Substance and Pattern

"Reality is not substance but pattern"

But what does it mean?

It is a shift (a paradigm shift, to use that ugly expression) in one's view of what is important in determining the nature of things.

The idea that substance is what determines reality: where does it come from? I'm not entirely sure, but it certainly runs deep. It is a candidate for being one of those unconscious assumptions which one holds without even realising it. Maybe it can be traced back to Aristotle (along with a whole lot else!); or maybe it is rather younger than that (empiricism?)... certainly the neoPlatonists' worldview didn't require things to have a physical existence to be real. (Although that is something slightly different -- personally I don't believe that if all physical matter was removed from the Universe there would be anything left, whereas the neoPlatonists and modern Christians, among others, do.)

Whatever its roots, the idea that substance is what reality is made from is a common-sense and a common one in the context of 20th century secular Western culture. True, there are many different configurations in which substance may manifest itself, but substance is the primary stuff of reality and the forms in which it is manifested are secondary to that fundamental fact.

I want to reconsider this "common-sense" assumption.

Reality and Particle Physics

The progress made in particle physics this century has thrown some valuable light on the nature and relevance of substance. Unfortunately, since this light shows up a view of substance that is precisely the opposite of the view our preconceptions have led us to expect, few people have realised its significance. (This is hardly surprising: we filter our perceptions through our preconceptions...)

Our preconceptions have led us to expect that the study of particle physics -- which is the study of the fundamental nature and properties of matter and therefore of reality -- should lead to a clear and clearer understanding of what reality (i.e. matter or substance) is. This has not happened; what has happened has been the exact reverse. All that we have learnt about those "fundamental" pieces of reality called atoms has only served to teach us that they are not fundamental at all, but are composed of smaller particles such as protons, neutrons and electrons, and in turn, all our efforts to understand these have made it plain that they neither are what reality is "really" made of, but are again subdivided into yet smaller entities. And the further you go down this chain of levels, the more difficult and costly it becomes to make further progress, the more bizarre, baffling and resistant to human understanding the resulting knowledge becomes, and the less and less any of it seems to bear any meaningful relation to everyday life.

I said earlier that few people have appreciated the true significance of the progress made in particle physics this century; I should have said that few were consciously aware of it. The colossal indifference with which the vast majority of the people in this world regard particle physics (assuming they have even heard of it) is an indictment of its irrelevance, a judgement no less damning for being subconscious.

The Anthropic Principle

Why is particle physics so irrelevant to so much of people's lives? In their recent book, The Collapse of Chaos, Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart offer an interesting answer to this apparent paradox. It is interesting because it's non-reductionist; but then any reasonable explanation of the paradox would have to be non-reductionist because it is reductionism itself that generates the paradox by insisting that low-level patterns (such as the physics of subatomic particles) are relevant to high-level patterns (such as human experience).

They reach their answer from a consideration of the "anthropic principle". Like atheism, the anthropic principle comes in "strong" and "weak" flavours, the distinction between which seems somewhat esoteric (if not downright incomprehensible) from without. I shall attempt to generalise.

As is well known, the existence of life on this planet owes much to the existence of carbon and its tendency to form stable long-chain molecules. Without this there could have been no DNA, no cell walls or cell membrances, no enzymes... you get the picture. Now, it has been observed that the formation of carbon depends, according to current models of particle physics, very heavily upon certain universal constants having the values that they do. Planck's constant, the mass of an electron... that sort of thing. With the value Planck's constant happens to have, carbon gets formed by nuclear resonance within stars. (Apparently.) Change it just the tiniest bit and it no longer would. And it's not just carbon. It's pretty much everything. Everything that had to have happened for us to be alive now, seems to have depended on the universe being set up exactly how it is. Without such-and-such, no ozone layer. Without such-and-such-else, no galaxies. Or whatever. (I extemporise.)

There are two readings you can put on this. (If I'm not hopelessly muddled -- and I probably am -- they correspond to the "strong" and the "weak" forms of the anthropic principle.) The first is that the Universe is set up the way it is because someone or something took care to make sure it was set up that way.

The second, and to me far more mind-melting interpretation is that we are in the universe with the particular set of constants that ours has (and wondering why it has those particular constants) because it's the universe that we had to be in. Humans can only happen in universes that have the set of constants that ours does. So it's meaningless to speculate on "why" our universe has these constants. It had to: if it didn't, we wouldn't have been in it. There may or may not be other universes with other constants, but we can't know about them because we couldn't have happened in them. We might as well ask, "Why aren't we all squirrels?" to which the weak anthropic principle would answer, "But if we were all squirrels, we wouldn't have asked that question."

However, Cohen and Stewart offer a different resolution of this problem. Let me quote.

