“Is there a meaning to life? Is there a reason that we exist? We wonder, we seek answers.
So can we answer the greatest question of
all? Is there a meaning to life? You might think it is a philosophical question, but I
think philosophy is dead….......” These statements are the start of an argumentative
theory proposed by the great scientist Stephen Hawking, in the second episode of his Grand design.
Through this documentary he has studied cosmogony based on science; especially
physics, believing that science can describe all of our questions about anything
including abstract issues. He claims that it’s possible to describe the meaning of life
by physics and that’s the science that defines the way that we perceive the reality of our
life. But how he supports this claim and to what extent he is right, needs a piece of deep
knowledge and study in both science and philosophy. There are many vague and
unanswered questions in Stephen’s theory which will be briefly mentioned through
this paper.
Questions like:
Is Stephen Hawking’s idea provable in all aspects of the universe?
Does his belief affect other major beliefs such as belief in God or the human first
creation....?
Are there any obvious and tangible examples during our daily life which
can verify his claims?
How his theory is related to principles of philosophy?
Does
any philosophical theory support or reject him?
However, to provide answers to these
questions it’s necessary to have a review over his theory. A physical, cosmological, and philosophical theory, the validity of which can have an enormous effect on our
life, values, science, and generally on the way that we have known our world.
Skepticism: putting any basic and true tenants in doubt to analyze and
consequently, accept or refuse them.
Metaphysics: the study of the most general features of reality example, existence, time, the
relationship between mind and body and causation.
Idealism: the belief that reality is mentally constructed or otherwise immaterial.
Subjective idealism: describes objects as no more than a collection of sense data
in the perceiver.
Realism: holds that reality, or at least some part of it, exists independently of the
mind.
Objectivism: holds that reality exists independently of consciousness, that human
being have direct contact with reality through sense perception.
... ... ...
In the first part of his documentary, he claims that philosophy is dead and it is the science that controls not only the world around us but also the way that we see
ourselves. He compares his idea to Rene Descartes’s recalling him as the father of
science instead of the father of modern philosophy. Descartes introduced ‘mind’ and
‘body’ as two fundamentally distinct kinds of things. Stephen Hawking believes finding out
that how mind and body are into connecting is the next step after Descartes and also to
find a scientific basis for the meaning of life. Then he explains the last discoveries
about the complexity of our brain. He claims that although the study of the brain is the
concern of neurology, ultimately it relates to physics since the brain is governed
by fundamental forces, forces like electromagnetism which finally creates thinking.
So as a physicist he introduces the human brain as a complex system and understanding
that how this brain is aware of the universe leads us to if there is a meaning to our life.
Stephen Hawking explains a metaphysical issue by scientific proof. In addition
to Descartes other philosophers like Parmenides, Plato, and Lock where those who
have the same conflict as Stephen Hawking’s; the conflict of the meaning of life, this
question that is there any reality in our lives. Among them, Parmenides was the first
who put the occurrence of ‘Thinking’ in doubt and claimed that it is impossible to
deny its existence and as Stephen Hawking himself mentions, the closest theory to his and the
most complete one is Descartes’s. His famous statement: ‘I think so I am’ is the most
concise and coherent explanation for Stephen Hawking’s idea.
There may be different personal experiences that lead one to think of the meaning
of life, to doubt whether what he or she has known is real. To me, the experience of
dreaming (seeing a world without time and place limitations), considering my own
ego different than others’, incapability to feel the air that makes me stay alive and
the amazing phenomenon of hypnotism which changes the nature of things,
motivates me to think that what happens if we find out the world around us is not
the real world which exists.
Mentioning the ancient Greeks as the first people who wonder if the mind is the
subject to the laws of nature, in this part he illustrates a scene in which three people
are enjoying their time on a boat. These people whose bodies are controlled by their
brains can interact with each other appreciate each other and their surroundings and
even decide to play a song or fall in love. He says: ‘all of these are meaningful even
a simple glance carries a meaning. To find out where the meaning is, is a problem
for science, why we have consciousness at all?’ he answers that one of the greatest
theories named ‘evolution’ is the key. A theory that explains every living thing
including human beings as the consequence of a very long process of sophistication. Therefore complex animals need brains in order to process large amounts of information,
the more aware an animal is of its environment, the more successful it would be. So
possibly awareness should become so sophisticated that one animal became aware
of itself and that is what humans are!
