How to Make a Human Being: A Body of Evidence

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014

Copyright © Christopher Potter 2014

Christopher Potter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007447794

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2014 ISBN: 9780007447800

Version: 2015-02-02

For Peter

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PART ONE: Materials and Instructions

Section 1: Getting started

Section 2: What can the matter be?

Section 3: Taking sides

Section 4: Nothing → something → everything

Section 5: What is science?

Section 6: What is the universe?

Section 7: Evidence for the existence of an external world

Section 8: Evidence against the existence of an external world

Section 9: On time

Section 10: On things

Section 11: Starting again

PART TWO: Animating the Doll

Section 1: Matter → meat

Section 2: Making babies

Section 3: On consciousness

Section 4: On the self

Section 5: Meat → mind

Section 6: On perception

Section 7: On free will

Section 8: On behaviour

Section 9: There is always something missing

Section 10: When the gene is no longer enough

Section 11: On tools and human evolution

Section 12: Being rather than making

PART THREE: On Being Human

Section 1: On culture

Section 2: On the relationship between human beings and nature

Section 3: On the relationship between human beings and other animals

Section 4: On the relationship between human beings and other human beings

Section 5: On love

Section 6: On doing the right thing

Section 7: On the difficulty of being

Section 8: On dreams and doing nothing

Section 9: On memory

Section 10: On faith, belief and truth

Section 11: On God

Section 12: On eternity

Section 13: On death

Section 14: On humility

Footnotes

Select bibliography

Index of names

By the same author

About the Publisher

PART ONE

What’s the matter?

The opening words of Coriolanus

SECTION 1

Getting started

1 | Clearly one way to make a human being is to start by making a universe of the right kind. But out of what material, and what conditions?

SECTION 2

What can the matter be?

There is only one sort of stuff, namely matter – the physical stuff of physics, chemistry and physiology.

Daniel Dennett, philosopher

There is only one kind of stuff in the universe and it is physical. Out of this stuff come minds, beauty, emotions, moral values – in short the full gamut of phenomena that gives richness to human life.

Julian Baggini, philosopher

The laws of physics have conspired to make the collisions of atoms produce plants, kangaroos, insects and us.

Richard Dawkins, biologist

1 | All of reality is nothing more than an arrangement of particles. Our physical and mental life must be made out of particles because there is nothing else. Everything comes down to what the particles are. Work that out and you know all there is to know.

2 | Bishop Berkeley’s1 strongest claims to whatever fame is still attached to his name are his theory of immaterialism – that material objects exist only because there is a mind that perceives them – and his ‘proof’ that there is nothing the world can be made out of. If the world is material and made out of some type of smallest thing, some particle, then whatever that smallest particle is, it must extend into space, since it is in the nature of all material things that they take up room. Furthermore it must be possible in principle, even if we don’t know how to do it in practice, to divide these particles into smaller particles; because however small any particle might be, we can imagine some part of it taking up less space. And so the search to find the smallest particles out of which the fabric of the material world is woven must be endless. The argument does not necessarily claim the world as spirit, so much as point out that a material world must be some kind of an illusion: not that the world does not exist, but that it is not what it appears it be.

There is no there there.

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), poet and novelist 2

I have followed the materialist story of our origin – nay, of my origin. But I have grave misgivings. As an act of faith it requires so much.

John Eccles (1903–97), neurophysiologist

I said that the latest advances in science seemed to have made materialism untenable, and that the most likely outcome was still the eternal life of the soul and reunion beyond the grave.

Marcel – Proust’s narrator – to his grandmother in Remembrance of Things Past

SECTION 3

Taking sides

1 | Ever since Newton’s time, when billiards was in vogue, science has tried to reduce the world to balls hitting one another: billiard ball atoms, billiard ball planets, billiard ball stars. For those of us who have fought shy of games ever since schooldays, it is sometimes hard to accept that ball games really are the be all and end all of existence. Even on those days when I know – or is it fear? – that all that there is can be reduced to particles, I am dispirited. I feel as I did at school: I know that materialism is the manlier choice, but it just isn’t me.

