OPTIMISM: THE WORLD AFTER CLIMATE CHANGE
Let us imagine it is 2080 and the problem of climate change has been solved.1 Our children will be elderly, or perhaps due to advances in medicine still in the prime of life. How will their thinking have been changed by their avoidance of catastrophe? It is easier to imagine what their perspective will be if we do nothing to bring the CO2 emissions under control. As they face rising temperatures and sea levels, drought and failing crops, as the northern cities crowd with refugees, one can well enough imagine what they will wish they could say to us.
But suppose human beings find the wisdom to avoid all this. What might we have learned along the way that would make success possible?
It is hard to imagine the consequences of solving the climate crisis because to succeed we have to do more than solve a big engineering problem. Even among those who appreciate the seriousness of the crisis, adherence to one or another of two naive commitments delays real progress. For those who see the world in economic terms, nature is a resource to be exploited and then transcended. For them this is just the problem of agriculture on a larger scale, to be managed by a cost-benefit analysis. Opposite this idea is the romance that underlies much environmental activism, the notion of a pristine nature that can only be diminished by the encroachments of human civilization. For those who hold this belief, the climate crisis is just another issue of preservation. Both sides miss the point, because both assume that nature and technology are mutually exclusive categories, so that when they clash a choice must be made between them.
Any adequate solution to the crisis, however, must muddy the distinction between the natural and the artificial. This is because the climate crisis is not a problem that can be solved with a one-time fix, after which business continues as usual. The problem requires not a choice between nature and technology but a reorientation of their relationship to each other. The overwhelming scientific consensus tells us it is we who are now destabilizing the climate, but it is also true that the climate has in the past fluctuated suddenly between very different states. Were the climate to change dramatically—whether triggered by our doings or not—it would have dire consequences for us. As long as we have the capability to do so, we must prevent or moderate major changes in the climate, for the same reason we must look out for and destroy asteroids that might collide with earth. Once we have resolved the current emergency, we will be committed to a continuing regulation of the climate to keep it in a range where human beings can thrive. This means melding our technologies with the natural cycles and systems that already regulate the climate. By the time we have succeeded in understanding how the systems that regulate the climate react to our technologies, and using this knowledge to further regulate our technologies and economies so that they work in harmony with the climate, we will have transcended the divide between the natural and the artificial on a planetary scale. The economy and the climate will not be two things, they will be aspects of a single system. Thus, to survive the climate crisis we have to conceive of and bring into existence a novel kind of system, which will be a symbiosis of the biological processes that determine the climate with our technological civilization.
The idea of a novel kind of organization merging nature and technology goes against the common presupposition that the natural and the artificial are exclusive categories. We are used to seeing ourselves as apart from nature, and our technologies as impositions on the natural world. But whether we fantasize about transcending nature or about nature surviving us, we have reached the limits of the usefulness of the idea that we are separate from nature. If we want to survive as a species we need a new conception in which we and everything we make and do are as natural as the cycles of carbon and oxygen that we emerged from and in which we participate with every breath. To begin this task, we have to understand the roots of the distinction between the artificial and the natural. As I will argue here, these have a great deal to do with time. The false idea we need to put behind us is what the Brazilian philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger has punningly called the perennial philosophy: the idea that what is bound in time is an illusion and what is real is timeless.
Early expressions of the perennial philosophy can be found in the Christian interpretations of the cosmology of Aristotle and Ptolemy, in which the earthly sphere is the unique abode of life but also of death and decay. It is surrounded by perfect spheres of unchanging crystalline construction that rotate eternally around the earth, carrying the moon, sun, and planets. The stars are fixed to the final sphere, above which live God and his angels. From this we get the common notion that goodness and truth are to be found above us, while evil and falseness lie below. To learn to live with our planet we have to grow out of this very old yearning for elevation from it. This hierarchy applies also to the natural/artificial divide, in that the natural is valued over the artificial because it is closer to absolute perfection, and therefore closer to timelessness.
How can we get rid of the conceptual structure of a divided and hierarchical world separating the natural and artificial? To transcend this conceptual trap we have to altogether eliminate the idea that anything is, or can be, timeless, and see everything in nature, including ourselves and our technologies, as time-bound and part of a larger ever-evolving system. There is another way in which the issue of the separation of the natural and the artificial comes down to our conception of time. We human beings have always gotten out of crises by inventing new ideas and novel structures. We have to do this again to survive climate change. But if the search for knowledge is essentially the task of remembering truths that have been ever-present, then the possible solutions to any problem already exist in fixed menus of possibility, and novelty is an illusion. A world without time is a world with fixed categories and fixed possibilities that cannot be transcended.
If, on the other hand, time is real, and everything is subject to it, then there are no fixed categories and no barrier to believing in the act of inventing genuinely novel ideas and solutions to problems. So to understand the distinction between the natural and artificial, and to open up the possibility for novel forms that are both, we have to situate them in time.
To fully realize the conception of a time-bound world, we need to invent a notion of truth that removes timelessness from the equation of truth and replaces it with a notion of truth that is no less objective, but which has room for surprise, invention, and novelty. That is, to have a future, we human beings have to learn to think and talk about the future differently.
