Brian Greene was on the Colbert Report the other day, promoting his new book The Hidden Reality. Little did he know (one presumes) how much he was endangering the moral fiber of today’s youth.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Brian Greene | ||||
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Brian’s book is about the multiverse, a hot topic these days in cosmology circles. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but he is one of the clearest and most level-headed people we have writing about modern physics, so I’m sure it’s worth checking out.
We’ve certainly touched on the multiverse idea on this very blog, for example here and here. It’s a controversial topic, as you may have heard. People worry that talking about unobservable things is a repudiation of what it means to do science, a symptom of the decadence of modern society, etc. Click the links to rehash the usual debates.
But a new rhetorical strategy has appeared among the anti-multiverse crowd — not that the idea is wrong (which would be very interesting, if there were a good argument for it), or even that it’s nonscientific (the usual complaint), but that it’s immoral. We are actually violating the Categorical Imperative by talking about universes beyond our own. Points for novelty!
Or not. The immorality argument was recently advanced by John Horgan and Peter Woit. But if you read the posts, it’s the usual curmudgeonly sniping, with the shrillness knob turned up a click or two. The actual argument is the same as it ever was: talking about unobservable things is not science. [Update: Peter explains his objection here.]
However, a truly novel version of the immorality charge was leveled by Clay Naff at the Huffington Post. Naff introduces a “moral principle,” which informs us to “resist accepting any proposition that tends to disable moral reasoning, unless and until the scientifically interpreted evidence compels us.” That is, instead of judging ideas by our conventional criteria of whether they are likely to be “right” or “wrong,” we should include an additional new factor that weights against ideas that would disable morality.
Hopefully the problem with this idea is immediately evident: ideas about how the universe works can’t possibly “disable moral reasoning.” The world does whatever it does, quite independently of our moral judgments. The job of morality is to figure out what we think we human beings should be doing, which, as we’ve been discussing, does not reduce to looking at what actually happens in the universe.
Of course, what counts as a moral action certainly depends on what actually happens in the universe. (Saving lives would be less urgent if everyone who dies goes to Paradise in the afterlife.) But Naff’s worry is a little funny. What he seems to be concerned about — although he never quite comes out and says it, so a bit of interpretation is required, and I could always be misreading — is the possibility that our moral intuitions could be undermined by the idea that there are an infinite number of copies of ourselves out there in the multiverse, some of them exactly like us and many of them slightly different, e.g. worlds where Hitler was victorious, etc. In such a setup, should we be concerned that morality is pointless, because every good thing and every bad thing eventually occurs elsewhere in the cosmos?
I don’t think we should be concerned about that (even if it’s true, which it may very well be). An idea like this doesn’t “disable our moral reasoning” — in fact, it might be extremely helpful to our moral reasoning. If your version of morality depends on the assumption that what happens here on Earth is unique in the universe, then it’s time to update your morality, not to put your hands over your ears when people start talking about the multiverse.
The real problem with Naff’s position is its fundamentally paternalistic tone — even if, to his credit, he seems to include himself among those who need protection from these scary ideas.
The danger lies in how they take root in popular culture. If we come to believe that choices do not matter, that any action is matched by its opposite somewhere, we risk losing our capacity for moral reasoning. History shows that, inbuilt though that capacity may be, ideas can short-circuit it.
In short, what I am saying is that those of us who are NOT so brilliant as to be able to follow the math need to resist being seduced by visions of parallel bubbles in a multiverse.
I have this old-fashioned notion that if an idea about the universe is very possibly correct, there is no moral or scientific advantage to pretending otherwise, even among those who can’t follow the math. Our capacity for moral reasoning shouldn’t depend on what’s happening many googols of parsecs away in an unobservable part of the universe. If it does, our moral reasoning needs an upgrade. And if reading popular books about the multiverse help nudge people along that path, I’m all for it.
For reasons which aren’t worth going into right now, I’m more sympathetic to the inflationary-cosmology flavour of multiverse than the Everettian kind; however, I agree that research on either topic is neither unscientific nor immoral. (I expect that there is no necessary contradiction in favouring, for example, a topos-theoretic propensity interpretation of quantum probability while also finding eternal inflation plausible.) If anything here is morally problematic, indicative of lax intellectual standards or unconducive to scientific progress, it’s the disregard for the scientific reasons why people consider multiverses and the misrepresentation of their thinking.
