Theories of Everything

A couple of times in this blog I have referred to figures connected with that strange, loose agglomeration of public intellectuals, pundits and ex-professors, known as the Intellectual Dark Web, whose opinions Youtube regularly recommends for my degustation. In tonight's post, I want to talk about them some more, focussing particularly on the theories of four of them. Specifically, I want to talk about Bret Weinstein, his brother Eric Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, and Sam Harris, in that order. What these thinkers have in common is a certain kind of philosophic bravado, an intellectual boldness – they all either subscribe to or claim to have invented Theories of Everything. We could call it genius or we could call it hubris. There is of course nothing wrong with having opinions on Life, the Universe and Everything, and if someone has an opinion on these topics, we should expect that someone to believe it true. Likewise, we would expect that particular someone to want to communicate his or her theory to as many people as possible, especially if he or she believes the theory novel, groundbreaking, and merits exposure. Social media today (and yes, Youtube can be considered social media) enables a person to reach an audience of potentially millions, so long as the algorithm falls out in his or her favour. Fame, additionally, itself has a certain allure. Oscar Wilde said that "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about", and intelligent people are not immune to the siren song of celebrity. I have noticed particularly that Peterson takes pride in the number of clicks his clips receives, that it feeds his ego. Peterson is not inured against vanity and it is possible that he may have been destroyed by it, by his fame or notoriety. Not only is Youtube full of clips by people like Peterson and Harris interviewing other people (or interviewing each other), it is full of clips of people talking about Peterson and Harris, typically eighteen years olds who think Harris wonderful or who once thought Harris wonderful, changed their minds, and want the world to know why. This meta-punditry can make people stars by association as I think might have happened recently with Lex Fridman. I myself might not be immune to the siren song of celebrity but there is little chance of me becoming famous so long as this blog only receives two hits a day. Suffice it to say – the type of person who believes he or she can change the world with a theory is also the type of person who loves the spotlight.

Since I have been in lockdown, I have become a fan of the Dark Horse live stream hosted by Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying. Bret was an academic, specialising in biology, who became famous as a result of the catastrophe that occurred at Evergreen State College when ultra-Woke students rose up in revolt against professors, including Weinstein, they deemed part some kind of oppressive white heteronormative patriarchy. Since being forced out of Evergreen, Weinstein, I believe, has made his living entirely through his online presence, his podcasts. (I might be wrong about this.) The live streams are fascinating – Weinstein and Heying are intelligent, sure-footed, knowledgeable and informed while also being personable and charming. They take every question posed to them, including the ones that seem on face value silly, quite seriously. But just because Bret Weinstein is smart and likeable doesn't mean he is right about everything.

Weinstein is a proponent of evolutionary biology. This theory, taken to its extreme, says that all features of living organisms can be explained as being the results of evolution, of natural selection (and other mechanisms such as genetic drift) operating on random genetic variation. The features that can be explained include not only physiology, but also culture and psychology. For instance, Weinstein argues that religion must possess some kind of adaptive value because all human societies have had some form of religion for millennia. A couple of years ago I watched a debate between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson about religion with Weinstein as the mediator. Harris thinks all religions are bad and that we should get rid of all of them. Peterson is harder to pin down but he seems to believe in some kind of Judeo-Christian deity. Weinstein, both figuratively and literally, sat between the two – an atheist who thinks religion serves some kind of evolutionary purpose and so shouldn't need to be extirpated. Weinstein didn't invent evolutionary biology but he is currently one of it its foremost advocates. I have inveighed against evolutionary biology in the past, partly because I did not think it could explain homosexuality, partly for other reasons. I have been thinking about this in the last couple of days and I think evolutionary biology and homosexuality actually can be reconciled – if we suppose that the Western world has misdefined the word 'homosexual'. If we suppose that sexuality is really a continuum from totally homosexual to totally heterosexual, if we suppose that there are lots of bisexual men and women in the world who do not identify as such, it may be possible to say that some inclination to homosexuality among a subset of the world's human population may be an evolutionary adaption of some sort. It has taken me a long time to arrive at this tentative conclusion because I myself am so strongly heterosexual and have had in the past a profound aversion to homosexuality in all its manifestations.

Despite recent developments, homosexuality remains a stubborn issue for evolutionary biologists. Another obdurate issue is ageing, referred to by biologists as 'senescence'. Why do we get older and, if we are lucky enough not to be killed by car accidents or volcanoes, at last die of old age? If we accept the tenets of evolutionary biology, an organism that has a longer period of reproductive fitness should be more likely to have more offspring than its cohorts. So there should be selective pressure towards a longer reproductive phase and a longer life. And yet, we age – we get grey hair,  a middle age spread, wrinkles, and hardened arteries. Women lose the capability to become pregnant with menopause and men's fertility also decreases as they age, albeit more gradually. If we suppose that in our ancient past, say an hundred thousand years ago, no one lived past the age of forty because of disease, starvation, or predation, we might suppose that Evolution didn't care about octogenarians. But, to the extent that some people have always died of diseases associated with old age, there should have been some selective pressure towards a longer life span, even if that pressure was small. Perhaps there has indeed been some pressure. Some do say that fifty is the new forty.

