Book Review
Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions, Sabine Hossenfelder
(New York: Viking, 2022)
As usual, I begin a review of a book from the back panel and inner folds of the book jacket,1
as these provide insights into how other readers approached the narrative. From the back
panel we read:
Sabine Hossenfelder offers a radical and brand-new exploration of the limits and power
of scientific explanation to address the most pressing existential questions that strike to
the core of the essential curiosity that makes us humans in the first place [added
emphasis].
And from the inner fold:
A contrarian scientist wrestles with the big questions that modern physics raises, and
what physics says about the human condition [added emphasis].
While I have no credentials to evaluate the big questions that modern physics raises, I am a bit
conversant with the big questions surrounding the human condition, whether these concern
ethics (Spinoza), the ontology of Dasein (Heidegger), the vagaries of the unconscious
(Freud), the pathologies of capitalism (Marx), or the Human Condition proper (Arendt).2 So,
my “essential curiosity” came from, and focused on, such qualifiers as “Existential” and “Life.”
As a once card-carrying member of the existentialist club and currently alive (zoē), I
approached this book with optimism. Unfortunately, my existentialist being-in-the-world
(bios) was very quickly undermined from the very outset [pg. xv]3 by what appeared to be a
rather unphilosophical (i.e., epistemologically naïve) distinction: belief-based vs math-based
sense making. “When it comes to these questions…,” that is to say meta-physics, the author
pre-faces:
… physicists have learned a lot in the past century. Their progress makes clear that
the limits of science are not fixed; they move as we learn more about the world.
Correspondingly, some belief-based explanations that once aided sense making and
gave comfort are now known to be just wrong. The idea, for example, that certain
objects are alive because they are endowed with a special substance (Henri Bergson’s
“élan vital”) was entirely compatible with scientific facts two hundred years ago. But
it no longer is. [xv, emphasis added]
1
See my Zizek in Rear View: Four Vignettes, on academia.edu
2
In what follows, I will have occasion to return to what Hannah Arendt (the existentialist) in The
Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 2018) has to say about the physicist.
3
I will use square brackets [pg. x] to reference pages from the text under review.
Author: Jacques Mourrain, PhD
Page 1 of 16
My disappointment was not simply that the author was naively repeating an enlightenment
formulation of scientific progress and spirit (Plato himself drew that line in the
epistemological sand in his Republic). Perhaps I was naively taunted by the accolades (i.e.,
pressing existential questions at the core of existential curiosity), and the sub-title itself (i.e.,
life’s biggest questions) to simply be (ego) deflated in the very pre-face. I could not help but
think that had the term “Existential,” as qualifier in the title, been more philosophically
informed, the example that the author would have chosen to legitimate scientific and rational
progress (and its teleology), would have been better illustrated by deriding (or
deconstructing, i.e., Derrida-ing) Henri Bergson’s analysis of laughter (qua existentiell) as
opposed to simply fingering vitalism and its élan (enthousiasmós). As Bergson in a more
existentialist mood wrote:
The comic is that side of the person that reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of
human events which, through its particular inelasticity, conveys the impression of
pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life. Consequently, it
expresses an individual or collective imperfection which calls for an immediate
corrective. This corrective is laughter, a social gesture that singles out and represses
a certain kind of absentmindedness in men and events.4
The comic (ludic) responds or reacts to the mechanistic automatism of the human condition,
and its determinism: movement without Life (bios). Had laughter been the “existential”
example the author had chosen to ground the dichotomy “belief-based vs math-based sense
making” in order to position mathesis universalis as the driver (prime mover) of a scientific
telos, we would have had a more entertaining, that is more philosophical hence existential
discussion (e.g., bios vs zoē).5 A discussion that perhaps would not have so easily
discarded/discredited belief-based epistemology (more on this to follow).
Not that laughter is necessarily a special substance (proprium) of our humanity, no more
than being featherless or bipedal (Plato).6 However, “compatibility with facts” is not the
privileged domain of science. Or is it according to our author? For not too far in the text [pg.
5], when discussing that very existential concept of the “passage of time” (granted from the
non-existential perspective of a GPS satellite), she posits a straw man where small effects
(and perhaps a precursor to quantum effects that we will find repeated in Chapter 6) are said
to be “physically real” and not simply “philosophy.” Presumably the distinguishing mark (qua
4
Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (New York: MacMillen, 1911) pg.
87, emphasis added.
5
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press:
1998). “The Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word “life.” They used two
terms that, although traceable to a common etymological root, are semantically and
morphologically distinct: Zoē, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings
(animal, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual
or group” (pg. 1).
6
Here I am visualizing the movie Quest for Fire (1981) where a story is told about the discovery
of laughter (among other things like the missionary position), which emerges out of a very
existential concept of being-with and thrownness (in this case a stone on the head).
Author: Jacques Mourrain, PhD
Page 2 of 16
distinction) between physis and philos is meant to echo the above opposition between mathbased (máthēsis) and belief-based (pistis) sense making, where mathematics becomes the
guarantor of the reality principle (even when reality is only manifest in principle… more on
this to follow).
