Missed the First Episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos Reboot? Watch it on Hulu (US Only)

If you, like me, did not see the first episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos reboot (and not having tv, there was no way for me to watch it live), Hulu has made it available for free to those in the United States (sorry to the rest of 6.7 billion people on the Earth).

Watch the First Episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos Reboot on Hulu (US Viewers)

March 11th, 2014


After a long wait, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s reboot of Cosmos began airing on Fox this past Sunday night, some 34 years after Carl Sagan launched his epic series on the more heady airwaves of PBS. Fox execs predicted big numbers for the first show — 40 million viewers. But only 5.8 million showed up. But, as we know, quantity has nothing to do with quality. Critics have called Tyson’s show a “striking and worthy update” of the original. If you live in the US, you can see for yourself. Episode 1 appears above, and it looks like the remaining 12 episodes will appear on Hulu. For those outside the US, our apologies that you can’t see this one.

via Kottke

Related Content:

• Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read
• Neil deGrasse Tyson Delivers the Greatest Science Sermon Ever
• Stephen Colbert Talks Science with Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Staggering Genius of Isaac Newton

Brian Greene — Reimagining the Cosmos (On Being)

Dr. Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University. He is also co-founder of the World Science Festival. His books include The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, and The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos.

He is one of the most entertaining science writers and television hosts (he has done several programs on physics and cosmology). This week he was the guest on NPR's On Being with Krista Tippett.

Brian Greene — Reimagining the Cosmos

January 30, 2014| On Being
Hosted by Krista Tippett


The discoveries which the physicist Brian Greene spends his life pondering lead to a thrilling, mind-bending view of the cosmos, and of the human adventure of modern science. Think of the certainties many of us grew up learning in school - now overtaken by the constant reimagining of the cosmos that is modern physics. The word “space” to describe what we now understand as a sphere teeming with mysterious energy and matter. In our lifetime the science fiction scenario of parallel universes has become a compelling mathematical possibility. Brian Greene works on this frontier, and he increasingly believes that the deepest realities are hidden from human senses and defy our best intuition.

A thrilling, mind-bending view of the cosmos and of the human adventure of modern science. In a conversation ranging from free will to the meaning of the Higgs boson particle, physicist Brian Greene suggests the deepest scientific realities are hidden from human senses and often defy our best intuition.

Listen

Radio Show/Podcast - (mp3, 51:00)
Unedited Interview - Brian Greene - (mp3, 84:55)
Transcript

Voices on the Radio

Dr. Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University. He is also co-founder of the World Science Festival. His books include The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, and The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos.

Pertinent Posts from the On Being Blog

Nobel Prize for ‘God Particle’ Discovery Prompts Deeper Questions

Would the Higgs boson exist without our thinking it existed in the first place. Is it possible that by thinking differently – about ourselves, about others, about our universe – we might begin to see things differently?

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The Higgs Boson (The "God Particle") Explained in Comics

With the important news about the the Higgs boson particle, this excellent video explainer with comic sketches may even help us understand it one day!

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Superstring Theory as a Unifier for the Laws of Physics

Writing script explaining string theory isn't so easy. Thankfully, Brian Greene's TED talk provided just the right language. A revelatory video that will excite your imagination.

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Quarks and Creation: On the Complementary Nature of Science and Religion

Krista Tippett reflects on her conversation with John Polkinghorne on quarks, creation, and God.

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Quantum Biology and the Hidden Nature of Nature (live video)

Put an astrobiologist and a mechanical engineer on the same stage and what do you get? One heck of an exciting conversation about how quantum physics realm holds sway and plays a pivotal role in our everyday experiences — in everything from bird navigation to our sense of smell.

****


Mathematics, Purpose, and Truth: The World Feels More Spacious

Of all the ideas Janna Levin presents, the most provocative and disturbing, perhaps, is her doubt that there is free will in human existence at all. She cannot be sure that we are not utterly determined by brilliant principles of physics and biology. Yet she cleaves more fiercely in the face of this belief to the reality of her love of her children and her hopes and dreams for them.

****


Black Holes and the Sonic Song of the Universe (video)

Listen to these sounds of black holes merging and falling into one another and the "white noise" of the Big Bang. A TED Talk with Janna Levin that stirs the mind.

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Symbols of Power: Adinkras and the Nature of Reality

Physicists have long sought to describe the universe in terms of equations. Now, James Gates explains how research on a class of geometric symbols known as adinkras could lead to fresh insights into the theory of supersymmetry — and perhaps even the very nature of reality.

The New Great Time War - The Philosopher's Zone

From ABC's Radio National (Australia), the episode of The Philosopher's Zone tackles the subject of time. Recently, Lee Smolin's Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe has questioned the orthodox view of time as outlined in physics, i.e., that time is an illusion. Smolin argues that time is, indeed, quite as real as we perceive it to be, although not in the ways we believe.

This discussion touches base with the book, and then some.

The new great time war

• Listen now

• Download audio

Sunday 6 October 2013


The nature of time has been in dispute for millennia—now a new front has opened in that ancient quarrel. (Mark Swallow/Getty)
An ancient feud has re-emerged. Over two millennia ago Heraclitus declared that all is flowing: you can’t step in the same river twice. Parmenides, on the other hand, thought that time is an illusion and all is fixed and permanent. He would fare well in the modern age where spacetime has won the intellectual day. Or has it? A new challenge is reigniting the Heraclitian view of the cosmos, and attempting to put the seconds, minutes and hours back into the arrow of time.

Guests 

• Kristie Miller, Director, Centre for Time, University of Sydney 
• Roberto Unger, Roscoe Pound Professor of Law, Harvard Law School 
• Craig Callender, Chair of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego 
• Huw Price, Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge

Further Information Watch Craig Callender on ABC TV Big Ideas

Credits 

Presenter: Joe Gelonesi
Producer: Diane Dean

Michael Barker - The Mystical Genius of Ervin Laszlo

Ervin László (born 1932 in Budapest, Hungary) is a Hungarian philosopher of science, systems theorist, integral theorist, originally a classical pianist. He has published about 75 books and over 400 papers, and is editor of World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution. He is associated with the integral movement, although he is not in the Wilberian AQAL camp.

