Rationality of the Universe

In other words, unless the primary Laws of Thought were Laws of Things, our thought would be doomed by its very nature to misapprehend the nature of things.  – H. W. B Joseph,  An Introduction to Logic, p. 13.

Origins of Reality as Subject to Reason

The notion that the universe is rational is rooted in the idea that the universe possesses inherent order, identity, lawfulness, and that these are what make the universe knowable to a conscious rational being. These are what make the practice of science possible.  Reason and science (its application), then, are possible because the laws of identity and order exist and are out there in the universe for man to discover.  The laws of nature are not known in advance (fallacy of prior certainty) but must be discovered by a careful inner-regulated process of thought (rational epistemology) which must at its axiomatic level first grasp as most fundamental the basic universal axiomatic truths of being (ontology or metaphysics).

These truths, or rather first principles of all attempts to grasp or speak about truth,  were first explicitly defined by Aristotle as: 1. that all that exists has a definitive definite nature or identity (the law of identity).  2. that nature does not contradict itself, it is what it is, and is all that is (the law of non-contradiction).   3. That all facts of existence are or are not, there is no in between.  (The law of the excluded middle).   Nothing can be and not be at the same time in the same respect (the law of either-or.)

In other words, if we think about anything, then (1) we must think that it is; (2) we cannot think that it at once has a character and has it not; (3) we must think that it either has it or has it not.  – from An Introduction to Logic, by H. W. B. Joseph, Second Edition, Revised, Oxford at the Clarendon Press 1926, p. 13.

Law of Identity Bridges Epistemology and Ontology

As a bridge between ontology and epistemology, the most fundamental principle is that of the law of identity.  What is, when grasped as such, must constrain our thinking.  The laws of logic are laws of both reality and our proper method of thinking about reality.

The connection between questions about our thinking and what we must think things to be, is excellently shown in the so-called Laws of Thought. . . . Now though these are called laws of thought, and in fact we cannot think except in accordance with them, yet they are really statements which we cannot but hold true about things.  We cannot think contradictory propositions, because we see that a thing cannot have at once and not have the same character; and the so-called necessity of thought is really the apprehension of necessity in the being of things.  . . . The Law of Contradiction then is metaphysical or ontological.  So also is the Law of Identity.  It is because what is must be determinately what it is, that I must so think.  The Law of Excluded Middle . . . involves the mutual exclusiveness of determinate characters which is the ground of negation; and that is a statement about things.  In other words, unless the primary Laws of Thought were Laws of Things, our thought would be doomed by its very nature to misapprehend the nature of things.  – from An Introduction to Logic, p. 13.

Needless to say, both Aristotelian logic and the bioperipatetic.com entirely oppose any form of dialetheism (the admissibility of self contradiction).  Here is Aristotle’s basis for his first principle of non-contradiction:

According to Aristotle, first philosophy, or metaphysics, deals with ontology and first principles, of which the principle (or law) of non-contradiction is the firmest. Aristotle says that without the principle of non-contradiction we could not know anything that we do know. Presumably, we could not demarcate the subject matter of any of the special sciences, for example, biology or mathematics, and we would not be able to distinguish between what something is, for example a human being or a rabbit, and what it is like, for example pale or white. Aristotle’s own distinction between essence and accident would be impossible to draw, and the inability to draw distinctions in general would make rational discussion impossible. According to Aristotle, the principle of non-contradiction is a principle of scientific inquiry, reasoning and communication that we cannot do without.  – from Aristotle on Non-contradiction , (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) article Copyright © 2011 by  Paula Gottlieb

Consciousness Emergent from Ontological Lawfulness

As for consciousness as the capacity to know reality,  extending the above notion of the ‘rational universe’, the universe’s determinateness, order, lawfulness, causality, makes possible the emergence of a consciousness whose essential function is to identify the nature of existence, and in particular, its individual facts regarding the subject and its relationship to the world.  The primary function of consciousness is to guide the individual organism in discovering values (Gibson would say affordances) in the world and guiding the organism’s actions in the achievement, realization, utilization, acquisition of those values.  This is the biological basis of morality: the identification of values and the action to achieve those values.  A Darwinian might say that consciousness and reason evolved (emerged) because they effectively served the life and survival of the species.  Thus consciousness ‘works’ because reality is of such a nature that consciousness can grasp its nature so as to guide the organism in its efforts to flourish and survive long enough to reproduce after its kind.  Aristotle would say the contact with the world and self-direction of its possessor with respect to the world are jointly the final cause (that for the sake of which) of consciousness (psuche Greek root of psyche) exists.

