This is part 2 of a series of blog posts.
Please read part 1 first.
Let’s first sketch a rough map of the road ahead of us.
The obstacles i have mentioned in the last blog post fall into three categories:
- The cognitive tools which are required to understand evil, have a bad reputation in the eyes of many people
- And even among those people who accept them in general, only few are willing to apply them to the human mind
- And even among those people who are willing to apply them to the human mind in general, many are not willing to apply them to the particular problem of evil
Let’s start with category 1:
With cognitive tools I mean science and mathematics (remember: you promised me not to stop reading now!). A field I’m too familiar with:
It was during the time when I was studying physics at ETH in Zurich. I was sitting on a table in the canteen together with a few other physics students (only men, as the fraction of female students was extremely small at the time). Suddenly some kind of „thought experiment“ came to my mind: what if I made a sentence beginning with „I sense that…..“? I was quite sure I would harvest only awkward silence. Physicists don’t sense. They solve problems by thinking analytically. Only stupid people who can’t think properly need to „sense“.
I did not dare then to turn my thought experiment into a real „lab“ experiment. But I realized that I would never become happy at this place. A few months later I rejected the offer to pursue a PhD. It wasn't physics' fault.
After graduating I asked myself how I could have gotten myself into this mess. Yes, physics is an extremely interesting subject, but why did I choose to make it the center of my life? And, if I’m completely honest with myself, there were indeed reasons beyond curiosity. Wasn’t it a fabulous tool to rule over chaos? To control things which I believed would bring only pain into my life when left uncontrolled. And were such desires the reason for the peculiar social environment I found at ETH [2]?
Some people say that mathematics and physics are inventions made by old white men to maintain their supremacy. While I really don’t believe that 5>4 is valid only for old white men, this reproach should not be ridiculed too quickly.
I don’t think these fields should be denoted as inventions. And both fields seem to be politically neutral in the sense that they describe generic methods of thinking and a way to describe nature as accurately as possible.
But this is not necessarily true for the way they are used by people. Both are also tools. People do all kinds of things with them and these things are only rarely politically fully neutral. And it is a fact that you can’t kill millions of people with your knowledge about Native American rituals. But with a hydrogen bomb, an invention made by physicists, you can do that easily.
Physics is very different from engineering. An engineering discipline is a subset of physics which …
- Has a clearly bounded scope to make sure the laws of physics can be ignored to a large extent
- Has its own formal methods (often comprehensive), based on the physics relevant for the bounded scope. They are designed in a way that they should always work (If they don’t work in some case, it’s a clear sign that the boundaries of the scope have been crossed and additional physics applies)
To give an example: currents and voltages in an electronic circuit can be calculated using the „Kirchhoff's circuit laws“. This works very well unless the frequencies in the circuit become too high and the components of the circuit start to couple or radiate too much.
Therefore, engineering usually just works if you don’t make mistakes (i.e. make errors calculating or leave the scope without being aware of it). Pocket calculators only very very rarely make errors in computing a multiplication of two numbers.
This property gives engineers a strong feeling of control. They are all the time working with stuff which can be controlled completely using analytical thinking. The only limit are their analytical skills.
It's easy to be fooled by this experience to believe that all phenomenons of life can be controlled in the same way.
Physics does not enjoy the luxury of “it always works if you stick to the rules“. The job of the physicist is to make engineering possible. This means finding approximations for the always unimaginable complexity of real world systems.
An example: the pressure the helium gas exerts on a kids balloon from the inside to expand it, is the result of a mind boggling number of collisions of gas particles with the balloon. No computer on earth could calculate exactly what’s going on inside the balloon. Physics used statistics, a subfield of mathematics, to tame the enormous complexity and derive equations to calculate the pressure in the ballon from the volume, the temperature and the amount of gas. This knowledge then allows the construction of things like the steam machine.
Therefore, for a physicist it is vital that he is highly aware of the limits of his mathematical models for nature. Like the equations describing gases at very low temperatures becoming much more complicated, as they have to account for quantum effects.
And it’s a physicists job to expand the border which separates the controllable from chaos. To prepare the ground for new engineering disciplines. In this sense, physics is the „expeditionary force of engineering“. Deployed in uncharted territory to conquer new colonies for engineering [1].
Now we are admittedly quite close - somehow - to the „white men lusting for supremacy“ mentioned above.
But while physics is often used to figure out how to control things, it is equally important to understand what is futile to try. We know today that it is impossible to build a perpetual motion machine of the first kind which produces more work than it consumes energy. Or that nothing can move faster than light. Or, by calculating the physical and chemical processes in the atmosphere, warning us from global warming.
Here physics prevents us from doing stupid things.
And this is exactly why we cannot afford to rule out scientific thinking in our quest for overcoming evil. Science and mathematics can help us to discover and understand the fundamental rules controlling complex processes. This allows us to understand which practical options are worth trying, but also which ideas are fundamentally impossible.
Without this knowledge we would, like it happened in the case of the „perpetuum mobile“ for centuries, waste time and resources on pipe dreams. And exactly this happened to humankind in the case of fighting evil. As we will see, our current attempts to push back evil are fundamentally flawed. They will not work, because they simply cannot work. And I’m sure that you agree with me that this would be a huge problem, if my analysis was correct.
But is the human mind not far too complex to be studied by human science? Not necessarily. Some of the „perpetual motion machines of the first kind“ humans invented are extremely complex. But, thanks to thermodynamics, we don’t even need to study them in full complexity to be sure that they can’t work.
And is nature not „doing“ similar „work“ like engineers for millions of years? Constructing molecular motors (like those powering the flagellum of the sperm cell) and even computers (DNA, which is transcribed, compiled and executed by a molecular machinery to produce outputs = proteins) in an attempt to create life out of the chaos of the primordial soup.
Is it therefore really unnatural to look at humans with the eyes of science and mathematics? We enjoy the huge progress of medicine in the past 100 years, but we forgot that medical research was regarded as something highly unethical and was even forbidden not long ago (Leonardo da Vinci hat to perform the dissections for his famous anatomical drawings in great secrecy).
Isn’t it high time to use all the tools we have built over the centuries to study every aspect of ourselves, including our mind?
Let’s proceed to category 2:
To be continued ….
[1] The topic of my Master’s thesis was driven by the hope to create optical crystals able to store enormous amounts of information. The idea has - so far - not materialized (apart from an early appearance in Stanley Kubrick’s famous 1968 movie „2001: A Space Odyssey“).
[2] I'm not saying they were not nice people. Most of them were!
Image: Shutterstock / ArtMari
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