The 10 tenets of Evolutionary Philosophy are so important to my beliefs that I've given each of the first 7 their own individual blog posts to explain them in more detail. In them, I've laid out my descriptions of the kind of universe we live in, the size and history of that universe, the forces that produced us, the source and type of knowledge we have, the definition of good that comes from this, and the way we can use our reason to guide the choices we have for chasing after this description of good. These tenets paint a picture of what our past and present look like: where we've come from and what we are. For the last three tenets, I want to look to the future - where do we go from here? Let's start with the rules of the game.

8. The process of evolution has no externally set goal, but entities in evolutionary systems will survive or perish. The existence of man has no known purpose. If we want to survive, we must know the rules of the system we have evolved in and play by them.

Millions of species have come and gone on this planet without any expression of celebration or sympathy from the universe. Life arises, it competes, and it struggles until it succumbs. We see this very clearly in the fossil record, we've watched it happen during our brief recorded history, and it is easy to project it continuing for millions of years to come. We are the first species to see this though and learn the rules about why this happens. Given our desire to survive, surely a cursory glance at Evolution 101 is warranted. In that study, we see principles about adaptation, fragility versus robustness, tit-for-tat cooperation, the power of trial and error, and what constitutes an evolutionarily stable strategy. Contemplation of these principles gives rise to a few conclusions.

9. Survival requires progress and stability. Stability and progress require society. Society requires cooperation. Cooperation requires balancing long-term benefits against short-term costs in order to control our emotions and guide our actions. Balancing long-term benefits against short-term costs requires wisdom. We must study philosophy - the love of wisdom - to know how to live and survive.

By this, I don't mean we all need to become professional philosophers (nor even study them for that matter), in the same way that we don't all need to become professional chefs in order to eat our daily meals. But we do learn how to cook, we do study how to refrigerate milk, boil an egg, assemble a sandwich, etc., etc. Similarly, if we want to feed our minds, we have to learn how to think logically, understand our biases, examine our fears, use reason to recognize good, pin down difficult definitions, ask questions about truth and beauty, and discuss our beliefs with our friends. I truly believe that when we do that sincerely, the best ideas will survive and spread, which will allow us to do so as well.

How about a final goal then? The universe may not provide one for us, but can we determine one for ourselves? Once we develop and share our finest ideas, where might that lead us?

10. Evolution describes the rules that govern the way that life survives. The end product of evolution therefore would be immortal life. Humans may have the intellectual capacity to achieve this end.

We have longed for this goal since the first comprehension of death. Our myths tell tales of it, our gods exhibit it, our artists tell cautionary tales about it, our scientists strive to create it. Surely we can admit that deep down we do want this, even if it's just for one more day at a time. Maybe not when the vagaries of existence wear us down over the years until the struggle becomes too much for our imperfect bodies, but while we are truly alive, we never want that to end. All life feels that way. And if we can understand our bodies and our environment to the point where we can engineer a permanence of that spirit - why wouldn't we? 

In the last post about tenet #6, I talked about how reason can guide us and guide our emotions when we are faced with complex choices. This presumption of choice implies a certain amount of free will - a hot topic once again given the 2012 publishing of "Free Will" by Sam Harris, and the latest findings in neuroscience that rebut an early 1980's experiment that Sam Harris and many others have relied upon for their arguments. I don't want to rehash all the debates here because there are many nuanced and graduated beliefs and definitions out there and arguing with each and every one of them could take years. I want instead to simply inject my own pragmatic definition of free will into the conversation since it's not one I have heard before and it gets us to a place where philosophy and choice matter, which is how we all live our lives.

7. Extreme versions of free will and determinism are just that - extreme. The truth lies in the middle and is easier to understand when timescales are introduced. In the short-term, on biological timescales such as those concerning biochemistry, molecular biology, and cellular biology, events are determined by their current states. In the medium-term, on biological timescales such as those concerning organismic biology, and sociobiology, free will is not only possible, it determines the states that arise in the short-term and the long-term. In the long-term, on biological timescales such as those concerning ecology and evolutionary biology, the characteristics of competitiveness, cooperativeness, and adaptability are required for survival. In that sense, the long-term is determined. The free will that occurs in the medium-term, and the randomness of destructive cosmological events, means that who survives is unknown. Evolution is blind. We are not.

