Though Robert Sapolsky presents a revolutionary way of thinking with a lot of amazing new ideas in the face of reductionism, unanswered questions in his theorization are many. It can be felt that his endeavor to simplify the working of the brain to the limit that perhaps random, unguided, simpleton processes become so disconnected with the intricate real-time mechanisms and activities running inter-cellular and inter-organ, that the processes described by him are thrown a distance away from the whole body experience.
The notion of swarm intelligence is attractive, but the movement patterns of ants and bees in search of food or new nesting places do not explain the gap between the initial finders and the followers. In summary, the theory presents a set of overgeneralizations made to reach an intelligent goal, that of a Godless existence.
Problem with this type thinking is that it is exciting yet false-promising. Though it takes intricate, painstaking research on a subject as its starting point, but very soon in the way, and with much generalization of too meager evidence, it potentially takes its followers into a false ‘belief’ that science is on the brink of finding everything needed to understand how everything was made and how it works, and that that would be a clear proof for the belief that there was no God behind all this.
To get over this type of thinking, one needs to understand that emergence can explain some phenomenon and cannot explain others. For instance, in human social organization, the behavior of an individual can emerge very differently regarding his/her responses to the same questions when in a confined environment compared to when in a public gathering. But at the base of this emergence is a given, that of a complete thinking person, and the response of the person in the two environments is different but not incommensurable, meaning, they are both thought processes, and two different thoughts are being compared.
On the other hand, to say that one neuron that is basically a structure that respond to a stimulus by generating an electrical signal through the neural network all the way to the brain and back, when the same neuron is in the brain it produces thought – is plainly an exaggeration. The human brain has some eighty-six billion neurons plus a 100 to 500 trillion synapses, imagine if ‘thought’ was neural property, how many ‘thoughts’ would be generated every second. But there is no thought related to all the impulses going around the body all the time, guiding the functioning of the organs down to every cell! Rather there is ‘thought’ apparently only in the brain, not in the neurons of the brain, not in a particular section of the brain, but somewhere everywhere around the brain. And again, those thoughts have nothing to do with what goes through the neurons, rather they are about the external world, about exploration, engineering, theorizing, philosophizing and believing. They are about colors that have nothing to do with survival and reproduction; they are about sounds of birds chirping and waters flowing and stars lit in the unfathomable skies. They are about poetry and culture and history; about lies and killing and wars; they are about where we came from and where we are to end!
To say that from a large concentrated collection of neurons, emerged ‘thought’, just like that, is in the first place ‘incommensurable’, meaning that that there is no relation between an ‘electrochemical impulse’ and a ‘thought’ they are generically two different and thus incomparable things. Secondly, is ‘thought’ was an essential emergent property of a large collection of neurons, the same rich thought system should have been present in other primates. According to study, ‘Remarkably, at an average of 86 billion neurons and 85 billion nonneuronal cells, the human brain has just as many neurons as would be expected of a generic primate brain of its size and the same overall 1:1 nonneuronal/neuronal ratio as other primates. Broken down into the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, and rest of the brain, the neuronal scaling rules that apply to primate brains also apply to the human brain. Neuronal densities in the cerebral cortex and cerebellum also fit the expected values in humans as in other primate species, and the ratio between nonneuronal and neuronal cells in the whole human brain of 1:1 (not 10:1, as commonly reported) is similar to that of other primates. The number of neurons in the gray matter alone of the human cerebral cortex, as well as the size of the subcortical white matter and the number of nonneuronal cells that it contains, also conforms to the rules that apply to other primates analyzed. Most importantly, even though the relative expansion of the human cortex is frequently equated with brain evolution, which would have reached its crowning achievement in us, the human brain has the ratio of cerebellar to cerebral cortical neurons predicted from other mammals, primate and non-primate alike’.
Interestingly, another line taken by geneticist, theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher, Stuart Kauffman, takes emergence to be ‘god’ itself. He explains with the example of the swim-bladder that has evolved in certain fishes, as an example of radical emergence. He says that the evolution of a swim-bladder in the certain fish means three things; a new function came into existence in the biosphere; there was an evolution or change in the biosphere along with the creation of a new adjacent possible empty ecological niche, that would become the nesting place of more changes; and that though nature might have known the change it is allowing to take place, it did not know that it was creating a ‘new adjacent possible empty ecological niche’. Therefore, not-knowingly, and also completely unaware where the simple change today will lead to tomorrow, the biosphere is creating its own future possibilities of ‘becoming’ – therefore, the biosphere is its own ‘god’.
At another place he says, ‘This emerging view finds a natural scientific place for value and ethics, and places us as co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture. In this scientific world view, we can ask: Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind .
Elegantly drawn out by Kauffman, yet Kauffman has nothing to say of how exactly ‘nature’ ‘allowed’ the first change to happen. He seems to be saying that, supposedly ‘nature’ knew exactly the change it was going to allow, perhaps because when the Lungfish was flapping from puddle to puddle, nature got the idea that it was in need of a swim-bladder, yet ‘nature’ has no idea what changes this will lead to later on, in coming generations.
