No More Learning

dinger's cat is shut up in a box with a killing mechanism triggered by a quantum-mechanical event. Before we open the lid of the box, we don't know whether the cat is dead. Common sense tells us that, nevertheless, the cat must be either alive or dead inside the box. The Copenhagen interpretation contradicts common sense: all that exists before we open the box is a probability. As soon as we open the box, the wave function collapses and we are left with the single event: the cat is dead, or the cat is alive. Until we opened the box, it was neither dead nor alive.
The 'many worlds' interpretation of the same events is that in some universes the cat is dead; in other universes the cat is alive. Neither interpretation satisfies human common sense or intuition. The more macho physicists don't care. What matters is that the
* A similar remark is attributed to Niels Bohr: 'Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it. '
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mathematics work, and the predictions are experimentally fulfilled. Most of us are too wimpish to follow them. We seem to need some sort of visualization of what is 'really' going on. I understand, by the way, that Schrodinger originally proposed his cat thought- experiment in order to expose what he saw as the absurdity of the Copenhagen interpretation.
The biologist Lewis Wolpert believes that the queerness of
modern physics is just the tip of the iceberg. Science in general, as
156
opposed to technology, does violence to common sense. Here's a
favourite example: every time you drink a glass of water, the odds are good that you will imbibe at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell. It's just elementary prob- ability theory. The number of molecules per glassful is hugely greater than the number of glassfuls in the world. So every time we have a full glass, we are looking at a rather high proportion of the molecules of water that exist in the world. There is, of course, nothing special about Cromwell, or bladders. Haven't you just breathed in a nitrogen atom that was once breathed out by the third iguanodon to the left of the tall cycad tree? Aren't you glad to be alive in a world where not only is such a conjecture possible but you are privileged to understand why? And publicly explain it to somebody else, not as your opinion or belief but as something that they, when they have understood your reasoning, will feel com- pelled to accept? Maybe this is an aspect of what Carl Sagan meant when he explained his motive in writing The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark: ''Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world. This book is a personal statement, reflecting my lifelong love affair with science. '
The evolution of complex life, indeed its very existence in a universe obeying physical laws, is wonderfully surprising - or would be but for the fact that surprise is an emotion that can exist only in a brain which is the product of that very surprising process. There is an anthropic sense, then, in which our existence should not be surprising. I'd like to think that I speak for my fellow humans in insisting, nevertheless, that it is desperately surprising.
Think about it. On one planet, and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules that would normally make nothing
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more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of com- plexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter. We now understand essentially how the trick is done, but only since 1859. Before 1859 it would have seemed very very odd indeed. Now, thanks to
Darwin, it is merely very odd. Darwin seized the window of the burka and wrenched it open, letting in a flood of understanding whose dazzling novelty, and power to uplift the human spirit, perhaps had no precedent - unless it was the Copernican realization that the Earth was not the centre of the universe.
'Tell me,' the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once asked a friend, 'why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating? ' His friend replied, 'Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth. ' Wittgenstein responded, 'Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating? ' I sometimes quote this remark of Wittgenstein in lectures, expecting the audience to laugh. Instead, they seem stunned into silence.
In the limited world in which our brains evolved, small objects are more likely to move than large ones, which are seen as the back- ground to movement. As the world rotates, objects that seem large because they are near - mountains, trees and buildings, the ground itself - all move in exact synchrony with each other and with the observer, relative to heavenly bodies such as the sun and stars. Our evolved brains project an illusion of movement onto them rather than the mountains and trees in the foreground.
I now want to pursue the point mentioned above, that the way we see the world, and the reason why we find some things intuitively easy to grasp and others hard, is that our brains are themselves evolved organs: on-board computers, evolved to help us survive in a world -1 shall use the name Middle World - where the objects that mattered to our survival were neither very large nor very small; a world where things either stood still or moved slowly compared with the speed of light; and where the very improbable
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could safely be treated as impossible. Our mental burka window is narrow because it didn't need to be any wider in order to assist our ancestors to survive.
Science has taught us, against all evolved intuition, that appar- ently solid things like crystals and rocks are really composed almost entirely of empty space. The familiar illustration represents the nucleus of an atom as a fly in the middle of a sports stadium. The next atom is right outside the stadium. The hardest, solidest, densest rock, then, is 'really' almost entirely empty space, broken only by tiny particles so far apart that they shouldn't count. So why do rocks look and feel solid and hard and impenetrable?