First, let me say a few words to dispatch the extreme versions of free will and determinism. Even the most ardent supporter of free will recognizes that our actions and beliefs come from something. Whether they come from our genes, our environment, our family, our friends, our personal reflection, our reading, or our previous choices, nothing that we produce can be said to be "free" from all influence. Even new inventions are simply the combination and rearrangement of what has come before in order to construct something different (aka the mating of ideas). This is simply a characteristic of our rational universe - no effects occur without a cause. Therefore, it is easy to dismiss the extreme position for free will that states we are "free to do whatever we want" because there are definite constraints placed on us by the universe we live in.

Now, the other extreme of this problem is to state that since everything has a cause, then if we were only smart enough, we could calculate all the influences, weigh them up, and know everything that would happen - the universe and our actions within it would be determined. This is an appealing argument to the rational-minded among us. It seems to flow naturally from investigations into chaos theory, which prove, for example, that if only we knew all the tiny variations in starting conditions and physical influences, then we could understand all the irregularities of planetary orbits or we could predict the weather with astonishing accuracy. Those examples may be true, but humans are not dead objects subjected only to the physical forces of the universe. We are living organisms influenced by our internal emotions to act to stay alive. However, since our emotions are momentary chemical reactions that can be fooled into preferring short-term fixes to long-term solutions, we evolved the power of reason to break free from the determinism of emotional pull. Those of us that learned to correctly weigh the complex choices we face, that were able to endure short-term pains for long-term gains, that were able to ignore powerful base urges for the benefit of subtler lasting pleasures - we were the ones who survived and passed on this remarkable ability. And this ability became unevenly distributed within the population so that some of us are quite conforming to our emotional pulls and some of us are quite rebellious against them. So yes, all of our actions may be said to be influenced by something, but if one of those things is our own nature, which includes an ability to ignore a majority of our influences, then this element of choice is as good as throwing a random variable into any equation of determinism, thus defeating its predictions. One of my favorite passages in literature illustrates this concept beautifully. It came from Dostoevsky in 1864 in his short novel Notes from Underground. See the quote below for his perceptive understanding of human nature.*

So if the extreme versions of free will and determinism are discarded, what is in the middle? Just the practical view that we are influenced, but we have choice. We don't have the freedom to do whatever we want, but we could do anything we can. We aren't free from the constraints of the universe, but the universe doesn't care what we do inside it. We aren't free to stop our cells from metabolizing the food we eat, but we are free to not destroy the ecosystems we rely upon for its production. In short, we are free to choose actions that lead to our survival or extinction, and that choice of outcome is obvious. How we get there is the tricky part, but philosophy can guide us.


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*  "…you say, science itself will teach man that he never had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature.  Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him.  All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 180,000, and entered in an index; or better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the world.
     Then - this is all what you say - new economic relations will be established, all ready made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the "Palace of Crystal" will be built. Then...in fact, those will be halcyon days. Of course there is no guaranteeing (this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull (for what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated), but on the other hand everything will be extraordinarily rational. Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom that sets one sticking golden pins into people, but that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the golden pins in them. Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation. I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, a propos of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentlemen, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!" That again would not matter, but what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers - such is the nature of man. And all of that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one's own interest, and sometimes one positively ought (that is my idea). One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy - is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continuously being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice."
                        -- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground, published in 1864

Now that we know a universal definition of good, what do we do about that? How do we act? What choices do we make? How can we do good? How can we be good? We'll get to all the specifics of that when I talk about how to Know Thyself through Evolutionary Philosophy, but first I need to talk about how we make decisions in general. This has been a bone of contention for millennia - are we a slave to our passions, or can our minds tame the savage beast within? An answer to this is surely worth it's own tenet:

6. Emotions are chemical reactions that arise in nature to guide and aid actions - this is the survival instinct. Reason arises in nature to help life choose between actions that satisfy short-term desires or long-term needs. We are not bound by any laws of nature to act on every emotional state we feel. The joy of the survival of life is our deepest feeling so reason can be said to serve that emotion, but reason rules over other emotions as it instructs us about which actions we should take and which emotions we should feel.

