The World View of a Simple Mind
The purpose of this story is to capture my world view in one place in a consistent and concise form. I am aiming for a set of statements that can serve as the foundation for my understanding of the world, as well as some explanatory notes to go with them. The objective of this exercise is a personal one and is manifold: the resulting world view should enable me to obtain answers for concrete questions in everyday life, to provide practical guidance in negotiating my path through life, and to find meaning.
This story is perhaps akin to establishing a system of axioms or premisses in science; maybe it also constitutes an attempt to define a system of universal values, should they exist, in a philosophical sense. There is nothing new in all this; everything has probably been said in other forms and places. Speaking as an engineer, this system is perhaps like a specification I can trace and link all my decisions, actions and experience to in a coherent manner. Lastly, it might be useful for other people, too.
Statements on Reality
The premise for my world view is captured in the following statements:
- There is an objective reality which exists independently of us humans (or any other being) observing or categorising it; this reality has been, still is and continues to be in a process of development.
- This reality appears to have produced at least one area in space where entropy decreases, in-formation occurs, complexity increases within an evolutionary process: life on planet Earth, including humans.
- Humans appear to be able to reflect on themselves, i.e. are self-aware and conscious; beyond being determined by the world around us, we have the ability to actively influence and change our world.
Objective Reality
In a free interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s initial statement in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus “The world is everything that is the case”: reality is all there is, it is all what is the matter. I hasten to add that there is no restriction to what our human senses perceive nor to what sensors conceived by humans can detect. This concept of reality embraces all that can be experienced, including space, time or any other dimensions and matter or energy of all colours, and beyond. I would even go that far claiming that it is vastly more than the three-dimensional space perceived by humans and everything found therein, or the four-dimensional space-time continuum theoretical physics talks about.
That said, our “three-dimensional world” is perhaps only a cross section of a four-dimensional space-time in a similar way that a circle is a cross section of a cylinder? Only at our human scale time appears as independent quantity. All these concepts are nevertheless anthropocentric and produce only a “view” of the world, in a Platonic sense; the concept of space is a human concept, as is time. The objective reality is much more than that, perhaps only an energy density distribution in multiple dimensions that appears to be evolving (assuming an independent time coordinate), or some abstract wave function? The bottom line is that we humans can only see very little (directly, or indirectly through instruments) and know very little, next to nothing.
In-formation and Life
My understanding of thermodynamics tells me that a system would always converge to its most stable state, usually the one with the lowest amount of internal energy and the highest amount of entropy, i.e. an equilibrium. However, instead of converging irreversibly towards a universal thermodynamic equilibrium with steadily increasing entropy, there seems to be another force that acts against that, one that allows entropy to decrease at least on one island, our planet Earth; here in-formation occurred and still does (Latin in-formare, becoming of form).
There is a whole body of research on entropy and life, starting with but not limited to works by Erwin Schroedinger’s What Is Life? For me, the increase of complexity on planet Earth seems to be possible through two factors: Earth a) is receiving exergy, i.e. freely available energy from the sun, and b) is able to transfer heat back into the cosmos; the Earth imports energy and exports entropy in order to maintain or even decrease entropy. Of course, I do understand that Earth needs to radiate that heat in order to shift the accumulating entropy to space. If this is the case, the question remains: why does that happen at all, and why here on Earth?
There is one concept in Greek mythology that always fascinated me: the driving force that created order out of chaos was thought to be Ερος, at least in the primordial incarnation of the earlier accounts: “the driving force behind the generation of new life in the cosmos”. My take on the primordial goddess Eros is that there is, as part of an objective reality, a driving force that allowed the coming into existence of life, i.e. increase of complexity and in-formation. This driving force still exists and permeates reality as well as humans: it reveals itself as the deep desire to create and maintain life.
Self-awareness
Barring the possibility that life is dream, or a simulation, I do believe that the process of in-formation created beings of varying degrees of self-awareness as a function of complexity, notably the complexity in the brain. This feature, as a sophisticated expression of life, manifests itself in so far as the stimulus for action appears to be not only a function of external inputs, but seems to originate in the being itself; the self-aware being has an agenda, has agency, based on an independent internal state. Therefore, beyond being influenced and determined by the world around us, humans appear to have the ability to actively influence and change the world to a larger extent than other beings (even to a degree that runs the risk to destroy the substrate our life depends on: we are at risk of pulling the rug underneath our feet).
Nevertheless, humans like all beings, are only through-farers on Earth, or at least our material body. As a direct consequence of the premise of self-awareness, there is the question of the origin and persistence of our mind beyond our physical life on Earth. In a materialistic sense, as one possible interpretation, if mind is an artefact of complex matter, then nothing immaterial persists beyond the existence of the material substrate. On the other hand, as an alternative view, mind and soul, the embodiment of our self-consciousness could be of a different nature, perhaps a singularity in the distribution of something that is part of an objective reality, some global consciousness which in itself is not detectable?
