Constructive Naturalism — Understand the World with Computers and Chance (Zufall)
From Popper’s Three Worlds and Peirce’s three world actions to the modern world model
1 Introduction with the Philosopher Karl Popper’s Three Worlds
In a famous lecture, the British-Austrian philosopher Karl Popper outlined in 1978 a philosophical world picture consisting of three subworlds. The subworlds are in his pre-computer world view World 1: the physical objects, World 2: the mental or psychological world, and World 3: the products of the human mind, e.g. the languages.
This is a plan of the world as a whole which could in fact have originated already from an ancient great philosopher, e.g. from Aristotle. But today, we can update these worlds and have a somehow deeper digging view.
With Charles Darwin’s evolution theory becoming science, it became clear that there is a strange creative driving force in the world, chance (Zufall in German). Our animated world is the outcome of the action of chance in myriads of accidental minievents. The American philosopher Charles Peirce was the modern thinker recognizing the importance of chance to bring the novel in the world.
For the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper (Popper, 1978) the computer was nothing more than an elaborated pen, an auxiliary tool. This was of course not just Popper’s view, maybe this is still today the prevailing thinking in the population. But the involvement of the computer resp. of information science in the philosophy of the world has changed everything. Without inclusion of information science, all scientific attempts to explain human feelings and thinking had been bound to fail.
This was particularly depressing at the end of the 19th century when physicists (and engineers) thought to have found (resp. invented) everything of importance. For example, in the year 1875, the young Max Planck was advised by a professor of physics not to study physics since there was nothing left to be discovered. Planck replied that he wanted simply to understand physics. There is a famous but desperate speech of a German scientist from the year 1872 about the boundaries of scientific knowledge. He saw most notably two unanswerable riddles, namely what matter and force are and how we are able to think (Du Bois, 1872):
What conceivable connection exists between certain movements of certain atoms in my brain on the one hand, and on the other hand the facts which are original for me, which cannot be further defined, which cannot be denied away, ‘I feel pain, I feel pleasure; I taste sweetness, I smell the scent of roses, I hear the sound of organs, I see red ‘.
Emil Heinrich Du Bois-Reymond, German physiologist , 1872.
The statement of the speech has a compact Latin name Ignoramus et ignorabimus „We do not know and we will never know“ (Wikipedia Ignoramus et ignorabimus, 2021).
At this point of time and development of science this is the position of the philosophical theory of Physicalism. The Physicalist explains the world — geology, chemistry, biology, everything — at the end through the laws of physics. The scientist of the 19th century Emil Du Bois-Reymond defines nicely the limits of physicalism (Finkelstein, 2013).
The prevailing general philosophy of the world in the 19th century, indeed until today, is completely different from this. It is the division of the world into matter and mind. Matter is something very simple, the epitome of solid, like wooden balls or iron bars. Mind is also simple, but without explanation, it is simply there. Animals don’t have it, but we humans do, and we can speak and think with it. Religiously thought, it is a gift of God. The personal spirit called Soul has in addition a hopeful quality: It can live on after the death.
But neither physicalism alone nor materialism/idealism are scientific theories. A fundamental second supporting pillar and a driving mechanism is missing for the world description to physics. The information science and the role of chance are missing. But the role of chance in the construction of the world was at the end of the 19th century already visible.
2 Chance as force to construct the living world inclusive us
The endless variety in the world is not created by law. It does not correspond to the nature of the uniformity to produce variations, nor to that of the law to produce the individual case.
Charles Peirce, 1839–1914.
Already the Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus two thousand years ago sensed the contradiction between a world governed by perfect laws and the real, chaotic and living world. These philosophers had invented or at least represented the ancient atomic theory: Everything consists of tiny, indivisible particles of various shapes moving freely in empty space. In principle, there are two types of them, heavier atoms for matter and lighter, subtle “spiritual” atoms for soul properties. For the transition from (boring) order into irregular movement, the philosophers introduce seemingly arbitrarily a trembling movement for all atoms, the clinamen. The atoms tremble and change the flight direction continuously, without reason and arbitrarily! The arbitrary insertion of the clinamen has been regarded as a horrible nonsense from Roman times up until today. But today we know that all real atoms and electrons jitter, even the vacuum does.
For us, the clinamen is an unbelievable fortunate anticipation of modern science.
In the age of enlightenment, coincidence is rather regarded as a kind of disturbance, which can be compensated and “tamed” by statistics if there are enough incidents. But for the enlightened scientist of that time it was clear: It was only a question of effort to find the (next) cause behind every coincidence.
