Does the universe require a mind?

A review of Spencer Klavan's "Light of the Mind, Light of the World"

Two posts ago I had shared “You are not a ghost in a meat blanket”, human beings are not just mechanisms. I don’t know if this happens to you too, but it happens to me all the time that, I’ll be thinking or writing about something, and suddenly I stumble across thirty other people all thinking and writing about that same topic - the result probably of some combination of what my mind is focused on, and what some subset of the public consciousness is focused on.

On that point, I just finished reading Spencer Klavan’s “Light of the Mind, Light of the World”, which investigates whether we live in an “automatic universe”, you could say mechanistic universe, and I thought a review of the same might be helpful to many. Now I have to say that I usually avoid what might be called “science and faith” books, because a lot of them just aren’t that good. They aren’t written by or to people who know science well, and sometimes they have as their purpose just to pat Christians on the head and say, “don’t you worry, science doesn’t contradict your faith, everything is going to be fine”. Well, that may be literally true, but I have no interest in the head-patting.

Klavan’s book is better, though I do not agree with it in total. I am not a frequent reader of his writing, and he appears to be a classicist, not a scientist, but he clearly knows scientific history well.

How did we get here?

The first half of the book or so is really a philosophically-informed scientific history, and that part of the book is stupendous. I have sometimes heard pastors say that the class in seminary most helpful to their theological understanding was not something like “systematic theology”, but rather Church history - because when you see where an idea came from, how it formed and changed over time, you understand it better, you understand its justification and its limitations. That’s true in science too.

Klavan begins with, the fact that we can even do science at all, comes from a belief (rooted in God for Christians) that the universe is ordered, and we can understand that order, and our questions about the natural world actually have answers. Let’s realize for a moment how amazing that is.

To set out in search of laws that govern nature is to insist, often against all appearances to the contrary, that the convoluted muddle of events as we currently experience them is just one phase of a regular pattern.

It is certainly a part of the modern mindset, and perhaps you can credit science for helping produce this, to believe that every effect has a cause, and we can figure out that cause. (You saw this all over our COVID response, perhaps to an excessive degree inasmuch as we also believed we could control all those causes. But nobody thought person X got sick for no reason. No, there was a cause, a natural cause, and if we could control that cause we could prevent sickness.)

Put another way:

It is natural to look out at the stars and wonder why they move across our field of vision. But what’s remarkable is that we expect such questions to have answers.

And then, really a great line from Klavan,

We cannot help but feel that the world should be accountable to our logic. Our way of seeing things feels to us like more than an illusion: it feels like a promise.

He then gets into a stupendous history of science, and let me just share a couple sample sections from that, because science is fun.

Why do projectiles fly?

If you shoot an arrow through the air, it flies in roughly a parabolic path until it strikes the ground or some other target. Why? And how?

Well that’s a question humans thought about for thousands of years. One ancient answer rooted itself in the idea that everything was composed of just a few, sometimes called “classical elements”, and these elements had some movement that was inherent to their nature.

Below, in our ‘sublunary’ realm, things moved in more erratic patterns as dictated by their rougher composition out of earth, water, fire, and air. But all things moved as Aristotle had taught, moved by nature toward their determined end.

So, for example, if I literally take a clod of earth and release it, it falls toward the ground. That is its natural motion, toward the center of the universe, which is also the center of the Earth, in this ancient understanding. But hang on, if I just take an arrow in my hand, and release it, it also just falls straight down. Ergo that, apparently, is its natural motion. But when I shoot it from a bow it keeps going. Why?

Well the ancients were aware of this problem and offered various solutions.

The arrow might be driven forward by the displacement of air, known in Greek as antiperistasis. What the medievals called horror vacui, the terror of the void, kept the world bursting with substance at all points: no stretch of space could ever be left completely empty, for nature abhors a vacuum. If the arrow threatened to leave a void behind it after departing from its initial position, perhaps air would rush in to fill that space and push the arrow forward. Or else the air behind the arrow, driven on by the same blow of the bowstring that delivered the shot, would outstrip the projectile’s downward motion and carry it forward until the air settled.

Did you get that? So, explanation one, as the arrow moves forward, the air in front of it has to get out of the way (that’s true), and so it also leaves a little vacuum hole behind it, which air from the surrounding area rushes in to fill. This new air then squeezes the back of the arrow (analogy is sometimes made to squeezing a bar of soap in the shower), and that pushes the arrow along.

