The Cosmic Designer

Having written The Cosmic Design and the Designer to explore what modern science can say about the nature of our universe and reality, I’ve been wondering what it might be possible to tell about the Designer: did it have an origin, where did it come from, what is it like? The first two questions seem, on the face of it anyway, truly unknowable. They eventually reach the point of whether it’s turtles all the way down. But the question of what the Designer might be like, how it might be described, is perhaps open to some exploration.

Considering the nature of the Designer depends on the questions we ask. We might start by asking if, from our perspective, the Designer did a good job or a bad one? Given the state of the world we live in at the dawn of the 21^st Century, you could go either way.

Or we might begin by considering whether humans are in the Designer’s image. (Humans have long imagined their gods in their own image, but somehow greater.) At our best, we are conscious, rational individuals with free will and the capacity to act with the moral sense of right and wrong, good and bad. At our worst, we are killers who shit in our our nest and do not always even eat what we kill. In between, we are weak souls often unable to perceive and understand our own self-interest. The cosmic design allows our best form, so perhaps the Designer is also a rational agent with free will, one that defines, by its own nature, the good. I’ll go with that.

Freud’s work on the healthy soul and Alastair McIntyre on individual practical reasoners can help us describe the rational agent. According to Freud, the psychically healthy individual is one where our I (das Ich) has absorbed the It (das Es) and the Over-I (das Uberich). The I holds the soul's facility of intellect and reason. In Freud's conception, psychic health is attaining the proper internal order, one where the I overcomes and absorbs the Over-I (the imposed internal agent of outside authority) and the It (the drives and desires of our animal and infantile self). Thus freed, the individual becomes capable of choosing and acting in a rational and practical manner, following our own defined ends and goals, within the confines of what reality presents. McIntyre looks to moral virtue (aretḗ) as elaborated by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Human beings are animals, they begin as such and remain as such with the bodily desires and needs of all animals. We possess the intelligence common to other animals such as the dolphins and our fellow great apes. But with language we can move beyond this to become independent practical reasoners (Freud’s healthy soul) following the necessary reciprocal obligations of giving and receiving (the virtues) that allow us as social animals to collectively live the good life.

Free will manifests as choice. Choice – the ability to choose and the act of choosing (as confined only by the laws of nature) – expresses free will. How does choice get made? Through individual consciousness. Consciousness allows choice and is a property of an individual agency, a being. Free will is an expression of an individual consciousness operating in a universe that permits the ability to choose between different achievable outcomes. Consciousness powers the will.

Consciousness – in the human at least – rides a wave generated by individual, biologically-based processes running through and on our “wetware” of neurons and neural networks with inputs from our bodily organs, processes and senses. These processes produce what might be termed native intelligence (as opposed to artificial intelligence) one that comes about through the biological equivalent of “machine learning” and probably includes quantum computing elements and entangled states. When the brain and neural networks of higher animals – great apes, dolphins and others – became complex enough to support quantum processing, that may have been the point at which consciousness is kickstarted into self-consciousness.

Humans are self-conscious creatures capable of reasoning and choice and, thus, also of acting morally. If we are in the image of the Designer, it must be also. The Designer included free will in the design because it enjoys free will and values it. Of course, who really knows and how could we tell? One might suppose our apparently designed universe was a random creation out of nothing, simply an accident (one of an infinite variety of random big bangs). Or perhaps it’s some form of “simulation” (as a higher dimensional form of entertainment?). But as I have argued before, these beg the questions of how and why there should be anything rather than nothing. If there was a design – and following St. Thomas’ finger – the Designer had to be an individual, conscious being.

The Cosmic Reset

In an early episode of the original Star Trek, aliens put Kirk on a rugged planet to duel with the captain of a rival Gorn ship. Kirk wins as the dinosaur-like Gorn was intelligent but really slow.