However how humans are able to think and assign
meaning to things? Then he goes over theories about how consciousness could
arise. In support of the latter proposition, Hawking shows viewers a computer
program called The Game of Life, invented by a John Conway in the 1970s. This is
an arrangement of squares in a grid (something like a chessboard of unlimited size)
that simulates a two-dimensional ‘universe’. Some squares in the grid can reproduce
themselves and then amalgamate with each other if the starting configuration has
been given the right set of instructions to cause this to happen. Viewers are then told
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that “it is possible to imagine that something like The Game of Life, with only a few
basic laws, might produce highly complex features, perhaps even intelligence.” He
believes that the human mind and the meanings it creates arise from a very large and
complex system working with very simple rules and also he considers this belief as
a confirmation of Descartes’s theory: the body and the mind are different; the body
and the brain are physical matters but the mind is the result of interchanging state of
these matters. He illustrates our body to hardware and our mind to software, so
we are only able to do things that our body and brain allow us while our mind is
more capable. So this idea makes the problem of ‘free will’.
He continues supporting himself with doubting whether there is any free will for
human beings, whether they are really able to choose or choice and free will are
concepts which they picked up to name the result of their hardware’s (body & brain)
complex and unconscious activities. He says that we are deluded by our free will
after all if our minds follow the rules of nature maybe the parts which we choose are
predetermined. As proof of this claim, he mentions the new scientific discoveries
saying that our decisions to do something can be affected by many things like
electricity. Our physical movements and even our decisions can be manipulated by
exposing specific parts of our brain to electricity. This experiment, known as awake
brain surgery, shows that although we think we choose to do or not to do something,
some other factors control our decisions. Observing how an external factor like
electricity controlled our body movements, it’s possible in the future via advanced
technology to control human thoughts or even make them fall in love! So our
decisions are all physics in our brain, which turns us into controllable machines.
Comparing our brain to earth atmosphere he says that although both are following
nature’s rules, being complex systems, it’s impossible to consider every variable to
predict their behavior.
In fact, sometimes little variables have big consequences.
The mind is like weather inside our heads and free will is the process of this complex
system when it faces a choice. He asks that if our choices are just physics does it
mean that we are deluding ourselves and there is no meaning to life?
To answer these questions he goes over a deeper matter and tries to explain the meaning of reality
itself.
Free will which Stephen Hawking tries to prove at first seems to be similar to hard
incompatibilism that denies the existence of free will but as he continues clarifying
his idea, it approaches nomological determinism, which holds that the future is
determined by preceding events. Because he takes an example of a man whose
choice of apple juice to drink is affected by his past experience of passing a happy
time with his favorite girl in an apple garden. So what he has known as free will
actually is the result of something in his unconsciousness.
It may sound somehow strange to consider all of our numerous choices as the result
of our brains’ data processing, the data some of which are not even remembered.
However, at the same time, we can make a relation between some of our feelings and our
experiences, sometimes we hate or love a specific smell; having a more review over
our past, we find that we have smelled that through a good or bad situation, or when
we hate a person unconsciously it leads us to hate the name which belongs to him.
To explain the meaning of reality he states that most of us share the same concept
of reality, the world around us exists independently from us, he shows us a girl
holding a glass bowl that contains a swimming goldfish. The world that the girl sees
(a market place) looks very different from the same world as seen by the goldfish
through its curved glass bowl. From this, Hawking tells us that he doesn’t think that
one reality is more valid than another and any living object perceives its reality
based on its senses.
Concluding that thinking exists, Parmenides claims that thinking must have an
object, so something beyond thinking really exists. And Plato also says that the
essence of things is mind-dependent forms, that humans can know them by reason
and by ignoring the distractions of sense-perception. To me, these ideas are
compatible with Stephen Hawking’s idea. As in continuing it’s explained, he tries to say that our
senses limit us to perceive the real world, in other words, they distract us to see the
reality.
When we compare our senses to animals’, we will see that what we know is
different from them and they perceive their reality differently. As an example the
structure of mosquito’s eye makes it to see its surrounding objects completely
different from what we see. Or when grass tastes delicious to cows!
All of these can be
proof to conclude that we build our reality in our senses’ frame.
