The Beauty of Seeing More Than We Can Understand

EXCELLENT BEAUTY T H E N AT U R A L N E S S OF RELIGION AND THE U N N AT U R A L N E S S OF THE WORLD

ERIC DIETRICH

ELEVEN

The Beauty of Seeing More Than We Can Understand

R E L I G I O N S A R E C O M P L E T E LY N A T U R A L I L L U S I O N S . All their alleged depth and mystery are chimerical. We can finally set them aside as sources of mysteries not worth taking seriously. We are now free to embrace the real mysteries, the ones worth taking seriously, the ones science reveals, the ones that have excellent beauty.

However, the reader might agree that the mysteries discussed in chapter 10 are indeed strange, yet disagree that they are beautiful. So, in this chapter, I make the case that chapter 10’s mysteries and all the others like them indeed possess excellent beauty: they are beautiful, profound, and unnerving, pointing to deeper truths that we have yet to embrace.

But first, we need to note something. As luck would have it, the very genetic makeup that makes us religious is also what stands in the way of seeing the beauty in the mysteries, for as we saw in chapter 5 and its appendix and in the appendix to chapter 4, one crucial aspect of religion is our psychological need for producing explanations.The walking tree from chapter 5, though strange, is meant to function, in part, as an explanation used by the “Walking Tree Clan.” How? Because of the not-so-simple reason that we humans, often by default, take intelligent agents, agents similar to us, to be the ultimate ground of explanation (this was a key point in chapter 4’s appendix). Given some phenomenon X, pointing out that X occurs because some intelligent agent wants it to occur or is responsible for doing it often fully explains X to

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us. Our gods and goddesses are there to make our world less scary by supplying us with agent-based explanations. This is why, as discussed in chapter 5, we are so good—too good, in fact—at recognizing agents in the world around us. The long and slow march of human science is the march away from deploying agents—sun gods, rain gods, thunder gods, crop-growing gods, love gods, war gods, and so on—to explain things; it is the march toward unearthing mechanical processes and using them to explain things, where “mechanical” entails “mindless.” Our conclusion is that seeing the excellent beauties (the mysteries of chapter 10) as beautiful requires at least some measure of refusing to be a victim of the religion illusion, if only temporarily.

I realize this could be difficult. The need for explanations runs very deep in our species (for all we know, many of our fellow species, especially our fellow big-brained mammals, also deploy explanations of some sort to help them cope with a dangerous and probabilistic world).

A beloved ideal from the Age of Enlightenment (roughly, the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth) was that science and rationality would eventually explain everything.1 With enough effort, ingenuity, and insight, humans, using science, could understand everything worth understanding. This ideal is still with us to this day, both within science and within our culture.2 The war between science and religion discussed in this book is not a war between those who are enamored with the Enlightenment ideal and those who are not. It is rather a war between those who think science can explain everything and those who think science and religion together can explain everything. The fight, therefore, is over boundaries (we saw this in our discussion of Gould’s alleged nonoverlapping magisteria). Science’s proper domain consists in explanations about how cancer works, why the moon creates tides, how the sun works, and so on. But science cannot explain where the universe came from or, currently, the origin of life or humans. Some divine intervention is needed to explain those things. But if we work separately or together with religion, the message is the same: everything is explainable, everything is understandable—if not by us, exactly, then by us and some deity.

Even though total understanding is an ideal, all scientists, and indeed nearly all people, love a good mystery: “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’

[I found it!] but ‘That’s funny . . .’”3 This is why, though it was a truly 148

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great machine, the Tevatron’s epitaph was so negative: it revealed no surprises. And everyone likes surprises . . . provided they don’t upset things too much. The reason scientists love surprises, the reason murder mysteries are a billion-dollar-a-year business, is that everyone loves to have a mystery to solve. Told up front that “this mystery has no solution,” most scientists, and most people, would be less than overjoyed.

The Enlightenment ideal insists on solvable mysteries, mysteries that give way to understanding.

