The Scientist as Rebel (42 page)

I am suggesting that paranormal mental abilities and scientific method may be complementary. The word “complementary” is a technical term introduced into physics by Niels Bohr. It means that two descriptions of nature may both be valid but cannot be observed simultaneously. The classic example of complementarity is the dual nature of light. In one experiment light is seen to behave as a continuous wave, in another experiment it behaves as a swarm of particles, but we cannot see the wave and the particles in the same experiment. Complementarity in physics is an established fact. The extension of the idea of complementarity to mental phenomena is pure speculation. But I find it plausible that a world of mental phenomena should exist, too fluid and evanescent to be grasped with the cumbersome tools of science.

I should here declare my personal interest in the matter. One of my grandmothers was a notorious and successful faith healer. One of my cousins was for many years the editor of the
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research
. Both these ladies were well educated, highly intelligent, and fervent believers in paranormal phenomena. They may have been deluded, but neither of them was a fool. Their beliefs were based on personal experience and careful scrutiny of evidence. Nothing that they believed was incompatible with science.

Whether paranormal phenomena exist or not, the evidence for their existence is corrupted by a vast amount of nonsense and outright fraud. Before we can begin to evaluate the evidence, we must get rid of the hucksters and charlatans who have turned unsolved mysteries into a profitable business. Charpak and Broch have done a fine job, sweeping out the money-changers from the temple of science and exposing their tricks. I recommend this book to believers and skeptics alike. It is good entertainment, whether or not you believe in astrology.

A deluge of eloquent letters came in response to this review. Orthodox scientists were outraged because I considered the existence of telepathy to be possible. True believers in telepathy were outraged because I considered its existence to be unproved. This is a question that is of deep concern to many readers. The most interesting response came from Rupert Sheldrake, who sent me papers describing his experiments studying telepathy in dogs. Dogs have several advantages over humans as experimental subjects. They do not get bored, they do not cheat, and they do not have any interest in the outcome of the experiment. Sheldrake’s experiments contradict my statement that telepathy cannot be studied scientifically. Unfortunately, the experiments were conducted by humans, not by dogs, and effects of
human bias and selective reporting could not be altogether eliminated. But Sheldrake is right when he says that the experiments are scientific. They are repeatable, and ought to be repeated by independent investigators using different dogs. Interested readers may examine the evidence in Sheldrake’s book,
Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals
(Crown, 1999), and in his more recently published papers.

LIFE SOMETIMES IMITATES
art. Olaf Stapledon wrote
Star Maker
sixty-six years ago as a dramatization of a philosophical idea. Now, sixty-six years later, cosmologists are proposing similar scenarios as possible models of the universe we live in.

Stapledon was a philosopher and not a scientist. He wrote this book to explore an elegant new solution of the old philosophical problem of evil. The problem is to reconcile the existence of evil in our world with the existence of an omnipotent and not entirely malevolent creator. The solution is to suppose that our universe is only one of many, that the creator is engaged in creating a long series of universes, that he is improving his designs as he goes along, that our universe is one of his early flawed creations, and that the evils that we see around us are flaws from which the creator will learn how to do the job better next time. Stapledon brings the story to a climax in his penultimate chapter, “The Maker and His Works,” which paints a powerful picture of the creator as a craftsman using us as raw material to practice his skills. The hero of the story is a human observer, who first explores the multitude of worlds in our universe on which intelligent life has evolved, and then finally confronts the Star Maker. But that supreme moment of confrontation is tragic rather than harmonious. Like God answering Job out of the whirlwind, the Star
Maker strikes him down and rejects him. The Star Maker judges his creation with love but without mercy. In the end, our entire universe, in spite of all its majesty and beauty, is a flawed experiment. The Star Maker is already busy with designs for other universes in which our flaws may be repaired.

Within the last few years, Lee Smolin and Martin Rees and other cosmologists have been addressing a very different philosophical problem. They are not concerned with moral judgments but with scientific facts. It is a scientific fact that our universe is strangely hospitable to the growth of life and intelligence. Many details of the laws of physics and chemistry seem to conspire to make our universe friendly to life. If the details of nuclear forces, gravitational forces, and chemical forces had been slightly different, life as we know it could never have evolved. Our form of life was able to adapt itself to the universe in which it originated, but there is no way in which any form of life could have adapted itself to a universe that collapsed into a fiery space-time singularity before it had time to give birth to stars and planets, or to a universe that expanded into a cold dilute gas before giving birth to any atoms heavier than hydrogen. It seems that our universe is somehow fine-tuned, with the forces of gravitational collapse and cosmic expansion almost exactly balanced, so that stars and planets have time to evolve, and the atoms of the various chemical elements necessary for life have time to be formed. The philosophical problem of explaining why the universe is hospitable to life is called the fine-tuning problem.

Lee Smolin was the first cosmologist to point out that the fine-tuning problem is solved if we assume that our universe is one of many, that new universes sprout like babies within older universes, that babies resemble their parents, that baby universes are born with a random assortment of laws of physics and chemistry, and that longer-lived universes give birth to more numerous babies. When these assumptions are made, it follows that a process of Darwinian evolution will
select longer-lived universes. And it is no accident that creatures like us happen to live in one of the longer-lived universes that has laws of physics and chemistry fine-tuned to the growth of life and intelligence. Among the billions of universes that exist, only a few will be fine-tuned enough for life to evolve, and one of those few must be our home. Smolin’s many-universe cosmology does not require a Star Maker to design it. It only needs the hidden hand of natural selection to guide its evolution, and the luck of a favorable random variation to provide a home for life.

