How to Make a Human Being: A Body of Evidence. Christopher Potter
sharp enough to descry the thread that ties cause and effect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), American transcendentalist
4 | Where does a cause end and its effect begin? What surrounds the cause and cuts it off from what it effects? What is in the space in between? What is the time between time? These are thoughts a precocious, gloomy child might have. But not childish; the problems run deep. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76) tried to pin down the elements of the illusion as a list of propositions that must be fulfilled: the cause and effect must be contiguous in space and time, the cause must come before the effect, there must be constant union between cause and effect; there are five further, increasingly elaborate tenets. Hume’s insight was to see that cause and effect are habits of the mind. We associate two events, two stimuli, two ideas in our minds, and time passes. But if an idea existed truly separate from another, how would we ever move from that idea to the next? We would be attached to the idea forever, unchanging and frozen out of time.
5 | The world is this then this, not this because of this. If there is intention in the universe it is hidden at all levels. Or does not exist.
The very idea of a cause is emergent and abstract. It is mentioned nowhere in the laws of motion of elementary particles and, as philosopher David Hume pointed out, we cannot perceive causation, only a succession of events.
David Deutsch
6 | In Dr Johnson mode, a harrumph is enough to dismiss the problem. I turn on the kettle, the element heats up, the water boils, a cup of tea is made. Causes and effects. We know what a cause is and what an effect is in our world of large things and from our human perspective. At the gross scale of human beings consciousness seeps in, granting us among its manifest powers the power to manifest cause and effect. But from a universal perspective that removes the human, the world must look differently. Pure thought tells us that there can be no gap between cause and effect – what could be in the gap? – but if there is no gap then there is nothing to distinguish cause and effect. Reductive materialism must and does account for this seeming impossibility. Relativity and quantum mechanics are two such accounts. Philosophy is not entirely useless! In relativity and quantum mechanics any exact formulation of what a cause can be is abandoned. Cause and effect are not qualities of the world at quantum scales. At the Big Bang the whole universe was a quantum event. Causality drains from the universe as we rush back towards its beginning. Radioactivity is an effect without a cause; the emergence of the universe from nothing is another example. Cause and effect emerge at human scales.
7 | Newton’s equations might suffice to retrace the path of a ball or of a planet, or predict their future courses, but the ball’s path and the planet’s orbit are not contained in the equations. As powerful as the predictions contained in the equations are, they always describe only some limited part of what is going on. The planet’s orbit might be changed because of some comet not taken account of. The ball may be thrown off course because of some unforeseen gust of wind. As hard as we try to predict what elements of change may arise, to describe any system, completely, we must eventually take account of the whole universe.
All this seemed to have ended well for Evgeny Mikhailovich and the yard porter Vassily: but it only seemed so. Things happened which no one saw but which were more important than all that people did see.
Tolstoy, ‘The Forged Coupon’
So, whatever the verdict of physics, the real causal explanation for why there are boiled eggs is that I, and other breakfasters, intend that boiled eggs should exist.
Alfred Gell (1945–97), anthropologist
8 | Time is an illusion, said the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, and the deeper reality is eternal and unchanging.
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Einstein writing, a month before his own death, about the recent death of his lifelong friend Michele Besso
9 | For Einstein the past and future exist eternally. Time does not flow, it just is. In fact all physical theories so far devised – Newtonian mechanics, Einstein’s two theories of relativity, even quantum mechanics – are symmetric in time. No arrow of time is indicated. There is no physical reason why a smashed plate might not rejoin itself, and indeed in some parts of the universe we should expect to see the arrow of time reversed. So far no such evidence has been found. To a material reductionist the arrow of time is an illusion of scale, just as Einstein’s special theory of relativity shows us that it is an illusion that time and space are separate. It is because humans experience the arrow of time that the second law of thermodynamics1 was added to physics. By fiat, the second law gives time a direction. The second law of thermodynamics fulfils an observational and psychological need rather than a physical one.
The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the world line of my body, does a section of the world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.
Hermann Weyl (1885–1955), mathematician
The physical world does not have tensed time, in which present, past and future exist side by side.
Raymond Tallis, philosopher
10 | Our human experience of living in the world is of time running forwards. We see a world in which everything, eventually, is ruined by time moving inexorably from past to future via a privileged instant we call now. The past is what the future becomes when it has been pulled through the ring of the present, and the present is the flame that burns the future into the ash of the past. Physical theories do not privilege the ‘now’. Physics tells us that everything that will ever happen in the universe has already happened. The universe simply is. If material reductionists are to hold fast to their theories and the God-like perspective of physics, they must explain why we human beings experience the illusion of an arrow of time, and why the moments of our lives cannot be revisited. Why human beings are consigned to march, once only, second by second, forwards along a line of allotted time is a question so far unanswered by science. Or rather there is no consensus around whatever theories have been put forward.
11 | That there is no dedicated sensory organ that detects time2 might suggest that the passing of time is a psychological phenomenon.
There is no mechanism to go wrong. We can have a fragmented sense of self, but no one has ever had a fragmented sense of time. Our subjective perception of it, however, causes time to tick variously. Physical time ticks regularly, subjective time ticks fast or slow depending on our age, the emotions we experience, whether we are in pain, or in love, or just bored. Dostoevsky writes of the condemned man’s last night in which each moment stretches into eternity. Is that why we fear death: because at the last, the moment of death never quite ends?3
To think is to be in time. What we cannot do is think ourselves into the future. Our inability to find the future except by waiting for it to arrive in time suggests that consciousness itself is based in time.4
Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always either too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.
Mary Crawford, in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
If we knew how long a night or a day was to a child, we might understand a great deal more about childhood … It may be that, subjectively, a childhood is at least equal in length to the rest of a lifetime.
John Berger, A Fortunate Man
Einstein said that the problem of the Now worried him seriously. He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter of painful but inevitable regret.
Rudolf