He underscores the importance of developing a holistic perspective on the world and man, an outlook he refers to as "quantum consciousness".[1] 

The following is from Wikipedia's entry on Laszlo (as was the above quote):

In an essay, Stan Grof compared László's work to that of Ken Wilber, saying "Where Wilber outlined what an integral theory of everything should look like, Laszlo actually created one."[6] Jennifer Gidley, President of the World Futures Studies Federation, is a researcher in the areas of futures studies, integral theory and spiritual evolution, which she refers to as evolution of consciousness. In an in-depth study of integral theorists she made the following claim:

A major distinction appears to be that László (2007)[7] builds his general evolution theory in a more formal, systematic manner. He claims that he built significantly on the theoretical traditions of Whitehead’s process theory, Bertalanffy’s general system theory and Prigogine’s non-linearly bifurcating dissipative structures (p. 164). Wilber’s process appears to have been much broader and more diverse—but perhaps less systematic—gathering together as many theorists in as many fields of knowledge as he could imagine, then arranging them according to the system that he developed—which he calls an integral operating system (Wilber, 2004).[8] Another difference is that although they both appear to use imagination and intuition in the construction of their theoretical approaches, Wilber does not make this explicit whereas László (2007, p. 162) does.[9]

Ervin László is a Visiting Faculty member at The Graduate Institute Bethany. 

Akashic Field Theory 

László's 2004 book, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything posits a field of information as the substance of the cosmos. Using the Sanskrit and Vedic term for "space," Akasha, he calls this information field the "Akashic field" or "A-field". He posits that the "quantum vacuum" (see Vacuum state) is the fundamental energy and information-carrying field that informs not just the current universe, but all universes past and present (collectively, the "Metaverse").

László describes how such an informational field can explain why our universe appears to be fine-tuned as to form galaxies and conscious lifeforms; and why evolution is an informed, not random, process. He believes that the hypothesis solves several problems that emerge from quantum physics, especially nonlocality and quantum entanglement.

Gidley's research also discusses László's Akashic Field theory, including a three page hermeneutic analysis of his theory compared to the similar theories a century ago of Rudolf Steiner.

Some of the terms Steiner used to characterize his spiritual-scientific methodology, such as cosmic memory and Akashic record, are currently being reintroduced into the scientific discourse by László...[10]

Macroshift Theory 

László stated in his book You Can Change the World that there is global choice for the coming world crisis, which could come in the form of a global breakdown centred on increasing fragmentation of economic inequality and a new arms race between rising powers. The other choice would be a global breakthrough led by international organizations. This would be by the linking of non-government organizations promoting sustainable development, using the Internet.[11] 

A Macroshift is defined as a popular movement to turn the tide from a global breakdown to a global breakthrough. László sees the years 2012-2020 as a critical period to change course as the coming crisis is taking shape in geopolitical current.

Global shift University 

His latest project created a university based on integral teaching. Among the schools Laszlo established at Giordano Bruno University are 

• Philosophy and Religion (BA in Psychology, with an MA in Religious Studies) 

• Government and Communication (BA in International Relations, with an MS in Human Rights) 

• Economics, Administration, and Sustainability (BS in Business administration, with an MS in International Business) 

• Arts and Culture (BA/MS in Art History, BA in Education)

The university also offers high-school certification and continuing education. Its goal is to creating change accelerators, which he defines as coalescing agents for social action and cultural awareness.

Among the more than 75 books he has published are Introduction to Systems Philosophy: Toward a New Paradigm of Contemporary Thought (1972), The Creative Cosmos: A Unified Science of Matter, Life and Mind (1996), The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences) (1996), Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos: The Rise of the Integral Vision of Reality (2006), Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything (2007), Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific RealityCan Change Us and Our World (2008), and Dawn of the Akashic Age: New Consciousness, Quantum Resonance, and the Future of the World (2013).

The two-part article below comes from Swans. Follow the title links to read the whole articles.

The Mystical Genius of Ervin Laszlo (Part I of II)

by Michael Barker

(Swans - May 20, 2013) You would be forgiven for not knowing who Ervin Laszlo is, as he certainly doesn't make the headlines very often; which is why it is useful that Laszlo has published an "informal autobiography" entitled Simply Genius! And Other Tales from My Life (Hay House, 2011). But despite his generally low media profile, Laszlo is an influential systems theorist and all-round power broker who has helped coordinate circles of ruling-class policy wonks for nearly half a century. New Age salesman and guru to the rich, Deepak Chopra, calls him "a one-man human-potential movement" and notes that: "In a skeptical age when doubters sit by the side of the road saying no to every new idea, Ervin Laszlo said yes." (1) But what exactly does he say yes to... yes to magic... yes to capitalism... yes to macrobiotics... yes to socialism? On the first three counts Laszlo answers with a resounding yes; on the last, well I think it is safe to say that yes is not an option. So why should you care about Ervin Laszlo? Well if his opposition to socialism was not enough, another good reason would be that he has set his life goal as undermining materialism, no less; and unfortunately he has the ear of some very well-heeled members of the liberal intelligentsia.

* * * * *

The Mystical Genius of Ervin Laszlo (Part II of II)

by Michael Barker

(Swans - June 3, 2013) So far Ervin Laszlo's and Aurelio Peccei's efforts to manage the world had ignored the participation of the mass of humanity, and so, as Laszlo tells it, at this stage they realized that changes would not come about unless the elite "were pushed by a critical mass." Therefore, in order to prompt the masses to demand their changes, Laszlo suggested that the Club of Rome needed to include artists among their fold. This apparently was not feasible, so instead Aurelio proposed that Laszlo should gather together a group of artists, writers, singers, and spiritual leaders to advise the Club. According to Laszlo such a group would be more intuitive and holistically orientated, but things never quite got off the ground And so it was only in 1993 that Laszlo eventually brought together this global cultural group as the Club of Budapest, whose aim was "to achieve timely and fundamental change in the world through timely and fundamental change in people's consciousness." (1) Just as one might expect, the Club of Budapest's "Manifesto for Planetary Consciousness" was written (in 1995) by just one person, Ervin Laszlo -- with absolutely no democratic accountability to the mass of humanity whose lives he was attempting to irrevocably alter. Although to be fair Laszlo did spend three hours in consultation with the Dalai Lama making final revisions to his final six-page manifesto. (2)

Michael Chorost - Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong

Over at The Chronicle Review, Michael Chorost offers support for Thomas Nagel's recent book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, which was trashed by the evolutionist hierarchy.

Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong

The philosopher's critique of evolution wasn't shocking. So why is he being raked over the coals?

May 13, 2013
By Michael Chorost 

Steve Brodner for The Chronicle Review
Thomas Nagel is a leading figure in philosophy, now enjoying the title of university professor at New York University, a testament to the scope and influence of his work. His 1974 essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" has been read by legions of undergraduates, with its argument that the inner experience of a brain is truly knowable only to that brain. Since then he has published 11 books, on philosophy of mind, ethics, and epistemology.