The Rationality of Nature as Reified Mathematics

The notion of a universe as the manifestation of rational laws is the idea behind the notion that reality, the universe, is fundamentally mathematical in its essence.  This is explicitly the view held by the scientist-philosophers of the Renaissance, which gave rise to the ‘New Science’ of Galileo, Newton and Descartes.  Descartes, in particular, held that the physical real is the mathematical in that the real is the extended physical, which qua extended (res extensa) is essentially geometry reified.  The essence of consciousness, of thought (or res cogitans) was, according to Descartes, the power to grasp the mathematical order of the physical through thought.  This was the transcendental logical bridge uniting res extensa and res cogitans (although their direct causal interaction was not possible under this scheme of Cartesian Dualism).

The Rational Universe of Renaissance Science

The New Science of the Renaissance began with the doctrine that all facts in the physical world are rigidly determined, ruled by inexorable laws of cause and effect.  These laws were conceived as reifications of mathematical and rational order inherent in nature itself.

The pioneers of the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes and Isaac Newton, took over this form from mathematics, and particularly (as Hobbes tells) from Euclid’s geometry.  In Euclid, each proposition flows from those which precede it by logical necessity; and so in physics, they argued, each happening must flow from those which precede it by natural necessity.  Cause must lead unalterably to effect.  The laws of nature are to be like the laws of deductive reasoning: by these steps we are to go from first to last, from first cause to last effect, along a path which is unique, certain, and (in principle) predictable in every detail.  – from  A Sense of the Future: Essays in Natural Philosophy,  Chapter 5 ‘The Logic of Nature,’ by Jacob Bronowski, The MIT Press, 1977, p. 34.

Modern Science Rejects Renaissance Doctrine

But the second scientific revolution of the early 20th century, was forced to reject much of seventeenth century science.  The concept of physical continuity and infinite divisibility were proven false empirically.  It is interesting to note that the logic (ontology) of this fact was first argued by Aristotle based on his rejection of the concept of the infinite as an actuality, holding instead that the concept of infinity as purely methodological and hence a concept of potentiality.  This Aristotelian view has been adopted by modern science, especially by modern quantum theory.  Einstein deeply examined the concepts of space and time, which he found to be relative (relational) and not absolute.  Again, the concepts of space and time as relative and not absolute were first deeply argued and defended by Aristotle.  Significantly, like Aristotle, Einstein was both a philosopher of nature as well as a scientist grounded by modern empirical evidence.  Science had 1. proven that matter was discontinuous and 2. embraced an empirical atomism, both premises amounting to a rejection of Descartes’ dualist doctrine of res extensa, which held that the physical was characterized as a plenum (full and infinitely divisible matrix) of extensiveness.

But what of energy?  Once Max Plank proved experimentally that at the subatomic level energy was discontinuous, discrete, quantal, there ushered in the beginning of quantum mechanics with all of its ontological and epistemological difficulties.  (See the bioperipatetic article entitled Aristotle and the Philosophical Crisis of Quantum Mechanics.)

The Subatomic Failure of Newtonian Mechanics

Attempting to apply the Newtonian atomism to subatomic particles proved to be a conceptual failure.  Twentieth century science discovered that the atom has subatomic structure whose parts manifest unique subatomic (as contrasted with macroscopic, Newtonian) dynamics.  The electron became understood as the key subatomic particle that united physics and chemistry.  Furthermore, unlike the Renaissance concept of fundamental particles, the electron could not be a solid ‘billiard-ball-like’ entity.  It was found to have a negative electrical charge and to be attracted by (captured and held in place by) the positively charged nucleus.  Its orbit should, according to Newtonian mechanics, eventually spiral into its nucleus.  But it does not, and keeps it ‘orbit’ eternally (under normal conditions).  Furthermore, the electron has an embodied energy property (associated with it angular momentum).  Yet when excited, the electron  changes the radius of its orbit discontinuously, i.e., in discrete jumps, without passing through intermediate radial positions (or energy states).  So says the empirical evidence.  Thus the electron’s energy factor, by determining its energy potential in a strictly quantal manner, was a pure example of quantum mechanical behavior.

Eventually, under the influence of De Broglie, the electron’s orbit was considered to be more of a probabilistic wave than a fixed circular or elliptical orbit with a particle in time-determinant positions.  This idea was the beginning of the wave-partical duality of modern physics, shown experimentally in the famous, and widely replicated, double-slit experiment of photon (and later of electron) phase-based energy cancellation, exhibited as a wave-like interference pattern on the detection plate.

The difficulties at once became insuperable when Plank showed that energy too is atomic: it comes in indivisible pieces.  No longer could nature  be imagined to glide from one state to another by infinite degrees.  The parts of nature leap and her states are as separate as the frames in a film.

This picture has slowly made over all our concepts.  For example, think of an atom radiating one of its characteristic colors — a yellow line of sodium, say.  It gets the precise energy for this when one of its electrons makes the precise leap from one of its characteristic orbits to another.  This leap takes no time and does not pass through the space between: the electron disappears from one orbit and instantly appears in another.  — from A Sense of the Future, p. 36.

