Complexity vs. Humanocentricism
Two big obstacles to planetary biology have been that biology is an extremely complicated form of chemistry, and psychology is an extremely complicated form of biology.
A lot of people say that the fact that making the jump from chemistry to biology and biology to psychology is so difficult proves there’s more to life than chemistry. But that isn’t true. All that proves is that it’s hard for our brains to process all that information. Arguing that something must not be true just because we can’t perceive it is a completely humanocentric view of the world. Change a few words around and you’re arguing that the Earth must be flat just because one person can’t see the entire Earth at the same time.
A lot of people argue that it would be better if people didn’t try to study biology as chemistry, because it’s so hard that most people can’t do it. People have found a lot of other ways to think about life, so why don’t we just use those instead?
Simply put, trying to dumb down reality to make it easily understandable to the ignorant masses doesn’t work. America might be ruled by the will of the majority, but the universe isn’t. The universe works in one way, and one way only, because anything else would require the laws of physics to change spontaneously in different ways for different people. That’s humanocentricism once again.
If the laws of physics seem to change for different people, that raises the question: What’s making them change? What lies behind the changing effects you’re seeing? Once you observe that laws of physics seem to change, you have some observable evidence you can use to study how those effects change.
Scientists have already done all of that for everything in the known universe—and certainly as it affects us here on Earth. By this point, behind every effect that changes, laws that cause those effects and never themselves change have been discovered. A process that never changes is the definition of a scientific law.
The problem with non-scientific means of studying the universe is that our natural perceptions evolved to make us perceive the world the way that made us survive and reproduce best in the conditions of our evolution. Eagles can see a lot further than people can, and cats can see in the dark a lot better than people can, because each species’ eyesight evolved in whatever way worked best for the way they lived. And so far I’m only talking about physiology.
When you start studying how subjectivity affects psychology, you start discovering bigger and more abstract misperceptions. Like, 58% of people believing themselves to be above average. That’s a big clue that over the course of our evolution, high self-esteem was more helpful to people than accurately comparing themselves to their peers. It’s also a big clue that you can’t figure out how the entire universe works by intuition alone.
If you try to force a piece of a jigsaw puzzle into a place it doesn’t belong because that seems to you to be easier than finding the piece that actually does fit in that place, it will come back to haunt you, because that one wrong fit will make other pieces not fit.
So it goes for the entire universe. If you make a wrong fit just because it seems like making that fit is easier than figuring out the right fit, it always comes back to haunt you. One way or another, something you build on your wrong fit will lead you to two conclusions that are mutually exclusive, or to a conclusion that obviously is physically impossible.
For instance, if you decide that people are inherently good just because most people believe that people are inherently good and it’s easier to get them to listen to you by telling them that, and you like to believe that people are inherently good, sooner or later you’ll run into a situation that inherent human goodness can’t explain. Americans believe themselves to be inherently good, and the Soviets believed themselves to be inherently good. So how exactly did inherent human goodness produce the nuclear arms race?
At the time anyone makes any decision, they always feel at the most fundamental level that it’s the best decision they can make—because if they didn’t, they would make a different decision. How did inherent human goodness create our world history of wars, conquests, slavery, genocide, Crusades, Inquisitions, and witch-hunts? Every group of people who have ever fought a war against anyone else felt that their own side was right and the other side was wrong. Either one side was inherently good and the other side wasn’t, or they were both inherently good and a lot of inherently good people killed each other. Americans fought against the British in the American Revolution and the War of 1812, and were allies of the British in World War I and World War II. Does that mean that British people are inherently good 50% of the time?
You could say that people are inherently good but sometimes they make mistakes. But World War II lasted six years and killed over 50 million people. Why did it take so long for everyone to realize their mistake? Why didn’t the inherently good people who were fighting it look around them after they killed, say, one million people, and say, “Oh my gosh, what are we doing here? We just killed a million people!”
You could say that people are inherently good except for a few evil people who start wars. But if a few people aren’t inherently good, then no one is inherently good. The fact that a few people are not inherently good proves that goodness is not an inherent quality of the human race.
You could say that people are inherently good in their own ways. But now you’ve rendered your argument completely meaningless. Now you’ve defined everything that people do as being inherently good, including killing a million people.
You could say that people are inherently good but are tempted by forces of evil. Now you’ve relieved all responsibility from people for starting wars and transferred all the blame to a supernatural force that people have no control over. But people obviously do have the choice whether or not to start wars. The Americans and Soviets decided not to let the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan escalate into World War III.
You started out with an explanation of human behavior that was easy to get people to believe and that you wanted to be true. You ended up with an explanation of human behavior that’s completely useless for explaining why wars start and how we can prevent them in the future. How many more wars do you think people should have to fight just so you can go on believing what you want to believe?
It is true that explanations of how the universe works that are easy to understand are a lot more popular than ones that are hard to understand. The world will not be safe until the ignorant masses become the educated masses. That depends on someone finding a way to teach a version of science that’s simple enough for everyone to understand—as opposed to simplifying science to the point that it ceases to be science.
Thinking, believing, or feeling there must be more to life than chemistry, doesn’t prove you’re smart. It just proves you can afford to be dumb. The average Third-World peasant farmer knows more about biology than the average American, because peasant farmers spend all day working with plants and animals. That means the average peasant farmer knows more about how the world works than the average American does, but the biggest decisions that have the most effect on the world are made by Americans. That’s a serious problem.
If you’d prefer the peasant farmer version of this book, you’re welcome to read my book Zapatista University. But if you care more about proving how smart you are than you care about solving problems in the world, that book is so simple you probably won’t be able to understand it.