MACROSCOPE
The Soul of Science
Michael Shermer
According to Greek legend, Poseidon's son Theseus sailed to Crete to
slay the monster Minotaur. After his triumphant return to Athens,
his ship was preserved as a memorial. As the vessel aged, decaying
planks were replaced with new ones; eventually, all the original
timber was replaced. Philosophers know the story of Theseus's ship
as a classic example of the problem of identity. What was the true
identity of the ship, the shape or the wood?
A more contemporary example may be found in the form of my first
car, a 1966 Ford Mustang with a 289-cubic-inch engine and a
speedometer that pegged at 140 m.p.h. As a young man high in
testosterone but low in self-control, by the time I sold the car 15
years later there was hardly an original part on it. Nevertheless,
my "1966" Mustang was now considered a classic, and I
netted a tidy profit. Like Theseus's ship, its essence—its
"Mustangness"—was intact.
The analogy holds for human identity. The atoms in my brain and body
today are not the same ones I had when I was born. Nevertheless, the
patterns of information coded in my DNA and in my neural memories
are still those of Michael Shermer. The human essence, the soul, is
more than a pile of parts—it is a pattern of information.
As far as we know, there is no way for that pattern to last longer
than several decades, a century or so at most. So until a technology
can copy a human pattern into a more durable medium (silicon chips
perhaps?), it appears that when we die our pattern is lost.
Scientific skepticism suggests that there is no afterlife, and
religion requires a leap of faith greater than many of us wish to make.
Whether there is an afterlife or not, we must live as if this is all
there is. Our lives, our families, our friends, our communities (and
how we treat others) are more meaningful when every day, every
moment, every relationship and every person counts. Rather than
meaningless forms before an eternal tomorrow, these entities have
value in the here-and-now because of the purpose we create.
Provisional Purpose
In science, a fact is something confirmed to such a degree that it
would be reasonable to offer our assent that it is true, provided
that the assumptions on which it rests are intact. In life, purpose
is provisional for the same reason—there is no Archimedean
point from which we can authenticate final Truths and ultimate
Purposes. In its stead, we have to validate our own facts and
determine our own purposes. The self-correcting machinery of science
corroborates provisional facts, and life itself provides the
template for provisional purpose.
Life's most basic purpose is survival and reproduction, and for 3.5
billion years, organisms from the pre-Cambrian to us form an
unbroken continuity. This alone ennobles us, but add the innumerable
steps from bacteria to big brains and the countless points at which
our lineage could have died and we conclude that human beings are a
glorious contingency in the history of life.
Humans have an evolved sense of purpose—a psychological desire
to accomplish goals—that developed out of behaviors that were
selected for because they were good for the individual or the group.
The desire to behave in purposeful ways is an evolved trait; purpose
is in our nature. And with brains big enough to discover and define
purpose in symbolic ways that are inconceivable to millions of
preceding and coexisting species, we humans are unique.
The Purpose Pyramid
With provisional purpose we define our goals, but there is an
inherent structure to the human condition that helps delimit our
search. By combining psychologist Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of
needs and ethicist Peter Singer's expanding circle of sentiments,
one can depict the 1.5 million years over which such drives and
sentiments evolved among humans and our social-primate ancestors. At
the bottom of the pyramid, the individual's needs for survival and
reproduction—food, drink, safety and sex—are met through
the family, extended family and community. Moving up the pyramid,
psychosocial needs—security, bonding, socialization,
affiliation, acceptance and affection—have evolved to aid and
reinforce cooperation and altruism, traits that benefit individuals
and the group. About 35,000 years ago, social groups grew larger and
cultural selection began to take precedence over natural selection.
The natural progression of this upwards trend is to perceive
societies as part of the human species and the human species as part
of the biosphere.
The width of the pyramid at each level reflects the degree to which
purposeful sentiment is under evolutionary control. The height of
each level indicates the degree to which purposeful sentiment
extends beyond us. Thus, the pyramid shows that these two variables
are inversely related—the more a sentiment helps a complete
stranger, the less it owes to specific evolutionary mechanisms.
Selfish genes drive kin altruism, and social relations fuel
reciprocal altruism, but to achieve species- and bio-altruism, we
need to learn higher-order prosocial behavior. Achieving the upper
levels of the pyramid requires social and political action. We
evolved in a manner in which our concern for the environment was
highly restricted, and global ecology and deep time were
inconceivable until recent millennia—too short a time for
evolution to expand the fundamental range of our purposeful concerns.
The Pleasure of Purpose
How can we attain deep-time awareness and global consciousness when
our sense of purpose is grounded in an ancient evolutionary
heritage? Thomas Jefferson suggested one answer in a letter to
Thomas Law in 1814: "These good acts give pleasure, but how it
happens that they give us pleasure? Because nature hath implanted in
our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral
instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to
succor their distresses." Scientific research supports this
proposition. Experiments with the "prisoner's
dilemma"—a game in which one person's cooperation or
defection elicits a varying payoff depending on whether the other
person cooperates or defects—reveal that subjects adopt a
cooperative strategy after multiple rounds, particularly when they
can interact to establish trust. Usually, the most selfish thing to
do—that is, gain the most in the long run—is to begin by
trusting and cooperating, and then do whatever your partner does.
Trust ... with verification.
Our brains reinforce cooperative behavior. In one study by James
Rilling and colleagues at Emory University, subjects that played the
prisoner's dilemma while undergoing functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) showed that cooperation activated the same brain
areas as desserts, cocaine, beautiful faces and other pleasures.
These responsive areas, the anteroventral striatum (the so-called
"pleasure center," for which rats will endlessly press a
bar to have it stimulated, even foregoing food) and the
orbitofrontal cortex (related to impulse control and reward
processing), are rich in dopamine, a neurochemical related to
addictive behaviors. Tellingly, the cooperative subjects reported
increased feelings of trust toward and camaraderie with their game
partners. In addition to dopamine, neuroscientists believe that
oxytocin—a hormone produced during eating, breast feeding and
sexual orgasm—plays a vital role in human bonding and
prosocial behaviors. Can we use this knowledge to accentuate
purposeful behavior at the personal and global levels?
Bootstrapping Purpose
Purpose is personal, and people satisfy this deep-seated need in
countless ways. Among these are avenues by which we can bootstrap
ourselves toward higher goals that have proven to be especially
beneficial to individuals and society. These include:
Deep love and family commitment—the bonding and
attachment to others increases one's circle of sentiments and
corresponding sense of purpose: to care about others as much as, if
not more than, oneself;
Meaningful work and career—the sense of purpose
derived from discovering one's passion for work drives people to
achieve goals so far beyond their own needs that they lift all of us
to a higher plane, either directly through the benefits of the work
or indirectly through inspiration;
Social and political involvement—as a social species
we have an obligation to community and society to participate in the
process of determining how best we should live together;
Transcendence and spirituality—a capacity unique to
our species that includes aesthetic appreciation, spiritual
reflection and transcendence through art, music, dance,
exercise, meditation, prayer or quiet contemplation, thereby
connecting us on the deepest level with that which is completely
outside of ourselves.
My own journey up the pyramid began with falling in love, parenting
a child and making the commitment to place family before self. The
immeasurable joy generated by the most quotidian of family functions
reinforces this commitment on a daily basis. Even with unlimited
wealth, I would continue my career no differently because I have
been fortunate enough to find a profession that offers more than
just personal gain. As such, my work takes me ever further out of
selfhood and toward global goals. Although I have visited many of
the grandest cathedrals in the world and sensed a spiritual
veneration of the highest order, my greatest transcendent
experiences have come through the contemplation of nature in her
grandeur, such as the view from Edwin Hubble's chair through the
100-inch telescope atop Mt. Wilson. From that perch, one's picture
of the cosmos grows to galactic proportions, dwarfing any prior
world view and yielding a perspective transcendent beyond imagination.
The Purpose Principle
Although purpose may be found in countless activities, is there a
principle by which we may generalize its particulars? In The
Science of Good And Evil I suggested two principles of
morality. First, the happiness principle: it is a higher moral
principle to always seek happiness with someone else's happiness
in mind, and never seek happiness when it leads to someone
else's unhappiness. Second, the liberty principle: it
is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone
else's liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to
someone else's loss of liberty. In this context I would
like to suggest a purpose principle: it is a higher moral
principle to pursue purposeful thought or behavior with someone
else's purposeful goals in mind, and never pursue a purpose when
it leads to someone else's loss of purpose.
Although purpose is inherent, moral purposes are learned; thus, the
highest levels of the purpose pyramid require individual volition,
personal effort and social consciousness. Morality and purpose are
inextricably interdigitated—you cannot have one without the
other. Fortunately, nature grants us the capacity for both morality
and purpose, culture affords us the liberty to reach for higher
moral purposes, and history brings us to a place where we can employ
both for the enrichment of all.
Through natural evolution and man-made culture, we have inherited
the mantle of life's caretaker on earth. Rather than crushing our
spirits, the realization that we exist together for a narrow slice
of time and space elevates us to a higher plane of humanity and
humility: a proud, albeit passing, act in the drama of the cosmos.