Can We Intuit the Meaning of Nature’s Wild Creativity?
Chaos, pseudo-randomness, and the universe’s godless productivity
Is it possible to intuit what it means for nature to have godlessly, mindlessly created itself?
To be sure, scientists track and explain in intricate detail how nature unfolds in various systems, processes, stages, levels, dimensions, and so on. Scientists use artificial, mathematically precise languages to predict which natural events will happen, based on knowledge of the events’ causes and underlying conditions, and they do so without appealing to theology or to miracles.
At the root of natural events is physicality, as in mass, energy, space, time, elementary particles, and so on, but no divine mind. Positing such a mind at nature’s origin is a religious act of faith, not the proposal of a scientific hypothesis.
Based on science, then, we can understand, for example, how molecules or solar systems form, or how life evolved on our planet. But an implication of the artificiality of proper scientific explanations is that these explanations aren’t intuitive. Indeed, they’re often counterintuitive, in that they depart dramatically from how we evolved to prefer to think of things.
Specifically, as social mammals we’re inclined to think in terms of terrestrial scales, and to deal with fellow social mammals like us. Theism, therefore, is a satisfying extension of the intuitions we evolved to make sense of fellow members of our species, and to interact with them in tight-knit clans. We posit gods or conscious “spirits” as the ultimate causes of natural events because we want to assimilate the unfamiliar to the familiar. We understand ourselves and our social groups well enough, so we presume that natural things are intelligently guided just like our bodies or our tools.
But again, those human-centered intuitions aren’t fit resources for science. On the contrary, scientists proceed by observing a natural pattern more neutrally and testing the best explanation of it. To some extent, scientists are conservative in evaluating which explanations are best, but they’re not so conservative that they require the explanation to cohere with our prejudices or vanity about our presumed central position with respect to all other beings. More generally, those explanations that scientists prefer are logically consistent, parsimonious, empirically testable, and useful (technologically empowering).
The more scientists have applied their methods of inquiry, the more alien nature seems to the norms of human societies. For instance, we care about life, morality, justice, pleasure, and the societal laws we codify to govern ourselves. No part of the vast universe beyond the confines of animal or human societies shares those concerns, according to scientific theories.
As scientists have filled enormous libraries with empirical knowledge, they’ve arrived at some tentative conclusions about the kinds of explanation that work best. One of those principles that have come to guide their studies is methodological naturalism. Scientists naturalize and objectify the patterns they encounter, and this is the opposite of the more intuitive mode of reasoning whereby we humanize or personify patterns to maximize our comfort.
The upshot, though, is that science alienates us from nature by superseding the intuitions that sustain our most naïve kind of pride, the kind that’s crucial to most of the world’s religions, for instance.
Again, with that background out of the way, the question I want to raise is whether we can stretch our intuitions to understand deeply what it means for Being at large to conform to scientific objectifications rather than to the presuppositions of human socialization. What does it mean for nature to have arisen and developed an intelligible order of events, without the aid of any conscious, intelligent agent such as a deity? What does it mean to speak of natural creativity when that creativity is understood to be godless and lifeless?
Schopenhauer’s failure of imagination
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer tried to stretch our intuition in that way by thinking of nature as being guided by raw, blind impulses. But his Eastern pantheism blunders by explicitly adapting our self-knowledge to the problem of understanding nature.
He thought that because the human body moves in response to the will, therefore all natural bodies have a will that makes for their inner being. The blind impulsiveness of this cosmic Will accounts for most of the suffering in life, so he argued that we’re obliged to save ourselves in the Hindu or Jain manner by not going with nature’s flow, by starving the cosmic beast and mastering our impulses, these being fundamentally the same as nature’s impulses.
As he says in the first volume of The World as Will and Representation,
The double knowledge we have of the nature and action of our body [based on the outer and inner senses], and which is given in two completely different ways, has now been clearly brought out. Accordingly, we shall use it further as a key to the inner being of every phenomenon in nature. We shall judge all objects which are not our own body, and therefore are given to our own consciousness not in the double way, but only as representations, according to the analogy of this [human] body. We shall therefore assume that as, on the one hand, they are representations, just like our body, and are in this respect homogeneous with it, so on the other hand, if we set aside their existence as the subject’s representation, what still remains over must be, according to its inner nature, the same as what in ourselves we call will.
Schopenhauer is here simply drawing an analogy between the human body and its volition, on the one hand, and all other natural bodies and their inner being, on the other. Human-like willpower is therefore supposed to be at the root of every natural occurrence.
