Beyond Chance and Necessity

1. Introduction

The philosopher Hegel suggested that the search for truth proceeded in this manner: Mind explored the world about it, forming a world-picture, proceeding on deep, often unconscious assumptions about the fundamental nature of Reality. Mind proceeded in this way until it encountered anomalies, contradictions. At this point, it returned to examine its fundamental assumptions and to revise them to accommodate the contradiction. Then it continued its search.

So it was with classical physics. The world-picture elaborated by Newton had become disturbingly blurred. Einstein revised the basic concepts of space and time, a new, more inclusive picture emerged, and the search could go on. So it is with scientists in their laboratories.

Physics has changed its nature since classical times. Not so, biology. Modern technology has made it possible to see more and more deeply into the fine structure of matter, but its basic principles remain little changed from the classical formulation made by Descartes and others. Progress in bioscience has been steady, continuous. The belief of most biologists is that biological phenomenon are ultimately reducible to physics and chemistry.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead thought that one day biology would revolutionize physics. Perhaps that day is here. At the forefront of bioscience are appearing anomalies, data that simply cannot be accommodated to scientific materialism. Specifically, consciousness is resisting assimilation to the brain.

Descartes first formulated the Mind and Brain dualism: Human beings are composed of minds and bodies, which interact in the pineal gland. Modern researchers in this field, Stephen Pinker, Roger Penrose, Gerald Edelman, and many others, hope to overcome this dualism by showing how the brain produces mind, or consciousness.

My contention is: It can't be done, for reasons I set forth in this article. My thesis is that the inability to "reduce" consciousness to the brain suggests not simply a revision of fundamental explanatory principles of biology—chance and necessity—but a whole new picture of the universe to which, as of yet, modern physics has not yet come, though it is well on the way. I present a physical hypothesis about the nature of the universe that should eventually be able to be empirically tested and evaluated.

2. Philosophical Background

Over two thousand years ago, Plato distinguished between two major principles for explaining the universe: Either it came to be by "art," or by "chance and necessity." "Chance and necessity" was the major explanatory principle of the pre-Socratic scientists of Plato's day. It has always been the principle of science, and it is the explanatory principle of the modern life sciences. The world and the universe come to be by chance interactions of the atomic parts, and a necessary reaction due to the properties of the participants. Plato chose "by art" as the best explanation. He thought the world patterned after ideas—unchanging and eternal forms resembling the pure objects of geometry, perfect squares, circles, triangles. He thought that only a world fashioned "by art" had a place for mind, for reason, for virtue, for ethics. The forms were glimpsed by the aspirant after a long intellectual flight upward by the critique of first principles or assumptions. One grasped the forms as something beyond all principles and assumptions.

The tradition of philosophy by and large follows Plato. There is intelligence in the universe. Even early physics followed Plato: The laws of nature were "ideas in the mind of God." But God was soon dropped. The story goes, when the Emperor Napoleon, viewing Laplace's mechanical model of the universe, asked "But where is God?" Laplace replied, "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis." And at the present time, the "laws of nature" are a description of the functional relationships of matter. Matter and mechanism, chance and necessity, rule our day.

Modern scientists are seldom interested in the philosophical underpinnings of their work, but modern science owes most to the philosopher Descartes. Scholars before Descartes wrestled with the problem of...