But Nagel's academic golden years are less peaceful than he might have wished. His latest book, Mind and Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 2012), has been greeted by a storm of rebuttals, ripostes, and pure snark. "The shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker," Steven Pinker tweeted. The Weekly Standard quoted the philosopher Daniel Dennett calling Nagel a member of a "retrograde gang" whose work "isn't worth anything—it's cute and it's clever and it's not worth a damn."

The critics have focused much of their ire on what Nagel calls "natural teleology," the hypothesis that the universe has an internal logic that inevitably drives matter from nonliving to living, from simple to complex, from chemistry to consciousness, from instinctual to intellectual.

This internal logic isn't God, Nagel is careful to say. It is not to be found in religion. Still, the critics haven't been mollified. According to orthodox Darwinism, nature has no goals, no direction, no inevitable outcomes. Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, is among those who took umbrage. When I asked him to comment for this article, he wrote, "Nagel is a teleologist, and although not an explicit creationist, his views are pretty much anti-science and not worth highlighting. However, that's The Chronicle's decision: If they want an article on astrology (which is the equivalent of what Nagel is saying), well, fine and good."

The odd thing is, however, that for all of this academic high dudgeon, there actually are scientists—respected ones, Nobel Prize-winning ones—who are saying exactly what Nagel said, and have been saying it for decades. Strangely enough, Nagel doesn't mention them. Neither have his critics. This whole imbroglio about the philosophy of science has left out the science.

Nagel didn't help his cause by (a) being a philosopher opining on science; (b) being alarmingly nice to intelligent-design theorists; and (c) writing in a convoluted style that made him sound unconvinced of his own ideas.

The Florida State University philosopher of science Michael Ruse, who has written extensively about arguments over Darwinian theory, says Nagel is a horse who broke into the zebra pen. Evolutionary biologists don't like it when philosophers try to tell them their business: "When you've got a leader of a professional field who comes in and says, as a philosopher, 'I want to tell you all that Darwinian evolutionary theory is full of it,' then of course it's a rather different kettle of fish."

Joan Roughgarden, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the ­Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, agrees that evolutionary biologists can be nasty when crossed. "I mean, these guys are impervious to contrary evidence and alternative formulations," she says. "What we see in evolution is stasis—conceptual stasis, in my view—where people are ardently defending their formulations from the early 70s."

Nagel really got their noses out of joint by sympathizing with theorists of intelligent design. "They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met," he wrote. "It is manifestly unfair." To be sure, he was not agreeing with them. He notes several times that he is an atheist and has no truck with supernatural gods. He views the ID crowd the way a broad-minded capitalist would sum up Marx: right in his critique, wrong in his solutions. But ID, he says, does contain criticisms of evolutionary theory that should be taken seriously.

Whatever the validity of this stance, its timing was certainly bad. The war between New Atheists and believers has become savage, with Richard Dawkins writing sentences like, "I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sadomasochistic, and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad. ..." In that climate, saying anything nice at all about religion is a tactical error.

And Nagel is diffident about his ideas. Take this sentence, which packs four negatives into 25 words: "I am not confident that this Aristotelian idea of teleology without intention makes sense, but I do not at the moment see why it doesn't." Mind and Cosmos is full of such negatively phrased assertions. If you're going to make a controversial claim, it helps to do so positively. It also helps to enlist distinguished allies. Nagel has done nothing of the sort. Which is strange, because he has plenty of allies to choose from.

Natural teleology is unorthodox, but it has a long and honorable history. For example, in 1953 the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley argued that it's in the nature of nature to get more advanced over time. "If we take a snapshot view, improvement eludes us," he wrote. "But as soon as we introduce time, we see trends of improvement."

More recently, Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired, made the case for teleology as clearly as could be in his book What Technology Wants: "Evolution ... has an inherent direction, shaped by the nature of matter and energy." That is, there may be laws of nature that push the universe toward the creation of life and mind. Not a supernatural god, but laws as basic and fundamental as those of thermodynamics. Robert Wright said much the same in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny: "This book is a full-throated argument for destiny in the sense of direction." Those books prompted discussion among the literati but little backlash from evolutionary biologists. Ruse thinks that's because the authors are science writers, not scientists: "At a certain level, it's their job either to give the science or to put forward provocative hypotheses, and nobody takes it personally."

But highly regarded scientists have made similar arguments. "Life is almost bound to arise, in a molecular form not very different from its form on Earth," wrote Christian de Duve, a Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine, in 1995. Robert Hazen, a mineralogist and biogeologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, struck a similar note in 2007: "With autotrophy, biochemistry is wired into the universe. The self-made cell emerges from geochemistry as inevitably as basalt or granite." Harold J. Morowitz, a biophysicist at George Mason University, argued that evolution has an arrow built into it: "We start with observations, and if the evolving cosmos has an observed direction, rejecting that view is clearly nonempirical. There need not necessarily be a knowable end point, but there may be an arrow."

Nagel discusses none of that work. He asserts only that evolution is directional, without making a case for it. That has left him open to a number of obvious rebuttals. The biologist H. Allen Orr, at the University of Rochester, pointed out that some species become less complex—parasites, for example, after learning how to steal resources from their hosts. And many species, such as sharks, have been happy to stay just the way they are for millions of years. Only one species—us—has bothered to reach sentience. "The point is," Orr wrote in The New York Review of Books, "that if nature has goals, it certainly seems to have many and consciousness would appear to be fairly far down on the list."

Indeed, biologists usually argue that when you do get progress, it came about by accident.

When you have millions of species taking random walks through the wilds of genetic variation and natural selection, some will, by the luck of the draw, become more complex and more capable. That is, when there is an overall increase in variance, some of the variants will be more complex and capable than their ancestors. Biologists say that such ascents in complexity happen "passively."

Yet some scientists think that increases in complexity also happen "actively," that is, driven by physical laws that directly favor increases in complexity. As a group, these scientists have no sympathy for intelligent design. However, they do see reasons to think that seen as a whole, life does go from simple to complex, from instinctual to intellectual. And they are asking if there are fundamental laws of nature that make it happen.

Perhaps the best known of these scientists is Stuart Kauffman, of the Santa Fe Institute, who argues that the universe gives us "order for free." Kauffman has spent decades on origin-of-life research, aiming to show that the transition from chemistry to metabolism is as inevitable as a ball rolling down a slope. Molecules on the early earth, he suggests, inevitably began to catalyze themselves in self-sustaining reactions ("autocatalytic networks"), converting energy and raw materials into increasingly complex structures that eventually crossed the boundary between nonliving and living. Nagel mentions his work once, briefly, in a footnote.

