Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall [31]
Some people turn to religion to answer difficult questions that they don’t think science will ever get to. Indeed, the materialist scientific view doesn’t mean we are guaranteed to understand everything—certainly not by simply understanding just the basic components. In dividing the universe by scales, scientists recognize that we are unlikely to answer all questions at once and that even though fundamental structure might be essential, it won’t necessarily answer all our questions directly. Even when we know quantum mechanics, we still use Newton’s laws since they tell us how a ball travels through the Earth’s gravitational field in a way that would be very difficult to derive from an atomic picture. The ball needs atoms to exist, but the atomic picture doesn’t help explain the ball’s trajectory, though it is of course compatible with it.
This lesson generalizes to many phenomena we all encounter in our daily lives. We can often ignore underlying details or composition, even though the material is essential. We don’t need to know the inner workings of a car in order to drive it. When we cook food, we evaluate if fish is flaky, if the center of a cake is dry, if oatmeal is mushy, or if a soufflé has risen. But unless we practice molecular gastronomy, we rarely pay attention to the buried atomic structure responsible for these changes. However, that doesn’t change the fact that food without substance is not very satisfying. The ingredients in a soufflé look nothing like the final product (see Figure 12). Nonetheless, the constituents and molecules in your food that you are happy to ignore are essential to its existence.
[ FIGURE 12 ] A soufflé is very different from the ingredients that comprise it. In a similar manner, matter might have very different properties—or even appear to obey very different physical laws—from the more fundamental matter of which it is composed.
Similarly, anyone would be hard-pressed to say decisively what music is. But any attempt to describe the phenomenon and our emotional response to it would almost certainly involve viewing music on a level apart from atoms or neurons. Even though we apprehend music when our ears register the sound waves produced by a particularly well-tuned instrument, music is much more than the individual oscillating atoms of air that generate the sound or the physical response of our ears and our brains.
Yet the materialist view still stands, and the substrate is essential. Music arises from those molecules of air. Get rid of the ear’s mechanical response to material phenomena and you have no more music. (And in space no one will hear you scream.) It’s just that somehow our perception and understanding of music goes beyond that materialistic description. Questions about how we as human beings perceive music won’t be addressed if we simply focus on oscillating molecules. Understanding music involves weighing chords and harmonies and lack of harmony in ways that never mention molecules or oscillations. But music nonetheless requires those oscillations, or at least the sensory impression they leave in our brains.
Similarly, understanding an animal’s basic components is only one step to understanding the processes that make up life. We almost certainly won’t understand everything without a better knowledge of how those components aggregate to produce the phenomena with which we are familiar. Life is an emergent phenomenon that goes beyond the basic ingredients.
Most likely consciousness will also turn out to be in this category. Though we don’t have a comprehensive theory of consciousness, thoughts and feelings are ultimately rooted in electrical, chemical, and physical properties of the brain.