Aristotelian Metaphysics as a Unifying Paradigm for 21st Century Science: Common Sense-ible Science 1527567281, 9781527567283

Table of contents :
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Notes
Bibliography and Further Reading

Citation preview

Aristotelian Metaphysics as a Unifying Paradigm for 21st Century Science: Common Sense-ible Science

Aristotelian Metaphysics as a Unifying Paradigm for 21st Century Science: Common Sense-ible Science By

Jacob Joseph

Aristotelian Metaphysics as a Unifying Paradigm for 21st Century Science: Common Sense-ible Science By Jacob Joseph This book first published 2024 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2024 by Jacob Joseph All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-6728-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-6728-3

This book is dedicated to the memory of Fr. John J. Connelly, who guided my explorations in metaphysics

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... ix Preface ........................................................................................................ x Acknowledgements ................................................................................. xiv Chapter 1 .................................................................................................... 1 Introduction: Beginning Again with the Why? Chapter 2 .................................................................................................... 6 End of the Beginning Chapter 3 .................................................................................................. 10 Aristotle’s Synthesis: Looking Behind Appearances Chapter 4 .................................................................................................. 15 Of First Philosophy and First Principles Chapter 5 .................................................................................................. 19 Diversity in Unity: Existence and Essence Chapter 6 .................................................................................................. 24 Substance, That Which Stands Under Chapter 7 .................................................................................................. 27 Beings, Similar Yet Different: Matter and Form Chapter 8 .................................................................................................. 31 Can Anything Change into Anything? Act and Potency Chapter 9 .................................................................................................. 34 Causation: What Causes a Being to Exist as that Kind of Being? Chapter 10 ................................................................................................ 37 Material and Efficient Causes

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Chapter 11 ................................................................................................ 40 Formal Cause Chapter 12 ................................................................................................ 43 Final Cause Chapter 13 ................................................................................................ 46 Interlude: Determinism, Chance, Reality Chapter 14 ................................................................................................ 48 Ignoring the Basics: How Did We Get Where We Are Now? Chapter 15 ................................................................................................ 55 Quantum Mechanics: Not So Mechanical Chapter 16 ................................................................................................ 61 Life is Hard Chapter 17 ................................................................................................ 67 Hierarchy of Life: Boundary Conditions Chapter 18. .............................................................................................. 71 Biology of Life: Dogma of Linearity Yields to Complexity Chapter 19 ................................................................................................ 74 Evolution: Not the Complete Answer Chapter 20 ................................................................................................ 79 The Big Bang That Shattered Eternity Chapter 21 ................................................................................................ 81 The Common Sense-ible Human Person Chapter 22 ................................................................................................ 85 Could There Be an Uncaused Cause? Chapter 23 ................................................................................................ 87 Brave New World of Human Knowledge Notes ......................................................................................................... 91 Bibliography and Further Reading ........................................................... 95

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Boundary Conditions

PREFACE

I never imagined that I would write a book on a subject – metaphysics that most people nor I had encountered during our formative years. It was my meandering across the globe in search of knowledge that culminated in acknowledging Aristotelean metaphysics as the foundations of all that I already knew and will come to know. I will offer the history of how this book came to be written, to explain why it was written and for whom. Like many, I am a man who has traversed the world in search of knowledge, from India to America, ultimately transporting myself back to Ancient Greece to rediscover the thinking of Aristotle, the originator of our systematic search for knowledge. It was an unexpected journey into medicine, and then a reverse journey, back from medicine to biomedical sciences, to natural science, to philosophy, to finally reach First Philosophy or Metaphysics. A journey back from being a witness to fragmentation of knowledge, called more elegantly sub-specialization, back to a more holistic approach. As I went through schooling in the state of Kerala, in the southern tip of India, I became enamored of mathematics and physics. I loved the linear progression of ideas from A to B to C, the certainty of mathematical proofs, the charm of unraveling algebraic equations to find out the unknown. In contrast, I disliked the seeming complexity and irreducibility of biology. I could not embrace the need for memorizing without equations to explain what we were studying in biology. Hence, I did not think I would pursue any career tied to biology. But that was not to be. My father was a physician who treated many poor people. Some of them used to come home and ask to see the son (I was the only son). And they would tell me that I must become like my father, become a servant of those in need. The repeated messaging throughout my teenage years influenced me, and I decided to become a doctor and was admitted to the local medical school. My father who knew my academic proclivities, asked me to think carefully before I committed to becoming a physician, and I, with all the false certainty of a teenage mind with minimal world experience, confirmed my decision.

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The first two years of medical school left me in disarray. My medical school prepared doctors to be clinicians; there was not much biomedical research going on in the India of that time. While the pre-clinical subjects like physiology and biochemistry had their basis in physical sciences and had mathematical equations, the lack of application and discovery and the need for rote memorization took its toll. I wondered if I had made the wrong choice in entering the field of medicine. My worries disappeared when I encountered my first patient in my third year of medical school. I felt an instant connection to the basic premise of the medical profession – to make individual lives better by treating disease. Even though I was just a medical student learning to take a medical history and examine a patient, I felt that encountering another human being in the depths of their being, with their fears and insecurities brought on by disease, and walking with them in their journey, that just seemed to be what I was called to do. But I still had difficulties with medicine as it was taught, its focus on gathering symptoms and signs from the patient and coming to a diagnosis and a plan for investigation and treatment. While there was an interest in the underlying pathobiology, i.e., understanding what aspects of human biology had gone awry, most of the focus was on assessing the symptoms and signs and deciding on management as had been established. I was fascinated by the combination of science and art in the practice of medicine. But I still yearned for that certainty that I perceived was provided by physics and mathematics. It was then that I happened upon a textbook of medicine called “Cecil’s Essentials of Medicine,” edited by an American academic physician, the late Professor Thomas E. Andreoli. In it I found a greater focus on pathobiology than I encountered in the standard textbooks we studied. I immediately felt a connection to what I thought was an American approach to medicine, one that focused more on the science of why we did what we did as physicians. I decided I had to get to America for further training. My intention was to understand how to apply basic sciences to medicine and come back to India to continue my journey. The path to further training was strewn with blocks that I had to get over, from taking a specific examination in another country, Singapore, to being denied a visa to go for interviews in America, to finally landing up via New York in the small university town of Columbia, Missouri. There I

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was introduced, during my training in internal medicine and cardiology, to basic research. I spent time in a molecular biology lab and investigated how to get a third strand of DNA to bind to the gene for collagen to shut down collagen production. After training, I decided that I had to stay in America and pursue an academic career, since I felt the combination of research and clinical practice and teaching would give me the greatest satisfaction. And so it was that I embarked upon research into heart failure as I launched my academic career. I felt that, finally, I could at least study some aspects of medicine in a manner that was akin to physics or mathematics. My illusions were quickly dispelled when I realized that while most of the advances in medicine were spurred by very specific studies of specific proteins and receptors and trying to enhance or block them to prevent or treat disease, what was happening inside the cell or the human body was too complex to be reduced to linear processes. It was clear that if you affected a single protein, there was not one specific effect, but multiple effects. It seemed that biological systems were complex systems that were composed of innumerous interacting molecules. How could science possibly unravel the functioning of a single cell, far less the functioning of a human being that I encountered every day, anxiously awaiting my judgements on their health and well-being? Intertwined with this quandary about dissecting a path forward through the thicket of humanity and its medical underpinnings was another seeming dichotomy: between the reason that I continued to be a physician – a deep seated altruism that seemed contrary to the dictates of a purely material existence; and my vocation as a scientist devoted to the biomedical sciences steeped in empirical, material science. In the increasingly physicalist realm of the biomedical sciences that accepted only facts established by experimentation, how could I achieve a consonance between my personal and professional life and not split my humanity into two spheres of action? The answer came in the form of a retired priest, who was a second father to me, who introduced me to Aristotelian metaphysics. Finally, I reached a milestone in my quest for knowledge – the joyful discovery that even though knowledge starts with what we could sense and observe, we could go beyond these empiric observations to find truths that pertain to all existing beings, and that explanations, while we would try to ground them in the material realm as far as possible, could go beyond the material to the non-material realm if necessary. Furthermore, I was comforted to find that in the Aristotelian metaphysical framework,

Aristotelian Metaphysics as a Unifying Paradigm for 21st Century Science: xiii Common Sense-ible Science

searching for certainty, for answers to the question ‘Why?’ and not just to the question ‘How?’ is the true avenue for pursuing knowledge. And all this using reason alone, without recourse to any supernatural explanations! I also saw that metaphysics was the answer not only to the increasing fragmentation of knowledge into further and further sub-disciplines that I observed in my own field of the biomedical sciences, but also to the almost frightening divide I saw developing between the public and those who were perceived to be part of a self-appointed scientific elite. This was no more apparent than during the battles played out in the public sphere during the tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic. One more episode from my life that shows the interplay of determinism and chance in the universe. I was in a flight reading a book on metaphysics. To my left was a young man who had been twice bumped off other flights to end up in the middle seat to my left. He was a medical student at Harvard, where I was a faculty. Interestingly, he had also been searching for answers to questions similar to mine, and was very interested in metaphysics. He convinced me to offer metaphysics as an elective course at Harvard Medical School, and this book is the offshoot of that course and the lecture notes I developed for the students. That, my dear readers, is my journey to rediscover and update metaphysics that has reconciled my duties as a physician and scientist with those of a citizen of humanity. I offer to you the fruits of my labor to make the quest for knowledge have some common themes that make that quest the property of all humanity, not of just a select few who may have a degree in the sciences – or in philosophy.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the profound influence of Fr. John J. Connelly, who introduced me to metaphysics as the avenue to unify my entire intellectual life. His carefully curated reading lists from his vast library, the countless sessions discussing each book, and the many, many, stimulating conversations we had before his passing in 2021, all contributed to the writing of this book. I am very grateful to S.B. Easwaran, who read the first drafts of each chapter and offered extremely helpful suggestions and edits. I am grateful to Dr. Michael Dykstra, who, when he was a medical student in Harvard Medical School, encouraged and assisted me in offering an elective course in metaphysics to medical students. My gratitude to Veronica Schrenk who critically read the manuscript and to Bernhard Schrenk who offered helpful suggestions. I am very grateful to my family for their support. My thanks to my wife Lija for her encouragement and critical reading of the manuscript. I am most grateful to my children, Anjali, Joe, and Anne, whose passionate striving to make this world a better place, and their encouragement, gave me the inspiration to write this book.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: BEGINNING AGAIN WITH THE WHY?