While I am not one to judge a book by its cover (even though it is my starting point: T0), I
became suspicious that the qualifier “Existential,” and the use of corresponding terms such
as “life” and “human condition,” had more to do with physis than philos. If only the author,
had seriously entertained the philosophical question “What is Real?” as opposed to positing
reality without question, perhaps some interesting thoughts might have followed. In fact, in
a book by that very title, Agamben exposed the philos in physis. Regarding the “Orthodox”
view of Quantum Mechanics, he observes:
For both the supporters of the orthodox theory and its critics, the state of the system
before and after observation is not a real but a probabilistic state; however, they seem
to produce a representation of this state and argue as if probability were a very
special kind of reality, which one can think only in a paradoxical way (for example, as
if a particle were at the same time in both state A and state B). But is it correct to
represent the probable as if it were something that exists?7
To what extent is probability (and by meta-physical extension possibility or dynamis) an
aspect of the Real (energeia)? Or is the probable more real than real? Hyper-real, perhaps,
through ontological virtualization or sublimation (i.e., mathematization)? But I am getting
ahead of myself and do not wish to paint the author (at this early juncture) as a “reductionist
hard-liner,” for this she has explicitly disavowed [pg. 83]. Nor do I believe she adopts a
classical position vis-à-vis mathesis universalis (à la Descartes or Leibnitz) or even
methodologically invested in a more geometricus (à la Spinoza). For she acknowledges that,
among her colleagues, “the belief…” [remember that word as it will re-appear] “…that reality
is math is deeply ingrained into the thinking of many physicists who treat mathematics as a
timeless realm of truth that we reside in. It is common for textbooks and papers to state that
space-time is a particular mathematical structure and particles are certain mathematical
objects.” To which she adds that “Physicist may not consciously…” [remember that word also]
“subscribe to the idea that math is real and when asked will deny it, but in practice they do not
distinguish the two” [pg. 20]. But it is not only physicists that “unconsciously believe” in the
transcendence of mathematic. A brand of philosophy curiously labelled speculative
materialism also imagines it can escape the hinc et nunc (that special place of existentialism)
through mathematical formulations. One such philosopher (Badiou) was able to construct a
whole ontology from the null set.8 Another believes to escape (Kantian) subjectivism, and
idealism generally, by projecting knowledge claims beyond the realm of human space-time
(i.e., in the past before humans existed and into the future where none will exist), thus
banishing language in order to escape into the hors-texte.9 This philosopher (Meillassoux)
7
Giorgio Agamben, What is Real? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), pgs. 27-28.
8
Alain Badiou, Being and Event (New York: Continuum, 2006).
9
This misunderstood expression by Derrida has been taken to mean that there is no existence
(being) outside the narrative (and language), a radical subjectivism and anthropomorphism
Author: Jacques Mourrain, PhD
Page 3 of 16
has great faith in both science and mathematics, and attaches his faith in science’s ability to
“describe a world where humanity is absent.”10 In his quest for the infinite, Meillassoux
attempts to deconstruct the privileged position of the thinking subject by positing a “spacetime anterior to the spacio-temporal forms of representation. To think this ancestral space time
is thus to think the conditions of science and also to revoke the transcendental.11 At first blush,
this “ancestrality” does not appear to be anything more than the fields of history, archeology,
or further in time, cosmology. Yet these fields or disciplines, he argues, merely rely on a precritical “co-relation” between subject and object (or the thing-itself and its representation,
matter and mind, etc.). His own proposed transcendence (i.e., overcoming) of the
transcendental spirit (of idealism and dualism) is a grounding in mathematics. He posits that
ancestrality (and presumably “progenality,” my imagined term not his) poses a fundamental
epistemological challenge to philosophy that only science and its mathematical re-solutions
can overcome. I cite at length the text since I do not wish to establish a strawman between
reality and philosophy (from the very outset):
To that end, we must once more emphasize what is truly at stake in what we shall
henceforth call the “problem of ancestrality.” Our question was the following: what
are the conditions under which an ancestral statement remains meaningful? But as
we have seen, this question harbors another one, which is more originary, and which
delivers its veritable import, to wit: how are we to conceive of the empirical sciences’
capacity to yield knowledge of the ancestral realm? For what is at stake here, under
the cover of ancestrality, is the nature of scientific discourse, that is its mathematical
form. Thus, our question becomes: how is mathematical discourse able to describe a
world where humanity is absent; a world crammed with things and events that are
not the correlates of any manifestation; a world that is not the correlate of a relation
to the world.12
One can easily imagine here the chicken/egg conundrum: A world “crammed with things and
events” (the egg) that is not a “correlate of a relation to the world” (the chicken). But these
scientific minded philosophers appear to forget that mathematics is a human (featherless
biped) construct initiated (in the West) by Pythagoras who himself believed it to be the
foundation of the universe. Archimedes, Euclid, Descartes, Pascal, Newton, Leibnitz (to name
a few up to the scientific revolution) all framed the calculus of the universe. Yet the
mathematical construct or frame (of reference), despite the fact that it discloses the existence
of a time before Pythagoras and imagines, anticipates, or projects one after humanity, does
not make mathesis universalis a de-historicized (objective), extra-human construct, nor are
(Being). Rather the intent, I believe, was to indicate that there was no outside the narrative itself
from which to establish an interpretation (e.g., intentionality). A similar claim was made by
Spinoza, when God lost its transcendental characteristics in favor of a deus sive natura.
10
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (London: Bloomsbury, 2009).
11
Ibid, pg. 26.
12
Ibid, emphasis added.
Author: Jacques Mourrain, PhD
Page 4 of 16
its conclusions (solutions) sempiternal. 13 It is as if mathematics was a found-object, whether
transcendental as it was for Descartes, or contingent as it is for Badiou or Meillassoux. As if
the “hors-texte” could be experienced by transferring words into numbers. So, we will ask
our contrarian scientist: What would be the requisite escape velocity (ve) needed to cross
(leap) the abyss (ab-grund) without a leap of faith (ab-sprung) in mathesis universalis? This
is the question I hope to unearth as a matter of fact or inversely as the facts of matter (hyle).
If I was not to be satisfied by a philosophically oriented approach to nature,14 nor an
existentially informed commentary on the human condition, at least I would be able to
uncover the underlying or foundational (grund) essence of beings (what matters). This
would be my new orientation to a reading of Existential Physics, in so far as it reflected the
noun phrase Quantum Physics, or Nuclear Physics, or Astro Physics, where “Existential”
simply circumscribes the field of inquiry: a physics for things alive (zoē).
