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Three Big Bangs: Matter-Energy, Life, Mind
By dividing the creation of matter, energy, life, and mind into three big bangs, Holmes Rolston III brings into focus a history of the universe that respects both scientific discovery and the potential presence of an underlying intelligence. Matter-energy appears, initially in simpler forms but with a remarkable capacity for generating heavier elements. The size and expansion rate of the universe, the nature of electromagnetism, gravity, and nuclear forces enable the the explosion of life on Earth. DNA discovers, stores, and transfers information generating billions of species. Cognitive capacities escalate, and with neural sentience this results in human genius.
A massive singularity, the human mind gives birth to language and culture, increasing the brain's complexity and promoting the spread of ideas. Ideas generate ideals, which lead life to take on spirit. The nature of matter-energy, genes, and their genesis therefore encourages humans to wonder where they are, who they are, and what they should do.
A massive singularity, the human mind gives birth to language and culture, increasing the brain's complexity and promoting the spread of ideas. Ideas generate ideals, which lead life to take on spirit. The nature of matter-energy, genes, and their genesis therefore encourages humans to wonder where they are, who they are, and what they should do.
160 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
5 people are currently reading
57 people want to read
About the author
Holmes Rolston III
24 books13 followersHolmes Rolston III was an American philosopher who was University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University. He is best known for his contributions to environmental ethics and the relationship between science and religion. Among other honors, Rolston won the 2003 Templeton Prize, awarded by Prince Philip in Buckingham Palace. He gave the Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh, 1997–1998. He also served on the Advisory Council of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence).
The Darwinian model is used to define the main thematic concepts in Rolston's philosophy and, in greater depth, the general trend of his thinking.
The Darwinian model is used to define the main thematic concepts in Rolston's philosophy and, in greater depth, the general trend of his thinking.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 9, 2012
Holmes Ralston III, a philosophy professor at University of Colorado was initially trained as a Presbyterian minister and later obtained a Phd from University of Edinburgh. He teaches environmental ethics and gave the Gifford Lectures in 1998 (I believe AN Whitehead did the Gifford Lectures in about 1923. They are one of the prized lectures in philosophy).
In somewhat tight, even dense, prose he describes what is known in physics about the genesis of the cosmos-the big bang. What is amazing about what has been learned about the first few microseconds of time following the big bang is that the various physico-chemical constants that evolved were precisely what were necessary to later support the beginnings of life. For example there is only slightly more matter than anti-matter (which cancel each other out), leaving behind the matter that makes up the cosmos as it is. Had the two entities been equal in amount there would have nothing but a flash and that is all. Also the rate of speed of expansion of the universe has been at one that allows for the gradual evolution of the condensation of planets, suns etc. If it was expanding even slightly faster, it would not have allowed for the gradual development of order. If it was expanding even slightly slower, it would have already collapsed. As a result energetic matter not only clumps, it complexifies. As a result: “In the last half-century cosmologists have found dramatic interrelationships between astronomical and atomic scales that connect to make the universe ‘user-friendly’. These discoveries are commonly gathered under the name ‘the anthropic principle…though it could be better named the ‘the biogenic principle.’”p.14 He ends this section: ‘The start up seems to be a setup’.
The second big bang of the title is that of life on the planet Earth (though he points out that our planet might be more accurately named Aqua given the predominance of water ). There is no way to predict the emergence of life from the elements that emerged from the first big bang any more than one could predict the contents of the library of congress from the constituents of ink, pen and paper. The first big bang was about matter and energy (matter/energy as Einstein demonstrated; E=mc squared). Energy and matter are interchangeable. Neither can be created nor destroyed, though each can take diverse forms. “In the biological big bang, the novelty is that matter/energy enters into information states.” P.42 “ The physical world is composed of matter and energy, with the two united in relativity theory-so physics and chemistry have insisted. But the earthen world, biologists now insist, is composed by information that superintends the uses of matter and energy.” P43. This information is contained in DNA which is an information storing protein capable of both executive function as when it causes development of the embryo and responsive to the phenotype which uses the information in DNA as a kind of Lego kit to construct what is needed to adapt to changing environmental challenges. The evolution of life is best described as exhibiting increasing diversity and complexity over eons. This progression has its ups and downs, but the overall direction has been upward. The development of neurons(thought to be about 700 million years ago), which are ‘fit’ for information detection and transfer, and later arranged into neural networks, made possible sentience. It became possible to feel both pain and pleasure. He sees pain as an ‘energizing force’. “Suffering not only goes back-to-back with caring sentience but also drives life toward pleasurable fulfillment.” P69 Evolutionary advances come through solving problems in context to avoid pain and suffering. “The evolutionary story could be titled, “The Evolution of Caring”, positively the capacity to enjoy pleasures. Or, perversely if one prefers, “The Evolution of Suffering.” Each seeming advance-for plants to animals, from instinct to learning, from sentience to self-awareness, from nature to culture-steps up the pain.” P.70 In discussing whether evolution has direction he states: “The motor of change is not simply challenging environments but prolife organismic drive. Survival of the fittest drives arrival of the more fit, which drives escalating biodiversity and biocomplexity.” P. 75. He ends the section on the second bang that of life on earth with another pithy sentence: “Life starts up, and, on many of its trajectories, it smarts up.”
