Science and Spirit
It seems to me immensely unlikely that
mind is a mere by-product of matter.
For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motion of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.
While its discoveries were eliminating any rational support for the existence of a transcendent creator deity, science was creating room for a different view of spiritual reality, one equally far removed from secularism. This alternative’s scientific roots were in post-Newtonian physics, many of whose founders had often observed that relativistic and quantum worlds were stranger and more paradoxical than anyone could get their mind around, other than through mathematical equations. Einstein demonstrated that mass and energy were different forms of the same “stuff,” sinking the notion that matter was fundamentally inert. But it was quantum mechanics that really divorced our day-to-day experience of the world from its reality at a deeper level.
Quantum theory challenged the last Christian-derived assumption in science: that mind and matter shared nothing in common. In fact, quantum theory suggested their relationship was quite intimate. In 1927, Sir Arthur Eddington wrote that viewing the universe as some kind of mind was “a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory …[But] Science cannot tell whether the world—spirit is good or evil, and its halting argument for the existence of a God might equally well be turned into an argument for the existence of a Devil” (Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World). Max Planck, whose work in physics provided the foundation for quantum theory, wrote, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness” (Planck, The Observer). These discoveries were very disconcerting to most scientists of the time, and remain so today. Most fields remain dominated by the assumption that consciousness and mind differ radically from matter. This was a matter of faith rather than proof, because it is clear to our daily experience that our consciousness continually affects the physical world, and vice versa. A color, let us say “red,” requires consciousness to make any sense at all. A person who saw only in black and white, who suddenly was able to see red, could be said to have learned something new about the world, something that could not be reduced to the wavelengths of light, because such wavelengths previously showed up as a shade of gray.
From science’s traditional standpoint, the ideal physics theory should not refer to human beings in any way, and should be the foundation for deriving all of chemistry, biology, and even human life. While accepting this ideal, Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg admitted, “I don’t see any way of formulating quantum mechanics without an interpretative postulate that refers to what happens when people choose to measure one thing or another thing” (Folger, “Crossing the Quantum Divide,” 32). On the whole, scientists turned their backs on the unsettling implications of modern physics. Quantum phenomena did not seem to matter in the larger world, but only in the realm of the fantastically small. It therefore seemed reasonable to continue applying a mechanistic model to all larger phenomena, from atoms to galaxies.
This approach gained added power with the coming of WWII and the following Cold War. World events drew many scientists’ interests away from theory toward addressing more immediately practical matters. The dominant view remains that, somehow, consciousness and subjectivity emerge from matter or, alternatively, that consciousness is in some way an icing on a materialist cake, playing no causal role in the world, and seeming to be a kind of illusion.
Physics’ philosophical implications remained unsettling curiosities best ignored in favor of practical research—until the seventies.
During the Cold War, plenty of money was available to train physicists, and many very capable people were attracted to the field. Then, in the 1970s, the bottom fell out of the job market. Many new PhDs, who had been doing cutting-edge research for their doctorates, learned that the positions they anticipated obtaining no longer existed. A group of young physicists in Berkeley had developed common interests in the philosophical implications of what they were studying, rather than the traditional focus on physics’ practical applications. Dubbing themselves the “Fundamental Fysiks Group,” they picked up where physics’ pioneers had left off, and banded together to explore the deeper meaning of its paradoxical phenomena (Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics). As they did, many of these scientists were intrigued not only with how quantum physics clashed with traditional Western assumptions about the physical world, but also how the quantum world seemed to support Eastern mysticism, and even the possibility of psychic mind reading. In the late 1970s, a small publishing industry had arisen that explored modern physics’ unsettling philosophical implications. I remember in the early 1980s, when two friends quite independently recommended I read Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (Capra, Tao of Physics). One, a mathematician, told me he was no expert on Eastern thought, but the physics was accurate and exceptionally clearly described. The other, a specialist on early Chinese Neo-Confucianism, told me he knew little about physics, but the description of much Eastern mystical thought was good. Capra’s book was the most prominent of many similar volumes appearing during this time, and was by far the most widely read.
Building on insights from quantum physics’ “founding fathers,” they also incorporated newer discoveries. Quantum entanglement in particular caught their attention. In quantum theory, particles separated by vast distances could retain a connection such that measuring one affected the other, for basic to quantum theory is the assertion that a particle’s speed and location cannot both be measured. Measuring one influences the other, which is where the issue of consciousness enters in.
Quantum entanglement indicates that different parts of a quantum system are linked in a way such that influencing one part instantaneously influences the other, no matter how far away it might be. Classical physics held this to be impossible, and Albert Einstein had used this alleged impossibility to argue that quantum theory was obviously incomplete since nothing traveled faster than the speed of light. In the sixties physicist John Bell developed a theorem that would in principle enable this issue to be tested empirically.