(I went through the above explanation in class, and one girl said, “but that makes so much sense!”. I told her she was born 2500 years too late.)

Or, second explanation, the bowstring also pushes air along, and that air continues to push the arrow.

Neither of those explanations, however, are correct, and people gradually realized this. For example, if “arrow is being squeezed along like a bar of soap” was the correct explanation, then making the front of the arrow a big blob, instead of a tip, should make the arrow fly even faster and further, since it would displace even more air, making an even bigger vacuum-hole behind it, bringing in even more surrounding air to push it along. But that isn’t what happens. Clearly the arrow is cutting through the air, not being pushed along by it (and other objects behave similarly, like a boat in water when you stop rowing).

So other explanations were proposed, some getting toward what we now understand as the modern concept of momentum. From Jean Buridan, in the 1300s:

Buridan helped point the way out of this tangled maze. Neither the arrow itself nor the air was responsible for the motion, he argued. Instead, it was the force of the bowstring that left a kind of mark upon the arrow and drove it home. The action of the archer, at the moment when he lets the arrow fly, ‘impresses upon it a kind of impetus or motive force’.

And indeed, that is the modern understanding (or at least one way to comprehend the motion). But I appreciated that Klavan did pause and say… but wait, what is this impetus? Chesterton, in places, talks about how the ancients would attribute a thing to “magic” or “the spirits”, which we moderns would never do, of course, we are sophisticated now. We moderns give things scientific names… but how different is that, really? If I notice nature always carries through some patterned behavior and I call it “magic”, and you notice nature always carries through the same patterned behavior, but you call it “gravity”, well…. I think Klavan actually says somewhere that science is just magic that works.

He does say:

But were the spirits really gone, or just displaced? After all, what exactly was impetus? What, for that matter, was the ‘force’ that sent the arrow flying in the first place? We might ask the same question now of words like ‘momentum’ and ‘energy'. We imagine that by reducing these concepts to clinical terminology, applying words to them derived from the erudite Latin of the Middle Ages, we have rendered them totally material and so lifeless. Perhaps, though, we have just given them colder and less descriptive names.

Love is just chemistry?

More briefly, I did appreciate Klavan pointing out how much our view of the human person has become scientific or mechanistic, as shown by comments like “those two have chemistry together”. Say that to anyone before the 20th century, and maybe an image of a beaker and a flask would have come into their head, but they would have no idea what you are talking about. No, we moderns believe that emotions are partially or entirely the result of chemical stuff going on in the brain… ergo, “those two have chemistry together” makes sense to us. Klavan, describing the default modern viewpoint:

The luck of the evolutionary draw had equipped humanity with an extraordinary calculating machine. Its processing power outstripped anything previously in circulation. But the by-product of this unplanned experiment was a whole weight of longing and remorse, consciousness and conscience. If man was brilliant, he was also deformed: the healthy animal functioning of his body was stunted by the lopsided development of his febrile nervous system. Now he must stumble around upright, dreaming bad dreams.

Human consciousness was nothing more than a by-product of naturally-occurring physical phenomena…

(And you can see, there, what a good writer Klavan is, by the way.)

And finally,

If the glimmer and exaltation of human feeling is actually just the aftershock of biological energy transfer, then emotional change is chemical change. Talking about one can become shorthand for talking about the other.

There you go. He does, elsewhere, talk about the tremendous harm that could follow if you think the human organism is just a machine to be tinkered with or programmed same as any other. I agree completely.

But does the universe require a mind?

So that’s all great, good book, quite enjoyed very much of it. But I have to end here disagreeing, I think, with what might be the overall argument he is trying to make in the book - and I do want to say, disagreeing with the “argument”, because the conclusion might still be fine, I’m just not convinced by the path he takes to get there. This argument is never stated as precisely as I’m about to write it, but it seems to go roughly as follows.

1. Humans are, in a sense, and by God’s choice, the center of the universe. We are the pinnacle of creation, the universe is, in a sense, here for us. (He does briefly suggest the possibility of other conscious minds elsewhere, but the focus is definitely on us.)