To be human is to strive to know. Not just some facts and the how of things, but to truly understand, to know the why of things. A beaver may build a dam, but doesn’t know – and doesn’t care to know – how water flows. Or even why it builds dams and what drives it to build them? But we humans wonder incessantly. Like the warthog Pumbaa in the Disney movie Lion King, we muse if the little dots in the night sky are balls of gas. Thirsty for knowledge, we seek answers even to questions devoid of immediate practical value. Why do we exist? What is the meaning of our existence? From childhood we keep asking why? Memory, storytelling, writing, and now digital media – these have made possible the uniquely human facility for sharing what we know and learning from others, even previous generations. But though we enjoy the benefit of the view from the shoulders of giants long gone, we still stride out in search of truth. For to be truly human is to strive to know the truth. Our ancestors interrogated the material world around them primarily for acquiring knowledge to better their lives. But they did not stop there – they searched for an understanding of how their world came to be and what lay beyond mere appearance. Initially they explained the world, its origins and its workings through myth. Later, starting with the Greek thinkers, our search for knowledge became systematic. Knowledge in the modern sense – scientia, Latin for knowledge, from which the word science derives – was born. Aristotle, considered the foremost among several originators of what we now call science, conceived of science as asking not just how things are, in order to use them to our benefit, but also why they are so, in order to truly understand the inner workings of the world. For Aristotle, science was certain knowledge of the reasons why things were the way they were. That is to say science should not stop at gaining practical utility from what it studied but would try to understand it by elucidating all underlying causes. This aspiration for certain knowledge thrived for two millennia since the time of Aristotle.

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As civilization progressed, we built instruments to aid our search for knowledge. Microscopes, telescopes and atom smashers made it possible to perceive the material constituents of the world. From the thirteenth century, however, the thrust of human knowledge shifted from discerning ‘certain’ causes to using knowledge gained by observation for practical purposes. In the seventeenth century, there occurred a major inflection point in the quest for human knowledge – the Scientific Revolution, during which the why undergirding our pursuit of knowledge was mostly abandoned for the how that would let us harness the power of nature. The new knowledge paradigm progressed rapidly and has now become a dominant worldview – physicalism, the idea that modern science can explain the whole universe, including human existence and human aspirations. It has no doubt benefited humanity enormously by increasing material comfort and breaking the shackles of disease. But the claim that physical matter is all that matters is a major sticking point. Is every action– including me typing these words – solely the result of the purposeless motion of particles of matter? Materialistic reductionism militates against our humanness. As physicians, I and my colleagues do not treat a patient as a passive recipient of tests and treatments, but as an active agent of knowledge, able to participate in decisions about her wellbeing. We teach medical students about patient autonomy – the imperative to let the patient make an informed decision about treatment choices. Why would we let a patient decide against a lifesaving treatment if we believed that such an abhorrent thought was the result of a material brain state that we could ignore for his material well-being! Whether we claim to be materialist reductionists or any other-ists who won’t see beyond matter, we still wouldn’t consider a person as just a material being subject solely to manipulatable physico-chemical laws. So, by respecting patient autonomy, are we acknowledging that there are trans-physical entities? By trans-physical, I mean an entity that transcends the properties assigned to matter and energy by physics and chemistry – not a supernatural cause. As we will discuss later, human society is based on concepts that lie beyond material comfort and could even be contrary to self-preservation, like sacrificing your life for your country. The recognition of a trans-physical aspect of the human person, and concepts such as altruism, integral to human functioning, yet transcending material comfort, also make us question whether the origins of the universe lie solely in its material components. Clearly, physicalism doesn’t give us all the answers, and even a firm materialist behaves

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contrary to his beliefs while treating another human as something more than solely a physical collection of atoms. The new paradigm has also artificially dichotomized the world into scientists and everyone else. Never was this schism more evident than during the COVID-19 pandemic and the controversies over COVID vaccines. Scientists wondered why their seemingly reasonable conclusions and recommendations were not being accepted verbatim; and nonscientists resented what they saw as an unwanted intrusion into their lives based on what they surmised was less than the truth. The internet and media, which allow the rapid dispersion of any information regardless of its verity, further separated the accidental adversaries. Disregarding my access to the best medical information on COVID, friends and acquaintances have plied me with news items and YouTube videos put out by self-proclaimed experts! It is time to recover the foundations of knowledge, so that it becomes part of the heritage of all people, so that all divisions based on artificial hierarchies of knowledge are removed for the benefit of humanity. For, within its narrow confines, modern science is just a part of the human quest for the sort of knowledge that makes life not just materially comfortable but also meaningful. This quest for meaning can and must go beyond the vague and vapid fashions of the age. In medical research there is a slow but inexorable trend towards studies that encourage the meaningful participation in the design of the study of those for whom the treatment is meant. In fact, some research funding is contingent on patient participation. Such studies merge the concerns of the scientific and lay fields in research. As a physician and medical researcher, I am involved in a trial that seeks to answer a key question: Do adults older than 75 years benefit from cholesterol-lowering statins?1 Heart attacks and strokes are usually caused by the rupture of blood vessels in which cholesterol-rich plaques have built up. Blood clots and clogs the vessel at the rupture site, interrupting supply to the heart or brain. Researchers, including myself, find ourselves gravitating to impersonal questions such as whether statins, by checking plaque buildup, prevent heart attacks and strokes. But the question uppermost on the mind of a participant might be this: If I have lived to the ripe age of 75 without a heart attack or stroke, would taking additional medication make me live a longer, meaningful life? When patients’ perspectives were included in the study, we modified the question it addresses to: Will the drug lead to better survival without dementia or disability? Such integration of concerns and interests will without doubt benefit applied science and its users. But is such bridging possible, even necessary, when it comes to pure theoretical science? I think it is – on both

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counts. All spheres of human knowledge can be melded, even in their austere beauty, by removing artificial divides. The novelist and chemist C.P. Snow spoke of divide between the “the two cultures” of arts and sciences; there is also one between the so-called hard sciences and lay knowledge. Such rifts are artificial and have materialized not out of any malign, elitist intent on part of scientists or other groups, but because ideas assume lives of their own and metamorphose into little worlds in themselves. Subsequent ideas that tried to repair the breach ended up widening it into a chasm of irreconcilable differences and mistrust. We can recover ‘common’ human knowledge by retracing our steps to the origins of our common quest for knowledge, by understanding the foundations of science before any biases crept in, and by recognizing the causes of those artificial rifts. Ours is an opportune era for such reconciliation. The internet has made dispersion of knowledge easy, and the discoveries of modern science – in physics, cosmology, medicine, neuroscience, neuropsychology, and evolutionary biology – are bringing us back to where we will again be able to ask the basic Why? Among the answers is the possibility of a trans-physical human soul and an explanation for the origins of the universe that includes an Uncaused Cause. I believe this approach will enrich rather than diminish science, and allow humanity to celebrate science as knowledge possessed by all – not just an elite. I call this rediscovered concept of science ‘common sense-ible science’ – common to all humanity, and derived from a) normal thinking, taking into account verified scientific findings, not inadequately elucidated scientific theories, and b) our own analyses using our senses and senseenhancing instruments. Metaphysics (from the Greek meta ta phusika, translated as after natural things), and physics itself, had broader connotations than modern day physics and encompassed the study of nature in its entirety. Modern physics itself posits many entities in nature that are not directly observable by the human eye or any instrument – like sub-atomic particles and black holes. So metaphysical thinking – which looks beyond appearance and the results of empiric investigations – must reclaim its position amongst academic endeavors, for its principles affect all subdisciplines of human knowledge. Metaphysical thinking also needs to verify the plausibility of mathematically based theories of science – for while there is a close correlation between many mathematically derived laws of nature and what happens in nature, not every equation that makes mathematical sense is instantiated in nature. Even historical events ought to be analyzed through the lens of common sense-ible science, verifying facts using testimony and probability, weighed always by the eternal yet forgotten Why? Equally, it is important to answer, rather than dismiss,

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skeptics who think COVID vaccines are a money-minting ruse of pharma giants or that climate change is a hoax. Their doubts may perhaps originate in incomplete answers to the why of vaccination or climate change. If people understand the why, there likely won’t be discrepant actions or beliefs. I have been privileged as a physician and scientist to observe both people and the workings of modern science. In this book, I will draw upon that experience of the theory and practice of biomedical sciences and my understanding of how the human quest for knowledge was established and then veered off course, to propose that all knowledge – even advanced cosmology and gene manipulation – can become a true common endeavor of all humanity by the recovery of its Aristotelian foundations. Nothing is beyond the reach of common sense-ible science. Everyone – scientists and non-scientists – can and should interrogate every aspect of human endeavor. I hope this book will empower you to do that and become a philosopher in the true sense of the word – a lover of knowledge, an active participant in the advancement of the frontiers of knowledge. No background in philosophy as a discipline is needed – just a love of knowledge, a love that has spurred us all since the first time, as a child, we asked the question why?

CHAPTER 2 END OF THE BEGINNING

While we may take pride in knowing more than our ancestors, we should recognize that our burgeoning knowledge is because of those who came before us. Extraordinary individual genius has existed in every age; what has advanced us, however, may be our collective human genius. If the treasures of human knowledge and the range of human intellect have grown exponentially, it is because we have transferred knowledge horizontally across societies and vertically across generations. Human knowledge may be thought of as a rope that is forever being braided, and comprising strands entwined since the time the first human pondered the world around her. Some of its strands extend right from the beginning to now, some have frayed, and some that were too weak to merit inclusion were excluded, have worn away or been replaced. That is why any survey of human knowledge – which is not a current fad but our collective heritage – must include its beginnings, and not just focus on the last few decades or centuries. Whoever invented the wheel may have been a greater genius than Einstein since she would have been operating de novo, without any well of previous knowledge to draw from. Put yourself in the shoes of a prehistoric human. Think of her waking up and looking for food in the various plants around her, wondering which plants are useful, which harmful or even deadly. Think of how our prehistoric predecessors decided which animals to hunt and which to stay away from. Careful deliberation preceded even the most mundane decisions. For we humans are born with fewer of the instincts that animals innately possess, which enable them to survive without “thinking.” As John Locke put it in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, we may even be born with a tabula rasa – a blank slate – for a mind, yet still attain such great heights of intellectual achievement. The very beginnings of the human quest for knowledge are shrouded in myth, which of course serves certain societal needs for comfort and communion. Focusing on the scientific approach to knowledge, however, we could start with the Greeks, who laid its foundations. Until

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the advent of the philosophers (lovers of wisdom, and not professional academics) who preceded Socrates, answers to the questions of why were clever fictive and literary creations that included gods endowed with supernatural powers. These inventions offered facile explanations of creation and natural phenomena through the agency of anthropomorphized gods who didn’t stray far from human foibles. Such interventionist gods were in fact integral to Greek theater: a deux ex machina, or god from the machine, would descend on the stage to extricate humans from a difficult place in the story. The pre-Socratic philosophers, however, forayed beyond myth and began to wonder about the composition of the world beneath what they could sense, and how the changes they saw all around them could be explained. While they all thought that what they saw was composed of some underlying common entity or entities, they had different conceptions about what those were. Thales declared it was water. Anaximander insisted that four elements – air, water, earth and fire – combined in different proportions to create everything in the world. Others had different explanations. While these may sound simplistic to us through the lens of the 21st century, such succession of ideas was a huge step forward in the progress of human knowledge. It ushered in the idea that the world was intelligible to humans, that the human mind could try to understand what lay beneath the appearances of things, that it was possible to discern the nature of the world as it truly is from what it seems to our senses. We are all familiar with the theory of atomism. But what we may not recognize is that it was first proposed by two Greek pre-Socratic philosophers, Leucippus and his disciple Democritus (who is more strongly associated with it). They proposed the idea of all matter being composed of tiny, basic units called atoms. These are indivisible and move about in a void, and their various combinations account for the rich variety of the world. This theory immediately provided the grounds for materialist reductionism, or the idea that our whole universe can be reduced to particles of matter. Most importantly, in the context of this book, the atomic theory is an example of the power of the human mind to propose plausible suppositions about reality not in lockstep with experimental verification. For it was proposed without a shred of empiric proof, and persisted so for more than 2,000 years till modern scientists showed that in fact the material world was truly composed of atoms! Besides the composition of matter, its changeability – and change itself – had to be explained and understood. Was there anything permanent about the world around us? How could we explain change without losing the sense of permanence that the world possesses? Two pre-Socratic

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philosophers had widely divergent views. Parmenides declared that change is an illusion. He argued that it did not make sense that an existing being could change into another since all being was one anyway. Parmenides just couldn’t get around to the fact that there could be different kinds of being. For Parmenides, change would have to go from being to non-being and back to being – that did not make sense, or course, since non-being would be the extinction of being and you couldn’t then get back to existing. So he concluded that all change was an illusion. Heraclitus, to the absolute contrary, could not accept the permanence of any being and concluded that change alone was what was real. “Panta rei (everything flows),”

he said, and more famously, “We never step into the same river twice.”