Over the years since, a number of experiments had been performed testing whether quantum entanglement really existed, and it had always survived the tests. But it seemed to some as if alternative “hidden variables” could also explain the observations, supporting Einstein’s objections. In 2015, eighty years after Einstein had made his objection and fifty years after Bell had devised his theorem, it finally became possible to conduct loophole free tests of quantum entanglement. Four experiments were conducted and quantum theory triumphed in all (Hanson and Shalm, “Spooky Action,” 59–65). Truly, as Haldane observed in 1927, “the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose” (Haldane, Possible Worlds, 286). The implications are profound. As Albert Wendt describes them: “The polarization of entangled photons would be correlated no matter how far apart they were, even across the universe. And since what goes for photons goes for other particles, and since all particles in the universe have at some point been entangled … everything in reality is correlated” (Wendt, Quantum Mind, 53–4). Capra and others demonstrated to a wide audience that science no longer stood in contradiction to many of the world’s mystical spiritual traditions, and subsequent experiments have supported them. Consciousness was a necessary part of the system, and the universe was connected as a complete whole, and instantaneously. This does not mean the universe is self-conscious, or necessarily even conscious that it is conscious, but if quantum mechanics depends on consciousness to complete the theory, it is reasonable now to say the universe in some way is conscious as experience. The challenge is to the other side, which denies it.
As Eddington had cautioned, science did not prove Eastern mysticism was correct, but it was compatible with it, “all the way down.” Long considered the “hardest” and most exact of all sciences, physics now denied that any account of the universe could be based on purely deterministic laws. The mechanists’ promissory note that even consciousness could be reduced to physical phenomena was proving impossible to pay.
However, one last divide separated quantum physics’ implications from influencing most of the rest of science. Quantum phenomena are unimaginably small. In any rigorous sense they cannot be measured because they are not really objects. Electrons sometimes act like balls, sometimes like clouds, and sometimes like waves, so measuring one, even in theory, is probably impossible. But if it were possible, the largest their radius could be is one billionth billionth of a meter. Atoms are about one hundred million times larger, but even an atom cannot be measured exactly because we would need to be able to measure its electrons to determine its size. But, again as an approximation, if a hydrogen atom were the size of a golf ball, a golf ball at the same scale would be the size of the earth (EMSB, “Relative Size of Atoms”). This size issue is important because by the time things get big enough to matter in our world, it seems as if quantum phenomena can be ignored. The traditional pre-quantum model works just fine. But recent research suggests this wall is crumbling.
Overcoming the size barrier
In 2018 the results of an extraordinary experiment were published in Nature. Scientists brought the motions of two drumheads into an entangled quantum state. The drumheads were about the width of a human hair, very fine by our standards, but truly enormous in quantum terms (Science News, “Einstein’s ‘spooky action’ goes massive”; Ockeleon-Korppi et al., “Stabilized entanglement”). They were on the verge of what we can see unaided, and far larger than many bacteria and other cells. These findings lend substantial credibility to the new field of quantum biology. Nor do they stand alone.
Birds apparently can see the earth’s magnetic field to aid them in navigation. Doing so apparently requires their being sensitive to quantum phenomena (Starr, “Quantum Coherence”). Using their sense of smell, fruit flies apparently can detect quantum level vibrations (Courtland, “Fly sniffs”). Perhaps most importantly, in 2018 an experiment with bacteria appears to demonstrate phenomena that were most easily explained by their entering quantum entanglement with photons (O’Callaghan, “Schrödinger’s Bacterium”).
Photosynthesis is one of the most important abilities life developed, for it enabled it to colonize the planet. In photosynthesis, plants gather photons through special cells which gather and transport the collected energy to where it can be transformed into chemical energy the plant can metabolize. Some researchers have discovered phenomena in this process that they believe indicate quantum level influences (Engel et al., “Evidence for wavelike energy transfer,” 782). Again, other researchers deny this, and it is currently a field of active debate (Ball, “Is photosynthesis quantumish?”). Physicist Paul Davies writes in the New Scientist that “the transition from living to non-living is marked by a distinctive transformation in the organization of information” where “top-down laws” that “make the flow of information depend on the global state of the system as well as nearby components.” There is a “well-known precedent in standard quantum mechanics” where “when a measurement is made of an atomic state—when new information becomes available—a completely different kind of evolution kicks in, sometimes called the collapse of the wave function” (Davies, “What is life?” 31). While work in quantum biology is still early, it is showing great promise at answering some of biology’s most perplexing current questions (Perry, “3 of Nature’s Greatest Mysteries”). That quantum physics very likely sheds light on larger scale phenomena such as avian migration underlines its implications for claiming consciousness is a dimension of reality.
Evidence and truth
Some years ago, I was discussing the possibility of psychic phenomena with an atheist who finally played what he thought was an unanswerable objection: such phenomena are impossible because consciousness does not exist independently of physical bodies. He knew this to be true because we cannot measure it outside bodies, though he admitted it existed within at least some living ones.
I replied, “So before Marie Curie measured it, radiation did not exist?”
He was silent.
His error grew from misunderstanding an important truth about science. Science’s power rests on its ability to expose errors, not to discover truth. As I explained in Chapter 4, what we sometimes generalize as the “scientific method” are those criteria scientists as a community have come to respect as fair methods for evaluating a scientific claim. There are two dimensions to this.
