From quarks to consciousness: physics, neuroscience & God debate

Neuroscience is one of the emerging sciences of today. New techniques and powerful tools are enabling scientists to gather enormous data that is helping in theorising how the brain works. Though immensely interesting in its own account, this emerging science, like so many before, is being heralded by many in the philosophical realm as the science that may eventually close the remaining gaps in human understanding that had traditionally been filled by supernatural reasoning.

This idea of closing all the gaps filled by God has been the slogan of Western philosophers since the Enlightenment Era (1715 -89), and it is useful to bear in mind that all the extensive progress in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy and so forth, has been a journey of ‘discovering’ all that is found in nature, and after that of trying to ‘exploit’ all that, but never of ‘creating’ something new. Engineering marvels in all the fields of science depict how increasing knowledge about the structure and working of things enable more precision and control, allowing exploitation of those systems in more powerful ways, but they do not create something on their own, as in, they do not create anything out of something that was not already there, rather it is just a reshuffle. And because human sciences are just ‘discoveries’ of tangible things and their processes, they cannot lead us to answer what is beyond the reach of tangible discoveries, therefore they do not touch upon the principal questions of how and wherefrom all that is tangible, sensible matter, came into being in the first place.

Therefore, it is elementary for thinkers to understand where the boundary between discovery and creation lies and where it is being smudged every time, leading to scepticism and disbelief.

For instance, in astrophysics, dealing with the matter of the beginning of the Universe, following the line of antecedents in the Big Bang Theory, we come to an initial state of the Planck Epoch, beyond which the laws of Physics as we know them, do not hold. It’s like, all the mathematical calculations from hard-known factual constants and formulations, when made to run back in time, come to a point where all matter and energy cannot be ‘in principle’ squeezed into a smaller four-dimensional space-time than that of the Planck Epoch, making the perceived ideal ‘Singularity’ beyond the Planck Epoch, impossible. Yet even if, one presumes that maybe one day another math will be discovered that can take us from the Planck Epoch to our desired singularity, the question that wherefrom a single particle or a single infinitely massive, infinitely energetic yet infinitely small form of existence come to ‘be’ from ‘nothing’ – and again we encounter the gap that leads to God as the only possible source for that!

But there are many that dominate the scientific world who are plainly disgusted with the idea of God and they are never ready to give up the search of perhaps a ‘theory of everything’ that will forever close the gaps of our understanding of the Universe – notwithstanding the fact that understanding the Universe will never be equal to creating the Universe – nor will understanding the whole of it mean that it was self-created!

One emerging example of such endeavours of approaching an overarching theory that would subtract God from the equation, is the String Theory. The String Theory is an extension of Quantum Physics. Previously, Quantum Physics had destroyed the concept of matter, which was the basis of all objectivity and realism; it took away from matter its ‘locality’, it defied the belief that nothing could move faster than light; it took away from matter its mass, leaving it as a set of probabilities that only comes into existence when an ‘observer’ observes it, And with Quantum Physics, the zeal to find matter in its most reduced form so that all the secrets of existence would fall into the lap of 20th Century scientists, evaporated into a universe of ghostly, conscious ‘field’ of ‘something’ that could equally be existent or non-existent at any moment of time!

This ‘field’ was hypothesised as the Higgs Field, a field that permeates space and endows all elementary subatomic particles of the Standard Model with their masses through its interactions with them. The field has a carrier particle called the Higgs Boson with zero spin, no electric charge, a mass of ~125 GeV and a lifetime of 1.56× 10-22 secs – meaning fundamental particles that have no internal structure and can be described as zero-dimensional points. The Higgs Boson came to be popularly known as the God Particle as it was supposedly the one that gave all matter its objectivity. Supposedly in the Higgs Field, the wave-function collapses at the points where the fields interact, and mass is acquired at those points – again there is no explanation why and how the wave-function collapse happens and how that causes the formation of object from non-object. All this happens at the scale of the Planck lengths, which is of the measure of 10-35 of meters.

Sadly, the Standard Model has yet to be accepted as an established theory as it has several unresolved problems. Like the symmetry problem, meaning the ability to remain unchanged in transformations through time and space; and the problem of being unable to account for gravity. In addition, the different variants of the Standard Model fail to take into account antimatter, the mass equal to but opposite in charge to all matter; dark matter that accounts for approximately 85% of all matter in the universe; and dark energy that is 68% of total energy in present-day observable universe, that should be explained in any universal theory!

With matters still unresolved in the Standard Model, the completely novel, String Theory came along. String Theory reduces the universe, previously built on the building blocks of ‘fundamental particles’ like electrons, photons, gravitons and quarks, not to zero-dimensional particles like the Higgs, but to a universe of one-dimensional string-like particle below the subatomic strata – in an attempt to find a unified approach for all particles and interactions. These ‘strings’ are of Planck lengths and form dancing fields of possibilities and probabilities at the core of all existence, and the rest of the particles arise from different oscillation modes of these strings. These ‘strings’ that are still ‘imaginary things’ owing to their being unidimensional, and the model is mathematical derivations into the extreme realm of reductionism, and that they are theoretical concepts not ‘real’ or ‘factual’ discoveries.

