You can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of this essay HERE.
Hawking’s Final Theory and The Neo-Organicist Turn
With [a] top-down [approach] we put humankind back in the center [of cosmological theory], he said. Interestingly, this is what gives us control. (Hawking, as quoted in Hertog, 2023: p. 207)
In mid-to-late March 2023, I read an article in The Guardian that philosophically and scientifically amazed me. It was entitled “A Brief History of Time is ‘Wrong’, Stephen Hawking Told Collaborator.” Here’s the gist of the article:
In 2002 Thomas Hertog received an email summoning him to the office of his mentor Stephen Hawking. The young researcher rushed to Hawking’s room at Cambridge. “His eyes were radiant with excitement,” Hertog recalls. Typing on the computer-controlled voice system that allowed the cosmologist to communicate, Hawking announced: “I have changed my mind. My book, A Brief History of Time, is written from the wrong perspective.” Thus one of the biggest-selling scientific books in publishing history, with worldwide sales credited at more than 10m, was consigned to the waste bin by its own author. Hawking and Hertog then began working on a new way to encapsulate their latest thinking about the universe. Next month, five years after Hawking’s death, that book – On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s final theory – will be published in the UK…. “The problem for Hawking was his struggle to understand how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life,” says Hertog, a cosmologist currently based at KU Leuven University in Belgium. Examples of these life-supporting conditions include the delicate balance that exists between particle forces that allow chemistry and complex molecules to exist. In addition, the fact there are only three dimensions of space permits stable solar systems to evolve and provide homes for living creatures. Without these properties, the universe would probably not have produced life as we know it, it is argued by some cosmologists. Hertog and Hawking were set on hammering out explanations for this state of stellar uncertainty after the latter had decided his previous attempts were inadequate. “Stephen told me he now thought he had been wrong and so he and I worked, shoulder to shoulder, for the next 20 years to develop a new theory of the cosmos, one that could better account for the emergence of life,” Hertog said…. [On the Origin of Time] takes its title from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. “In the end, we both came to think of physics in a way much more like how we think of biology. We have put physics and biology on the same footing.” According to Hertog, On the Origin of Time deals with questions about our place in the universe and what makes our universe fit for life. “These questions were always in the background in our scientific publications. What I have done for this book is to make these questions central and tell our story from that perspective. “Stephen and I discovered how physics itself can disappear back into the big bang. Not the laws as such but their capacity to change has the final word in our theory. This sheds a new light on what cosmology is ultimately about.” According to Hertog, the new perspective that he has achieved with Hawking reverses the hierarchy between laws and reality in physics and is “profoundly Darwinian” in spirit. “It leads to a new philosophy of physics that rejects the idea that the universe is a machine governed by unconditional laws with a prior existence, and replaces it with a view of the universe as a kind of self-organising entity in which all sorts of emergent patterns appear, the most general of which we call the laws of physics.” (Guardian, 2023)
More specifically, what philosophically and scientifically amazed me about the Guardian article is the mind-boggling double fact it reports, to the effect that (i) Hawking radically changed his views about cosmological theory during the last two decades of his life, and (ii) in his final theory, worked out with a collaborator, Thomas Hertog, Hawking progressed radically beyond the Standard Models of cosmology and particle physics towards a new anti-mechanistic, processual cosmology. In my opinion, this new anti-mechanistic, processual cosmology is grounded on what I call the neo-organicist worldview, and therefore, in my opinion, during the last two decades of his life, Hawking philosophically and scientifically accepted, embraced, and enacted for himself a sub-variety of what I call the neo-organicist turn (Hanna, and Paans, 2020; Hanna, 2020, 2021a, 2021b, 2022a, 2022b, 2022c, 2022d, 2022e, 2022f, 2023g, 2023h, 2022i, 2022j, 2022k, 2022l, 2022m, 2023). Hallelujah.
Hertog’s On the Origin of Time (henceforth “Origin”) was published on 6 April 2023; and, thanks to pre-ordering, I had a hard-copy in my hands by 11 April. I’ve read it all the way through once. Much of the book is a Hawking-centric insider’s history of 20th century and early 21st century cosmology and particle physics, right up to the publication of Origin, interwoven with interesting biographical information about Hawking, Hertog’s personal recollections of him, photographs of him and other famous and not-so-famous physicists, and so-on. The really important philosophical and scientific action happens in the last three chapters—chs. 6, 7, and 8—which I’ve re-read several times. So this essay records my initial impressions of Origin and Hawking’s final theory.