But why take such a parochial analogy seriously? Schopenhauer lays out the reasoning (with my emphases):
For what other kind of existence or reality could we attribute to the rest of the material world? From what source could we take the elements out of which we construct such a world? Besides the will and the representation [body], there is absolutely nothing known or conceivable for us. If we wish to attribute the greatest known reality to the material world, which immediately exists only in our representations, then we give it that reality which our own body has for each of us, for to each of us this is the most real of things. But if now we analyse the reality of this body and its actions, then, beyond the fact that it is our representation, we find nothing in it but the will; with this even its reality is exhausted. Therefore we can nowhere find another kind of reality to attribute to the material world.
Yet Schopenhauer is committing here the fallacy of arguing from incredulity. Before the invention of the airplane, most people would have said that human flight is impossible because who could even imagine such a thing? After all, humans have arms rather than wings, so we weren’t meant to fly. Likewise, Schopenhauer is arguing just that we can’t imagine a nonhuman inner nature because we’re intimately acquainted only with our willful interiority. Nothing is “conceivable” to us, he says, apart from our outer and inner natures, and thus by extension, material embodiment and inner volition.
Moreover, he implies, this analogy is an act of charity: we should “wish to attribute the greatest known reality to the material world,” this being our inner reality, the having of a will.
That estimation of us, though, is self-centered. Schopenhauer presumes that our inner nature is relevant to the rest of nature because ours is “greatest.” That is, he presumes that because our willpower is most real to us, therefore human-like willpower should be more widely applied, as though there were some such obligation. This mistakes what might be just an epistemic limitation for a metaphysical one. Who says the universe must be bound by our failure of imagination or by the limits of human proprioception?
Schopenhauer didn’t stretch his imagination far enough. Still, he may indirectly have given us a clue as to how we should intuit the essence of natural creativity. Nature’s “will” would be unguided by human reason or sense organs, and this would turn nature into a wild, blindly groping monster. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it,
Schopenhauer’s particular characterization of the world as Will is nonetheless novel and daring. It is also frightening and pandemonic: he maintains that the world as it is in itself…is an endless striving and blind impulse with no end in view, devoid of knowledge, lawless, absolutely free, entirely self-determining and almighty. Within Schopenhauer’s vision of the world as Will, there is no God to be comprehended, and the world is conceived of as being inherently meaningless. When anthropomorphically considered, the world is represented as being in a condition of eternal frustration, as it endlessly strives for nothing in particular, and as it goes essentially nowhere. It is a world beyond any ascriptions of good and evil.
Phony and real randomness in nature
The question, then, is how we should think of nature’s wildness, without importing the notion of willpower to it, assuming volition is too human to be relevant to what’s plainly inhuman. (And I say “plainly,” based on the objectification in scientific knowledge). How could such a wild thing as the outer, cosmic wilderness come to exist and be so creative without the benefit of any mental property, such as willpower, artistic inspiration, intelligence, or sense of moral duty?
There are at least three places to turn for guidance: chaos theory, random number generators in computer science, and quantum mechanics.
What’s interesting about chaos theory is that it shows how what we used to think of as purely chaotic systems turned out to have hidden order. For instance, there’s the butterfly effect in which certain systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions. Depending on those conditions, the system may evolve in opposite, unpredictable ways. Chaos, then, isn’t so chaotic, as it were, since there’s a pattern in the apparent disorder.
We must distinguish, then, between subjective and objective randomness. The evolution of chaotic systems may be practically impossible to predict, but that doesn’t mean the evolution is inherently random.
That distinction is borne out by computer scientists, too, who discovered that we can’t program perfectly random numbers based on mathematics. Thus, there are pseudorandom number generators that are still hackable because these systems are deterministic, meaning that they follow patterns, even if those patterns are visible only on scales that our brainpower can’t encompass. Still, a hacker could predict the results of a pseudorandom number generator, using a computer that flies through the options faster than we can survey them.
This is why lotteries use naturally chaotic, mechanical, or analogue systems like balls bouncing in air, systems that are technically ordered rather than being inherently random, but which are practically too complex for anyone to predict.
True randomness is supposed to be found only at the root of nature, in quantum mechanics. For instance,
A block of radioactive material consists of billions of atoms which decay over time: they fall apart into smaller atoms while emitting dangerous radiation.