Mathematics and theory are both part of our imagination, they are tools that form forms that match with the forms of the objective world, but it seems that imagination can discover in itself several realms of forms, some of which may and some of which may not coincide with those in nature – the possibilities of the imagination are much wider and numerus than those of the objective world – the objective world may be multi-layered and each layer may have a different set of laws, but thought may create several theories for each layer in its pursuit of finding the right one – yet each set of such imaginative theories serve to be something to cling on in terms of belief.

This does not mean that the Quantum realm and the Astrophysics realm are not the most amazing, and even more so because of the possibility of finding clues for the expansive extents of the Universe billions of lightyears across, and of finding the infinitesimal bounds of subatomic particles, and being able to relate them with each other. Because the human imagination can aspire for such diverse parameters and find beauty and stimulations in worlds that are neither seen by the eye or touched by the hand, rather such that were only discoverable with the tools of the thought.

So, the String Theory after the Standard Model, has been yet again something to put one’s finger on, even if that something exists, as of now, in the unfathomable depths of reality, or just in the world of our imagination. Nevertheless, the theoretical existence of such fields has philosophical implication, it gives reason to those who believe our Universe to be a self-made, Godless entity – that has otherwise evolved purely casually, in scientific manner. Yet we see that this same community is ready to give up reason and snug into oblivion at every stretch of scientific research that ends at a dead wall in terms of the fact that all sciences are losing their ‘matter’ at their deepest levels of research. It is not as if the scientific community does not believe in magic, they would love to think that these same ‘imaginary’ strings, aimlessly swinging in the depths of ‘nothingness’ – are magically creating space and time as they interact – are magically creating indestructible massive forms as they interact – are magically putting life in some of those forms as they keep on interacting – are magically taking away that life again in the tiniest times compared to universal time – and are magically bestowing cognitive conscience of the level of conceptualisation, formulation and in depth research to just one life-form from within a wide diversity of it, just on one planet! Yes, we are happy to believe in all that magic, only if it is based on a theory of a core entity that is all-present, all-manifesting, is at the extreme edge of causation, creates all sorts of unexplainable phenomenon, is ghostly but not Godly, is controlling but not obligating, is not our God but allows us to maybe be its gods! That is the crux of the approach of the dominant part of scientific society – they simply slide away from the questions that science itself presents to us and is unable to answer, and who keep contending with the idea of God even when it is the simplest, most plausible explanation to all mysteries of the Universe.

Indeed, the clues of the existence of dark matter and energy are a fundamental question upon the incompleteness of our theoretical powers as yet, as if our thought is a bounded infinity that keeps expanding but never touches the periphery of its bounds – call it the way it has evolved or call it the way it was created, but something has put limits upon its pursuits that are tending to infinities that it can never approach – yet these pursuits are the ultimate beauty of life. So, it seems like, the more we discover reality the more complicated it becomes, and every new solution opens the way to several new anomalies; like for instance here are some popular ones that physicists are unable to solve; is there a Theory of Everything which explains the values of all fundamental physical constants, not yet; why does observed spacetime have three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension, no clue; are fundamental physical constants really fundamental, not sure yet; are there elementary particles that have not yet been observed, don’t know; are there unobserved fundamental forces, maybe yes; how will the values of dimensionless physical constants be calculated, blank; are dimensional physical constants necessary at all, not sure; is spacetime fundamentally continuous or discrete, no idea, and the list goes on. And then the fundamental question, how does the quantum description of reality, with phenomenon such as the superposition, wavefunction collapse and quantum decoherence, give rise to the reality of definite states that we perceive? Because all these idea: superposition, the idea that any quantum state is the result of a superposition of two or more or an infinite number of other states; wavefunction collapse, the idea that a superposition of several eigenstates collapses to a single eigenstate; and quantum decoherence, the idea of the loss of quantum behaviour when the environment is shared by another observer – are ideas that do not coincide with observable behaviours of observable reality, rather they are incommensurable with everything real, they are ghostly and occultic.

In this backdrop, neuroscience has become another favourite of atheists, especially of the Four Horsemen of new atheism, rather it has been their god that would presumably fill the gap of understanding the secrets of life and conscience, the gap that for believers is only filled by God. Two of them, both neuroscientists, will be undertaken in the next part of this essay. One of them, Daniel Dennett, argues that human brains are just ‘machines’, "We're not just robots, we're robots, made of robots, made of robots".

Second of them, neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris, deems the human brain to be a mere ‘accident’ that came along the millions of years of blind chemical and structural evolution. Serotonin and dopamine control human feelings and emotions, like puppeteers they pull the strings of the marionette brain, only they too have no meaning, nor any purpose to fulfil.

The details about their works will illuminate the kind of worldview they promote; one which is a colourless, purposeless, string of events, upon which we have neither any control nor is there a need to feel good or bad about it, because there is no such thing as morals or freewill.

Aneela Shahzad is a geopolitical analyst who tweets @AneelaShahzad. All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the author