One thing that struck me immediately is that a core thesis propounded by Hawking and Hertog (henceforth, “H-&-H”), to the effect that the laws of nature are not absolute, unconditional, and timelessly universal, but instead evolve over real time insofar as the natural universe itself evolves, is, at least on the face of it, very similar to a theory developed by Lee Smolin in the 1980s and published in 1992 (Smolin, 1992), called cosmological natural selection, which Smolin then re-presented in fully-elaborated versions in The Life of the Cosmos (Smolin, 1997) and Time Reborn (Smolin, 2013). Yet H-&-H don’t refer to this important work at all, although Smolin’s name is mentioned twice in different contexts. Another thing that struck me immediately is that if it’s true that, as Hertog puts it, “the observation that the universe happens to be just right for life is the starting point of everything else” (Hertog, 2023: p. 208), then since, according to my own view, all minds are necessarily and completely embodied in appropriately complex living animal organisms (Hanna and Maiese, 2009; Hanna, 2011), it follows that it must be just as cosmologically important that the natural universe happens to be just right for mindedness—epecially including the conscious, self-conscious, sensibly cognitive, intellectually cognitive, and more generally rational kind of mindedness required for creating and knowing cosmological theories, not to mention the kind of mindedness required for affect or emotion, and free agency—as it is cosmologically important that the natural universe happens to be just right for life. Yet H-&-H have nothing to say in Origin about the nature of the fundamental relationship between life and mindedness, and how that fundamental relationship bears on cosmology, except insofar as it’s obviously implicit in what they have to say about “observership.” Nevertheless—and this is the third thing that immediately struck me—Hawking’s final theory strongly resembles Immanuel Kant’s famous “Copernican Revolution” in epistemology and metaphysics, which says that in order to make theoretical progress beyond skeptical stalemate in philosophy, instead of assuming that our minds structurally conform to the natural universe, we postulate instead that necessarily, the manifestly real natural universe structurally conforms to our minds.[i]
In any case, here are some key texts from Origin, collectively constituting a brief synoptic summary of H’s-&-H’s cosmological theory, which they call top-down cosmology.
We started out searching for a deeper explanation of the universe’s fitness for life in the physical conditions at the origin of time. But the quantum cosmology we developed to this end suggests we were looking in the wrong direction. Top-down cosmology recognizes that, much like biology’s tree of life, physics’ tree of laws is the outcome of a Darwinian-like evolution that can only be understood backward in time. The later Hawking propounded that down at the bottom, it isn’t a matter of why the world is the way it is—its fundamental nature dictated by a transcendental cause—but of how we got where we are. From this viewpoint, the observation that the universe happens to be just right for life is the starting point of everything else. (Hertog, 2023: p. 208, boldfacing added)
In this book I have argued that a genuine quantum outlook on the universe counters the relentless alienating forces of modern science and lets one build cosmology anew from an interior viewpoint—the essence of Hawking’s final theory. In a quantum universe, a tangible past and future emerge out of a haze of possibilties by means of a continual process of questioning and observing. This observership, the interactive process at the heart of quantum theory that transforms what might be into what does happen, constantly draws the universe more firmly into existence. Observers—in this quantum sense—acquire a sort of creative role in cosmic affairs that imbues cosmology with a delicate subjective touch. Observership also introduces a subtle backward-in-time element into cosmological theory, for it is as if the act of observation today retroactively fixes the outcome of the big bang “back then.” This is why Stephen referred to his final theory as top-down cosmology; we read the fundamentals of the history of the universe backward—from the top down…. Top-down cosmology turns the riddle of the universe’s apparent design in a sense upside down. It embodies the view that own at the quantum level, the universe bioengineers its own biofriendliness. Life and the universe are in some way a mutual fit, according to the theory, because, in a deeper sense, they come into existence together. In effect, I venture to claim that this view captures the true spirit of the Copernican Revolution. When Copernicus put the sun at the center, he realized all too well that from then on one would need to take the motion of the Earth around the sun into account in order to interpret astronomical observations correctly. The Copernican Revolution did not pretend that our position in the universe is irrelevant, only that it isn’t privileged. Five centuries on, top-down cosmology returns to these roots. (Hertog, 2023: pp. 254-255, boldfacing added)
The early Hawking (as well as the early author) sought a deeper understanding of the universe’s apparent design in the physical conditions at the origin of time. He (we) assumed that there was a fundamental causal explanation hidden deep in the math governing the big bang that would determine “why the universe is the way it is,” as Stephen so often put it. That is, we assumed that there was a final theory that superseded the physical universe—or multiverse. Having turned cosmology upside down and inside out, the later Hawking claimed that his earlier alter-ego had erred. Our top-down perspective reverses the hierarchy between laws and reality in physics. It leads to a new philosophy of physics that rejects the idea that the universe is a machine governed by unconditional laws and replaces it with the view that the universe is a kind of self-organizing entity, in which all sorts of emergent patterns appear, the most general of which we call the laws of physics. One might say that in top-down cosmology, the laws serve the universe, not the universe the laws. The theory holds that if there is an answer to the great question of existence, it is to be found within this world, not in a structure of principles outside it. (Hertog, 2023: p. 258, boldfacing added)
As I mentioned at the outset, in my opinion Hawking’s final theory—top-down cosmology—is in fact grounded on what I call the neo-organicist worldview, and therefore is a sub-variety of what I call the neo-organicist turn. What do I mean by “the neo-organicist worldview” and “the neo-organicist turn”? Here’s a brief exposition of them, based on (Hanna, 2023: Introduction).
