The
Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Prolog
Prolog: The Nature of Meaning and the Meaning of Nature
If nature is divine artifice, as religious faith supposes, then nature is of a kind with technology. Nature is somebody's science project.
A peculiar virus struck the world of ideas in the fall of 1998. A lot of people perceived suddenly that science and religion had become reconciled. A flurry of books and articles announced the reconciliation. The two rivals had buried the hatchet, finally.
The New
Republic, not to miss a trend, featured as its October 12 cover story
an excerpt from Greg Easterbrook’s "Beside
Still Waters: Searching for Meaning in an Age of Doubt
The urge to reconcile the rival worldviews and present them as chummy
is understandable. But no matter the earnestness of the matchmakers, without
a new conceptual framework the rivals will head further apart into extremes
of the secular and the sanctimonious. The star larvae hypothesis redirects
the scientific and religious impulses. It proposes not only that human
purpose fills the gaps in science's account of nature, but that science
points the way toward a natural theology.
With regard to religion the hypothesis is ecumenical. It integrates motifs from across the spectrum, from shamanism to "The Tao of Physics." It is Catholic in its emphasis on ascension to the celestial. It is Jewish in its regard for humankind as God’s partner in the ongoing project of Creation. It is Gnostic in its burdening of humankind with the task of engineering its own salvation. It is Pagan in that it regards nature as ensouled. It is syncretic with regard to many brands of religion, because it shares with them a teleological view of history—the belief that natural and human history proceed purposefully, according to a plan.
With regard to science, the hypothesis adopts biology, rather than physics, as the fundamental discipline, or at least the fundamental metaphor. This move is justified by the universality of metabolism. Because human beings are biological organisms, biology is the cross section of nature’s metabolism that most easily reveals nature's habits (because biology operates roughly at a human scale—at least compared to the subatomic and astronomical scales of physics). Habits of nature identified on the biological scale apply generally to the larger and smaller scales of nature, given the unifying universality of metabolism across physical scales and systems.
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Courtship Dances of The Spiral Galaxy.
In
his New Republic excerpt, Easterbrook reviews scientific advances,
such as the Big Bang, the discovery of DNA, and the concept of the Higgs
Field. Based on his review, he concludes, "Regardless of whether our
mettle is natural or supernatural, purpose is something people can make
by leading moral lives and helping carry one another’s burdens."
Whether or not humankind has a purpose, it is incumbent upon humans to,
in Easterbrook’s words, "treat one another lovingly and with
justice." What such ethical bromides have to do with the achievements
of science is anybody's guess. Nonetheless, New Republic hyped
the story as "Science Sees the Light—The Rediscovery of Higher
Meaning." The editors are guilty of conflating meaning and virtue.
The star larvae hypothesis presents itself as a candidate for an integration that meets this requirement. It assigns a specific purpose to humankind within cosmic nature. It draws from science and religion, but not always from their orthodox doctrines. It leans equally on science’s innovative fringes and religion’s archaic roots. The fringes of science include self-organization, quantum theories of mind, and other odd technical and theoretical conjectures. The roots of religion include belief in a machinery of cosmic fate, fueled by the stars, within which humans operate. These seemingly unrelated branches of understanding, avant-garde science and primal religion, inform the hypothesis.
Among scientific advancements, the theory of complex systems provides an obvious access point through which religious ideas can flow into the scientific view of the world. The theory invites notions of an animate universe to re-enter the marketplace of ideas. Central to this about-face in scientific thinking is the concept of spontaneous self-organization. This is science’s new term for the tendency of matter and energy, under the right circumstances, to arrange themselves into complex, dynamic structures. These structures, kept stable metabolically, persist in states that are far from equilibrium. By legitimizing the concept of nature’s spontaneous self-ordering, science acknowledges the occurrence essentially of miracles, even if it tries to conceal the discovery under a shroud of technical argot. But spontaneous self organization by any other name still smells like a miracle. This is because complexity theorists cannot articulate the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a box of stuff will self organize into a dynamic system that persists stably in a state of disequilibrium. What components are necessary? In what configurations? How much energy is necessary? Input by what means?
The most ancient understanding of nature, so far as anyone can determine, was in a commonsensical, intuitive way a deeper understanding than is today’s scientific view. Science since Descartes has regarded nature as dead and living organisms as guests in that dead world. But conceiving of nature on the whole as being an integrated living system is more true to humankind’s experience than is science’s conception of nature as inanimate particles and fields drifting steadily toward equilibrium—and from which inanimate context biological life improbably sprung. Complex systems theory revives the ancient conception, in which biology is only one expression of life in an animate cosmos.