2. In quantum mechanics (the physics of the very small), “things”, or perhaps “matter”, do not have “definite form”, or do not have “reality”, unless and until they are observed by a conscious mind. If you know some QM, objects at the atomic and subatomic scales become fuzzy. Though at our level you can say, “the tennis ball is right there”, at the quantum level you cannot usually say “the electron is right there”. Objects have associated with them a wavefunction which describes the probability of locating the objects at any point. In Klavan’s interpretation, the objects are in some sense unreal until observation “collapses the wavefunction”, one way this is normally said, giving the object a definite position.

3. Therefore, our interaction with the universe gives the universe reality. No human minds, no reality. The long scientific project, almost the whole point of it, has been trying to give things objective existence apart from and without the need for us. You can’t do that. We cannot stand outside the world and judge it, we are part of it. Quantum mechanics makes us necessarily part of the puzzle.

My main disagreement would be with #2, which would then at least make #3 not necessarily follow. Before I give you one illustration, I did want to say that it also seemed to me that he linguistically mixes up two claims:

1. For us to speak about the universe, we must talk about the effect it has upon us - we would know nothing without our senses, for example. That’s surely true.

2. The universe itself gains reality by interacting with us.

Now I would certainly mark those two as rather different claims… unless, of course, you reconcile them by defining “reality” to be the conscious impressions the universe makes upon man, or something like that, and solve the problem that way.

A helpful illustration of all of this, for me, was in a discussion about the light from galaxies. The issue here (which I am not expert on, but I think he is correct), is that some galaxies seem too old for their location in the universe. In other words, we observe them very far away which, since light has a finite velocity, means we observe them as they were in the distant past. But, based on current cosmological theories (e.g. Big Bang model), such galaxies (built up soon after the Big Bang) should look “immature”, and instead these look mature, and we don’t know how to handle that within the current paradigm.

Klavan appeals to physicist John Wheeler on this point to suggest that measurements we perform on light today, affect how that light behaved yesterday. So, say, some photon of light is emitted by a distant star, so the photon has some wavefunction, but that wavefunction describes probabilities of finding the photon here or there, not its “real path”. For it to have a “real trajectory”, in Klavan’s understanding, someone has to make a measurement. Once that measurement is made, the ENTIRE PATH of the photon, nearly all of which is in the past, now becomes real.

Perhaps the light that travels to us from distant stars, sailing around the curves made in spacetime by the heavenly bodies, only really charts out its trajectory once it meets our measuring devices.

And then later, after pondering why the galaxies seem the wrong age, he says,

Perhaps the answer lies in us: as these galaxies reveal themselves to human observation for the first time, new portions of their history are being called forth into existence by the appointed regents of the universe.

That’s very poetically said but… experts on QM, clue me in here if I’m wrong, I think nearly zero physicists would say that a correct, or even possible, explanation here, is that in a very real sense the galaxies did not even exist until some human first saw them.

And that sort of typifies my disagreement with him - had he stuck to philosophical arguments, I suspect, he would have done better. But instead he says “quantum mechanics teaches us” and then makes claims that, I think, nearly no physicists would affirm as results of QM.

The quantum world is very bizarre - wavefunctions and probabilities and, in one understanding, particles that seem to pop in and out of existence. This is why Richard Feynman used to say that nobody understands quantum mechanics - to try to get a sense of what is “really going on down there”, we make analogy to things on our level. But those analogies are weak, because what is “really going on down there” is very different from our usual experience with the world. (This is why he also said that if you can do the math, then you understand it - the world is written in math, the math is the thing. You may not be able to visualize it, that’s OK.)

But the point is, I think nearly all physicists would agree, the stuff going on down there, the wavefunctions interacting with each other, the fields pushing on each other, is real. That is reality. It’s still happening even if no human is watching. It’s very poetic to make the claim that the universe only comes into being when finally the pinnacles of God’s creation observe it. But, I think, you’d be hard-pressed to make that argument from the science.

That is how I see it, anyway. If someone with a 2024 PhD in quantum field theory wants to drop by and say “no sir, Klavan is correct about everything!” I will be happy to accept that correction. If that is you, please leave a comment now! I WANT TO BELIEVE but I just didn’t, this argument. But even without that, still very much that is good in this book. I have some thoughts about reading it with a class, it might make an especially good discussion book with a scientifically-informed group of people.

THE END