To me, trying to answer this question is futile; there is no need to answer this question of the persistence of the life of an individual. Simplistically, for an individual, all happens within one’s life. What matters is that life per-se persists and, as a consequence, that the life of all individuals is protected, respected and cherished during their time on Earth.
Practical Consequences
How do the three aforementioned premises translate to everyday life?
Looking around, I get the impression that most human activities have the character of being only a means to a remote end. One tends to be occupied working on tiny aspects in a complex, economic system; one gets engrossed and trapped in that activity without realising that this struggle may only be a diversion, an insignificant and ephemeral link in a long chain of necessities. What activities have true meaning then?
Once one starts to question most human activities, then one realises that human occupations with real meaning are the ones that are not a means to another end but are the end in themselves, are indeed very simple:
- Any effort to comprehend this reality as much as possible in all its dimensions and forms, e.g. through our scientific endeavours. This is in essence the process of obtaining knowledge through acquisition. Human beings appear to be equipped with the ability to derive joy from understanding aspects of this complex reality, or in the words of Wittgenstein, from creating “A logical picture of facts”, i.e. making a mental image of the world or aspects of it.
- Any manner to appreciate complexity. Human beings appear to be equipped with the ability to derive joy from simply observing complexity, without necessarily needing to understand every detail in a scientific or conscious way. Some people are able to capture the essence of certain aspects of reality through Art as an expression of knowledge by presence; other people are able to appreciate these artefacts; the result is an alternative way of communicating.
- All work to maintain what was confided in us to our best abilities and share it equitably among all peoples, i.e. allow all people to evolve and participate in the appreciation of this world; the application of knowledge, acquired and/or present in us, is our duty in order to uphold life and continue of the process of in-formation, driven by the force of life within us. This is possible by following a simple cost function: do whatever is conducive to life, avoid what is detrimental to life.
Everything else is merely support work that needs to be done as a means to serve these true ends. The following expands on the three types.
Understanding the World — The True
In philosophy, the attempt to uncover the mystery of life is called episteme, i.e. or in the words of Goethe’s Faust: “So that I may perceive whatever holds; The world together in its inmost folds”. This includes all forms of science that allows us to obtain fundamental knowledge as well as to grasp small truths about this world. In this vein, the ambition to explore space, to travel and explore, or learn foreign languages sounds more sensible to me than the focus on the production of more consumer goods, or more and bigger cars (see Material Expression of Societal Regression). As a consequence, this highlights the importance and the value of gaining some form of general education. i.e. education for its own sake (“Bildung” in German as opposed to Ausbildung which means education or training for a specific task). This form of general education should make us more human and hopefully more robust to societal and political deviations.
Along those line, I would like to take the example of learning Latin. The pragmatic and utilitarian person would assess learning Latin from a practical perspective: what is the effort, what is the gain? Well, there is that, e.g. once you master Latin grammar you can easily learn other languages (including computer languages). Also, the effort spent on acquiring Latin vocabulary will help in learning Romance languages and even English. The true value, however, lies beyond: it is a gain in an understanding of timeless aspects of human existence, from mythology to history. The value learning Latin lies in itself. The example of Latin might be applied to many things we can learn about: if they are just a means to an end, they are helpful but not meaningful. In contrast, any endeavour to explain life in all forms sounds meaningful to me, and may be helpful, too. Like our physics teacher used to say: “I do not want to make you into radio technicians but convey a world view that allows you to reason about this world”.
What is the driving force behind gaining knowledge and the joy we can derive from having eureka moments? I do not know the answer to that but can only experience this innate feature of the human mind. Perhaps it is rooted in the simplification that, at least in our order of magnitude, time seems to flow in a linear fashion, resulting in apparent causal sequences. Consequently, our mind, or more precisely our brain’s hippocampus exhibits the ability to create a temporal and hence causal model of the world around us which in turn allows us to make predictions. The better the model, the better the predictions, the better we can navigate the world as the gained abstract knowledge is transferable to solving new problems. Here there is some positive feedback mechanism that might explain our drive for knowledge. The underlying faculty to build models of our world is built-in, at least from our current understanding, and has perhaps evolved naturally out of complexity, thus allowing us to acquire knowledge.
Appreciation of the World — The Beauty
A second human activity that, to my mind, has its purpose in itself without being a means to something else, is the appreciation of the world, generally by admiring the world in all its complex forms and shapes, and specifically through art, in both passive and active forms. As Brian Eno expressed his view on art in a the BBC Music John Peel Lecture at the British Library as a part of the Radio Festival 2015 so succinctly: “.. art is everything that you don’t have to do”. To me that means art is everything that goes beyond bare necessities, beyond the essential; as such art becomes the foundation of our culture. Creating, performing, enjoying and appreciating art may not contribute much to GDP, or can be measured in energy and resource expenditure, but it does to being human. I think that is one aspect that elevates us above other species. For me personally, it is music with pieces such as these, for others it might be something else.