First, a scientific claim must be interesting. If I say the sun will rise in the east tomorrow because I have burned an offering to Sol, and it does, no scientist (except maybe some psychologists) will be the least bit interested. If I say I burned an offering to Sol so it will rise in the west, and then it does rise in the west, my claim will attract notice, and Sol may well attract worshipers.
The same principle applies to a scientific claim. Scientists must find it interesting, and then ideally have some means to test whether or not it survives a challenge. Even surviving a test does not prove its truth. It only proves it remains a reliable explanation for why something happened. The more it proves to be reliable, the more confidence scientists will have in it. The criteria for evaluating reliability emphasize experiment, measurement, and prediction. So far, quantum mechanics has proven 100 percent reliable.
Scientists continually seek to make their standards ever more exact, reducing uncertainty in interpreting a test’s results. But uncertainty about a claim can never be reduced to zero. Measurements still need to be interpreted. Ultimately judgment is still needed, and judgment always has a psychological dimension.
Sometimes a very tiny difference between a predicted outcome and the actual measurement indicates a fundamental flaw within a theory that has worked flawlessly for hundreds of years. A justly famous example involved Newtonian mechanics and Mercury’s perihelion. The perihelion is the point in a planet’s orbit where it approaches the sun most closely. When measured, Mercury’s perihelion shifted annually a little more than Newton’s theory of gravity predicted, adding up to less than one thirty thousandth of a full orbit around the sun over a century.
This predictive error disappeared when Einstein’s new theory of relativity was applied to the problem. But until Einstein’s theory was tested, Newton’s theory reigned secure despite the problem, nor was this unreasonable. Newtonian mechanics worked wonderfully well, and perhaps there was an explanation for Mercury’s orbit that, once grasped, would solve the problem. After all, this had happened before.
Much earlier, astronomers had discovered a small error in Uranus’ predicted orbit as calculated by Newtonian mechanics. The mystery was resolved when Urbain Le Verrier (1811–1877) hypothesized that an unknown planet still farther out would alter Uranus’ motion in the way observed. His mathematical calculations predicted where and when astronomers should look to find it. When they did, in 1846, the planet Neptune was discovered. Newtonian theory had predicted where astronomers should look to find the then unknown Neptune, thereby explaining the discrepancy between theory and observations about Uranus.
In short, a predictive error may or may not indicate an underlying problem with the larger theory, and when it is first discovered, there is no sure way to tell.
Predicting what has never been observed
Not being able to observe something is not in itself evidence it does not exist, and science has many cases where what had never been seen was accepted to exist because doing so solved otherwise unsolved problems. In the mid-1800s, long before there was experimental proof they existed, many eminent physicists treated atoms as real. Other eminent physicists rejected their existence because they could not be seen. Finally, in the late 1800s, measurements of cathode ray tubes revealed puzzling observations that could apparently only be explained if atoms existed. Atoms themselves were never actually “seen” by scientists until the 1970s, more than one hundred years after physicists and chemists had largely accepted their existence.
Nor were atoms the only unobservable entities important in physics. In 1897, physicist J. J. Thomson argued for the existence of a small unknown particle he called an electron, which was vastly smaller than the still unobserved atom. He won the Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1906. Wolfgang Pauli postulated the existence of neutrinos in 1930. There was no way then to test for their existence, which was only confirmed in 1958.
These “unobservables” solved problems and enabled predictions confirmed by experiments. Nothing else did as well. They did so consistently enough that scientists accepted their reality. Today unobservables such as multidimensions, multiple universes, and dark matter continue to play powerful roles in physics.
As the importance of unobserved entities in science demonstrates, there is no purely impersonal determination of many important scientific theories (Polanyi, Personal Knowledge). The facts often do not speak for themselves. Scientists’ personal judgment is needed to weigh the various factors that create the context within which these “facts” need to be evaluated, and scientists can differ in their judgment.
Two factors moderate scientists’ susceptibility to simply affirming their own desires. First is a personal commitment to truth, but that commitment is an individual virtue and differs in degree among scientists, who are also motivated by ambition and other desires. But these individual variations exist within science as a system. Scientists at their best seek truth, and the scientific system weeds out their errors, enabling other scientists to build further on what has so far survived as the most reliable knowledge (Ziman, Reliable Knowledge). Scientists such as Richard Feynman have pointed out that different theories with identical observational consequences can provide different perspectives on problems, and lead to different answers and different experiments. In addition, as Adam Beckler observes, “it’s not just the observable content of our scientific theories that matters. We use all of it, the observable and the unobservable, when we do science” (Beckler, “What is Good Science?”). This history needs to be kept in mind when we explore the question of consciousness.
The hard problem
Today many scientists call exploring the nature of consciousness the “hard problem.” No one is quite sure what consciousness is, although quantum mechanics seems to require it. If consciousness in some sense exists, it includes some kind of subjective experience. But, because of the initial mechanistic assumptions largely baked into scientific procedures, scientists seek to minimize subjective experience as far as possible. On many questions these procedures have been successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. As Steven Weinberg emphasized earlier in this chapter, science relies on what is impersonal and objective as far as it can, and when that dependency breaks down, as it did in quantum physics, a serious philosophical crisis arises. This lack of fit between the tools for scientific investigation and the phenomenon to be investigated is what makes the problem of studying consciousness so hard.