After a few pre-liminaries, that is to say discussions that set the stage of the debate, we enter
in what I (among Others) consider to be a truly existential inquiry: what it is to be human.15
Philosophers have for millennia entertained this quest(ion), whether this took the form of a
featherless biped (Plato) or a zoon politikon (Aristotle), to Fichte’s I and Heidegger’s Dasein,
or to Sartre’s no-thing-ness. So what would a physicist propose to this most pressing
existential question? Her answer is: “Carbon alone makes up about 18 percent of the human
body… nitrogen (3 percent),… calcium (1.5 percent) and phosphorus (1 percent) and tiny doses
of potassium, sulfur, sodium and magnesium. And that’s about it. That’s what humans are:
pretty much indistinguishable collections of chemical elements” [pg. 80]. And furthermore, this
combination of elements is simply an external manifestation and accidental conflagration of
what is truly ab-original and “essential”: the atom. “The universe didn’t start out with chemical
elements in place” [pg. 80] much less the human combinatorial. Now this “foundationalism”
or “essentialism,” which scientifically guarantees the transformation from energy, to atoms,
to molecules, to cells, to the human brain, and eventually to imagination, thought, and
consciousness is not to be considered a “reductionism,” or for that matter any formal “-ism,”
13
And perhaps, has Arendt noted, “…the famous reductio scientiae mathematicam permits
replacement of what is sensuously given by a system of mathematical equations where all real
relationships are dissolved into logical relations between man-made symbols. It is this replacement
which permits modern science to fulfill its ‘task of producing’ the phenomena and objects it wishes
to observe.” The Human Condition, op. cit. pg. 284.
14
To be fair the author does introduce Carnap’s (philosopher) discussion with Einstein (scientist)
regarding the “problem of the now,” but chastises Einstein for seeking philosophical advice
regarding what is truly a quantum mechanical and entropy calculus. But asking a logical
positivist to comment on Being and Time (Heidegger) or Being and Nothingness (Sartre), is
tantamount to asking a scientist to interpret a poem or a dream. Perhaps a better example of
the tension between mind and matter would have been the exchange between Jean-Pierre
Changeux (scientist) and Paul Ricoeur (a philosopher) in What Makes Us Think: A Neuroscientist
and a Philosopher Argue About Ethic, Human Nature, and the Brain (Princeton Univ. Press, 2000).
On this exchange see my Vignette 4 – Zizek’s pickled brain in a vat (academia.edu).
15
While interesting to introduce the impact of entropy on organic systems, I do not consider “is my
grandma still alive?” or “why am I not getting younger?” existential questions, much less worthy
of philosophizing.
Author: Jacques Mourrain, PhD
Page 5 of 16
a label the author explicitly rejects. It is simply “fact” or based (grounded) in factoids. These
factoids, with the help of complex “mathematical skill and computational tools” ensure that
(human) Being is not more than the sum of its (chemical) parts. And the author is of the
strong belief [that word again] that “if we had a big enough computer, nothing would prevent
us from simulating a brain atom by atom” [pg. 83].16 And this strong belief is based on a metaphysics, one that is felt in the GUT. For only from within the church of Grand Unification
Theory, can this metaphysical principal be promulgated and its future prophesized. Even
when there are no present facts that connect the dots, the leap of faith must be maintained.
Without it (faith) one is “subject” to the anomie that “no-thing-ness” brings: nausea,
existential angst. The emergence of thought (and language) from the brain, or proteinic
structures from the cellular, and a cell from its atomic constituents is, however, in “fact”
mathematically too difficult [pg. 86]. “But it does not matter for our purposes whether or not
we can actually perform the calculation that connects the deep level with the high level. We are
interested here only in what we can learn from the structure of natural laws” [pg. 87]. For it
does not matter that we cannot “actually perform the calculation,” that we cannot currently
get there from here, because “in principle” the laws (nomos) tell us we should (normative).
We can actually trace this paradigm shift--from the ontological and descriptive to the
epistemological and prescriptive--in the 17th century, when philosophy was in its scientific
infancy adopting a mechanistic model of the universe. The belief that everything “emerges”
from foundational laws linking the deeper level (quantum mechanical) to the higher levels
(the sociological) is not deterred by the absence of a unified and coherent mechanism of
action, even one that would be grounded in a unified mathematics. The “challenge you have
to meet” the author proclaims, if you think otherwise (fundamentalism, dualism, relativism),
is to explain lower level behaviors (the micro) from higher level ones (the macro). But that
is a false challenge, “emerging” from the frame of the unification church. Why persist (despite
the evidence) to seek the universal, the Absolute, or the continuum? Even with such
admissions as in the “derivation of the effective model you throw away information for good.
This usually happens in the mathematics by taking some parameter to infinity, or equivalently,
by discarding small corrections” [pg. 86, added emphasis], the faith is not shaken. Despite
such admissions as “The Mathematics” itself is not unified [pg. 75], this will not divert the
proclamation that “to the best current evidence the world is reductionist [pg. 89].” But is it the
world or is it the mathematical objects that, in the mirror phase, reflect reality?
If I am indistinguishable (scientifically) from Pol Pot or Idi Amin, what reason is there to live,
or perhaps what is the Reason (logos) for living (bios). That is the existential physics at issue,
16 On this point our contrarian physicist could learn from a contrarian phenomenologist, who in an
article titled “Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing it Would Require Making it More
Heideggerian,” explained that: “Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of embeddedembodied coping, therefore, is not that the mind is sometimes extended into the world but rather that,
in our most basic way of being-i.e., as skillful copers-we are not minds at all but one with the world.
Heidegger sticks to the phenomenon, when he says that, in its most basic way of being, ‘Dasein is its
world existingly.’ (To make sense of this slogan, it’s important to be clear that Heidegger distinguishes
the human world from the physical universe.). Hubert Dreyfus Skillful Coping: Essays on the
phenomenology of everyday perception and action (Oxford University Press, 2014), pg. 259.