There are days when the world seems to be split into two teams and I do not know which side to be on. Brian Greene, Richard Dawkins (captain), Daniel Dennett, Dr Johnson, Thomas Jefferson, Lucretius, Stephen Hawking, Aristotle, David Attenborough and Thomas Huxley are on one side.1 Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, William James (captain), Marilynne Robinson, John Keats, Rowan Williams, Karen Armstrong, Plato, William Blake and Emily Dickinson on the other. Dr Johnson and Rowan Williams sometimes play in goal. Proust and Keats invariably call in sick. Darwin and Descartes have been known to show up for either side. Einstein is a popular referee. Confusingly, there are times when it is hard to tell which team even Richard Dawkins or Brian Greene is playing for. But generally Richard Dawkins’s team terrifies me and wins. William James’s team invariably loses, but they don’t seem to care.

On the one side are the materialists: what you see is what you get. The world can be reduced to basic ingredients, and those ingredients are material: they exist, can be weighed and counted, measured and timed. Materialism, reductionism: words that shine with confidence.

On the other side are the idealists, who believe that the physical world is somehow a manifestation of something immaterial. We are the transcendentalists, they cry (‘Give us a T …’). Idealism, transcendentalism: words that sound airy-fairy.

2 | At school I remember games period, lining up, waiting to be chosen, down to the last four, the final humiliation of being the very last hardly averted by the gamesmaster: ‘The rest of you just divide up equally’; then the desperate rush to attach myself to what I hoped was to be the stronger side, wanting to be on the winning team but not wanting to take part, hoping that I might be in goal, left alone to sing hymns to myself while everyone else battled it out at the other end of the pitch.

3 | I remember, too, poring over a copy of the Ladybird book of Roundheads and Cavaliers, puzzled. Clearly, my heart told me, it was better to be a Cavalier: the clothes, the hair, the colours! And yet rationally I knew that to be a Roundhead was the right, the moral choice.2

4 | There are these days:

I am satisfied and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), American founding father

There was no room for the mystical, the mysterious, the illusory in his temperament. Anything that did not stand the test of practical experience or the scrutiny of analysis he rejected as an optical illusion, some kind of interplay of light and colour on his retina, or else a phenomenon that still lay beyond the reach of experience. There was in him nothing of the dilettante who loves to delve into the realm of the fanciful and idle speculation about the wonders and marvels that lie a thousand years into the future. He took a firm stand on this side of the threshold of the mysterious, free equally of a childlike credulity and the doubts of the over-sophisticated, and patiently reserved judgment until the evidence came in and provided a key to the mystery.

Konstantin Levin in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

5 | There are also these days:

i Days when I feel like Fotherington-Thomas3 – ‘who sa hello clouds hello sky’, and who ‘like all goody-goodies he believe in fairies father xmas peter pan etc and unlike most boys they are kind to their sisters’ – days when ‘I simply don’t care a row of buttons whether it was a goal or not nature alone is beautiful.’

ii Or like the evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin when he writes that science is ‘filled with the violence, voyeurism, and tumescence of male adolescent fantasy. Scientists “wrestle” with an always female nature, to “wrest from her the truth”, or “to reveal her secrets”. They make “war” on diseases and “conquer” them. Good science is “hard” science; bad science (like the refuge of so many women, psychology) is “soft” science, and molecular biology, like physics, is characterised by “hard inference”. The method of science is largely reductionist, taking Descartes’s clock metaphor as a basis for tearing the complex world into small bits and pieces to understand it, much as the archetypal small boy takes apart the real clock to see what makes it tick.’

6 | But there are days, perhaps most days, when it is not clear which side to be on.