One conceptual exception remained and caused concern: The introduction of entropy, in the sense of disorder by the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906) in the year 1877. In fact, entropy is a macroscopic measure of the randomness that a piece of matter contains. The invention (or detection) of entropy is one of the greatest achievements of physics in the 19th century perhaps only surpassed by the establishment of the equations for electromagnetism by James Maxwell.
Charles Sanders Peirce, Wikimedia Commons, NOAA Office and NOAA Corps Operations
Chance comes into science of the 19th century from a completely different side than physics, namely from biology. It also comes from a completely different world, as we will see, namely as a matter of fact from information science. It is the doctrine of the origin of species of 1858 of the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882). But it is clean science albeit based on the narrow basis of observations in the Galapagos Islands, though more than the famous various Darwin finches. Chance is hidden in the unknown mechanism of spontaneous changes in the still unknown genome of living creatures, but its effect is obvious. The plant and animal species are not fixed once and for all, but everything is in flux. Of course, this also concerns the emergence of man as an animal species. The main arena of the Darwinism controversy was religion and far from the still mechanical world of physics.
The American philosopher Charles Peirce (1839–1914) had still in the 19th century the great gift to see deeper — even deeper than some later philosophers. Charles Peirce was a polymath, chemist by training, but also a mathematician and logician. Today he is considered (e.g. by Bertrand Russell) to be the most important American philosopher.
Peirce understands the physics of his time, including the importance of entropy. Entropy in a closed system grows and can only grow; the expected heat death of the universe is at this time a topic of discussion among intellectuals. A physics with cleanly continuous laws cannot explain the irreversible one-sided development of the world.
He sets at the beginning of the universe some chaos which he calls the “womb of indeterminacy”. At the beginning of his cosmology stands a ball of chance or coincidence. To have no misunderstandings, we define with Peirce and Hehl, 2021:
A coincidence is a causal chain whose origin cannot be determined. Item.
The origin of the coincidence event is hidden in a non-inextricable mess, his womb of indeterminacy. Peirce takes a second basic idea from the mode of action of the biological evolution. It is a kind of adaptation that results in permanence out of chance. In evolution, for example, it is successful mutations that lead to relatively stable species. According to the knowledge of his time, he cannot penetrate to the heredity mechanism itself, and he speaks of the phenomenon habit of taking habits:
The tendency to develop or generalize habits arises from one’s own action, through the habit of adopting habits as one grows.
However, Peirce goes too far. He sees the physical laws of nature themselves also emerging from chaos by such a habit-taking mechanism. But physics is another world with exact and hard specifications probably for the whole universe, habit-taking applies only the living, because this is information or “software”.
It is the merit of Peirce to have made chance from the trivial disturbance to a foundation of the world.
Charles Peirce calls his doctrine of the world with chance as main driver Tychism after the Greek goddess Tyche, corresponding to the Roman Fortuna. Tyche is responsible in mythology for the changing course of history. She elevates and degrades people.
3 Information Technology — the missing pillar
Life is a DNA software system.
Craig Venter, Biologist.
Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process. You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different area.
Ray Kurzweil, Computer Scientist.
In a [regular digital] computer, software and hardware are separate; however, our brains and our minds consist of what can best be described as wetware, in which what is happening and where it is happening are completely intertwined. Matthew Cobb, Zoologist, in TheGuardian, Feb 27, 2020.
There is no doubt that the brain as a whole is a computer in the sense of an information generating and processing device. But there are many misunderstandings with the term computer just by the well-known digital computer: processor, memory and software do not have to be separate (there is e.g. microcode, flexible software in the core of the computer), the internal properties do not have to be fixed (there are adaptations to the application, for example for efficient graphics), the computer can also handle fuzzy data, it does not have to be one computational path but there can be hundreds of thousands of parallel ones, and so on.
The engineers had to build a reliable and transparent device (at least that is the intention). In particular, it does not have to run on silicon transistors, it could be dominoes or DNA molecules.
Nature had to build the brain computer with wet, fuzzy analog elements. In addition, there are boundary conditions such as the construction plan must be compact, the associated volume and the energy to be available are limited, about 1.2 liters and probably 20 Watts of the total available 70 Watts per human. In computer terms, brain research is reverse engineering. It is an attempt to find the inner static bonds and to understand the dynamic processes from the outside. It is not to be expected that nature hides this (why should it), but it is a very complex undertaking.
Inheritance in nature is another area of information technology in nature: it is about passing on successful blueprints. Genetics is even a digital science. The whole of biodiversity has become a big software library.
Passport photo at age 16.
Alan Turing aged 16, Wikimedia Commons, unknown. Cropped.
Information technology thus passes on the blueprints of life construction and provides the intelligence to manage life for animals and us humans. Our brain computer has an operating system for it, which we experience as a pretty addition as consciousness. It is philosophically speaking an epiphenomen that facilitates life.