An important manifestation of ageing is ever shortening telomeres. "What's a telomere?" you may well ask. A telomere is a structure at the end of a chromosome, a little like like a cap or aglet; when a chromosome replicates itself (during mitosis) it is unable to copy its whole length and so some non-coding DNA at the end of the chromosome acts as a fail-safe. The more often a cell divides, the shorter its telomeres become; there is some evidence that shorter telomeres contribute to the diseases of old age, bring about cell death (known as 'apoptosis'). I often used to wonder, having learned a little about telomeres, why a sperm cell isn't as old as old as the man who produced it, why we aren't born as old as our parents. I now know that there is an enzyme, telomerase, that lengthens telomeres. This enzyme is present in germs cells, such as those found in the testicles, but absent in somatic cells. This raises the question: if ever shortening telomeres and consequently cellular senescence can be reversed by an enzyme that occurs in some bodily tissues, why isn't it present in all bodily tissues?

And now we bring Bret Weinstein back in. In 2002, Weinstein and some collaborators published a paper called, in part, "The reserve-capacity hypothesis". Weinstein argued that the same mechanism that causes cellular senescence reduces the possibility of cancerous tumours forming when an organism is young. The logic is that a cancerous tumour occurs when a cell goes renegade, becomes immortal, and starts producing a legion of immortal descendants; telomeric diminishment prevents tumours from becoming uncontrollable by killing them off. There is a trade-off between avoiding cancer when young and the diseases associated with senescence when old. The notion behind Weinstein's hypothesis is 'antagonistic pleiotropy', the idea that an adaption can be beneficial to an organism when it is juvenile but detrimental when it gets older. An even more fundamental notion behind Weinstein's hypothesis is that, because he believes all the details of life can be explained evolutionarily, he thinks that ageing itself must have some kind of evolutionary purpose.

I do not think Weinstein's hypothesis can be correct. To either defend or refute it, we would need to work out a mathematical model of the growth or decline of a population that takes into account reproduction, death as a result of external environmental factors, death as the result of cancer, and death as the result of senescence. I was thinking about this last night and though I haven't worked out the mathematics of such a model, I don't think it would be that complicated. My hunch is that extended life span would always win out. My chief objection to Weinstein's hypothesis, however, is simple. If it were true that ever-shortening telomeres prevents cancer, we would expect cancer to be a disease that affects young people more than old people, because young people have longer telomeres. The obvious fact, however, is that the likelihood of getting cancer increases with age. And the somatic cells of old people already have short telomeres. It is possible that I have misunderstood Bret's hypothesis but, simply put, the fundamental question is, "Why is death inevitable? Why does everyone die?" and I don't think Bret's hypothesis has answered this most intractable of problems.

Bret Weinstein subscribes to a Theory of Everything, evolutionary biology, the idea that all features of biological systems can be explained as being the results of Darwinian evolution. But he didn't invent this theory. In contrast, his brother Eric Weinstein has come up with an original honest-to-God Theory of Everything all on his own. The field is physics rather than biology but the confidence (or hubris) is the same. A couple of days ago, I googled Eric Weinstein and found, on Youtube, a strange clip, published on April Fools' Day this year, in which Eric, quarantined at home, presents his theory of Geometric Unity. Eric had presented this theory before, at Oxford in 2013, but although he has been hosting his own podcast, the Portal, since June 2019, this is the first time he has talked his theory publicly since then. Eric Weinstein is not currently an academic but it seems he came up with this theory while completing a PhD in mathematical physics in 1992 or sometime just before then. The theory has been something he has privately obsessed over for thirty years (while working as managing director of Peter Thiel's investment firm). I lack the mathematical expertise to judge whether his hypothesis is plausible or not – it involves something known as the 'observerce' which has fourteen dimensions, and, in order to understand Eric Weinstein's theory, one needs to understand General Relativity first. Although I got to grips with Special Relativity a long time ago, General Relativity remains beyond my comprehension, although I understand it much better now than I did a fortnight ago because I have been attempting to educate myself about it by means of Wikipedia entries and Youtube clips. It is possible that Weinstein's theory is correct but it doesn't seem that there has been any discussion of it within the Physics community. Perhaps because he has now disseminated it publicly, such discussion will soon occur. An objection to it, apparently, is that he predicts the existence of particles that would already have been found by the Large Hadron Collider if they existed. Still, I would like Eric Weinstein's theory to be true, if for no other reason than to applaud his bravado, his being an outsider speaking truth to the establishment intolerant of novel ideas.