But he also proposed a more fundamental concept – that of logos, the word, or reason, or order, which underpins the existence of the universe. The idea that the universe has a rational order and hence can be interrogated by human thought proceeds from this Heraclitean concept. While we do not have any written record of Socrates’ teaching, we do know from the writings of his illustrious pupil Plato that Socrates’ most important lesson was his act of pleading ignorance: “I know that I know nothing.”

And this stands parallel to a crucial characteristic of being human – that we are constantly striving to know more. We are never satisfied with believing that we have known all we can about the world; the more we know, the more we desire to push the boundaries of knowledge. Isn’t it amazing that the world seems to continually open itself to us? The more we find out through science, the more there will be to find out, because, as we will discuss later, the world might not fit into neat templates of explanation. In the Socratic sense, we must be skeptical of the position that we already know enough, or that it is only a matter of time before the fully enumerated properties of the physical world will completely explain how the world works. We must be wary of the physicalist position, for then we cannot accept the thoughts generated by the material state of our brain as representing anything real. Plato conceived of the world as consisting of unchanging, eternal ‘ideas’ that are imperfectly embodied in the visible world. What we see is

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not the real thing, for the real thing only existed as an idea, imperfectly represented by matter. Only in our mental world do real things exist. Thereby, Plato inaugurated the opposite of materialism – idealism, or the concept that the only real things were mental beings. What we see are not real things but just their approximations. And where did the ideas in our mind come from? Plato thought that ideas existed in the mind of God, the Ultimate Good, and that these ideas were imprinted on our souls, which pre-existed our bodies. With the idea of an immaterial soul separate from and inhabiting the material body, Plato also set into motion the error of dualism, i.e., the sharp divide between an immaterial being and the material body, as in the soul-body and mind-brain dichotomies. Fortunately, Plato’s disciple Aristotle, whose teachings are the major springboard for the ideas expressed in this book, rescued us from this prison of the mind and offered a solution that laid a foundation for human knowing.

CHAPTER 3 ARISTOTLE’S SYNTHESIS: LOOKING BEHIND APPEARANCES

“All men by nature desire to know.”2

While Aristotle is the seminal thinker who inaugurated systematic human knowing, we have inherited only a meagre share of his writings. What we have, rather, are what might be called lecture notes from his teaching sessions at the Lyceum in Athens. We are not even sure whether he wrote these or whether they were jotted down by his students. In the absence of more polished work, we are forced to piece together Aristotle’s creative thoughts from the available vulgate. Compared to the 21st century corpus, the empirical knowledge Aristotle worked with was minuscule. So, in adapting his ideas to our times, it is possibly to our advantage that we are working from those broad outlines. Aristotle was a star student of Plato, but broke with his teacher to dissect his own path. Plato conceived of a world that existed primarily in the mind and secondarily in the material world. Aristotle, however, framed a startling assertion – that what we know had to start with what we could see, hear, touch, smell, and taste, and not arbitrarily from what we thought about what we saw, heard, touched, smelled or tasted. But he did not eliminate the role of the mind. For Aristotle, mental action was important in that it got behind what was sensed in encountering a particular being and grasped abstract universal ideas beyond that particular being. For example, from seeing poppies, daffodils and lilies to reaching the universal idea of what a flower is, or “flowerness.” He took the median course between idealism, or the premise that only mental beings truly existed, and materialism, the premise that all that comprised any being was solely a particular arrangement of some basic matter, be it air, water, or the atoms of Leucippus and Democritus. Universal ideas existed in the mind; they were realized only as particular beings. “Flowerness”, for instance, exists in the mind, but is embodied and made real only in a real daffodil. Based on his observations of nature, living and non-living, Aristotle derived explanations of nature. He conceived of science, or

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“natural philosophy”, as certain knowledge through causes. For Aristotle, scientific quest did not end when we had acquired knowledge of the properties of an existing being sufficient for practical human purposes. The aim of science was to obtain certain knowledge of causes from observed effects. Certain knowledge of the object of inquiry meant obtaining answers to questions such as: What were the reasons for a particular thing to exist with its unique properties? and Why did such a change have to happen? The one deficiency in Aristotle’s scientific method was that he did not incorporate experimental investigations into his method of enquiry of causes. Incorporating experimental investigations into the Aristotelian framework to create the premises from which certain knowledge can be deduced would be an appropriate updating of the method of metaphysics. Aristotle applied his genius to explore almost all domains of human knowledge, from the principles of logic, the non-living and living worlds, human beings, and human endeavors such as ethics and politics. In Aristotle’s days, as mentioned before, the discipline that investigated the natural world was called physics (from the Greek word phusis or nature), and Physics is the title of one of Aristotle’s extant works, in which he details principles pertaining to the natural world. Andronicus of Rhodes, who collected and edited the lecture notes of Aristotle into books, titled one of these books Metaphysics, meaning ‘after physics’ in Latin, and that’s exactly where Andronicus placed this book, after the book titled Physics. Why did Aristotle lecture on metaphysics and what is its relevance for us today? Metaphysics starts with the statement “All men by nature desire to know.” We have to surmise that for Aristotle, the individual study of specific aspects of nature was not adequate for human understanding. From reading Metaphysics, it is clear that Aristotle surmised that underlying the study of all beings are some basic principles, or a “First Philosophy”, as he called it, that would unite all intellectual inquiry of nature. In the words of Aristotle, ‘There is a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature. Now this is not the same as any of the so-called special sciences; for none of these others treats universally of being as being. They cut off a part of being and investigate the attribute of this part.’ For Aristotle, since human knowing was about existent beings, we had to derive some principles that applied to the investigation of any and all beings in the universe before we embarked on the study of specific categories of beings. Metaphysics then becomes common human knowledge, with each science an independent offshoot of that common trunk. Thus, each

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science is not a separate entity with its own set of principles of knowledge separate from metaphysical foundations. Anthropology and medicine both study the human being but from different vantage points. But both are meant to operate under metaphysical foundations or first principles. These are based on common sense understanding of being, but incorporate definitely proven discoveries of science. (I emphasize “definitely proven” because some scientific premises are less proven than scientists claim.) An interesting fact about Aristotelian concepts: they would have been lost to the world forever but for a set of fortunate occurrences. The texts of Aristotle disappeared from the Western world during the so-called Dark Ages, but were fortunately kept alive and commented on by Islamic scholars. In the Middle Ages, they were rediscovered by the West and the concepts further developed by Western scholars, most notably St. Thomas Aquinas.3 While these Aristotelian principles are derived from the study of the world around us, they pre-exist knowledge derived from observation, and are waiting for us to apprehend them. The Aristotelian synthesis of the first principles of human knowledge was called metaphysics, as described above. These are first principles because they constitute certain knowledge, which is known intuitively and cannot be proven experimentally. One might draw a parallel here with some self-evident first principles of every science that cannot be proven from within the science itself. A first principle in medicine, for example, is primum non nocere, Latin for ‘first do no harm.’ This is obviously not based on experiment, but makes clear sense and is self-evident from observing what a doctor is called on to do in her trade. Notably, it was this first principle that the Nazi doctors and the Tuskegee experimenters violated in their abhorrent investigations on people for the purported benefit of advancing medicine. Sciences aim to achieve certain knowledge through causes. One way Aristotle proposed is through the instrument of logic, that definite proofs are provided by the syllogism, an instrument of logic which can reach certain conclusions by systematic progression through a three-part premise: middle term: conclusion construct, as seen in: All planets revolve around the Sun Earth is a planet Hence, Earth revolves around the Sun. Notice that the middle term is certain. If we proceed with this mechanism to prove any theory as being certain, we will have to stop at some principles that we cannot prove by further syllogisms. These are intuitively

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known, cannot be empirically demonstrated, and are “First Principles.” In the words of Aristotle (Metaphysics, Book IV, Part 4), referring to the first principle of non-contradiction you will learn in the next chapter, “Some indeed demand that even this shall be demonstrated, but this they do through want of education, for not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues want of education.”

The syllogism can also be used in sciences subsidiary to metaphysics to reach certain conclusions that are not first principles and are derivative of other facts or of empiric investigations. For example, you can see the syllogism work in the following example: “If air is needed for fire to burn, then a fire will go out after a finite period of time if enclosed in an airtight glass jar. Fire does go out when enclosed in an airtight glass jar. Hence fire needs air to burn.”

While Aristotle’s lack of experimental focus is considered a weakness of his approach to knowledge, we can see that his method of searching for certainty works even in empiric science. Back to first principles - I would like to call these first principles common sense-ible human knowledge, accessible to all humans who think about the world around them. Being first principles, they need constant updating with new discoveries about the physical and living world. In this book, updated with examples, I will offer the salient features of this system of thinking: the first principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason, metaphysical commons-in-being to explain being and change (existence/essence, form/matter, substance/accident, act/potency), and the four causes that underlie any certain explanations of being and change: material, formal, efficient, and final causes. Then we will examine the application of these principles of thinking to a number of major questions: the origin of the universe, the origin of life, living systems, evolution, and finally, to what is a human person. Some of Aristotle’s concepts may not seem as applicable in light of the scientific understanding of today, because Aristotle did not have access to today’s vastly increased empiric knowledge enhanced by instrumentation and experimentation, and also because Aristotle, while his genius touched all aspects of human knowledge, was first and foremost a naturalist studying the living world and hence may have exuberantly applied concepts to inanimate objects that are more fitting for living beings. However, I argue that his concept of the four causes is irrefutable,

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standing the test of time, and should be the lens through which you interrogate any scientific claim. You should not accept scientific claims that do not satisfy the certainty criteria, and you should not be dazzled by the enormous technological advances into accepting theories, some unverifiable, put forward by scientists as definite knowledge. You should feel empowered as an individual to challenge conclusions that are described as certain if they are not based on these principles of common sense-ible human knowledge. To empower you – that is the intent of this book.