Thus it is clear:
Information technology is a pillar of the living world.
The computer is thus not just a tool: it is a highly important philosophical principle.
We are also a computer! In the expanded definition of the computer, this is not a metaphor, but a statement with the consequence:
Philosophy of mind without knowing and including information technology could only be superficial or simply wrong.
Accepting this, some questions and problems become obsolete, such as:
Can a computer think? The computer scientist Alan Turing (Fig. 3) was probably the first to foresee the thinking computer and also the problem for us humans to acknowledge this. For this purpose he proposed the neutral imitation game, the famous Turing test. This paper is from 1950 (Turing, 1950), from the early days of computer technology. The computer winning against the chess world champion is far away! As we know since 1950, the question is nonsensical. We and the digital Computer play in the same category, just with different implementations.
The pillar of biological information technology and thus of life has a beginning. Before the beginning there was only physics and coincidence in the world: The coincidence produces complex constructs also in physics, for example the wonderful snowflakes, but they pass away again.
Only when it became possible to preserve the accidental complexity and to build on top of it, the evolution to higher forms of life became possible.
This was achieved with the RNA and DNA structures. With physics alone, there is self-organization, with information storage, it is life.
The evolving evolution is a great ongoing software development. Life itself is running software. The difference to technical software development is that in biology the hardware had to be developed together with the software. The term software is abstract and seemingly far removed from life, but software are instructions to the associated hardware to do something specific. The amount of software is a measure of complexity, corresponding to digital software, with the corresponding problem of measurement. The whole column of information is abstract.
But not to forget:
The information needs a (tiny) material basis and for the processing a (tiny) amount of energy.
Only with large amounts of computer power it becomes large amounts of matter and energy for information storage and processing.
4 Constructive Naturalism
If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by ‘mere machines,’ there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.
Daniel Dennett.
At the end of the Enlightenment, naturalism, the recognition of the world without supernatural intervention, suffered as explained from a large, double gap: How to explain life, and how to explain thought? Life was understood as driven by the spirit of life called vitalism, thinking was the spirit itself.
A desperate, but famous and rather crude saying comes from the zoologist Carl Vogt in 1846: Thoughts are in the same relation to the brain as bile is to the liver or urine is to the kidneys.
What the natural scientist did in his distress, without understanding it, was to transfer an example from the “physics” pillar to the “information technology” pillar. It’s not quite that bad: the urine is World 1, but at least it’s from a living being, so it’s from World 2, too.
We are now in a position to assemble the overall world picture (Fig. 4).
World 1 is the world of the laws of nature, ultimately the world of physics. We avoid the word “matter” — the hard wooden spheres no longer exist in philosophy. Matter and energy have become mental in the standard model of elementary particles. World 1 is the basis of everything and is full of coincidence from the beginning, the Big Bang. On the one hand the physical world develops further, on the earth as in the universe. That is the blue column at the left growing upward.
World 2 starts to exist when by chance it succeeds to copy molecules and to store good configurations, the coincidences create the green column at some time. It is the beginning of evolution, initially chemical evolution. The green column grows and with it the complexity of the supporting “software” to become real biology. It thrives the whole sequence of the development of plants and animals up to the Homo Sapiens in modern time.
Naturally, the column of the information world (World 2) is built on a world-1-foundation. Besides the further vertical development of the inanimate world, this foundation yields a graphic in the form of a big L (Hehl, 2016). In the run of the world, the construction of Pillar 2 can change the nature of World 1. Global examples are the creation of the oxygen atmosphere about 2 billion years ago by cyanobacteria and the warming carbon dioxide blanket by us humans in our time. Lower life first created the basis for higher life, and thus for us, with World 1 oxygen through photosynthesis. With the additional carbon dioxide we hope that World 2 does not destroy its foundation in World 1 itself! But nothing is certain (Hehl, 2021).
But World 2 has a second, a non-green part in parallel to the green. It is information technology created by man. First only as physics (mechanics), but then more and more proper World 2:
a) Calculators and automata (still in the blue color of physics).
b) Programmable machines (for example Charles Babbage and Karl Zuse).
c) Today’s computers that “solve mental tasks” like translating natural language.
d) The unknown future with more AI and something like the Singularity.
The transition from a) to b) is philosophically particularly distinguished as a definition of mankind:
Man is (as biological life) software, which itself generates software (and the computer).
In our era, the computer has factually proven that many skills we humans pride ourselves on and consider as mental can also be performed by machines: such as reading handwriting, understanding spoken language, translating texts, carrying on a conversation, or recognizing faces and understanding a smile. It’s proving true all the time:
Anything a normal human can learn [in terms of skills], a computer [robot] can or could do.
