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Evolution and the Nature of Reality

by Douglas H. Shennan

144 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-0947; ISBN 1-55395-233-2; US$17.00, C$20.00, EUR14.00, £10.00

Shows how the conventional idea of absolute truth is false. Our concept of truth depends on the experience of our ancestors and on the evolution of their sense organs

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about the book      about the author      excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book

The senses we possess have evolved differently for each individual, depending on the environments of our ancestors, and we are only equipeed to find out things that were necessary to their survival. Truth is therefore not absolute, and each of us lives in a somewhat different world.
To draw conclusions about everything that affects us, and not merely scientific facts, we have to start the drain of reasoning from the subject ("myself") and work outwards. That is the right approach to non-scientific issues like emotions, motivation, love between parents and children, and relationships with other people, whch are the most important concerns of humans.

About the Author

Shennan is a medical doctor whose career dealt with tuberculosis in developing countries, mainly in Africa. For more than 30 years he has been concerned about the technology spiral and its effects. Since retirement in 1992 he has read widely on human evolution and culture and set out to draw together the work of these authors and that of the specialists who have written on the many other disciplines affecting people, so as to achieve an overview of the present human predicament.
Also by Douglas H. Shennan:
Evolution and the Spiral of Technology

Excerpts

Table of Contents

PART I: EVOLUTION
1. How evolution works. 2. Natural selection, relentless and total
PART II: THE INVOLVED NATURE OF HOMO, THE OBSERVER
3. The history of the subjective viewpoint 4. The subjective as primary reality
PART III: FINDING TRUTH
5. The nature of the physical world 6. The nature of truth
PART IV: THE SUBJECTIVE VIEWPOINT IN PRACTICE
7. The subjective view of reality resolves certain problems 8. Subjectivity, human relations and morality.
References Bibliography index
Introduction

In a previous book Evolution and the Spiral of Technology I have discussed how the history of human evolution affects our mode of life and our future. However, it also affects our knowledge and understanding of the world. This book deals with the contrast between the objective (physical) world and the subjective (real) world. We experience the latter, and what we experience depends on the way we have evolved. Our contact with the world is primarily subjective, and we derive the nature of the physical world from it. This primary role of the subjective explains certain phenomena which are problematic when viewed objectively, including free will, purpose, who is the "observer" needed to collapse the quantum wave function, and the statistically improbable fact that of all the millions of species, humans appear to be the most advanced. The primacy of the subjective viewpoint is particularly important when considering relationships between people, which are based on attitudes towards one another rather than on logic.
    Chapter 2 is taken from the earlier book. It stresses the inescapable total influence of our evolutionary past on our present. Not only human activity is restricted by it; it also places well-defined limits on what we can know.
    In this presentation I often use "I" and "me" to describe the real world; this is not egotism but an effort to be faithful to the truth. I can only know that things are real to me, though by analogy I may decide that other people reach the same conclusion.     The great difference between the subjective and the objective viewpoints may be illustrated by the case of pre-knowledge. I fell off my bicycle last week travelling at some speed round an icy corner. I was surprised but even when rolling over on the road, had little sense of alarm or dismay. I did not even know that I had any abrasions until some time later - as hockey-players do not until they look at their shins after a match. had I known for a week beforehand that this was going to happen I would have been a nervous wreck by the time of the event, which would itself have been a horrifying experience. Thus great is the difference between the all-knowing objective standpoint and that of the involved subject meeting events as they come.
    To reach logical conclusions about the nature of reality, we have to achieve a marriage between the classical philosopher's subjective view of life and the biologist's objective one. Philosophers sometimes talk of the "coloured" sheet" that we throw over the physical world with, for instance, our eyes (as well as the other senses). Because the nervous systems of each one of us work slightly differently, we all see, hear, etc., things in a somewhat different way from each other. Philosophers than ask "What is the nature of the real physical world, if any, underneath the sheet?" They have never been able to agree on a conclusion. Most scientists, on the other hand, regard the physical world as absolute. ever since Descartes made his famous distinction between the res cogitans and the res extensa, no satisfactory reconciliation between the philosopher's subjective viewpoint and the scientist's objective one has been achieved. The key is to recognize that all physical phenomena are observed by creatures who are themselves tied to the biological world, its objectives and its evolution, and in this way attempt a synthesis between the philosophical and objective points of view.     We need to turn the world upside-down in order to understand it, and see the subjective includes not only what we sense, externally and internally, but also our motivations. Our needs and desires therefore constitute primary reality to us. In this real subjective processes of deduction and induction, though we can use reductionism to see what they make people do, and also to see what causes these needs in people. We do this by using the sciences of sociobiology and behaviourism. Our individual world, however, which is the true reality to each of us, is subjective. It is formed by the interaction between the subject and the observed object. Quantum theory arrives at the same answer: reality is discovered through the interaction of observer and observed object. What we perceive is the product of the interaction.
    To derive logical conclusions about the relationship between the subjective and objective worlds, and hence about the nature of reality, we therefore have to start from the subjective 0- what our senses tell us - and work outward from there. Only in this way can we discover the nature of the physical world and the meaning of that elusive term truth.
from Part II
Students of Homo must recognize their involved position
I am hungry. To me this is a statement of absolute truth. In the search for truth, how much wider is the range of statements that can be regarded as absolutely true?
    To unravel the real nature of the world - or otherwise expressed, to discover truths of immediate relevance to everyday life - one needs a different approach from the objective. As such a student, I have to recognize my place as an inhabitant of the very biological world which I am studying. I must see that the nature of both the observations and the conclusions that I make is governed by my essential character as a living thing. Because I live, I am not a disinterested observer of the world, and as an interested party, I am biassed. I have the in-built objective to reach conclusions - and indirectly to initiate actions - that will be favourable to myself, my relatives and my species. Even my sense-organs are so evolved as to give only information that is of use to me, as it has been to my ancestors, in the perpetual struggle for survival
    Scientists reason directly from the subjective, their source of information, to the real world, which they see as the physical world presented to them by their senses. The purpose of Parts II and III is to reason from the subjective through the biological, and thence to identify the nature of the real world. We have to understand the influence of biological considerations on ourselves as involved subjects.
from Part III
The frank realization that physical science is concerned
with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of
recent advances.
         A.S. Eddington
I am looking at a shop window on a cold, dark December evening. In the street everything is dim and obscure, but in the window gaily-coloured toys are picked out by many bright lights. In the middle of the window is a model railway, with three trains going round and round, obeying signals and remarkably, never running into each other on the intersections. But the window is not my world. My world is the dark street, where everything is vague and ill-defined; the window, which I can clearly see, is not my world.
    The shop window is like our conception of the physical world: bright and clearly-defined, governed by certain laws, predictable, completely objective and outside myself. Yet the real world in which we live is not like that. It is dominated by emotions and the need to survive. We are part of it and cannot see it clearly.
    The scientist's concepts are all built on a projection like the shop window which we have made and called the physical world. Knowledge acquired by science is totally objective and no matter how far-reaching it becomes, it is limited to that sphere. It does not touch upon the essential, motivated, vital world which is ourselves.
    Perhaps Santa Claus himself is sitting in the window. If so I can watch him and see how he reacts to children who talk to him. I can even knock on the window and talk to him myself to see how he responds. I am recognizing in him a being like myself, a fellow living-thing. But the only way I know of to study him is as with the inanimate things in the window - the objective method. I set aside all my own desires and aims, and see what Santa Claus does in given situations. The scientists who study things like Santa Claus are called biologists, and they use the same methods as those who study the movements of the train and other physical phenomena - fully objective and external to themselves.
Things that are known do not exist
Berkeley's position (to be is to be perceived) implies that actuality is identical with knowledge of it; there is no difference at all discernible to us - and no difference discernible to us is the same as no difference at all. John Barrow and Frank Tipler write: "An entity X is said to exist if it is possible, at least in principle, to observe it, or to infer it from observation of other entities. If it is claimed that X has, had and will have no influence whatever on anything we can possibly observe, then by definition X does not exist."     Ask yourself these questions:
If you had never been born, would the world be real to you? If nobody had ever been born, would the world be real? To whom? Is it possible for the world to be real without being real to anyone or any living thing? If so, what is its nature? Any nature you describe is expressed in terms of what your sense-organs can detect; therefore if nobody and no animal had been born nothing would have a nature that can be described. This is equivalent to saying that nothing would have a nature. In other words, nothing would exist. For this reason an observer is necessary for the world to exist. Conversely, to say that something exists is to say that it is detectable by someone. Finally, there is no difference between saying we do not know about something and saying it is non-existent.
    The justification for the Anthropic Principle, to be discussed in Chapter 7, is that because an observer is necessary for the existence of anything, the world could not exist unless it had evolved in such a way as to produce observers like ourselves.

Catalogue Information

Catalogue Information