Author: Jacques Mourrain, PhD
Page 6 of 16
or in the terms of Jean-Luc Nancy: a Sexistence. Echoing Agamben’s distinction of zoē and
bios, Nancy elaborates on the (human) conditions of Life.
It is somewhat like what the French language allows one to say with the verb vivre or
in German with leben: one can “live,” without complement, that is be alive, or one can
“live an adventure,” that is go on an adventure, be carried off on an adventure,
experience the contingencies, the risks, and the emotions that it has to offer. On this
model, we might attempt to say that “being” in and through an adventure is precisely
to live it; and that being this or that, no matter what it happens to be, is not a matter
of attributing a predicate to a subject (for example, “I am alive”) but rather of living-or practicing or investing or putting into play, mobilizing, taking, gathering or
welcoming, inviting, pushing, impelling that which cannot be an attribute without
always also being an allure, a coming, an exposition, an excess beyond what would be
a pure being-this-thing---which precisely would not be but rather would subsist in
inertia (not to say in entropy, in a release from what makes it be). 17
Here, Life is de-scribed as an adventure, a risk, and contingent, not articulated via the
structure of the natural laws that explicate beings that subsist in inertia and subject to the
Second Law (of thermodynamics); but rather as subject to the (fictive) Third Law of
cybernetics, i.e., to protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with
the First or Second Law (do not harm and obey). Can emergence out of the primordial soup,
that which created the foundational compounds of organic existence, explain Life as an
adventure? Or will information be thrown away for good in order for the math to re-solve?
Will “coarse grain modelling” allow us (as does language) to attain a humanity, a human
condition, with the appropriate re-solution, viz., one that can distinguish Mother Teresa
(magnificent) from Pol Pot (maleficent)? Or will the “decoupling of scales” problematizing
emergence and its effective reductions? Can we get there (the macro-logical) from here (the
micro-logical) without a leap of faith inside the universe of probabilities?
But as I said at the outset (rhetoric aside), I should avoid the risk of painting the author as a
radical reductionist (as I have so far done). It is not the reduction to more essential
components that enables a scientific explanation of the Existential (although an important
methodology). My difference from Pol Pot is not merely attributable to atomic spin. “Your
you-ness,” the author re-minds us, “whatever exactly it is,” she hedges, “emerges from the
configuration of the particles you are constituted of” [pg. 91]; and what “…we care about is the
arrangement of the components” [pg. 92]. No simple reductionism here, but rather a
structure or arrangements of constituents / components across the decoupling of scales
(from the subatomic to the planetary) is what makes us human, defines our identity, and our
difference. If the author was a realist, she told us, she would be a “structural realist,” but she
is not [pg. 76]. So, what are we to make of the bold claims regarding the most pressing
existential questions half way through the narrative? To this point we have a distinction
between belief and science, a false dichotomy pitting philosophy and reality, an ontological
commitment to factoids, a methodological investment in a symbolic language, a strong belief
in unification across registers (scales), and an inability to differentiate between living (zoē)
17
Jean-Luc Nancy, Sexistence (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2021), pg. 59 emphasis added.
Author: Jacques Mourrain, PhD
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and Life (bios). But I must press on, for I assume these trifles are simply preliminaries: hors
d’oeuvres (that is to say outside the main points or work of the text): The mise en place for
the meal to come.
I skip what are un-existential exchanges [pgs. 95-123], or in the author’s words “intellectual
entertainment” [pg. 123], and in my opinion philosophically un-entertaining questions about
multiple universes (also entertained by Leibnitz) and the simulacra (extensively exposed by
Baudrillard), and I turn to that truly existential question regarding free will18 (Chapter 6).
Has physic ruled out free will, we are asked? The question of free will is as old as philosophy
itself.19 But the question framed here (in Chapter 6) appears however to be disingenuous,
as the author does not accept the terms of engagement (free will) nor the perspective on the
topic. In fact, another straw man is erected in order to deconstruct the very foundation of the
question. Just like the straw man framed earlier between philosophy and reality, now
philosophers are pitted against, what Plato referred to as, the hoi polloi (οἵ πολλοί), or in her
words (perhaps as “uncharitable” [pg. 125]), the “normal people.” But this semantic (or
Freudian) slippage, this very distinction collapses (a form of de-coherence or internal logical
contraction) merely six pages later, when she adresses “normal people-sorry, I mean
philosophers” [pg. 131]. Are normal people and philosophers caught in a hermeneutic circle,
without enough excitation energy to break free? Has philosophy and idle talk (gerede)
converged, collapsed, co-joined on the discursive exitentiell?
So how do scientists uncover (alethea) normal(ized) thinking? Of course! the survey
research, which the author turns to as conclusive evidence of the “problematics” of the
compatibility of free will and determinism: “A 2019 survey of more than five thousand
participants, [the hoi polloi?], from twenty-one countries found that ‘across cultures,
participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection [philosophers?] were more likely to view
free will as incompatible with causal determinism.’ It seems we weren’t born to be
compatibilist” [pg. 131] so she happily concludes.20 Since this “survey research” is not
formally cited (not that it would matter), we can only be impressed by the Bayesian
proposition (five thousand participants) that leads, logically and ineluctably, to the
conclusion that the tension between free will and determinism is an either-or proposition
18
I follow the author’s practice of putting the term in suspension [bracketing, epoché] by using
italics for the term in contention.
19
There is debate as to whether the Greeks had a developed concept of will, or whether the
concept only emerged at the time of Augustine. On this topic see Aristotle’s Theory of the Will,
Anthony Kenny (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
laws of statistics,” explains Arendt, “are valid only where large numbers or long periods are
involved, and acts or events can statistically appear only as deviations and fluctuations. The
justification of statistics is that deeds and events are rare occurrences in everyday life and in
history. Yet the meaningfulness of everyday relationships is disclosed not in everyday life but in rare
deeds, just as the significance of a historical period shows itself only in the few events that
illuminate it. The application of the law of large numbers and long periods to politics and history
signifies nothing less than the willful obliteration of their very subject matter.” The Human
Condition, op. cit., pg. 42.