Consciousness is easier to point to than define because defining something requires standing outside it in some sense. But only conscious beings seek to define consciousness (de Quincey, Radical Nature. 62). Based on our daily experience, as well as the reports of others, consciousness is an awareness of existing separately from other existing things, or it is an experience of an egoless unity, with no sense of separation, which is often called a mystical or unitive experience. “Awareness” and “experience,” of course, presume consciousness rather than standing outside it. We end up where we began.
These kinds of experiences arise in one of three ways: in a world where consciousness once did not exist; in a world where, in some sense, consciousness is a basic characteristic of reality; or in a world where consciousness is an illusion that never really existed. Leading scientists can be found arguing all of these positions, though I have a hard time taking the third seriously, since we must first be conscious to experience an illusion, so illusion implies consciousness.
Because of the experiences I related in Chapter 5, I believe consciousness in some sense is a basic constituent of reality. If so, then consciousness plausibly exists as some kind of unitive awareness without a subject, because it is easy to imagine a universe where subjects able to experience subjectively did not exist, as after the Big Bang. Physicists Bernardo Kastrup, Henry Stapp, and Menas Kafatos summarize this position, writing, “The dynamics of all inanimate matter in the universe correspond to transpersonal mentation, just as an individual’s brain activity—which is also made of matter—corresponds to personal mentation” (Kastrup et al., “Coming to Grips”).
What contemporary science enables us to do is to abandon science’s last remaining theologically rooted assumption: that consciousness and matter are radically distinct and therefore a scientific explanation is solely in terms of matter without reference to consciousness. Of course, some scientists disagree, but their disagreement is no longer backed by unambiguous evidence; it instead reflects their judgment, a leap of faith, that someday, despite present appearances, their claim will be demonstrated. It has no more evidence in its favor, and I would argue less, than the alternative that awareness in some sense appears to be coexistent with all that exists.
A number of perceptive authors have written excellent books exploring these issues in great depth, and I have benefitted enormously from them. The most important for my purposes have been David Abram, Christian de Quincey, Thomas Nagel, Emma Restall Orr, and Alexander Wendt (Abram, Becoming Animal; de Quincey, Radical Nature; Nagel, Mind and Cosmos; Orr, The Wakeful World; Wendt, Quantum Mind). To explore these issues more deeply, I recommend reading them. I will give summaries here of some major points in what are careful and subtle arguments. Readers seeking more detail should turn to these authors. Each takes a different route to a similar conclusion: that awareness of some sort exists at every dimension of reality.
Self-organization
In Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel argues that in science what needs explaining is subjectivity. Consciousness is not an effect of physiological neurological processes, because they are “in themselves more than physical.” If I hit a nail into a rock with a hammer, something happens to the rock, but science would say the nail did not know anything happened to it. However, if I hit you with a hammer, you would experience the blow subjectively. You would know something happened to you. If you then wondered why I had hit you, you would be thinking about what had just happened. In a sense you step back from the experience to examine it. In Nagel’s terms, thinking “transcends subjectivity and … discover[s] what is objectively the case” (Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 72). As simple consciousness, I experience being hit rather like a worm experiences being hit. Unlike a worm, I might wonder why that happened. In doing so, I have gone beyond experience to step back and think about it. I then can ask why it happened. Seeking truth enters in to try to understand my experience. As Nagel puts it, “Reason connects us to truth directly—perception to truth indirectly” (Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 82, 83, 87).
Nagel then introduces the concept of “self-organization” to describe how consciousness becomes more complex than simple experience alone. I will frequently make use of this term in the chapters to come, so it is important to get at least an initial idea of what it means. “Self-organization” refers to the ability of ordered patterns to arise without their being imposed by a divine engineer, or through the linear working-out of reductionist laws governing their parts. The pattern emerges from the relations between its various components, and relations are not linear, but mutually influence one another. The pattern could be purely physical, such as the shape of a tornado, or it could involve consciousness, as when organisms reach sufficient complexity to be able to think, as well as experience. It can also refer to unintended patterns arising from actions by many organisms in some kinds of relationship.
The term “self-organization” has important applications in many fields. My first book explored self-organization in democracies (diZerega, Persuasion, Power and Polity). The patterns in a market economy, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” emerge out of the independent actions of many people. The same is true for the patterns that enable us to distinguish an ecosystem. Self-organization enables us to describe a whole as greater than the sum of its parts because, at a minimum, the context of their relations shapes the actions of all their parts. The processes generating the pattern transcend what we can deduce from its parts alone. This perspective will ultimately take us to polytheism, but there are some more steps we need to take along the way.
If consciousness is in some sense a basic aspect of reality, thinking emerges from conscious processes that are not thinking. Thinking is a pattern of consciousness that cannot be reduced to perception alone. Reason cannot be reduced to perception and desire because it also requires some self-awareness and the ability to separate a larger and more important context from the immediate desires of the self. To act beyond the spur of the moment we must anticipate our future situation, imaginatively projecting ourselves into some future circumstance. This future self of ours does not yet exist. It is not a perception, it is a creation.