The development of the human brain is the third big bang and represents the fastest growing organ in the history of life. Its sudden expansion occurred about 1.5-2 million years ago, a very brief period of time. The co-evolution of the ear and ability to hear, the larynx, trachea and tongue enabling speech, makes possible non-genetic learning leading to culture and written language. Again the direction of these developments is toward diversification and increasing complexity. The emergence of consciousness and, in particular, self-consciousness were major milestones, with the latter being unique to humans, but the former present in many animal species. The uniqueness of this is illustrated by the observation that evolutionary processes produced eyes at least 40 times, in different species, but the human brain only once. “Mind is embedded in matter-energy, a singularity within it. Mind is embodied in biology, a singularity within it.”
I was a bit surprised and disappointed that at this point in the book he didn’t refer to the experiments done at U of Montreal, Harvard and elsewhere that have pinpointed areas of the brain involved when people feel numinous or in the presence of God. These experiments remind of the discovery of opioid receptors in the brain, followed by the discovery of the brains own endorphins. Why have human brains evolved the ability to detect the presence of something greater than themselves?
The book uses a lot of scientific terms that don’t have definitions and thus seems to assume a high degree of familiarity among readers. It could be improved by having a glossary of terms included. An example of a term that crops up repeatedly is ‘possibility space’, but it is nowhere defined. Resorting to a Google search turns this up from W. Daniel Hillis a physicist (http://edge.org/q2011/q11_1.html):
Possibility Spaces: Thinking Beyond Cause and Effect
One of the most widely-useful (but not widely-understood) scientific concepts is that of a possibility space. This is a way of thinking precisely about complex situations. Possibility spaces can be difficult to get your head around, but once you learn how to use them, they are a very powerful way to reason, because they allow you to sidestep thinking about causes and effects.
As an example of how a possibility space can help answer questions, I will use "the Monty Hall problem," which many people find confusing using our normal tools of thought. Here is the setup: A game-show host presents a guest with a choice of items hidden behind three curtains. Behind one is a valuable prize; behind the other two are disappointing duds. After the guest has made an initial choice, the host reveals what is behind one of the un-chosen curtains, showing that it would have been a dud. The guest is then offered the opportunity to change their mind. Should they change or stick with their original decision?
Plausible-sounding arguments can be made for different answers. For instance, one might argue that it does not matter whether the guest switches or not, since nothing has changed the probability that the original choice is correct. Such arguments can be very convincing, even when they are wrong. The possibility space approach, on the other hand, allows us skip reasoning about complex ideas like probabilities and what causes change. Instead, we use a kind of systematic bookkeeping that leads us directly to the answer. The trick is just to be careful to keep track of all of the possibilities.
One of the best ways to generate all the possibilities is to find a set of independent pieces of information that tell you everything you could possibly need to know about what could happen. For example, in the case of the Monty Hall problem, it would be sufficient to know what choice the guests is going to make, whether the host will reveal the leftmost or rightmost dud, and where the prize is located. Knowing these three pieces of information would allow you to predict exactly what is going to happen. It is also important that these three pieces of information are completely independent, in the sense that knowing one of them tells you nothing about any of the others. The possibility space is constructed by creating every possible combination of these three unknowns.