The existence of the excellent beauties destroys this ideal. Some things are not understandable. And some of these things are so central to being human that it is nearly impossible to conceive of us without them—consciousness, for example. In the appendix to this chapter, I discuss just how strongly the existence of mysteries with excellent beauty clashes with the Enlightenment ideal. If I’m right about the excellent beauties, the Enlightenment ideal stands unmasked as overly optimistic; it should therefore be abandoned.

I confess that the excellent beauties from chapter 10 strike me as obviously beautiful: once seen, they and their stark beauty are almost overwhelming. But the reader perhaps needs convincing. Of course, judgments of what is beautiful vary considerably from person to person, so arguments for this or that aesthetic are notoriously unconvincing.

This is all the more true when it comes to arguments for an enduring mystery aesthetic. Still, something positive can be said.

First, even someone who denies that the mysteries are genuinely and permanently mysterious can come to see that the problems or insights they present are profound. And profundities are intrinsically beautiful. The great mathematician David Hilbert (1862–1943) once said of the perplexing infinity of infinities revealed by Georg Cantor’s work (see chapter 10), “No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.” All paradises are beautiful, by definition.Viewed this way, the mysteries can be seen to be more than problems to be solved.

They add an aesthetic dimension to our lives.

Second, the strange behavior of infinity, the intractable existence of consciousness, and the rarity of the commonplace challenge the idea that the universe in which we live is a place for humans.This is the heart of the clash between the excellent beauties and the Enlightenment ideal: the mysteries of chapter 10 reveal a world that is not mundane. The mysteries show us that this seemingly ordinary universe is not ordinary 149

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at all. It is richer, deeper, more magnificent than it appears in the standard coming and going of our daily lives. And this richness expresses possibility, open-endedness, opportunity. And, simply put, all this is beautiful.

This point goes deeper. There is a sort of paradox here, for the universe is very much a place for humans since we evolved here. In human life, if something X fits inside of something else, Y, then X is smaller than Y. The even numbers clearly fit inside the set of all the counting numbers. Ergo, the set of even numbers must be smaller than the set of counting numbers. But this is not true: there are, as we have seen, exactly as many even numbers as counting numbers, namely, there are ℵ0 of both. So to some extent, the excellent beauties exist because of the kinds of beings we are. We are Earthlings, emerging on the scene just a tad under 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang. We are large mammals, with five senses, big brains, and opposable thumbs. We are not made of dark matter (as far as we know); it is therefore strange to us. We live in the subinfinite realm, not the transfinite realm, so the behavior of infinity is strange to us. Most of the numbers we use are garden-variety rational numbers. So it is strange to us that the rationals take up basically no space at all on the number line, which turns out to be composed primarily of the exotic transcendentals like π. The excellent beauties again reveal our Janus-faced nature. We find the behavior of infinity puzzling, but we unearthed the behavior of infinity. We built our modern world primarily using rational numbers, yet we can prove the existence of the transcendentals. We are not made of dark matter, yet we have solid cosmological evidence that it must exist. We can, therefore, see more than we can understand. And the universe stands revealed as a place that shows us more than we can understand. It is paradoxical to be human. And the excellent beauties show us this. And, I submit, this fact about us is deep and profound, and while perhaps unnerving, it is beautiful.

But won’t science (again, broadly construed) one day solve every question we have? No, it won’t. This is precisely what our mysteries point toward: the world is full of surprises, or, better, our relationship with the world is full of surprises. Our knowledge of the universe and our place in it is robust and complex. But even with our knowledge, the world keeps surprising us not only with new surprises like dark energy, but with continuing surprises that result from crucial phenomena refusing to succumb to explanation—consciousness, for example, 150

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which decade after decade remains completely unexplained and seemingly beyond the reach of any theory. Consciousness’s intractability becomes more perplexing, not less, as the centuries roll by. Again, I claim that these surprises are beautiful.

The open-endedness of our relationship with our universe appears to be permanent. Even if, one day, consciousness were to be reductively explained via the discovery of some sort of very subtle neural process, the science required to do that is so unimaginable, currently, that this science itself would open up whole new ways to think about ourselves, our minds, and the universe. Those new ways of thinking would introduce further, deeper problems that would be new mysteries, pointing still further into the universe’s profound richness and unexpected open-endedness.