Not every organism possesses the ability to stand back from experience and analyze its implications within a larger context, and those that do vary greatly in this capacity. However, a sufficiently complex organism can step back from perception and desire, and using reason, evaluate them within a larger context. A new quality, thinking, arises from sufficiently complex relationships among simpler organisms that cannot think. For example, I see something I desire, perhaps a work of art, but my reason tells me if I buy it a future “I” will not be able to pay rent. So, I pass it by.
The same capacities enabling us to put ourselves into our future shoes enable us to put ourselves into the shoes of others. In both cases we project our present self into the imagined mind of another self. Sometimes we knowingly sacrifice this future self’s well-being for the pleasures of the moment, but when we do not, we make use of our ability to empathize with others. To act in “self-interest” depends on our ability to recognize similarities in beings other than our immediate self, and to care for them (diZerega, “Deep Ecology and Liberalism”). Thinking therefore requires a capacity to step back and view what is immediate from a larger context, and self-interest requires this context to include others that are not me, which requires the capacity for empathy.
Truth
Nagel argues that if reason exists, then mind independent truths also exist, truths which require thinking to discover (Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 85). A purely physical being, determined by physical law in every respect, would not be a being where “truth” had any relevance to its actions. Examined carefully enough, it would be an automaton. A nail hit sufficiently hard with a hammer will penetrate wood. But this truthful observation is irrelevant to the nail, and the hammer; it is relevant only to the living being observing it.
Regardless of whether I was raised believing something is true, or convinced myself later that it was, or simply spent my life pursuing it without success, truth exists at a different level of reality than atoms. And as we saw earlier, science is possible only because many scientists pursue truth, even if science as a system can only eliminate errors and confirm what is provisionally true. The concept of truth requires awareness of its possibility, and science depends for its existence on scientists pursuing truth, even if science can never know whether or not truth has finally been discovered.
Natural teleology
Nagel introduces a concept he calls “natural teleology.” Teleology suggests a direction of future development exists that, absent interference, will eventually manifest. That the telos or “goal” of an acorn is to become an oak and that of a chicken egg is to become a chicken are teleological observations. It is irrelevant to this truth that most acorns and eggs never become either, because they are eaten. Absent external interference, organisms tend to be healthy. Health is another teleological concept. (The concept of teleology is avoided by reductionists who seek explanations entirely by past causes rather than future outcomes. It is not accidental that reductionists also deny consciousness can exist as a basic quality of reality.)
Similar to health for an organism or becoming an oak is for an acorn, truth is not a cause because it is unknown; rather, it is a goal, an attractor for the mind. Truth is an inherent “goal” for reason to pursue. While science as a system can never be sure when truth has been discovered, for it to work by expanding our store of reliable knowledge, as individuals, scientists must pursue truth.
While teleology makes sense when applied to living organisms, how can it apply to processes far transcending individual organisms? Nagel’s “natural teleology” requires that physical determinism not be total, nor that the universe be random. If determinism is total, all outcomes are the working-out of mechanical processes. If the universe is random, nothing will have an intrinsic direction of development. If we compare the universe to a cosmic dice game, the dice are loaded. Some outcomes are more likely than others. The dice still must be thrown and in any particular case the outcome is not determined, but over time their bias will show. Some outcomes will be more likely than others, and these outcomes will tend to produce increasingly complex systems (Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 92–3). Natural teleology manifests through the self-organization of complex systems, and Nagel holds that these laws of self-organization apply to matter “or of whatever is more basic than matter” (Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 93). Please keep this idea of self-organization in mind as we will return to it again and again.
Beyond our valuing of truth, what evidence do we have that such a teleological bias exists? We do not know what consciousness is, nor can we measure it, but we can look for evidence of its impact within the world where there is an absence of the physical structures assumed necessary for its existence. If the evidence is strong enough, the ubiquity of consciousness is a reasonable conclusion, and from it arises thinking and the values it implies.
Reality is not “value free”:
the iterated prisoner’s dilemma game
One clear example suggesting such a bias arises from a contest political scientist Robert Axelrod held for computer programmers. The goal was to discover the program that could win the iterated prisoner’s dilemma game (Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation).
If two people are arrested for a crime, the prisoner’s dilemma arises when something like the following happens. They are guilty, but each knows if both are silent they will get a year in prison, because while some evidence of a crime exists, there is not enough to demonstrate its severity. The prosecutor knows a more serious crime occurred, but lacks sufficient evidence to convict on it. The prisoners are then separated, and each is told if they inform on the other, they will get a six-month reduction in their sentence, while the other will get a sentence of four and a half years. However, if each implicates the other, both get four and a half years. They cannot communicate with one another. If the prisoners are self-interested, what do they do?