I won't try to imagine how Wittgenstein might have answered that question. But, as an evolutionary biologist, I would answer it like this. Our brains have evolved to help our bodies find their way around the world on the scale at which those bodies operate. We never evolved to navigate the world of atoms. If we had, our brains probably would perceive rocks as full of empty space. Rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands because our hands can't penetrate them. The reason they can't penetrate them is un- connected with the sizes and separations of the particles that constitute matter. Instead, it has to do with the force fields that are associated with those widely spaced particles in 'solid' matter. It is useful for our brains to construct notions like solidity and im- penetrability, because such notions help us to navigate our bodies through a world in which objects - which we call solid - cannot occupy the same space as each other.
A little comic relief at this point - from The Men who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson:
This is a true story. It is the summer of 1983. Major General Albert Stubblebine III is sitting behind his desk in Arlington, Virginia, and he is staring at his wall, upon which hang his numerous military awards. They detail a long and distinguished career. He is the United States Army's chief of intelligence, with sixteen thousand sol- diers under his command . . . He looks past his awards to the wall itself. There is something he feels he must do even though the thought of it frightens him. He thinks about
A MUCH NEEDED GAP ? 369
the choice he has to make. He can stay in his office or he can go into the next office. That is his choice. And he has made it. He is going into the next office . . . He stands up, moves out from behind his desk, and begins to walk. I mean, he thinks, what is the atom mostly made up of any- way? Space! He quickens his pace. What am I mostly made of? He thinks. Atoms! He is almost at a jog now. What is the wall mostly made up of? He thinks. Atoms! All I have to do is merge the spaces. . . . Then General Stubblebine bangs his nose hard on the wall of his office. Damn, he thinks. General Stubblebine is confounded by his continual failure to walk through his wall.
General Stubblebine is appropriately described as an 'out of the box thinker' on the website of the organization which, in retire- ment, he now runs with his wife. It is called HealthFreedomUSA, and it is dedicated to 'supplements (vitamins, minerals, amino acids, etc. ), herbs, homeopathic remedies, nutritional medicine and clean food (untainted by pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics), without corporations (through the use of government coercion) dictating to
you what dosages and treatments you are allowed to use'. There is no mention of precious bodily fluids. *
Having evolved in Middle World, we find it intuitively easy to grasp ideas like: 'When a major general moves, at the sort of medium velocity at which major generals and other Middle World objects do move, and hits another solid Middle World object like a wall, his progress is painfully arrested. ' Our brains are not equipped to imagine what it would be like to be a neutrino passing through a wall, in the vast interstices of which that wall 'really' consists. Nor can our understanding cope with what happens when things move at close to the speed of light.
Unaided human intuition, evolved and schooled in Middle World, even finds it hard to believe Galileo when he tells us that a cannon ball and a feather, given no air friction, would hit the ground at the same instant when dropped from a leaning tower. That is because, in Middle World, air friction is always there. If we had evolved in a vacuum, we would expect a feather and a cannonball to hit the ground simultaneously. We are evolved denizens of Middle World,
* www. healthfreedomusa. org/aboutus/president. shtml. For what looks like a very characterful portrait of General Stubblebine, see www. mindcontrol forums. com/images/Mind94. jpg.
370 THE GOD DELUSION
and that limits what we are capable of imagining. The narrow window of our burka permits us, unless we are especially gifted or peculiarly well educated, to see only Middle World.
There is a sense in which we animals have to survive not just in Middle World but in the micro-world of atoms and electrons too. The very nerve impulses with which we do our thinking and our imagining depend upon activities in Micro World. But no action that our wild ancestors ever had to perform, no decision that they ever had to take, would have been assisted by an understanding of Micro World. If we were bacteria, constantly buffeted by thermal movements of molecules, it would be different. But we Middle Worlders are too cumbersomely massive to notice Brownian motion. Similarly, our lives are dominated by gravity but are almost oblivious to the delicate force of surface tension. A small insect would reverse that priority and would find surface tension anything but delicate.
Steve Grand, in Creation: Life and How to Make It, is almost scathing about our preoccupation with matter itself. We have this tendency to think that only solid, material 'things' are 'really' things at all. 'Waves' of electromagnetic fluctuation in a vacuum seem 'unreal'. Victorians thought that waves had to be waves 'in' some material medium. No such medium was known, so they invented one and named it the luminiferous ether. But we find 'real' matter comfortable to our understanding only because our ancestors evolved to survive in Middle World, where matter is a useful construct.