This appreciation of the world that procures joy goes beyond a Darwinistic understanding in terms of survival of the fittest: standing in awe in front of a beautifully blossoming tree makes one more prone to be eaten by a predator. Yet we are attracted to “beauty”, a human concept because it lies in the eye of the beholder. I do not fully understand the mechanisms, but I believe the ability to perceive “beauty” to be an innate human quality. At times I think about the concept of beauty of first order: it could be some kind of resonance, feeling of harmony, even the change from dissonance to consonance. Perhaps it is the resonance of our inner self with natural phenomena that lies at its heart. Oscillations are all around us, and certain ones may resonate with us, for example if the wind generates sound effects with harmonic series of tones. We do not need to understand the concept of natural frequencies and harmonic series, but just listening to those procures joy, releases endorphins even. After beauty of first order there would be beauty of second order: human artefacts that are abstractions of the first order effects, possibly in many layers. It is perhaps the concept of knowledge by presence, i.e. the ability to “see” aspects of reality without needing to acquire them that fuels makes this appreciation possible.
Often, activities contributing to subsistence, i.e. the design and production of every-day goods are the only things considered to be useful by pragmatic people; indeed, they are necessary, no doubt about that. But these are the things you have to do to maintain the material foundations; activities sometimes considered useless by the same people are however the ones that transcend utilitarianism, such as art; they are truly human. I would go as far as saying that we develop new products because we can not only because we have to; we want to be creative. That is the true cause of innovation. In that vein humans enjoy technical challenges; one factor might be due to the pleasure we derive from being creative as an expression of the innate driver for life, engineer or artist. The “pressure” to innovate is a side effect because all economic actors are doing the same, it is an artefact of system dynamics. Free markets appear to drive innovation yet innovation is a mere consequence and not the cause.
An important point I would like to make here is that the joy associated with the appreciation of beauty and truth is not about hedonism and pleasure. One could consume a lot of drugs (DOSE: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins) to maintain the feeling of being happy, some form of joy. You might be smiling all your life, but I question whether one would truly feel fulfilled. Joy and pleasure are the cream filling in a complex cake; one would not indulge on the cream filling alone (without becoming unwell). Endorphins are the consequence and not the cause.
As a last point I need to add that the joy derived from the appreciation of the world is not limited to the arts. In a free interpretation of Brian Eno’s statement, this would include sports and games, riding a motor cycle on windy roads in the mountains, you name it, anything that floats your boat and is not a means to something else.
Stewardship of the World — The Good
It is perhaps self-evident: mankind populates this planet together with many other living entities; the planet has limited resources and a limited influx of energy (solar radiation). Life on earth is akin to life on a space ship (which it is in a sense); we have to make do with the means on board. Therefore, we have to protect and maintain the status quo if we do not want the system to deteriorate. Consequently, we need to devise a system that works with the constraints, a suitable economic, social and political system, designed to be circular and regenerative. In the long run, like on a space ship, the turn-around of materials has to be constant and is bounded within the limits of regeneration, i.e. no material growth. This does not preclude further evolution, or growth in non-material terms such as the development in the true areas mentioned above (e.g. science and art) resulting in prosperity (see Prosperity within Material Bounds).
What comes to mind is again the relationship to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the natural increase of entropy as a measure for “disorder”; things naturally decay, gravitate towards a lower state of energy and higher state of entropy. Pure energy is then needed to restore order. conversely, maintaining a high level of order needs constant supply of energy (and shedding of heat). Human efforts appear to me often like building and keeping a sand castle. Once built, water and wind will wear it down; constant effort is needed to to keep the castle in good shape. In the same vein, energy and effort is needed to maintain the state of a complex material world. The energy needed is more or less proportional to the total amount of complex, organised matter. The more stuff we turn around, the more energy, the less the less energy is needed. The same is true for all resources needed to support a complex material life style.
A very important aspect to managing the limited resource is sharing, on a local as well as on a global scale, and in many domain. In the absence of sharing, there is a cost for inequality, both on a national and international scale: crime, conflicts and all their consequences. Hence, it is not the accumulated wealth that counts, but a measure for a fair distribution of wealth on a global scale, albeit without equalisation or normalisation (some people consider a Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution to be fair, as an example for how interacting particles exchange energy, like economic actors would trade value and money). If an economy metric included a factor that is proportional to a fairer distribution of wealth, then a drive towards a fairer society would be the consequence. This needs a global perspective, possibly with feedback of exploited resources into the global commons (see Gaia Tax — A Compensation for Extracting Earth’s Resources).