Kauffman has plenty of company. The paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, at the University of Cambridge, has argued that natural structures such as eyes, neurons, brains, and hands are so beneficial that they will get invented over and over again. They are, in effect, attractors in an abstract biological space that pull life in their direction. Contingency and catastrophe will delay them but cannot stop them. Conway Morris sees this as evidence that not only life but human life, and humanlike minds, will emerge naturally from the cosmos: "If we humans had not evolved, then something more or less identical would have emerged sooner or later."

Other biologists are proposing laws that would explain evolutionary ascent in fundamental terms. Daniel McShea and Robert Brandon, a biologist and a philosopher of science, respectively, at Duke University, have argued for what they call a "zero-force evolutionary law," which posits that diversity and complexity will necessarily increase even without environmental change. The chemist Addy Pross, at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel, argues that life exhibits "dynamic kinetic stability," in which self-replicating systems become more stable through becoming more complex—and are therefore inherently driven to do so.

Still other scientists have asked how we could measure increases in complexity without being biased by our human-centric perspective. Robert Hazen, working with the Nobel Prize winner Jack Szostak, has proposed a metric he calls "functional information," which measures the number of functions and relationships an organism has relative to its environment. The Harvard astrophysicist Eric Chaisson has proposed measuring a quantity that he calls "energy-rate density": how much energy flows through one gram of a system per second. He argues that when he plots energy-rate density against the emergence of new species, the clear result is an overall increase in complexity over time.

While the jury is most definitely out on whether these proposed laws and measures are right or wrong (and if right, whether they are profound or trivial), this is a body of work that Nagel could have drawn upon in making his argument. He apparently felt it was acceptable to ignore the science. "Philosophy cannot generate such explanations," he wrote; "it can only point out the gaping lack of them." But there is no gaping lack of attempts to supply them. "He's done so little serious homework," says Michael Ruse. "He just dismisses origin-of-life studies without any indication that he's done any work on it whatsoever."

In short, Mind and Cosmos is not only negative but underpowered, as if Nagel had brought a knife to a shootout. (He declines to comment, telling me by e-mail, "I have a longstanding aversion to interviews.")

But Nagel's goal was valid: to point out that fundamental questions of origins, evolution, and intelligence remain unanswered, and to question whether current ways of thinking are up to the task. A really good book on this subject would need to be both scientific and philosophical: scientific to show what is known, philosophical to show how to go beyond what is known. (A better term might be "metascientific," that is, talking about the science and about how to make new sciences.)

The pieces of this book are scattered about the landscape, in a thousand scraps of ideas from biologists, physicists, physicians, chemists, mathematicians, journalists, public intellectuals, and philosophers. But no book has yet emerged that is mighty enough to shove aside the current order, persuading scientists and nonscientists alike, sparking new experiments, changing syllabi, rejiggering budget priorities, spawning new departments, and changing human language and ways of thought forever.On the Origin of Species did it in 1859. We await the next Darwin.


~ Michael Chorost is the author of Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) and World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet (Free Press, 2011).

Marcelo Gleiser - Where Did Life Come From? The Mind? The Universe? Can We Even Know?

The title of this post comes from the first article of three by Marcelo Gleiser at NPR's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog. This is a pretty interesting series of articles on life, the mind, and the universe. Enjoy.

Where Did Life Come From? The Mind? The Universe? Can We Even Know?

by MARCELO GLEISER
March 20, 2013

The Universe has an origin; whether we'll ever get to the bottom of it is the question.

Today I'd like to start a discussion on the ways certain kinds of questions present formidable challenges to the conventional scientific method of explanation, based on hypotheses and empirical validation. Given that the topic is vast and space short, I will divide the discussion into three parts (at least). Although there may be many questions that pose a challenge to the scientific method (for example, the much-debated questions of morality and altruism), I am interested in a trio that can be grouped as the "three origins questions": cosmos, life, and mind.

Working with any of these can fill many lifetimes of research, without any promise of success. In fact, how we measure success in answering any of these questions is already part of the challenge. They each invoke different areas of research, with different operational principles and scientific methodologies. Even so, there are points in common, and it is to those that I turn today, and in subsequent blog posts. (There have been many books and essays written on these three issues, taken together or separately. At the end I provide a list of further reading.)

The first point in common is that not so long ago these three questions were not considered scientific. On the contrary, the origin of the Universe, of life, and of mind were thought to be the result of divine work, products of supernatural intervention. Which god or gods were responsible depended (and still does to the vast majority of the world population) on your particular faith. Differences aside, in any religion only an entity that transcended space and time could create the cosmos, which exists within space and time; only an immortal entity had the power to create life; and only an omniscient power could endow His creatures with intelligence and a sense of being.

The confrontation with natural processes is immediate: Nature is within space and time, living entities are not immortal and no one is — or can be — omniscient. (Although the World Wide Web, allied with global human intelligence and powerful search engines, could, in some sense, be called a proto-omniscient entity. Stuff for another week.)

For this reason, it is not at all surprising that scientists encounter such resistance when they state that they are near — or at least making progress — in answering such questions without recourse to divine intervention. According to the scientific viewpoint, the origins of the cosmos, of life and of mind are natural processes that obey material laws and principles. Their complexity and our current lack of answers do not mean that such questions are completely beyond the reach of science, or that such questions can only be addressed through religious belief. In science, ignorance is the pre-condition to knowledge; to not-know is the pathway to knowing.

Perhaps the proper way to phrase the question is not whether science can provide answers to the three origins but how far it can go in answering them. For it may very well be that science can only go part of the way. To see why, let's begin with the one that may, perhaps, be the "easiest" of the three, the origin of life.

Although we are far from understanding the details (see guest blogger Wim Hordijk's recent contribution to these pages), it seems clear that the transition from non-life to life follows from the increasingly complex chemical reactions that took place on primal Earth: at a certain point, networks of chemical reactions became self-sufficient and, partially isolated within protective membranes, were able to absorb energy from the outside environment and to produce copies of themselves with some efficiency. We certainly don't know how this happened here some 3.5 billion years ago (or even earlier).

More to the point, unless someone offers a formal proof that there is only one biochemical pathway toward life — a possibility that I consider highly unlikely — we will never be able to know exactly how life emerged here. At best, we can come up with viable scenarios of the origin of life given the conditions prevalent on primal Earth (another challenge in itself, to find those out).

So, the question of the origin of life, at least in the exact way (or ways, for it may have happened more than once) in which it emerged here or in any other planetary platform out there, is not answerable scientifically. Does this mean that science can't help us understand the origin of life? Not at all. We can only understand the origin of life through science, even if this understanding is necessarily limited. Of the three origins questions, the origin of life is still the most tractable, given that we can simulate conditions and chemical reactions in the laboratory with some degree of control.