A new philosophy is needed that anticipates the merging of the natural and the artificial by achieving a union of the natural and social sciences, in which human agency has a rightful place in nature. This is not a relativism in which anything we want to be true can be. To survive the challenge of climate change, it matters a great deal what is true. We must also reject both the modernist notion that truth and beauty are determined by formal criteria and the postmodern rebellion from that, according to which reality and ethics are merely socially constructed. What is needed is instead a relationalism, according to which the future is restricted by, but not determined from, the present, so that genuine novelty and invention, while rare, are real and possible. This will replace the false hope for transcendence to a timeless, absolute perfection with a genuinely hopeful view of an ever-expanding realm for human action and agency, within a cosmos with an open future.
SCIENCE AND THE FALSE HOPE TO TRANSCEND TIME
The notion that truth is eternal and lies outside of the world we experience is not only a religious idea. It is in science as well, as is exemplified by the Platonic view of mathematics. According to this view, the objects mathematicians study, such as numbers and shapes, exist in an eternal realm apart from physical reality, but are somehow just as real. This view is not popular among philosophers due to a powerful and commonsense objection to it, which is that to the extent that mathematical objects live in a separate realm outside of time and space, there is no way for human beings to gain access to or knowledge about them. Mathematical Platonists, some of them great mathematicians, such as Alain Connes and Roger Penrose, reply that they believe in the power of intuition to give them a transcendent view into this timeless realm. If the Platonists are right, then mathematics is discovery of preexisting truths, so there can be no novelty and no genuine invention. Thus, this view of mathematics reinforces the idea that the scope of human agency and creation is limited to a contents of a preexisting and timeless realm.
The natural world as we experience it differs profoundly from the imagined worlds of theology and mathematics in that, in our world, time is ever-present. We experience the world a moment at a time, each moment one of a succession, and we experience each moment emerging from the previous one, an aspect of time Henri Bergson called becoming.
A fundamental question for science is whether or not nature is really like the imagined Platonic realm of mathematics, so that our experience of the flow of present moments, each one a becoming, is an illusion. The claim that our existence in time is an illusion is the heart of the perennial philosophy. There are two versions of this view in physics. In one, called the block universe picture, what is real is actually and only the whole history of the universe, all at once. This was the view of Einstein and many twentieth-century philosophers. (Although, one of them, the logical positivist Rudolf Carnap, recounts conversations in which Einstein regretted the loss of a place for the present moment.) Another version is proposed by the physicist and philosopher Julian Barbour, in his book The End of Time: all the possible moments that might be part of the history of the universe exist together in a big heap, so that not only the succession but also the ordering of moments of time is an illusion. If either of these views is right then there is no novelty and no real scope for human agency. The future is no more and no less real now than the present or the past. This timeless view of nature is compatible with the way that physical systems are described in mathematical language in Newton's physics, and equally so in Einstein's general relativity and quantum mechanics. The method whereby time is expelled from the description of a physical system is a codification of the necessity to do experiments over and over again to confirm their results. One can repeat an experiment, varying the initial preparation of the system, and recording the outcome. By doing so one isolates what is general and repeatable in all the instances and calls that a law. The law is then understood to act on the system as it is initially prepared and transform it into its later states. The possible preparations are called the initial conditions. One then takes all the possible states or initial conditions and abstracts them into a timeless “space of states.” The law then acts on these states to evolve initial states of an experiment over time to final states. The law is both that which does not change and the generator of change; it gives the unchanging rules for how change takes place.
When applied to describe experiments done in a laboratory this is a very successful method. But it is important to emphasize that it makes sense and accords with experimental practice when applied to a small isolated system, with the experimenter and her clocks and measuring instruments left outside in the larger universe. But if we attempt to apply this picture of a laboratory experiment to the universe as a whole, we commit a metaphysical fallacy. There is no scientific justification for this extrapolation, as there is no experimental result whose explanation requires it. Nonetheless, it is made unthinkingly by most contemporary cosmologists. What helps us fall into this fallacy is the old dream of transcendence, because it requires the scientist to think of himself as outside the universe, watching it without being a part of it. This is then a fantasy of the scientist as god.
One principle of a relational philosophy is that nothing can be outside the universe of events evolving in time, and yet act on it. This implies there is no view of the whole universe as if from outside of it, and no timeless laws that are imposed on the world as if from outside. Since the space of states and laws contemplated in this method are described mathematically, it is easy for a cosmologist to proceed further under the influence of the yearning for transcendence and proclaim that the whole history of the world is identical in every way to an object in the eternal Platonic realm of mathematics. Since both the history of the world and its mirror in mathematics are timeless, this is a vision of nature in which time has been expelled. There is no present moment, and certainly no room for novelty, invention, or human agency.
There is another way that time is expelled from physics. If one considers an isolated system in nature, say the contents of a thermos bottle, one can argue that the system evolves to a state of equilibrium, in which there is no organization or order and no change, apart from the random motion of molecules. This equilibrium state is timeless, and it is unique, so that here too there is no room for surprise or novelty. Some cosmologists go even further, and follow Max Tegmark in identifying the history of the world with the imagined mathematical object to which it is believed to be identical.