On Earth, dinosaurs never became intelligent. Arising 240 million years ago, they survived some 175 million years and for 135 million of those were the dominant land animal. By the time they became extinct, dinosaurs had perfected two ways of living: eating plants or eating each other. The plant eaters were excellent at converting plant matter into animal bulk and could grow very large. The carnivores were very good at using tooth and claw to eat the vegetarians. Some carnivores – such as the raptors – may have hunted in pacts and perhaps had some wolf-like intelligence. But in general, brain power doesn’t seem to have been on the dinosaurs’ primary evolutionary path.

Mammals arose just 10-15 million years after the dinosaurs. But for most of their first 160 million years, they lived underfoot as squirrel-sized, nocturnal plant eaters and insectivores. For this life style, relatively larger brains gave an evolutionary advantage. So under the feet of the dinosaurs, mammals got smart. Still, even with their brains, they could not compete with tooth and claw.

Enter the six-mile wide asteroid that found the earth 66 million years ago. That asteroid – nudged out of its distant orbit by a chance encounter with another rock or after swinging too close to Jupiter or Saturn – had travelled silently on its way for perhaps a million years to arrive just seconds before the earth moved just beyond it in its own orbit. When it hit, it set the earth on fire and after it had burned away, caused a long dark winter that left most creatures dead and many extinct, including the non-avian dinosaurs. This disaster was, however, good news for the mammals. Perhaps because they were small, lived underground and could eat anything, some survived (along with birds, who are smart flying dinosaurs). Within a million years, the earth had recovered and mammals were the dominant large land animal. Some of those eventually evolved even further in reliance on brains, eventually producing us.

That asteroid wiped the slate clean, resetting the course of animal evolution in favor of the brain and intelligence. There is no reason to assume that an additional 66 million years would have led the dinosaurs towards the Gorn as in 175 million, it had not done so. It’s as if the universe has a bias in favor of intelligence and sent a “do-over” to set things right.

Himself the Age Transfigured (#2)

We have come to be the movement,
The moment of the cosmos.
Each particle that exists,
Changes and touches all others.
And we are the awareness.

To each change, we give name.
We track each touch,
We push all levers,
Or learn them just the same.
We are the lever,
The hand that encompasses.

Each molecule flowing over and around
Every other molecule
Is perceived by us,
Measured by us,
Called into being by us.

Ours is the time in which
The Universe came into it own.
We ride the surf and,
At the same time,
Dive the waters.

That which we cannot do,
We can imagine doing.
Ours is the power and the glory,
To be true.

GMG 

Interlude: Ex nihilo nihil fit

Wisdom is the highest goal of man; our knowledge as such is obscure, but it is illumined by searching.

Xenophanes in Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought

Some 2500 years ago, having moved beyond the anthropomorphic religion of Homeric Greece, the Greek Pre-Socratic thinkers began seeking to understand reality through reason and observation. They were doing science in the sense of trying to explain the fundamental facts of existence according to logical standards and the kinds of observational tools then available. They sought to explain two basic elements of reality, that anything exists and the process by which things change.

Heraclitus saw only change: “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.... It is in changing that things find repose.” For him, the universe was uncreated, it always existed, coming apart and back together again. He saw fire – the most visible form of energy – as the principle force of change, as could be seen in the cool becoming hot and the wet, dry.

Parmenides and the Eleatic School made central the logical claim that nothing can come from nothing. Parmenides, like Heraclitus, saw no reason to explain existence as “to be is possible and not-to-be is impossible.” The Eleatics saw the universe as unique, uncreated, unchanging and unbound. They argued that if the universe was bound in space or time, that would mean that it was not unique. If it was not unique, it could not be the universe. The Eleatics denied the existence of change. Zeno used various paradoxes of logic to argue, for example, that things cannot move as “if anything is moving, it must be moving either in the place in which it is or in a place in which it is not” and neither is possible.

Despite the Eleatics, the fact that things appear to change needed explanation. Empedocles accepted the monist view of reality: the universe is singular and unbounded. He pictured it as a circle containing the All. But while the underlying reality is unchanging, the four basic elements – fire, air, water and earth – produce change by combining and separating driven by the opposing forces of Love (philia) and Strife. Anaxagoras developed this approach further by positing a universe made up of an infinite number of particles of all possible qualities while “in everything there is a portion of everything else.” In the original cosmos, all these fundamental particles already existed but were mixed and therefore left the total without quality. Mind (nous) set them in motion and caused them to be separated into what now exists.

