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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 . . . or?

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." In December, Astronomy magazine ran its own article on the "rapprochement" between science and religion. The same issue carried a review of Chet Raymo's "Skeptics and True Believers: The Exhilarating Connection Between Science and Spirituality." Even stately George Will got into the act, drawing on Easterbrook’s ideas, in his November 9 Newsweek column, "The Gospel from Science." This was a formative time for the star larvae hypothesis, which welcomed the passing focus on the science-religion integration meme as a nod of encouragement. Commentary pro and con the rapprochement continued into 2012. And even today A web search will bring up dozens of institutes pursuing an integration of science and religion.

The urge to reconcile the rival worldviews and present them as chummy is understandable. But no matter the earnestness of the conciliatory mood, without a new conceptual framework the rivals likely will clash again and head deeper into extremes of the doctrinaire and the sanctimonious. The star larvae hypothesis hopes to redirect these impulses. The hypothesis is a disruptive proposition. It disrupts the ideological dichotomy framed on one side by the mythemes of religion and on the other by the doctrines and equations of science.

A New Organicism

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 casting 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—a faith that natural and human history proceed purposefully, according to a plan.

With regard to science, the hypothesis adopts biology, rather than physics, as the paradigmatic discipline. This move is justified by the universality of metabolism, the linkage of anabolic and catabolic (or complexifying and entropic, or excitatory and inhibitory, or expressive and repressive) processes into regulatory feedback loops. Because human beings are biological organisms, biology is that cross section of nature’s metabolism that most easily reveals her habits, because biology operates roughly at a human scale—as compared to the subatomic and astronomical extremes 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 spatial and temporal scales.

The hypothesis, then, situates itself within the philosophical tradition of organicism, the view that nature per se is animate, not just in its particulars, such as individual organisms, but in its essential character. The universe and its parts form a continuum of interwoven processes that constitutes the metabolism of physical being, with small ecologies being called bodies and large bodies being called ecologies. The organicism of the hypothesis is not (merely) metaphorical—it is not satisfied with saying that stars, galaxies, and atoms and electrons, and so on, and the universe as a whole are similar to, or can be seen as, organisms. Rather, it sees all as participating in the ongoing business of a living universe. Normal physics, calling on the principle of entropy, declares that the universe as a whole is running down, in a sense dying, despite matter and energy having become increasingly organized since the universe's initially undifferentiated infancy at its Big Birth. The observational evidence for an on-average increase in entropy is lacking, despite science's insistence on the "fact" of its occurring. It may be an inevitability, as is the demise of any living creature, but science has yet to muster the empirical evidence. The universe continues to develop.

The essentially religious notion of "Intelligent Design" casts nature in the role of a mechanism, a product that was engineered and manufactured. This way of understanding nature has an understandable appeal. The universe easily is perceived as being a big machine. In contrast, the star larvae hypothesis regards the universe as an organism, also an appealing way in which it can be perceived. As Marshall McLuhan and others have noted, technology looks to be a collection of extensions of the human organism. And the organic and the mechanical seem to be to a degree congruent. The Intelligent Design contingent can claim as theirs the mechanical side of the coin. The star larvae hypothesis claims as its own the organic side. The universe was born, and it owes its life not to a cosmic tinkerer, but to a parent in the multiverse.

Courtship Dances of The Spiral Galaxy.

Archaic Meets Avant Garde

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 virtue with meaning.

Virtuous behavior doesn't connect science with "Higher Meaning." Only involvement with a teleological program will do that. Any hoped-for integration of science and religion will have to deal squarely with the need for an overarching plan, inherent in nature, that gives human existence a necessary role—and not gloss over the issue with ethics talk.

The star larvae hypothesis presents itself as a candidate for an integration that meets that requirement. It assigns a specific purpose to humankind within cosmic nature. It draws from science and religion, but not always from their orthodoxies. It leans equally on science’s fringes and religion’s roots. The fringes include self-organization, quantum theories of mind, panspermia and other technical and theoretical conjectures. The roots include belief in a machinery of cosmic fate—fueled by the stars—within which humans operate. These seemingly unrelated branches of understanding, innovative science and archaic religion, inform essential aspects of the hypothesis.

Among scientific advancements, the theory of complex systems provides an obvious access point through which religious ideas can flow into the scientific worldview. 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 processes. These processes, 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 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 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 sinking into equilibrium from which unlikely context biological life emerged. 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.

Science, for all its technical successes, has failed to find a necessary place for human beings in nature. Science describes a pragmatic worldview but one 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 (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 doings.

The inability of science to find a necessary role for humankind has at least something to do with the ideology of science itself. That 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. Mind is epiphenomenal.

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.)

Science, unlike religion and at least since Darwin, perceives nature as designless. 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 campaign for the same office.

The star larvae hypothesis proposes to subordinate and supersede scientific and religious orthodoxies. 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 . . . or?

NEXT > Complexity and the Retrieval of Vitalism

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