Every Model Is A Lie But Some Models Explain More Than Others

So just to clarify, right, one of the grand goals of modern physics is to build a theory of everything at all. Not a very beautiful name. But a theory of everything that would in principle explain all that we can observe in nature in terms of a single force, so to speak. And it's a very beautiful idea. It's very Platonist in its essence, you know, that the essence of nature is mathematical. There is one big symmetry out there and that symmetry is beautiful and beauty is truth. And hence, you know, there has to be that sort of idea in nature as well. And a lot of people, including Einstein — Einstein spent 20 years of his life looking for this theory of everything, this unifying theory, and of course he didn't find it.

In today's program of On Being, with Krista Tippett, Marcelo Gleiser said something that was very interesting to me.

Ms. Tippett: Hmm. So in your recent writing, each of you is driven from different directions by an observation that we have been working, thinking, acting on outdated models of reality, a limited conception of humanity and of the universe and even of science. I mean, Marcelo, you talk about growing up as you became interested in science, fascinated with this idea of unification, which was an idea of Einstein. And you talk about going to grad school, following this intellectual Holy Grail.

Dr. Gleiser: Mm-hmm.

Ms. Tippett: But you don't quite see it that way anymore.

Dr. Gleiser: Right. So just to clarify, right, I went to grad school trying to find it too, right, and after many years doing this and talking to lots of my colleagues I came to the conclusion that that's impossible. That the theory of everything is an impossibility as a matter of principle. And the problem is this: that the way we understand the world — and interrupt me if I go on for too long.

Ms. Tippett: No, no. It's good. We're all — we're with you.

Dr. Gleiser: The way we understand the world is very much based on what we can see of the world, right? Science is based on measurements and observations. And the notion that we can actually come up and have a theory that explains everything assumes that we can know everything, right? That we can go out and measure everything there is to measure about nature and come up with this beautiful theory of everything. And since we cannot measure all there is to measure, since our tools have limitations, we are definitely limited in how much we can know of the world.

So you can even build a theory that would explain everything that we know now. But then two weeks from now, someone else will come and find something new that does not fit in your theory. And that's not a theory of everything anymore because it doesn't include everything that can be included.

Which is about as obvious a series of points as I can imagine, yet it has captured the minds of many scientists as obsessively and the popularization of science so cluelessly as the far more innocently believed in quest to turn base metal into gold that the alchemists were engaged in.   They had the excuse that they didn't understand the nature of gold and other metals, that they were, for all human purposes, immutable elements, that people couldn't change one to another, for all their ability to change the forms of other metals through them with other elements by chemical action.   I suspect that something Marilynne Robinson and Marcello Gleiser said later in the same conversation points to why those who cleverly and, less often, brilliantly can address very narrow aspects of physical reality are so basically clueless about the futility of this race after the impossible to have.  And it is in those engaged in another Cerveantean quest to turn our conscious minds into comprehensible molecular actions that a clue to their cluelessness is found.

Ms. Tippett: Here's a line of Reverend Ames in Gilead [one of M.R.'s novels]: "This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it." Just before we finish, let's talk a little bit about mind, which takes us a little bit outside the realm of physics, but very much into your writing, Marilynne.

Ms. Robinson: Mm-hmm.

Ms. Tippett: And somehow, the primacy, the centrality of our minds, the power of them, even in all of this discerning of distant galaxies.

Ms. Robinson: Well, it's I think one of the things that is fascinating is that we don't know who we are. Human beings in acting out history describe themselves and every new epic is a new description of what human beings are. Every life is a new description of what human beings are. Every work of science, every object of art is new information. And it is inconceivable at this point that we could say anything final about what the human mind is, because it is demonstrating, you know, in beautiful ways and terrifying ways, that it will surprise us over and over and over again. You know?

And if I read something that seems to me — I mean, we have mind in two senses, or of several senses, but one of them is this sort of the individual striving mind: I want to come up to the mark. I want to follow my passion. I want to let myself think about something that seems beautiful to me. There's that mind. And then there is the larger collective mind that somehow or other seems to sort of magnify impulses and so on that occur among us individually.

You know, when you think how even the most brilliant people living, you know, in the first century would see how we know and what we know now and so on, which is basically a pure elaboration of what they'd already started, nevertheless they would be completely astonished, they would say, that human beings could've done such a thing. You know? We know things about our minds because we have seen them reaching and reaching and unfolding in this uncanny way that they do.