I'll delve further into the causes of emotion a little later, but for now I just want to place a little more emphasis on why reason guides emotion. For many decisions that we face, the answer can be pretty obvious: should I run from this snake?, should I avoid touching this hot stove?, should I hold onto this railing while I walk past this ledge? Our emotions are clear and unambiguous in these situations (either from innate inheritance, early trial and error, or overwhelming social influence), and we can happily listen to them and quickly make the right decision. That's fine. But these are not the only types of decisions we face. Most of the time, our emotions are ambiguous or conflicting over our innocuous or important decisions: should I go out or stay in?, should I eat that piece of cake?, who should I vote for?, what should I study in school?, should I marry this person? It is these types of complex decisions where we cannot simply "listen to our hearts," but must use reason to decide what is best for us. When we don't do this, we are living the unexamined life. When we do this well, our hearts will follow, and we will be happy.

So far, in posts about tenets one, two, three, and four, I've made a lot of observations about what the universe is. It's knowable...but really large and changing. It's forces can bring matter together...but they can also tear it apart. Our senses can deceive us...but our reason can unveil the trickery. We are a product of this universe...but the universe doesn't care about us. These descriptions give us a good idea of where we are. Tenet 5 of Evolutionary Philosophy, however, takes us in a new direction - where we want to go.

5. A universal definition of good arises from nature. Good is that which enables the long-term survival of life.

Good has had many definitions throughout history. It was what felt good, it was what our elders told us, it was what our leaders demanded, it was divinely revealed to kings, it was what a god told a priest, it was what philosophers argued, it was whatever your society voted for, and it went back to what feels good. It's no wonder that relativists threw up their hands and said there is no definition of good so figure it out for yourselves.

But these were not true definitions of good. They were not true because they were not grounded in the reality of our universe. They relied on isolated individuals, mythical creatures, ignorant arguments, and general confusion. Sure, many of the rules that came out of these definitions of good may have been correct, but not all of them. The need to obey your king, the need to avoid mixing meat and dairy, the need to stone adulterers - these and many other rules for good behavior have gone extinct. And the thing that corrected these false rules was not a better god, a better ruler, or a better philosopher; it was the dawning feeling that these rules were leading us off a cliff. The cringe that we feel when we think about drowning witches, burning heretics, and mutilating genitals, is not a voice in our heads from a new religion. Quite simply, it is just the growth in understanding of what enables life to survive in the long term. That is the voice of our conscience. That is the source of our morals. That is the basis for our definition of good. It arises naturally from an understanding of both the history, shape, and rules of our universe as well as the course of evolution that has led us to the place we occupy here, and it will evolve in the future as our knowledge of history, science, systems, and consequences grows.

I'll get into many of the implications of this definition later. I'll also get into some distinctions of what exactly does or doesn't enable the long term survival of life. But for now, I just want to hear some thoughts about this bold claim. Do you agree with it? What could refute this? Can it be that the the answer to the eternal question, "What is the meaning of life?", is simply...to live!

Continuing the tour of the 10 tenets of Evolutionary Philosophy, we move from the last blog post about #3 (a description of the size and age of the universe), to some thoughts on the 4th tenet (a summary of the most basic processes we find within that universe):

4. Once matter exists and moves, forces of the universe dictate that it must either come together or come apart. As it comes together, it creates order, complexity, and life. As it comes apart, life, complexity, and order are lost; death, disorder, and chaos reign. We have arisen from life and have evolved an intense need to avoid death. All life competes against death. It is by no means a futile fight.