Business as usual at the HuffPo, I suppose.
So maybe, according to this line of thought, the Catholic Church is right to say that thinking about committing a sin is as bad as the act itself. If the immoral action is not possible, because your mind is pure, then there will be no universe in which you commit that action.
I don’t know if I would agree that ignoring an idea that is correct means there is no scientific advantage to pretending otherwise.
Currently in physics we have the notion of an effective field theory, in which we knowingly write down a low energy approximation ignoring details that only become relevant at higher energies. You could easily argue that this is not the same thing – by construction an EFT acknowledges the existence of a greater theory by the fact it (typically) breaks down at some scale — or that the theory “predicts its own demise”. You could also argue that the EFT allows us to calculate close to the cutoff scale and invites us to think about what could possibly fix it. I would argue that, at least as written, we are ignoring things about the universe (higher energies) and using an approximate technique to extract information — thus yielding a scientific advantage.
I think what the above paragraph points out is that a case can be made for EFTs violating the letter of your statement, but I think we both agree they don’t violate the spirit of it. I think there are objections to even the spirit of the argument, however. If I was allowed to send one message back into the 1600s (say 5 seconds long) there are a bunch of things I wouldn’t say. For example:
* You can change elements from one type to another.
[A true statement from nuclear physics, but the development of chemistry benefited greatly from the assumption that elements could not change. Such an accepted truth lead people to think about chemical reactions to turn lead into gold via “conventional chemistry” setting research back.]
* Physics may not be deterministic
[Depending on your flavor of QM interpretation, or how you interpret deterministic within a decoherence world view. However the development of physics benefited greatly from assuming that there was a deterministic world to study.]
I would be interested on your views on the above.
Multiverse-induced amorality is both silly, and old news. It was also very silly in 1971 when Larry Niven wrote the story All The Myriad Ways about it (google, you’ll find it).
The moral argument in considering alternate universes must recognize that the me in this universe is subject only to the the laws and mores of this universe. What I do elsewhere/elsewhen are subject to those laws and mores. To me they are by their nature exclusive.
For those troubled by the moral question of the multiverse:
“All you need to know is that there is a Multiverse and you are not it.”
David Lewis famously defends the thesis that all possible worlds exist. Some have alleged that his position, if true, leads to moral indifference (see section 2.6 of Lewis’s book, On the Plurality of Worlds). It seems that someone *could* raise a similar complaint about loose talk of a multiverse.
It is our moral imperative to travel to every other universe and stop all Hitlers!
I agree with you Sean. Either we choose to explore the universe and all of its implications or we cower in the corner and revert to believing in tree sprites whenever we find something that makes us uncomfortable.
People thought atheism would lead to amoral behavior. It didn’t. Whatever compels humans to choose to live in a civilized and cooperative society, it is not the idea of morals. I would posit that its the need to survive. And in order to survive we agree that certain behaviors are not tolerated or productive.
Placing moral behavior in the context of whether my bizarro world twin is actually killing babies right now, is pointless. I (the person in this world) have to live with the consequences of actions in this world. And if I wish to survive, I must cooperate. So even if I take a fatalistic attitude of “a bad choice is happening anyway in some other universe”…I don’t have to live in that universe – I have to live in this one.
John Bell said about the many-worlds theory: “if such a theory were taken seriously, it would hardly be possible to take anything else seriously”. (in Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists, 1981).
Hang on, I can view it! They’ve ended the rights restrictions in the UK! Halleluyah, praise the lord!
And an end to Mubarak in Egypt as well. What a day.
The number of universes (and “alternate” selves) has absolutely no rightful effect on an individual’s morality. Never mind Kant’s Evil. Morality serves the interest of the individual (the furtherance of his existence as man, and all that properly implies); his decisions and their consequences affect the corresponding reality. He is neither beholden to his alternate selves, nor they to him; they can’t be.