Copernicus’s 16th and 17th century scientific revolution said that instead of naively assuming that humanity occupies the central place in the natural universe, as per Ptolemaic cosmology, we postulate that humanity’s Earth-based home be displaced away from the cosmological center and made relative to circular or elliptical (Keplerian) motion around the sun. Kant’s 18th century Copernican Revolution in epistemology and metaphysics, explicitly building on Copernicus’s Gestalt-shifting scientific revolution, said that instead of assuming that our rational, conceptual, and sensible (i.e., perceptual imaginational, and memory-based) human cognitive capacities passively conform either to mind-independent, noumenal objects, as per classical Rationalism, or to subjective, mind-dependent, phenomenal objects, as per classical Empiricism, we postulate instead that the manifestly real world of objective veridical appearances necessarily conforms to the innately-specified structures of our rational, conceptual, and sensible human cognitive capacities. And the early 20th century scientific revolution carried out by Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory (SRT) and General Relativity Theory (GRT) (Einstein et al., 1923/1952; Born, 1962), and Quantum Mechanics (QM) (see, e.g., Eddington, 1929: chs. IX-X; Ismael, 2021), following on from the 19th century neo-Kantian tradition, said that space, time, matter, energy, and causation necessarily conform to—are relativized to—the properties of experimental measuring devices, as used by scientific experimenters or observers (e.g., clocks, light-signal-sensitive equipment like cameras, measuring rods, the Michelson interferometer, microscopes, telescopes, particle-tracking and wave-tracking equipment including single-slit devices, two-slit devices, the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, and so-on, weigh-scales of various kinds, etc.), and also introduced the mechanistic worldview, which makes everything in the natural universe explanatorily and ontologically dependent on fundamentally physical facts and properties, and on formal—i.e., Turing-computable, decidable (Boolos and Jeffrey, 1989)—mechanical systems and/or natural mechanical systems, and also—as Max Planck rightly points out—dehumanizes physics, even while at the same time, inconsistently,
emphasiz[ing] particularly that we have here to do, not with an absolute separation of physics from the physicist—for a physics without the physicist is unthinkable. (Planck, 1915: p. 14)
For even if the physicist were an alien, and not specifically human, they’d also have to be a rational, concept-using, conscious, self-conscious, sense-perceiving, imagining, and remembering minded animal alien, and so SRT-GRT’s/QM’s dehumanization of physics wouldn’t escape at least the necessary conformity of physics to the physicist.
Moreover, the SRT-GRT/QM revolution, for all its theoretical and social-institutional success, and indeed hegemony, nevertheless remains fully impaled on the horns of a 19th century neo-Kantian and Vienna Circle Logical Empiricist/Positivist philosophical dilemma: EITHER formal and natural science capture a godlike or superhuman noumenal insight into humanly-inaccessible hidden reality, OR formal and natural science express only a “human, all-too-human” subjective idealist (whether solipsistic or communitarian) construction of a phenomenal world of falsidical appearances. And never the twain shall meet. This is also what Steven L. Goldman aptly calls the science wars (Goldman, 2022). Let’s call that problem A.
Furthermore, ultimately, SRT-GRT/QM cannot explain manifestly real organismic life, conscious mind, negentropy, irreversible processes, and unidirectional or asymmetric time, except by appealing to random fluctuations in a Boltzmannian universal probabilistic or statistical indeterministic micro-world of atomic particles, energy quanta, and waves, and their micro-states. In particular, because “all irreversible processes may be considered as reversible elementary processes,” then “in the final analysis all processes in nature are reversible” (Planck, 1915: p. 134). In short, irreversible processes are ultimately explained away. And the same ultimate explaining-away goes, mutatis mutandis, for life, mind, negentropy, and unidirectional or asymmetric time. But precisely what are “random fluctuations” and how are relevantly different from what Newton called “occult qualities”? In my opinion, they’re not relevantly different. So the explanation-by-explaining away is grounded on a metaphysical mystery. Let’s call all that problem B.