On the other hand, even we Middle Worlders can see that a whirlpool is a 'thing' with something like the reality of a rock, even though the matter in the whirlpool is constantly changing. In a desert plain in Tanzania, in the shadow of Ol Donyo Lengai, sacred volcano of the Masai, there is a large dune made of ash from an eruption in 1969. It is carved into shape by the wind. But the beautiful thing is that it moves bodily. It is what is technically known as a barchan (pronounced bahkahn). The entire dune walks across the desert in a westerly direction at a speed of about 17 metres per year. It retains its crescent shape and creeps along in the direction of the horns. The wind blows sand up the shallower slope. Then, as each sand grain hits the top of the ridge, it cascades down the steeper slope on the inside of the crescent.
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Actually, even a barchan is more of a 'thing' than a wave. A wave seems to move horizontally across the open sea, but the molecules of water move vertically. Similarly, sound waves may travel from speaker to listener, but molecules of air don't: that would be a wind, not a sound. Steve Grand points out that you and I are more like waves than permanent 'things'. He invites his reader to think . . .
. . . of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place . . . Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.
'Really' isn't a word we should use with simple confidence. If a neutrino had a brain which had evolved in neutrino-sized ancestors, it would say that rocks 'really' do consist mostly of empty space. We have brains that evolved in medium-sized ancestors, who couldn't walk through rocks, so our 'really' is a 'really' in which rocks are solid. 'Really', for an animal, is whatever its brain needs it to be, in order to assist its survival. And because different species live in such different worlds, there will be a troubling variety of 'reallys'.
What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished real world but a model of the real world, regulated and adjusted by sense data - a model that is constructed so that it is useful for dealing with the real world. The nature of that model depends on the kind of animal we are. A flying animal needs a different kind of world model from a walking, a climbing or a swimming animal. Predators need a different kind of model from prey, even though their worlds necessarily overlap. A monkey's brain must have software capable
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of simulating a three-dimensional maze of branches and trunks. A water boatman's brain doesn't need 3D software, since it lives on the surface of the pond in an Edwin Abbott Flatland. A mole's software for constructing models of the world will be customized for underground use. A naked mole rat probably has world- representing software similar to a mole's. But a squirrel, although it is a rodent like the mole rat, probably has world-rendering software much more like a monkey's.
I've speculated, in The Blind Watchmaker and elsewhere, that bats may 'see' colour with their ears. The world-model that a bat needs, in order to navigate through three dimensions catching insects, must surely be similar to the model that a swallow needs in order to perform much the same task. The fact that the bat uses echoes to update the variables in its model, while the swallow uses light, is incidental. Bats, I suggest, use perceived hues such as 'red' and 'blue' as internal labels for some useful aspect of echoes, perhaps the acoustic texture of surfaces; just as swallows use the same perceived hues to label long and short wavelengths of light. The point is that the nature of the model is governed by how it is to be used rather than by the sensory modality involved. The lesson of the bats is this. The general form of the mind model - as opposed to the variables that are constantly being inputted by sensory nerves - is an adaptation to the animal's way of life, no less than its wings, legs and tail are.
J. B. S. Haldane, in the article on 'possible worlds' that I quoted above, had something relevant to say about animals whose world is dominated by smell. He noted that dogs can distinguish two very similar volatile fatty acids - caprylic acid and caproic acid - each diluted to one part in a million. The only difference is that caprylic acid's main molecular chain is two carbon atoms longer than the main chain of caproic acid. A dog, Haldane guesses, would prob- ably be able to place the acids 'in the order of their molecular weights by their smells, just as a man could place a number of piano wires in the order of their lengths by means of their notes'.
There is another fatty acid, capric acid, which is just like the other two except that it has yet two more carbon atoms in its main chain. A dog that had never met capric acid would perhaps have no more trouble imagining its smell than we would have trouble
A M U C H N E E D E D G A P ? 373
imagining a trumpet playing one note higher than we have heard a trumpet play before. It seems to me entirely reasonable to guess that a dog, or a rhinoceros, might treat mixtures of smells as harmonious chords. Perhaps there are discords. Probably not melodies, for melodies are built up of notes that start or stop abruptly with accurate timing, unlike smells. Or perhaps dogs and rhinos smell in colour. The argument would be the same as for the bats.
Once again, the perceptions that we call colours are tools used by our brains to label important distinctions in the outside world. Perceived hues - what philosophers call qualia - have no intrinsic connection with lights of particular wavelengths. They are internal labels that are available to the brain, when it constructs its model of external reality, to make distinctions that are especially salient to the animal concerned. In our case, or that of a bird, that means light of different wavelengths.
In a bat's case, I have speculated, it might be surfaces of different echoic properties or textures, perhaps red for shiny, blue for velvety, green for abrasive. And in a dog's or a rhino's case, why should it not be smells? The power to imagine the alien world of a bat or a rhino, a pond skater or a mole, a bacterium or a bark beetle, is one of the privileges science grants us
when it tugs at the black cloth of our burka and shows us the wider range of what is out there for our delight.
The metaphor of Middle World - of the intermediate range of phenomena that the narrow slit in our burka permits us to see - applies to yet other scales or 'spectrums'. We can construct a scale of improbabilities, with a similarly narrow window through which our intuition and imagination are capable of going. At one extreme of the spectrum of improbabilities are those would-be events that we call impossible. Miracles are events that are extremely im- probable. A statue of a madonna could wave its hand at us. The atoms that make up its crystalline structure are all vibrating back and forth. Because there are so many of them, and because there is no agreed preference in their direction of motion, the hand, as we see it in Middle World, stays rock steady. But the jiggling atoms in the hand could all just happen to move in the same direction at the same time. And again. And again . . . In this case the hand would move, and we'd see it waving at us. It could happen, but the odds
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against are so great that, if you had set out writing the number at the origin of the universe, you still would not have written enough zeroes to this day. The power to calculate such odds - the power to quantify the near-impossible rather than just throw up our hands in despair - is another example of the liberating benefactions of science to the human spirit.
Evolution in Middle World has ill equipped us to handle very improbable events. But in the vastness of astronomical space, or geological time, events that seem impossible in Middle World turn out to be inevitable. Science flings open the narrow window through which we are accustomed to viewing the spectrum of possibilities. We are liberated by calculation and reason to visit regions of possibility that had once seemed out of bounds or in- habited by dragons. We have already made use of this widening of the window in Chapter 4, where we considered the improbability of the origin of life and how even a near-impossible chemical event must come to pass given enough planet years to play with; and where we considered the spectrum of possible universes, each with its own set of laws and constants, and the anthropic necessity of finding ourselves in one of the minority of friendly places.
How should we interpret Haldane's 'queerer than we can suppose'? Queerer than can, in principle, be supposed? Or just queerer than we can suppose, given the limitation of our brains' evolutionary apprenticeship in Middle World? Could we, by train- ing and practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World, tear off our black burka, and achieve some sort of intuitive - as well as just mathematical - understanding of the very small, the very large, and the very fast? I genuinely don't know the answer, but I am thrilled to be alive at a time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.
Appendix
A partial list of friendly addresses, for individuals needing support in escaping from religion
I intend to keep an updated version of this list on the website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science: www. richarddawkins. net. I apologize for limiting the list below largely to the English-speaking world.
USA
American Atheists
PO Box 5733, Parsippany, NJ 07054-6733 Voicemail: 1-908-276-7300
Fax: 1-908-276-7402
Email: info@atheists. org
www. atheists. org
American Humanist Association
1777 T Street, NW, Washington, DC 20009-7125 Telephone: (202) 238-9088
Toll-free: 1-800-837-3792
Fax: (202) 238-9003
www. americanhumanist. org
Atheist Alliance International
PO Box 26867, Los Angeles, CA 90026 Toll-free: 1-866-HERETIC
Email: info@atheistalliance. org www. atheistalliance. org
The Brights
PO Box 163418, Sacramento, CA 95816 USA Email: the-brights@the-brights. net www. the-brights. net
Center For Inquiry Transnational Council for Secular Humanism Campus Freethought Alliance Center for Inquiry - On Campus
376 T H E G O D D E L U S I O N
African Americans for Humanism
3965 Rensch Road, Amherst, NY 14228
Telephone: (716) 636-4869
Fax:(716)636-1733
Email: info@secularhumanism. org
www. centerforinquiry. net
www. secularhumanism. org
www. campusfreethought. org www. secularhumanism. org/index. php? section=aah&page=index
Freedom From Religion Foundation PO Box 750, Madison, WI 53701 Telephone: (608) 256-5800