One of the newer voices within the punditry who comprise the Intellectual Dark Web or who are loosely connected with it (or who want to be connected with it) is Lex Fridman. Not long after I watched Eric Weinstein's clip, I watched Fridman interview Weinstein about Geometic Unity. Weinstein became visibly annoyed with Fridman because Fridman couldn't follow Weinstein's account of it. Weinstein seems to think that anyone who has an interest in the deepest questions in physics and maths, such as the questions "Is a Grand Unified Theory possible? And, if so, what is it?", can understand the problem simply by doing a little research, and blamed Fridman for not understanding. Anyone, he seems to be saying, who puts in the requisite effort should be able to see that General Relativity, Dirac's theory of matter, and the Yang-Wells-Maxwell-Higgs theory don't fit well together, and that a better, more encompassing theory is needed. This is like saying that anyone who picks up a guitar, with a little effort, should be able to play as well as Jimi Hendrix. In fact, to be good at anything requires the right kind of talent and lots and lots of application. I agree that it would be good for people to make the effort to understand and decently critique Weinstein's hypothesis but those people should be professional physicists. To take it out on poor Lex Fridman seems a little mean.

Another public intellectual who has proposed a Theory of Everything is Jordan Peterson. Peterson's theory isn't biological or physics-based; rather it encompasses psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Peterson's core idea, his idee fixe, is that life consists of a battle between chaos and order with the ego in between – generally speaking we live our lives within a world of fixed meanings but occasionally chaos intrudes forcing us to reassess our priorities and usual procedures. Peterson's theory is inevitably tripartite, a misreading of Jung. Order is the father, chaos is the mother, and in between is the son, the hero, the logos. If this seems sexist to you, you'd be right – Peterson is a misogynist and I have no idea how he can have, as he seems to have, a reasonably cordial relationship with his wife and daughter. About six months ago I read his magnum opus Maps of Meaning – or, rather, I read half of it. I had decided that if I was going to be critical of Peterson, I should do him the justice of reading his most important book. But I was overwhelmed with boredom halfway through, during his seemingly unending discussion of Mesopotamian myth, and set it aside permanently. When the libraries reopen, I will borrow it again and finish it. Someone who did manage to read the whole thing is Nathan Robinson;  I highly recommend his piece about it in The Magazine of Current Affairs "The Intellectual We Deserve" (https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve). Robinson's criticism of Peterson centres on Peterson's obscurantism, his mixing of banal platitudes with ridiculous assertions all dressed up in language so tortuous and byzantine that it becomes impossible to work out what position Peterson is actually taking on anything. Personally, I found it tedious and endlessly repetitive. Peterson's central idea is that humans are goal-seeking agents and that, so long as we are inhabiting 'explored territory' and are attaining our goals in the ways we expect, we are happy. If a little chaos intrudes, we reassess our procedures for attaining our short-term goals but, if a lot of chaos intrudes, we are forced to reassess the goals themselves, in short reassess everything. The distress we experience when this happens can lead to violence and war. Peterson repeats this core idea over and over again, and sees it reflected in ancient myth, across cultures, and across religions. The problem with Peterson's core 'insight' is that it is so vague and general as to be unfalsifiable. Those people who see life as the pursuit of one goal after another may find that his world-view resonates with theirs, but it didn't resonate with me in the slightest. It is completely foreign to me. I myself am not goal seeking at all; rather I just allow myself to float with the tide as it ebbs in and out. Perhaps I should read Peterson's book 12 Rules for Life and admit that existence is a constant war against everyone else and that I should take responsibility for my life.

Karl Popper said that one of hallmarks of much pseudoscience is that it is unfalsifiable. A question we could ask evolutionary biologists is, "What evidence could refute your claim that all features of living organisms are the result of chance mutation and natural selection?" If the evolutionary biologist cannot give an answer, evolutionary biology isn't a real science. Freud asserted that dreams are an expression of repressed desire and that the proof of this is the content of dreams; likewise evolutionary biologists argue that a biological feature must be an adaption to past circumstances because an organism possesses it. Although I lack the mathematical nous to understand Eric Weinstein's theory of Geometrical Unity, the problem with it may be that it, too, is unfalsifiable. And quite obviously Peterson's theory is unfalsifiable. The problem of unfalsifiability may bedevil all potential Theories of Everything.

And now, finally, I turn to Sam Harris.