This is a case where great metaphysical harm has been done by taking a method that works well when applied to a small isolated system as might be studied in a laboratory and extending it to the universe as a whole. For the universe is not in equilibrium, with its myriads of hot stars pouring photons into cold space. Indeed, life is possible because the earth's surface is continually energized by a flow of the energy carried by those photons through it. Nonetheless, a lot of silly cosmology, from Boltzmann in the late nineteenth century to the fantasies of contemporary quantum cosmologists, imagines that the natural state of the universe is to be in such a lifeless equilibrium, with the presently observed nonequilibrium state only a temporary and rare fluctuation. A favorite model of contemporary theorists is called eternal inflation, whose name signifies that it reflects the old desire for a transcendent science in which the cosmologist stands mentally outside of time and space. This field is as much speculative metaphysics as science. A lot of its literature is taken up with issues that can have no bearing on experiment, such as how probabilities are to be defined in an infinite and timeless realm, or whether it is overwhelmingly probable that a conscious brain would appear as a fluctuation in an eternal state of equilibrium rather than as a product of biological evolution.
Part of the program of the new philosophy is to save cosmology from this unscientific excursion by recognizing the central role time must play on a cosmological scale. But more importantly, a civilization whose scientists and philosophers teach that time is an illusion and the future is fixed is not likely to be able to summon the imaginative power needed to invent the communion of political organizations, technology, and natural processes needed for human beings to thrive sustainably beyond this century.
THE TROUBLE WITH ECONOMICS
Probably the greatest harm done by the metaphysical view that reality is timeless is through its influence on twentieth-century economics. The basic flaw in the thinking of many economists is that a market is a system with a single equilibrium state. This is a state where the prices have adjusted so that the supply of each good exactly meets the demand for it, according to the law of supply and demand.2 Furthermore, it can be argued that the equilibrium point of a market optimizes everyone's satisfaction. There is a mathematical theorem that in equilibrium no one can be made happier without making someone else less happy.
If each market has one and only one such equilibrium point, then the wise and ethical thing to do is to let the market alone so it can adjust to that point. Market forces—i.e., the way producers and consumers respond to changes in prices—should be sufficient to do this. A recent version of this idea is the efficient market hypothesis, which holds that the prices reflect all the information relevant to the market. In a market with many players contributing their knowledge and views by means of their bids and asks, it is impossible, in principle, that any asset is for very long mispriced.
It is remarkable that this line of reasoning can be backed up by elegant mathematical proofs, in mathematical models of market economies. Within these models, there are even formal proofs that equilibrium points always exist, there are always choices of prices such that supply exactly balances demand.
However, this simple picture in which the market always acts to restore conditions to equilibrium depends on the assumption that there is only one equilibrium. But this is not the case. Economists have known since the 1970s that their mathematical models of markets have typically many equilibrium points where supply balances demand. How many? The number is hard to estimate but certainly grows at least proportional to the numbers of companies and consumers, if not faster.
In a complex modern economy with many goods, each made by multiple firms, and bought by a large number of consumers, there are many ways to set the prices of all the goods so that supply and demand are in balance. This is shown by a theorem proved in 1972 by three highly influential economists. One of them was Hugo Sonnenschein, who was not just a member of the Chicago school but served as president of that university.
Because there are many equilibria where market forces balance, they cannot all be completely stable. The question is then how a society chooses which equilibrium to be in. It cannot be by market forces, because supply and demand are balanced in each of the many possible equilibrium. There is then a necessity for other forces to determine which way the market forces are satisfied. Hence there is a necessary role for regulation, law, culture, and politics to play in determining the evolution of a market economy.
How is it possible that influential economists have been arguing for decades from the premise of a single, unique equilibrium, when there were results in their own literature by prominent colleagues that showed this was incorrect? I believe the reason is the pull of the timeless over the time-bound. For if there is only a single stable equilibrium, the dynamics by which the market evolves over time is not of much interest. Whatever happens, the market will find the equilibrium, and if it is perturbed it will oscillate around that equilibrium and settle back down into it. You don't need to know anything else.
If there is a unique stable equilibrium, then there is not much scope for human agency (apart from each firm maximizing profits and each consumer maximizing their pleasure), and the best thing to do is to leave the market alone to come to equilibrium. But if there are many possible equilibria, and none is completely stable, then human agency has a big role to play, to participate in and steer the dynamics by which one equilibrium is chosen out of many possibilities. What seems to have happened, in the thinking of the economic gurus who won the day for deregulation, is that the role of human agency was neglected in deference to an imagined mythical timeless state of nature. This was the profound conceptual mistake that opened the way for the errors of policy that led to the recent economic crisis and recession.
Another way to speak about this mistake is in terms of path dependence and independence. A system is path dependent if there are many ways it could evolve, so that some measure of choice is involved in where it goes. A system is path independent if there is no choice and there is only a single state to which the system can evolve. In a path independent system time and dynamics play little role, because at any time the system is either in its unique state or at worst, fluctuating slightly around it. In a path dependent system time plays a big role.