What does the behavior of the electron do to our classical concepts of a particle with its ontological temporal continuity and its fixed laws of inertial movement under the influence of universal gravity?   Bronowski continues:

It does not make much sense to call something with this behavior a particle, it does not even make sense to ask whether what appears in the two orbits is “the same’ electron.  Neither does it make sense to give the electron one place at one time in its orbit; its possible positions are spread around the orbit like a wave.  The electron, in short, is an electron and nothing else, with its own unusual but definite laws; and words like “particle’ and “wave” are mere metaphors, each of which describes an aspect and no more of the whole algebra of its behavior.  — from A Sense of the Future, p. 36.

With more and more experimentation and theory development regarding the subatomic level of physics, even the concepts of an event, a signal and an observation became hopelessly entangled.  As Bronowski put it:

No! Physics does not record events but observations.  And event, signal, and observation are linked in a way which cannot be taken apart.  We cannot abstract the event, we can only study the relation between observations.  Relativity is the understanding of the world not as events but as relations. — from A Sense of the Future, p. 39.

So modern physics tells us that an event generating an energy packet that acts as a signal to a sensing device or organ and that is detected by the observation of that signal, is a single, irreducible ontological primary.  This implies a radical inversion of the relationship between consciousness and existence.  For given this conception of an event entangled with a) the concept of a signal, b) the concept of a sensing device or organ, and c) the concept of signal detection or sensory awareness d) the concept of observation, events can only be said to exist (finally or completely) when they are sensed by some form of consciousness, where the event is transformed into an observation.  Quantum mechanics takes this analysis quite seriously, holding, for example, that the act of observation (or measurement, which is a species of observation) actually causes the quantum wave (electron position, for example) to come into existence as a discrete property/value.  What then is the conceptual impact of the 20th century scientific revolution with respect to subatomic physics on our view of the physical world?

So the second scientific revolution has abandoned the hidden tenets of the first.  Its model of nature no longer assumes that she must be causal, continuous, and independent.   These assumptions were idealized from everyday experience.  And they were right, and splendidly successful, during two centuries when physics worked and measured on the everyday scale.  They have turned out to be false on the small scale of the atom and on the large scale of the nebulas, and at least inappropriate to studies of the living. — from A Sense of the Future, p. 39.

We see in this last quote, that Bronowski’s view of modern science embraces the idea that reality is not independent.  Independent of what?  Of consciousness, of reason, of observation.  This is, in the opinion of bioperipatetic, a misreading of quantum science.  It is in effect the error of taking the properties of quantum physics as foundational to and continuous with all truth, based on the questionable assumption that all facts simply derive from quantum reality.  This assumption is not necessarily  true, even within the limits of quantum physics, and is in fact rejected by some leading quantum physicists.  We will discuss this more directly later in this paper.

The Rationality of Science and Logic of Nature

One might ask: If modern science now sees the physical (subatomic) world as probabilistic, and NOT deterministically causal, continuous and independent of consciousness; where lies the rationality of modern science and its view of an ordered causal world?  Bronowski argues that rationality is attributed to the methodology of science which captures the logic of nature.

For it is the method, the activity of science which expresses its profound rationalism. . . Science is rational because it is the unprejudiced discovery of the logic of nature.  — from A Sense of the Future, p. 41.

Implicit in this statement is the idea that nature is ruled by a logic that, though discoverable by man, is not necessarily that of man’s logic.   Clearly here is an equivocation of logic as a methodology and logic as an ontological external order.   Yet it is just that order that underlies the historical notion of a rational universe, ruled by logical laws.  And that is what is being denied by modern science (especially quantum physics) for it holds that all that is knowable requires observation which hopelessly entangles consciousness with the ontology of the subject of observation (sub-atomic particles).

Loss of Reason in Quantum Theory

But can we go further?  What of the ‘rational’ or ‘ordered’ or ‘lawful’ or ‘causal’ nature of existence?  Does existence, reality itself, require for its own existence and persistence, some principle of transactional interaction that rests on the lawfulness of all material objects?  Do objects actually operate (actively exist) by some inherent ‘rational’ principles?  Was Leibniz right?  Were the modern quantum transactionalists right?  Is the Copenhagen interpretation an implication of the ‘rational’ roots of being?  Here is a recent article that raises that question more boldly in the light of modern quantum mechanical theory:

The Loss of Direct Realism in Neo-Darwinism

Meanwhile, modern biology has widely embraced the Darwinian (or Neo-Darwinian) view of cognition, from perception through conceptualization, which holds that all tools of knowledge are the product of competitive environmental and inter-species adaptation to stress and to threats to survival, thus all knowledge and all tools of knowledge are the ultimate product of Darwinian pragmatic selection.  This was the view held by Karl Popper: