Degrees of Consciousness

 

 

Think of the last time you sat opposite someone you know well and talked for a while. You had all sorts of conscious experiences: the look of the person’s face, the sound of his or her voice, and so on. At some point you may have said his or her name and simultaneously heard it. Were you conscious of the person’s name during this period? You certainly were at the moment of uttering it, but were you the rest of the time? We can say that you knew the name all the while, and not in any weak or reduced sense. Was the name on the tip of your tongue? No, but it was hovering somewhere nearby; you were not like someone struggling to recall the name, or someone who had never learned it. I am inclined to say that you were conscious of the name during the period in question—as much as you were conscious of other aspects of the person (his or her lip movements, eye color, accent). You weren’t paying attention to these things, but you were conscious of them—they were within your field of consciousness.  [1] Yet your consciousness of the name was not like actually hearing the name, either perceptually or in the form of an auditory image. There were no “name qualia”, though a name was consciously present. Were you as conscious of the person’s name as you were of his or her face? Probably not, unless you kept recurring to it, but it would be incorrect to say that you were unconscious of the name—that your knowledge of it was unconscious knowledge. You were entirely aware of the name at all times (not unaware)—it was an element of your overall state of conscious awareness. It was like your awareness of the sex or nationality of the person.

            Was there anything it was like to be conscious of the name during this time interval? No—there was no subjective impression of the name, no qualitative feel (except when you uttered the name). It was not part of your sensory field. Nor was there any conscious episode of thought involving the name—no inner act of speech containing it (“George is looking handsome today”). The name did not “pass before your mind”. So consciousness does not require these kinds of occurrence: things can exist in consciousness without existing in those ways. It is quite wrong to say that unless an item belongs to consciousness in either of those two ways it is simply unconscious; on the contrary, the name was an aspect of your current total consciousness of the world—you were conscious of the fact that you were speaking to a person called “George”. This is not a fact of which you were unconscious, like the forgotten fact that you once saw George on the subway, or the Freudian fact that you unconsciously hate him. Similarly, you were conscious of your own name during the conversation, though it likely never crossed your mind—as you were conscious that you exist, are a person, are sitting in a restaurant, and so on. Your consciousness can be populated by many things that go beyond the subjectively sensory and the cognitively episodic: it is not all sensory qualia and inner speech–of what passes before and through consciousness. Consciousness is more capacious than that, more inclusive.

            But names are not always consciously present in this way—ripe for the picking. They do not always trip off the tongue with the greatest of ease, as if crossing a perfectly permeable threshold—as if the transition to full consciousness were nothing. Sometimes names are hard to recall, even impossible to recall. In fact, names vary widely in their ease of recall, as everyone knows: sometimes it can take a whole day to recall a name. It is thus natural to say that different names are more or less accessible to consciousness–they can vary in their proximity to conscious awareness. Just as a name can be conscious and yet not at the center of consciousness, so a name can be only faintly conscious compared to another name (sometimes you can recall only part of the sound of a name). That is, we can introduce the notion of degrees of consciousness to mark these distinctions: we replace the idea of a sharp dichotomy between conscious and unconscious with the idea of gradations of consciousness shading into complete unconsciousness. This is not to say that the mind shades into the material world and so has no distinctive reality (whatever that may mean); it is merely to say that the traditional bifurcation into the conscious and the unconscious mind is simplistic and dispensable. What is called “the conscious mind” is more amorphous, more heterogeneous, than people tend to suppose, merging as it does with memory, language mastery, and background knowledge. The proper metaphor is the penumbra not the spotlight (though all such metaphors are misleading). It is misleading to focus on momentary states of sensory consciousness and assume that these are paradigmatic—they are merely one variety of consciousness. Don’t focus on the bat’s current echolocation experience to the exclusion of all else; remember everything that shapes the bat’s total awareness of the world, including such things as its knowledge of where it lives, of the existence of other bats, and of its own bodily orientation. There are boundaries to consciousness, but they are not so narrow as to exclude everything except the “phenomenal” and the “cognitively episodic”. Knowing someone’s name can be perfectly conscious without being either of these things.  [2]

            Part of the point of recognizing degrees of consciousness—or rejecting a sharp division between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind—is to question the idea that only certain types of mental phenomena pose a serious challenge to science and philosophy. It is not as if anything not conscious in the restrictive sense is not a deep theoretical problem: the mind as a whole is a problem not just some segment of it—that which we are currently conscious of in some limited sense. Relying on the model of perceptual sensations gives a distorted picture of the terrain, since these are just one part the mind, and not characteristic of the whole. That is why I picked on the case of knowing a person’s name, which doesn’t fit the model. Being aware of someone’s name in the normal course of speaking to him is just as much an instance of consciousness as anything else, even if such awareness can come in degrees. It isn’t that the mental differs only in degree from the non-mental; rather, mental states can differ from each other in their degree of consciousness. There is no sharp line separating the conscious mind from the unconscious mind but a kind of interpenetration and continuity; this dichotomous terminology itself encourages a false antithesis. Don’t picture the mind as a radiant conscious region adjacent to an unlit unconscious region; picture it instead as an overlapping series of more or less illuminated regions—from bright to dappled to shady to crepuscular to inky. A name can occupy any of these contiguous regions: from the clearly heard to the explicitly known to being on the tip of the tongue to the momentarily elusive to the maddeningly buried. In our efforts to highlight consciousness we should not oversimplify it or assimilate it to one class of mental phenomena; nor should we suppose that what is designated unconscious belongs to a different family from what is designated conscious. These terms are just rough labels for a more complex reality; they should not be allowed to dominate and distort our discussions of the mind.

 

Co

  [1] Of course, you were not perceiving the name, as you were other aspects of the person, but that does not prevent you from being conscious of it—as you would be if you kept saying it to yourself inwardly.

  [2] The same might be said of our knowledge of language as a whole, but I won’t go into this—the case of names suffices for my point.

 

Universals of Consciousness

 

 

“There is something it is like to be a conscious being”: let’s examine the logical form of this statement. There are two possible readings of it, depending on the scope of the quantifiers: one reading says, “For any conscious being B, there is something L it is like to be B”; the other reading says, “There is something L it is like such that for any conscious being B, B has L”. That is: we can either mean that there is a unique thing it is like for any conscious being, or we can mean that for any conscious being there exists some thing it is like to be that being (not necessarily the same thing in each case). It is clear that those who use this phrase typically intend the narrow scope reading of “something”: they wish to allow that different conscious beings can have different things it is like to be them (hence the bats). The claim is not that every conscious being is identical with respect to what it is like to be them: that would be empirically indefensible and conceptually narrow. Thus the standard employment of the phrase recognizes the variability of consciousness from one conscious being to another—there is no universal thing it is like to be conscious. If we introduce a modal operator into the picture, the claim is, “Necessarily for any conscious being there is something it is like to be that being”, but not, “There is something it is like such that necessarily for any conscious being that being has that something”. In fact, there is nothing it is like to be any conscious being—nothing specific or universal or unique. It could be that conscious beings vary from individual to individual in what it is like to be them, with nothing shared.

            But this leaves open the question of whether there are any universals of consciousness: is there any property of consciousness such that every case of consciousness instantiates that property? Compare belief: every believer has some set of beliefs, but there is no set of beliefs such that every believer has it. But isn’t there something in common to all believing beings over and above the fact that every believer has some set of beliefs? Can’t we say that all beliefs are propositional or involve assent or are potential elements of reasoning? Can’t we even say that all belief systems concern an objective reality, indeed an objective spatiotemporal reality? Where is the parallel for the case of consciousness? All we are told is that there must be a thing it is like to be a conscious being, but we are not told what unites the class beyond this. Is it that nothing further can be said about what consciousness is generally? Contrast other attempts to characterize consciousness: consciousness as intentionality (Brentano, Husserl), consciousness as nothingness (Sartre), or consciousness as an inner process (lots of people). These are features held to characterize every conscious state equally, while accepting that the contents of consciousness can vary from case to case. What plays this role for the “what it’s like” characterization? The obvious answer is that each type of conscious “likeness” has something in common with the others—that there is a universal property of “likeness”. But what is this? The question comes down to whether all senses (actual and possible) share a single phenomenological feature. Without considering the question in detail, I suggest that the only possible answer will rely on some other approach to what consciousness is—say, that it is intentional, or is nothingness, or is inner. Perhaps the most immediately plausible answer is that all senses are presentational: they present a world of perceptual objects to a subject. But then consciousness is being defined in terms of the notion of presentation: to be a conscious being is to be presented with a world. The idea of what it’s like has disappeared from the definition in favor of a kind of intentionality definition. The problem is that we either rest content with a disjunctive definition of consciousness or we resort to another sort of concept in the definition: either we disjoin all the specific things it is like (bats, humans, octopuses, etc) or we find some common property such as presentation. There is no single “likeness” property that runs through all the cases and unites them: each sense has its own proprietary set of qualia, its own distinctive “feel”—there is no universal subjective property common to all senses. There are irreducibly many things it is like.

            The problem is more general. The intuitive motivation for the original definition traded upon the phenomenology of the senses, but consciousness is not confined to sensations—what about thoughts? Thoughts can be conscious, but is there something it is like to have them? Is that something peculiar to a certain class of thinkers (say, bat thinkers) or is it common to all thinkers? The question seems misguided: for thoughts don’t really have a subjective phenomenology in the way sensations do–they are not tied to a specific sense modality. If a being had thoughts but no senses, there would be nothing it is like to be that being (in the original sense of the phrase); yet such a being would be conscious. In order to cast our net widely enough we need some other way to include thoughts along with sensations; and again the notions of intentionality and innerness suggest themselves. The notion of there being something it is like lacks the generality we seek: it can’t include thought, and it fails to find a common feature for the case of sensations (except that there is something it is like to have a sensation). And this is before we get to other denizens of consciousness such as emotion, decision, and remembering. The definition only works for a subclass of conscious phenomena, and it only works well for one type of sensation at a time (we know what it is like to have a visual experience and so we grasp what visual consciousness is—but not consciousness in general). Thus the intuitive notion of “likeness” doesn’t provide a satisfactory definition of consciousness.

            It may be that the scope ambiguity conceals this failure of generality: if we hear the statement with wide scope for “something”, it says that there is something in common to all cases of consciousness (a “likeness” property possessed by every type of conscious state); but it turns out that this is not what is intended (and is not true), so we are left with a disjunctive definition. Perhaps too we have a general tendency to unify the different senses, so we easily slide into the idea that some subjective property applies to them all. But if we try to identify this property we come up empty handed or we resort to another sort of definition. For instance, we can hear the phrase “what it is like to be x” as making reference to a subject and how things seem to that subject: then we can easily suppose that what unites the different senses is the fact that each of them involves a subject being appeared-to, not the subjective quality of what appears (“qualia”). But now that is a very different kind of definition, involving subjects and the relation of being appeared to, not intrinsic features of states of consciousness. It is tantamount to saying that a conscious subject is a subject of experience, or that a conscious state is what a subject possesses in as much as it is appeared to (or some such thing). If we hear the statement in the wide scope way, it sacrifices its intuitive content as relating to specific types of sensation (what we can grasp only from a particular “point of view”); while if we hear it in the (intended) narrow scope way, it fails to capture consciousness in general, since there is nothing it is like that holds of any conscious being. In saying merely that there is something it is like to be conscious, but no specific thing it is like, we fail to unify the cases: for we cannot specify any particular “likeness” property common to all cases of consciousness. This is analogous to saying that a believing subject has some set of beliefs without being able to say generally what a belief is.

I suspect that when we consider the case of the bats we tacitly do assume universals of consciousness (at least of the sensory kind), which is why we find the definition appealing: we think of the comparable phenomenological complexity of our visual field and of our sensations of hearing echoes—we don’t assume that the bat’s experience is completely alien to us. Similarly, we unify our own sensations around such concepts as intensity, foreground and background, multiplicity of stimuli, overlap, perceptual constancy, and so on. These concepts provide a common framework for thinking about perceptual consciousness, and they are not specific to particular senses. They are what induce us to believe that we have hold of the essence of (sensory) consciousness, not the admittedly specific and parochial concepts that apply to particular sense modalities. But then the general concepts are the ones that are doing the definitional work not the specific concepts—in which case it is the wide scope reading that we need. The phrase itself (“there is something it is like”) lumps all this together, enabling us to slide from one reading to another, with the associations natural to each reading. We want to say that there is something it is like to be (perceptually) conscious, not just to be one kind of conscious subject or another; and maybe there is, but the standard formulations don’t say what it is, encouraging us to fall back on specific modes of sensory consciousness.  [1]

            My own view is that the “what it’s like” definition is a useful heuristic to move people’s intuitions in the right direction, but as a proper definition it falls short. It captures at best only certain aspects of consciousness but not consciousness in general—witness the case of conscious thought. Thoughts are not conscious in virtue of being about qualia, and they are not subjective in the sense that to grasp what they are you have to possess a certain “point of view” on the world (i.e. a specific sense modality). They have intentionality and they are also inner states or processes (private, unobservable), but these properties are a different matter. Certainly, if there is something it is like to be x, then there is something problematic about x from a materialist perspective; but that is not to say that everything thus problematic is a case of what it is like. The concept of the inner does a better job of capturing the general nature of consciousness, as well as gesturing towards the reason that consciousness is theoretically problematic. The concept “what it is like” is useful and catchy, but is not the stuff of sound definition.  [2]

 

  [1] Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is a five hundred page book on what it is like to be conscious as such, focusing on the concepts of nothingness, anguish, bad faith, temporality, and so on; it is not about human senses versus bat senses and the varieties of conscious awareness. This is the kind of thing we think we are getting when someone sets out to define consciousness in terms of “what it is like”: not what it is like to be a bat or a human, but what it is like to be a conscious being (to be “haunted by nothingness” etc).

  [2] Compare definitions couched in terms of “seems” and “feels”: “There is some way it seems/feels to be a conscious being”. That has an intuitive ring, but it is surely too narrow to capture the full range of conscious phenomena—is there some way a conscious thought seems or feels? And then there is the question of scope: are there many ways of seeming or feeling or is there some one way common to all cases? Interestingly, we do have available here a single property common to all cases, namely seeming or feeling as general properties; but in the case of “what it’s like” all we can say is that likeness is what is in common to all cases of there being something it’s like. But what is that property exactly—what is it for a mental state to have the general property of likeness? This question is obscure at best. It is telling that the “like” locution is preferred over “seems” and “feels”, which wear their defects on their face as general accounts of consciousness. The phrase “what it’s like” has just the right degree of appeal and obscurity to gain currency.

                                               

 

 

 

Games and Languages

 

 

Evidently, play evolved among animals, including humans: there is a “ludic instinct”. The most likely explanation for this fact is that play provides the opportunity to practice skills that will be useful in the animal’s life—hence its appearance during childhood. But games in the formal cultural sense are not among the instincts of animals; nor are games conspicuous in the animal kingdom. There is no instinct for chess, say, and chess does not exist in animal societies. Games are structured activities governed by rules and these rules have a specific character, namely that they involve the overcoming of unnecessary obstacles toward achieving a goal.  [1] For instance, the game of golf is constituted by rules that forbid the direct placing of balls in holes—the balls must get into the holes by means of clubs wielded from a distance, not merely by dropping them in by hand. A game is not just any old kind of playful activity. I wish to say two things about games so understood: animals don’t play games in the sense defined, and no game is innate in humans. Animals don’t distinguish between activities designed to achieve a certain goal as efficiently as possible (“technical activities”) and activities in which an artificial obstacle is created in order to serve the purposes of a game (such as the net in tennis or the handball rule in football). Animal play, which is real enough, is not governed by rules that proscribe the use of maximally efficient means to achieve a goal; presumably this idea is beyond animals. But even if something like games in this sense did exist in animal societies, they would not be instinctive; games are something additional to instinctive play. Thus in humans no games are innate, though evidently play is. No one is born knowing the rules of chess or baseball or tennis. The origin of games is not natural selection.

            How then do games originate? The obvious answer is invention: people invent games. Two caveats: first, people don’t reinvent a game that has already been invented—they learn a game invented by someone else; second, the invention is not generally a one-off solitary act of creation but consists in a drawn-out sequence of actions gradually honed into the kinds of games we observe. But still, the origin is human inventiveness not genetic endowment: game competence is passed on culturally not by biological inheritance. And it is not that humans originally learned games by observing their natural environment—say, by watching some other species playing games and learning from them. No, humans create games from their own cognitive resources, as they create different kinds of technology (the wheel, the computer)—games are human inventions, neither learned nor innate. We can only invent games because we have a creative capacity—the capacity to bring new and interesting things into the world. This kind of creativity seems generally absent from the animal world, though animals can obviously learn. Animals will never invent snakes and ladders.

 Thus humans have two sorts of capacity in relation to play and games: (a) an innate evolved capacity to engage in play, and (b) a creative capacity with which to invent games (this capacity is presumably itself innate, though its products are not). The innate intersects with the invented: we (instinctively) play (invented) games. Not surprisingly, then, we find a universal tendency among humans to play combined with much variation in what is played. Many different games have been invented in which to express the single universal desire to play. The innate capacity to play might itself involve certain kinds of cognitive and motor competence, and this competence could be quite complex; it is not some kind of lumpish disposition to engage in “frolicking behavior”. It might be structured and rule-governed, generative and unlimited; it might be an intricately organized computational mental module (“the play module”). The play programs might even be digital, recursive, and combinatorial. It is just that they are innate while the actual games played are invented (no innate program for billiards or backgammon). There is interplay between the two levels of psychological reality but the levels should not be conflated, and we must characterize them appropriately (innate versus invented).

            The reason I am making these (I hope) pedestrian remarks is that I want to make an analogy to a far more contested area—language. I want to say that the general human capacity for language is innate but that individual languages are invented—as play is innate but games are invented. The first claim is familiar and I won’t defend it: I shall simply assume that humans are equipped with an innate cognitive structure with the formal characteristics of natural languages (notably recursive syntactic rules and a finite lexicon that combine to produce infinitely many potential sentences).  [2] You can think of this structure as a language of thought: call it LANGUAGE. It is not identical to any human natural language, being more abstract than such a language; it is best understood as a formal computational system instantiated in the brain and deriving from the genes. It is not spoken: whatever its lexicon is the elements of it are not parts of ordinary speech. For concreteness, you might think of it as like a logical language along the lines of quantified modal logic (or whatever your favorite logic is) couched in inscrutable symbols. It is the secret code in which thought expresses itself—the universal medium of mentation. It is not an external spoken language, not even being hooked up to the vocal articulation system. Indeed, it is not inherently communicative but rather a device for expediting reasoning—a tool of thought. Thus LANGUAGE has nothing essentially to do with languages, i.e. spoken systems of human communication. LANGUAGE might have existed without languages ever coming to exist: an internal cognitive structure serving thought but accompanied by no outer system of audible signs. Similarly, play (even complex play) could have existed without the existence of games in the sense defined above; they are something superadded, by no means presupposed. Games incorporate play, but they are not entailed by play. No doubt languages likewise incorporate LANGUAGE, but they are not entailed by LANGUAGE.

            Now I can state my main thesis: languages are invented while LANGUAGE is innate.  [3] Humans found themselves genetically endowed with an internal language of thought and on that basis they erected spoken communicative languages—the former was folded into the latter. Particular languages are thus neither innate nor learned (for who could have instructed the original speakers?); they exist by virtue of human inventiveness. Note as before that this inventiveness is not to be conceived as a singular all-at-once feat of mental construction; it is rather the kind of long drawn-out haphazard process that other cultural inventions are (art, law, politics). But it is still invention, still the exercise of human creativity (not innate endowment or observational learning). Languages are indeed still being invented, reconfigured, changing and growing by human will. They are not like LANGUAGE, the fixed innate system inherited from our ancestors after some freakish genetic mutation and subsequent natural selection. The two sorts of symbolic system have quite different kinds of origin—just like play and games.  [4] That both deserve to be called “language” is neither here nor there: that is a structural description neutral on the question of origin. When languages were invented humans exploited a pre-existing fact about themselves—an internal cognitive structure they did not invent. They linked this structure to the organs of articulation to produce a sound system (possibly a sign system) capable of expressing syntactic combinations—a highly nontrivial task. There was no guarantee that the resources of the vocal system could match the internal structure of LANGUAGE, and indeed some modifications and upgrades were called for. The reason humans invented languages, using LANGUAGE as template, was presumably for purposes of interpersonal communication (though possibly external language further helped as a tool of thought): people had to speak to be heard, i.e. to convey messages–there being no such thing as telepathy. People invented languages as a tool of communication by tapping into a LANGUAGE they did not invent. Hence there are many languages and only one LANGUAGE—as there are many games but only one play instinct (per species). Games and languages are thus part of culture, while play and LANGUAGE are part of biology. Games and languages are products of our inventive faculty, while play and LANGUAGE have their roots in biological evolution (mutation and natural selection).   [5]

            To the old question of how “language” evolved we must split the answer into two parts: (a) how the internal language of thought evolved; (b) how spoken languages evolved (came to exist). These are quite different questions, one question belonging to the science of biology, the other to the study of culture broadly construed. This division corresponds to traditional expectations, if not to many theories popular in the twentieth century; in particular, the concepts of innateness and invention replace the concept of learning.  [6] If LANGUAGE is a tribute to the power of biological evolution, then languages are a tribute to the power of human invention. Clearly our distant ancestors must have been a clever and resourceful lot: they in effect created the language of Shakespeare from a cognitive system not originally designed for external use. This is as impressive in its way as the invention of the cell phone or the atomic bomb.

 

  [1] Here I am following Bernard Suits’ classic treatment of the concept of a game in The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (Broadview, 2005).

  [2] Chomsky’s oeuvre is the obvious reference: see in particular Why Only Us: Language and Evolution (MIT Press, 2016; written with Robert C. Berwick) on how language evolved and the relationship between internal and external language.

  [3] I also discuss this in “Invention and Language”.

  [4] This is consistent with allowing that some aspects of our utterances are instinctual: not everything vocal is invented, e.g. groans, cries, shrieks, laughs, etc. We did not invent these noises; we inherited them. But such vocalizations are not part of language properly so-called: they are not part of the system of spoken words that combine syntactically. We invented this system—the mapping of meanings onto segmented sounds. We invented the sound-meaning pairings of English, German, Japanese, etc—though not the species-wide expressive sounds speakers of these languages also make.

  [5] This is not to deny that LANGUAGE is embedded in languages as their scaffolding and soul; it obviously is so embedded. It is just to say that language differences originate from invention not inheritance.

  [6] Of course children learn their native language, but languages don’t come to exist in virtue of learning as opposed to invention (unlike, say, geographical knowledge). The concept of learning was connected to empiricism, but the concepts of innateness and invention invoke quite different modes of intellectual acquisition.

                                               

 

 

Unity and the Universe

 

 

The universe contains different sorts of unity. There is the kind of unity found in conscious subjects (psychic unity), the kind found in animals and artifacts (telic unity), and the kind found in inanimate objects like pebbles or snowflakes (geometric unity). There is phenomenological unity, functional unity, and symmetrical unity. There are also things that lack unity, such as random collections of rocks in a desert or splashing water: here the parts (if we can call them that) are not organized according to any unifying principle—they just exist as separate entities. We can form sets of them, such as the set consisting of this cup, that fern, and the spider under the table, but there is no natural unity here, no coalescence or collusion. Merely being found next to something else does not a unity make.

            Is the universe itself a unity? I want to say not. The universe consists of a disorganized distribution of bits of matter in space with no internal cohesion or pattern. It is not a psychic unity or a telic unity or a geometric unity. In particular, it lacks symmetry: its geometry is nothing like the geometry of a circle or rectangle. It has no more unity than a sprinkling of rocks in a desert. No doubt such a sprinkling had its causes and was brought about by laws of nature (which might themselves be unities), but what was brought about lacks unity—it is just a mess. Perhaps we can say that planets, stars, and solar systems are unities, but the layout of galaxies forms nothing similarly unified, despite being the result of laws. The distribution of matter across space is chaotic, disorganized, and formless. It is so much spatial noise. It exhibits neither logic nor purpose. It is hard to see how it could be planned or thought out—it just happened that way. It’s all higgledy-piggledy. You would think it had just been thrown there, scattered about, rather than carefully arranged or made obedient to some principle of symmetry.

            We have discovered this to be so. The universe was not always thought of this way: we used to believe that it was a unity. There was the idea of celestial harmony (“harmony of the spheres”), but also the more concrete idea that the universe had the unity of a home—that it had the telic unity of a designed artifact. The earth was our house, the sun our heating system, and the starry sky our backyard. God created this home for us and his own unity was stamped upon it: all the parts were laid out to serve a purpose, with nothing jarring or gratuitous. The universe was not a disorderly mess in which we contingently happened to reside. Even when astronomy went heliocentric, this comforting picture survived: still the universe was conceived as a harmonious unity, a place of purpose and pattern. But twentieth century astrophysics put an end to that picture: not only is the universe unimaginably vast and impersonal; it is also formless and chaotic, a complete shambles. We have discovered that it is not a unity but a plethora: a bunch of stuff scattered about without rhyme or reason. It is not like a home or an animal or even a snowflake. It is a hodgepodge, a jumble, a shapeless agglomeration.

            This discovery has reverberations. First, it puts the idea of a divine designer into serious doubt: for how could an intelligent creator put together such a meaningless assemblage? Wouldn’t we expect at least some pleasing symmetry shaping all this widely distributed matter—a kind of cosmic snowflake? Instead it looks like a child’s rumpus room with stuff scattered all over the place. The impressive extent of the universe seems to confirm God’s majesty (but what is the point of so much space and matter?), but its sheer untidiness doesn’t fit our image of God—what was he thinking?  [1] The galaxies are just dotted about the place without regard for aesthetic or functional form, and their internal structure leaves much to be desired (each one a veritable dog’s dinner). The problem becomes acute if we try to follow Spinoza and identify God with the universe. For Spinoza, God is the infinite and perfect substance, so the universe itself needs to be infinite and perfect. But how could a perfect unitary substance such as God stand in the relation of identity to the formless unorganized universe we have discovered to exist? The universe is not really a substance at all—any more than a random collection of rocks in a desert is a substance. The universe is not a unity, so how can it be God? Surely God can’t be a mess! Haphazardness is really not what we expect from an almighty and discerning God.

Secondly, putting the question of God aside, there is the psychological or spiritual impact of astrophysics. It is often noted that the sheer vastness of the universe, compared to our puny dimensions, is an affront to humanity’s self-important view of itself: we are so small and it is so big! But there is also the disquieting fact that we exist in a vast and chaotic world: space stretches out to astronomical distances (literally) and all that space is populated with disorder and chance. It isn’t even like a city that has grown up over time; at least that has some point and form to it. It’s more like matter has just been chucked there, like so much litter. It mocks our attempts at order and pattern: there is no system, no intelligible arrangement. It’s just one damn galaxy after another. The microcosm has system and unity—atoms and molecules—but the macrocosm is a giant disorganized heap (it would be different if it had the form of a crystal, say). The elements of the universe form no overarching unity beyond that of mere spatial aggregation. The universe has about as much form as your average rubbish dump or junkyard. Come to think of it isn’t that the aspect under which the universe presents itself—as a repository of junk? What are those billions of galaxies but so much astronomical garbage, taking up space but serving no purpose?  [2] Biologists speak of junk DNA; well, aren’t vast swaths of the universe so much astronomical junk? You could make a bonfire of it all and lose nothing of value. The universe is a pile of pointless old garbage (even if there are some nice glittering jewels amidst all the dull lumps). Who needs the asteroid belt, for example? It isn’t as if we have found the universe to be some sort of mathematically marvelous super-entity with all sorts of lovely symmetries and a cosmic purpose to boot; no, we have found it to be a disorderly dumping ground for chunks of old matter nobody wants. Unity is the last thing it has on its mind.

You may think I am being too hard on the universe, not giving it its due. You may think I am overstating the universe’s disarray, its charmless lack of structure (as if it is ungrammatical), but consider what we know of its origins. It came about from an explosion (the big bang): there was a previous universe, an antecedent reality, which literally exploded to form the current universe.  [3] This universe, our universe, consists of debris from that explosion, flying out with great velocity into space. And what does debris from an explosion look like? It looks like an unholy mess—anything but orderly. Explosions don’t leave pleasing unities; they leave chaos and disorder. Our universe is the result of an explosion and it has just the properties you would predict from that fact. Our universe is a bombsite, a blast scene, a debris field. It is the result of a shattering and splintering (“the splintered universe”). We can reasonably suppose that the previous universe had some sort of inner unity–enough to constitute a bomb at least, and maybe more (it was not itself the result of an explosion). Then the big bang was the undoing of this unity. The previous universe killed itself in the big bang, destroying its unity and replacing it with the chaotic remains that we see today. If we think of it as analogous to a pane of glass, then the big bang was the shattering of this pane’s unity into a million shards: from organized unity to shapeless heap—or better, an expanding front of fragments whipping through space.  [4] Explosions convert unities into non-unities—surviving fragments, formless debris. Thus we live amidst the ruins of a previous world. Compare the demolition of a building: from a cohesive structured form it instantly turns to dust and jagged fragments. That is our universe: the result of a previous universe demolishing itself. Some unitary parts may survive demolition, but the whole entity does not. Our universe contains some unities, possibly prefigured in the previous universe, but not the original cosmic unity; all that is left is a random distribution of dispersed elements. We live in a razed and ruined city. The universe we know consists of the ruins left behind when the previous universe violently put an end to itself. We could call the big bang the “big splintering”. We are accustomed to thinking of it as an act of creation, but it is also an act of destruction. All explosions create something—their remains—but they are mainly destructive. From the point of view of the previous universe, the big bang was anti-creative: it destroyed what went before. True, it created the bombsite in which we now uneasily reside, and that bombsite has taken on a life of its own (as architectural ruins often do). But the process was a destructive explosion, leaving only debris (initially the big bang produced nothing but formless gas). Given the nature of the universe’s origin, then, we should expect chaos and disorder—the usual results of an explosion. Bits of matter are distributed according to the initial explosive event and whatever forces the bits themselves exert. The expanding universe is simply the universe as it acts after an explosion has propelled it into space.