CHAPTER 4 OF FIRST PHILOSOPHY AND FIRST PRINCIPLES

“First principles and causes are the most knowable” (Metaphysics Book I)

As we discussed in the previous chapter, we need first principles to initiate any human knowing. Metaphysics, which formulates first principles for all other sciences to assist in their study of specific beings, also needs first principles. First principles imply that, while all knowledge starts from sensed objects, we must have some principles that are so certain that they don’t need further verification by the senses or demonstration by the stairway of syllogism ascending from premises to conclusion. That creates a seeming paradox. In the words of Aristotle (Metaphysics Book I Part 2), “And these things, the most universal, are on the whole the hardest for men to know; for they are farthest from the senses…first principles and the causes are most knowable; for by reason of these, and from these, all other things come to be known, and not these by means of the things subordinate to them.”

These first principles, he writes, are both the hardest to know and the most knowable. By hardest to know, what Aristotle means is that we find the objects that we can perceive with our senses easier to acknowledge in our minds than derived mental concepts such as first principles. And by most knowable, he means that these concepts, abstracted from our sensory perceptions of the world around us, are clearer to our mind since we can examine them carefully in the confines of our minds. Material objects may seem easy to grasp, but we have had limited success: we are still struggling to understand the components of matter after a century of investigation using atom-smashers, electron microscopes and such. But certainly, these first principles are not easily arrived at and require careful deliberation. Aristotle speaks of two first principles underlying the study of all being. By being, what is meant is any existing thing. With the advent of

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relativity and quantum mechanics, we know that matter and energy are interchangeable and hence (existing) being includes not only matter but also energy. And as scientific knowledge expands, we are finding out that there are more enigmatic entities such as dark matter and gravity-repelling dark energy that also must be included as existents in the universe of beings. The first is the principle of non-contradiction. In Metaphysics (Book IV, Part 4), Aristotle writes, “But we have now posited that it is impossible for anything at the same time to be and not to be.”

And also that (Metaphysics Book IV, Part 3) “Evidently then such a principle is the most certain of all; which principle this is, let us proceed to say. It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect.”

This means that I cannot be both writing this sentence and not writing this sentence at the same time, that a man cannot be alive or dead at the same time, that a swan cannot be both black and white at the same time. Seems simplistic and unnecessary from our vantage point. But that is precisely the point – once arrived at, first principles seem intuitive in retrospect. But if you ruminate more, while this principle of non-contradiction seems simplistic, without this basic first principle, all knowledge becomes impossible, for we would be able to state something and its contrary to be true at the same time – which wouldn’t make any sense, and would undermine common sense-ible human knowledge. The study of the subatomic world governed by the laws of quantum mechanics poses some interesting quandaries related to this principle. A sub-atomic entity such as an electron can exist as a wave of probability and thereby can behave as though present in two places at once till it encounters an instrument that is able to measure its existence as a negatively charged particle and then it behaves as a particle! As we will discuss later, it is not that an electron violates the principle of non-contradiction and behaves as a wave and a particle at the same time, but that its behavior is dependent on how we measure it. The second principle – that of causation – is not explicitly stated in Aristotle’s extant texts but implied by his concept of causes. As he states in Physics (Book II, part 3)4,

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“Knowledge is the object of our inquiry, and men do not think they know a thing till they have grasped the why of it >which is to grasp its primary cause@.”

By this he means that there is a cause for the existence of every ‘thing’ exactly as it is, with its unique set of properties. From this, by implication and extension, we arrive at the principle of causation, the idea that there must be a cause or causes for the existence of a thing. We can also extend the principle of causation to the territory of change – we must also find certain causes underlying any change of one existing thing to another thing. While at the beach, as we watch the water level rise, we don’t think of that as a de novo occurrence – intuitively, we apply the principle of causation and know there must be a reason behind it. As was wont in ancient days, legend was invoked to explain causation – a Norse legend ascribes the tides to the god Thor being tricked into a futile attempt to empty a horn filled with water, with the horn being surreptitiously connected to the oceans! Man’s subscribing to the principle of causation has replaced Thor’s futile quaffing by the cyclic gravitational pull of the moon. It is implied that when we see an existing being, there are causes we must search for; and when we see a change in a being such as an infant growing into a schoolgirl or a woman dying and becoming a corpse, we must not be satisfied till we have searched for a cause or causes. Now the cause may be within the being as well as outside the being that is existing or undergoing change. For example, cure of an infection in a patient depends on antibiotics given to hasten the demise of the bacteria as well as on the patient’s own immune system that attacks the bacteria. Acceptance of this principle of causality is central to all scientific investigation, since science explores causal connections between beings, and describes these causal connections as scientific laws. The idea of causality was challenged by some modern philosophers such as David Hume who stated that what we perceive as causation is just the repeated ordering of events as before and after merely giving the appearance of causality. That begs the question, why do these sequences happen so regularly, and how does the fact that we do certain things lead to certain things happening – for example, when we heat water it boils, the first and the one hundred millionth time we heat water. Clearly heating imparts kinetic energy to the water molecules making them move around faster till they move so fast that water changes into water vapor. Hume’s denial of causation shows how brilliant minds can also be prone to error once they discard first principles of human knowing. Another side-effect of Hume’s concept is the converse, the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that scientists are always warned against – not to automatically assume

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causality just because one thing follows another, just because two events are connected in time. Causality requires certainty that some being or some event actually causes another being to exist or another event to happen. Correlation between two events does not automatically imply that one causes the other. Since all the beings that we encounter or study in science do not exist due to themselves, we see a universe of beings depending on another being for existence. For example, we can trace our existence to our parents, that of our parents to our grandparents, and so on. This chain of being doesn’t stop at the first few Homo sapiens. It keeps extending backwards till it ends in a being that exists by itself, an Uncaused Cause. If you conjure up concepts that do not require an Uncaused Cause, you are basically postulating that something can originate from nothing, that being can come from non-being. We will discuss these implications of the principle of causality later. The idea of causation obviously forces us to answer whether there can be an infinite chain of causation or whether we have to posit an Uncaused Cause. An infinite chain of causation becomes incoherent and only serves to obscure truth in the mist of an ever-recessing past, a cop-out to avoid achieving certainty.

CHAPTER 5 DIVERSITY IN UNITY: EXISTENCE AND ESSENCE

“It is true that if the object of knowledge does not exist there can be no knowledge: for there will no longer be anything to know.” (Categories Section 2 Part 7)5

Have you wondered about your own existence? It may have been a dream – that someone pointed a gun at your head and you wondered about your existence and what may come after if your earthly existence was snuffed out – and then you woke up and didn’t have to worry about your existence anymore. The point is that our existence is something we take for granted. Most humans, beginning in childhood, every so often pause to think about themselves, their existence, and what they are? Who am I? Why do I exist? After you think of your own existence, expand that notion and think of existence in general – that existence, the act of existing, is something all beings in our universe participate in. The only way we can understand it is by studying other existing beings – and of course we find a plethora of beings, a wide range of ‘existence’. We see other human beings like ourselves, other living beings, we learn in physics classes about subatomic particles that seem to have an ephemeral existence. Are there separate types of existences in the universe we inhabit? Should we not accept the existence of the universe of things and of us as a brute fact before moving on to study the specific nature of things? “Why is there something rather than nothing?” thundered the great German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. For it seems more likely that nothing should exist, rather than our immense universe with its diversity of beings. For if nothing exists there is nothing to explain. The more diverse the entangled web of existing, interacting, beings, the exponentially greater the difficulty of reaching explanations with certainty. And if you truly believed that nothing was ordained, that everything was happenstance, then the fact the universe exists, and that we exist to think about why the universe exists, is contrary to the logic of the argument! While we may take existence for granted, we should marvel at

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the fact that each thing that we encounter exists when it doesn’t have to. Not to do so is to commit the error of “forgetfulness of being” that the 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger pointed out as a defect of Western Philosophy. This imposed amnesia is a defect of the modern worldview, of the global technologically infused civilization we currently exist in. So, the first common feature to existing beings is existence itself, which metaphysics also addresses. While we do not have any surviving works of Aristotle that addressed existence directly, the quote at the beginning of the chapter indicates that he must have given thought to the idea of existence as the primary characteristic of being that makes a being actual in the universe. In fact, the term universe – from the Latin uni, for one, and versum, for turned or combined – means turned or combined into one. And science has proven that the universe, all that exists in the material world, did in fact have a singular beginning in the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. So, we can say that whatever existence itself might be, all existing beings share or participate in existence that began at the Big Bang. But clearly that participation seems to vary widely. At the subatomic level, there are beings such as electrons and photons that can exist as wave probability functions and as discrete particles. In our everyday world we see other human beings such as ourselves, other living beings, and inanimate objects. What would be a proper framework to reconcile this aspect of one existence shared by a great variety of beings, inanimate and animate? An intuitive solution offered by an interpretation of Aristotle by the 13th century scholar St. Thomas Aquinas is that existence and essence are separate but combined to form all existing beings. In On Being and Essence (Chapter 4), he wrote that ‘being (verb, meaning existence) must be other than its quiddity (essence, or whatness), nature, or form.’ Existence is a cardinal property of all beings (raising the question: What initiates existence in the universe as such? - a conundrum we will discuss later), and all existing beings partake in existence, but to different degrees. Hence a subatomic particle and a human being both participate in existence, but one in an ephemeral manner, and the other in a more extensive manner, due to their vastly different essences. Essence defines or limits the partaking in existence, thereby differentiating existing beings from each other. Norris Clarke, an expert on Aquinas’s interpretation of Aristotle6, names concepts such as existence and essence as metaphysical co-principles, which I would like to term ‘inseparable participatories,’ that occur concurrently in every being – they are entities that cannot exist separately but only conjointly in an existing being. I will discuss other