I for one, if given the option, would prefer to live in the most moral of all multiverses, and will make my choices to promote that end result… It’s like saying that because there are bad neighborhoods, everyone should stop trying to build good ones. What utter twaddle.
The evidence supporting any new scientific idea is rarely, if ever, conclusive. Instead, the data pointing to the new idea are typically equivocal, open to reinterpretation and bedecked with large error bars. If we refuse to consider unpleasant hypotheses “until the scientifically interpreted evidence compels us”, we will deny ourselves the chance of progress.
It’s hard to know what to make of this post. If one follows the link to Peter Woit’s comment on this, you’ll find that he actually SHARES Sean’s views concerning personal morality in terms of the multiverse. Sean correctly summarizes Woit’s points in his next two sentences, condescendingly, after having written “The immorality argument was recently advanced by John Horgan and Peter Woit.” Woit, at least, did no such thing. It’s clear that Sean knows this, so why in hell did he write that sentence?
Both Woit and Greene are professors at Columbia… I’ve often wondered if that makes for any interesting encounters in the hallway, or cafeteria, or faculty meetings etc…. (not that profs at a university can’t have opposing viewpoints, but just wondering… it didn’t work very well for Gould, Lewontin, and Wilson at Harvard).
It seems to me that all this concern about the moral implications of a multiverse is a tempest in a teacup.
After all, what is the difference if we propose multiple universes or if we propose Buddhist, Christian or Islamic moralities? Isn’t that spread of moral views threatening enough to moral purists? Really … if you’re a moral purist, *anything* and *everything* can *possibly* threaten the moral sense of the average person … depending on the person.
If such *threats* are of concern to a person who is moral-centric, I suggest spending the remainder of their lives meditating in a cave, on a mountain somewhere.
For the rest of us, facts are things to be proven, morals are to be lived by and only when facts require changes to moral values shall the two meet.
Some 65,000 years ago we started migrating out of Africa. In the 65,000 years that followed we have explored, expanded into and filled every nook and cranny on this planet. That long experience has changed us into beings that are compulsively curious explorers. And as our mind expanded we explored ideas as well as geography.
So, however much Naff and others may rail against untested ideas, we can’t deny our exploratory instincts and nor should we.
@Brian C.: At least in Niven’s story, people could experience the alternates directly, making them less abstract than current multiverse hypotheses.
The problem with the multiverse theory isn’t that it is amoral. It is that it isn’t falsifiable.
String theory flirts with the same problem set.
It’s a little like the claim that if humans evolved from other apes, that means humans aren’t God’s chosen special creations, and there’s no hope for morality, so stop talking about that.
Sean,
In my blog posting that you link to I was reporting on what Smolin and Horgan had to say about morality and the multiverse, and noting that I disagreed with them.
I’ve only one concern about the multiverse that has to do with morality, and I tried to make that clear. When it became well-known that string theory unification was an idea that couldn’t be used to predict anything, standard scientific ethics would indicate that those promoting the idea should admit failure and move on. Instead what we’ve seen is a turn to multiverse models constructed purely to avoid predicting anything. This is pseudo-science, and the way it’s being done and the motivations for doing it raise a moral issue.
If you feel that this is shrill, so be it. I think you’ll find though that there’s a significant fraction of the scientific community that shares my concern. They may not know the ins and outs of the string theory story, but they can see the heavy public promotional hype surrounding an idea that makes no scientific predictions, and strongly suspect something not kosher is going on.
Shecky R.,
Brian and I have known each other for over 20 years, and have never had any trouble getting along fine despite our disagreements. He’s a very nice, easy-going guy, and I’m not so hard to get along with either.
I never understood the “multiverses cannot be observed” crowd. We don’t even have a Standard model of the Multiverse, how do we even know how to predict whether it can be observed or not?
The multiverse is not a theory, it’s just the consequence of following the rules of several different, disparate ideas that we know to be right or think it has a chance of being right.
Peter, I did not say that you agreed with Horgan. I said that you mentioned moral concerns about the multiverse, which you did. As to shrillness, you started your own blog post with “[Warning, somewhat of a rant follows, and it’s not very original. You might want to skip this one…].”