Contrary to the origin of the Universe or of mind, the origin of life is a problem we can attack from the outside in. It is for this reason that I call it the "easiest" of the three, although there is nothing easy about it.

Molecular biologists like Gerald Joyce, from the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, and Nobel laureate Jack Szostak from Harvard University, among many others, are making spectacular advances toward understanding life. They can manipulate RNA and DNA and coax them into enacting the game of life, that is, respond and adapt to environmental pressure as the theory of evolution dictates; they can strip away cellular structures and genes from living cells to search for the minimum living system; Günter von Kiedrowski in Germany was able to construct auto-catalytic chemical sets that show self-replicating abilities.

These experiments are not yet creating life in the laboratory. But they are certainly steps in the right direction. Even if we will not be able to explain exactly how life emerged on Earth, science still offers the only pathway toward understanding.

A Short Reading List On The Three Origins:

1. Cosmos

The Origin of the Universe, by John Barrow
Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe, by Simon Singh
A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, by Lawrence Krauss
The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, by Steven Weinberg
The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang, by Marcelo Gleiser


2. Life

Origins of Life, by Freeman Dyson
Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story, by A. G. Cairns-Smith
The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life, by Paul Davies
Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview, by Iris Fry
Life's Origin: The Beginnings of Biological Evolution, J. William Schopf, ed.


3. Mind

Origin of Mind: Evolution of Brain, Cognition, and General Intelligence, by David C. Geary
Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, by Francis Crick
The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, by Eric Kandel
How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker
Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, by Antonio Damasio

* * * * * *

The Origin of The Universe: From Nothing Everything?

by MARCELO GLEISER
March 27, 2013

A computer simulation of the formation of large-scale structures in the Universe, showing a patch of 100 million light-years and the resulting coherent motions of galaxies flowing towards the highest mass concentration in the centre. The snapshot refers to an epoch about 10 billion years back in time. Klaus Dolag/VIMOS-VLT Deep Survey/ESO

Last week, I started a discussion of what I call "The Three Origins," focusing first on the origin of life. Although we are far from knowing how non-living matter became living organisms on primitive Earth some 3.5 billion years ago (or more), or how to repeat the feat in the laboratory, I consider this the "easiest" of the three questions.

Contrary to the origin of the Universe and the origin of mind, the origin of life is something we can study from the outside in, where we can have an external and objective view of what is going on. Even if, as I have argued, it seems impossible to know exactly how life originated on Earth (unless it could be proven that there is only one pathway from nonlife to life), we can still investigate the biochemical pathways leading to what we may call a living organism. In the case of the cosmos or the mind, things are subtler.

From what we know, all cultures have a creation narrative describing the origin of the world, of how everything came from nothing. As I explored in The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang, there are only a small number of possible answers to the origin of the cosmos. All creation myths presuppose the existence of some kind of divine or absolute power capable of creating the world. In the vast majority of cases, the Bible being one example, this absolute power is embodied in God, or a group of gods. In others, the Universe is eternal, without a starting moment in the distant past: it has existed forever and will exist forever. In others still, the cosmos emerges without any divine interference from a primal Nothingness, from an innate tendency to exist. This Nothing can be complete emptiness, a primal egg, or even a struggle between chaos and order. Not every creation myth uses divine intervention or supposes that time started in some moment in the past.

According to modern science, the origin of the universe is part of cosmology. In trying to describe a creation process through scientific language we encounter a serious challenge: if every effect results from a cause, we can follow the chain of causation backwards in time until we arrive at the First Cause. But what caused this cause? Aristotle, for one, used some kind of divine entity to solve this conundrum, the Unmoved Mover, the one that can cause without having been caused. Very convenient, but not scientifically satisfying.

As current astronomical observations resolutely point to a Universe with a beginning in the distant past (according to the latest measurements from the Planck satellite related here last week, at about 13.8 billion years ago), scientific models of the origin of the Universe must face the challenge of explaining or doing away with the problem of the First Cause.

The fundamental question is this: even if a scientific explanation exists, is it an acceptable answer to the question of the origin of the Universe? Defenders of scientism might argue that this is the best that we can do, that it is the only reasonable thing that we can do. Fair enough, if you believe that science should provide an answer to this question and if you are happy with the answers given.

The best answer we have at this point is that the Universe emerged spontaneously from a random quantum fluctuation in some sort of primordial quantum vacuum, the scientific equivalent of "nothing." However, this quantum vacuum is a very loaded nothing: it assumes the whole machinery of quantum field theory, the modern description of how elementary particles of matter interact with one another, was already in operation.

In the quantum realm, even the lowest energy state, the "vacuum," is not empty. Even if the energy of a quantum system is zero, it is never really zero due to the inherent quantum fluctuations about this state. A zero energy quantum state is as impossible as a perfectly still lake, with absolutely no disturbances on its surface. This quantum jitteriness amounts to fluctuations on the value of the energy; if one of these fluctuations is unstable it may grow big, like a soap bubble that blows itself up. The energy remains zero on average because of a clever interplay between the positive energy of matter and the negative energy of attractive gravity. This is the result that physicists like Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Mikio Kaku and others speak of when they state that the "universe came out of quantum nothingness," or something to that extent.

The essential question, though, is whether this is indeed a satisfactory explanation to the question of cosmic origins, or simply part of one. The philosopher David Albert raised similar points in a recent review of Lawrence Krauss's book. Here is Krauss's response.

It is obvious that this quantum nothingness is very different from an absolute nothingness. Physicists may shrug this away stating that concepts like absolute nothingness are not scientific and hence have no explanatory value. It is indeed true that there is no such thing as absolute nothingness in science, since the vacuum is pregnant with all sorts of stuff. Any scientific explanation presupposes a whole conceptual structure that is absolutely essential for science to function: energy, space, time, the equations we use, the laws of Nature. Science can't exist without this scaffolding. So, a scientific explanation of the origin of the universe needs to use such concepts to make sense. It necessarily starts from something, which is the best that science can ever hope to do.

Even if we move on to the multiverse, things still need to be formulated in terms of fields, energy, spacetime, derivatives, etc. Furthermore, scientific hypotheses need to be testable and falsifiable, and we don't yet know how to do this with a quantum fluctuation that generates a universe. We can't set this experiment in the laboratory and examine the right conditions for universes to emerge from the quantum vacuum. Contrary to the origin of life question, we can't step out of the Universe to examine it from the outside in. At best, and this should be quite enough for a scientific explanation of cosmic origins, a model for the quantum origin of the Universe should lead to a cosmos compatible with current observations. Stepping out into the abstract multiverse may provide us with different plausible cosmoids and help us understand why our own Universe is so special. But unless there is a very clear selection principle that doesn't predicate our existence, the question as to why this Universe and not another will remain open.

And this is not at all bad. The fact that science answers so many questions doesn't mean it should answer all; or that some questions should only be answered through science. Before I am accused of advocating obscurantism, let me be clear. What I mean is that a scientific explanation to the origin of the Universe, at least one based in the current way we do science, cannot be self-contained. Sometimes we must have the humility to accept that our modes of explanation have limits and make peace with what we can do; and marvel at how much we can do without the pretense of knowing how to do everything.

* * * * * *

Mind and Matter: Confessions Of A Perplexed Soul

by MARCELO GLEISER
April 03, 2013

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

After a week on the origin of life and another on the origin of the universe, we now turn to the third installment of this series, a digression on the origin(s) of mind. The plural expresses the many ways in which we can think of mind and its origin. I shall touch on some of these without any hope or intention of being either exhaustive or coherent. For when it comes to mind, I confess my perplexity. And I am sure I am not alone.

First some definitions, just to start the controversy. Since I am not a cognitive psychologist or a philosopher of mind, I hope my co-bloggers Tania Lombrozo and Alva Noë will come to the rescue in due course. We play with three words, "brain," "mind" and "consciousness," and possibly a fourth, "intelligence."

Brain is easy. All vertebrate animals have it in their skull; it's the central organ of the nervous system. An interesting but tangential question is which is the simplest brain, or what animal has the simplest brain. Jellyfish, for example, have diffuse nerve nets but no central nervous system. The winners are worms, who have small bundles of neurons arranged as nerve cords running along the length of their bodies.

Mind, consciousness and intelligence are hard. From a scientific perspective, all three are products of the brain. There is matter and nothing else. The question then is to figure out how the brain does it: how we can ask profound questions and write essays about them while dogs and chimps can't, even though they are arguably intelligent. There are levels of intelligence, levels of consciousness and levels of mindfulness. So, one of the questions about origin of mind is how it evolved to the level we see today.

In this connection, I note the recent New York Review of Books essay by John Searle on Christof Koch's book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. Searle criticizes Koch for his attempt to indiscriminately use information theory to explain consciousness, starting with attributing it to devices such as thermostats or cellphones. Koch claims that even a photodiode is conscious: It turns on when the light is on and off when the light is off. So, its consciousness has two states (on and off) and minimal information.

Perhaps Koch is paving the road to conscious machines, but I must agree with Searle that unless there is some level of subjective understanding of the action that is undertaken, there is no consciousness to speak of. When cellphones start chatting with one another, we should be duly impressed.

Consciousness needs a conscious observer. And that's the rub.

To facilitate things, let's say that mind is a faculty that conscious, intelligent beings have, the ability to think, feel and reflect about the world and the subjective experiences it presents. It is then legitimate to ask whether other animals have minds or whether machines can one day have them too. This is a key aspect of the debate, since the mind-body problem has traditionally split the line between two sides: Mind is a property of brains that reach a certain level of cognitive complexity and hence a state of matter; or mind is not matter — it is something that can't be reduced to how the brain works.

Of course, this kind of mind-matter dualism dates back at least to Descartes, something that nowadays is mostly not seriously considered, at least by cognitive neuroscientists. (See, for example, the very heated debate surrounding philosopher Thomas Nagel's latest book, Mind and Cosmos. For a good review with many references, see the contribution by Jennifer Schuessler to the New York Times. See also the powerful essay on Nagel's book by Adam Frank in these pages. Nagel goes against scientific reductionism and proposes that mind is a property of the universe, something beyond the merely quantifiable. He is not alone, even among scientists.)

Attributing some sort of teleology to the universe in order to explain mind is merely an updated version of the biblical aspirations that we are special creatures because we were created with a purpose. Instead, I would argue that we can be special without having been created, that what makes us special is precisely the opposite — the fact that we evolved in a universe that is pretty hostile to life, especially complex multicellular life. If you don't believe life is rare, take a look around our planetary neighbors. (Yes, there should be life elsewhere in the universe; but no, it doesn't follow that this life would have evolved to the level of intelligence we see here.)

The wonder lies not in some sort of unknowable property of the cosmos but in the fact that we do have a mind to ponder such things. The answer is within our heads, and the challenge is to find it without being able to step outside and take an objective look.

Recently, Brazilian neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, showed that the often-quoted figure that the human brain has about 100 billion neurons is off by some 14 billion. The proper number is around 86 billion, connected through trillions of synapses, all packed in about 2.8 pounds. How perplexing that this little bundle of nerve cells can do what it can! Noninvasive probes such as fMRIs provide amazing activity maps of what goes on whereas different stimuli are teased. Without getting lost in the immense maze of cognitive experiments being performed today, it is clear that the brain integrates sensorial stimuli from the outside and re-creates our sense of reality from within.

The only reality we can perceive is the one our brain allows us to. This thought has all sorts of implications to the nature of reality, and to how we define what is real, something Adam touched on in his essay and that I hope to come back to sometime in the near future.

What we call the world happens inside our brains, teased from the outside or from the inside. (Dreams are worlds within, with arbitrary physical laws and narrative rules.) A key question to be answered is whether consciousness needs organic matter to sustain it or whether it can exist merely through electronic circuits. Of course, we all like to think that circuits will do it, that it is a matter of time before we build an intelligent, conscious machine. But we don't really know whether that's even possible, do we?

NOTE: I'd like to add one more book to the reading list from the first week:

Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, by Alva Noe.

Howard Bloom - The God Problem (UTNE Reader)

From the current issue of the UTNE Reader (March/April 2013), this is a lengthy excerpt from Howard Bloom's newest book, The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates. This is another book I have purchased and have yet to read. So many books, so little time.

The God Problem

By Howard Bloom

UTNE Reader

March 2013

"The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates" attempts to reshape thinking on science and form conclusions about the existential question of how a godless cosmos creates itself.

Cover Courtesy Prometheus Books

God's war crimes, Aristotle's sneaky tricks, Galileo's creationism, Newton's intelligent design, entropy's errors, Einstein's pajamas, John Conway's game of loneliness, Information Theory's blind spot, Stephen Wolfram's New Kind Of Science, and six monkeys at six typewriters getting it wrong. What do these have to do with the birth of a universe and with your need for meaning? Everything, as Howard Bloom tries to explain in The God Problem (Prometheus Books, 2012).

Bloom leads a scientific expedition into the secret heart of a cosmos you've never seen: An electrifyingly inventive, obsessive-compulsive cosmos. A cosmos of screaming, stunning surprise. A cosmos that's the biggest invention engine — the biggest breakthrough maker, the biggest creator — of all time. The following excerpt sets up the journey by posing the ultimate question: How does the cosmos create?

Imagine this. You are a twelve-year-old in a godforsaken steel town that once helped suture the Great Lakes to the Atlantic coast of North America and Europe. A city that, for you, is a desert—a wasteland without other minds that welcome you. Buffalo, New York.

Your bar mitzvah is coming up. (Congratulations—you are Jewish for a day.) And you are avoiding a huge confession. One that will utterly change your life. A confession about one of the biggest superstars of human history. God.

You are not a popular kid. In fact, other kids either ignore you or try with all their might to keep you from getting anywhere near their backyard play sessions, their baseball diamonds, their clubs, and their parties. When they do pay attention to you, it’s to take aim. They kick soccer balls in your face. They grab your hat and play toss with it over your head while you run back and forth trying to yank it out of the heights above your reach. Or they pry your textbooks from your arms and throw them on a lawn covered with dog droppings.

No one your age wants you in Buffalo, New York.

But at the age of ten you discover a clique that does welcome you. Why? It’s a clique of dead men. And dead men have no choice. The two heroes you glue yourself to, two heroes not in a position to object if you tag along and join them in their games, are Galileo and Anton van Leeuwenhoek. These are men who shuffled off this mortal coil roughly three hundred years ago. But they put you on a quest, a mission, an adventure that will last you a lifetime.

Your task? To pursue the truth at any price, including the price of your life. To find things right under your nose, things that you, your parents, and all the kids who shun you take for granted. To look at these everyday things as if you’ve never seen them before. To look for hidden assumptions and to overturn them. To look for really big questions then to zero in on them. Even if the answers will not arrive in your lifetime.

Why do this? Because your dead companions have lured you into science. And the first two rules of science are:

1. The truth at any price including the price of your life.
2. Look at things right under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before, then proceed from there.

What’s more, in science the next big question can be more important than the next big answer. New questions can produce new scientific leaps. They can tiddlywink new flips of insight and understanding. Big ones. Paradigm shifts.

New questions can even show the people who’ve rejected you how to think in whole new ways. And that is your mission. Finding the questions that will produce the next big perception shift. Finding the unseen vantage points that will allow others to radically reperceive.

So how does God get into the picture? Remember, you are twelve. Your bar mitzvah is coming up. Your dad is going to throw a party for all the kids you know—for all the kids who humiliate you at Public School 64. And this time you are invited. Yes, your bar mitzvah is the very first time that you will be allowed to attend a celebration with your peers. And it gets better. The center of attention will be, guess who? You.

But something is rumbling through your mind. Something you refuse to register. Something that could cancel your bar mitzvah. You’ve read the arguments that Bertrand Russell has made about God. These arguments hit home with you. God, in Russell’s opinion, is a silly idea. If it took a God to create a universe, then a thing as complex and as powerful as a God would need a creator, too. And who or what created God?

In other words, the notion of a God doesn’t make sense. And it doesn’t appeal to your emotions, either. So the confession that you are dodging is this: You are about to become a stone-cold atheist. But if you admit that to yourself right now, you will blow your bar mitzvah.

The result? The question of whether there is a God stays safely hidden in your subconscious. You never put it in words, even to yourself. But that’s just the beginning.

The party happens—a bowling party. It isn’t what you expected. The other kids show up. But they do what they’ve always done. They ignore you. You are left out even at your own shindig. Thank God the dead guys of science still welcome you. But the heap of presents is extraordinary.

Then it’s confession time. There is no God. You are as certain of that as you are that a bus slamming into you and your bicycle at thirty miles per hour at the corner of Colvin Avenue and Amherst Street could do you serious damage. And if there were a deity hanging around in the skies, what kind of God could he be? A monster, a pervert, and a serial killer? A demented and addicted murderer of plants, animals, and entire species? A torturer and slayer of creatures made in his own image, a mass murderer of human beings?

You’ve read the Bible from cover to cover, and one story in particular bothers you. The story of Job. Job is a good man, a man whom God has made successful and rich. And a man who believes profoundly in his maker. But God is sitting around heaven one Saturday afternoon with the Accuser—God’s chief prosecutor: a combination of security chief, head of Earth’s domestic spy agency, and district attorney. There is no Super Bowl and no TV. So what do two very macho guys, two guys on a power trip, do when they are forced to amuse themselves? They compete over who can do the best job of guessing the future. They make bets. (Why we humans and the gods that we imagine get a kick out of testing our prediction powers—and competing over them—is a subject for another time.)

Here’s how your twelve-year-old mind recalls the tale. The Accuser bets God that humans only believe in the Deity-in-Chief so long as he delivers the goods. God, the divine attorney implies, suckers humans into belief by paying them off, by putting them on the payroll. Cancel the flow of bribes, says the quibbling public prosecutor of the heavens, make life miserable enough for the greatest believer, and even the most pious human will turn on God and curse his very name. You’re on, says God. I’ll take that bet.

To prove his point, God puts Job in the crosshairs of a demonstration project. Wealth, in these biblical times, is based on the number of four-legged animals you own. And because God has been generous to Job, his flocks of animals are abundant—seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, a thousand oxen, and five hundred “she-asses” to be precise. So God kills the sheep, the camels, the oxen, and the asses. He wipes out Job’s savings. He turns Job from a rich man to a poor man overnight.

Does this make Job turn on God? Not a bit. Strip Job of his fortune and he still swears his belief in his creator. So God takes the demonstration a step further. God has been good to Job in the fertility department, and Job and his wife have ten kids—three daughters and a whopping seven sons. So God kills the children. All ten of them. Does Job curse God? Not one bit. He hangs on tight to his belief.

God takes things even further. He takes aim at the one thing Job has left, his body. He turns Job’s very skin into a torture chamber. He gives Job boils whose pains produce an infinite hell minute by minute and second by second. Job sits in a pile of ashes and covers himself with them, trying to stop the agony. But does Job say screw you to the big guy in the sky? Does he curse God? Not one bit. He prays to God, he begs for God’s aid, and he sticks to God through thick and thin.

The bet is over. God wins. Then God, who is praised for his compassion but should be condemned for his mean streak, gives Job ten new children and a slew of new sheep.

In other words, God is a mass murderer. He has no compunctions about killing Job’s children. And he acts as if a new family will make amends for the kids whose lives he has snuffed. Why does God kill so casually? In this case, just to win a bet. What’s worse, God makes mass murder ordinary. He makes massacre an everyday reality. How? When you and I were born, only one thing was certain about the rest of our lives: that you and I would someday die. Just as billions of humans and over a trillion, trillion, trillion (1036) microorganisms, animals, and plants have died before us. Yes, God kills creatures by the trillions of trillions of trillions. In fact, trillions of tril­lions of trillions is an undercount.