In the computerized version, “iterated” means the parties involved play this game over and over, with points substituting for years. Axelrod offered a prize for whoever could devise the winning computer strategy. It turned out cooperative strategies fared better than competitive ones, and the one that ultimately won was called “Tit for Tat.” It was very simple. Start by cooperating. As soon as the other side fails to cooperate, retaliate once. Do not escalate. Return to cooperating when the other side does.
Escalating retaliation risked further escalation in return, leading to unending conflict that depressed both scores. In addition, according to these competing programs, there was no advantage in seeking to lower the other’s score. The winning strategy focused only on improving its own score. Cooperative strategies were labeled “Nice.”
Next, Axelrod developed an “ecological” approach to make the game more like evolution as it happens in life. Initially the game’s environment consisted of many different strategies playing against one another. Some were unsuccessful, and were eliminated from future play. The next round pitted the remaining strategies against one another, and again, the least successful were eliminated. This weeding out continued until a single best strategy emerged. Axelrod’s intent was to develop better and better adapted “life forms” that “reproduced” by making it to the next series of games. In his words: “At first, poor programs and good programs are represented in equal proportions. But as time passes, the poorer ones begin to drop out and the good ones thrive. Success breeds more success, provided the success derives from interactions with other successful rules. If, on the other hand, a decision rule’s success derives from its ability to exploit other rules, then as these exploited rules die out, the exploiter’s base of support becomes eroded and the exploiter suffers a similar fate” (Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, 52). Exploitive programs might appear successful at first, but by eliminating the programs they exploit “in the long run it can destroy the very environment it needs for its own success” (Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, 52). Interestingly, Tit for Tat was not always the best strategy. When paired with a “mindless” strategy such as “Random,” which did not seek to win points, Tit for Tat sank to Random’s level. But, as its name suggests, Random sought neither to win nor to hurt its opponent. Random was mindless (Chen et al., “Axelrod’s Tournament”). A computer code seeking the most logical way to win a game is about as detached from ethics in our sense as one can get. Yet cooperation proved to have an intrinsic advantage over other strategies, an advantage embedded in reality. This is what we would expect if there was a slight natural teleology to reality that would give the advantage, ultimately, to cooperators. If an environment is mindless—that is, random—tit for tat is not successful; on the other hand, the concept of success has no real meaning.
But there is much more.
Mutualism
Traditionally evolution has been considered a purely competitive process, the opposite of tit for tat. But the reality is different. Mutualism arises when relationships between species are beneficial to both. The most immediately obvious examples are plants and their pollinators. But this example, so fundamental to life as we know it, only scratches the surface of mutualism in the plant world.
The vital importance of mycorrhizal fungi and the plants whose roots they link is increasingly recognized as vitally important. For example, Suzanne Simard discovered birch and Douglas fir trees in northwestern forests are connected underground through these mycorrhizal filaments. In the winter, when birch have no leaves, nutrients flow from the firs to the birch. In the summer, especially if the fir is in the shade, the birch benefits the firs. Three very different species are involved: fungi, which are more closely related to ourselves than to any plant; the broad-leafed birch; and the coniferous firs (Gorzelak et al., “Interplant communication”). Once looked for, mutualism appears all over. For example, lichens are not a single organism. They are symbiotic communities of fungi and algae. Legumes, such as beans, exist in close association with rhizobia bacteria, which is why they add nitrogen to the soil. And many animals depend on nutritional or digestive symbiosis with bacteria to flourish—including cows, termites, and ourselves. It is safe to say our world would look entirely different, and be far simpler, in the absence of symbiotic relations.
In keeping with the logic of the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, most mutualism seems to have evolved from previously antagonistic relationships (Mayhew, Discovering Evolutionary Biology, 114). Successful long-term (iterated) strategies for well-being tended to favor cooperation, and the same holds true in the biological world. The language of competition and zero-sum thinking cannot grasp the principles underlying biological diversity any more than they can the pure logic of a computer program. Again, there seems to be a “natural teleology” at work.
But we are raised to believe that the road to success is through competition. Americans, fortified by economists, like to talk about the market as competitive, and emphasize how competition makes life better for all. But market competition emerges from cooperation. People cooperate to form businesses. Competition arises when two or more businesses seek the same customers or buyers seek a scarce product such that there is not enough to go around. From these initially cooperative foundations, a social ecology arises, one of mind-bending complexity weaving together competition and cooperation. But it would rapidly dissolve if everyone treated their relationships as competitive. A social world based on competition would be an impoverished place, if it could exist at all.
Nor is this truth unique to human beings.
Eusociality
Eusociality challenges the common notion in some biological circles that altruism is genetically advantageous. Mutualism serves all the partners, but how might a kind of altruism arise where an organism sacrifices its own interests for the benefit of unrelated others?
Eusociality exists in species with advanced levels of social organization and where multiple generations perform different functions by means of an altruistic division of labor. Ants, termites, and some bees and wasps are eusocial, as are a crustacean, a rodent, the African wild dog, and we humans. While eusocial species are few, compared to the total number of species, in terms of their biological success they represent what E. O. Wilson describes as The Social Conquest of the Earth (Wilson, The Social Conquest of the Earth). For example, while amounting to about 2 percent of over nine hundred thousand known insect species, eusocial species make up more than half the insect biomass.