Physicists can calculate the probability that a particular atom will decay in a certain period of time, but it is impossible to work out which one will decay next — even if you know the exact properties of every atom.
This is inherent, metaphysical randomness, not just the kind that’s due to the limits of our methods of inquiry. But this isn’t to say that quantum particles are perfectly random. After all, they behave like particles rather than, say, like elephants or lawnmowers. We can’t say when exactly radioactive atoms will decay, but we do know that they decay and that they have the other properties worked out by the standard model of particle physics. For instance, quarks are divided into six types, based on their ordered properties, types known as “up”, “down,” “charm,” “strange,” “top,” and “bottom.”
Here again, then, quantum weirdness is chaotic in a deflated sense, in that there’s a hidden order in the randomness. And notice that this is just the duality we’d expect from the foregoing idea of wild creativity.
What would perfect rather than just partial metaphysical randomness look like? It would resemble what theoretical physicists call a white hole, this being the opposite of a black hole. Anything can fall into a black hole because nothing can escape its gravitational pull, just as anything could pop out of a white hole.
So, imagine there’s a white hole that outputs the craziest possible combination of things, such as squirrels, dragons, hairbrushes, black holes, and so on. And let’s suppose this white hole is as inherently random as a quantum particle, so there’s no predictable order of those outputs. Let’s suppose also that this white hole lasts for as long as a black hole, so this random generator goes on generating stuff for trillions of years.
Many of the generated things won’t be able to interact with each other, but eventually some will do so in a sustainable way, and order will develop in accordance with the law of large numbers. Maybe the dragon will befriend the squirrel and the pair will employ the hairbrush to attempt to avoid falling into the black hole, for example.
True, this assumes the spatiotemporal order, which isn’t itself perfectly random. That is, like black holes, the white hole would exist in a universe that includes the dimensions of space and time. But if nature is fundamentally wild, that wildness must be exhibited somehow. In any case, spacetime would eventually pop out of the white hole, too, governing the subsequent outputs.
The point here is just that even a perfect case of wildness — like a white hole — would develop eventually into some kind of intelligible order. The variety of products would cohere at some point by chance.
And of course, there can’t be squirrels or dragons at the quantum root of nature since those complex things are made of quantum particles. But the particles we do find are analogous to types of larger things since they, too, fall into types, according to the Standard Model. Wherever there’s a type, as in a pattern that holds among some particulars, there’s an order. Thus, there’s a quantum order, and for all we know, what we call the natural universe is a point of local convergence between stuff that’s randomly generated by something as wild as a white hole.
At the bottom of nature would be perfect wildness and randomness, but this source would be chaotic in the newly developed sense, in that the wildness would include the potential to output an ordered series (amidst many disordered sequences). Eventually, there would be a method to proto-nature’s madness, as it were. That method might be the apparent natural order that eventually developed.
Intuiting the nature of wildness
But how does that analysis of chaotic wildness help us intuit the wildness of nature? After all, a white hole would seem like a magical top hat, the latter being counterintuitive by design.
There is, though, an intuitive sense of “wild,” and it’s just the anthropocentric one we apply in speaking about the wilderness in a way that betrays our species’ ambition. “Wild” in this sense means something that isn’t yet cultivated. This sense of wildness is liminal in that it deals with the frontier of what’s been humanized.
We sense the limits of what’s familiar to us and of what we control precisely when we encounter something wild. Wild animals, for instance, are indifferent to our social laws, so they’re disposed to steal or to kill at will. And the wild cosmos is a giant outer wilderness that we haven’t tamed.
There’s a connection between this sense and the analysis of perfect wildness since just as people intend to undo the wilderness by turning it into an artificial world, a chaotic system undoes its disorder by eventually experimenting with options that happen to find a way to cohere or to turn into a pattern. That is, a chaotic system is self-organizing, which is just to speak of wild creativity.
We can intuit perfect wilderness, then, because our very anthropocentric conceits presuppose this limiting condition. There could be no cultivation of territory without the wilderness, so we understand wildness in so far as we understand ourselves. Wildness is the opposite of personhood.
If we’re preoccupied with morality, for example, wild nature isn’t so, and if we have thoughts and feelings, nature at large is bereft of those states. We create by intelligently designing things, whereas nature creates by flailing about and trying out all possible options until some assemble themselves into an ordered product.
Stretch our imagination to negate the qualities in us that we admire, and we arrive at an image of pure wildness — and that’s the closest we can get to bonding with our maker.