7 | When told of Bishop Berkeley’s fashionable new philosophy of immaterialism Dr Johnson4 said, ‘I refute him thus,’ and kicked a rock. I’ve always had a soft spot for Dr Johnson. He preferred people to places, and loved his cats. When he first read Hamlet he was so frightened by the ghost of Hamlet’s father that he rushed outside in order to have living people about him. According to his friend Jonas Hanway, he was ‘a hardened and shameless tea-drinker’. He devoted himself to conversation. He was terrified of eternal damnation. As an entertainment to his guests, he pulled up his tailcoats to form a pouch and jumped about in imitation of a kangaroo. When he was four years old his mother called him a puppy and he said to her: ‘Do you know what they call a puppy’s mother?’ He rolled down a hill in Lincolnshire when he was in his fifties. He leapt a wall in his seventies. When William Hogarth met him he mistook him for an idiot, ‘shaking, twitching, pock-marked, half-blind and distinctly careless about his dress’. He compiled a dictionary of the English language from scratch, and although after two years he got stuck on the word ‘carry’, he persevered. In 1755, nine years after he had begun, the dictionary that made his name was published in two volumes, each volume weighing in at fourteen pounds. He said he had tried studying philosophy, ‘but cheerfulness was always breaking in’. In that unsubtle, if entertaining, gesture Johnson kicks more than a rock; he directs a kick in the general direction of all philosophical argument that goes against common sense. And it’s common sense, the gesture insists, that makes us human, and not some illusive philosophical argument. Dr Johnson kicked His Grace into the sidelines of history.

8 | And yet, if Dr Johnson has about him the no-nonsense mien of the Roundhead, it is surely as a shield to protect the heart of a Cavalier. Tolstoy’s Levin could hardly be less like Dr Johnson (for one thing he is fictional), but he too combines traits of both Cavalier and Roundhead, idealist and materialist. Levin wants to believe but cannot. Yet it is his unbelief that tortures him. As a child and adolescent he had turned to Christianity to try to address the questions of life: ‘whence it came, wherefore, why, and what it was’. Finding no answers there, he turned as a young man to science: ‘involuntarily, unconsciously, he now sought in every book, in every conversation, in every person, a connection with these questions and their resolutions’. By his mid-thirties he found that even scientific answers no longer satisfied him: ‘he became convinced that those who shared the same views with him simply dismissed the questions which he felt he could not live without answering … He was in painful discord with himself and strained all the forces of his soul to get out of it … He read and pondered, and the more he read and pondered, the further he felt himself from the goal he was pursuing … Convinced that he would not find an answer in the materialists, he reread, or read for the first time, Plato, and Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer – the philosophers who gave a non-materialistic explanation of life.’ But nor does philosophy bring consolation: ‘Following the given definition of vague words such as spirit, will, freedom, substance … he seemed to understand something. But he had only to forget the artificial train of thought and refer back to life itself … and suddenly the whole edifice would collapse like a house of cards.’

But Levin did not shoot himself or hang himself and went on living … not knowing and not seeing any possibility of knowing what he was and why he was living in the world, tormented by this ignorance … and at the same time firmly laying down his own particular, definite path in life.

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Anna Karenina

SECTION 4

Nothing → something → everything

1 | Physicists don’t pack up just because some philosopher or other points out that what they are doing is paradoxical. Particle physicists accept that elementary particles are not required to extend into space, nor to exist. If that means redefining what it means to exist, then so be it.

2 | In the main, scientists working at the coalface have little time for the fine distinctions made by philosophers. They are interested in what is in front of them. They are Dr Johnson not Bishop Berkeley, Romeo not Friar Laurence.

3 | Philosophy is adversity’s sweet milk, says Friar Laurence. Hang up philosophy! says Romeo in reply. Unless philosophy can make a Juliet, Displant a town, reverse a prince’s doom, It helps not, it prevails not: talk no more.

Philosophy is dead.

Stephen Hawking, on the first page of his book The Grand Design

Philosophy is to science what pornography is to sex.

Steve Jones, biologist

Philosophers keep out. Work in progress.

A notice pinned to the laboratory door of the physicist Niels Bohr (1885–1962)

If you ask in how many cases in the past has a philosopher successfully solved a problem, as far as we can say there are no cases.

Francis Crick (1916–2004), biologist

4 | In refutation of Zeno’s paradox,1 Diogenes got up and walked across the room.

To study Metaphysics as they have always been studied appears to me to be like puzzling at astronomy without mechanics.

Charles Darwin (1809–82), in his notebook

Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, ‘Why?’ and sometimes he thought, ‘Wherefore?’ and sometimes he thought, ‘Inasmuch as which?’ – and sometimes he didn’t quite know what he was thinking about.

Eeyore the philosopher in A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh

Philosophers have been profoundly wrong in almost every question under the sun over the last 2,000 years. You should never listen to the answers of philosophers, but you should listen to their questions.

