In Chronicle 840 concerning 17th-century French mathematician/religious philosopher Blaise Pascal, I referred to his conception of the bet (le pari), in which he applied his pioneering analysis of probability to the problem of convincing skeptics to believe in God—in a 17th century context where such belief meant not an abstract yes-no but effective acceptance of the strict Catholic doctrine of Jansenism. Pascal’s idea was simply that denial of God is the acceptance of extinction at death, whereas betting on his existence offers a chance at eternal life. Given this infinite difference, the gambler has no reason to hesitate; the slightest chance of God’s existence makes it worthwhile to bet on it, since if the bet is lost, it is no worse than if you bet against it—you perish in any case—whereas on the least chance of winning the bet, one is assured of the Paradise of the faithful, as opposed to the other place where are sent the unbelievers.
Pascal (who also created the first practical calculating machine) lived at the dawn of the modern age, when science was beginning to acquire its modern toolkit of microscopes and telescopes, calculus and analytic geometry, a century before the steam engine gave birth to the industrial era. At that time, to return to a passage I quoted in Chronicle 815, the poet Alexander Pope exemplified the public reaction to Newton’s laws as the ultimate scientific accomplishment: what we would call today the theory of everything:
Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said: “Let Newton be!” and all was light.
And even up to Einstein’s discovery of relativity more or less contemporaneously with the atomic theory of Niels Bohr, the general public had the impression that we were indeed very close to having achieved a general knowledge of the components of the universe and their laws of interaction. Certainly this was the atmosphere in the high schools and universities in my youth: the theory of everything had not yet been attained, but it was ever closer to achievement.
Today, and already for many years previously, most strikingly since the emergence of the apparent necessity of explaining the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy, which are theorized to make up something like 95% of the matter/energy in the universe, it has become ever more clear that, rather than closing the perfect circle that Pope imagined had been traced by Newton, we are instead discovering ever-new complications, and however successful future generations may be in resolving these, it seems painfully naïve to imagine that we will ever reach the utopian end of the process.
And indeed, one wonders what would then be left for scientists to accomplish afterward, beyond working out ever more secondary and tertiary details within this unchangeable scheme. Intellectual work, most particularly empirical science, implicitly depends on an infinite future; like Alexander of Macedon, scientists dread facing a universe in which there are no more worlds to conquer.
Yet the very possibility of such meditations as this has been dependent on millions of man-hours of intellectual labor, including that involved in building the ever more powerful machines that have allowed us to probe the various domains of reality. I need not feel ashamed of my minuscule knowledge in this area, since what I am suggesting is that, like Pascal’s gambler, to assume that the amount of information required to explain everything is infinite, in the sense that some ultimate limit will never be attained, means that however useful it is to learn about reality, it is in principle an infinite rather than a finite task, one that only God, in whatever sense we give to this term, can encompass it. And indeed, this acceptance allows us a (relatively) objective definition of God, as the Being in whom all is complete—a conception which, I would point out, is dependent on the existence of a system of signs in which knowledge can be recorded.
II
These prefatory remarks were meant to provide a taste of what might be called the bad infinity of such speculations about empirical science, and to suggest that they would best be set aside—that our efforts to understand reality should be pursued independently of any ultimate goal, in the interest and usefulness of acquiring ever more knowledge and consequently ever more power over reality.
And in that spirit, I would like to suggest a purely speculative model of the universe. It is simply this: given a universe sufficiently complex to permit the emergence of forms or structures of any kind, that is, of configurations of its minimal components that have their own properties not identical with those of these components taken separately, that such a system will continue to generate indefinitely more complex structures, and that the history of these structures will, regardless of setbacks, be a steady improvement, in the sense that they will become more elaborate and more capable of various manipulations of their surrounding reality so as to evolve, precisely in the Darwinian sense, into increasingly successful and durable forms.
And all this may be summarized by Darwin’s simple, and ultimately tautological, device: the survival of the fittest.
The fittest what? The struggle for life implied by this expression should not blind us to the simple fact that competition of the sort described is in no way limited to self-conscious creatures, or to living ones, or even to complex ones: in a universe where different objects encounter each other to be modified (or not) in various ways, we can say with certainty that within a given (more or less) isolated/independent sector of this universe, to the extent that its parts can interact, interdependent structures will form, and those fittest to survive the random effects of time will indeed survive better than the others, so that to the extent that there is any possibility of smaller and simpler units combining into larger and more complex ones, the latter will tend to increase in size and complexity to the extent that the results are more durable. It may be that only the smallest units can survive in a certain milieu, that no combinations are durable; in that case, these small units are the fittest. But if complexity can provide advantages, even rarely, then a sufficiently long period will tend to generate increasingly survivable and more complex beings.
Seen in this light, the universe we inhabit is certainly capable of producing beings of for all intents and purposes unlimited complexity. No doubt not all beings can be treated as integrated units; a planet, for example, is a collection of materials whose degree of organization is far lower than that of what we on Earth consider living creatures.
Do such creatures exist elsewhere? It seems strange that if they do, we have not yet encountered traces of them; yet given the number of planets in the universe, it is hard to defend the position that life in the sense of self-reproducing organisms has not appeared elsewhere, perhaps even of a comparable or superior level of complexity to our own. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the persistent lack of evidence in the face of the constantly increasing power of our tools of observation.
There is no use speculating about these questions, save as a background to maintaining the curiosity that drives our continuing quest for more powerful systems of detection along with theories to explain our observations. But from a Pascalian point of view, bracketing all ultimate questions about why there is something rather than nothing, which even without discussing God tacitly presuppose a God-like intelligence as the source of being—who alone could answer the question—what seems demonstrated is that, whatever catastrophes may occur in individual sectors, the universe that has (at least) generated us is almost certain to continue generating creatures of equal or greater complexity, whether or not we ourselves are fated to participate in their generation. If the history of the universe as beginning with the big bang is indeed a reasonably accurate account of how we got to where we are, then whether or not our species and its successors survive is secondary to the obvious and presumably unstoppable trend to greater complexity, greater concentrations of negentropy, no doubt not in an uninterrupted continuum, but clearly with an upward trend.
I suppose that in the current historical context, with the never quite absent threat of another yet more destructive World War to follow those of the 20th century, we are not inclined to content ourselves with resigned acceptance of the near-certainty that, even if the human species is fated to kill itself off—or, at best, to fail to survive the demise of our solar system (giving us a few billion more years to work with)—other and better-adapted species will continue to arise—always assuming that the whole shebang is not fated to return to its originary big-bang state and start over, in what one might call the Buddhist version of modern cosmology.
But, as I said at the conclusion of the meditation in Chronicle 840, if indeed the universe has only been around for a few billion years, simply given the tautological principle with which we began—how unimaginably wonderful things should become after trillions, quadrillions, GOOGOLS of years of evolution! Unless, of course, all this has already occurred, and we are now, once more, just starting over.