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concepts such as matter and form, act and potency, which also belong to the same class of inseparable participatories which makes us understand being, and only exist commingled in existing beings, and cannot be separated by physical means. One way of thinking about these metaphysical participatories are by analogy to mathematical equations that are used to describe the workings of the physical world. Mathematical formulations allow us to explain and describe the physical world in a manner that is understandable and conveyable. Similarly, these inseparable participatories result from intellectual investigation including both direct intellectual intuition (of first principles) and what we learn from empiric scientific investigation. The only difference is that most of the mathematical formulations are subject to empirical experimentation and also lead to practical utility; metaphysical formulations that make us understand the truth about our universe are agnostic towards practical utility. Aristotelian concept of inseparable participatories enable us to understand the changeable beings we observe in our universe. The participatories are not separately existing entities but can only exist together in any existent being. While the concept of inseparable participatories is different from current scientific notation, we do come across some analogous concepts in modern science. Examples are quarks, particles that cannot exist separately but only in combination, and the wave-particle duality of entities like the electron posited by modern quantum physics. Another manner of thinking about these metaphysical concepts is from experimental science itself. We surmise the existence of sub-atomic particles like quarks and large beings like black holes, not because scientists have seen them, or will ever see them, but because they make sense to explain other scientific observations. And again, metaphysical concepts are akin to mathematical formulations that are not part of material being, but are a good fit that explains why an existing being is the way it is, and how beings can change. These metaphysical inseparable participatories are the basis of common sense-ible science and the foundations on which all special sciences rest, and are accessible to all who seek to know. One finding of cosmology is the Big Bang, the well-established concept that the universe we inhabit started at a single point in time and has not forever existed as Aristotle thought. (That may be why Aristotle, at least in his extant writings, did not pay much attention to existence. For if the universe existed eternally, we can accept existence as baked into the universe without worrying much about existence as a separate principle we have to account for.) Hence the Big Bang joins the entire universe together – we all share in the existence that began with it, but obviously in vastly

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different ways. Our essences are separate from existence and define what we are. According to Aristotle, ‘What, then, you are by your very nature is your essence’ (Metaphysics Book VII Part 4). Aristotle elaborated on essence and set the stage for analyzing certain causes of why an existing being exists with the type of essence it has. But more on that later. An interesting finding of quantum physics and cosmology is the presence of anti-matter particles corresponding to each sub-atomic matter particle. Matter and anti-matter particles, like the electron and positron, can annihilate each other and create a light particle, the photon. In fact, the early universe was a cauldron of matter and anti-matter particles. A very slight preponderance of matter particles over anti-matter particles – to the tune of an excess of one in a million matter over anti-matter particles – is the reason that we and the material universe even exist today! Otherwise there would have been no matter, no galaxies, no Sun, no earth, no humans. Think of that – if there were not 1,000,001 matter particles for each million anti-matter particles, there would have been just energy and no matter to form the stars, the Sun, the earth, ourselves! Gives a new meaning to existence, doesn’t it? And if we consider that the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago, we are very late entrants into the universe of existence! We cannot ignore the fact that we exist – without existence there is no real being – we can always conjure up images of unicorns and fantasy worlds for our amusement or inspiration, but to really exist is the fundamental characteristic of a real, existing being. The first thing we have to ask ourselves is: does this thing exist? We may verify its existence ourselves as when we look out of the window and see the oak tree that we can also touch. Or we may accept the verification by others, maybe supported by photographs, that a creature called the Giant Panda exists. In these days of fake news, it is crucial that you verify all the information provided to you. Reflect on your own existence – a being that senses things, thinks thoughts, and interacts with the material world. Then think how your existence compares with that of other things, the tree outside your window, a snowflake, and the sub-atomic particle called the quark that you have been taught about. All these exist – but do they exist in the same manner? All beings exist; existence is an all-or-none phenomenon, but a being’s participation in existence ranges from popping in and out of existence and existing only for a short while like subatomic particles, and stars lasting for billions of years, and humans existing for seven to ten decades while creating great civilizations and harnessing the power of the material world. Intuitively, you realize that we need inseparable participatories to make sense of being as participating in existence to

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varying degrees. This participatory, separable from existence intuitively but not by experimental methods is the “essence” or “nature” of a thing. You could think of essence as making existence real, making a thing confirmed as not only existing, but existing as a particular kind of thing. Essence can also be conceived of as that which limits existence; thereby the existence of a quark is vastly different from yours, even though both you and the quark exist. You and the quark “share” in existence in vastly different ways based on your essence or nature. The concept of existence begs the question: “Where does the initial act of existence that we all partake in come from?” One solution is the Uncaused Cause we briefly discussed earlier and will discuss in detail later. If there is an Uncaused Cause, then it is the cause of all existence, and includes the entire plenitude of existence we observe today. All existent beings in the universe partake of this plenum of existence emanating from the Uncaused Cause as befits their particular essence, a large, long-lived existence as the Sun, or an ephemeral existence like the positron, or somewhere in between like a human being.

CHAPTER 6 SUBSTANCE, THAT WHICH STANDS UNDER

“Substance does not belong to anything but to itself” Metaphysics (Chapter VII, Part 16)

The word substance comes from sub-stare (Latin; in Greek hypostasis) and means “that which stands under.” Accidents come from accidere – “to fall upon.” These terms were the result of Aristotle’s reconciling of change with permanence to make sense of the material world, an innovative combination of commingled participatories of existing being that provided continuity through all its changes. In his book Categories (Section 1, Part 5), Aristotle introduces the concepts of substance and accident as a way of categorizing and understanding the world. He writes, “Substance, in the truest and primary and most definite sense of the word, is that which is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject.”

That is, substance is the primary mode of existence. To characterize how a substance can be different in different periods of time, Aristotle (Categories, Section 1, Part 5) states: “To sum up, it is a distinctive mark of substance, that, while remaining numerically one and the same, it is capable of admitting contrary qualities, the modification taking place through a change in the substance itself.”

However (Categories, Section 1, Part 6), states: “For though substance is capable of admitting contrary qualities, yet no one is at the same time both sick and healthy, nothing is at the same time both white and black.”

The contrary qualities that can cause a substance to change, but not to differentiate it so much that the substance becomes another substance, is better termed accident. Substance and accident exist together in a being. The fundamental difference between substance and accident is that

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substance stands by itself while accidents do not exist separately from a substance. Cold or hot water is still water, which is the substance possessing the accident of being hot or being cold. Substance is what stands under the different modes of the same thing as accidents befall it. The tree in my home in New England remains the same whether it has golden leaves, or its branches are barren, or leaf buds adorn it. Substanceness unites various accidents in a single instance and also forms the entity that persists through change. Water is the substance with the molecular formula H2O which undergoes accidental changes such as becoming ice or water vapor. If water were broken into constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms that would be a substantial change in which the form of water is changed, and two separate substances, hydrogen and oxygen molecules, result. Change is what we experience in our study of the universe of beings. Changeable being is what we observe in our daily life and what we study in science. When we examine change, we observe two types of change. In one type of change, we see a being coming into existence as a de novo being. For example, hydrogen and oxygen, two flammable gases, combine to form water, a liquid. Sperm and ovum combine to form an embryo, the beginning of a new human being. An animal dies, and the body of the animal disintegrates into constituent molecules and atoms. In contrast to these types of changes, which are substantial changes, i.e., change from one substance to another, another type of change, for example the autumnal display of gorgeous colors by the trees in New England, is an accidental change; substantial change will have to wait till the tree withers and dies. When we wake up in the morning and find out we are alive, or wake up from anesthesia after a surgery, do we think we are a new person? Our concept of self, ourself, may be the best stepping-stone for us to enter the realm of substance and accident, for we are also substances. As Aristotle writes in Categories (Section 1, Part 5), “For instance, one particular substance, ‘man’, cannot be more or less man either than himself at some other time or than some other man.”

Let us chew on what he is saying. Metaphorically we may think “we are a new woman” if we had a good night’s sleep or following a major positive event in our life, but we obviously know that whatever we were yesterday we still are today, even though we ate quite a bit of food that went into our body, and in spite of some new experiences yesterday that we never experienced before. We are the same across time even

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though substantial changes occur from the time we are conceived extending through the embryonic, fetal, child, adult, middle age, and old age stages of our life. We identify that we are composed of something that is continuous across time. But we also recognize that we are not exactly the same person – we recognize the vast changes that we went through as we grew from childhood to adulthood. Accidents describe all the modes of being that are not separately existing but only able to exist in a substance. In the case of a human, we can say that learning Spanish is an accident that converts a non-Spanish speaking human into a Spanish speaking human. The same substance, but with a new accident existing in the primary substance. With the onset of dementia, the human person may lose some accidents like knowing how to speak Spanish, but remains the same substance of the human person that existed before dementia with the same dignity and rights as a human being. Hence the concept of substance and accident has great significance at the beginning and end of human life. Substance, with its accidents, is the fundamental unit of being resulting from the commingling of existence and essence. The commingling of substances with various accidents, permits the introduction of contrary characteristics into a substance, not at the same time, for that is impossible since it violates the first principle of noncontradiction, but allows for a substance to change across time. A substance cannot be hot and cold at the same time, but can change from hot to cold at different times. Substance also brings ethical issues into focus since as we discussed, human beings are also substances. Aristotle writes (Categories Part 1, Section 5), “One man cannot be more man than another.”

In a particular variety of substance, while there may be differences due to accidents, there is no difference in terms of “substanceness”. To quote Aristotle (Categories Part 1, Section 5), “Substance, again, does not appear to admit of variation of degree.”

A human being, regardless of skin color, mental or physical ability, or whether residing in a palace or a mud hut, is the same type of substance, and any rights given to one human applies to all humans. What Aristotle taught more than two millennia ago provides an unshakeable foundation for human knowing when we explore the nature and meaning of human existence.

CHAPTER 7 BEINGS, SIMILAR YET DIFFERENT: MATTER AND FORM

“And so form and the compound of form and matter would be thought to be substance, rather than matter.” Metaphysics Book VII, Part 3

Matter is essential to material existence, but is not a self-circumscribed explanation of all there is. When we look around our universe, we do not see a random collection of existent beings. Rather, we see beings that are similar in many ways, yet possessing unique differentiating features. Based on similarity, we group things into species, genera, and further up the ladder of our Linnaean tendencies to classify. We see other members of the human species whom we recognize as similar to us, yet different (notwithstanding the fact that teenagers may think that their parents belong to a different species). Since the matter that coalesces into beings in the same species is different in each being, there must be something else that explains why we see similar beings. This something else Aristotle proposed as form, what forms matter into a ‘something.’ Form is what makes matter into a particular kind of being, i.e., form informs matter to organize it into a particular kind of being. This combination was termed hylomorphism, from hyle meaning matter, and morphe, meaning form. The inseparable participatories of matter and form create a unique being, a substance. To reach this concept, we could work backwards from the artificial to the natural. The computer I am using to write these words is comprised of many material components. What makes it a computer is a form, or blueprint that has been used to organize the various material components into a unique artifact by a human-engineered process. While all replicas of this computer acquire the same form, each computer is different because the material components used to create the form is different. If we looked at them minutely, there will be obvious differences in the material components of each computer–and we all know that some computers work fine while others burden us with multiple trips to the shop for service.

