Javier
Sánchez Cañizares is one of the contributors to the book Preguntas
sobre Ciencia y Fe, published in 2014 and republished this year. In 2020,
Javier has published a book in
Spanish with the same title as this post, which can be considered as a book
on philosophy of science at a high level of popularization. The goal of the
book is to show that materialistic reductionism has no chance of providing a
correct complete explanation, as our universe is singular because of several different
reasons:
- Because the standard cosmological model
tells us that the universe, which probably started at a singularity (the Big
Bang) with extraordinary initial conditions (a very small
entropy), appears to be finely tuned so that life can
exist. This is the subject of the first chapter.
- Because quantum mechanics, one of the two
basic theories of contemporary physics (the other one is general
relativity), raises the problem of the distinction
between the quantum world and the classical world. None of
the interpretations of quantum mechanics, or the concept of decoherence,
have successfully solved the measurement problem that connects both
worlds. The second chapter deals with this.
- Because the
existence of the human mind and the hard problem of
consciousness bring up the need to redo all scientific activity, which up
to now has been based exclusively on the action of efficient causes, while
the existence of final causes is evident in man, despite the insistence of
materialist reductionism in denying human freedom and in considering us as
machines (see the post
about Thomas Nagel's book recently published in this blog, which also
touches on the subject, and whom Javier quotes). Reviewing this question
is the subject of the third chapter, from which I have selected the
following quotes (my translation and highlights):
Even if it is true that,
today, we don’t have conclusive evidence about the relevance of quantum
mechanics in the brain, the simple reference to complexity or emergence, as
future explanations of the mind, leads to a dead end... The description of the lower level
provides necessary but not sufficient conditions for the description of the
higher level... The existence of correlations between the brain and the mind is
peacefully admitted, but asserting which is the cause and which is the effect is
absolutely hypothetical, insofar as the causality model is not specified, and a
theoretical background is not given for the corresponding interpretation... Thus, reductionism is not just
simplistic, but generally false.
In this context,
the human mind and our scientific activity are totally related, and the second
constitutes an exploration of reality different from that which non-human
animals or inert beings can perform... The existence of an object of study is a
relative fact, dependent on the analysis, but the existence of the subject is
absolute and its determination is a singular fact that needs an explanation.
Knowing is
different from simply having information... Nature is informative because it
consists of differences, inequalities, which can be interpreted by human beings
according to different levels of abstraction or description. And we are capable
of extracting relevant information because we have minds. Information becomes knowledge when it is
integrated into a coherent story by the subject... This primacy of a nature pregnant
with information can only be perceived by minds capable of extracting it and
dealing with it at different levels... The presence of information in the
universe, and of human beings with immaterial mental properties - not
necessarily linked to a specific material configuration - are two sides of the
same singular coin.
- The fourth chapter addresses complex
dynamic systems (such as living beings) and raises the possibility of two
types of emergence: epistemic with bottom-up
causality, advocated by materialist reductionists, and ontological,
with top-down causality, which the author considers more
defensible at the current state of our knowledge. Let’s look at an
interesting quote from this chapter: The very
definition of complexity... is complex, because it cannot be described by means
of universally defined parameters.
The following quote from the fourth chapter is a fairly representative summary of the book:
Whoever wants to
maintain a global microscopic determinism of the universe should explain the existence
of restrictions such as the second law of thermodynamics, the collapse of the
wave function and the emergence of information and cognitive determination in
nature, starting from laws much more basic. As I have tried to show in these
pages, this is extraordinarily implausible.
Thematic Thread on Natural and Artificial Intelligence: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
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