Email: info@ffrf. org
www. ffrf. org
Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia PO Box 242, Pocopson, PA 19366-0242 Telephone: (610) 793-2737
Fax: (610) 793-2569
Email: fsgp@freethought. org www. fsgp. org/
Institute for Humanist Studies
48 Howard St, Albany, NY 12207 Telephone: (518) 432-7820
Fax: (518) 432-7821 www. humaniststudies. org
International Humanist and Ethical Union - USA
Appignani Bioethics Center
PO Box 4104, Grand Central Station, New York, NY 10162 Telephone: (212) 687-3324
Fax: (212) 661-4188
Internet Infidels
PO Box 142, Colorado Springs, CO 80901-0142 Fax: (877) 501-5113
www. infidels. org
James Randi Educational Foundation
201 S. E. 12th St (E. Davie Blvd), Fort Lauderdale, FL 33316-1815 Telephone: (954)467-1112
Fax: (954) 467-1660
Email: jref@randi. org www. randi. org
Secular Coalition for America
PO Box 53330, Washington, DC 20009-9997 Telephone: (202) 299-1091
www. secular. org
Secular Student Alliance
PO Box 3246, Columbus, OH 43210 Toll-free Voicemail / Fax: 1-877-842-9474 Email: ssa@secularstudents. org www. secularstudents. org
The Skeptics Society
PO Box 338, Altadena, CA 91001 Telephone: (626) 794-3119
Fax: (626) 794-1301
Email: editorial@skeptic. com www. skeptic. com
Society for Humanistic Judaism
28611 W. 12 Mile Rd, Farmington Hills, MI 48334 Telephone: (248) 478-7610
Fax: (248)478-3159
Email: info@shj. org
www. shj. org
Britain
British Humanist Association
1 Gower Street, London WC1E 6HD Telephone: 020 7079 3580
Fax: 020 7079 3588
Email: info@humanism. org. uk www. humanism. org. uk
International Humanist and Ethical Union - UK 1 Gower Street, London WC1E 6HD Telephone: 020 7631 3170
Fax: 020 7631 3171
www. iheu. org/
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National Secular Society
25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tel: 020 7404 3126
Fax: 0870 762 8971 www. secularisrn. org. uk/
New Humanist
1 Gower Street, London WC1E 6HD Telephone: 020 7436 1151
Fax: 020 7079 3588
Email: info@newhumanist. org. uk www. newhumanist. org. uk
Rationalist Press Association
1 Gower Street, London WC1E 6HD Telephone: 020 7436 1151
Fax: 020 7079 3588
Email: info@rationalist. org. uk www. rationalist. org. uk/
South Place Ethical Society (UK)
Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Telephone: 020 7242 8037/4
Fax: 020 7242 8036
Email: library@ethicalsoc. org. uk www. ethicalsoc. org. uk
Canada
Humanist Association of Canada
PO Box 8752, Station T, Ottawa, Ontario, K1G 3J1 Telephone: 877-HUMANS-l
Fax: (613) 739-4801
Email: HAC@Humanists. ca
http://hac. humanists. net/
Australia
Australian Skeptics
PO Box 268, Roseville, NSW 2069 Telephone: 02 9417 2071
Email: skeptics@bdsn. com. au www. skeptics. com. au
APPENDIX 379
Council of Australian Humanist Societies
GPO Box 1555, Melbourne, Victoria 3001.
Telephone: 613 5974 4096
Email: AMcPhate@bigpond. net. au http://home. vicnet. net. au/~humanist/resources/cahs. html
New Zealand
New Zealand Skeptics NZCSICOP Inc.
PO Box 29-492, Christchurch Email: skeptics@spis. co. nz http://skeptics. org. nz
Humanist Society of New Zealand PO Box 3372, Wellington
Email: jeffhunt90@yahoo. co. nz www. humanist. org. nz/
India
Rationalist International
PO Box 9110, New Delhi 110091 Telephone: + 91-11-556 990 12
Email: info@rationalistinternational. net www. rationalistinternational. net/
Islamic
Apostates of Islam www. apostatesofislam. com/index. htm
Dr Homa Darabi Foundation
(To promote the rights of women and children under Islam) PO Box 11049, Truckee, CA 96162, USA
Telephone (530) 582 4197
Fax (530) 582 0156
Email: homa@homa. org
www. homa. org/
FaithFreedom. org www. faithfreedom. org/index. htm
Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Society Email: info@SecularIslam. org www. secularislam. org/Default. htm
Books cited or recommended
Adams, D. (2003). The Salmon of Doubt. London: Pan.
Alexander, R. D. and Tinkle, D. W. , eds (1981). Natural Selection and
Social Behavior. New York: Chiron Press.
Anon. (1985). Life - How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or by
Creation? New York: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.
Ashton, J. E, ed. (1999). In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Choose to
Believe in Creation. Sydney: New Holland.
Atkins, P. W. (1992). Creation Revisited. Oxford: W. H. Freeman. Atran, S. (2002). In Gods We Trust. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Attenborough, D. (1960). Quest in Paradise. London: Lutterworth. Aunger, R. (2002). The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We
Think. New York: Free Press.
Baggini, J. (2003). Atheism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Barber, N. (1988). Lords of the Golden Horn. London: Arrow. Barker, D. (1992). Losing Faith in Faith.