In their answers to the questions of why anything exists and how things change, the pre-Socratics said everything that we can logically say. The cosmology of Empedocles and Anaxagoras could be read as an early premonition of our modern version. Our understanding of reality includes seemingly unchanging fundamental particles and forces making up the changing observable. Love and Strife can be read as Gravity and Dark Energy, one pulling matter together and the other pushing it apart. More generally, the essential dynamic of everything that exists – natural and human – can be seen as either a coming together or a coming apart.

It was while reading Empedocles that I went back to reconsider the modern theory of the creation of the universe from the Big Bang. The Big Bang theory essentially explains nothing. Literally. It does not and cannot explain where whatever it was that went “bang” came from. Ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing can come from nothing. Further following the Eleatics, it is not possible to understand the universe as expanding since that would require space to expand into. Modern cosmology seeks to sidestep this by positing that space itself expands as the surface of a balloon expands as it’s pumped up. (Where does it expand into?) Or perhaps our universe is one of many in some higher dimensional multi-verse. (And in what space and from where does that come?) Obviously, these too explain nothing.

That the universe exists, that we exist, must mean that something always existed. That the universe seems to be expanding may be better understood as an unchanging totality without boundaries of time or space. Everything that exists – in the “past, present or future” actually exists at once, whole. Stephen Hawking once hinted at this by noting that the universe could be understood as one big wave function, a singluar All. That the universe appears to be expanding under the influence of dark energy and will eventually decompose into its constituent particles may simply be the state of this All. It is we – individual living beings – that move through reality that experience change and time.

This leaves the question of why there should be something rather than nothing in the first place unexplained except by the very fact that we exist. I don’t know where any of this leads except to wonder.

A Conclusion to a Still Unwritten Book: The End?

I previously have suggested that the universe seems to have been designed and that this therefore implies a designer. Following this supposition further leads to two fundamental questions: where did the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit. Subsidiary questions might include what materials and tools did the designer use and what can be said of the designer? We might also wonder if the designer watches or cares for us or has any of the other attributes humans have often associated with their gods such as being infinitely powerful, wise, kind, all knowing, loving, good etc?

Before taking a stab at these questions, it is worth noting that physicists and cosmologists are also trying to peer behind the curtain of creation. String theorists are still seeking – despite a lack of any experimental evidence offered by current high energy physics – to reconcile relativity and quantum physics and thereby explain the menagerie of observed elementary particles and forces. Recently, they have found a set of one quadrillion possible solutions to string equations within a ten-dimensional spacetime that have “the same set of matter particles as exists in our universe.” But there remains no experimental evidence or process for deciding which of these quadrillion, if any, may be applicable to the observed reality.

Also, for the past decade or so, cosmologists have been looking at alternatives to the inflationary scenario of the post-Big Bang universe. Inflation explains features of the cosmic background radiation. However, it does not explain from where the Big Bang itself arose beyond the suggestion that it came from some quantum fluctuation within a primordial singularity. An attractive alternative to having to explain any sort of a beginning is to assume that the Big Bang was simply our side of a “bounce” or “collision” between universes.

All these efforts to explain what might otherwise appear to be an amazing Goldilocks universe – in which all the elemental particles and forces seem to lead to the evolution of complexity and the seeming inevitability of life – must in the end still suppose something unexplained and just given: a multidimensional universe beyond ours, a singularity just sitting there at the beginning of time or a series of bouncing universes just following one another. (This latter leaves aside the issue of dark energy’s apparent speeding up of the expansion of our universe so that it never reverses into a big crunch. Instead, it seems that eventually – in some enormous 10 to the 100th years – matter will have broken down and even black holes will be warmer than space and radiate away with a final pop.)

