Aristotle's Toy Universe

The title might sound condescending, but "toy" is meant in a sense similar to that in a physicist's "toy model," an oversimplified version of a physical situation. Modern physics famously has its spherical cows.

In contrast with the universe of his "scientific" descendants, the cosmos of Aristotle will undoubtedly strike modern people as small. His entire cosmos had its termination in the sphere of the fixed stars that revolved not far outside the sphere of the outermost planet. The earth, of course, sat at the center, the cosmic sump at the bottom of all things; contra Enlightenment rhetoric, the earth was the least important part of the cosmos.

Another way Aristotle's cosmos was smaller was that he had only four or five elements, as opposed to our 118 (at present). Of course, what he identified as elements were probably closer to what we call phases of matter (solid to plasma). Of course we humans can only distinguish elements by their activities. But only the coarsest macroscopic activities were readily accessible to him, hence his identification of phases of matter as elements.

Aristotle was also aware of a much smaller number of plants and animals. There's only so much one can do at the beginning of science to catalog all creatures.¹

But the universe we know today is also, in a way, deeper than Aristotle's cosmos. There is much more structure on the way down. It's as if the bottom of reality, the infinite division that yields featureless matter, were farther away than he estimated. But this is a constant human tendency. Well into the 20th century biologists still thought the protoplasm of the cell was structureless, homogeneous liquid, whereas nowadays we know that it has important structure at all levels down through macromolecules to its atoms.

But it's interesting to consider how much Aristotle's cosmos was very like our conception of the universe. Our universe, most especially our solar system, still has orbiting bodies, though they don't orbit in perfect circles around the earth. We do have (chemical) elements. Most fundamentally, Aristotle was right about the need of any science to distinguish the elements of its study. As he opens the Physics:

When the objects of an inquiry, in any department, have principles, conditions, or elements, it is through acquaintance with these that knowledge, that is to say scientific knowledge, is attained. (I.1.184a10, trans. Hardie and Gaye)

And for scientists (and philosophers) to know both the form and matter of their subject:

Again, matter is a relative term: to each form there corresponds a special matter. How far then must the physicist know the form or essence? Up to a point, perhaps, as the doctor must know sinew or the smith bronze (i.e. until he understands the purpose of each): and the physicist is concerned only with things whose forms are separable indeed, but do not exist apart from matter. (II.2.194b9-12)

Aristotle described a simpler universe, but many of the right distinctions are present even there. Today the best physicists openly acknowledge that our picture of the universe is much simpler than the reality. The most remarkable thing left out of our "scientific" universe is the scientists themselves, and all humans in fact: the thinking, reflecting subjects that are somehow part of the universe without being thereby constrained to the same level as the rest of it.

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Notes

1. Interesting trivia: Aristotle spent two years studying animals on the island of Lesbos. An infinity of jokes is possible from this one historical fact.

A Mechanical Superstition

Just a hot take regarding this short video: A Bet Against Quantum Gravity (6.75 mins).

I don't have the credentials in the field to evaluate the merits of Jonathan Oppenheim's research program. But I have a natural philosopher's gut instinct. I like very much the fact that Oppenheim's theory allows information to be destroyed. As he says of the black hole information paradox, "It's only a paradox if you believe that physics somehow has to be deterministic."

Determinism, which is a feature of physical theories that physicists became used to from Newton, seems to imply that information cannot be destroyed or created, but is just shuffled around. This feature gives physicists the idea that they have the supposedly god-like power of predicting the future for all time, at least in theory. But in actuality, the evolution of things in nature is constantly producing real and unpredictable novelty. That was one of the lessons of quantum mechanics. Quantum indeterminism is so widely known as to be proverbial. And even if nowhere else, information is constantly being destroyed in the so-called collapse of the wave function, for which we have no physical law. What we have here is a failure of many, even great physicists to take to heart the lessons of quantum mechanics, leaving just a mechanical superstition.

The philosophical point that gives me pause is Oppenheim's insistence that the resulting novelty has to be stochastic, random; whereas in nature, novelty need not be random. But I think on the low level of the natural hierarchy with which his work deals, randomness is a good approximation and appropriate. And indeed, if we're talking about heat emerging from a slowly evaporating black hole, the motions of the particles have to be random.

There's more to be said about randomness and how it is often used in modern science as a placeholder for human ignorance more than an actual statement of the reality of things. I've taken up this theme elsewhere in this blog (regarding Darwinian evolution, for example) and I'm sure I'll return to it again, but it's beyond this hot take.

The Fright of Infinite Spaces

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

—Pascal, Pensées, 206

It's well known that the Milky Way in the Star Trek universe is surrounded by a barrier, as shown in the original series episodes "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "By Any Other Name". But I recently learned that there is also a barrier around the far-away Star Wars galaxy too. But why? Why a galactic barrier?