And I just think that undervaluing mind, it distorts what we're capable of. You know? I don't know. That's what I think. I think the mind is fantastically competent and beautiful and in a very large degree unexplored.

Ms. Tippett: Marcelo, is this new frontier of mind and consciousness, is it challenging for physics? Or where does it fit into your way of seeing the world?

Dr. Gleiser: It's very challenging, because the way physics traditionally has worked is through this reductionistic method, right? You look at a complicated problem, you break it down into small parts, you understand how these small parts work and then try to make sense of the whole. And this extrapolation works beautifully when you talk about stars and galaxies, but it really fails miserably when you're talking about the mind or the brain. Right?

So as I said earlier on, you can't understand the brain by understanding how a neuron works. And so it poses a tremendous difficulty for physics because we can't model the brain. Right? And physicists, that's what we do for a living. We make models. We test our hypothesis. And we need a different kind of explanatory, descriptive tool.

[Laughter from audience]

Dr. Gleiser: Because the way we have dealt with things just won't work for the brain. So what would that be now, right? So there is this whole new notion that comes from complexity theory that the mind is an emergent phenomenon that we can't quite explain that has to do with the concatenation of many different groups of neurons at the same time. So the interesting thing about that is that, if that is true, then new laws will emerge at different levels of complexity. And you can't go from one level to the other level directly. You really need a completely different kind of explanation. And we're not there yet, but it's just an alternative way of thinking about how the brain works. And to me, given the complexity, even if we go there and we gain some level of understanding above what we know now, it's always going to be incomplete, just like Marilynne said.

Ms. Tippett: But I think that part is exciting for you, the fact that it will be incomplete, the fact that there will always be more to learn.

Dr. Gleiser: Yes. When I was saying this, I was thinking can we ever build a machine that thinks? Right? That's really the question, right? Because if you could build a clock that thinks, right, then you'd really say, yes, we mechanized the brain and we understand exactly how it works and what are the rules that make it all make sense. But I am a skeptic when it comes to that. I really am, at least for the foreseeable future. I don't see how even increasing the power of computers we'll be able to do that.

What we will be able to do is what the Internet is already doing, which is creating an enormous databank of information that will almost look intelligent, but you will always be asking the questions. You know, it's the asking of the question that is the mystery, not so much how you find the ways to answer it.

Needless to say, I'm recommending you listen to the program or the entire recorded conversation and read the transcript.

My point is that it is one of the most commonly found conceits of many phyicists today, Sean Carroll, Lawrence Krauss, ... that they can merely ignore the fact that everything they are creating, everything they have based their ideas on is a peculiarly human idea, that it is bounded and limited by human limits which, much as they must hate the idea, they share with those other benighted human beings who they so often disdain.  That physics can't escape its origins and the limits of those origins, their minds, the minds of their brilliant teachers and the most famous men in the history of physics and science.

Their frequent resort, to consult the materialistic priesthoods claiming the even more absurd, that they can come up with the equivalent of physics to dispose of those bounds and limits by coming up with even more clueless claims about the invisible, inaccessible, ineffable minds whose limits are even more relevant to the claims of psychology and its modern sects of neurology and consciousness studies.   Perhaps that they grasp onto those pictures that the entirely artificial imaging of brains gives further insight into their refusal to acknowledge the limits and bounds that contains all of human culture. In their faith, consulting their modern day shamans and priests, they continue to ignore that those are the product of very human choices in sampling, what to include, what to leave out, how to analyze the magnetic shadows those produce. And, most telling of all, they refuse to take into account that all of the reports linking the flashy, colorful images to consciousness is utterly and inevitably dependent on the reports of those whose brains were thus imaged.  What happens in their experience is entirely inaccessible to would-be science except by their anecdotal reports of entirely subjective experience.

Materialism, or its modern labels, naturalism, physicalism,.... are all models of reality and they are all based in a sort of meta-lie, a refusal by these people to face the inescapable fact of all of human culture, all of human thought, that it is not the direct reproduction of anything but a peculiarly human product that carries all of the collective limits of our thinking, it's that no matter how much of the individual peculiarities of thought can be wrung out by the common consensus of scientists, none of whom can escape the limits of their own minds and thoughts and their own experience.   Just as there isn't a single object in the universe that science has described comprehensively and exhaustively, there is no mind that has exceeded the limits it exists in.  Collective agreement, which is what science is, might help to some extent, and that is the faith that democracy is based in, but it can't do what it can't do.