The driving force to maintain life is, I would claim, present in all living beings, beyond the instinct to survive as an individual — the balance between preservation of the self and the community is always a challenge, but in a nutshell: do whatever is conducive to life, avoid what is detrimental to life. I would say that we do recognise the need for the “maintenance of life” as an innate imperative, including the drive to help our fellow living being, and those coming after us. Would that not be in place, humans would have ceased to exist by now. All that is possible through compassion, a trait in our being that allows us to recognise and project somebody else’s circumstances onto ourself, most likely due to our ability to build models in our mind as mentioned above: we do not literally feel the pain of somebody, but we can project it in our mind. Therefore, we want to help and care, for others and the world. Is that perhaps what is referred to as “love” at times, the desire to care for Life, a gift by the primordial Eros?
Individual Participation
While it’s all good to gain knowledge in an ivory tower, or appreciate art on your own, many activities only develop their full potential if shared with others; this is the social dimension of all aforementioned activities. Therefore, as individuals we participate in this world in many ways not only for our own gratification and selfishly to our own advantage; we partake by sharing in order to maintain life beyond our own interest. We do that as members of a family, communities and groups, in various layers and networks. These networks are not mutually exclusive as we can be many things at the same time. I would hope that in the long term humans can shake of the concept of exclusive affiliation to one network such as a country and its historic constraints, but move on to a more global outlook. I can imagine that smart contracts using block chain technology has the potential to lead to a true global society where people belong to various networks simultaneously, underpinned with mutual guarantees, benefits and obligations.
Personal Success
In the uncertainty and insecurity of our existence we seek reassurance and confirmation of our being and doing. Success is a possible positive feed back mechanism for our participation; it depends on our value system which is influenced by your upbringing as well as our peers, and those, in turn, may be determined by the alignment of their value systems to ours, etc. The easiest and most common view of success is based on status and accumulated material wealth. For me, and in alignment with the world view presented so far, there are two aspects to success. The first aspect, perhaps paraphrasing a section of the song “Breathe” by Pink Floyd on “The Dark Side of the Moon” is expressed by “And all you touch and all you see Is all your life will ever be“. In that sense, success would be correlated to experiencing life to the full, not in a hedonistic manner, but to understand and appreciate as much as possible, with your mind and all your senses: intellectual wealth. This covers the dimensions of True and Beauty above.
Contribution Metric
Once a physical being disappears, all accumulated experience is likely to vanish with the material existence, too; if not, only non-material things would have a chance to persist in the best case. Since I personally do not want to base my participation in this life on the hypothesis of an after-life, I bet on the here an now as well as the continuation of the world after my own demise. Therefore there is a second, more important aspect to individual participation (in addition to the two aspects mentioned above): some notion on how much you have applied your wealth (material or intellectual) to maintaining, if not improving of life, life that allowed you to gain your own experience. Through your contributions, your fellow beings and those coming after you will be able to do the same, or even more so, and so on.
There are many forms of contribution; for instance, passing on knowledge, caring for other people, helping in building a more sustainable civilization. Material wealth may be an enabler but remains a means to an end. Success is then perhaps the degree of utilization of received assets (material and immaterial) for the maintenance, continuation and improvement of life on Earth. The more one has received, the higher the bar.
Priority and Balance
An obvious question would arise from the pursuit of the three major values: what has priority and what is a good balance. Well, I do not know the answer to that, but I would say that the ratio between them is not constant. I would say that at certain times focusing on the maintenance of the world is more important, e.g. when more effort is needed to develop a sustainable civilisation, with sustainable energy supply and regenerative agriculture, as well as one that emphasizes in fact more the immaterial values such as science and art, or social activities. Further, as productivity and efficiency increases, less time has to be spent on the mundane tasks to support the material base. This aligns with John Maynard Keynes’ prediction that working hours will get reduced with a gain in productivity, in particular in a circular economy with a constant revolving mass.
Conclusion
The majority of all human activities is only there to support mankind as a whole in our transcendental endeavours, not the other way round. Economy, technology, industry and finance need to serve mankind, not the other way round where people become enslaved in the system that appears to be created for the benefit of a few. The former is actually an Aristotelian idea. Perhaps working on metrics around this understanding can help to re-focus mankind. In then end it is all down to the metrics the global society chooses to be optimised that will determine our path forward (see Alternative Measures of Progress).
Finally, what is life all about then, given the three premises from the beginning? The following make sense to me:
- try to comprehend life and all its manifestations (the True),
- maintain life in all its forms given your best abilities (the Good),
- enjoy the privilege to appreciate life and all its artefacts (the Beauty).
In a nutshell, the purpose of life lies in itself: try to understand, appreciate and uphold life, protect what allowed you to exist in the first place, and have some joy on the way.