So far, the Standard Model and the General Theory of Relativity provide the best descriptions we have for the basic building blocks of the universe.* From them, we gather definitions of the subatomic elementary particles (quarks, leptons, bosons, etc.) and the four fundamental forces that govern their interactions (electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, electro-weak force, and gravitation).  Strong nuclear forces hold the particles together to form atoms. Electro-weak forces cause radiation and decay. These give us ordinary matter. Gravity draws material together. Electromagnetism can make it stick or explode apart. This is highly simplified, but the general picture we get is one of attraction and repulsion, of combination and separation, of construction and destruction. We get a universe that is fluid and changing, but capable of solid stability. We get a universe that comes together into wholes and comes apart into pieces. This is the scientific basis for tenet #4 of Evolutionary Philosophy.**

What does this mean for philosophy? Well it obviously contributes part of the answer to the question, "Where did I come from?" To understand our place in the universe all the way back to the first separation of matter at the Big Bang, through the subsequent cumulative turbulent joining together of matter into our complex selves, grounds our lives in a powerful context. We are not outsiders placed here by an external deity, forever confused about our role and our power. We are instead products of everything we see and understand, and we are at home. We are not independent beings shorn of all duty or obligation. We are the product of matter coming together into life, and we must continue to build and come together if we are to honor the time and the trial and error it took to get here. This has profound implications for the rest of our philosophical questions, as I hope to continue to show.


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* We do not know what caused these building blocks, nor what came before the Big Bang where our first evidence of them is found. I don't mean to skip over this ignorance as a way of hiding from something magical (that a god may have caused this universe), but merely to move on to something pragmatic (that we must act based on what we do know). As I said in the post about tenet #1, we see no evidence of supernatural interference in the 13+ billion years of this evidence, so there is no reason to spend time speculating about something supernatural that might have come before this universe.

** Over the history of the universe, we now understand quite clearly the evolution from elementary particles to complex molecules. Physics, chemistry, and astronomy have given us that picture. We also know quite clearly the evolution of single celled organisms to complex life. Biology and archeology have given us that picture. A gap that remains is the clear understanding of how complex chemicals evolved into single celled organisms. This process is known as abiogenesis or the origin of life. Again, I will reiterate that we see no evidence of supernatural intervention in this universe so we do not expect it here either. One of the best leading theories of abiogenesis comes from the work of Nobel-prize-winning Professor of Genetics Dr. Jack Szostak. The video below provides an excellent summary of his work, which ties in beautifully to the thread of this post about matter coming together to create structure, order, and life.

The first two tenets of Evolutionary Philosophy told us the universe is knowable and we can know much of it, even if we can't know everything. These facts can make us feel large and important. They can make us think that we must play a critical role here, that we are destined for something, that the universe has been waiting for us to come along. But nothing could be farther from the truth.

3. The universe is composed of trillions and trillions of stars and is currently expanding after a Big Bang and 13-14 billion years of evolutionary processes.* We are just another species of animal life on a single planet orbiting one of the stars in the universe. (* The best current estimate of the age of the universe is 13.75 ± 0.11 billion years. The best current estimate of the number of stars in the universe is from 3 to 100 × 10^22 or between 30 sextillion and 30 septillion.)

The world is not flat with everything else falling off its edges. The sun does not revolve around the earth. Our solar system is not at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Our galaxy appears no more special than any of the other billions of galaxies in the universe. This is what this third tenet of Evolutionary Philosophy is reminding us.

But this is not something to despair over. This is not something to take away all pride. It merely takes away the false pride of ignorance that humans once had. It takes away a false pride that was dangerous in its ability to inspire overconfidence and recklessness. This is why this humbling knowledge is something to celebrate. It gives us real context and truth about our lives. We know much. We know how lucky we are to be here. We know how responsible we must be with that privilege. We know just how much more there is to learn and see and do. And for me at least, that fills me with great hope and excitement about our future. It makes me happy to do what's right and play whatever part I can to help us survive and explore this universe. That's what this third tenet means to me. What does it say to you?

It's hard to convey the wonder of the universe in just a simple blog post, but fortunately I can point to Carl Sagan on YouTube to make the case as eloquently and visually stunningly as possible in a mere five minutes.

