Inner Limits
As concerns the self, while a cybernetic understanding of the human organism has enabled more sophisticated chemical manipulation of moods and behaviours, the question of free will - of an agency behind the organism - seems only to have slipped away, to the point where now it is argued that agency, a fundamental attribute of lived experience, is only an illusion. So the argument goes, you don't really have free will, you only think that you do. Precisely who is the you who is being deceived in this reasoning is unclear, and also by whom? Consciousness then is the experience of being deceived into thinking one has agency - the delusional fantasy that constitutes being.
Why there should be consciousness at all - why we should have an awareness of our existence - is a hard problem in philosophy made only thornier in the context of the no free will theorem. What's the utility of a non-agentic awareness being continually deceived into believing it is agentic? Marching along with instrumental reasoning one arrives at the conclusion that consciousness itself is, like free will, also a delusion.
We are left with an absurdity: the most fundamental facts of our experience are "delusions" without scientific, empirical reality. I submit that this is an inevitable result from the boundary that science has drawn for itself. Agency, or will, is central to experience; consciousness seems to be constituted of or the absolute expression of the will of the organism. Consigned to offer explanations without recourse to purpose or will, science cannot make sensible statements about purposive agents composed of responsive will at a fundamental level. Scientific language erases that which we are interested in - the subject - and then explains the omission not as a limitation of its toolkit, but as a flaw in our belief system. "So you see," says Science, "you aren't even here."
Outer Limits
Then there is the question of the outermost - the cosmos. Attempts to answer the ultimate questions about the universe have been stymied by the inability of the how methodology of science to get to the heart of the matter - to answer the why. Out of this pursuit have come a lot of frustrated physicists and a lot of bad metaphysics masquerading as science.
Within physics there is the well-known pursuit of a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) that would unite the theories of General Relativity with those of Quantum Mechanics. But underlying this motivation are more unsettling problems than the disagreements between the theories of the Big and those of the Small, and it has been hoped that their union would point the way toward resolving these conundrums. Among these is the tuning problem in cosmology1. Within the standard model of quantum mechanics one is left with a number of free parameters whose values are permitted to vary according to theory. The only way to know these parameters is to measure them, there is no a priori justification for their values. This is irksome because it implies that the values could be anything (although if they were different the universe as we know it would not exist) and that the theory is not fundamental. Further the values as measured are seemingly arbitrary, not yielding to nice multiples of elegant mathematical constants. They don't look as though they have descended from the realm of Ideal Forms, rather they seem all too muddy and familiar, as if after all our efforts we had managed not to glimpse a more true reality, but merely the same one albeit from a different perspective.
One way to get around (or to attempt to explain) the tuning problem is to posit the existence of multiple universes (perhaps infinite in number) with freely varying parameters, of which ours is just the one that happens to have its peculiar settings. Of course one is still bothered - one would like to have the laws for the super-universe containing the set of all universes explaining the mechanisms by which the parameters vary.
For Lee Smolin, this kind of thinking arises from the application of the Newtonian experimental method taken to the universe as a whole. With this method, an experiment consists of a system which can be effectively isolated from the environment, with measurements made by an experimenter standing outside of the system. This method works well for small systems for which isolation is possible or for phenomena of sufficient coarse-graining that the isolation which is practically obtainable is also suitable for our purposes. However, it breaks down as the phenomena we wish to study become overly fine-grained (such that they are apt to be effected by everything) or as the size of the environment we wish to isolate grows too large. Newtonian thinking is built around this method, and expectations for scientific theories and equations follow the format prescribed by it.
With the universe we are dealing with precisely that system which cannot be isolated, from which no outside perspective is possible. The moment we step outside of the universe we have simply encountered the "real" universe. All such cosmological theories are therefore prone to invent a vantage point outside of the universe2.
Without recourse to purpose or will, the scientific technique falters at the questions of the outermost. It is unable to grasp the totality of all systems without positing a position outside that system - a position that should be theoretically impossible - and further it is unable to provide any kind of explanation for this system that would be of the least bit of satisfaction to the human mind.
In the experimental framework, the experimenter is always present, although seldom spoken of. It is the experimenter who isolates the system, the experimenter who sets the experiment in motion, and the experimenter who makes the observations. Purpose and will are assigned to and tied up with the identity of the experimenter. Their absence from the descriptive toolkit is therefore not missed, since their location within the narrative frame is understood. But when the experimental system grows to subsume the experimenters, just where the purpose or will are supposed to reside becomes ambiguous. The Newtonian frame enabled the scientist to act as a god over the experimental system, with the consequence that God would not be denied his place over the functioning of the total system3.
Denying Limits
The techniques of science4 prevent any true insight into the natures of purpose or will - they limit its scope and thereby its ability to answer the truly human questions. While in the past religion may have seen this as a demarcation of limits, a setting aside of a certain realm "not to be touched by science", the religious dogma in these domains lost all credibility as the claims it made in the domains where science was free to roam were roundly debunked and found wanting. The culture at large has not held to the traditional views on these domains and is more liable to now turn to science for answers. But rather than recognizing the need for new or extended methodology, science reassures us of its totality, even as it demonstrates its own limits, and attempts to convince us through linguistic play that what we are looking for doesn't really exist at all.
Footnotes
1 I previously wrote about some of my thoughts on the tuning problem in physics here.↩
2 What use such a perspective could possibly have to those who are trapped inside the universe is an open question, one that many scientists, keen on educating the public about how time doesn't really exist or how they are just an inhabitant of an infinity of universes, seem uninterested in answering.↩
3 The impossible task of Science with the removal of God from the picture has come to be to provide a replacement for the role once occupied by him without any changes to the framework that was implemented with an understanding of being embedded in him. Here perhaps some sort of answer is hinted at by cybernetic feedback loops wherein the organism and environment can be understood as part of the same system. This would entail rewriting purpose and will back into the frame, not as forces that are ultimately outside, but as integrated into the system. Indeed, some notions of consciousness, for example that consciousness is a kind of field within the universe that beings become tuned to, start to get close to such ideas, the trouble of course is wringing anything scientific out of such ideas.↩
4 These techniques refer to science as it has come to be understood in the modern era, at least since the Enlightenment. As science became wildly successful in specific domains with very restrictive rules it became more exclusive, and began excommunicating strands of inquiry that didn't conform to the emerging 'scientific' mold. To be clear, being very exclusive is a very good thing, but one needs to be aware of what questions one is fundamentally disallowing oneself to ask with such an approach. Moreover, upon such recognition, we are not barred from expanding the frame to allow for such inquiry, although this is far easier said than done.↩
References
Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hayles, N. K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. London: The University of Chicago Press, Ltd.
Lanier, J. (2017) Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Smolin, L. (2013) Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt.