‘To find the meaning of life we must answer the question: is there an independent
reality or not?’ he starts explaining that the world around us is actually nothing more
then an elaborate fabrication of some unknown superior intelligence, a giant super the computer provides us with all our senses, from what we see to what we smell, hear
and touch. He goes on with claiming that in fact, we have no senses, our body does
not exist and we are just brains in jams he admits that it may sound bizarre but this
is a genuine scientific hypothesis called the assimilation theory which says that the
assimilation of our brains -working as a supercomputer- is as much as perfect that
we never ever notice and Stephen considers this hypothesis as a confirmation to Descartes’s statement: I think so I am. Then he pictures a table on which an apple is
stated in a room he says that if you leave the room you would not be able to see the
table anymore so it can fly through space, go to the moon and return to the same position
before you re-enter the room. He says that this is an unlikely scenario, of course, but
it also is a good example to show that it is the best to fit the model of reality; here to assume
that the table stays put when we are not there.
According to him, that’s what scientists
do. They create best-fit models of how we believe our universe actually was. So the
ancient Greeks, considering the earth motionless and fixed at the centre of the
universe, were the first to build such scientific models. But later pioneer scientists
like Galilee found a simpler and completely revolutionary model to describe the
same observations they described that the earth itself was spinning and orbiting the
sun at the same time along with all the other planets. He says that no model can be
considered actually true because these models are just in our heads that best fit the
reality we perceive, in fact, physicists are creating more sophisticated models and the
truth of those models is impossible to establish. Here Stephen Hawkings continues by explaining our brain as a supercomputer and all of our
known realities and meanings as a piece of this computer program, in other words, our senses make the inputs of this computer ready and our brain creates the best fit
models which connect this inputs logically. Here his idea is partly close to George
Berkeley’s which says existence is fundamentally connected to perception. He
summarised himself in this sentence: “to be is to be perceived or to perceive.”
In the final part of the second episode, he concludes that we, human beings, are complex
biological machines behaving in accordance with nature’s laws. Our conscious
minds are created and sustained by our brains via a network of neurons. A three
dimensional model of our outside world is made by this consciousness, the best-fitted model! Which we call: reality, he believes that this reality is much more than what we see around us and we know it just as far as our knowledge and senses
allows us, and gradually our knowledge improvement helps us to build a much bigger
model of reality than before. He says that the answer to the main question i.e.
whether there is a meaning to life or not, is pretty clear and that is: meaning itself
is simply another piece of the model of reality that we each build inside our own
brain. Then he takes a mother and her child as an example. The mother is talking on
the phone and the child is playing near to the edge of the roof. He says that each of
them has a reality in their conscious minds. The baby can create a deep mental
model of his surroundings while he does not know he is on the fifth floor. At the
same time, his mother’s reality is also produced by her mind. And a reality of her is
that her love for her boy is as real as the phone in her hand shortly the brain is
responsible for not only the reality we perceive, but also for our motions and
meaning too. He continues that love and honor, right and wrong, are the heart of the
universe we create in our minds just as a table, a planet, or a galaxy. He considers it
remarkable to think that our brains which are essentially a collection of particles
working according to the laws of physics have this wonderful ability to not only
perceive reality but to give it meaning to! He believes that the meaning of life is
what we choose it to be. Personally, he likes to think that it is every one of us that
gives meaning to the universe… he says that the meaning of life is not somewhere
outside of there but right between our ears and in many ways it makes us the lords
of creation.
This documentary and its other episodes have several subtitles, for example, discussions around the part that mentions the start of human creation, he believes
that we, human beings, are accidentally developed and sophisticated but how our
early defective and incomplete versions were able to generate, is a question which
cannot be easily answered. As the title of his first episode is “did God create the
world?” and he ignores it, there are lots of critics to this claim. So another subtitle
of his idea is God's existence. But to me his use of phrase “superior intelligence” for
explaining the manager of the world in the fifth part of this episode (which is highlighted
10
in red) can be considered as his confession to the must of God's exists and to me
it seems incoherent to his claims about God. After all how such a complex exact
system can be accidentally created? I personally found the basis of his idea great,
logical, distinct, and considerable. That is why I tried to include compatible
points more than the incompatible ones. To me his attempt seems a collection of
great philosophers’ theories, explaining and proving by a different perspective;
science perspective. Although the complete validity of his idea seems strange in our
time, however, I think science improvement through time passage will make his thoughts will be more clearer…
Subroneel Saha is high in life. He enjoys life and believes to savour everything by doing along the path with passion, which he considers to be the most important part of the experience. He is a prolific writer on history, mythology, sacred lore, legends, folklore, fables and parables, and for challenging willful misinterpretations of ancient Indian and world scriptures, stories, symbols, and rituals. He intents to break the dogma and reveal the intentional part of every myth and the story, with the relevance with business, management, social life, student life.Image Courtesy: Internet
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