And finally this better, more versatile and in combination with things that we humans cannot do.
from “Die unheimliche Beschleunigung des Wissens”, vdf Zurich, 2012.
The scientific method in World 1 to prove something is the experiment, the method on the computer science World 2 is the working construction. The repositioning of the mind only as a product is summarized compactly by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett:
The mind is the effect, not the cause.
The new understanding of the mind as computer also explains concepts like consciousness (as mentioned above), but also soul (in the sense of psyche — as our operating system for personal relationships) and free will (as necessary illusion) or in philosophy “qualia“ (as pseudo problem).
The figure 4 misses something important: the penetration of the worlds by the coincidence, the Zufall. The origin of chance is in World 1. For World 1 this means further development of the stars and galaxies. For the green column, chance is the driving force in myriad ways. In the real world, the coincidence or chance is everywhere with concentrated areas (“wombs”) of the indeterminacy: e.g. the atmosphere, the ocean or the fertilization of the ovum. The philosopher Daniel Dennett again:
There’s Nature and there’s Nurture. Is there also some X, some further contributor to what we are? There’s Chance. Luck.
We call this worldview Constructive Naturalism. It is naturalism because without supernatural influence, and it is constructive because the spiritual world has been built and continues to be built. Of course, through the role of chance, an undefined element has also been introduced into the model which delivers creativity.
Chance brings a loophole for the believer in God. It is not forbidden to imagine a spirit behind chance. This is not impossible, just like having luck or bad luck in daily life. It is a-scientific, not anti-scientific. But man loses the qualitative special role to the animals: We are in a line.
At first sight, nothing remains of Popper’s World 3: Computer science (with chance) has converted thinking, speaking, understanding, creating and so on into natural actions, both in flesh (the brain) and in silicon (in computers). Even works of art (Beethoven’s Fifth, Michelangelo’s David) are at least problematic . Everything that is learnable is World 2! There remains the assumption of a certain rest of a World 3, for example the possibility of genius or of real art or also of real love. Some people question this; therefore we draw in the diagram Fig. 4 the World 3 dashed.
4 Executive Summary
If we denote chance by X, then the formula holds: We are nature(X) and nurture(X) + X
A world formula, slightly shaped after Daniel Dennett.
Still around 1900 one had only physics (and derivative sciences) for understanding the world plus unexplained, supernatural. The typical philosophy was therefore materialism vs. idealism (plus religion). This was still the basis for Karl Popper’s 1978 division of the world in three categories — physics, subjective and man-made. But two fundamental ideas were missing: the chance as a basic essence to get creativity, and the computer science as an absolutely necessary branch of knowledge for the understanding of life and of the intellect.
With the realization that computers with sufficient complexity can also think, the present world view with two (or three) worlds arises: World 1 of physics and what is derived from it, and World 2 of computer science with blueprints of ever increasing power, already starting with simple forms of life. This creative side constantly continues to construct the world.
Some people question whether a non-natural world World 3 in addition exists, such as for example a real art.
Some readers may now say: This is nothing new, this is exactly how I imagined the world model. This is not a problem, but on the contrary pleasing. But altogether we think it is worth to put these thoughts together coherently. And we get a definition of the specialness of man:
The species Man is software, which itself generates software.
The two world models differ considerably in the outlook into the future, the old one with the mind as an untouchable unknown being, the new with the mind as a product of biological evolution and the growing artificial mind from the machine: In the old picture, the human spirit remains a constant, in the new model the development of World 2 continues dynamically with further growth of intelligence and with uncertain outcome. For example, in the futurologist Ray Kurzweil’s conception, the singularity threatens. The new world model is more satisfying and it is certainly more exciting.
5 Literature
Finkelstein, Gabriel 2013. Emil du Bois-Reymond: neuroscience, self, and society in nineteenth-century Germany. MIT Press, Cambridge. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/emil-du-bois-reymond
Hehl, Walter 2016. Wechselwirkung. Wie Software die Philosophie verändert. Springer Heidelberg. In German. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-48114-1
Hehl, Walter 2021. Chance in Physics, Computer Science and Philosophy. Springer Berlin.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-658-35112-0
Hehl, Walter 2022. Klimawandel — Grundlagen und Spekulation. Springer Heidelberg. In German.
https://link.springer.com/book/9783658355401
Popper, Karl 1978. Three Worlds — Tanner Lectures. https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/p/popper80.pdf
Turing, Alan 1950. Computing Machinery and Intelligence. https://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf.
Wikipedia 2021. Ignoramus et Ignorabamus. English Wikipedia, drawn November 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignoramus_et_ignorabimus