In The Moral Landscape, Harris presents a Theory of Everything applicable to morality. Now, I haven't actually read The Moral Landscape but I have read and heard enough about it that I feel I can venture an opinion on it. Harris argues that morally good actions are those that increase human well-being. His is thus a kind of utilitarianism. He makes two important claims: that this theory follows inevitably from science, from our understanding of the objective world, and that our definition of human well-being is open to revision as our understanding of science improves. He thinks that it is self-evident that human flourishing is an objective good. He derives an 'ought' from an 'is'. I used to believe in utilitarianism but no longer do so, and want to give some reasons why.

The problem with utilitarianism is that we can imagine scenarios in which a utilitarian calculation produces a result that runs counter to the ordinary morality that informs our everyday life. Suppose I am extremely hungry and can satisfy my hunger by shoplifting a packet of biscuits from the supermarket. Suppose furthermore that the supermarket won't even notice that the packet of biscuits is missing. If we accept Harris's theory, my shoplifting a packet of biscuits increases the net amount of well-being in the world and so is not only morally permitted but morally required. In practice however, we all believe theft is wrong, regardless of the circumstances. We have accepted a rule from on high which we do not even question. A second scenario is the one we are all currently living through. Some people on the Right have argued that the net loss of sum-total well-being occasioned by shutting down the global economy, almost certainly bringing about a global economic depression, is greater than the sum-total loss of well-being occasioned by allowing a few old people to die. But most people, including Harris himself (I know this from a tweet he wrote), do not believe this. Most people believe the most important thing is to save lives. We believe this because we trust our governments to make the right decisions (at least here in New Zealand, if not in the United States.)

The word for the type of morality I subscribe to is 'deontological', a category of moral theory different to utilitarianism. The most famous deontologist is Immanuel Kant but I am not going to spend any time talking about him here. Deontology holds that an action is right or wrong to the extent that it conforms or fails to conform to a set of rules, and has nothing to do with any consequences it brings about. It is just such a deontological schema that is our default moral setting. Consider the following example. About three weeks ago, David Clark, the Minister of Health here in New Zealand, was found to have taken his mountain bike to a mountain bike trail at Signal Hill near Dunedin for a ride, in contravention of lockdown rules. Even though the probability of him transmitting coronavirus to anyone or catching it himself while mountain biking alone in the wilderness is by almost any measure nonexistent, Clark was stripped of one of his portfolios and demoted. The media were unified in denouncing him; not one voice spoke up in his support. By a utilitarian standard, he had done nothing wrong, but he had violated the isolation rules established by the government. This shows that our default moral setting is deontological. I'll give another example. My mother and I inhabit the same bubble and have only interacted with each other for over a month. The day before yesterday some friends of hers walked over to the apartment block she lived in and we all sat out the front, several meters apart, drinking beer or wine and conversing. From a utilitarian perspective, we had done little wrong. But my mother didn't sleep at all that night, plagued by pangs of remorse. We were guilty of having broken, in a small way, the quarantine rules.

Morality begins at home. Children are told by their parents to do what they are told and to always tell the truth, or be punished. As adults, social authorities take the place of our parents in telling us what we should or shouldn't do. The rule, "Always tell the truth!" is a maxim very strongly supported by Sam Harris. But Harris fails to recognise that there may be occasions when lying might increase human well-being. One argument for religion is that, if people believe that if they do the right thing they will go to heaven or otherwise go to hell, even if this belief is false (even if they have been lied to), it increases the amount of well-being in the world because it encourages people to act virtuously. This argument is one Harris and the other New Atheists, such as Hitchens and Dawkins, vehemently oppose, but they haven't disproved it. It seems to me that morality is simply those set of rules established democratically by a government for the good governance of a nation. This raises the question: can a government ever be wrong? The abolishing of the Jim Crow laws in the 'sixties and the recent legalisation of cannabis in many American states shows that elected officials are themselves subject to higher moral laws. Every religion in the world preaches the central doctrine, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", a doctrine related although not identical with Kant's Categorical Imperative. The universality of this precept suggests that it, rather than any utilitarian calculation, is the foundation of morality. Children do not calculate the future utility of their actions when the decide what to do or not do – and neither do adults. We simply follow the rules we have been taught.

In this post, I have discussed four members of the Intellectual Dark Web. All four either subscribe to or claim to have invented Theories of Everything. Bret Weinstein subscribes to Evolutionary Biology. Eric Weinstein claims to have discovered a Grand Unified Theory that reconciles particle physics with General Relativity. Jordan Peterson claims to have discovered that human nature is a battle between order and chaos. And Sam Harris claims that morality can emerge from science, that morality is objective. At least three of the four are wrong. The question I ask myself sometimes is whether I could come up with a Theory of Everything myself or at least answer some of the philosophical problems that bother us. Probably not. But it is worth trying.