And just in case that video didn't hit home with how truly awesome and large our universe is, and how futile it is to fight over a few square miles for a few short years, here's another fun way to beat you over the head about the vastness of time and space that we really find ourselves in. Enjoy!

In the last blog post, I went into some detail about the first tenet of Evolutionary Philosophy, which described the kind of universe we find ourselves in - namely a rational, knowable one that is non-magical. With that being the case - that the universe is knowable - then the next logical questions are, what do we actually know and how well do we know it? In tenet #2, I claim that our best answers to this are:

2. Knowledge comes from using reason to understand our sense experiences. The iterative nature of the scientific method is what hones this process towards truth. In a large and changing universe, eternal absolutes are extremely difficult to prove. We must act based on the best available knowledge. This leaves us almost entirely with probabilistic knowledge, which means we must act with confidence and caution appropriate to the probability, being especially careful in realms where knowledge is uncertain and consequences of error are large.

Let's break that down because there are many historical arguments wrapped up in these sentences. First, there is the part about using reason to understand our sense experiences. Many philosophers in history have argued that we are born as blank slates and only learn through the information conveyed to us through our senses - where else would the information come from?* However(!), other philosophers say, looking at things such as illusions, the relativity of observations, or memory error show that our senses can be deceived or are faulty. They have used this dependence on weak senses to declare that all knowledge is therefore suspect and relative. This unfortunate viewpoint is still expressed by many people today: college freshmen who have had their first philosophy class, wallowing stoners who justify their idleness by declaring everything to be an illusion anyway, and post-modernists and mystics who exhibit the same level of thinking as these first two. The rebuttal to these arguments is that while our knowledge does rely on sense observation, which can be faulty, we are not reliant on single observations. We are able to use more than one observation, from more than one person, and compare the differences using our reason, our memory, and our tools. We can determine where we have been tricked or misinformed. Long before we formally defined this iterative technique as the scientific method, we used repeated actions to learn things as simple as how a stone will travel through the air, or as complex as how the sun travels along the horizon throughout the year (even though we now know through further observations that the sun isn't the object that's actually traveling).

So, we can know the world, and we know the process we should use to gain that knowledge. How far can it take us? Well, quite far so far. Far enough, for example, to see that the universe is immensely large - far too big a place for us to see and know all at once. This alone is enough to tell us that there are real limits to the extent of our knowledge. We cannot know things with 100% certainty because we cannot know the entirety of the universe. As an extreme example to illustrate the point, we do not know what lies beyond our visible universe. Perhaps there are many universes in a multiverse and one is expanding toward us with the energy and rapidity to destroy everything we see in the blink of an eye. Now, we can observe over 13 billion years of history within our universe and see no evidence of an event like this happening, but that does not rule out its possibility. Therefore, as stated in the tenet, we are left with probabilistic knowledge.**

Does being only 99.99...% sure that the sun will rise tomorrow mean that all knowledge is fatally flawed and we should abandon all efforts of planning and learning? Of course not! It is merely a reminder that we are not perfected creations and should not be surprised to see our knowledge grow and change as our observations and logical reasoning grow and change. It is a reminder that we will always have work to do in this endeavor to understand the universe and our survival within it. And it is a caution that we must be careful about going too far down an uncertain path (with, for example, climate change, genetic modifications, geoengineering, or agriculture monocultures) without hedging our bets against our uncertainties. We must find the balance between our ignorance and our hubris. We must find confidence - not meek under-confidence, not rash over-confidence. We must have a proud humility about what we have learned and what we still need to know. These are not new recommendations, but are merely confirmed by a full understanding of the sources and limits of our knowledge. They should not be forgotten.


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* While the blank slate theory has been rebuffed by the observation of innate instinctual responses passed on through the genetic makeup of our bodies, this covers only a tiny percentage of our adult knowledge and actions. The rest results from the ongoing interaction of our environmental experiences (experienced through our senses) with our genetic makeup - the "nature x nurture" answer to that old debate.

** This applies for all things outside of our own definitions. We know with 100% certainty that 2 + 2 = 4 because we have defined it so. But mathematics are not a concrete aspect of the universe.