We know little if anything about the nature of the previous universe, but it seems reasonable to suppose that it was unified—a unity. What kind of unity? In principle it could be anything from our three categories—psychic, telic, or geometric. Or maybe it had some other type of unity whose name we don’t know. The question seems worth investigating: is it possible to infer anything about the nature of this unity from the results of shattering it? What we do know is that the universe that succeeded it is not a unity; and we know why—it’s a debris field. It isn’t the result of a de novo act of constructive creation; it’s the result of a pulverizing act of destruction—the dismemberment of a prior cosmic unity. The big bang destroyed in order to create; or better, it destroyed and accidentally “created” (we don’t create ruins). What we call Creation could equally be called Destruction. You can create a desert by destroying a city, but that is not a terribly impressive form of creation. The previous universe might have been a beautiful unity, only to be replaced by a broken landscape of charred remains. Our universe is like the smoking remnants of a once great metropolis. We have eked out a place in it, like rats in a bombed-out building, but we can’t deny that it is a palace brought to ashes.  [5] We literally live in an exploded (and still exploding) world.

It can take a while before scientific discoveries sink into the human imagination. The heliocentric view is still sinking in, and Darwinian evolution has yet to penetrate deeply and widely; the big bang and associated cosmology have not made much of a dent in old preconceptions. That is, our imagination is stuck in an earlier epoch; we need imaginative forms of expression to make the reality of the universe vivid to ourselves (even if we grasp it abstractly). It is not enough to know it; we have to feel it—feel its consequences and ramifications. Science needs poetry. Here I have tried to articulate what modern cosmology is telling us by emphasizing the lack of order in the layout of the universe and the meaning of the big bang as an act of destructive creation. The universe is less a magnificent cathedral than a pile of remnants. At the moment of the big bang the previous universe was literally vaporized, existing as nothing but free-floating gas, formless and devoid of unity, the very picture of destruction, as if the previous reality had gone up in smoke. But even when gravity began to form pockets of solid matter the universe was still in the throes of the initial destructive act, and the onset of life did not change that. Life on earth evolved on a piece of debris flying through space after the initial cataclysm. We humans live among the remnants of a universe-busting event, a place of disarray and disorder. It is nothing like the friendly and harmonious world depicted by world religions and the mathematical speculations of the ancient Greeks.

 

  [1] Everyone knows the story of Russell extolling (but also lamenting) the vastness of space and Ramsey replying that he wasn’t much impressed with bigness, since he was quite big himself; the human mind was what impressed him. I wonder what both men would say about the unending messiness of the universe.

  [2] You might reply that they could be home to advanced civilizations or at least contented animals, so they are not junk to them. But they might not, and even the ones that are will be mostly redundant junk. Face it: the universe looks like the work of a particularly determined and indiscriminate hoarder.

  [3] I will speak of a “previous universe” though I could make the same points by speaking of previous states of theuniverse. This seems a more apt way of speaking to me, given that the pre-big bang universe must have been radically different from what we see today.

  [4] I should note that on the standard interpretation of big bang cosmology space did not pre-exist the big bang but came with it: space was created by the big bang and expanded as matter was accelerated by it. However, this does not detract from the truth that the big bang was a type of explosion: an abrupt radiating force stemming from a spot of exceptionally high density, pressure, and temperature.

  [5] Of course, I don’t know that the universe before the big bang was a “palace”, but grant me some poetic license. It must have been something other than scattered debris from a prior explosion, since debris doesn’t explode. Astrophysicists speak of a “singularity” and that captures the idea of unity I am working with: the pre-big bang universe was not a sundered mishmash but a concentrated oneness.