The astronomer Martin Rees has suggested another way in which nature might have solved the fine-tuning problem. He remarks that if a multitude of universes exists, then some of them are likely to allow the evolution of life-forms with mental processes far more advanced than ours. A superintelligent life-form might be capable of simulating in its brain or in a supercomputer the complete history of another universe with a lower degree of complexity. Now Rees asks the question: Might we and the universe we live in be simulations, lacking any real physical substance and only existing as mental constructions in the minds of our superintelligent colleagues? “This concept,” says Rees, “opens up the possibility of a new kind of virtual time travel, because the advanced beings creating the simulation can, in effect, rerun the past. It’s not a time-loop in a traditional sense: it’s a reconstruction of the past, allowing advanced beings to explore their history.” Rees solves the fine-tuning problem by allowing future superintelligent beings to fine-tune the past.

If our present universe is a simulation created by intelligent aliens interested in exploring the consequences of alternative laws of physics, then we should expect the laws of physics that we observe to be chosen in such a way as to make our universe as interesting as possible. We should expect to find our universe allowing structures and processes of maximum diversity. The immense richness of ecological environments on our own planet gives support to Rees’s proposal. So
does the diversity of planets, stars, galaxies, and other more exotic inhabitants of the celestial zoo. We observe our universe to be not only friendly to life, but friendly to the maximum diversity of life. As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once remarked, the Creator appears to have an inordinate fondness for beetles. Future beings with superior intelligence may be fond of beetles too.
¹

Now comes the big surprise. The proposal of Rees, imagining our universe to be a simulation in the minds of intelligent aliens, is very similar to the proposal of Stapledon, imagining our universe to be an artifact of the Star Maker. The two proposals were addressed to different philosophical problems, the problem of evil for Stapledon and the problem of fine-tuning for Rees. They arose out of different cultures, the culture of moral philosophy for Stapledon and the culture of scientific cosmology for Rees. Yet, coming from different cultures and different concerns, Stapledon and Rees converged upon the same solution. This is not the first time that a writer of science fiction has leapt ahead to a new vision of reality that only became a part of the discourse of respectable scientists half a century later. Stapledon’s Star Maker is like Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo and H. G. Wells’s Doctor Moreau, fictional characters who have become more real as the years go by.

Another fictional character who has become more real as the years go by is Sirius, the superintelligent dog who is the hero of Stapledon’s next major novel after
Star Maker
. Stapledon published
Sirius
in 1944. It is another story presenting a philosophical problem in dramatic form. The philosophical problem addressed by
Sirius
is the moral status of animals. Since animals evidently have feelings and
emotions similar to ours, why do they not have legal rights and moral standing similar to ours? In the half-century since
Sirius
was written, campaigns for animal rights and animal liberation have gained strength in many countries. As we have learned more about the rich social and emotional lives of animals living in the wild, our denial of rights to animals living in captivity becomes harder to justify. And the rapid progress of genetic engineering will make the emergence of superintelligent dogs and cats a real possibility in the century now beginning. Stapledon’s story gives us warning of the tragic consequences that may follow from a blurring of the boundaries of species.

I hope that Pat McCarthy will edit a new edition of
Sirius
as a companion to his edition of
Star Maker
. In my opinion,
Sirius
is the finest of all Stapledon’s works. It received less attention than it deserved when it was published, because the majority of readers in 1944 were preoccupied with more urgent matters. In style it is less didactic and more personal than
Star Maker
. The drama of
Sirius
is played out against a vivid background, the sheepdog country of North Wales which Stapledon knew and loved. The characters are real human beings and dogs rather than disembodied spirits. The tragedy is the predicament of a lonely creature who understands both the world of dogs and the world of humans but belongs to neither.

But I must not praise
Sirius
too highly. That would be unfair to
Star Maker
.
Star Maker
may be, like the universe we happen to live in, a flawed masterpiece, but it is still a masterpiece. It is a classic work of imaginative literature, speaking to our modern age. It should be on the list of Great Books that anyone claiming to be educated should read. It is worthy to be compared, as McCarthy compares it in the introduction following this preface, with
The Divine Comedy
of Dante.

BREAKING THE SPELL
of religion is a game that many people can play. The best player of this game that I ever knew was Professor G. H. Hardy, a world-famous mathematician who happened to be a passionate atheist. There are two kinds of atheists, ordinary atheists who do not believe in God and passionate atheists who consider God to be their personal enemy. When I was a junior fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, Hardy was my mentor. As a junior fellow I enjoyed the privilege of dining at the high table with the old and famous. During my tenure, Professor Simpson, one of the old and famous fellows, died. Simpson had a strong sentimental attachment to the college and was a religious believer. He left instructions that he should be cremated and his ashes should be scattered on the bowling green in the fellows’ garden where he loved to walk and meditate. A few days after he died, a solemn funeral service was held for him in the college chapel. His many years of faithful service to the college and his exemplary role as a Christian scholar and teacher were duly celebrated.

In the evening of the same day I took my place at the high table. One of the neighboring places at the table was empty. Professor Hardy, contrary to his usual habit, was late for dinner. After we had all sat down and the Latin grace had been said, Hardy strolled into the dining hall, ostentatiously scraping his shoes on the wooden floor and
complaining in a loud voice for everyone to hear, “What is this awful stuff they have put on the grass in the fellows’ garden? I can’t get it off my shoes.” Hardy, of course, knew very well what the stuff was. He had always disliked religion in general and Simpson’s piety in particular, and he was taking his opportunity for a little revenge.