The Meaning Without

The Meaning Without

We live in an uncertain world. Uncertainty ticks relentlessly at the core of the universe, i.e., the world of subatomic particles. Laws that govern this realm can be formulated and understood only in terms of the laws of probability. This esoteric branch of physics was discovered in the beginning of twentieth century and was called Quantum Mechanics. Over the years, its truth and its powers of prediction of natural phenomena- a major test of the veracity of any scientific theory- have been confirmed incontrovertibly. Richard Feynman, a Noble laureate and a celebrated Quantum physicist, compared the precision of Quantum prediction to measuring of distance between New York and Los Angeles accurately to the width of one human hair. But quantum physics is also unfathomably counterintuitive. Einstein, one of the forefathers of Quantum physics, could never accept the inherent uncertainty in the working of universe, on which this exact science is predicated. He constantly evoked his God- Einstein’s God were the simple immutable laws that governed the working of the infinitely nuanced Universe- and remarked repeatedly, ‘God doesn’t play dice,’. To this his lifelong friend and another founding fathers of Quantum physics, Neils Bohr, is said to have quipped in frustration, ‘Einstein, stop telling God what to do’.

Human beings evolved in a world where immediate dangers and opportunities in environment had to be interpreted successfully and expeditiously to survive each passing moment. Can the movement in the nearby bush signify a predator? Can the thin rope-like structure on the path be a snake? Does sudden appearance of green grass indicate a nearby source of water? Do red fruits on trees point towards a source of rich food? Correct and speedy interpretation of such stimuli could decide between life and death. Intuitive answers, which came to mind instantaneously, served this purpose. Brain which could supply these came to be passed on -through genes of parents- to maximum progeny and the species thrived. For about two hundred thousand years of the existence of our species, these were the only queries which confronted our ancestors and a brain capable of resolving these, proffered unparalleled advantage to the body that sheltered it. Understanding of Quantum Mechanics and laws of probability did not and does not offer any survival benefit to such a brain. Thus, pathways in our brain, that empower us to look at the world through the prism of probability are forever hidden from our consciousness by the overpowering influence of the intuitive pathways which supply swift, unambiguous answers. That we are the most successful species, other than microbes, that ever lived on earth- judged from our numbers and power to inhabit and proliferate in a vast range of varied environments- tells us that this decision-making apparatus in our brains has served us well.

Humans did not evolve to live in skyscrapers hundreds of metres tall, to navigate a highway where vehicles are zooming at breakneck speeds, to fly in the sky at speeds faster than sound, to travel in to the deep dark space, to defy disease and ageing and live well in to ninth decade, to fathom the workings of the forces of nature, to predict the unpredictable vagaries of weather, to observe the unobservable world of subatomic particles, to unravel origins of life and universe, to cogitate over the reality of space and time, and neither to make and loose wealth in stock market. We came to this life gradually in the last millennium. For more than two hundred millennia before this, our forefathers spent their days as hunter-gatherers. This vast cornucopia of modern knowledge is alien to our intuitive brain, which evolved to serve the needs of our ancestors. It requires rigorous application of analytical tools which our mind abhors to employ readily. Hence even in a situation like predicting weather phenomena, market behaviour, natural course of a disease, effects of different treatment strategies; processes which are governed by many uncertainties, our mind reflexively summons the fast, intuitive pathway and often errs massively. But it is loath to submit to the dictates of the laws of probability.

We start our lives in a dense miasma of millions of possibilities. A female has about three to four hundred thousand eggs at puberty. She releases one during each menstrual cycle. A male releases 40 million to 1.2 billion sperms in one ejaculation. Each of this ovum and sperm, code for a unique you and I: some with light coloured eyes, some with black; some slim, others given to corpulence; some with balding pates in youth, others with exuberant hair in their sixties; some irredeemably introverts, others profusely gregarious; some endowed with skilful hands, others with imaginative minds; some who exult in seeing their thoughts faithfully reflected on a page, others who cannot understand the lure of the written word. Yet it’s a reality that I sit here stringing words in an effort to convey a thought and you would read them in future as surely as I write them. Isn’t it an unbelievably wonderful chance, one in many millions or billions, that the day you and I were conceived, two particular cells out of millions united to produce such individuals as will one day feel the need to indulge in these activities, while the remaining millions just remained possibilities which were never realised. And I am not even touching on the chances inherent in the process of formation of reproductive cells which involves random mixing of genes between two strands of a chromosome, the innumerable combination of environmental influences which are capable of engendering myriads of different personalities from the same genetic material. Aren’t we then truly the creation of uncertainty?