Is this simply a storytelling trope, the modern version of Aristotle's prescription that drama have unity of place? Perhaps that's part of it, but it still seems somewhat gratuitous. Why is it hard to believe that the true barrier between galaxies is not a hard limit, but simply vast distance?

I suspect the real answer lies deep in the heart of man.

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The significance of vast distances struck me at last year's Thomistic Institute Science and Christianity conference (March 4–5, 2022 at the Harvard Museum of Natural History). Some of the talks juxtaposed our modern scientific picture of the universe with passages from Scripture on creation, not just the act of creation, but also the relationship of creation to its Creator.

In particular, the beginning of Fr. Thomas Davenport's talk alluded to the way God's activity is much more immediate in the picture presented by Scripture, in contrast to the picture presented by science, in which God's activity is mediated by long chains of secondary causes (13.8 billion years, etc). This tremendous distance seems to present something of a difficulty for belief: God's Providence seems distant.

In such a universe, a gnosticism of a sort might seem reasonable. Recall that in the ancient Gnostic religions, the Creator of the universe is not the true Divinity, who lies behind the universe. Man, conceived as originally and purely spirit, is thrown or imprisoned in the material world, not a natural part of it. Nature/creation is sundered from the true God, and man must reject nature to align himself with the real God and true goodness. In the 20th century, Hans Jonas discovered the hidden parallel between ancient Gnosticism and modern Existentialism/Nihilism, which might be called neo-gnosticism. The so-called scientific picture has no place for man, such human concepts as teleology (purposes) supposedly playing no part in nature. As in Gnostic religion, humans are sundered from nature.

Akin to this gnostic alienation from the universe is the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft, whose effect comes from the terror of the incomprehensible. But Lovecraft's universe is rather too malevolent (along with its denizens) to represent the apparent indifference lying in the vastness of the scientific universe. Perhaps that indifference was too horrible for even Lovecraft, though it might also be that the horror of the infinite empty quantity is simply so inarticulable that the closest neighbor is the quality of evil.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu")

At the very least, science by itself leaves us in a state of ambiguity: does nature bespeak God or not, and where do I belong in all this ambuguous vastness?¹ Pascal's Pensées elaborate:

205 When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? Memoria hospitis unius diei prætereuntis [Wisdom 5:15, Latin vulgate: remembrance of a guest who tarried but a day].

229 This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied; wherefore I have a hundred time wished that if a God maintains nature, she should testify to Him unequivocally, and that, if the signs she gives are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether; that she should say everything or nothing, that I might see which cause I ought to follow. Whereas in my present state, ignorant of what I am or of what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty. My heart inclines wholly to know where is the true good, in order to follow it; nothing would be too dear to me for eternity.

Pascal stood on the cusp of modernity and the modern rethinking of the universe. It might be healthy to look back to the ancient world and take a lesson from the psalmist in reflecting on our smallness and the world's vastness:

When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars which thou hast established;

what is man that thou art mindful of him,
and the son of man that thou dost care for him?

Yet thou hast made him little less than God,
and dost crown him with glory and honor.

Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands;
thou hast put all things under his feet...

(Psalm 8:3–6)

The reality is that in complaining about the size of creation, we're complaining about the size of the dominion given to us humans. The deeper problem is that we don't appreciate the goodness of the universe. There is an infinite distance between nothing and any finite reality. Maybe it's because the need to survive has wired us to always be so occupied with the next problem that we rarely take time to contemplate the tremendous good we have, that we've been given. It's a crisis of gratitude: we don't appreciate what we've been given, so we have little sense of God's continued presence and providence.²

Science as practiced today doesn't help matters. One big limitation of science is that it projects human knowing onto an unimaginably vast world. We only know the "scientific universe" in terms of experiments in the lab. This approach originated with Galileo's insight, which Newton completed: the unification of the sublunar and translunar realms. We describe the motions of stars and planets in terms of the motions of mechanical bodies on Earth, especially those we study under the controlled conditions of the lab.

We project our own emptiness and chaos on the vast world and then recoil on beholding our reflection.

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Notes

1. Collective Soul's 1993 song "Shine" asks this question, "Where do I belong and where do I find love?", poignantly.

2. A great book on this subject of God's providence and presence that I rejoice in having found though only recently is Providence by Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange.

The Greater Does Not Come from the Less

I've been reading Garrigou-Lagrange's Providence. Perhaps its most foundational principle, highlighted in the first paragraph:

The greater does not come from the less, the more perfect does not come from the less perfect, since the latter is incapable of producing the effect. [emphasis in original]

Now, Providence is a great book that I highly recommend. But if would be anyway it could now be improved, it is that it could tackle more squarely some of the more recent objections to Aristotle's and St. Thomas's thought about nature.

