Ask A Genius 1224: Rick Takes Humanism to Task!
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/12/24
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s start.
Rick Rosner: You work for humanist publications and just interviewed a prominent humanist earlier today. So, how would you define humanism?
Jacobsen: “Reason, science, compassion,” you might say. It’s the shorthand: reason, science, compassion. So, it has a certain amount of overlap with existentialism. There can be an overlap with existentialism, where you have to create your own moral framework in a universe without an inherent moral structure. Is that where we’re going with this? It’s like establishing a framework for better actions versus worse actions once you set out a baseline of agnosticism or atheism. So, the psychological theory is about the meaning of life. Humanism tends to be more positive and scientifically informed than existentialism while still grounding itself in human experience the way existentialists do.
Rosner: Okay, so here’s where I’m going. As I’ve said before, here’s where humanism and existentialism wash their hands of the universe. They give up on the universe having inherent moral value. Right?
Jacobsen: The moral value in the universe is what we impose upon it. We are part of the universe. We make meaning in our lives. Therefore, the universe has meaning as we make meaning in our lives. It doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t another form of meaning outside of us. But meaning is fundamentally relational between the objective world, agents like us in the universe, and other agents.
Jacobsen: All right. So here’s where I will argue against the universe being cold and random. On average, the amount of information and the amount of order in the universe increases over time. For instance, we are products of the increasing order in the universe, or at least a local increase in order.
Jacobsen: That’s a different argument, then.
Rosner: But, okay. Let’s consider at least the local level. Entropy occurs in closed systems where you can’t eliminate waste heat. Eventually, you end up in a situation where everything is at the same temperature, and no exploitable energy can be found. Negentropy, or the opposite of entropy, happens in open systems like planets. The sun shines on us; we use the energy for evolution and other processes, but we can shed heat to space.
We’re an open system, allowing us to do the opposite of entropy and increase in order. You could argue that evolved organisms represent an increase in order. There are processes in the universe that allow it to shed waste heat and increase information.
Jacobsen: Well, humanism is an empirical moral philosophy. So, if the evidence were to show an increase in global information in the universe, and if this was at odds with the idea of a cold, indifferent, random universe, then proper humanists would follow that evidence and agree with it. It would be incorporated into humanist philosophy. So it’s an evolving moral perspective. It’s not sad.
Rosner: Okay. I’ll buy that.
Jacobsen: We have catmas. We don’t have dogmas. But most humanists don’t believe that, explicitly.
Rosner: It would be weird to believe about the universe because the dominant belief about the universe is that it’s random and is not increasing in order overall.
Jacobsen: I wouldn’t argue for randomness in trying to frame it. I get what you’re getting at, but I think it’s more—I mean if it’s an empirical moral philosophy, there is a structure of laws governing the universe. With that structure of laws, you will have a type of order. So it wouldn’t be random. There would be principles to how things operate. That’s not random, but that order can still be indifferent.
Rosner: Okay.
Jacobsen: Cold is more of a subjective quasi-scientific orientation on it. Right? It’s like saying we feel cold. There is no cold in the universe outside of our psychology. So it’s ordered, with aspects of entropy and localized order, but governed by laws nonetheless.
Rosner: But there’s a strong possibility that the universe favours order, and by order, it favours the preservation of systems.
Jacobsen: I go with you, as far as localized. I mean, how we define local can be quite a large system, but because those are not closed systems—because they’re local in a larger closed system—so they’re going to be locally open in a larger closed system and that you can get much order out of. So even if the system is running down to chaos rather than order, you can have localized order. Or if you have global order as a bias, you can still have local order. So your metrics can’t be whether or not it’s a large scale down or up in order, because the localized order increase can increase temporarily in either case.
Rosner: Here’s another angle on it. You can’t necessarily trace back a universe to the point where it originated out of zero information because the possible pasts of a universe, I think, tend to get erased, to become unclear, as the universe moves forward through time. But it’s possible to imagine that every universe originated with zero information. It might even be necessary to imagine it like that. I’m not sure. So even though there’s no record of a universe originating from zero information, I think it’s possible for most universes. So given that I don’t think that there’s a limit on the upper size of a universe, there’s a bias for the continued existence of universes. Because you have to get to the arbitrarily large universes somehow, does that mean that some universes can—does it mean that a non-zero percentage of universes, a non-infinitesimal percentage of universes, can persist indefinitely? I don’t know. But it’s possible.
I don’t know how possible, you know? The universe consists of information, and events within and external to the universe could determine the persistence of that information. And you’d think that, in a random universe, the universe would eventually randomly walk itself back to zero information. It randomizes itself out of existence.
Rosner: But I’m unsure if that’s the most probable path for all but an infinitesimal fraction of universes.
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