Eusociality developed from earlier, more narrowly individual organisms and apparently arises from a combination of unusual ecological and biological factors. As with the evolution of cooperation in the prisoner’s dilemma game, prolonged iteration of interactions within a species seems to be required. Under these conditions the logic of cooperation emerges.
Solitary ancestors of eusocial bees and wasps built nests and cared for their offspring, opening the door to further development of those characteristics. Groups are more effective in defending nests and offspring against predators and parasites, and large groups are better at it than small ones. At this point, group selection begins to dominate individual selection, giving the evolutionary advantage to more integrated and cooperative groups over less integrated and cooperative ones. Wilson points out that while selfish individuals will generally beat altruistic individuals, which supports the individualistic selfish gene model he once accepted, groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals (Wilson, The Social Conquest of the Earth, 162–3). When those conditions exist, it is not difficult to imagine how group selection could ultimately create cooperative breeding and then caste systems (the defining property of eusociality in the strong sense).
Wilson and Hölldobler argue that eusociality in its strongest sense is dependent on the evolution of an anatomically distinct worker caste (Wilson and Hölldobler, Eusociality). The advantages arising from the division of labor magnify the developing further specialization in a self-organizing process as successes in one kind of cooperation set the stage for successes in others. In insects the first step is a division of labor between those who reproduce and those who serve the group, as with bees. Then the worker caste becomes more diverse and specialized, as in ants. And further specializations then unfold (Hölldobler and Wilson, The Ants). This process can proceed so far that what is considered a single organism can change, and in the most eusocial cases “a colony can most meaningfully be called a superorganism” (Wilson and Hölldobler, Eusociality). The ancestors of ants were once more solitary and less specialized. Today most ants cannot even reproduce. Wilson goes so far as to describe most “individual” ants as “robots” of their queen. It is as if our hands and feet could physically detach from our body, to serve us better. Wilson describes ant colonies as superorganisms based on queens.
Human eusociality arose by different means than in insects, and is not as complete. Even India’s caste system never approached the caste distinctions in eusocial insects. Individuals can also have interests that hurt the groups within which they live, and sometimes they act on them. Further, in contrast to eusocial insects, human societies of any size contain different and sometimes overlapping groups with their own group interests. Yet here as well, the triumph of cooperation over other approaches to intraspecies relationships is clear. This truth is hidden from many of us by a deeply flawed understanding of individuality, rooted in Protestant assumptions. I will discuss this in the next chapter.
Eusocial qualities give a species an evolutionary advantage over less social ones, but it takes a particular kind of environment to enable it to arise through group selection. As within the iterated prisoner’s dilemma game, certain conditions are necessary for this arrangement to emerge, but once it emerges, it beats all competitors. Again, this condition fits Nagel’s discussion of a “natural teleology.”
To this point, we have seen that the logic of cooperation appears intrinsic to the logic of a computer program, and reappears in cases of cooperation among living organisms. This also means that truthfulness has an intrinsic long-range advantage over deception for equal organisms in relation to one another.
Mind in unexpected places
We think of mind as existing when an organism can remember past experiences and learn from them; when it can discern relevant differences in its environment, and respond appropriately; and, in some cases, when it can engage in complex communication. Traditionally minds have been thought to be limited to some animals, who have developed complex biological structures such as brains and nerves to facilitate minded activity. A complex brain was supposedly needed for a mind to exist, strengthening the claim that consciousness arises internally within certain organisms.
Scientists have now discovered this is not the case.
In some relevant sense, mind exists far more widely within the world. A hint exists in the previous example of mutualism between three very different species: firs, birch, and fungi. Another stronger one involves “mother trees” in these same forests. Mother trees are old firs who are therefore the most connected by underground mycorrhizal networks with other trees. They feed little firs through these networks, but as Suzanne Simard discovered, they feed those related to themselves more than those that are not. In addition, they reduce competition between their roots and the roots of their smaller kin. On the other hand, if a seedling that is kin to the tree was sick, the mother tree would direct more carbon to neighboring seedlings, regardless of relationship, to encourage better health. In other words, they could distinguish between kin and not kin, assist both, favor kin and refrain from action that might hurt them, but also have a sense of the larger whole as more important than kin alone (Petersen, “Web of the Woods”; Markham, “Trees talk to each other”; Simard, TED talk). What Simard discovered regarding Douglas fir and paper birch seems to apply to plants within natural ecosystems in general (Toomey, “Exploring How and Why”). We would have no problem attributing this behavior to conscious intent if observed among human beings.
Additional research has found something perhaps even more amazing. When environmental conditions deteriorate for one species of tree, its declining members can then feed resources to another better-adapted species through these underground networks. This was found to be the case with Douglas fir and ponderosa pine, where declining firs sent resources that assisted the pines. Jennifer Fraser writes: “It wasn’t a trivial amount of food, either. The amount transferred and measured by radioactive carbon labelling was about the same as the energetic cost of reproduction—a significant donation by any standard” (Fraser, “Dying Trees”; Song et al., “Defoliation of inferior Douglas-fir”).