In this case, the possibility space is three-dimensional, because there are three unknowns. Since there are three possible initial choices for the guest, two dud options for the host, and three possible locations for the prize, there are initially 3x2x3=18 possibilities in the space. (One might reasonably ask why we don't just call this a possibility table. In this simple case, we could. But, scientists generally work with possibility spaces that contain an infinity of possibilities in a multidimensional continuum, more like a kind of physical space space.) This particular possibility space starts out as three-dimensional, but once the guest makes their initial choice, twelve of the possibilities become impossible and it collapses to two dimensions.
Let's assume that the guest already knows what initial choice they are going to make. In that case they could model the situation as a two-dimensional possibility space, one representing the location of the prize, the other representing whether the host will reveal the rightmost or leftmost dud. In this case, the first dimension indicates which curtain hides the prize (1, 2 or 3), and the second represents the arbitrary choice of the host (left dud or right dud), so there are six points in the space, representing the six possibilities of reality. Another way to say this is that the guest can deduce that they may be living in one of six equally-possible worlds. By listing them all, they will see that in four of these six, it is to their advantage to switch from their initial choice.
Host reveals left dud Host reveals right dud
Prize is behind 1 2 revealed, better to stick 3 revealed, better to stick
Prize is behind 2 3 revealed, better to switch 3 revealed, better to switch
Prize is Behind 3 2 revealed, better to switch 2 revealed, better to switch
Example of a two-dimensional possibility space, when guest's initial Choice is 1
After the host makes his revelation, half of these possibilities become impossible, and the space collapses to three possibilities. It will still be true that in two out of three of these possible worlds it is to the guest's advantage to switch. (In fact, this was even true of the original three-dimensional possibility space, before the guest made their initial choice.)
This is a particularly simple example of a possibility space where it is practical to list all the possibilities in a table, but the concept is far more general. In fact one way of looking at quantum mechanics is that reality actually consists of a possibility space, with Schrödinger's equation assigning a probability to each possibility. This allows quantum mechanics to explain phenomena that are impossible to account for in terms of causes and effects. Even in normal life, possibility spaces give us a reliable way the solve problems when our normal methods of reasoning seem to give contradictory or paradoxical answers. As Sherlock Holmes would say, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."
Looking at the course syllabi that Holmes Ralston offers at U of Colorado is very interesting. I imagine listening to one of his lectures would be a challenge however. I had to read many paragraphs in this book two or three times to be sure that I understood what he was saying. The book seems to be aimed at those scientists stuck in reductive modes of thoughts, and those religionists who need a scientific basis. In the end I am reminded of Northrop Frye’s insistence that God is not a noun, but a verb.
In somewhat tight, even dense, prose he describes what is known in physics about the genesis of the cosmos-the big bang. What is amazing about what has been learned about the first few microseconds of time following the big bang is that the various physico-chemical constants that evolved were precisely what were necessary to later support the beginnings of life. For example there is only slightly more matter than anti-matter (which cancel each other out), leaving behind the matter that makes up the cosmos as it is. Had the two entities been equal in amount there would have nothing but a flash and that is all. Also the rate of speed of expansion of the universe has been at one that allows for the gradual evolution of the condensation of planets, suns etc. If it was expanding even slightly faster, it would not have allowed for the gradual development of order. If it was expanding even slightly slower, it would have already collapsed. As a result energetic matter not only clumps, it complexifies. As a result: “In the last half-century cosmologists have found dramatic interrelationships between astronomical and atomic scales that connect to make the universe ‘user-friendly’. These discoveries are commonly gathered under the name ‘the anthropic principle…though it could be better named the ‘the biogenic principle.’”p.14 He ends this section: ‘The start up seems to be a setup’.