Neoclassical economics conceptualizes economics as path independent. An efficient market is path independent, as is a market with a single stable equilibrium.
In a path independent system it should be impossible to make money purely by trading, without making anything. Opportunities to do so are called arbitrage, and there is a basic understanding in financial theory that in an efficient market arbitrage is impossible because everything is already priced in such a way that there are no inconsistencies. You cannot trade dollars for yen, trade those for Euros, and trade those back for dollars and make a profit. Nonetheless, hedge funds and investment banks have made fortunes from trading in currency markets. Their success should be impossible in an efficient market, but this does not seem to have been a problem for economic theorizing.
Decades ago, Brian Arthur, who was at the time the youngest holder of an endowed chair at Stanford University, began to argue that economics was path dependent. His evidence for this was that a law of economics, called the law of decreasing returns, is not always correct. Decreasing returns is the idea that the more of something you make, the less profit you make from each item you sell. This is not necessarily true, for example, in the software business. Arthur's work was treated as if it were heretical, and indeed, without the assumption of decreasing returns, some of the mathematical proofs in neoclassical economic models cannot be carried through. He ended up leaving Stanford and founding the economics program at the Santa Fe Institute.
In the mid-1990s, an economics graduate student at Harvard, Pia Malaney, working with a mathematician, Eric Weinstein, found a mathematical representation of the path dependence of economics. In geometry and physics, there is a well-understood technique for studying path dependent systems, which is called gauge fields. They provide the mathematical foundations for our understanding of all the forces in nature.
Malaney and Weinstein applied this method to economics and found that they are path dependent. Indeed, there is a quantity that is easy to compute, called the curvature, that measures path dependence, and they found it was not zero in typical models of markets where prices and preferences of consumers are both changing—i.e., in the real world.3
The work of Malaney and Weinstein was ignored by academic economists, but the basic fact that markets are path dependent has been since rediscovered by a number of physicists who took their skills to the financial markets and found it natural to apply gauge theories to the markets. Hence, like the earth, and the geometry of space-time, the mathematical spaces that model markets are not flat.
There is no way of knowing how many hedge funds are making money by discovering arbitrage opportunities by measuring curvature—i.e., path dependence that is not supposed to exist in neoclassical economics—but it is hard to imagine this is not going on.
A path dependent market is one where time really matters. How does neoclassical economic theory deal with the fact that in reality markets do evolve in time, in response to changing technologies and preferences, continually opening up opportunities to make money that are not supposed to exist in their models? Neoclassical economics treats time by abstracting it away. In a neoclassical model you as a consumer are modeled by a utility function. This is a mathematical function that gives a number to every possible combination of goods and services that might be purchased in the economy you live in.
This is a rather huge set, but hey, this is math, so let's continue. The idea is that the higher the utility a collection of goods and services has for you, the more you would like to buy them. The models then assume that you buy the collection of goods and services that maximizes your desires, as measured by your utility function, given the constraint of how much you can afford.
What about time? The idea is that the lists of goods and services includes all the goods and services you might want to buy over your entire life. So the budget constraint that is imposed is over your lifetime income. Now this is clearly absurd—how could anyone have any idea what they will want or need decades from now, or what one's lifetime income will be?
What about contingency (i.e., the fact that over our lives we will confront a myriad of circumstances that cannot be predicted)? The models deal with these by lumping them into the lists of goods and services (i.e., the assumption is that there is a price for every possible collection of goods and services at every time and in every contingent situation that might arise. There is a price not just for a Chevy Mustang, but for a Chevy Mustang in 2020 under every possible contingency). The models assume not just that all the goods we might buy now have been perfectly priced in equilibrium, but that every future price of any collection of goods under every possible contingency is also perfectly priced. This is still more absurd, yet this is a description of the theory used and taught by the economists who advise governments.
The fact that the neoclassical economic models go to such absurd lengths to abstract time and contingency away shows how central the issue of time is. There is a powerful if unconscious attraction to theories in which time plays no role. It gives theorists the impression of standing outside the world, in a timeless realm of pure truth, against which the time and contingency of the real world pale.
It took a string theory postdoc at our theoretical physics institute, Samuel Vázquez, less than six months to go from hearing these ideas to measuring path dependence in real market data.4 What he was doing was impossible and heretical in the framework of neoclassical economics theory, but there it was in real data.
We live in a world in which it is impossible in principle to anticipate and list most of the contingencies that will arise in the future. Neither the political context, nor the inventions, nor the fashions, nor the weather nor climate are specifiable in advance.
There is in the real world no possibility of working with an abstract space of all the contingencies that may evolve in the future. To do real economics, without mythological elements, we need a theoretical framework in which time is real and the future is not specifiable or knowable in advance, even in principle. It is only in such a theoretical context that the full scope of our power to construct our future can make sense.
Furthermore, to meld an economy and an ecology, we need to conceive of them in common terms. The grounds for a common conception are in seeing each of them as open complex systems, evolving in time, with path dependence and multiple equilibria, governed by feedback. This fits the description we have briefly given here of economics, and it fits the theoretical framework of ecology, with the climate as the sum and expression of a network of chemical reactions driving and regulated by the basic cycles of the biosphere.