Christof Koch, neuroscientist

Philosophers will tell you the whole idea of science is just a subset of philosophy.

David Rothenberg, philosopher

5 | Philosophy used to matter more. Of Plato’s five kinds of imagined regimes, the greatest – named Kallipolis – was ruled by philosopher kings.2 Socrates had to die because philosophy was seen as a threat to society. These days philosophy matters only to philosophers.

Philosophy is the highest, the worthiest, of human endeavours.

Slavoj Žižek, philosopher

6 | Scientists have a habit of dismissing the questions they don’t want to answer. They call them philosophical. For many scientists, philosophy is a step too close to theology. Scientists eschew philosophy for logic or even for just plain common sense.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

It is generally thought that common sense is practical. It is practical only in a short-term view. Common sense declares that it is foolish to bite the hand that feeds you. But it is foolish only up to the moment when you realize that you might be fed very much better.

John Berger, writer and art critic

7 | If, as philosophers have concluded, there is nothing that the universe can be made out of, scientists have wondered what that nothing might be.

8 | Science, philosophy and religion have this in common: that they all must account for how nothing became something. Philosophers have worried for centuries about the nature of substance and of nothingness. Religions have their various creation myths. Science too tells its own creation story. The triumph of particle physics is that it so nearly explains how nothing became everything.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), philosopher and mathematician

All things are born of nothing and are borne onwards to infinity.

Blaise Pascal (1623–62), philosopher and mathematician

9 | If only we knew exactly how the story began. If only we could say, ‘Once upon a time’ and know what follows.

10 | An ancient Greek cosmology has the world created out of a pre-existing condition called chaos. Kaos is not emptiness but formlessness. It was the world before there were things in it. The word nothing, like some fossil of ancient thought, still retains that original concept of no thing. The universe emerged when Logos, meaning variously form, knowledge and word, came into contact with Kaos. Out of their union comes Cosmos (beauty or order, as in cosmetics, which bring order to the face). The opening words of St John’s gospel repeat this ancient prescription: In the beginning was the Word. In the original Greek the word translated as ‘word’ is Logos. And in Genesis we find God creating nature by separating out from chaos what then become things with names. Naming is a process of separating out, and the first step in any scientific investigation of the world. Before explanation must come the naming of parts. The idea of nothing as emptiness came later. That the universe was created out of emptiness, ex nihilo, is a radical departure from how creation was envisaged by certain ancient Greek philosophers, and was an interpretation imposed on the Biblical story by medieval scholars.

11 | Our current best modern-day creation stories are variants of the Big Bang theory, a mathematical description of the universe coaxed out of the equations of general relativity. Even though they were his equations, Einstein at first denied the Big Bang. Later he changed his mind.

The most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.

Einstein, of an exposition of the Big Bang given by its inventor (discoverer?) Georges Lemaître (1894–1966), priest and physicist

12 | All matter can ultimately be reduced to constituent particles – bosons and fermions – that are the excitations of various types of energetic field. At the Big Bang there may have been a single kind of energetic field which, in an expanding universe, evolved into other kinds of energetic field.

Within a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang the universe is a cascade of particles decaying into other particles. Whole eras of the universe passed before it was even a second old.

13 | We know what happened in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, but what happened in the beginning?

14 | In the beginning everything was in the same place at the same time. In the beginning the physical world is pure energy, whatever that is. In the beginning the universe is some condition of form, number and energy held in perfect symmetry. It cannot last. The symmetry breaks and becomes a world of asymmetries, imperfections and accidents. The world falls into existence.

The positive energy within matter can be counterbalanced by the negative sink of the all-pervading gravitational field such that the total energy of the universe is potentially nothing; when combined with quantum3 uncertainty,4 this allows the possibility that everything is … some quantum fluctuation living on borrowed time. Everything may thus be a quantum fluctuation of nothing.

Frank Close, particle physicist

Zero exists now, it has always existed, and it will always exist. It is the native state of existence. It is what the physicist David Bohm called implicate order. It is the timeless quantum superposition of all universes and all life in an infinite universe. As the most brilliant physicists have long held, a perfect zero is the most ordered state of all, it just isn’t found in the past where time begins. It exists in the future where time ends.