It might also be worth pausing to wonder why the universe would have to be designed rather than simply “wished” into being as befitting an all-powerful “god.” Put another way, why would a creator need to design a universe using materials and processes that we would find understandable as laws of physics? Was the designer constrained in some way – perhaps by some preexisting Platonic Forms – to act through means such as singularities and Higgs fields?

Occam’s Razor suggests to me that we simply acknowledge that our universe seems to have a design discoverable by science and wonder about the designer. Following this line of inquiry, I return to considering where might have the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit?

It seems to me that there is no way to answer the where question. One must either posit that there never was an original moment of creation or accept that there was such a moment and recognize it as an uncaused first cause. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Either the designer was caused – by what, from where? – or was itself the First Cause. This seems to me the unanswerable question behind all others and thus the essential mystery at the bottom of all science, religion and philosophy.

The why question may be somewhat more amenable. Consider that the universe does appear to have been designed and put into action according to the physical laws thereby built into it. Could it be a grand simulation to test theories of good and evil, a complex and especially vivid dream or simply a work of art? Might it be a majestic theater on which a countless number of actors play our parts and then disappear off stage thus making the designer a cosmic Shakespeare? Or might it have been set in motion for the consciousness behind the design to dump itself into to avoid an endless eternity of loneliness and thereby undergo an almost endless series of experiences acted through everyone and everything? I myself drift toward the last suggestion and to the possibility of a universe in which consciousness is primordial and attaches to everything with mass (a kind of panpsychism). Life would offer the most interesting existence. So perhaps the designer looks out through the being of everything, in a sense making us all “children of god?”

One last question, does love come into it at all. Does the designer love its creation or any part of it, such as us? If the cosmic consciousness is in everything, then it may be essentially a matter of self-love, even when we “love” one another. I believe we exist as individuals and we love as such. Our capability – indeed need – to love suggests it is somehow built into the design.

A Conclusion to a Still Unwritten Book: An Interlude

What are we and what were we made for? For some, this question may be neither important nor interesting. That we exist is its own reality and sufficient explanation. The universe exists because it has always existed, no need to consider any creation story. One such person, a good friend, suggested after reading my previous post that I read Why Does the World Exist by Jim Holt. I had that on my bookshelf and reread it along with some Roger Penrose. These led me down some rabbit holes and thus this interlude, which I hope will eventually connect to the rest of my “conclusion.”

So, what about the Big Bang, doesn’t that seem to be a beginning requiring explanation? How can a grand explosion that became our universe be squared with an eternal universe that always existed? Well, our Big Bang might be just the most recent of a series without beginning or end, maybe one of a multi-verse of such. Perhaps “chaotic inflation” out of some “quantum fluctuation” created our universe from a tiny burp in the vacuum that “arose spontaneously from sheer nothingness.”

Or why assume, as I did in my previous, that “nothing is the more natural state because it would need no explanation.” Perhaps the universe exists because it has always existed and because nothing is itself not possible. The universe exists so why posit nothing as more natural? In any case, before the Big Bang, there was not nothing because there was no time, therefore no past. The singularity assumed to have exploded in the Big Bang was matter and energy infinitely compressed (just as it is in a black hole). Infinite compression of mass and energy means spacetime doesn’t exist so before the Big Bang there was nothing and no time. Therefore, the Big Bang requires no history.

Or perhaps the universe came into being through being observed by us. In other words, because we are here, it had to be.

None of these possibilities account for why they might have been the case. They do not explain why they should be true or what was their First Cause. But one could argue that any explanation of existence that leaves itself unexplained simply means that the ultimate wall has been reached and not that it is wrong. All explanations must end in such a explanatory wall. Just accept the one you choose.

Holt notes one rejoinder to this (Arthur Lovejoy, 1933) that if the universe existed as an accidental – it’s just-there – world – “uncertainty would infect the whole; anything...might exist and anything might happen, and no one thing would be in itself even more probable than another.” Indeed, the simplest alternative to Nothing is Everything, i.e., all possible worlds. In a multiverse of all possibilities, why not an entire universe – even ours – simple turning into chocolate cake?