SCIENCE AND THE OPENNESS OF THE FUTURE
If our civilization is to thrive, it would be very helpful to base our decision-making on a coherent view of the world, in which there is a union between natural and social sciences. If we are to purge from economics and social theory the notion that change is an illusion hiding timeless truths, we should do this in science as well. And we should do this all the way down, to the foundations of physics, cosmology, and mathematics.
One place to start is with the limitations on the notion that everything can be reduced to laws of physics. Reductionism is the good advice that if you want to understand the workings of a complex system, it is good to have a working knowledge of the properties of the parts. But this does not mean that the properties of the whole can always be completely reduced to sensible and useful statements made entirely in the language used to describe the parts. Biological cells are made of molecules, for sure. And it is the case that the properties of molecules can be entirely described in terms of quantum states, which provide probabilities for each set of positions that their component atoms might take. However, cells have properties that can be understood only functionally, such as by their contribution to their fitness. The fitness of a biological cell certainly depends on the molecules that make it up, but this does not mean that there is any useful definition of that fitness as a function of the positions of the atoms that comprise those molecules. Neither in practice nor in principle need there be a complete reduction of the properties needed to explain the higher-level system in terms only of the properties used to describe its component parts.
This means that new concepts, properties, and laws may emerge at a higher level that are not able to be stated in the language used to give a complete description of its parts. This means that novel laws may emerge in time, when the complex systems they apply to evolve into existence.
Four billion years ago there was nothing on earth that the laws of Mendelian genetics or sexual selection applied to. Those laws came into existence only when the cells they apply to evolved.
Moreover, the higher-level laws can, and often do, influence the lower levels of description. There are molecules that only exist on earth because they are components of biological systems and hence byproducts of evolution. Suppose we wanted to know how many hemoglobin molecules are present on earth. Hemoglobin is just a big molecule, completely describable by the laws of quantum mechanics. But there is no way the question of how many exist at a given time could be arrived at just by solving the laws of quantum mechanics. To explain why there are any hemoglobin molecules on earth, and to estimate their number, one must reason in terms of higher-order laws that apply to animals and are not completely reducible to quantum mechanics. For one thing, to determine whether evolution would lead to the emergence of animals, and hence blood, one must reason in terms of selective advantage.
Applying this to the future, it is fair to say that one cannot, even in principle, propose any calculation to give a list of the molecules that will be present in the biosphere in a billion years. Evolution sometimes proceeds by discontinuities, by which novel forms of organization emerge. These have included cells, eukaryotic cells, multicellular life, plants, animals, intelligence, language, etc. Each of these was an unprecedented novelty when it emerged. There is no reason to believe that evolution has produced its last novel form of organization, and no reason to believe that any scientific method could be devised that would provide a complete list of such possible novelties. Surprise is a real part of science, even if the laws of physics that apply to elementary particles are deterministic.
How does this ubiquity of novelty square with the notion that time is absent in physics?
As we have seen, in physics as developed so far, there are timeless laws acting on timeless spaces of possible states. On the level of complex systems there are neither.
The space of states in the biosphere or an economy can suddenly expand, in ways that are not predictable from the present state. As they do, novel forms of organization can emerge, which can exhibit novel regularities described by novel laws. The best that theory may be able to do is describe what complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman calls the adjacent possible—that is, to discern some of the very next forms that may emerge. Or there may be singularities where not even this is possible.
Another limit to the applicability of reductionism comes at the lower end. If the properties of the whole depend on the parts, what determines the properties of the parts? One can answer, break it down further, into smaller parts. This has proceeded well, from molecules to atoms to nuclei to quarks, but at some point, if there is to be an end to the chain of explanation, we must get to a particle that is truly elementary, that has no parts. It will still have some properties, which govern how it moves and interacts with other truly elementary particles. What will determine those properties?
This is a part of the question of what chooses the laws of physics. Till recently, this was not a question physicists often asked; our job was to discover what the laws of physics are. But over the last three decades we have been asking more and more, why these laws and not others? Why this set of elementary particles, with the particular properties they have, and not others with other properties?
Many theorists used to imagine that the requirement that the laws of nature be expressible in mathematics would limit a unified theory to a unique candidate. It was felt that the requirements that the laws be mathematically consistent and unified would together only have one solution. So far as we can tell, this is false. The most developed candidate for a unified theory so far, string theory, appears to come in an infinite number of versions, all equally consistent. Motivated by an analogy with landscapes of possible genetic sequences, this is called the landscape of possible string theories. So the mystery of why these laws and not others has been deepened by the discovery that there appear to be many possible consistent laws.
The first person to ask this question cogently seems to have been the founder of the American pragmatist school of philosophy, Charles Sanders Pierce. He wrote, in 1891, “The only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for uniformity in general is to presume them results of evolution.”5 In fact, it is possible to invent a scenario by means of which a process analogous to natural selection has acted in our past to produce our universe. It offers a partial answer to the question of why these laws, and it does so in a way that makes genuine predictions that are vulnerable to being shown false by experiment.
