As discussed in my previous post, The Romance of Reality presents a set of scientifically-premised arguments for viewing life, consciousness, and the physical universe as being all of one piece, a view mistakable at times for a Vedanta, Tao, or Zen-like stance on the oneness of being. By the end of the book, however, it seems far less focused on ‘being here now.’ Instead, the author declares as self-evident that if humans and the devices with which he expects us soon to merge fail to escape the limits of terrestrial existence before the sun becomes a red giant and vaporizes Earth some 7 or 8 billion years from now, our existence will have been for naught.
Having made a plausible case that life was almost inevitable given the way that the universe generates complexity as it moves towards its eventual heat death, he argues that it is the universe’s fate to become completely saturated with intelligence, with technologically advanced species and their non-carbon-based aids and partners colonizing its every corner. And even though this is all written into the universe’s laws of motion, so to speak, not only can the vision laid out “imbue [our] existence with meaning and purpose” (to quote the book’s website blurb), but we should take doing our part to help it come about as a moral imperative—a sort of “giving the inevitable a helping hand” argument reminiscent of the Communist revolutionaries of a century ago, who argued that “the revolution” was an inevitable consequence of the dynamics of social and technological change, but that the good revolutionary needed to be prepared to die for the cause. From a philosophical standpoint, it is also a glaring inference of “ought” from “is” that should be eyebrow-raising to alert readers.
I personally find startling and illogical the idea that if the diversity of life to which the Earth has given rise over the past 3-plus billion years, and especially the cognitively astounding ape that has come so far in its journey toward mapping the universe, were all to disappear some billions of years from now, the existence of life would have been pointless. And I find equally starting the proposition that populating the stars, whether as recognizable scions of our current selves, or as parts of a more complex consciousness merging the biology that propelled us this far with the still more capable machines that we are beginning to launch on their own evolutionary trajectories, is our moral obligation.
The disconnect between the scientific thinking of the physicists and cosmologists to whom the author attributes views of nature similar to his, and the eschatological character of the values implicit in his judgments about what will or will not have been worthwhile, is stark. Since when is it the case that what is not eternal is without value? Or that what is eternal therefore holds value? These assumptions remind me more of religious fundamentalism than of science. “Eternal” is clearly a quality humans have felt drawn to over the ages, perhaps because the trauma of loss makes us wish to expunge endings from our experience. That desire for eternity is precisely the craving that is the root of suffering, according to some Eastern traditions. And it seems absurd to lie awake at night worrying that sentience might end billions of years from now with the heat death of the universe, since we each will have been gone for those same billions of years.
Indeed, how can anyone who knows how rapidly views of the fate of the universe have changed over the past century and a half, and even over the past few decades, be confident that our best current projections about it will stand firm against changes in scientific knowledge during coming decades, centuries, or millennia? If our contemporaries and successors progress in their understanding of dark matter, dark energy, the problem of sentience, and so on, are predictions about the evolution of the universe likely to remain unchanged? And since the average lifespan of complex species on Earth has been on the order of tens or hundreds of millions of years, at most, why pronounce creatures having finite horizons—almost sure to include our beloved dogs, cats, and horses—as having existed to no avail? We shall all miss “the ending” of this saga. Just as our grandparents don’t get to see what our grandchildren grow up to be, as Lincoln did not live to see the present state of America, and as Marx (in a favorite saying of Deng Xiaoping’s) never rode in an automobile, a lot will happen that we will never get to see. What to do? Get over it. Let it go. We are part of a process too big for us to comprehend in its totality.
Even more strange, to me, is the author’s assumption that the filling of our universe with some sort of hybrid sentience comprised of both human descended and inorganic components sparked initially by human design, is something to celebrate or to hasten along. Since he’s writing about the universe’s fate many billions of times further into the future than the 4 billion years evolution has had to sculpt life on Earth so far, not to mention the bare 2 or 3 million years that Homo has existed, why treat whatever evolves from the fusion of wetware and hardware over the coming billions of years as something to identify with, something through which we would obtain our own immortality? For that matter, why assume we would feel kinship with similar fusions emerging from evolutionary trajectories on any of the vast number of other planets potentially supporting life elsewhere in the universe? And why privilege the intelligences of the universe we perceive ourselves to be in, while our physicists are still trying to sort out whether consciousness and physicality are even “real” and how vast a number of parallel universes there might be?
Much, indeed, is wondrous about the emergence of thinking, feeling life from the stardust of our cooling cosmos. Even more is wondrous about the advances in our scientific understanding. The idea that intelligent life is a way for the universe to know itself, attributed to Carl Sagan, is a beautiful metaphor that may indeed turn out to be more than metaphorical. But to the present writer, there are too many disconnected leaps and strange value judgments in it for a book of this kind to be an aspirational roadmap. I see, more ominously, too much danger that its kind of thinking will help to fuel the anti-social aspirations of our billionaire tech elites who are so creepily anxious to leave behind them the other 99.999% of humanity. Better to stay behind in the compassionate and reflective mode of Capra and his inspirers than to blast off with the tech visionaries and Azarian, hurrying to “terraform” Mars.