20 “The
Author: Jacques Mourrain, PhD
Page 8 of 16
(and innate). How could one argue with the shear scientificity21 of a survey of this magnitude?
But the author’s inability to come to a mathematical re-solution to this existentialist (and
essentially philosophical, i.e., ethical) concept of free will, and her corresponding
bewilderment as a physicist, does not necessarily entail that “it doesn’t matter just how you
define free will; it will still derive from the microscopic behavior of particles—because
everything does” [pg. 131]. Or does it (even when framed mathemagically): Either Bayesian
(law of large numbers) or Boolean (either-or)? Is free will what remains when re-solving
three unknowns with two equations? As we leap from one S curve to the next? Without a
safety net!
In the absence of a resolution, the author reluctantly confesses “the need to express
mathematics in words to make it accessible, which is why [she]… used metaphors for
superpositions…” when pressed for time (and presumably space) [pg. 106]. But metaphors
(and other tropes such as synecdoche, analogy, metonymy, irony, and paradox) are never
satisfied with superpositions, they are parasitic, and indifferent to time and space.22 For
example, the practice of repetition, used by many rhetors and sophists, provides a sense
(impression, not meaning) of ineluctability. In this chapter (six) the author repeats (over a
half-dozen times): “But the future is still fixed except for occasional quantum events that we
cannot influence” [pg. 130]. This repetition, as if a final word or stance, finds its counter point
(paradoxically) in the laws of nature herself: “The laws of nature don’t work that way [future
contingency]. For the most part, there is really only one path, because quantum effects rarely
manifest themselves macroscopically” [pg. 126, added emphasis]. Quantum effects rarely
manifest themselves macroscopically, just as Bayesian logic cannot predict the next throw of
a die, nor a survey research establish the meaning of the term free will (only what 5000
people think about it). But determinism is determined and the “relation between the deeper
and higher level doesn’t go away just because we don’t know how to solve the equations that
relate them” [pg. 132]. And engaging the hyperbolic and hypothetical, the author finally
confesses, that “it could be that the derivation of the macroscopic behavior from the
microphysics fails for another reason. It could be that in the calculation we run into a
singularity beyond which we just cannot continue-neither in practice nor in principle” [pg. 132,
emphasis added]. It could be that our author is stuck in what Leibniz coined as the “labyrinth
of the continuum:” when we “… confuse ideal with real substances when we seek for actual
parts in the order of possible, and indeterminate parts in the aggregate of actuals, and so
entangle ourselves in the labyrinth of the continuum and in inexplicable contradictions.”23
21
Here I am echoing Roland Barthe’s neologism Italianicity (uncited reference).
22
Perhaps we should also be reminded of Hannah Arendt’s 1958 warning “that the ‘truths’ of the
modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and
proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and
thought… If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and
thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so
much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget
which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.” The Human Condition, op. cit., pg. 3.
23
Leibniz in a letter to Des Bosses (1706) as cited by J.E. McGuire in “Labyrinthus Continuui:
Leibniz on Substance, Activity, and Matter,” in Motion and Time, Space and Matter, Peter
Machamer and Robert Turnbull eds. (Ohio State University Press, 1976), pg. 309.
Author: Jacques Mourrain, PhD
Page 9 of 16
Quantum events we cannot influence, linkages between deep structure and surface structure
we cannot calculate,24 a singularity we cannot think beyond,25 and yet that “could be” (in its
immanent possibility). These slight of hands are no deterrent to determinism or the author’s
faith. From the author’s perspective, the question of free will is best left to the masses to
ponder (as non-sense), is an either-or proposition (Boolean) according to scientific survey
research (Bayesian), and conflicts with the “laws of Nature” (as mathematically un-resolvable). The fact that the quantum physicists cannot think beyond the fork in the road, is
that they have no language (or mathematics) for expressing the impossibility or the
improbable incalculability of an event (e.g., me here before this UI). The groundwork for this
improbable incalculably is presented (by the author on pg. 126) with a rather improbable
example of a quantum particle appearing on a driver’s windshield causing an accident on the
highway. The trivial nature of this example, of course leads to a dismissiveness that the fork
in the road could lead to a multiverse, discounted earlier as a “science compatible belief
system” [pg. 113]. Perhaps the road accident that took the life of Diana (Princess of Whales)
might be a more illustrative example of the contingency of life events (which I will flag as
free will for the purpose of argument). If indeed we imagine forks in the road on a life event
horizon as singularities whose future we cannot calculate because we cannot “see beyond
the de-scissions we do not understand” (information-loss), because the totality of singular
per-mutations (forks in the road) is infinite (or rather indefinite). In the case of Diana,
Baudrillard tells us, and the event on the Pont de l”Alma (space) on August 31, 1997 (time),
a series “should not have taken place for it not to occur.”26 The double negative here is
important as it is designed to exclude all of the possible per-mutations in her life trajectory
(from July 1, 1961) within the context of existence (event horizon qua history), whose
Probability of Technical Success approaches zero: F(x) where XPTS-D -> 0. To solve this
(différance) equation, we would need to “…assess all that would have had not to have
happened for the event not to have taken place” (ibid). For example:
There would have had to have been no Pont de l’Alma, and hence no battle of the
Alma. There would have had to have been no Mercedes, and hence no German car
company whose founder had a daughter named Mercedes. No Dodi and no Ritz, nor
all the wealth of the Arab princes and the historical rivalry with the British. The
British Empire itself would have had to have been wiped from history. So everything
24
The reference here is to Chomsky, a devout Cartesian, who attempted to bridge the gaps of
language (syntax and semantics) by avoiding tropes. He too ran out of computational power
when engaging existence. Perhaps the reason he turned to politics.