This provides further motivation for believing in the reality of time and the openness of the future. If the selection of the laws of nature that determine what elementary particles exist and how they interact is a result of evolution analogous to natural selection, then there must be a time that this evolution plays out in. And it must be a time that exists prior to the laws, for the laws must have scope to evolve in time. Moreover, if the process of natural selection can lead to novel forms of organization in the biosphere, there is no reason to think they cannot do so in the whole of nature. The big bang may even be an event that brought into being a novel form of organization in which particles move in space; if this is so then the laws we probe with particle accelerators like the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) emerged then.
To have a cosmology in which time is more basic than laws, we need an alternative to the Newtonian way of doing physics based on timeless laws acting within timeless spaces of possible states. This is possible because the context in which that method works requires modeling a small part of the universe, with the clocks and observers removed.
There is no empirical result that calls for the science of cosmology to be based on the extension of this method to the universe as a whole. Indeed, attempts to do so result in the endless chasing of absurd questions with no bearing on observation, such as what determines the laws and what chooses the initial conditions. We must find instead a way of framing principles and hypotheses about the cosmos as a whole that does not at the beginning separate the truths of the world into timeless laws and initial conditions.
The starting point for any cosmological theory must be the relational conception of time and space as formulated by Leibniz, which is fully realized in physics within Einstein's general theory of relativity. Within a relational theory, all properties of an entity refer to relationships it has with other entities. Quantum mechanics also partly realizes a relational conception of properties. The revolution started by Einstein in 1905 remains to be completed by a full unification of quantum theory with relativity, and the key issue here is the role of time. Much research in quantum gravity and cosmology has been based on a timeless picture in which time is to emerge only when the universe is sufficiently big. There is a growing sense that these attempts to construct a consistent unification of gravity with quantum theory on a timeless framework fail on their own terms. At the same time, a lot of progress has recently been made on approaches to quantum cosmology in which time is fundamental rather than emergent. There remains a great deal to do in these directions, so what can be said now is only that the idea that time is real rather than emergent is now motivating some of the most interesting research on the cutting edge of the field of quantum gravity.
DEMOCRACY AND THE OPEN FUTURE
One reason to be optimistic about a consilience of the social and physical sciences is that in the past great conceptual steps in one have been echoed in the other. Newton's idea of absolute time and space is said to have greatly influenced the political theory of his contemporary John Locke. The notion that the positions of particles were defined with respect, not to each other, but to absolute space, was mirrored in the notion of rights, defined for each citizen with respect to an unchanging absolute background of principles of justice. As general relativity moves physics toward a relational theory of space and time in which all properties are defined in terms of relationships, and in which the future is open, is this mirrored in an analogous movement in social theory? I believe that it is and that it can be found already in the writings of Unger and a number of other social theorists.6 These can be understood as exploring in the context of social theory the implications of a relational philosophy, according to which all properties ascribed to actors and agents in a social system arise from their relationships and interactions with each other. As in a Leibnizian cosmology, there are no external timeless categories or laws. The future is open because there is no end to the novel modes of organization that may be invented by a society as it continually confronts unprecedented problems and opportunities.
This new social theory has the task of moving democracy toward a global form of political organization, adequate to guide the evolution of the multi-ethnic and multicultural societies now in ascendance. It must also be adequate to make the decisions necessary to survive the crisis of climate change.
Here I would like to very briefly sketch my understanding of what democracy looks like from the relational perspective of the new philosophy. Remarkably, the same ideas provide an understanding of how science works. This is important, as the challenge of climate change concerns the interaction of science and politics. Both democratic governance and the workings of the scientific community have evolved to manage several basic facts about human beings: We are very smart, but we are flawed in characteristic ways. We have the capacity to study our situation in nature over a single lifetime, and with culture accumulate knowledge over many lifetimes. But we also have evolved the capacity to think quickly and act decisively at the snap of a twig.
This means we often make mistakes, and we often fool ourselves. To combat our tendency for error, we have evolved societies that embrace the contradiction between the conservative and the rebel, in the service of future generations. The future is genuinely unknowable, but the one thing we know for sure is that in the future our descendants will know a lot more than we do. By working within communities and societies, we can achieve much more than we can as individuals, and yet progress requires individuals to take great risks to invent and test new ideas and viewpoints.
Both scientific communities and the larger democratic societies they evolved from progress because their work is governed by two basic principles. Both are necessary for knowledge to develop and wise decisions to be made in the face of a world where the present is increasingly comprehensible, but the future remains unknowable.
1) When rational argument from public evidence7 suffices to decide a question, it must be considered to be so decided.
2) When rational argument from public evidence does not suffice to decide a question, the community must encourage and nurture a diverse range of viewpoints and hypotheses consistent with a good faith attempt to develop convincing public evidence.
That is, we respect the power of reasoning when it is decisive and, when it is not, we respect those who in good faith disagree with us. The limitation to people of good faith means those within the community who accept these principles. Within such communities, knowledge can progress and we can strive to make wise decisions about a future that is not completely knowable.
These are ethical principles, and communities that adhere to them may be called ethical communities. Such communities are formed and bonded together by a shared adherence to a set of ethical principles. Membership has nothing to do with history, ethnicity, gender, race, or any other circumstance, other than adherence to a set of ethical principles.
