Okay, so, I know what you’re wondering: sure, progress in evolution and human society is great, but how the hell does that make progress a universal epiphenomenon.
Well, sadly, I don’t have a good answer for you. It’s just a conjecture. And about all I can respond with is highly theoretical stuff which will likely be proven wrong in the future. Or maybe it’s right, who knows? But to me: it fits the pattern, and that’s what I consider important.
Okay, so, let me introduce you to Dr. Lee Smolin:
Yes, there he is, chilling in his chair at Harvard.
Okay, so who the hell is he?
Well, you may or may not have heard of string theory. Lee Smolin has been working on a different theory called Loop Quantum Gravity. He just put out a book called “The Trouble With Physics” where he argues that physics has entered something of a post-modern age where the limits of experimental verifiability have been exceeded. Initially Smolin worked under the assumption that string theory and loop quantum gravity were both approximations of some underlying theory, but lately he has changed his mind and this book is the result.
For those of you who aren’t aware, scientists still don’t know how gravity works, at least in the world of the very small where the rules of quantum mechanics apply, the realm of the Planck scale. Einstein came up with a description of how it works on large systems, which says that gravity is essentially a warping of spacetime itself. But for now, scientists have been unable to find a way to work Einstein’s theory of relativity into the small scales where the laws of quantum mechanics operate. So while Einstein’s theory explains how gravity works, it doesn’t come close to explaining what gravity actually is. Only a theory of quantum gravitation can do that, and for now, we don’t have one. String theory is one explanation. Loop Quantum Gravity is another.
What does Loop Quantum Gravity say about gravity? (Certainly something, it’s in the title after all!) Well, one important aspect leads to one of Smolin’s hypotheses. At a certain critical density, say, that achieved at the center of a black hole, gravity becomes repulsive. When this happens, what you get is a new universe… spacetime crunches down to an infinitessimally small point, then the repulsive force of gravity causes this infinitesimally small super-dense bit of spacetime to explode, the result of which is a new universe with a slightly altered set of physics from the original. It’s a big bang, but one powered by the repulsive power of gravity, a “quantum bounce.”
This leads to an idea Smolin calls fecund universes. Rather than the universe being a once off sort of thing, universes themselves have been evolving over time. A black hole forms in a parent universe, and a fecund universe with slightly different physics is the result, and in turn, black holes form in this fecund universe, leading to another generation of fecund universes. What naturally follows is that the universes with the most descendants are the ones who have rules that are most conducive to forming black holes. Does this sound kind of like what happens in biology with natural selection: a naturally-originating consequence of a set of events results in progressive evolution, in this case, towards better black hole formation?
If this sort of cosmological evolution really exists, are we just the lucky by-products of it, or do we have some larger role to fulfill in the universe? Even if they were to accept Smolin’s hypothesis, existentialists and post-modernists will certainly say the former: we have no purpose, there is no universal progress metric, and we’re just the accidental offspring of a set of universes which has become progressively more adept at the art of making black holes.
I believe we’re something more, and I believe the two progress metrics I previously defined are resultant from the emergent process of the progressive evolution of physical law itself. This evokes what’s known as the weak anthropic principle, namely that the reason our universe and the physical law by which it operates seems so conducive to life is that there have been countless universes in the past that weren’t. We happened to luck out, and had our universe not been conducive to life, we wouldn’t have been here to care.
If a progressive pattern exists, just where is it taking us? Well, right now futurists forsee an event which they have labeled The Singularity occuring sometime in the next few decades. After The Singularity, humans will have produced technologies that outperform humans themselves in all aspects. After this happens, humans will be obsolete and the human age will have ended.
“The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs.”
– Nikola Tesla