25
The reference here is to the Oracle in the film The Matrix who could not see beyond the decision
that she did not understand. The author cannot understand the terms (and conditions), as well
as their implications to ethics, that “free will” engages as an existentiell.
26
Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, Trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2001), pg. 136. The
full citation is: “The event, therefore, is itself unreal, since it is made up of all that should not have
taken place for it not to occur. And as a result, thanks to these negative probabilities, it produces
and incalculable effect. Such are the lineaments of a Fate-based analysis, an unrealist analysis of
unreal events. And the death of Diana is an unreal event.”
Author: Jacques Mourrain, PhD
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combines, a contrario and in abstentia, to demonstrate the urgent necessity of this
death.27
The event is that which remains after all possible multiverse have been excluded, where the
probability of occurrence of each alternate event in potentia has reached zero.
The dream of a total world of information has its opposite in the universe wholly
made up of elective affinities and coincidences--not an accidental world, but a
predestined one, since the coincidence is the opposite of the accident. In effect what
can not happen (if the probability is zero) in a sense must happen. It is one or the
other: probable or certain. If it has no serious reason not to happen, every event must
succumb to the urgent necessity of occurring… All events will eventually take place:
they are there in potentia. That potentia, that power of things longing to appear, is
beyond our grasp. But it underlies that sense of a priori certainty that something
must happen.28
The deterministic dream of the totalized world of calculable events, where the “future is still
fixed except for occasional quantum events that we cannot influence” [Chapter 6 multiple
instances], “underlies that sense of a priori certainty that something must happen:” A
retrospective optics that confirms the ineluctability of a fait accompli. When a subject at
speed obstructs an object (like the Pont de l’Alma), its (large) object-ness takes over where
mass (m), velocity (v), momentum (p), force (F) and energy (E), and their interrelated
equations, prevail. No thought, imagination, creativity, no bios can alter the outcome.
However, bios intervenes in the de-scission to marry the Prince of Whales, have children, go
on tour, meet Arab playboys, with all the potentia and “longings to appear.” When the
potential (dynamis) becomes actualized (energeia) at a singularity (like a wedding at St
Paul's Cathedral), the probability of alternate realities reaches zero, and another branch is
consummated. The fact that something becomes somehow (quelconque)29 is itself not
sufficient for the universal affirmation of determinism in its calculative rationality.
“If free will doesn’t make sense, why then do so many people feel it describes how it goes about
their evaluations? [pg. 127].30 To answer this very existential question (re. feelings,
impressions, intuition), the author has us stare at an optical illusion [pg. 133] as if this could
change our optics on the question. As if our “impression” of free will could be deconstructed
by simply pointing to the very limitation of our senses, as did the 17th century scientists who
reminded the hoi polloi that the sun was in “Reality” larger than it appeared. I would think
that in the 21st century, scientific explanation would have evolved to rely less on analogy, the
rhetoric of repetition, sociological research in scientific journals bordering on opinion polls,
or citations from paragons of science (Crick) meant to elicit “impressions” [pg. 140]. The fact
that behavior can be explained anecdotally through inter-generational trauma [pg. 136], that
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid, emphasis added.
29
Clément Rosset, Le Réel: Traité de l'idiotie (Edition Minuit, 1977): “All reality in necessarily
somehow (quelconque).”
30
To cite the cyberneticist in iRobot: “That is the correct question!”
Author: Jacques Mourrain, PhD
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“birds of a feather flock together,” that “you marry your mother,” or any similar folk wisdom
[gerede] does not explain away freedom, indeterminacy, incommensurability, or undecidability. Nor does a retreat in physicality, materiality, and reduction (like in a sauce),
offer us a deeper structure. “Because the physical part of our brain is demonstrably the thing
we use to make decisions, I don’t see what one gains in believing in a non-physical free-will…
[pg. 134, emphasis added for quantum effect], she contends. Neurology has indeed explained
the res cogitans in greater micro-logical detail (at the cellular level) but has yet31 to penetrate
the cogitationes. Materialist reductions, presented here in the form of a que sais-je?
(Montaigne), does not allow us to see beyond the unintelligible decisions, beyond the un-resolvable singularity. But: “You are welcome to use a little loophole in the derivation from
microphysics that I detailed earlier,” she offers me, “[t]hough I suspect that if you tell someone
you think free will is real because the renormalization group equations might run into an
essential singularity, you might as well paint GEEK on your forehead” [pg. 134]. In other
writings (op. cit. re. Zizek) I have risked the label of Sophist, so the tattoo GEEK, or for me I
would write it G(r)EEK, is exactly what I am proposing. The author herself provided the
fodder: The incompleteness of her argument (Gödel), the uncertainty of the re-solution
(Heisenberg), the discontinuity between micro-macro (Mandelbrot), these are more than
loopholes; they are the holes themselves (in black and white), through which one cannot
experiment (other than of the gedenken type, and in principle). Yet the author stubbornly
(resolutely) concludes in the form of a “brief answer” to her problem of/with free will:
“According to currently established laws of nature, the future is determined by the past, except
for occasional quantum events that we cannot influence.32 Whether you take that to mean that
free will does not exist depends on your definition of free will” [pg. 141]. The simple fact that
the future is determined by the past is self-evident in hind-sight (20-20 to continue with
optics), it is a necessity (Spinoza), the best of all possibilities in a world (Leibnitz), it is what
the math tells us as its solution (fait accompli). But that is its limitation not its ineluctable
conclusion.