There is, of course, a lot of incompleteness in the adherence to these ethics, in scientific communities and democratic societies alike. There is a lot of corruption and taking advantage of power, wealth, and status in both contexts. But what matters in the long run is not perfect adherence, it is the shape and direction of things, and when push comes to shove these are the ethics that make scientific communities, courts and parliaments function.
Scientific communities and democratic societies share a frank acknowledgement that they do not know the future. They educate not to indoctrinate but to prepare future generations to face an uncertain future in which the only thing we can ensure is that they will know more than we do now. We can call these open communities.
There are also ethical communities that are not open, because their ethics is based on a confidence that they do know the future. These include fundamentalist religious communities and some communities of political ideologues. Instead of being open, they have a theory of the future that they believe gives them the right to power over others.
Fundamentalist communities and open communities can be distinguished by their understanding of time and the possibilities for knowledge of the future. Fundamentalists believe that the future already exists, and they are prone to believe that time is altogether an illusion. They believe in mythological stories according to which the ever-changing world we perceive is an illusion that hides a true timeless reality. They teach faith and acceptance and fear of what the future may bring. Open communities teach that the future is not yet real, what is real instead is time and the processes by which the future unfolds and emerges out of the present. For a fundamentalist, human agency is an illusion; for a member of an open society human agency is the necessary means of constructing a future that would not otherwise exist.
People of many histories, religions, and ethnicities can participate in a scientific community or a democratic society, and there is something essentially universal and universalizing about them. Any two people of good faith, who accept the principles stated above, can work together to understand the present and build a common future.
The scientific community certainly demonstrates this. While its origins may have been localized, by now it is completely universal. One sees people from every continent, culture, and religion working together in laboratories and institutes around the world. The same is to be said for the governance of more and more of our democratic states, as immigration becomes more and more central. Canada, the United States, and some European countries have discovered that democracy thrives in communities of people from diverse backgrounds. There is a genuine sense in which there is a common society formed by the democratic nations of the world.
To successfully tame climate change, and then over a century build a sustainable marriage of nature and technology that can keep the climate in balance, will require an unprecedented level of cooperation among the nations, peoples, and corporations of the earth. To make this unprecedented international cooperation possible, there must grow up a recognition of a global culture and community. This is not a replacement for the many cultures of the planet, which will no doubt continue to thrive.
Many of us have learned to live with multiple identities and affiliations, and this will be one more; the romantic concept of a citizen of the planet will gain concrete reality as decisions are made by a global process in the interests of our thriving on this planet.
The basis of this global community will be science and democracy, as captured by the two ethical principles I proposed above.
Over the next few decades, each nation, each community, and each individual will be faced with a choice. They can join this global community by accepting the principles of science and democracy and participating in the decision-making over melding our human technologies with the natural processes of the planet. Or they can choose to stay outside of this universal community. We cannot expect that everyone will join, but we can hope that enough will so that we can make the decisions necessary for our survival.
A NEW VIEW OF ECONOMICS AND ECOLOGY UNFOLDING IN TIME
From the perspective of the new philosophy, the problems that democracy and science must solve together take on fresh perspectives. As we have seen, the problem of inventing and regulating a system of economic markets looks completely different from this perspective. The basic question is no longer to let the market alone to come to a mythical, unique state of equilibrium. It is instead to give full scope to human agency to design a system in which ethical concerns guide the choice of which among many paths the markets evolve along, and so choose, always temporarily, among the many possible states of equilibrium. Most centrally, the menu of possibilities is not fixed, but ever increasing, because of the human capacity for inventing novel products and processes and entire forms of economic organization. As Unger proclaims, the role of intellectuals and politicians is less to debate existing possibilities and more to create novel ones.
This view of economics fits into the larger picture of the biosphere as a self-organized system, far from equilibrium, driven to ever-higher levels of order by the flow of energy from the sun. This view sees the planet as an evolving network of processes, stabilized by feedback processes occurring over a wide range of time scales, from days to eons.
These processes include the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and other cycles that are the basis for life and the climate.
The economy is then fundamentally a novel form of organization we human beings invented to participate in and extend those natural cycles and systems. This is illustrated by the fact that the main fuels our economy runs on—so far—exploit buried deposits of carbon. Our food comes from exploitation and extension of those natural cycles, as do most of our medicines. Agriculture and biotechnology are just steps along the path by which we humans have integrated ourselves in the natural cycles and processes of the biosphere.
This perspective completely alters how we think about climate change. There is no single natural state for the earth's climate, that human beings can either leave alone or damage. The climate is not static, and it is not to be taken for granted; it is an aspect of the living planet, determined by processes that involve the gases that cycle among the living plants, animals, and microbes. The fact is that the earth's climate has spent most of the time since life arose in states different from the present. For much of the time, the climate was much warmer than it is now; during the ice ages it was much colder. The record shows that it has sometimes changed abruptly from one state to another and that there is a strong correlation between elevated CO2 levels and elevated temperature. The science suggests that what stabilizes the climate, when it is stable, is feedback working through great cycles, such as the one by which carbon is transmuted through the atmosphere and oceans from rock to plants to animals and back again.