Much more can be said about these conflicting positions. But as Holt notes, one way to escape the ultimate inability to provide a First Cause simply is to assume a self-explanatory something that would have to exist in order to explain everything else. That something would have to be eternal, infinite, powerful and – since the universe is ordered and includes intelligence – intelligent. In my last post, I suggested that such a thing is “what might be called God.” I should make clear that I would not suggest using that term as it carries a load of baggage that seems to me beside the point (more on that next time). I prefer to talk simply of a design and a designer.

For myself, I find the bare acceptance of a universe without explanation to be an ultimate abandonment of reason and intellect. We are capable of considering the infinite even if we cannot understand it. And I reject the notion that the effort to follow St. Thomas’ finger – science and reason – to consideration of a fundamental design and a designer is just an expression of a religious impulse. Man has long sought the answer to his Being. Religion did grow out of that but so has science and philosophy.

A Conclusion to a Still Unwritten Book: Part One

Sometime ago, I wrote in this space an Introduction to a Still Unwritten Book. For several years before and since, I have been pondering consciousness, cosmology and quantum physics in what I like to think follows in the tradition of natural philosophy. While I am not a scientist, I believe that the ultimate questions are essentially unanswerable but – following Saint Thomas’ finger – the proper subject of a reasoning intellect. It seems to me that the most fundamental question remains one that has haunted all philosophical and religious traditions: why is there anything? Science alone cannot shed light on this. Current science points to a Big Bang some 13 billion years ago. Today’s quantum physics and cosmology can say much about the first few moments after that event and the subsequent evolution of the universe and life. But we cannot say much about where the Big Bang came from and even less about why it might have occurred. Nor can we explain – without positing an infinity of less comfortable parallel universes – why our universe seems so right for us.

So the ultimate questions – why should there be anything, why should there be us – remain unanswered. It would seem that nothing is the more natural state because it would need no explanation. That there was nothing and always would be nothing would require nothing to be done or said about it. That nothing somehow gave way to something, anything, would have required a departure from the most simple state of nothing to greater complexity. The universe, in which we find ourselves a part, exists, it is something. Furthermore, it seems to have been fine-tuned insofar as it expresses a particular set of physical laws that seem designed to make life and intelligence inevitable. We live in a Goldilocks’ reality, not too cold, not too hot, but just right for us. The apparent design that gave rise to our existence must inevitably imply a designer.

But granting all this, this still leaves two fundamental questions. Where did the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit. The possible answers to the first question appear to converge on two possibilities, that the designer always was – i.e., that something always existed and there never was nothing – or that there was an original act of creation (or self-creation) that led to the existence of the designer. Both of these “explanations” essentially define what we might call God. One of them must be true.

The second question, why did the designer enact the particular act of creation that led to us, could have a myriad of answers. It might have been from boredom – as an eternity of nothing but self might eventually wear thin – perhaps in the form of a cosmic-scale version of a computer SimUniverse. It could be the night’s sleep of a very rationally-minded dreamer. It could be an experiment of some kind, or a simulation set to explore possible design parameters. It could be an act of love. Whatever the possible reason, the act of creation implied a kind of consciousness (even of the sleeper) and some version of a conscious choice. The designer must have been a conscious entity, perhaps even consciousness in its rare form. Whether the designer always was or was somehow created, the form it had or took was consciousness. In either case, consciousness was primordial, coming before the creation of our universe, before matter, before the Big Bang. The primordial consciousness – what might be called God – was the designer.

A fascinating aside about following this chain of thought is the seemingly inescapable conclusion that the designer was or felt constrained to create a universe capable of being apprehended by scientific reason. The universe is not just some stage set on which we players play our parts but an intricate mechanism that obeys its own complex, intrinsic laws. This suggests that the designer was using – for whatever reason – a given toolbox that provided the means to form the particular set of physical parameters manifested in the Big Bang.

Still, why us? What are we and what were we made for? I lean toward the notion that the cosmic consciousness designed a reality that it could then enter, whether out of loneliness, curiosity, love or some combination of these. 

TBC...