a far greater emphasis on God's creative choice and design. While the material out of which he creates may place some ultimate limitations on God's action, and while his ultimate end is described as creating man in the image and likeness of himself, most of the limitations and particular features in the account are justified neither by a rationally necessary model nor by the limitations of his material but seemingly by God's own creative choices within the indefinite field of possible variations.
In its full flowering in the Middle Ages, the doctrine of creation was designed to accommodate the contingency of the world in a far fuller sense than any previous system. Both the world's existence and its features, while aimed fundamentally at imitation of and participation in divine being a la Plato and Aristotle, nevertheless belonged to the domain of God's creative choices and were thus entirely contingent and non-necessary. The goal of this system was both to rationally explain the universe fully by its connection to a unified self-explaining being, and to truly affirm the apparent contingency, temporality, and multiplicity of the world of our experience.
Naturally such systems were aimed at a rather different fundamental goal than modern physics, with its commitments to experimentalism and utility. Still, if Time Reborn and Lee Smolin are in fact correct, modern physics and cosmology is rapidly approaching a point where the fundamental concerns of ancient and medieval philosophy will be not only relevant, but absolutely determinative for the future and shape of the discipline as a whole. If this is so, it might behoove those involved to pay attention to these traditions--if for no other reason than for purposes of comparison or to avoid dead ends.
Ancient and medieval philosophy are certainly not ready to merely take over or replace modern physics: but nor, yet, is modern physics competent to replace the whole of philosophy. If this very interesting little book is anything to go by, they could certainly learn something from each other. This is my (fairly modest) conclusion.
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