Given science’s unfulfilled promise of a grand unified theory and the unlikelihood of ever fulfilling that promise (given obstacles such as Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem, the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics, and the conundrum of conscious experience), religion can only feel increasingly emboldened to challenge the suppositions and authority of science. But religion performs no better than science when it comes to presenting a grand unified theory. Religious doctrines provide moral instruction, but they are weak technical guides.
— Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Address,
Harvard Law Association, February 1913
Science, for all its technical successes, has failed to find a necessary place for human beings in nature. Science describes a reasonably comprehensible physical world but within which humankind has no particular purpose or historical destiny. That should not bother scientists, because it is not the mission of science to find any particular purpose for people (perhaps other than employment). But insofar as science provides an account of the workings of nature, and insofar as human beings are products of and participants in the workings of nature, it might seem by now that science would have something to say about human purpose and destiny within the context of nature’s operations.
The inability of science to find a necessary role for humankind has at least something to do with the ideology of science itself. The ideology regards questions of meaning and purpose as psychological questions, which have to do with the workings of the mind, which are epiphenomenal to, or contingent upon, or derivative of the workings of the brain, and which therefore cannot be fundamental to—cannot a priori be built into, or be necessary to—the workings of nature. Therefore, science fails to, and possibly never can, locate for humankind any natural meaning, purpose, or destiny. Science in this sense continues the project of Gnosticism. It throws the prospect of any kind of redemption for humankind back onto human beings themselves. (The Gnostic scheme regarded nature as the creation of a deliberative, purposeful mind. But human redemption was something to be engineered by humans, because the mind behind nature was insane).
—
T. S. Elliot
Little
Gidding
Any apparently purposeful design in nature, any seemingly necessary patterning, say the scientists, is merely a coincidence of contingent patterns drawn by the universe’s various physical laws, undirected, intersecting this way and that. The religious sensibility takes issue, perceiving the coincidence of patterns as evidence of a creative mind at work behind the scenes. Religion, in contradiction to science, places human meaning at the center of a purposeful creation. It grants humankind a special place in nature—but only a folkloric understanding of the technical details.
Science,
in contradiction to religion, at least since Darwin, perceives design
in nature as illusory. A bird’s beak, for example, being shaped
necessarily in a particular way, has no purpose as such, no matter how
well it serves the bird as a tool for acquiring food, attracting a mate,
or any other use to which the bird might put it. Purpose can be assigned
only by a conscious
mind making choices in pursuit of an outcome. The beak serves the bird,
but it was not designed intentionally to do so, according to science.
The religious sensibility, in contrast, assigns to the beak a purpose
that embodies the intent of a conscious mind, that of the creator of nature.
The presumptions of science and religion can be distinguished in greater
detail, but these broad characterizations cover them well enough to establish
their fundamental incompatibility—at least within their normal exegeses
and insofar as they hope to occupy the same office.
The star larvae hypothesis proposes to subordinate and supercede both
science and religion in terms of explanatory power. It repositions scientific
and religious descriptions into a common context. This repositioning involves
pulling the scientific, religious, and historical data from their neat
files, spreading the facts messily around and linking and configuring
them in new ways. The need for a novel interpretation of the facts is
demonstrated, for example, by the uncanny number of coincidences in physics
that science declares necessary to keep our particular universe’s
house in order. Religious sensibilities point to these coincidences as
evidence of a grand design. And so the debate wraps itself around itself
over and again.
If nature is divine artifice, as religious faith supposes, then nature is of a kind with technology.
Nature is somebody's science project.
NEXT > Complexity and the Retrieval of Vitalism
Welcome
to the Star Larvae Hypothesis
The Star Larvae Hypothesis:
Stars constitute a genus of organism. The stellar life cycle includes a larval phase. Biological life constitutes the larval phase of the stellar life cycle.
Elaboration: The hypothesis presents a teleological model of nature, in which-
Stellar nebulae manufacture bacteria and viruses in their interiors as they cool.
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Biology evolves within an ontogenetic program that in its entirety, on- and off-planet, constitutes a generational life cycle of the stellar organism.
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Technology plays a necessary role in evolution. It enables biological life to emigrate from planets to weightless space.
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Postplanetary life manufactures the protons needed to create, then metamorphoses into, new stars.
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A prescient complex of celestial religious motifs expresses humankind’s stellar calling. The star is the human imago.
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Nature's metabolism encompasses the organic and the inorganic in a continuum of anabolic and catabolic processes.
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