Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall [32]
We aren’t guaranteed to understand consciousness in terms of the most fundamental units, but we might ultimately figure out principles that apply on some larger, more composite or emergent scale. With future scientific advances, scientists will better understand the fundamental chemistry and electrical channels of the brain and thereby understand the basic functioning units. Consciousness will probably be explained as a phenomenon that scientists will only fully understand by identifying and studying the correct composite pieces.
This means that not only neuroscientists, who study basic brain chemistry, stand a shot at making progress. Developmental psychologists, who ask how a baby’s thought process differs from our own,20 or others who might ask how human thought differs from that of a dog, stand a good chance of making progress as well. Just as music is not one thing but has many levels and many layers, my guess is that so too is consciousness. And by asking questions at a larger level we might gain insights both about consciousness itself and about what are the right questions to ask when we do go ahead and study the building blocks—namely, the chemistry and physics of the brain. As with a lovely soufflé we will have to understand emergent systems that arise as well. Nonetheless, no human thought or action will occur without affecting some physical component of our body.
Though perhaps less mysterious than the theory of consciousness, physics advances by studying phenomena on various scales. Physicists ask different questions when studying disparate sizes and different aggregates. The questions we ask about sending a spaceship to Mars are very different from the questions we ask about how quarks interact. Both are legitimate questions to study, but we won’t readily extrapolate one from the other. Nonetheless, the matter that gets sent out into space is made up of the fundamental components that we ultimately hope to understand.
I’ve occasionally heard people mock as reductionist the materialist view that particle physicists employ and point out all the phenomena we won’t—or don’t—address. Sometimes these are physical or biological processes such as brain function or hurricanes, and sometimes they are spiritual phenomena—where I in turn become a little perplexed about what people mean, but which I would have to agree we never address. Physical theories address structure from the largest to the smallest scales that we can hypothesize about or study with experiments. Over time, we build a consistent picture of how one layer of reality proceeds from the next. The basic elements are essential to reality, but good scientists don’t assert that knowledge of them in itself explains everything. Explanations call for further research.
Even if string theory turns out to explain quantum gravity, the “theory of everything” will remain a horrible misnomer. In the unlikely event that physicists arrive at such an all-embracing fundamental theory, we would still have to face lots of questions about phenomena on larger scales that won’t be answered simply by knowing the basic components. Only when scientists understand collective phenomena that arise on larger scales than those described by elementary strings will we hope to explain superconducting materials, monster waves in the ocean, and life. In the process of doing science, we’ll address phenomena scale by scale. We will investigate objects and processes at larger distance scales than we would ever be able to handle if we tried to keep track of each component.
Though we focus on different layers of reality to address different questions, the materialist view is nonetheless essential. Physics and other sciences rely on studying the matter that exists in the world. Science at its core relies on objects interacting