The second big bang of the title is that of life on the planet Earth (though he points out that our planet might be more accurately named Aqua given the predominance of water ). There is no way to predict the emergence of life from the elements that emerged from the first big bang any more than one could predict the contents of the library of congress from the constituents of ink, pen and paper. The first big bang was about matter and energy (matter/energy as Einstein demonstrated; E=mc squared). Energy and matter are interchangeable. Neither can be created nor destroyed, though each can take diverse forms. “In the biological big bang, the novelty is that matter/energy enters into information states.” P.42 “ The physical world is composed of matter and energy, with the two united in relativity theory-so physics and chemistry have insisted. But the earthen world, biologists now insist, is composed by information that superintends the uses of matter and energy.” P43. This information is contained in DNA which is an information storing protein capable of both executive function as when it causes development of the embryo and responsive to the phenotype which uses the information in DNA as a kind of Lego kit to construct what is needed to adapt to changing environmental challenges. The evolution of life is best described as exhibiting increasing diversity and complexity over eons. This progression has its ups and downs, but the overall direction has been upward. The development of neurons(thought to be about 700 million years ago), which are ‘fit’ for information detection and transfer, and later arranged into neural networks, made possible sentience. It became possible to feel both pain and pleasure. He sees pain as an ‘energizing force’. “Suffering not only goes back-to-back with caring sentience but also drives life toward pleasurable fulfillment.” P69 Evolutionary advances come through solving problems in context to avoid pain and suffering. “The evolutionary story could be titled, “The Evolution of Caring”, positively the capacity to enjoy pleasures. Or, perversely if one prefers, “The Evolution of Suffering.” Each seeming advance-for plants to animals, from instinct to learning, from sentience to self-awareness, from nature to culture-steps up the pain.” P.70 In discussing whether evolution has direction he states: “The motor of change is not simply challenging environments but prolife organismic drive. Survival of the fittest drives arrival of the more fit, which drives escalating biodiversity and biocomplexity.” P. 75. He ends the section on the second bang that of life on earth with another pithy sentence: “Life starts up, and, on many of its trajectories, it smarts up.”
The development of the human brain is the third big bang and represents the fastest growing organ in the history of life. Its sudden expansion occurred about 1.5-2 million years ago, a very brief period of time. The co-evolution of the ear and ability to hear, the larynx, trachea and tongue enabling speech, makes possible non-genetic learning leading to culture and written language. Again the direction of these developments is toward diversification and increasing complexity. The emergence of consciousness and, in particular, self-consciousness were major milestones, with the latter being unique to humans, but the former present in many animal species. The uniqueness of this is illustrated by the observation that evolutionary processes produced eyes at least 40 times, in different species, but the human brain only once. “Mind is embedded in matter-energy, a singularity within it. Mind is embodied in biology, a singularity within it.”
I was a bit surprised and disappointed that at this point in the book he didn’t refer to the experiments done at U of Montreal, Harvard and elsewhere that have pinpointed areas of the brain involved when people feel numinous or in the presence of God. These experiments remind of the discovery of opioid receptors in the brain, followed by the discovery of the brains own endorphins. Why have human brains evolved the ability to detect the presence of something greater than themselves?
The book uses a lot of scientific terms that don’t have definitions and thus seems to assume a high degree of familiarity among readers. It could be improved by having a glossary of terms included. An example of a term that crops up repeatedly is ‘possibility space’, but it is nowhere defined. Resorting to a Google search turns this up from W. Daniel Hillis a physicist (http://edge.org/q2011/q11_1.html):
Possibility Spaces: Thinking Beyond Cause and Effect
One of the most widely-useful (but not widely-understood) scientific concepts is that of a possibility space. This is a way of thinking precisely about complex situations. Possibility spaces can be difficult to get your head around, but once you learn how to use them, they are a very powerful way to reason, because they allow you to sidestep thinking about causes and effects.
As an example of how a possibility space can help answer questions, I will use "the Monty Hall problem," which many people find confusing using our normal tools of thought. Here is the setup: A game-show host presents a guest with a choice of items hidden behind three curtains. Behind one is a valuable prize; behind the other two are disappointing duds. After the guest has made an initial choice, the host reveals what is behind one of the un-chosen curtains, showing that it would have been a dud. The guest is then offered the opportunity to change their mind. Should they change or stick with their original decision?
Plausible-sounding arguments can be made for different answers. For instance, one might argue that it does not matter whether the guest switches or not, since nothing has changed the probability that the original choice is correct. Such arguments can be very convincing, even when they are wrong. The possibility space approach, on the other hand, allows us skip reasoning about complex ideas like probabilities and what causes change. Instead, we use a kind of systematic bookkeeping that leads us directly to the answer. The trick is just to be careful to keep track of all of the possibilities.
One of the best ways to generate all the possibilities is to find a set of independent pieces of information that tell you everything you could possibly need to know about what could happen. For example, in the case of the Monty Hall problem, it would be sufficient to know what choice the guests is going to make, whether the host will reveal the leftmost or rightmost dud, and where the prize is located. Knowing these three pieces of information would allow you to predict exactly what is going to happen. It is also important that these three pieces of information are completely independent, in the sense that knowing one of them tells you nothing about any of the others. The possibility space is constructed by creating every possible combination of these three unknowns.
