Five scientists make up stuff about cosmic meaning

Because they can’t help themselves, apparently

NGC 7714, a spiral galaxy located about 100 million light-years from Earth. Image from universalsci.substack.com/notes.

Before we get started: much of what you’ll read below is an example of what Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum (1620) called pars destruens, which we can loosely translate as flushing down the crap. But if you make it to the end (no cheating!) I promise you will be treated to a small taste of pars construens, the positive replacement for the crap one just flashed down.

So here we go again, talking about meaning, or lack thereof, in the universe. You may reasonably begin to think that I’ve developed an obsession about this. But, truly, it isn’t me, it’s them! By “them,” in this case, I mean a number of cosmologists interviewed for one of the most irritating pieces I’ve ever seen published by Big Think, an outlet I follow and generally admire.

Back in June, contributor Shai Tubali wrote an article entitled “5 scientists on finding meaning in our Universe’s 13.8-billion-year story,” which is so full of equivocation, deepeties, and sheer nonsense that I wondered who he was. A simple web search revealed that he traffics, among other things, in guides to expand your consciousness (in just seven days!). His page says that he “make(s) use of ancient mystical knowledge to enlighten our human experience.” He also offers a one-year “professional certificate program” in Chakra-informed therapy and coaching, whatever that means.

The article begins innocuously enough with a recounting of some of the stunning discoveries of modern cosmology. The universe is much vaster and older than we thought even a century ago. As surprising as it may be, Edwin Hubble discovered evidence of other galaxies, outside the Milky Way, as recently as 1924! It is also true, as Tubali writes, that we don’t know anything about 90% of the (dark) matter and energy that makes up the universe, and that the cosmos is a highly dynamic set of processes, not a static thing.

But then he immediately goes on to make the first category mistake of the article: “And through us, the Universe crossed a threshold: It began, for the first time, to contemplate itself.” No, no, no. This is trivially true if what one means is the obvious fact that we are part of the universe and we are capable of contemplating our own existence. But it is a well known logical fallacy—known as the fallacy of composition—to attribute a property of a part to the whole. Universes are not in the business of contemplating anything, because they are not conscious beings. Though this universe obviously does contain conscious beings.

Tubali then characterizes the period since the Copernican revolution as “a long, dizzying hangover” that cast humanity off the center of the universe. But now, thanks to a new brand of brave cosmologists, we are beginning to realize that the universe speaks to us. Some of these cosmologists, we are told, even suggest that the new perspective may trigger the next step in the evolution of humanity, thus betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of the theory of evolution, which is not characterized by “steps” and it doesn’t go anywhere in particular. It’s only and strictly about survival and reproduction.

Still, Tubali, insists, a new “science-based wisdom tradition” is about to be established, not to replace but to complement existing religions. Oh crap. All right, I’ll bite, let’s see what these deep and wise insights amount to, shall we?

Let’s begin with Brian Swimme, who has developed a meditative practice grounded in “evolutionary cosmology.” It turns out to just be a variant of the famous view from above practiced by Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and beautifully described by Cicero in his “Dream of Scipio,” in the sixth book of De Re Publica. I practice the view from above myself, and it is indeed a useful way to help put things in perspective and to reacquaint oneself with the notion that we are part and parcel of the universe, not outside of it.

But when Swimme says that “The Universe has turned back on itself, when we gaze at the stars, we’re looking at the process that is looking” he is either talking poetically or engaging again in the fallacy of composition. The universe is not “looking” at anything because universes are not the sort of things that look. We are the ones doing the looking, the pondering, and constructing of meaning. To talk like Swimme does is just sloppy, which is unacceptable either for a scientist or for a philosopher, progressions that are in the business of describing reality as precisely as possible.

But the cosmologist isn’t done yet. Contemplating at a fish he comments: “I wasn’t looking at a separate creature. I was looking at something that had given birth to me.” No and no. You were indeed looking at a separate creature, albeit one you are indeed related to by common descent. And that creature did not give birth to you, you both derive from a distant common ancestor. To be specific, the last common ancestor between fish and land vertebrates is believed to have been a lobe-finned creature that lived around 390 million years ago. It was a member of a group known as Sarcopterygii, which includes modern coelacanths and lungfishes, and whose descendants gave rise to tetrapods.

A second cosmologist, Nahum Arav, also begins in a promising fashion, and then veers toward the nonsensical. He recounts his fascination with the starry sky when he was a kid, referring to it as a spiritual experience. I’m on board with that, I’ve had the same experience when I first pointed a telescope to the Moon and to Saturn, when I was eight or nine.

But then Arav continues: “I feel one with the Universe… I consider the stars and constellations my friends in the sky.” Again, if speaking poetically, sure. But if this is meant to be an insight into a new science-based wisdom tradition it is woefully lacking. Constellations, as Arav surely knows, do not, in fact, exist, they are an illusion creative by perspective. And stars are massive and decisively unfriendly (to human life) celestial bodies fueled by nuclear fusion. One such star, to be sure, is the source of life on Earth, but others are either too hot or to cold for that, not to mention that they may explode and/or turn into black holes, either of which would be lethal to us if it happened nearby.

Joel Primack also talks about awe, but in his case he feels it when a calculation turns out to be true. He describes this as “God is speaking to you.” A better way to put it is that natural selection built into us a reward system that floods our brains with pleasure hormones when we do something that is likely to increase our survival and reproduction, like avoiding a predator, finding a mate, or solving a problem by identifying an underlying pattern. The awe we get when we solve a mathematical equation (or the Sunday puzzle in the newspaper) is a nice byproduct, but nothing to wax mystical about.

Ball-and-stick model of the dopamine molecule, the pleasure hormone of the brain. Image from Wikimedia, CC license.

Marcelo Glaser also talks about mysticism and awe in the Big Think: “The mystical connection has inspired scientists for centuries—but modern science often strips out that emotional core. [To restore it] I’d suggest cosmos bathing, a deep exposure to the night sky—not just learning what is what, but communing with the vastness—can open doors of perception.” Again, nothing problematic about the practice, which is the same view from above we discussed earlier. But why invoke mysticism, the bane of modern science? And who says that scientists are incapable of feeling the awe of nature? Did these people never read Carl Sagan, or even Richard Dawkins?