At least some plants also have memories and can learn from past experiences. This has been proven in experiments with mimosas, whose leaves normally fold up when touched. Australian scientist Monica Gagliano and her colleagues dropped water on mimosa leaves, initially prompting them to close up. The mimosa stopped closing their leaves when repeated disturbance had no damaging consequences, acquiring this learned behavior in a matter of seconds. Further, learning was faster in less favorable environments. These plants also remembered what they had learned for several weeks. The study’s authors write: “Astonishingly, Mimosa can display the learned response even when left undisturbed in a more favorable environment for a month. This relatively long-lasting learned behavioral change as a result of previous experience matches the persistence of habituation effects observed in many animals” (Gagliano et al., “Experience teaches plants”). Gagliano has continued her research searching for evidence of consciousness in plants such as peas, and in companion planting experiments, and finding it (Gagliano, Thus Spoke the Plant).
Still simpler organisms can also learn and, to a point, remember. Slime molds, which in the cases studied are essentially single cells, can solve mazes and other puzzles, escape from traps, and learn that what may once have appeared harmful can be safely ignored. Slime molds were taught to ignore substances that they would normally avoid, such as caffeine. Unlike mimosa, if left to themselves, slime molds “forget” what they learned within a few days, but if carefully dried, so they enter into dormancy, when revived a year later, they will “remember” what they “learned.” This finding is all the more interesting because the process of going dormant and then reviving involves substantial physical and biochemical changes (Miskivitch, “Slime Molds”; Yong, “A Brainless Slime”). On the other hand, this short-term memory can be transferred to naïve slime molds. Separate molds will tend to fuse together, and when they do, the “new” mold obtains memories from the smaller one. These memories were not diluted, but extended equally throughout the larger organism. Experiments evaluating these findings have been applied more than two thousand times, with the same results. As with the discoveries about plants, no one understands how this happens (Yong, “A Brainless Slime”). This kind of learning is called “habituation,” and is considered the most primitive form of learning. We learn this way as well. For example, habituation enables people to tune out nonessential stimuli and focus on the things that really demand attention. I once rented an apartment for a summer’s research, not knowing it was next to railroad tracks. The first night I was awakened by the noise
and vibrations from an approaching train. I wondered how I, a light sleeper, would handle a summer here. Within a week I slept soundly all night and never heard the train again. Below the level of explicit awareness, I remembered this sound and accompanying vibrations were not worthy of attention.
To summarize so far, the world is not devoid of values, and these values privilege cooperation over competition. The elaboration of this cooperative principle requires competition to exist in order to demonstrate cooperation’s selective advantage. The value of cooperation appears deeply embedded in life as such, as well as simple logic. Mind appears to be needed for this cooperation to emerge (even in Axelrod’s case, programmers needed to write the programs). Mind appears to exist in organisms that do not have the biological structures long thought necessary for mind to exist. Even in the absence of brains and neural tissues, consciousness as perception, decision-making, learning, and memory exist in plants and even in single cells. It becomes more developed as an organism becomes more complex, but exists even at the cellular level.
Memory
Memory is required for a self to exist. A self in the sense that I am using it is simpler than our conception of ourselves. It is a point of awareness in a context where it experiences other things that are not it. Here I find Orr’s work very insightful. She observes: “As the subject becomes self-defined it asserts a measure of control, adjusting its perception of its external and internal context, honing the coherence of its own part of nature’s mind. The inner community of minds develops the capacity to respond as a coherent interiority of mind. It is a development that is happening all the time. It is a process that continues until the perceptive data allows for thought, consideration, and consciousness” (Orr, The Wakeful World, 202–3).
We have seen such focused awareness can emerge at the level of a single cell.
A self arises from experiencing what Emma Restall Orr describes as a “flow of moments,” whose inner coherence memory makes possible (Orr, The Wakeful World, 231). Selves arise as emergent properties from a more diffuse “primal” consciousness when relations between the elements constituting an entity become complex enough to make memory possible, as we have found exists in a simple form in even the simplest cells. With a growing capacity for memory, Orr writes, “what we perceive is the depth and breadth of soul, and every soul is an integral part of nature as a whole” (Orr, The Wakeful World, 215). Every soul exists within the all-encompassing field of awareness that is sometimes accessed through mystical experience.
We have tracked crucial dimensions of a self down to the level of single cells. Where life exists, consciousness does not appear to be either emergent or illusory, but life as we understand it, and selves, are. As new qualities emerge with growing complexity within the physical world, the same holds true in the world of awareness. When we have those kinds of experiences where the self disappears into a state of mystical oneness, consciousness is experienced as all-encompassing and beyond the ability of any self to describe.
Awareness precedes complexity, not the other way around. Alternatively, if awareness is a derivative of nonconscious matter, it must arise within the simplest forms of life, without more complex physical structures such as nerves, that were long considered necessary for consciousness to exist. There appears to be no living entity that does not have at least some basic consciousness, and even self.
But if consciousness in some way is a basic quality of reality, how does it become isolated in individuals?