The Science and Religion in Islam research group is the result of a collaboration between a number of Muslim academics who have decided to work together to explore the interface between science and religion from the perspective of different disciplinary horizons. We hope to contribute to the emergence of a working culture which is based on a double perspective: on one hand that of a rationality that is open to problems of a metaphysical, spiritual or theological order and, on the other hand, that of a spiritual life, of a religious conscience, and an inner experience that is open to philosophical problems that arise from investigations in the area of contemporary science. We advocate this double perspective in the sense that we consider that science and religion have things to say to one another. But, at the same time, this requires a great deal of clarity in our intentions as well as rigour in our method. The bringing together in a illusory side-by-side, or a fallacious analogy, of Islamic religious knowledge and the findings of contemporary science can lead to disappointing results since, by ignoring the specificities of the two areas and the singularity of the principles which govern their respective movements, this approach prevents, in reality, the emergence of a real "convergence" between science and religion. For this reason, unlike a certain reading which dominates in the Islamic World, we do not think that these two spheres of knowledge can seriously enter into dialogue with each other in a direct fashion. In our opinion, the nature of the relationship between the two areas requires an "internal", philosophical, theological or spiritual inquiry. Hence we will be able to phrase the question as follows: what is it within science that can enter into a meaningful dialogue with Islam? And what is it within Islam that can enter into a meaningful dialogue with science?   When we speak of Islam we are not only talking about the religious component. In order to promote the emergence of a serious dialogue between science and religion in the perspective of religion, we need to consider all the dimensions of the culture that has arisen from the civilisation that has been nurtured by this religion. It is one of the reasons why our research group includes not only mathematicians, physicists, and astrophysicists but also theologians, historians and philosophers. An interdisciplinary approach is an important aspect of our work: creating links between the findings of each discipline while keeping within the rules of each discipline.   The science-islam site intends to function as a knowledge forum in view of the emergence of a genuine scientific modernity that is rooted in the conscience of intellectual, spiritual and ethical values. Under these four section-headings (articles, abstracts, bibliographical references and links) our site will propose a certain number of tools, concepts and methods, theses and structures which may, in some way, contribute to the renewal or, more accurately, the "revitalisation", of Islamic thought based on a profound comprehension of the challenges and the advancements that are being made in the 21st century. 

Emergence: Any philosophical overtones to the new scientific paradigm?

A commentary on ‘A Different Universe’ by Robert B. Laughlin Basic Books – 2005

R. Laughlin

A different Universe

Being interested in all cosmic issues, and knowing that Robert Laughlin has been a strong advocate for the “new paradigm” of “emergence”, I quickly ordered this book, confident that I would find in it a bold new philosophy of physics, perhaps even one that would not only give a fatal blow to the reductionist paradigm but also help in the efforts of some of us to sap the overly materialistic basis of modern science. The book does indeed deal with “emergence” to a large extent, and the “universe” in the title is meant to represent “nature” generally, even though the author is mostly concerned with microscopic levels of nature and leaves out the cosmic scales entirely. In fact, the book is subtitled “Reinventing Physics from the bottom down”, a phrase which remained rather awkward and obtuse even after one had finished reading the whole book; furthermore, why the hugely important term “emergence” does not figure in either the title or the subtitle of the book is a baffling mystery; why the obvious title “The Emergent Universe” was not used perhaps says something about the writer and his editor.

Robert Laughlin is well credentialed and prepared for writing such a book; he shared the Nobel prize in Physics with Dan Tsui and Horst Stormer in 1998 for ground-breaking work (experimental and theoretical) on the fractional quantum Hall effect, which showed that the electric charge of the electron is not indivisible. Even more relevant to the topic of emergence and to the new philosophy of physics being presented are some articles and lectures Laughlin has written and given in the past decade or so, particularly “The theory of everything”, which he co-authored with David Pines and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in 2000, an article that quickly became very popular, albeit somewhat controversial. Our author summarizes his concerns and outlook in the preface by relating a discussion he had one evening with his father-in-law (a retired academician) over whether it is laws that make organizations or the other way around, the “chicken-and-egg problem of laws, organizations of laws, and laws from organizations” (do laws make legislative bodies or are they made by them?). Laughlin acknowledges having been preceded on this terrain and to some extent influenced by Ilya Prigogine and PW Anderson (two illustrious and original scientists of the 20th century), but that he considers his views “considerably more radical” due to their having been sharpened by recent events…