So the mysteries are, or can be thought of as, beautiful, and that beauty is permanent, even if some of the mysteries themselves are not.

What of the nonmundane world behind the mundane one? What of the magnificent richness and depth revealed by the mysteries? What of the possibilities and open-endedness of the universe? How should we approach all of this? Perhaps it wouldn’t be out of place to approach it with a kind of reverence. Those willing to acknowledge the mysteries as genuine mysteries and to see their beauty are probably willing to go a little further and allow themselves to feel reverence toward the mysteries, or if not that, then reverence toward what the mysteries reveal: a strange universe of which we are intimately a part.

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APPENDIX TO CHAPTER 11

Welcome to the Inscrutable

T H E E N L I G H T E N M E N T I D E A L I S A T W O R K , full force, in David Chalmers’s book Constructing the World.1 Indeed, this book is an exemplar of the Enlightenment ideal. Here I briefly discuss how his conclusions are incompatible with the existence of the excellent beauties.

Chalmers’s central tool is the notion of scrutability, which is just comprehensibility. (Scrutability is introduced as a technical term so Chalmers can use it as he needs without importing a lot of implicit definitions and extra notions.) If we leave out the technical philosophy, Chalmers’s claim is this: there is a compact class of truths such that knowing those truths suffices to know all other truths about our universe.2 Chalmers calls this a scrutability thesis. Chalmers is asserting that knowledge of some relatively small set of basic truths about our universe (the compact class of truths) can serve as a basis for knowledge of all other truths about the universe. He says: “To a first approximation, these [scrutability] theses suggest that knowledge of the base truths about the world might serve as a basis for knowledge of all truths about the world” (p. 7).

We know from chapter 10 that there are excellent beauties, truths that we know but that we don’t really comprehend. Quantum mechanics is crawling with such truths, and, as discussed in the text, infinity defies our ordinary notion of “is contained in.” (If something X fits inside of something else,Y, then X is smaller than Y. The even numbers

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clearly fit inside the set of all the counting numbers. Ergo, the set of even numbers must be smaller than the set of counting numbers. But it is not.)

This is a good place to introduce our own technical term: Grok (from Robert Heinlein’s famous novel Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1961). To grok something is to understand it thoroughly, intuitively, even empathically (that is, by empathy). More metaphorically, “grok” means to be one with or one with the observed. (In the novel, “grok” has a literal meaning, too: “to drink.”)3 We grok a lot of things. We grok the notion “contained in”: “If something X fits inside of something else, Y, then X is smaller than Y.” We grok both the notion of consciousness and the notion of being physical.Yet we do not grok how the even numbers are strictly a subset of the counting numbers while both sets are the exact same size. In general, we do not grok infinity. We do not grok how a physical being such as an Earthling could be conscious, which we clearly are. Nor, if we go the other way, do we grok how consciousness could be physical.

(In the case of consciousness, it is fair to say that we don’t even comprehend in an ordinary sense how consciousness could be physical.) We understand quantum mechanics to a very robust extent, but we don’t grok it. My point here is that in its ordinary sense, we might understand the excellent beauties, but we don’t grok them.

What then of Chalmers’s scrutability thesis? Chalmers has not distinguished between understanding something and grokking it. The claim I’m making here is that this distinction is crucial to seeing the reality of how humans are embedded in, exist in, this universe. This distinction is crucial to understanding what humans are and the universe we are in: we grok some things, but not other things.

We might phrase the problem I am raising this way: the universe is perhaps scrutable, but it is not grokkable.

The parts that are not grokkable contain the excellent beauties, the mysteries that possess excellent beauty, to put it slightly more formally.

Yes, we understand things, complex and difficult things. But there are many things we don’t thoroughly, intuitively, and empathically understand. There are many things we cannot be one with. All of these are ungrokkable things. And some of these ungrokkables are beautiful both intrinsically and simply because they are ungrokkable.

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And what of the Enlightenment ideal? It fails, too, to distinguish between comprehending via science and rationality and grokking via science and rationality. We already know that the Enlightenment ideal is only partially true for ordinary, mundane comprehending. We now also know that it is certainly not true of grokking.4

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