The present crisis is brought about because our input of carbon and other greenhouse gases into these cycles is on a track to more than double the amount of CO2 in the air.
There is a lot more to know about the detailed observations and modeling that strongly support the claims that the temperature has risen because of our input of carbon, and will continue to do so long as we continue to pump carbon into the air, and for at least a century afterward. But it is not necessary to know all the details to understand that this is a fundamental crisis whose solution will require long-term changes in how our economies interact with the natural cycles of the planet to produce our food and energy.
The view of nature as pristine and in need of protection has played an inspirational role during the history of environmental movements. Nonetheless, it is based on an antiquated nineteenth-century view of nature that is based on false oppositions between human life and the rest of life, the time-doomed versus the timeless, and the artificial versus the natural. This view is now getting in the way because it gives us no options to resolve the climate-change problem morally, that is to say without giving up the rightful desires of the world's people for freedom from poverty and want. As Stewart Brand has documented in his eloquent book Whole Earth Discipline, the romantic idea that equates wisdom with protection of a pristine nature from civilization has led some environmentalists to make the wrong call on a range of issues including nuclear energy and urbanization.8
The main mistake is to suppose that there is a unique state for nature and a unique natural path for the evolution of the biosphere. Since there are many possible partly stable states the climate can be in, and many possible paths along which it can evolve, and since the same is true for the economy, we must become part of the processes that choose those states and paths. This means we must join our civilization and technology and the natural systems of the biosphere into a single, novel form of organization.
Since the basic processes on which our economies are built are just extensions of the basic cycles of the biosphere, we are already well on the way to a joining of the natural and artificial. What is required is to consciously accept our role as partners as we modify our systems to bring them into harmony with those of the planet. This means among other things that we cannot simply impose an invented vision of the climate on the planet. We must work cautiously and deliberately, step-by-step, testing and refining our inventions and strategies as we see how the natural systems respond to them.
There is real danger in getting this wrong, but we have no choice, as there is even greater danger in doing nothing.
When it comes to policy, this means that we do not have the luxury of seeing climate change as an emergency, to be dealt with by making some decisions now, after which everything will work out and we can move on to other things. It has always been inevitable that sooner or later the industries of food and energy we need to thrive, being extensions of natural processes, would grow to a scale that their management affected the stability of those processes. What we have to do is learn how to manage our role in, and contribution to, the climate. Like farming, this is not something we do once, this is a responsibility we will have from now on. So we have to understand the next several decades as the first step of a permanent expansion of our role in nature, as consequential as the invention of agriculture. It will take some time to get the hang of it.
While we are doing so, the best policy will be to not try to predict one outcome or choose one path but to expand the range of options available to policymakers in each decade of our century, so that whatever arises there will always be tools available appropriate to the situation then.
So while we certainly have to begin now to drastically lower our contributions to the CO2 levels of the atmosphere, by all means at our disposal, while developing and putting to use alternative means of energy production, we have to simultaneously work on improving the science of the biosphere to the point where we reliably understand the systems we are interfering with and how to affect them. We have to be prepared to respond to various instabilities and nonlinearities that may drive the climate away from states comfortable for us. At the same time, we have to work on developing modes of international governance adequate to make the decisions that will be required to keep the climate stable and hospitable.
The more tardy we are about implementing aggressive strategies to lower our CO2 emissions, the more likely it is we will have to implement emergency measures for rescuing vulnerable populations from the consequences of global warming and forestalling the effects through geoengineering. Each of these levels of response must be coordinated and global. Thus, while it is hard to predict how the crisis will evolve, there is no good outcome that does not involve very high levels of international cooperation as well as unprecedented coordination of scientists and policymakers.
There is no choice about whether measures that interdependently regulate the economy and the climate are put into place, the only option is the time scale over which the new governance and regulatory structures necessary to solve the problem are invented. The earlier we start, the more gradually will we be able to implement the changes, the less imposition there will be on economies and the sovereignty of nations, and the sooner the benefits will outweigh the costs.
By the end of this century we will either have failed or there will be a new entity, satisfying new regularities: a planetary civilization that has unified its biology and technology. By doing so we will have done much more than save human civilization from catastrophe, we will have gained the knowledge to fully cultivate our planet as a garden for ourselves and all the living creatures. This may well will involve leaving much of it wild; what must be domesticated is our technologies and economies, together with the feedback processes that stabilize the global climate. And whatever the costs along the way, in the long term there will be enormous benefits to having achieved a global coordination of economies and ecologies necessary to live sustainably on this planet. If the nations of the earth can learn to work together to solve this problem, other key global challenges will also be easier to solve.
As living, intelligent creatures who are products of evolution within this world, we have the blessing of being conscious, active agents, able to invent and construct novel solutions to the surprising situations we are continually presented with. Let us use the full scope of this power and agency to make a world where we and everything else that lives on this planet can thrive sustainably. Let us make a future for our descendants that will bequeath to each generation the freedom and range of choices they need to continually deepen our humanity, while melding our created worlds with nature, so that each generation will make a world that their ancestors could not have imagined, but would nonetheless have thrilled to. Let us, at the very least, not screw it up.