The book is a continuous mixture of, on the one hand, attacks on reductionism, the principle that declares that nature can be fully understood by having it dissected (the whole is understood by figuring out the parts and their working mechanism), and on the other hand many important examples of emergence (new laws and new phenomena “emerge” when one goes from one scale of nature to another, e.g. from the microscopic to the macroscopic) and its necessity in understanding the universe. Here are a few examples of how Laughlin opposes emergence to reductionism. On page 20 he writes: “Its [reductionism’s] most insidious effect is to lead us into the desert by inducing us to search on smaller and smaller scales for meaning that is not there.” Elsewhere (p. 113) he writes: “Despite all this evidence that the reductionist paradigm in physics is in trouble, subnuclear experiments are still generally described in reductionist terms. […] instead of low-energy universality, physicists speak of effective field theory. Instead of phases, we speak of symmetry-breaking. Instead of phase transitions, the unification of forces.” One simple example he gives is the quantization of atomic spectra, which he describes as “a collective effect masquerading as a reductionist one…” Finally, toward the end of the book, Laughlin attacks the reductionist camp but attempts to find some middle ground; he writes: “The pig-headed response of the science establishment to the emergence principles potentially present in life is, of course, a glaring symptom of its addiction to reductionist beliefs… […] The rejection of emergence is justified [by the establishment] as defending science from mysticism. […] the unknowability of living things may actually be a physical phenomenon. This does not make life any less wonderful, but simply identifies how its inaccessibility could be fully compatible with reductionist law.”

To counter the reductionist paradigm, Laughlin offers a multitude of examples from physics and to a lesser extent and with much less clarity and success from the fields of computing, biology, psychology, and sociology. Indeed, what are we to make of the following rather typical statements: “we owe the existence, reliability, and utility of computers to principles of organization—including economic ones. That women have an easier time understanding the supremacy of organizations than men is not news, for this was known to the ancients and recorded in numerous places, notably the I Ching.”

The author is definitely on more solid footing in the physical areas, and he starts with what he knows best, the electron’s charge: “We are accustomed of thinking of this charge as a building block of nature requiring no collective context to make sense. The experiments in question, of course, refute this idea. They reveal that the electron charge makes sense only in a collective context, which may be provided either by the empty vacuum of space […] or by some matter that preempts the vacuum’s effects.” He adds, quite surprisingly: “The electron charge conundrum, as it turns out, is not unique. All the fundamental constants require an environmental context to make sense.” But he quickly moves on to provide examples that are more familiar to the reader: “Newton’s legendary laws have turned out to be emergent”; “No one has ever succeeded in deducing [the laws of gases and fluids] from first principles[…] The reason we believe them, as with most emergent things, is because we observe them. Like the laws of rigidity in solids, [these] laws become more and more exact as the length and time scales on which they are measured increase, and they fail in the opposite limit.” Finally, he brings up light and sounds as emergent phenomena: “The emergent quantum of sound, known as a phonon, is aptly analogous to the quantum of light, the photon. The physical equivalence of these two kinds of particles has been confirmed by a large number of experiments, some quite beautiful and clever. The analogy between phonons and photons raises the obvious question of whether light itself might be emergent.”

So we are impressed with the suite of interesting examples and statements regarding emergence, some of them quite bold from a physicist’s stand or from a philosopher of science’s approach and some of them somewhat fuzzy and opaque. But through all this, did we get a clear definition and understanding of what emergence is supposed to be? In this regard Laughlin adopts an “emergent” approach: he lets us develop a sense of the concept from various examples and descriptions before allowing for a definition to emerge at the end. In fact, before concluding with a “parting thoughts” last chapter, he devotes one to a collective attempt at coming up with an acceptable definition of emergence. Indeed, in “Picnic table in the sun”, he relates the discussions that took place in a one-day “picnic” symposium he co-organized at Stanford University in 200x when he assembled a stellar interdisciplinary cast of thinkers (a cosmologist, a bioethicist, a materials engineer, a religious scholar, a philosopher, an anthropologist, a lawyer, a computer guru, a philologist, among others) to freely confer over laws, emergence, consciousness, and life. How appropriate it is then to witness such a natural emergence of the definition of emergence: “the complex organizational structure growing out of simple rules”, although this is followed by a series of typically fuzzy descriptions of the consequences of emergence, such as: “Emergence means the stable inevitability in the way certain things are. Emergence means unpredictability, in the sense of small events causing great and qualitative changes in larger ones. Emergence means the fundamental impossibility of control. Emergence is a law of nature to which humans are subservient.”

Although the latter statements make it clear that emergence has strong philosophical overtones and implications, Laughlin tries to remain “scientific” (lest he be accused of “mysticism” by the “establishment”) and stick to the appropriateness of the concept to the understanding of the physical world. We shall come back to this reluctance to venture onto philosophical and religious areas toward the end of our review/commentary.

Was the author successful then in fulfilling his own objectives? There is no doubt that the series of examples and phenomena that Laughlin presented and described as many wounds in the body of the reductionist paradigm, those examples were often impressive and quite convincing. I must say, however, that sometimes the explanations were confusing or “above one’s head”, and sometimes the statements were rather surprising. A few examples will suffice: “The fractional quantum Hall effect reveals that ostensibly indivisible quanta—in this case the electron charge e—can be broken into pieces through self-organization of phases. The fundamental things, in other words, are not necessarily fundamental.” Elsewhere: “The transition to the Age of Emergence brings to an end the myth of the absolute power of mathematics. […] Good laws […] create mathematical predictive power through protection, the insensitivity of certain measured quantities to sample imperfections or computational errors.” And finally: the “hierarchical society of physical laws […] render[s] the most fundamental laws… irrelevant”.

I should also comment on another important aspect of the book, its style and presentation, which to me was so lacking that it hindered the author’s ability to win the reader’s mind or even to keep his/her constant attention. Laughlin adopts a personal and somewhat informal style, using work anecdotes and family stories, ranging from hikes in Yellowstone Park to a conference river cruise honoring von Klitzing and the dinner at which John Bardeen (“at least in some circles […] considered the greatest theoretical physicist who ever lived”) figured out a major piece of the semiconduction theory. Not only do such anecdotes and stories rarely serve the purpose of the book, they further often end up losing the reader (and the author) in the circumvolutions. Indeed, the book loses steam in the middle part; several chapters seemed to simply belabor the main point, and could have mostly been edited out, even if the book ended up much shorter. (The book comes alive again in the last two chapters, the “picnic” one and the “parting thoughts” one.) Along the way, Laughlin sometimes digresses and offers biting views on topics like nanophysics and nanotechnology, which he regards as not just misguided (“like predicting lasers from the existence of Christmas ornaments”) but “deeply unimportant” as well, and string theory, which he calls “a textbook case of the Deceitful Turkey, a beautiful set of ideas that will always remain out of reach […] the tragic consequence of an obsolete belief system”. Finally, I must mention the inclusion of a dozen drawings (by the author?) in the book which served no purpose whatsoever other then to visually represent some idea or quote in the chapter, most often totally unimportant. The book, in short, would have greatly benefited from a good editor.

Let us now address the philosophical – and perhaps even theological – aspects of the emergence paradigm. A few statements in the book, some of which have been noted above, hint at possible important implications, but the author resolutely keeps clear of such topics. And for readers like me, leaving out or brushing aside such hugely important dimensions of the discussion was disappointing. Perhaps this was left for more philosophically or religiously inclined scientists and writers to expound on.

In the whole book, the word “God” was mentioned only once, and the term “Maker” was used once, although from the way these words were used, it appeared clear that Laughlin is a believer, perhaps a slightly spiritual person in his own way. (At the end of the fourth chapter, for instance, he makes the tantalizing statement “the laws of nature are enforced by higher authority” but adds nothing more.)

Even more surprising is his haughty dismissal of the anthropic principle in one sentence: “It is fun to imagine what Voltaire would have done with this material.” Isn’t the emergence of humans pre-conditioned by the special parameters that the universe must be built on? Can’t the series of emergences (from quantum to complex molecules to cells to creatures to mind and intelligence) be considered an “anthropic” program or, at least as Hubert Reeves prefers to label it, a program of “complexification” – emphasis on “program”. Referring to John Wheeler, Philip Clayton has coined this view of emergence as “Us from It”.

Similarly, the emergence of life has until most recently been largely avoided as a problem, often mentioned as one step, albeit an extraordinary one, in the long evolutionary scheme of the appearance of life forms. Some thinkers have seen in the emergence of life from matter a theological significance, and some have seen in it at least an important hint at a non-reductionist paradigm. In the first camp, Michael Denton (“Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe”) finds in this emergence support for a natural theology. In the second group, Brian Goodwin (“How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: Evolution of Complexity”) emphasizes the non-reductionist paradigm and the non-applicability of natural selection; for him, complexification has worked not as a result of random mutations (at least not solely) but as the result of cooperation, altruism, and creativity just as much as egoism, competition, and destruction among living things. Finally, Simon Conway Morris (“Life’s Solution”) finds in the nature of the emergence process, what Laughlin calls “protection” (of the higher-level laws from the lower-level ones), an implication regarding the types of creatures that can appear at the top: Is the human type necessitated by the macroscopic laws? How do we know what higher-level laws can emerge if they are “protected” from the lower-level ones? What implication does this have on the existence of intelligence and spirit elsewhere?

Unfortunately John Laughlin refuses to address such questions; he seems to believe that no such philosophical overtones exist in the emergence paradigm. Although we can only applaud his defense of emergence and denigration of reductionism, upon further thought it becomes quite clear that his will definitely not be the last word on the subject, that richer and more enlightening works will certainly follow.