This principle in particular has been cast into doubt in the modern world most especially by the idea of the evolution of biological species following Darwin. (In the early 20th-century France in which the book was written, the significance of Darwinism may not have been fully felt.)

Many Darwinists even deny that evolution's tendency over time is to perfect species. Perhaps the need to deny a cosmological hierarchy originates in their materialist premises. But such ideological prejudices aside, most reasonable thinkers would admit that a human is greater than an ape, and an ape is greater than a fish. So the simple-minded conclusion from evolution is that the greater evolves from the less. How can we square this appearance with the principle of Garrigou-Lagrange's book?

What that mistaken conclusion ignores is that even from Darwinists principles, species don't evolve on their own. Of the two primciples of Darwinism, random mutation and natural selection, random mutation is essentially directionless. But the other principle, natural selection, strongly requires interaction with the environment, the larger universe. And the larger universe working out all its hidden potentialities is arguably more perfect than any non-rational species.

So if you look deeper, Garrigou-Lagrange's principle holds.

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Additionally, I'd like to point out that "random mutation" is like a large area rug that can hide lots of (to a materialist) unseemly dirt. Randomness basically means that we, from our limited knowledge, cannot trace back the relevant lines of causation from the effect, so we just sweep this happenstance of reality under the rug of "randomness." I'm no evolutionary biologist, but it seems fair to say that it's hard, if not impossible, to distinguish the perfecting effects of natural selection from any perfecting effects that might come from "random" mutation (whether in reality directly from God or mediated by some hidden natural cause). Actually, on further reflection, it might be possible to distinguish the two. But it would require somehow detecting that the mutations that have arisen have a preferential direction. I doubt our knowledge of the fossil record could be so comprehensive or that we could observe such a process at work today with the necessary completeness.

Sean Carroll and Emergentism

With excitement a Catholic physicist friend pointed me to a recent paper by Sean Carroll Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space. Carroll, as you may know, is a prominent atheist. My friend says Carroll's paper shows he is turning toward a more realistic metaphysics, and singles out this paragraph:

Nothing in this perspective implies that we should think of spacetime or quantum fields as illusory. They are emergent, but none the less real for that. As mentioned, we may not be forced to invoke these concepts within our most fundamental picture, but the fact that they play a role in an emergent description is highly non-trivial. (Most Hamiltonians admit no local decomposition, most factorizations admit no classical limit, etc.) It is precisely this non-generic characteristic of the specific features of the world of our experience that makes it possible to contemplate uniquely defining them in terms of the austere ingredients of the deeper theory. They should therefore be thought of as equally real as tables and chairs.

I haven't read the paper, but for my part, I'm rather cautious about reading too much into Carroll's claims. Feser has a concise paragraph that captures my general reservations about emergentism:

Second, the Aristotelian resists the language of “emergence” because, despite its anti-reductionism, it gives the impression of conceding to the reductionist the thesis that the micro-level is ontologically fundamental or privileged. It is as if the emergentist allows that the macrolevel is problematic in a way that the micro-level is not, so that we should concede the reality of macro-level phenomena only to the extent that we can make sense of them somehow “emerging” from the micro-level. As I have said, the Aristotelian rejects any such privileging of the micro-level. From an Aristotelian point of view, modern emergentist arguments, though salutary, are at best only partial rediscoveries of the correct, hylemorphist account of nature.

I may be misreading the paragraph, but it doesn't sound like Carroll concedes much, or anything really. I think he would do well to read the introduction of A.S. Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World.

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Edward Feser, Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science (Editiones Scholasticae, 2019), 337-8.

The magic is back!

Existential Comics had a funny and funnily true Facebook post a couple years ago that's worth remembering:

Science has been the slow process of showing that the exciting magical world we believed in doesn't exist, and there is nothing but boring reality. Well, except for quantum mechanics, which showed boring reality doesn't exist, and everything is basically magic. (December 13, 2018)

That's actually a strong theme among Thomistic-Aristotelian philosophers these days: the vindication of Aristotle's natural philosophy in quantum mechanics. The world needn't be the disenchanted drudge modernity has made it. Instead we have back the world of possibility and meaning.

Some references:

Edward Feser, Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science (Editiones Scholasticae, 2019).

Robert C. Koons, “Hylomorphic Escalation: An Aristotelian Interpretation of Quantum Thermodynamics and Chemistry,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (2018) 92:159-78.

Adam Schulman, Quantum and Aristotelian Physics (Harvard University dissertation, 1989).