In a previous post I wondered at man’s need for finding meaning in his life. Our intuitive mind, obsessed with deriving truth in the world through its own experiences, compels us to look at the world through the glasses tinted in hue of certainty. And we conceive that every event has a cause. We want to believe that things happen, because they were meant to happen. Thus, we not only find meaning within our lives, but strive to see a meaning without too: in the world we live in, in the events that surround us. We see faces in the clouds and in damp patches on a wall; we see our fate in the patterns of star-constellation in the sky, in the creases in our palms, in the way cards turn out in our hands, in the manner tealeaves settle on a platter. We reckon that everything that happens to us was preordained. We were destined to meet our life-partners, to beget our children, to forge friendships we gathered, to practice professions we came to choose, to experience the joys and the sorrows that we came by. We do not know how we come to harbour these dogmatic beliefs. If asked, most will attribute this certitude to a gut-feeling. But our guts are not organs of thinking.

Howsoever against our intuition it may be, in modern science there is nothing certain. Uncertainty in universe is irreducible. It is an ineluctable strand in its fabric. Certainty is an illusion. I wrote about the role chance plays in conception of life. Even the universe need not have been the way it is. There are some constants in our universe so minutely fine-tuned, that even a millionth variation in their values would make the universe and life as we see it, impossible. Some of these are: ratio of gravitational and electromagnetic forces, mass and charge of basic particles, distance between earth and sun. Most of us would like to conceive that these rigid constants are another proof that our universe was meant to be as it is. But science tells us this may not be true. All the various combinations and values of these attributes could be realised in some universe. We could only exist in a universe where chance had contrived a combination of such values that make evolution of life and a thinking brain possible. Hence this illusion about a universe which is designed just for us.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a seventeenth century German philosopher, logician and mathematician, compatriot of Newton, co-discoverer of calculus, asked the most vital, the mother of all existential questions, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ A modern astrophysicist might say it need not have been. Science teaches us to think in terms of probabilities, in this world teeming with possibilities. Likelihood of monsoon hitting the southern tip of Indian peninsula by the end of this May, a brilliant student walking into an ivy league university for graduation, a dullard succeeding in family business, share price of a blue chip company plummeting in two years, withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in a year from now, a fifty-year male leading a vigorous life developing a block in his heart’s vessel, surgical removal of cancerous growth from a seventy-five-year old smoker’s mouth affecting a complete cure, India becoming an economic superpower in coming years, and COVID-19 melting away in the heat of Indian summer; these are all possibilities with varying degrees of certainty. Only after an event has occurred does it acquire an aura of inevitability, of being predestined.

Once more I return to a story about Einstein and Neils Bohr. They invented ingenious thought experiments and argued incessantly over the tentative view of reality that Quantum physics postulates. Einstein is alleged to have asked once, ‘does the moon not exist when I am not looking at it?’ Bohr snapped back, ‘you can’t prove it does, however hard you try. Why bother about moon when you are not looking at it?’ Though the story may be apocryphal, it highlights the uncertain fabric of existence. God, it appears, does play dice.

The scientific truth notwithstanding, human mind will always endeavour to discern meaning in existence of universe and life. There is a solace in the belief that the world has been created to achieve an end; that our lives are not mere chance occurrences drifting like fallen leaves in the wayward winds of an aimlessly unwinding universe, but have been created deliberately to fulfil a role in a grand cosmic scheme. Human life is replete with unending tribulations. This belief in inevitability of life events, gives strength to the believer to bear the unbearable. Psychological experiments and studies have shown that people who attribute purpose to natural calamities like tsunami, seem to endure the resulting stress much better. It may be that they lead a happier, contended life. Unhappiness then would appear to be the price one pays for believing in an uncertain world, wages of the sin of rational thinking.