Certainly, Kauffman is allowing for a half-god, one that makes all the selections but has no idea what they are going to end up into. All the time the half-god is inserting changes, with no design or end-product in mind, it is rolling itself out with changing circumstances of its own making, and as the new niche are added to its workings, they all become a part of it, not part of its creative baggage, but part of its creative space, all of them and all of us now, unknowingly, working as apprentices of the seeming mad-scientist. Wonderous in this theory, is the question that an ever-active force, doing its meticulous works but unaware of what it is really creating, is at its epitome creating a being that is aware, of purpose, of design and completely laggard upon performing an act without knowing its outcome! Who deserves to be ‘god’ then, the creative force without a plan, or the un-resourceful planner? Another unanswered question is whether the ‘god’ Kauffman calls ‘nature’ is a juggler of present resources of is it able to put new entities, new forces into ‘becoming’, in that case, it would be having everything, the power to create new things from nothingness, the power to restructure them, the power to move all things and changes within a framework of set laws, but only not have any idea what it is actually doing. This all seems to be a ‘selection’ being induced by Kauffman himself, which he is completely allowed to do because after all he is ‘god’ himself now.
Perhaps this is what allows Kauffman to jump from the swim-bladder, from evolution of the biosphere directly to economy and technological jumps like having Facebook and Twitter in our times – even though the later have been preplanned designs of conscious designers – albeit, constructed within a larger environment they had no control on.
Though largely filled with unanswerable dead ends, all such theories have such elaborate layouts that it is hard for intelligent minds to cross them without notice or not be indulged. But that does not mean they fill all the gaps – they may seem to be filling one gap while being able to hide all the other gap behind their artful story-making like magicians enchanting their unconditioned audience.
The tragedy of Western thinkers is that they have to start from a position of a ‘lost heritage’ with God. Whenever they refer to ‘God’, they have to refer to the New and Old Testaments, that are no more than obliterated relics of the true word of God. Packed with controversies and contradictions, they make for a bad reference that cannot be approached with reason – for this reason, those among them who have spirituality and are inclined towards the question of inevitability of a creative force that has to be behind the precision, beauty and unity of the whole universe, find their way to some kind of a god that has to be essentially not the God of the Bible or Torah.
Muslims have to start from a wholly different position, they are, miraculously so, the bearers of the unobliterated, last, true word of the true God – they cannot by pass it. Unlike the West, that longs for spirituality but is faced with a ‘word’ that is bereft of true spirit, and empty of pure morality – Muslims bear in their hands, a text that is rich of a high-moral structure and a spirituality that unfailingly heightens the spirit closer and closer to the Divine as one seeks Him the more. The Quran tells of evolution in a different way, it acknowledges a timeline, and the fact that creation has not discontinued, but it refuse it to be blind and a result of blind, design-less, unknowingness, the Quran says:
‘Praise to Allah, Who cleft asunder the heavens and the earth; makes angel-messengers with wings two, three and four; increases in creation what He wills. Lo! Allah is Able to do all things’ (35:1)
And Allah knows best if these two, three and four-winged are the elementary spins of the fundamental particles or the sublime forces that move them, or if they allude to an even deeper substrata the subatomic fabric of existence yet to be explored. Whatever the case, it is clear that the force behind the expansion of the Universe, and the creative power behind the increasing complexity of lifeforms, and the giver and taker of life itself is the One and Only, and all is measured, designed and planed into the future. The Quran confirms that every particle, be it an atom, a fermion, a boson or a string, is part of an intricate design:
‘And does not escape from your Lord the like of a particle in the earth or in the heavens nor anything smaller than that or greater than that, except that it is registered in a book clear’ (10:61)
Likewise, life on the planet, and the appearance of humankind, its being endowed with language and reason and its being aware of a moral standard, are all from the Source, the Quran says:
‘So, lean your direction towards the faith a true leaning, it is the nature of Allah, upon which He set the nature of mankind; there is no change in how Allah has proportioned His creation; this is the course that will remain; but most people are unaware’ (30:30)
The standards of morality have been same from the first human and will remain unchanged to the last, they are not relative. And humankind, though bounded in the physical system of the universe and the solar system, and in the bounds of its flesh and earthly parameters, still possesses a free-will bestowed upon it by the Maker, which is why it needs to act with responsibility. But this need is not associated with the greed of getting rewarded or the fear of being punished, so much so as it is associated with a heart that is turned toward the Creator, the Quran says:
‘This is what was promised to every penitent and heedful. Who feared the Merciful without seeing Him, and have come with a heart that keeps returning to Him’ (50:32,33)
‘When he came to his Lord with an unblemished heart filled with humility’ (37:84)
Because the heart and its love, and its pain and joy, its peace with the earth and with fellow humanity, its altruism for the sake of the love it harbors for Him whom it cannot see, its freedom from all slavery and its submission to the One, Originator and Perpetuator – matters! And matters the most to Him who has put all the laws and all the resources of the universe in place, for Him all these wealth is mere dust and the dust of a loving heart is the wealth He wants to extract from it all!
Aneela Shahzad is a geopolitical analyst who tweets @AneelaShahzad. All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the author