A God who slaughters is no God at all. Or if he is, he is a God who has to be opposed. He is a God whose cruelty cannot be allowed to continue. He is a God who must be stopped.

Or, to put it in the words of the mid-twentieth-century American poet Archibald MacLeish, “If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God.” If God is all powerful, if God is omnipotent, then his brutality is outrageous. And if God is not the creator and the controller of violence, then God is not omnipotent. He is not all powerful. He is not God.

Your bar mitzvah takes place on your birthday, so you are now a grown-up thirteen. And you’ve finally confessed your atheism. But you see the dilemma of deity—the problem of Job, the problem of good and evil—in terms of another biblical story, the tale of Jacob. Jacob wants to climb to the heavens and palaver with God, to negotiate with him face to face. God plays this scene as if he were Al Pacino in The Godfather. He has a thug, an angel, guarding the ladder to heaven. You imagine this as a ladder about eight feet high leading to a heaven that hovers over the earth at roughly the height of a low-hanging tree house. When Jacob reaches the foot of the tree house ladder, the holy bouncer refuses to let him touch even the first rung. Jacob objects. Strenuously. The two—Jacob and the angel—get into a nasty fight, wrestling their biceps off. Jacob loses.

As you see it, it’s your job to do what Jacob failed to accomplish. It’s your job to toss the bouncer aside as if he were a crumpled candy wrapper. It’s your job to climb that ladder, to barge into God’s living room, to grab the little sucker by the collar of his robe, and to tell him that either he shape up or we humans will have to take over. Why? Because it’s your job to do some­thing we still have not learned how to do—to stop the massacre, to stop the new Holocausts and the new Rwanda’s. To stop death in its tracks. To stop the vicious little bastard we call God.

The first rule of science is the truth at any price including the price of your life. That rule also applies to morality. You have to stop torture, pain, and death even if doing so endangers you. Which means if mass murder is taking place, you and I have to stop it. Even if we risk losing our lives.

But the nonexistence of god and the cruelty of the cosmos is not the really big revelation. It is not the insight that leads you to a massive challenge for science—and to a massive challenge for you and me. The crucial bolt of lightning that hits you is this. You are still thirteen. A mere ten weeks after your bar mitzvah and your confession of atheism, the Jewish High Holidays arrive. Your parents believe in God so deeply that they literally try to outdo God’s bouncer—they wrestle you into a car to take you to Temple Beth El on Richmond Avenue. Why? Because High Holiday services are the most important services in the Jewish year. But when it’s time to leave the car, you refuse. So your mom and dad literally grab you by the ankles and try to drag you from their blue, four-door Frazer while you hold on to the rear right doorframe for all you’re worth. Or at least that’s the way you remember it.

What’s more, by then you’ve been in science for a whopping 23 percent of your life. Since the age of ten. So you’ve read a considerable amount of anthropology. And every tribe you’ve ever read about agrees with your parents. Every tribe believes that there is some sort of god, some sort of supernatural power. Yes, the gods of each of these strange clans scattered across the face of the earth and sprinkled through history have been dif­ferent—gods who create, gods who keep things running, gods who destroy, gods with faces on the fronts and backs of their heads, gods with a third eye, gods who hold lightning bolts in their hands, gods who hold fistfuls of snakes, dog goddesses, gods of civilization, gods of music, Earth goddesses, gods and goddesses of death, goddesses of light, monkey gods, emperor gods, gods of jade, gods who handle heaven’s paperwork, gods who file reports on your behavior, gods with elephant trunks, goddesses with eight arms, gods with the heads of jackals, goddesses with the heads of cats, and gods with the heads of hawks. Nearly every tribe and nearly every human being has gods. Belief in gods is all over the place. It’s universal. It squeaks and squoozes from every pore of humanity.

So if there are no gods in the sky, on the mountaintops, or in rivers, rocks, and underworlds, where are they? The second rule of science tells you to look at things right under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before, then to proceed from there. The most obvious thing right under your nose turns out not to be under your nose at all. It turns out to be behind your nose. The gods are in our imaginations. The gods are in our emotions and in our passions. The gods are in our hearts and minds.

But take God out of the skies, put him in the minds, guts, and gonads of human beings, and you’re left with a massive question. How does a Godless cosmos pull off the tricks that every genesis myth tries to grasp? Back to your café table in the nothing before the birth of the universe. If you believe the big bang theory—and the story of what the big bang theory means for you and me is about to come—then once upon a time there was a nothing. From that no thing came the first some thing, the big bang. And it wasn’t just any something. It wasn’t just an undifferentiated mass like a black hole. It was a speed rush of time and space that had within it the seeds of an entire universe. The seeds of atoms, suns, planets, and galactic superclusters. The seeds of algae, cabbages, flamingos, termites, and trees. The seeds of you and me.

That’s a colossal act of creativity, a stupendous act of genesis and inven­tion. How did it happen? Why did it happen? If there is no creator, no engi­neer, no omniscient and omnipotent consciousness presiding over the start of everything, no sleazy little bastard in the sky making bets with his buddy the public prosecutor, then how did this rush of time and space come to be? How did the universe create something so unlikely, something so surprising, something that broke every previous rule? Something that made brand new rules of its own? How did the cosmos create time and space? And why?

But there’s more. In the first 10-12 seconds of this cosmos’s existence, as you and I saw from our café table at the beginning of the universe, the space-time sheet popped forth the very first things—quarks. Then it show­ered protons and neutrons. But that was just the opening act. The cosmos shaped the flickers and flits of photons and electrons. It crafted the lumpy nanoballs called atoms, the giant sweepings of dust and gas called galaxies, the massive clench and screaming crunch of stars. The cosmos birthed giant ropes of molecules able to seduce each other into dances beyond the dreams of human choreographers into the most peculiar molecule dance of them all, life.

How in the world did the cosmos pull this off?

How does a godless cosmos make a heaven and an earth? How does she make crocodiles, crusaders, continents, and Milky Ways? How does a godless cosmos cough up insight and emotion? How does it burp forth you and me?

That becomes the quest of a lifetime for you. It’s the quest you will begin in 1956. It’s the mission that you will pursue for over half a century. It’s the question whose answer can change the way that hundreds of millions of others see. It’s the question that can help us utterly reperceive.

How does the cosmos create?

That’s not just any question, it’s THE question.

It’s the God Problem.

~ Reprinted with permission from The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates by Howard Bloom and published by Prometheus Books, 2012.