Sherlock Holmes Stories

...It sounds like a powerful argument, but it falls down in one crucial respect. It assumes that while exploring universe-space by changing Planck's constant, you don't change anything else. Sherlock Holmes stories have the same fragility. If you change just one event, the story falls apart. In "The Red-headed League," if Jabez Wilson had not possessed red hair, then the trick of luring him off the premises of his pawnbroker's shop would have failed. All of which implies, of course, that there is only one possible Sherlock Holmes story... and now you see the fallacy, for there are hundreds of Sherlock Holmes stories. Each one is so carefully crafted that changing a single feature will destroy the logic. But you don't do that. You change several features in a consistent way. Jabez Wilson could have been bald, in a story called "The Bald-headed League."

It is certainly interesting to know that if we change Planck's constant while keeping everything else the same then humanity would become impossible. Or that if we change the mass of the electron, while keeping everything else the same, ditto. But these two facts together do not imply that, in order for us to exist, Plank's constant and the mass of the electron must both have their observed values. Perhaps if both were changed at the same time... The anthropic principle's argument is not exploring universe-space, as it tries to imply. The argument is exploring only a few very specific directions within an enormously multidimensional universe-space -- the directions along the Planck's-constant axis or the electron-mass axis. This kind of argument for the anthropic principle is like claiming to have explored the whole of the universe when you've only "gone down the road to the chemist," as it says in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Transparency

They then move on to a related but much farther-reaching idea: that of "transparency". The analogy is with transparency in the sense that a computer scientist would use the word: to describe a piece of software whose internal workings don't need to be understood for it to be used effectively.

How does this apply to the physical universe?

Levels of organisation. You don't need to understand the details of one level of organisation in order to manipulate the level above effectively. This is fairly obvious when you think about it. Biologists (I pluck my example from thin air as usual) may need to know certain principles of chemistry -- such as the equations describing the rate of a chemical reaction. But they don't usually need to know about the periodic table, or crystal lattices. They certainly don't need to know about electron shells or energy levels; not to carry out effective biological research that is, although it may enhance their sense of understanding of the physical world. Even less do they need to know about bosons or gluons. Similarly, a software engineer doesn't need to know the fine details about semiconductor devices (electrons and holes, for instance).

There might be a few rare exceptions to the above statements, but on the whole this principle of transparancy could probably be accepted as common sense by most. Cohen and Stewart, however, take it one step further. They argue that it actually doesn't matter what the details of underlying levels of organisation are. That the details of atomic physics are quite irrelevant to biology, because what matters is the immediate internal and external context (at a high level of organisation) of a biological system. That the formation of the kinds of complex systems we see in the world around us is "downhill" to the Universe, irrespective of low-level organisation and things like Planck's constant. That the Universe, in and of itself, is a creative force that generates complexity spontaneously; and that if you were to "tweak" a few universal constants you might not get long chain carbon molecules anymore, but you would get complexity of some sort, and you might well get life operating on very similar principles to the life we know (after all, variation and natural selection have only the broadest dependence on chemistry).

I would like to incorporate this idea into the overall topic of the page with the following elaborated definition:

"Reality (at a given level of organisation) is the pattern into which the underlying level of reality is configured."

(Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it's the interaction of the pattern of the given level and the pattern of the underlying level.) I like this statement a lot because it's a recursive definition. There's some reason for recursive definitions being exciting but I can't quite put my finger on it just now.

Anyway, this is more or less what Cohen and Stewart argue. They virtually state in as many words that reality is pattern and not substance, but never quite do so. Which is disappointing (to me!) if hardly surprising.

The view of reality we have reached so far is appealing (well, I think it is (grin)) but incomplete. To help complete it, we need the concept of strange loops. But since I've made the arbitrary decision to put that on a different page, our discussion here is almost ended.

A final few words

Almost. I have left one small but rather important thing out: a justification of why reality should be pattern and not substance. The answer to this is buried in the previous three pages. All these kinds of complex systems, which operate in very different media and yet show startlingly similar features (more startlingly similar than my inadequate descriptions have probably managed to convey), hold the key. The answer is that the pattern into which substance is configured is far more important than the substance from which a pattern is made. The same pattern expressed in two different substances is far more similar than the same substance configured into two different patterns. And if patterns are allowed to become primary, then they can be not only configurations of the world of substance, but meta-configurations. Think about a statue. Let's make it a limestone statue, of something suitably dramatic... Well, why don't you choose the subject? Anyhow, this statue, of whatever it is, is a configuration of limestone into the pattern of whatever it happens to be a statue of. (Maybe I should have chosen a subject -- the phrasing is getting a bit tortuous!) But what about the image of the statue in the sculptor's mind before it has been carved? That is another pattern, but you can't find it by looking at substance. It nevertheless possesses a reality far more tangible, or at least meaningful, than any bank of neurones firing. Substance has been configured into that particular pattern not directly, but at a meta-level (if I may be excused such a hideous turn of phrase). Or take something else: a sheet of music manuscript. Compare it with the soundwaves that are produced when the music is performed, and the patterns produced in the minds of listeners when they hear the music. All utterly different in substance, and yet they are all still very much the same thing. Is a limestone statue the same as a limestone hill? A piece of origami the same as a church newsletter?

I had better stop wittering now, before I spoil all the fun saved up for the next page ("Psychic projection")! It does develop this theme a bit further -- kind of.

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