In this case, the possibility space is three-dimensional, because there are three unknowns. Since there are three possible initial choices for the guest, two dud options for the host, and three possible locations for the prize, there are initially 3x2x3=18 possibilities in the space. (One might reasonably ask why we don't just call this a possibility table. In this simple case, we could. But, scientists generally work with possibility spaces that contain an infinity of possibilities in a multidimensional continuum, more like a kind of physical space space.) This particular possibility space starts out as three-dimensional, but once the guest makes their initial choice, twelve of the possibilities become impossible and it collapses to two dimensions.
Let's assume that the guest already knows what initial choice they are going to make. In that case they could model the situation as a two-dimensional possibility space, one representing the location of the prize, the other representing whether the host will reveal the rightmost or leftmost dud. In this case, the first dimension indicates which curtain hides the prize (1, 2 or 3), and the second represents the arbitrary choice of the host (left dud or right dud), so there are six points in the space, representing the six possibilities of reality. Another way to say this is that the guest can deduce that they may be living in one of six equally-possible worlds. By listing them all, they will see that in four of these six, it is to their advantage to switch from their initial choice.
Host reveals left dud Host reveals right dud
Prize is behind 1 2 revealed, better to stick 3 revealed, better to stick
Prize is behind 2 3 revealed, better to switch 3 revealed, better to switch
Prize is Behind 3 2 revealed, better to switch 2 revealed, better to switch
Example of a two-dimensional possibility space, when guest's initial Choice is 1
After the host makes his revelation, half of these possibilities become impossible, and the space collapses to three possibilities. It will still be true that in two out of three of these possible worlds it is to the guest's advantage to switch. (In fact, this was even true of the original three-dimensional possibility space, before the guest made their initial choice.)
This is a particularly simple example of a possibility space where it is practical to list all the possibilities in a table, but the concept is far more general. In fact one way of looking at quantum mechanics is that reality actually consists of a possibility space, with Schrödinger's equation assigning a probability to each possibility. This allows quantum mechanics to explain phenomena that are impossible to account for in terms of causes and effects. Even in normal life, possibility spaces give us a reliable way the solve problems when our normal methods of reasoning seem to give contradictory or paradoxical answers. As Sherlock Holmes would say, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."
Looking at the course syllabi that Holmes Ralston offers at U of Colorado is very interesting. I imagine listening to one of his lectures would be a challenge however. I had to read many paragraphs in this book two or three times to be sure that I understood what he was saying. The book seems to be aimed at those scientists stuck in reductive modes of thoughts, and those religionists who need a scientific basis. In the end I am reminded of Northrop Frye’s insistence that God is not a noun, but a verb.
December 28, 2018
An inquisitive book that infuses the reader with astonishment at the unfathomable extent of the cosmos and gratitude for being bestowed with cognitive capacities that render Homo sapiens the most complex entities in the perceivable universe.
July 10, 2012
This is a challenging book in several ways. First Rolston's discussion of each of what he identifies as the three big bangs, matter-energy, life, and mind is technical and requires careful reading. Second his position comes through his descriptions of these singularities as belief in a spiritual existence that may have had a role in each of these events. While not overtly religious or even theological in context, he does challenge the reader to think about the uniqueness of these events and just maybe why they happened.
May 17, 2015
A short book written surprisingly elegantly, sweeping through the grandest concepts in the cosmos, and diving down in to some gritty specifics in physics and biology. Sections on evolutionary leaps in biodiversity and then primate brain were the most thoroughly presented with the most wow, but it was his architecture of the universe and our place it in which I'll take with me.
December 11, 2012
Holmes Rolston III gives a brief history of the universe, and the evolution of intelligent life. Interestingly, he finds a way for science and religion for reconcile, suggesting that the presence of a higher power is not a given, but that it is possible.
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January 4, 2014Uncle Holmes ias written a very thoughtful and helpful work. I could not help reading the book through the lens of Abraham Joshua Heschel who notes that all wisdom begins with awe. The read inspires the awe one needs to open the entirety of life to the mystery of the cosmos.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews