I took this classic 1925 essay by Bertrand Russell as a blueprint for a not-so-short manifesto and introduction to AutóMata. The order of some sections has been switched around a bit, and I made no effort to emulate any of Russell’s original points or arguments; I just used the section headlines as writing prompts. I do not intend to flesh out all the arguments in this piece, so some of it may come out as somewhat aphoristic or glib. I’ll do deep dives on the reasoning for my positions eventually—that’s what this space will be for. Nature and Man I should begin by specifying that I’m not only a physicist but a physicalist and, as far as I can remember, always have been. For now I will leave the arguments for physicalism for another time and skip directly to state its conclusion: there is no such thing as a non-physical entity, and indeed there can’t be, because the notion of a non-physical entity is gibberish. Sometimes this view is also known as naturalism or materialism. I find the choice of nomenclature to be a matter of what one wants to emphasize. Physicalism will be a common theme throughout this article (and the whole of AutóMata), and many of my views on different topics follow from it. I consider the supernatural to be not only inexistent, but also incoherent—hence it cannot exist. Also, I don’t think concepts or abstractions exist in the same way as fundamental particles, apart from the trivial sense that they reside in physical brains. I have always been an atheist as far as I can remember, though I did not associate it with materialism explicitly until adulthood. As shortcuts of language, it is sometimes practical to use abstractions or stories to help us make sense of the world and our place in it. But these are only practical shorthands for the real stuff that exists and of which everything is made of: fundamental particles living in spacetime. This way of thinking about things is commonly known as physical reductionism. Many people speak of reductionism with derision, but I have found that even the ones worth taking seriously do so only with arguments from semantics or practicality, not soundness, and certainly not evidence. They mistake certain derivations or calculations from fundamental objects and their interactions being intractable or impractical with their being untrue. Whatever else may be considered to exist is only a convenient shorthand for the underlying fundamental physics. One of these shorthands is ‘humanity’, itself a particular case of another larger category known as ‘life’. Under physicalism, there is no escape from the conclusion that life, and therefore humanity, is a collection of different kinds of self-replicating mechanisms—we are meat robots, as I’ve seen said in some places (the title of this publication is a play on this conclusion and my last name). This is in no way belittling—what matter can do is amazing! No myth, ancient or modern, could have imagined what we now know matter can do. Given enough time and a suitable source of constant energy, it can create flowers, whales, humans, cathedrals, pyramids and, most wondrous of all, knowledge about those things and many more. The way Carl Sagan once put it is that “we are of the Cosmos”, a way for it to know and understand itself. This view of what we are in the grand scheme of things is open-ended, full of endless puzzles, problems and possibilities, and I find it wonderful. Every time we have made headway in understanding how the world works, we have done it by moving away from the supernatural and towards the natural—there is not a single exception in all of history. Gods and spirits become ever more irrelevant, and their retreat reveals a multi-layered web of mechanisms, from microscopic to cosmological, far more elegant and subtle than any ancient or modern superstition. We humans have a wonderful opportunity, now that we’re here, to discover and understand ever more and more of it. There is no evidence that the Cosmos was made for us but, as we come to comprehend it better, it becomes clearer and clearer that we can use our knowledge to make it more to our liking. Rather than despair at its cold vastness, we should rejoice at the opportunity to understand and shape it to our advantage. We are not merely the subjects or playthings of some god. Whatever is physically possible, given enough knowledge, we can achieve. Even if the Universe doesn’t care about what happens to us, it is more than enough that we do. It is undoubtedly true that the knowledge we create could lead us both to flourishing or destruction. There are real risks ahead, but the greatest risk is to content ourselves with ignorance and superstition—this will doom us to stagnation, squalor and, inevitably, extinction. So I say we go for it. Moral Rules A purely physical, mechanical Universe is amoral by definition. Fundamental particles have many properties, but moral values are not among them. Whatever our values are, they must be emergent phenomena which arise from the complicated interactions of lower-level mechanisms. Values are thus not absolute; they are not really ‘out there’ in the same sense as fundamental particles. This doesn’t mean they are not real, nor that they are arbitrary. It only means that they are constructed and, indeed, they can even be objective. I have found that it is helpful to distinguish between the absolute and the objective. By absolute I mean that which is ‘really’ out there, whereas the objective is that which is true about what is absolute plus a few constructions. A useful example that illustrates this is the game of chess: given the rules and the objective of the game, there are objectively better and worse ways to play—but the game itself is made up (that is, constructed). We can imagine a world where chess never existed without incurring in any logical contradictions (a condition philosophers sometimes describe as contingency); indeed, that was the way things were for most of the Universe’s history. Even so, one could not say that the rules of chess are arbitrary—they are designed to make the game interesting and playable. Like games, values are constructed according to criteria. To build up morals, there are certain ‘givens’ within physicalism that serve as our starting points: pain and pleasure in their different forms, the finitude of life and the absence of an afterlife, and many others which we may call ‘human nature’. We wish to avoid poverty, disease, hunger, war, and plague; we prefer to keep our anxiety under control, and some guarantees about our minimum material security are appreciated. Family, friends, leisure, knowledge and art are valued almost universally. Most of us, including non-physicalists, agree on many of these givens and many more. But some moral systems are just wrong—objectively as well as absolutely—because they build upon mistaken or incoherent premises and principles, such as religion or ideology. It’s agreeing on the objectives where things start to get more difficult. Morally, these correspond to the ethical ends we wish to achieve, or what many would call our lives’ purpose or meaning. Again, I don’t think there is such a thing. There is what we would like to do with the time we have, and nothing more. I have not heard a single coherent or intelligible example of ‘the meaning of life’ that doesn’t collapse down to ‘the things we like to do with our life’. This is why agreeing on the objectives of our moral systems is so hard: people like and value different things. So far, the best solution we have come up with is liberalism: allow people to live their own lives as they prefer as much as possible, only stopping them when they interfere negatively with the lives of others. There are some difficulties and tricky cases for this framework, but all other alternatives tried so far have been much worse. There is currently a lively debate about whether liberalism is enough to keep humanity going and motivated. I am content to spend my days… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit automata.substack.com