The next two chapters “7 - Was the Universe Made for Us?” and “8 - Does the Universe
Think?” are more theological than existential in nature, so I will gloss over their “potential
input” into the review at hand or the object before us [gegenstand]: Subjectivity, existence,
humanity, βίος. The anthropic principle, the proposition that the universe exists (effect)
because of carbon based life (cause), is entertained by physicist in two forms: The strong and
the weak, like the nuclear force, but in this case the force of an argument. The strong
argument can be discounted de jure as inherently theological: “It’s a practical problem: life is
difficult to define, it is even more difficult to quantify…” [pg. 164]. But Life (bios), for our
author, is simply 1 of 26 constants associated with equations that affirm the 25 elementary
particles and 4 forces (only 3 of which resolve), driven by the prime mover PLA (Principle of
Least Action). The path of least resistance (PLR) in this argument (numerology aside), “is to
decouple ontological reductionism from theory reductionism” [pg. 164]. Let the numbers land
where they may! “But is there such a thing as a theory that leaves no questions unanswered?”
31
The futurist punctuation here is in anticipation of the computing machine that will s(t)imulate
the human brain in its computational (cogitationes) prowess and resolve algorithmically the
meaning of life, which hopefully will not be 42.
32
I stopped counting the number of times this caveat emptor was introduced in the chapter.
Author: Jacques Mourrain, PhD
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[pg. 167]. Thomas Kuhn answered that question in his Structures of Scientific Revolutions:33
Answers to questions can only be resolved with the terms (quantitative and qualitative) that
define the question as a Question (epistemologically speaking). What we observe is always
already framed (perhaps in the full sense of that term), within the meta-physical initial
conditions (even numerological ones), viz., paradigma, which sets the questioning in motion
(qua prime mover). Whether we call this a hermeneutic circle, a correlation, or an
entanglement does not change the rules of the theoretical game. Keeping the theories “…
that agree with observations and toss[ing] the rest” [pg. 167] simply limits the observable
(that which shows itself - paradigma). But humanity is the noise in this equation, the “ghost
in the machine,” and tossing out the noise to solve the equation in order to align with
observation is a meta-physical de-scission. Granted one that has had many impressive effects
since the scientific revolution (to which I will concede shortly).
“As I mentioned earlier dualism isn’t wrong, but if mind is separate from matter, it has no effect
on the reality we perceive; hence it’s clearly an ascientific idea” [pg. 184]. The question (of
dualism) is here articulated around “separateness,” “distinction,” or “difference.” We have
already witnessed throughout the book (in review) many instantiations of separateness,
whether these distinctions are manifest as incompletely resolvable scales, coarse-grained
modelling, differences in the force (non-unification), or the separateness of varying
mathematical models that attempt to make sense of the world (each with its own internal
consistency). The separation of mind and matter, should only alarm the radical empiricist
whose reductio ad infinitum is designed to re-affirm facticity, materiality, and the solace of a
unitarian reality (the One, the Absolute). But to claim that aesthetics, ethics, politics, or
culture do not matter, or do not manifest themselves materially is a reductio ad absurdum.
Of course, thoughts display themselves chromatically in a CAT scan, and materialize
themselves through language (a physical medium) or mathematically (a symbolic language),
and even find their way on paper or electrons (as pdfs). But, reducing thinking, awareness,
or consciousness to a numeric value (F) does not bridge the gap between mind and matter
(brain), it is simply a measurement. Moreover, simply simulating fear and anxiety in the
brain (or suppressing it pharmacologically) does not mean “consciousness has left the realm
of philosophy” and is now science [pg. 190].34 Such simulations and stimulations may create
linkages between ontologies, between scales, between theoretical models, but this is very far
from causal reduction to the atomic level. What I am about to type (next), on this page, hinc
et nunc, is not awaiting a synapse to fire, but a thought to emerge. The fact that this thought
relies on chemical storage (memory), does not explain the thought I am about to reveal… or
not. Moreover, the fact that I am predictable “for group averages” [pg. 190], along the
Bayesian curve of normalcy (within one or more standard deviations) or via social or
political research, is no solution to the deviancy of identity, to its ideotes, to its singularity to
cite Clement Rosset again.
33
Thomas Kuhn, Structures of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
34
This point (and additional examples) is better articulated by Paul Ricoeur in his exchange with
neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux in What Makes Us Think: A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher
Argue About Ethic, Human Nature, and the Brain (Princeton Univ. Press, 2000).
Author: Jacques Mourrain, PhD
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In (the) lieu of a Conclusion
Finally, the author concludes her foray into an existentialist physics with the following
(literally) last words: “So, yes, we are a bag of atoms crawling around on a pale blue dot in the
outer spiral arm of a remarkably unremarkable galaxy. And yet we are so much more than this”
[pg. 223]. We must read this conclusion with the irony it elicits (perhaps unintentionally…
but that is the fate of intentionality), since the “much more than this that we are” was never
entertained in the 200 or so pages preceding this conclusion. There was never a concession
or confession to this excess, to this remainder, only a brief allusion to the “rest” [167] which
was discarded as problematic. So instead (au lieu), it is my turn to celebrate this unthought
(and unthinkable) in the Existential Physics within the space (lieu) of a conclusion.
In the space of this review, my purpose was not to deny science its accolades (Nobel prizes),
or deny its progress in the realm of understanding (qua technology and know-how). Ever
since Pascal, through his detailed and painstaking experimentation, deflated Aristotle’s
metaphysical proposition that “nature abhors a vacuum,” science has flourished in the realm
of “material science and biomedicine” [pg. 167]. Who can deny the sublimity of a mushroom
cloud (especially when no life is in proximity)? Or not be impressed by the transformative
nature of cellular technology (in the dual sense of the term)? Or surprised at the ability to
recreate Black Holes in a laboratory at the micro-logical scale? But the fact that “we always
have been, and always will be, children of the universe” [pg. 69] does not explain what it means
to be a child, even if we know with mathematical precision (in light years) what is a
“universe.” To claim that “biology is ultimately based on physics” [pg. 68] does not entail “that
subjectivity can well be described by mathematics” [pg. 65]. That physics (esp. quantum
particles) is at the foundation of large objects, say as described by chemistry and biology,
does not resolve the in-commutability or un-computability that is foundational to the
“decoupling of scales.” Occasionally, “getting there from here” requires a leap of faith. And,
as the author did for her discussion on free will, I too will also summon Nietzsche to this
debate.
Those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by
the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and
history; and in so far as they affirm thus “other world”-look, must they not by the
same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world. But you will have gathered
what I am driving at, that is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith of science
rests…35
Indeed, in order to be true to the science of the observable, in order to describe the universe
Sub specie aeternitatis (i.e., under an aspect of eternity and universally valid laws of nature),
our scientist must disavow “this world, our world,” must “throw away information for good…
by taking some parameter to infinity, or equivalently, by discarding small corrections” [pg. 86].
Thus we find the pretense of the mathematician to produce an objective knowledge
is defeated as well, but [her] subjectivism is that of an inert thought that allows itself
35
Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science (New York, Random House, 1974), §344.
Author: Jacques Mourrain, PhD
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to be fatally manipulated from the outside… This is what separates the enterprise of
the mathematician and that of the philosopher; more geometrico, id est non
philosophico, and vice versa.36
Geometrically is not philosophically and vice versa. When confronted with the Reality of an
atomic age, Heidegger (a thoughtful philosopher), pondered the future of thinking. He
wondered if there was still a place for thinking, but one that is not essentially calculative. In
his memorial address (1955) entitled Discourse on Thinking, he questions some “eighteen
Nobel prize winners” who (it is said) proclaimed: “Science is the road to a happier human life,”
to which Heidegger responded:
What is the sense of this statement? Does it spring from reflection? Is [hu]man[ity],
then, a defenseless and perplexed victim at the mercy of the irresistible superior
power of technology? He would be if [hu]man[ity] today abandons any intention to
pit meditative thinking decisively against merely calculative thinking. But once
meditative thinking awakens, it must be at work unceasingly and on every last
occasion… Meditative thinking demands of us that we engage ourselves with what at
first sight does not go together at all.”37
This is the type of thinking that needs to be constantly awakened against a narrative that
would have us believe that I am essentially no different from Pol Pot, our de-scissions are of
no consequences in the final analysis (i.e., onto death), and bios can essentially be reduced to
zoē. This type of thinking discards speculation in the name of an idio-syncratic and narrow
definition of science, only to add the Greek privative “a-” in order to mark an exclusion or a
distinction. But philosophy (philos) and science (physis) are both engaged in Thinking.
Philosophy is prescribed by several conditions that are the types of truth procedures,
or generic procedures. These types are science (more precisely, the matheme), art
(more precisely, the poem), politics (more precisely politics of interiority or the
politics of emancipation), and love (more precisely, the procedure that make truth
out of the disjunction of sexuated positions). Philosophy is the place where both the
‘there are’ [il y a] of truths and their composability is stated. In order to do this,
philosophy sets up an operating category, Truth, which opens up an active void in
thought.38
While I don’t necessarily accept Badiou’s four-fold division of philosophy, nor can I claim him
as my favorite philosopher, his point here is that a discipline “sets up an operating category.”
For philosophy it is epistemological in nature and therefore (according to our author under
review) “ascientific.” Whereas science, which we could claim to be “aphilosophical,” sets up
the operating category of the Real, an ontological positioning. As a philosopher (and
36
Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), pg. 41
37
Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pg. 52. I am less
concerned whether this is an actual or apocryphal citation (found on page 50) as to the starting
point of a discussion.
38
Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought (London: Continuum, 2005), pg. 124, emphasis added.
Author: Jacques Mourrain, PhD
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essentially ascientific), I have addressed / undressed the “aphilosophical” nature of the
author’s discursive strategy and metaphysical assumptions, as well as her “belief-based”
metaphysics. But before concluding (in this place), we should go back in time, circa 1945,
where the Father of “existentialism,” Jean-Paul Sartre, attempted to unpack some of the
misconceptions that circulated around this term (back then). “What do we mean by
“existence precedes essence?” he asks rhetorically:
We mean that man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and
only afterwards defines himself. If man as existentialists conceive of him cannot be
defined, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later,
and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature since
there is not God to conceive of it. Man is not only that which he conceives himself to
be, but that which he wills himself to be, and since he conceives of himself only after
he exists, just as he wills himself to be after being thrown into existence, man is
nothing other than what he makes of himself. This is the first principle of
existentialism.39
Our Sexistence (to recall Nancy) is an adventure, a contingency of risks and forks in the road
of bios, and our destiny qua destination; our thrownness (Geworfenheit) in this world and
onto death (but not necessarily at the Pont de l’Alma). This fundamentally existential physics,
escapes the scientist (even the contrarian ones), because she “…acts into nature from the
standpoint of the universe and not into the web of human relationships,” Hannah Arendt
reminds us (in 1958 after Sputnik), and:
… lacks the revelatory character of action as well as the ability to produce stories and
become historical, which together form the very source from which meaningfulness
springs into and illuminates human existence. In this existentially most important
aspect, action, too, has become an experience for the privileged fee, and these few
who still know what it means to act may well be even fewer than the artists, their
experience even rarer than the genuine experience of and love for the world.40
“The truth is of all doctrines, [i.e., existentialism] is the least scandalous and the most austere:
it is strictly intended for specialist and philosophers.”41 Perhaps the scientist should leave
philosophy (esp. the existential kind) to the hoi polloi (I mean philosophers), and avoid
nominal compounds like Existential Physics. “And I don’t want to be uncharitable. Certainly
not” [pg. 125].
39
Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pg. 22.
40
The Human Condition, op. cit., pg. 324 emphasis added.
41
Existentialism is a Humanism, op. cit., pg. 20.
Author: Jacques Mourrain, PhD
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