Nor, finally, can SRT-GRT/QM actually unify SRT-GRT and QM themselves into a single consistent and complete theory. For example, it’s entirely unclear how gravitational force, as modeled by curved four-dimensional spacetime around large material objects—such as planets—in GRT, as the weakest of the four fundamental forces, (i) applies to the paradigmatic quantum-mechanical items—particles, waves, and energy quanta—whose masses, densities, and weights can be virtually infinitely small, and (ii) applies at the center of a black hole, where spacetime curvature can be virtually infinitely great. Let’s call that problem C.
Now, in the third decade of the 21st century, roughly a century after the hegemonic but nowadays troubled and even crisis-ridden (Smolin, 2013; Hossenfelder, 2018) SRT-GRT/QM revolution, enter the neo-organicist turn, which I strongly believe that everyone should philosophically and scientically accept, embrace, and enact. The neo-organicist turn has two basic parts.
First, manifest realism, which says that the natural universe is, at least in principle, directly accessible to rational human pure or a priori intuition and human sense perception alike, precisely because the natural universe consists of a complete, unified, structuralist system of objective veridical appearances, such that anything X appears to be F (or G, or whatever) to us if and only if (i) X really and truly is F (or G, or whatever), and (ii) the fact of X’s being F (or G, or whatever) is, at least in principle, intersubjectively directly accessible to all actual or possible rational human minded animals, and not idiosyncratically restricted to any single rational human individual or to any particular rational human community/social institution or special set of such communities/social institutions.
And second, organicism, which says (i) that mental properties are at least as fundamental as physical properties in the natural universe, that they don’t exclude each other in the same substances, and indeed that they’re necessarily complementary in minded animals (liberal naturalism), (ii) that conscious mind and organismic life are metaphysically continuous with one another (mind-life continuity), and (iii) that instead of assuming that the world is fundamentally mechanical, so that manifestly real conscious mind, organismic life, negentropy, irreversible processes, and unidirectional or asymmetric time all explanatorily and metaphysically mysteriously pop out of fundamentally physical, non-living, computable, entropic, and reversible mechanical systems, only in order ultimately to pop back into them in the state of maximum entropy, we instead postulate the natural universe is fundamentally organic and therefore all formal and natural mechanical systems are explanatorily and ontologically dependent on uncomputable, negentropic, irreversible, processual, purposive, self-organizing, and time-unidirectional or time-asymmetric organic systems (explanatory inversion).
According to organicism, then, what is the explanatory and metaphysical or ontological function of mechanical systems? It’s nothing more and nothing less than to provide a relatively fixed, rigid, and static skeleton for channelling, distributing, focusing, framing, and more generally supporting the essentially richer informational or representational and causal powers of organic systems, just as the relatively fixed, rigid, and static skeleton inside a living animal channels, distributes, focuses, frames, and more generally supports the essentially richer informational or representational and causal powers of the organism itself. And when formal or natural organic systems fully unfold, naturally die, or otherwise creatively realize themselves and achieve closure, then the skeletons of their embedded mechanical systems continue to exist, either in a state of computable, decidable, recursive, and yet creatively inert formal perfection or else in a state in a state of calcified or frozen thermodynamic energy dispersal and equilibrium, i.e., heat-death. Therefore, trying to explain or construct organic systems from mechanical systems is like trying to explain or construct animals from their skeletons alone.
Manifest realism solves problem A, because it defines formal and natural scientific objectivity in such a way as to avoid noumenal realism and subjective idealism alike. And organicism solves problem B, because it provides a natural and fully non-reductive explanation of manifestly real conscious mind, organismic life, negentropy, irreversible processes, and unidirectional or asymmetric time alike, while also effectively explaining the existence and specific character of formal and natural mechanical systems.
Moroever, when taken together, as jointly constituting neo-organicism (NO), manifest realism and organicism collectively solve problem C, as follows. On the negative side, NO fully avoids what I call The RepresentationàRepresented Fallacy, committed by SRT-GRT and QM alike, which consists in mistakenly inferring directly from the representational and quantitative properties of experimental devices, to objective properties of what’s represented and measured by those devices. Correspondingly, NO rejects Einstein’s postulation of the speed of light, i.e., 186,000 miles per second, as an absolute causal speed limit in the natural universe. Moreover, on the one hand, NO rejects Einstein’s spinozistic classical macro-determinism. But on the other hand, NO equally rejects the non-classical Boltzmannian universal probabilistic or statistical indeterminism of atomic particles, energy quanta, and waves, and their micro-states. As Einstein famously remarked, God doesn’t play dice with the universe; but that’s only because God, and God’s noumenal, dehumanizing standpoint, doesn’t play ANY sort of substantive role in neo-organicist physics, which resolutely focuses on the standpoint of rational human minded animals. On the positive side, NO postulates the fundamental existence of non-deterministic and also non-indeterministic uncomputable, negentropic, irreversible, processual, purposive, self-organizing, and time-unidirectional or time-asymmetric organic systems. Furthermore, NO adopts what I call the no-layered scalar dynamic world-picture of the manifestly real natural universe, which says (i) that the cosmos has three basic scales: mega- (i.e., very large-sized) scale, meso- (i.e., middle-sized ) scale, and micro- (i.e., very small-sized) scale, all of which are calibrated solely by reference to the egocentrically-centered, spatiotemporally orientable, embedded standpoint of rational human minded animals, and (ii) that complementarity, entanglement, and non-locality pervade manifest natural reality at all basic scales. In turn, and finally, NO also postulates the fundamental existence of what I call the rubber sheet cosmos, in which all organic systems and their explanatorily and ontologically dependent mechanical systems are fully embedded, at all basic scales.
As I mentioned above, I strongly believe that everyone should philosophically and scientifically accept, embrace, and enact the neo-organicist turn, including manifest realism and the three sub-parts of organicism: liberal naturalism, mind-life continuity, and explanatory inversion. Or more briefly and simply put, I strongly believe that everyone should philosophically and scientifically accept, embrace, and enact what I call science for humans (Hanna, 2023). Furthermore, I strongly believe—abstracting away for the moment from the nitty-gritty technical mathematical details, and some differences of emphasis or opinion between my way of conceptualizing the contemporary philosophical and scientific situation, and H’s-&-H’s way[ii]—that the neo-organicist worldview and the neo-organicist turn, epitomized as science for humans, are essentially and ultimately what Hawking’s final theory is all about. And that interpretation, in turn, comports perfectly with the Hawking quotation I used as the epigraph for this essay:
With [a] top-down [approach] we put humankind back in the center [of cosmological theory], he said. Interestingly, this is what gives us control. (Hawking, as quoted in Hertog, 2023: p. 207)
***
Let’s suppose that my interpretation of Hawking’s final theory is correct. Then we can neatly resolve an apparent contradiction or paradox. In his 2010 book, The Grand Design, Hawking asserted with characteristic boldness and self-assurance, that “philosophy is dead,” by which he meant that contemporary philosophy is irrelevant to contemporary physics (Hawking and Mlodinow, 2010: p. 5). But as Hertog rightly points out in the preface to Origin, “for someone who had renounced philosophy, Stephen used it liberally—and creatively—in his work” (Hertog, 2023: p. xiv). This is contradictory or paradoxical only if the term “philosophy” means the same thing in every one of its occurrences. But if “philosophy” in “philosophy is dead” and also in “for someone who had renounced philosophy” means contemporary post-classical Analytic philosophy in general, especially including Vienna Circle-driven Analytic of science in particular, and if the meaning of “it” in “Stephen used it [i.e., philosophy] liberally—and creatively—in his work” means speculative and value-laden philosophy of science, as per the neo-organicist worldview and the neo-organicist turn, epitomized as science for humans, then not only are the following two statements perfectly consistent, they’re also both true:
1. Contemporary post-classical Analytic philosophy in general, especially including Vienna Circle-driven contemporary Analytic of science in particular, is irrelevant to contemporary physics (see also Hanna, 2021c), which is why Hawking justifiably renounced it.
2. Nevertheless, Hawking also used speculative and value-laden philosophy of science, as per the neo-organicist worldview and the neo-organicist turn, epitomized as science for humans, both liberally and creatively in the collaborative work with Hertog that led to Hawking’s final theory.
NOTES
[i] I’ll spell out Kant’s Copernican Revolution a little more explicitly [a few paragraphs] below. For an elaboration of Kant’s revolutionary idea in the context of contemporary physics and the debate about Anthropic principles, see (Hanna, 2022m).
[ii] For example, H’s-&-H’s theory deploys holographic cosmology, which “tells us that there is an entity more basic than time—a hologram—from which the past emerges” (Hertog, 2023: p. 243). On the contrary, standing on the shoulders of two giants—Ilya Prigogine (1997) and Smolin (2013)—I think that holographic cosmology is prima facie implausible and that there are decisively good reasons for asserting the existence of an asymmetric forward-directed arrow of manifestly real phenomenological and cosmological time.
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