147. THE MYSTERY WE ARE

“The Mystery We Are” is the title of the On Being interview by Krista Tippett with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson and Templeton Prize-winning physicist Marcelo Gleiser. This post includes gleanings from that interview. Tippett introduced the interview with the following statement about her interviewees:

“They connect thrilling dots among the current discoveries about the cosmos and the new territory of understanding our own minds.”

Mr. Gleiser: “I grew up in Rio in particular and right in front of the ocean. So it’s impossible not to be amazed by the enormity of nature when you have that huge, beautiful Atlantic Ocean in front of you. And I was lucky that my grandparents had a house in the mountains about two hours from Rio, which we used to go to, which is part of what is called the Atlantic Forest, which is this incredibly luscious, full of life, orchids and bromeliads exploding everywhere that enchanted Charles Darwin when he went down there, you know, on The Beagle and he talked about this power of nature.”

Ms. Tippett: “And Marilynne, you grew up in Idaho, which you describe also as a place of more austere but intense beauty.”

Ms. Robinson: “Well, my grandparents had a house in the mountains not terribly far from where I lived. It was in the western side of the Rocky Mountains, near Canada, and the proportion, or the disproportion, of nature on the one hand and human settlement on the other was really striking.”

Mr. Gleiser: “The way we understand the world is very much based on what we can see of the world, right? Science is based on measurements and observations. And the notion that we can actually come up [with] and have a theory that explains everything assumes that we can know everything, right? That we can go out and measure everything there is to measure about nature and come up with this beautiful theory of everything. And since we cannot measure all there is to measure, since our tools have limitations, we are definitely limited in how much we can know of the world.”

Mr. Gleiser: “So when you look out into the nature, everything is in transformation at all times. And we see this at the very small and we see this at the very large. When we look at the whole universe, it is expanding, it’s growing, it’s changing in time. And so, to me, I look at things much more as a state of flux, of becoming, of transformation, as something that has some static truth behind it. … So the notion that we as humans could come up with a final answer to the mystery of nature is pushing things a little too far for our capabilities.”

Mr. Gleiser: “I think that once you adopt that there is only one way of understanding the complexity of things, you’re just emptying humanity of its value, of the plurality of visions. And so, yes, science is powerful. I love it. I do it. But there are other ways of knowing. And to say that there is only one way of understanding the mind, which is a topic that Marilynne talks so much about in her book, is just silly, to be honest. It’s impoverishing the richness of human culture.”

Ms. Tippett: “I also want to talk about this idea of creation and of myth. Because, Marcelo, you are not a religious person. Marilynne, you are certainly someone who — well, you preach and you teach the Old Testament and you are a big defender of John Calvin.”

Ms. Robinson: “I think that our bond with humankind is felt as a sort of very much enlarged family narrative of origins in that sense, you know. There’s some sort of a feeling that if you know where you came from you would know who you are. You would know what you should do. We lack definition of ourselves, which is an incredibly haunting feature of human life. And I think that often we, you know, if you look at these narratives like the epic of Gilgamesh or something like that, it says things about who the gods are, what the purpose of human life is, and so on. I think these are questions that people need, crave, and they take them right back to primal origins.”

Ms. Tippett: “There’s a line that you wrote, Marcelo, that is the kind of statement that you’re making as a physicist, but it’s also just a statement about being human, right? ‘Symmetry may have its appeal, but it is inherently stale: Some kind of imbalance is behind every transformation.’ I mean, you could be talking about the cosmos and you could be talking about me yesterday, right?”

Mr. Gleiser: “Yeah. Absolutely.”

Ms. Robinson: “I think that the arts are our effort to articulate the experience of self and mind and so on that is inaccessible to scientific description — that that deep yearning that is as ancient as the desire to know where we came from and the rest of it has been disallowed as the legitimate part of the human record and the human conversation. … And along with, of course, other forms of the profound self-exploration of human inwardness is the rejection of religion, which is also put out of account. There’s nothing really more universal, I think, in human cultures than the impulse to religion.”

Mr. Gleiser: “And to think of science as separate from spirituality to me is a big mistake. There is nothing that says that science should be dispassionate about the spirit or the life of the spirit. And to me it’s quite the opposite. It’s exactly because I feel very spiritually connected with nature that I am a scientist. And to write equations on a blackboard and to come up with models about how nature works is, in a sense, a form of worship of that spirituality. And I feel that very concretely all the time.”

Ms. Tippett: “Marcelo, is this new frontier of mind and consciousness, is it challenging for physics? Or where does it fit into your way of seeing the world?”

Mr. Gleiser: “It’s very challenging, because the way physics traditionally has worked is through this reductionistic method, right? You look at a complicated problem, you break it down into small parts, you understand how these small parts work and then try to make sense of the whole. And this extrapolation works beautifully when you talk about stars and galaxies, but it really fails miserably when you’re talking about the mind or the brain.”

“So there is this whole new notion that comes from complexity theory that the mind is an emergent phenomenon that we can’t quite explain that has to do with the concatenation of many different groups of neurons at the same time. So the interesting thing about that is that, if that is true, then new laws will emerge at different levels of complexity.”

Mr. Gleiser: “What we will be able to do is what the internet is already doing, which is creating an enormous databank of information that will almost look intelligent, but you will always be asking the questions. It’s the asking of the question that is the mystery, not so much how you find the ways to answer it.”

Ms. Robinson: “I tell my students, actually, that the mind continuously creates hypotheses. You know, tomorrow is a hypothesis. You have some theory of the general shape of tomorrow, which could be completely false, completely inaccurate, but you have to have the hypothesis in order to be sane and act rationally in the world and so on.”

Q: Are you comfortable living with the mystery behind questions and hypotheses?