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As we move from artifacts to the humans who make them, we find that all human beings also have a form - the form of the human, with its unique characteristics of a rational, self-conscious being, along with many other characteristics also seen in animals. Form can be considered the organizing principle in a being that organizes the constituent matter to become a unique kind of being. Each species of beings has a unique form. However, each individual in a species is unique. That is why even identical twins have some differentiating characteristics. The uniqueness of each individual arises from the fact that the form emerges in a unique collection of material particles. All that is required for the form to emerge is that the material particles should have the potency to be aggregated and organized into an existing being by a particular form. Of course, this organization of matter by form into a being cannot happen spontaneously, but requires a cause, of which we will speak later. The matter from which a form emerges can differentiate each being; hence each individual is different from every other individual due to individuating matter while having the same form, e.g., human beings that differ in height, color of skin and eyes, etc. Think about a human being at the moment of death. When you look at the material composition of the same person just before death and the zeptosecond after death, there is no difference in the material components that constitute the human body and its organs. This shows that there is something other than the material components that lead to the unification of the material components into a unified being. That is form. Form is also the root word for information, the idea that something about the world can be passed from intellect to intellect. Now, this idea of the inseparable participatories of matter and form is clearer in the case of living organisms than in inanimate beings. In fact, one of the criticisms of Aristotle’s synthesis of knowledge is that he may have “overfitted” his concepts derived from the living world onto the inanimate world. That is a valid criticism, but it is the living world that needs more understanding anyway, since life does not submit easily to categorization and explanation by properties and laws that apply to inanimate matter. But the concept of matter and form also applies well to inanimate beings. The next time you take a sip of water think about matter and form. Water molecules are formed from hydrogen and oxygen, two highly flammable gases. You can see that the form of water is very different from the form of the hydrogen and oxygen molecules that “form” water. When we see a swan gliding in the river, we know that it is composed of matter that occupies space, and modern science has taught us, that swan can be broken down into organ systems, organs, proteins,

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molecules, atoms, and sub-atomic particles. But we also know that a material description does not truly tell us what a swan is – for matter is common to all beings with a material existence. There is something else that organizes the matter into the particular type of being – that something has to exist along with matter, a separate entity but not distinct, separate but intertwined or commingled with matter, a something else that permeates all through the matter that comprises the swan and hence is distinct but not separable by empiric experimentation. A matter-form composition is intuitively known once encounter with many beings has percolated through our minds and makes perfect sense without violating any scientific principle. It is something that can be accepted like a unit of arithmetic, the number one or zero. Form also follows from the law of sufficient reason – matter cannot spontaneously become a particular type of being – form is required to make matter into a specific type of being. When we accept the very strange fact that a sub-atomic particle can exist as a wave of probabilities and as a particle at the same time, matter-form seems less strange by comparison! Modern biology has shown that the instructions to form a living being is present in the DNA inherited at the time of fertilization, along with additional instructions, called epigenetic modifications, independent of the DNA sequence. The fact that we have found the instructions for shaping matter into a living being does not nullify the matter-form composition; it just shows that there is information transmitted from parent to offspring that continues the transmission of form from being to being in a continuous chain, thereby perpetuating a species. DNA is not the form; it is the information code for the form that is transmitted from being to being in a species. And as we all know from observing congenital anomalies, sometimes the evolution of the form of a human being can be interfered with by material conditions such as starvation, illicit drug use, viral infections, and such. An important corollary of the matter-form composition of human beings is of great relevance to ethics. Racism started with the premise that different races were so far apart that some were inferior and some superior races. Francis Galton started the notorious scientific field of eugenics with the unfounded assumptions that there were genetically inherited differences that made races separate, and that “defective” humans within any race, such as those with mental retardation, should be eliminated to purify the gene pool and enhance humankind. If 19th and 20th century scientists had paid attention to the matter/form composition of the human person, they would not have fallen into the heresy of racist science. In fact, genetic studies have shown that the majority of genetic variation occurs within a race or ethnic group and not between races. Truly, the form of the

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human person that organizes atoms, cells, tissues, and organs into a thinking, acting being, is a great wonder. Matter does not imply a uniform substance that underlies all material being. The basic constituents of matter may still be a matter of contention, since the science of sub-atomic particles may not yet have discovered all existing particles. Matter ascends a stairway of complexity as smaller particles aggregate and bond under the control of physical laws. For example, we could consider sub-atomic particles as a basic form of matter; physical forces organize these particles into atoms, atoms acquire the form of molecules by the action of other physical forces, and so on. So, the “building blocks” of a particular being may be different from that of another. For example, we can consider the human being as formed from organ systems, which are formed from organs, which in turn are formed from cells, which are formed from complex molecules, and so forth till we reach the subatomic level. So, while matter is a general term, we recognize different levels of the matter that forms a being. Form may be difficult for a physicalist to accept. Why not surmise that all that matters is matter – matter just organizes itself to various existing beings based on some laws of physics. That is true in the case of many objects – the Earth has “organized itself” into a spheroid shape under the influence of gravitational forces. But when you examine a living organism, we can observe that life forms don’t just obey the laws of physics and chemistry, but harness these laws to sustain themselves and reproduce. There is something beyond matter that brings together the various material components of a living organism to act in unison. It is very difficult to jettison the concept of form and matter commingling to create an existing being. In human technological and artistic endeavors, we subliminally subscribe to the matter-form dyad: when we create an automobile or even write an article, essay or poem, we are transferring a form into a new collection of matter to create a new being, similar yet dissimilar. Matter/form permeates through human knowing and acting, whether we acknowledge it or not.

CHAPTER 8 CAN ANYTHING CHANGE INTO ANYTHING? ACT AND POTENCY

“Everything changes from that which is potentially to that which is actually” Metaphysics Book XII Part 2

Change, for the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, was an impassable quagmire. To him it seemed impossible to explain, and so he concluded that change was just an illusion interfacing between us and an unchangeable reality. A central insight of Aristotle, one that helps situate change within reality, is that act and potency must be considered together to explain change. Every being undergoing change to a different kind of being must have within itself the inseparable participatories of act and potency. Change requires two distinct modes of being: before and after. But all change must also abide by the principle of maintaining underlying continuity; otherwise, instead of a transition from one mode of being to another, we would see the annihilation and creation of beings with every instance of change. Aristotle called this principle of continuity potency to indicate the capacity or aptitude to receive a new mode of being. Like other metaphysical co-participatories, act and potency do not have independent existence; rather, they exist together in a being. Potency can also be considered a limiting principle, so that there are certain boundaries within which all the possible changes of a being are contained. We could look at these two inseparable participatories in this way: potency, or potentiality, describes the latent stage of actuality waiting to be actualized, and act describes the bringing into actuality of the potency (or potencies) of a being. What we observe in our world is beings changing all the time. But it is obvious that for the most part changes occur in a pattern unique to each type of being. Water has the potency to become ice or water vapor, not wine; if it becomes wine, that would not be explainable by currently known physico-chemical laws. A human embryo has the potency to become a fetus, child, and adult human being, not a lion.

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Potency, unlike other Aristotelian concepts, is as ubiquitous in our vernacular as in the modern sciences. It is common for us to ask if someone has the potential to become something or other: whether little Billy, for example, has the potential to become a good sportsman or a math Olympiad champion. In school, we have plotted graphs and plugged numbers into formulae to calculate the potential energy that accumulates in a ball raised high by a pitcher – and transforms into kinetic energy as it leaves his hand to head for the batter at 90-plus miles per hour. The potential energy of food, measured in calories, either gets converted to the energy required for jogging or settles into comfortable repose around our bellies with the potential to cause heart disease. Electric potential, magnetic potential, potential difference – the word abounds in lingua scientia. So, potency is implicitly accepted by lay persons and professional scientists alike. The discovery of the quantum nature of the world has given new meaning to act and potency. Classical physics was able to describe the world in mechanical terms. Every material being existed in a definite manner and its behavior was predictable in response to definite and predictable forces and fields. We thought we could precisely determine the “potency” of any being and predict all its “acts.” Based on the discoveries of quantum mechanics, we now know that subatomic particles like the electron or photon can behave as probability waves, without any definite location, and, when we try to measure their position, the wave function collapses and they manifest as definite, locatable particles. So, Aristotle’s insights on act and potency may be said to have anticipated the advent of the “strange” world of quantum mechanics. We could argue that at the subatomic level, particles exist in both potency (that is, in any of a number of positions, with a probability wave function describing all the probabilities of being in various positions) and in act (that is, being in one definite position when observed or measured). Hence, the strange world of quantum mechanics provides a close approximation of the intertwining of metaphysical inseparable participatories. Act and potency permeate through all of human knowing and human doing. As we grasp the workings of the natural world, we assign potency and act to understand being and change along the entire hierarchy of being. Agriculture started with the understanding of the potency of a seed, given the right conditions, to develop into a food providing plant. It was an intellectual feat to conclude that a tiny seed could grow into a large tree, and this was based on the concept that a tiny seed contained within it all the potencies needed to develop into a tree, that the form of the tree developed from the potency contained in the seed by accumulating all the

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matter needed to become a fully formed tree. Starting in the 19th century, with the remarkable discovery of inheritance patterns in plants by an unknown monk, Gregor Mendel, toiling far from the crowd in a monastery in what is now the city of Brno in the modern Czech Republic, humankind started to understand how offspring inherited parental characteristics. Now we know that the ‘blueprint’ for a living being is contained in the aperiodic crystal structure of DNA and the arrangement of its bases, with this information transcribed and translated by cellular machinery to form viable organisms that repeat the form of the parent for eternity, if the right material conditions permit. What is less obvious, though hardly as esoteric as quantum mechanics, is that act and potency have relevance in ethical issues. A human embryo has all the instructions to develop into a fully functioning human being. Hence, based on the concept of act and potency, we can say that an embryo is a human person in potential. Similarly, a person in a coma, whether due to anesthesia or an illness, still has all the potential features of a human person, even though she does not seem to overtly manifest human characteristics. There seems to be a confusing dividing line between act and potency when we speak about the basic rights of a human – and it has been made even more confusing by moving the demarcation lines based on the prevailing ethos. Potency and act are the commingled, inseparable participatories that exist in a being that undergoes change. It is the being that, if human, has certain inalienable rights. Act and potency, like other Aristotelian commingled participatories are inseparable in a being. So, we cannot separate the act and potency in an embryo, toddler, mentally retarded person, the President of the United States or a demented older person and deem them to have different degrees of human rights. They are all human beings, with the same rights. In the words of Aristotle (Metaphysics, Book IX, part 7), “A thing is potentially all those things which it will be of itself if nothing external hinders it.”

The inseparable participatories of act and potency also preserve the uniqueness of each being through the changes they undergo. This is most evident in the case of a living being, since only living beings act to realize all their potencies if not hindered. Even though these changes may be stark at times – like a chrysalis blooming into a beautiful butterfly – these are part of the same being realizing various acts of their totality of potency. To draw again from the atomic world, we can say that even an atom has a potency – to gain the maximum number of electrons each of its orbitals permit – which underlies all chemical reactions, and ultimately, life itself.

CHAPTER 9 CAUSATION: WHAT CAUSES A BEING TO EXIST AS THAT KIND OF BEING?

“Evidently we have to acquire knowledge of the original causes (for we say we know each thing only when we think we recognize its first cause), and causes are spoken of in four senses” Metaphysics Book I, Part 3.

Knowing has to pass through the corridors of causes to the inner sanctum of certainty, the hallmark of true knowledge. Once we have described existing beings using metaphysical inseparable participatories of existence/essence, matter/form, substance/accidents, and act/potency, we have to answer the questions: do they exist by themselves, or if not, why do they exist with the properties they have; and if they change, how and why do they change? As the title of Aristotle’s book (Metaphysics, i.e., “after the study of nature”) from which the introductory epigraph is drawn suggests, we reason backwards from what we observe in changing being to the four classes of fundamental causes. Human knowing is grounded in the first principles of noncontradiction and of sufficient reason (or causation). From the first principle of causation, we derive the dictum that for true knowledge, we cannot stop at knowing the essence of a being; any existing being, and any change, has to be explained by a cause or reason, either within the being itself or if necessary, by an extraneous mechanism. While philosophers such as David Hume have disputed whether causation is really real or just a coincidental sequence of events that appear linked, we moderns who have grown up with minds saturated with the exciting advances of natural science, do not give a second thought about causation and accept it as an implicit fact of nature. Causation is also part of our everyday lives; we recognize that we ourselves are causal agents in the world around us; some of the motives may be reflexive or unconscious such as eating to satiate hunger, some may be freely-willed such as gluttonous feasting.

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Now if we started thinking about causation, we might become inundated with innumerable types of causation related to all the types of beings and all the types of changes we observe in the universe. Fortunately, Aristotle’s genius winnowed causation into just four causes that are sufficient to understand each and every existing being and the universe as a whole. But the key is that we must address all four causes – ignoring some of them would not be true science and would not yield true scientific understanding. So, what are these four causes? I will only give a brief introduction here, since each of these four causes will be addressed in detail in subsequent chapters. Aristotle’s four causes derive by extension from the composite structure of being, since if beings are the composites of matter/form, act/potency, substance/accident, and existence/essence, something has to bring these metaphysical participatories together to create a being, or break them apart to cause change in the being. If there was a being that was not a composite, then such a being could potentially exist by itself. Aristotle’s reduction of causation to four causes has an uncanny numerical coincidence with the four fundamental forces, i.e., gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear, that govern the physical universe. It is evident that the beings that we observe are formed from preexisting matter. But for a being to come into existence a form has to organize the matter into a particular kind of being with a particular kind of form. The cause that organizes matter is the formal cause–since the formal cause and form are inextricably linked, we could conclude that the presence of form necessitates a formal cause. The formal cause acts from within the being; but all beings that we observe cannot spontaneously generate a formal cause from within themselves. Hence there must be a separate extrinsic cause that generates the formal cause and causes form to emerge from matter – this cause Aristotle termed the efficient cause. An efficient cause cannot operate in an indeterminate manner. For if it did, then any being can change into any other being at random, and any matter can acquire any form. In the physical world, we observe efficient causes act in a specific manner and not randomly; there seems to be a pattern to efficient causes across multitudes of beings and eons of change. When we see changes in the physical world such as the movement of the Earth around the Sun, we see that movement occurs in a specific manner similar to the movement of other large bodies in the universe. Final cause is what causes efficient causes to act in a specific manner and not randomly. In the universe we observe, efficient causes seem to be ‘ordered’ to act in a mostly predictable manner unless interrupted by chance events – this predictability results from the last of the Aristotelian causes termed final

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cause. Of course in human endeavors, the final cause may not be entirely pre-determined, for self-conscious rational beings can choose to contravene the predetermination of the law of gravity to make things fall towards the center of the earth, and build airplanes. Thus, Aristotle enumerated four causes applicable to every being, four causes we must investigate to understand every being: material and formal causes that are embedded in the being, and efficient and final causes that are agencies of change that lie outside the being. True scientific understanding would be incomplete without investigating all the four causes of any being. Let’s apply these causes to an iconic building – the Taj Mahal. Aristotle used the example of a bronze sphere, but let’s ponder something more spectacular. The material cause is the marble and other materials that comprise the structure. The formal cause is the structure as conceived in the mind of the architect (or architects). The efficient cause is the architect and the laborers who converted the matter into the form that continues to evokes wonder. The final cause is the desire of the Mughal Emperor Shahjahan to build a monument worthy of his love for his deceased wife Mumtaz. Of course, when we come to a final cause, the process of discernment to arrive at certainty becomes more difficult. I cannot with certainty say that the final cause was Emperor Shahjahan’s desire spurred by love. It certainly could have been something else, such as his desire to write his own name in the annals of man. The point is that, when it comes to the big questions of life and origins of the universe, the concept of final cause might be the most troublesome, but also the most necessary if we want to attain certain knowledge.

CHAPTER 10 MATERIAL AND EFFICIENT CAUSES

“For everything that changes is something and is changed by something into something. That by which it is changed is the immediate mover; that which is changed, the matter; that into which it is changed, the form” Metaphysics Book XII, Part 3

We will discuss material and efficient causes together not because of any particular affinity between them, but because they are both probably easier to conceptualize within the framework of modern science. Material cause is simple in modern terms: the matter that causes a being to form. It is a principle fluid enough to mean various types of material entities that constitute beings, and not just one entity. Matter has come to be understood as a more complex entity than the Greek scientists’ proposals of earth, air, water, fire, and the like as the primary material constituent(s) of all beings, although the atomic theory of the Greeks in its modern version has obviously taken hold. But with the modern proof of the atomic theory came the astonishing finding that most of the atom was empty space! Think about it: I and the chair I am sitting on to write this chapter are both mostly empty space!! Why don’t I fall through the chair, obeying the force of gravity? Because that so-called empty space in atoms may be empty of particles but not of force fields. The various forces that operate within an atom and between atoms, such as the electromagnetic field, repel atoms enough to result in the material property we label as solidity. The pressure you feel as your butt presses against the chair is caused by the way the electrons in the atoms of your butt (and clothes) and in the atoms in the chair interact as they all come close together to cause a repulsive force that you feel as solidity. If your eyes had the acuity to see at the subatomic level, you certainly would be astonished to perceive what a solid object really looks like – empty of solid, “seeable” stuff. So material cause is not just “stuff”; it also includes energy, forces, and force fields. The Greeks were not wide of the mark when they thought that fire, a manifestation of energy, was part of the material cause of the universe. In fact, Einstein has gone one step further and shown that matter is

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interchangeable with energy. E=mc2, probably the most famous equation in the history of science, equates matter with energy. Matter can be converted into enormous amounts of energy, and this conversion is the principle underlying nuclear bombs, nuclear energy, and most importantly, how the Sun gives us sustenance by its light. The story of matter is even weirder than the fact that you can create matter from energy. Study of the universe has shown that only 5% of the universe is comprised of what we can empirically measure as matter and energy. The rest, a staggering 95%, is composed of dark matter and dark energy: dark, because we cannot measure this type of matter and energy by our current techniques. We know they exist by inference, because they are required to explain certain aspects of the universe. So, while matter is central to the material cause, matter itself is not so easy to pin down, and material causes are not so ‘material’ in the vernacular sense of the word! So, the Greeks’ deductions of material causes from observation, though not close enough to the mark or backed up by enough empiric data to earn tenure for the proponent at a modern research university, do demonstrate the power of deduction in providing broad avenues for the progress of scientific knowledge. In his writings, Aristotle chides his predecessors for thinking that the material cause was all that was needed to completely explain the universe of beings and the phenomenon of change. But if something is to come into being or to change into something else, by the principle of sufficient reason, there has to be a cause that is the “immediate mover”, the most proximate cause to the change. Efficient cause, simply put, is the proximate cause to the existence of a being or of its change. Along with the material cause, efficient cause is likely the easiest of the causes to accept by modern empirical science, because both matter and the immediate phenomenon that causes the formation of a being from matter by acquiring a new form are observable. Efficient cause makes the formal and material causes to act in the formation of a being from matter. Efficient causes also act to produce change by causing potency to become actualized. Hence efficient cause is what empiric science studies. If you think about yourself coming into being, you could see that the efficient causes of your existence are your parents and their decision to be open to the life-giving nature of the sexual act. But efficient cause is not easy to buttonhole into a single all-encompassing cause. The nourishment that your mother took during pregnancy was also an important efficient cause that promoted proper development of you in the fetal stage. The efficient cause of the Earth and other planets of the solar system is the Sun, since the planets are composed of material that broke off from the Sun. So you can see that the efficient causes stretch backward in a chain. When we let

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electric current flow, light emanates from a flashlight. When the wind blows, the flowing air makes leaves move. Falling water moves a dynamo; the motion of the dynamo in a magnetic field creates an electric current; the electric current sent to our room makes the light bulb turn on. You can see how efficient cause is easy to accept because we study and manipulate efficient causes all the time for our benefit or enjoyment. That has been the pattern of modern science since the Scientific Revolution, a laser focus on efficient and material causes to predict and control nature for utilitarian purposes.

CHAPTER 11 FORMAL CAUSE

“Plato, then, declared himself thus on the points in question; it is evident from what has been said that he has used only two causes, that of the essence and the material cause (for the Forms are the causes of the essence of all other things, and the One is the cause of the essence of the Forms)” Metaphysics Book I, Part 6

Before settling on his novel approach, which later set the course for modern science, Aristotle examined the ideas churned up during his predecessors’ quest for knowledge. There was none more illustrious than his teacher Plato, whose concept of the Ideas or Forms was metamorphosed by Aristotle to create his own concept of the form and the formal cause. As described in the epigraph, Plato thought that material reality was just an imperfect representation of the real deal, or ‘Forms’, which he said emanated from the One, or God. Aristotle acknowledged Plato’s genius in discovering something beyond matter to explain an existent being, but lowered the Forms from the heavens and made them formal causes, causes that were responsible for the ‘form’ that molded an indeterminate mass of matter into a particular being. We know that matter is a constituent of all material beings – even though the type of matter differs, and as we learned in the previous chapter, what the constituents of matter are is still being investigated. What makes matter a particular kind of thing? Does matter randomly form itself into a specific being? Then anything can come from anything, and we won’t see any patterns of similarity between beings – or very limited similarity, imposed by a random combination of atoms. That would undercut the whole scientific enterprise, which is based on discovering laws underlying the existence of beings and their observed changes. Independent of scientific investigations, randomness is not what we see when we look around the house, the neighborhood woods, or the universe. We see similarities, sometimes very close similarities, as in the members of our own family, or in the band of wild turkeys that forage in our neighborhood, or in pine trees in a forest. Other similarities, such as when we see a bird and the tree it is sitting on, are less clear unless we use our

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human intelligence and think of them as unique in that they both possess some qualities that we know belong to living beings. And in other cases, we don’t see much of a similarity at all, as when we ponder a tree and the soil it is growing in. Based on the similarity of properties, we organize material beings into species, species into genera, and so on up the scale of similarity. From our observations, it is obvious that something else coexists with matter in each being to make it the type of being it is. We encountered the metaphysical commingled participatory of form that coexists with matter in every being. Let us now discuss form as a cause, the formal cause of every existing being. Material cause is self-explanatory and derives automatically from the concept of matter as being necessary for any material being to exist. Formal cause requires more intuitive digging into the concept of form. Let us reverse course and examine the artificial, man-made world first. The whole world of technology and engineering is based on forms such as blueprints for a car or a computer being made into existing artifactual beings by using matter to translate the form into an actual being. Similar objects (or beings in strict Aristotelian terminology) created by human industry are composites of form and matter. While form and matter coexist inseparably in the actual being, the form also exists in the mind of the person who created the concept of the being – so the formal cause is the idea or blueprint of the computer or the car in the mind of its creator. By the same argument, whatever organizing principle causes subatomic particles to become a hydrogen atom, or atoms and molecules to become a human being, is the formal cause. Modern scientists and philosophers may be wary of formal cause, since to them, form and formal cause may smack of anthropomorphism or the imposition of human rationality and thereby premeditated design to the origins and evolution of the universe of beings. Since we implicitly recognize formal causes in all manmade objects, we cannot ignore formal cause in natural objects, albeit a formal cause embedded in nature. Accepting formal cause does not mean accepting the presence of a Designer in the universe. It just means accepting that there is a cause that informs matter to “organize” itself to become a certain type of being – over and over again – as in the case of perpetuation of a species of animals. In fact, an earlier usage of the verb “inform” was to indicate how the formal cause enables raw matter to become a particular type of being with a unique set of characteristics. The concept of formal cause is probably better applied to living beings. When we think of a being, a universal characteristic of all beings is unity, i.e., the fact that the being is a single entity in action, and not a conglomerate of different parts. We don’t say that my mind asked my

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hand to move to pick up the cup of coffee; rather, we say that I picked up a cup of coffee. What is it that unifies the trillions of cells into a unitary being called you? And how does it achieve that unification? Is there something that unifies or are we just the sum of all the sub-atomic particles falling in an empty void as Leucippus and Democritus proposed. There is something besides matter that is required to make the matter that composes us a human being with rational actions and not a lump of clay or a rabbit, right? And we see that pattern repeated generation after generation in humans. There must be something that from moment to moment orchestrates all the various functions of a human being, something that forms the matter into a unique being, and acts incessantly to keep that uniqueness, that substance-ness, against the assault of physical forces that tend to disrupt this uniqueness. This characteristic is called form, and since it has to act incessantly to ensure the matter is organized in a certain way, it is a cause, the formal cause. The formal cause acts constantly on the matter to ensure the being “stays to form” through various changes in the environment. In a single-celled organism too, the formal cause is necessary to keep the organism act as a single entity that continues through changing environmental conditions and growth. We can see form in operation in the inanimate world also. For example, hydrogen, carbon and oxygen atoms each have their form based on interaction of basic forces such as the strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, and electromagnetism on the subatomic particles. When these atoms combine to form a sugar molecule the forms of the atoms are subsumed into the form of the carbohydrate molecule that is based on the intermolecular forces and bonds. The form of an inanimate being is dependent on physical forces which act as formal causes, and these formal causes can be disrupted by physical agents such as energy supplied by heat. The concept of formal cause also raises the question of hierarchy of formal causes. As in the case of the transition from subatomic particles to individual atoms that then form complex molecules like a molecule of sugar, there appears to a hierarchy of formal causes in which lower formal causes may be subsumed under higher formal causes – this will be discussed in more detail later when we encounter the idea of boundary conditions between various levels of formal causation. Hence the formal cause applies to all beings, forming matter into particular types of beings with unique and unitary characteristics that tends to persist in the face of disruptive forces.

CHAPTER 12 FINAL CAUSE

“…everything that comes to be moves towards a principle, i.e. an end” Metaphysics Book IX, Part 8

Finally, we come to the most “controversial” of the four causes. Controversial because it has been linked to the concept of teleology, of the purpose and end to which actions tend, including the changes we observe in nature. This avenue of thought is accused of being anthropomorphic, of imputing human rationality to random natural events and setting the stage to introduce a “Grand Designer.” But Aristotle, in posing the final cause, was simply asking the question: do efficient causes act randomly to create random beings out of matter and form, or do they act in a certain predetermined manner? The answer of course is that efficient causes tend to produce beings and change in a manner that is ordered for the most part unless prevented from doing so. This is what modern science is about, finding efficient causes we can manipulate. If efficient causes acted randomly, we wouldn’t be able to understand any efficient causes. This orderliness of efficient causes, their acting together in a certain manner, is what Aristotle termed the final cause. We see evidence of final causes everywhere. Species perpetuate themselves along predetermined lines. Embryos develop into specific types of beings and not others. Water freezes at 00C into a solid that is surprisingly less dense than liquid water (cold temperature is the efficient cause that effects this change, and this surprising quality of water preserves aquatic life through harsh winters rather than preserve aquatic life frozen and dead in ice). Some of these efficient causes are so fundamental that they have been codified by modern science into laws. The Law of Gravitation proposed by Newton showed how large bodies interact with each other at a distance across the universe. Einstein, three centuries later, showed that gravitational attraction may not be an actual force between two bodies but a warping of the space-time fabric that changes the motion of bodies. Modern science is a constant pragmatic quest to reduce these

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predeterminations of efficient causes to mathematical equations that allow us to harness nature. So why is final cause so controversial? Well, all is well if we are just interested in the predetermination of immediate or single efficient causes. The issue is when we excavate the long sequences of efficient causes that have operated since the beginning of the universe to now. How is it that starting from just the four fundamental forces we know of so far – electromagnetism, gravity, and strong and weak nuclear forces – we have arrived at ourselves, members of a species of beings that can ask that question? There has been a long sequence of events since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago that have occurred – how did they all converge to produce life on a small planet? How did these life forms evolve into a rational species that can actually determine to some degree how the world should be, independent of the laws of nature? Could all this have happened solely due to the effects of four forces acting randomly? There are several, roughly about 30, constants in nature (such as the magnitude of gravitational attraction, mass of the electron, etc.) that had to be the way they are for the universe to have developed the way it did and for human life to happen. That fact contributes to the idea of the final cause – several efficient causes or constants of nature that are preordained in a certain way and thereby have resulted in a certain result – us, human beings. Again, these constants that are the way they need to be indicates a predetermination of efficient causes in the universe. There are some who propose the idea of the multiverse – an infinite number of universes – to get around these constants and a final cause. The bottom line is that to truly explain why a being exists in the way it does, or to explain an incredibly complex process such as evolution, we have to invoke all four causes, including the final cause. Without a final cause, we are just left with random chance as the cause of everything – which brings us back to the beginnings of the quest for knowledge – are we trying to get certain knowledge or just know enough to navigate life and satisfy our immediate needs? If we need certain knowledge we need all four causes - especially the final cause – to find out why efficient causes act in a certain way. The explanation may be very simple and be present in the natural realm – but we have to search for an explanation and not stop when we are able to pragmatically manipulate efficient causes. While we arrive at the final cause reasoning a posteriori about material, formal, and efficient causes of an existing being, the final cause is the first among causes in the sequence of causes that leads to the creation of a being. For it is the final cause that determines the way in which the efficient cause will act to bring the material and formal causes

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to create a being. Hence the final cause is the “first” among causes. If you think about a human activity such as a painting, the painter is moved by the final cause, maybe the desire to make money or find fame or both, before she starts putting the paintbrush to the canvas to transform herself into the efficient cause that will bring the form of a painting to watercolors. But, as we discussed before, we must not become anthropomorphic when assigning final causes to inanimate beings. We have to think of each and every being in the universe in terms of final causes – how did they form from inanimate matter and physical processes? We cannot avoid searching for final causes of the universe, of life, of human beings. If we decide to ignore the final cause, we do not achieve certain knowledge; we need a final cause for every existing being and every process of change or else the cause becomes just random chance. As in the case of efficient causes, with the advances in scientific knowledge, we can assign the moniker ‘final cause’ to a variety of natural causes. We could say that the predetermination of two molecules of hydrogen and one molecule of oxygen to combine to form a water molecule is a type of final cause. We could say that a fundamental force like gravity is a final cause that governs the interaction and motion of large bodies in the universe. But when we observe the unfolding of the universe from a singularity at the Big Bang into the diverse forms of beings that exist today, we have to think of a unifying final cause that in some way has predetermined innumerable efficient causes to act in a certain way. And when see the epitome of the universe (that we know of), i.e., us human beings, endowed with the ability to know and to change the world for us and for others, we have to think about the final cause or causes that guided all the efficient causes to operate in the unfolding of the universe and of the coming to be of human beings. The Big Bang, the fact that our universe originated as a singularity which then gave rise to a multitude of diverse beings united by their explosive origin, forces us to think of a final cause that incorporated all the efficient causes that then ensued. If such a cause exists, it would also be the predetermination of all there is or will be.

CHAPTER 13 INTERLUDE: DETERMINISM, CHANCE, REALITY

“It is clear then that chance is an incidental cause in the sphere of those actions for the sake of something which involves purpose.” Physics Book II, Part 5

Science has advanced material and efficient causes, while ignoring the two Fs – the formal and final causes – thereby abdicating any knowledge of the fundamental essence of a being, and the chain of causation that creates a particular type of being. The success of Newtonian science led to the idea that everything in the universe is determined by laws. Determinism negates any chance occurrences, and denotes chance events as those whose determinative laws and explanations have not yet been discovered. Clearly this viewpoint has profound implications for the human person and morality. Let us say we lose our money to a Ponzi scheme. Then, under the rubric of materialist determinism, shouldn’t we accept the end result and move on? With the acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the extension of Darwinian mechanisms into multiple spheres of scientific investigation, chance was proposed as a cause; if we humans, the epitome of existence, could be arrived at by chance processes, why not everything in the universe? The problem with chance is that it is not a real cause or explanation but an absence of explanation. In fact, to posit chance, we need to propose order in the first place – since without ordered events and causes, we cannot recognize any event as occurring due to chance. Abnormal, to exist, needs normal; uncommon needs the common. In fact, if we explore further, we observe that chance events do not spring out of nowhere, but may have some underlying explanation that involves multiple deterministic series that collide. For example, the asteroid belt has its normal patterns of motion based on gravitational attraction as does the earth. It is possible that these gravitationally determined motions may collide, leading to a meteor shower, or much worse, a big meteor strike and the Ice Age. In reality, we observe a combination of determinism and chance. We see efficient causes operating with regularity for the most part but we

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see events that occur not so much due to a change in a law of nature but due to unanticipated collision of determinative causal series, that while individually subscribing to the norm, together leads to an uncommon event or being. These so-called chance events have played crucial roles in the evolution of life. The Ice Age that followed the meteor incursion into the earth’s atmosphere led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and the ascent of mammals, without which we would not have existed as a species. Current materialistic metaphysics subscribes to a combination of determinism and chance. Based on materialism, all material beings are composed of purely material elements that obey deterministic laws. Any variations are proposed to result from random events. Materialistic determinism claims that this determinism applies to everything from the origins of the universe, to the formation of a planet conducive to life, to the formation of life itself, and the ascendance of life through hierarchies to the human being itself. All these occurrences, according to the materialistic view, are predetermined by physical forces. Throw in some chance as proposed by Darwinism – random genetic changes occurring due to random changes in DNA sequence that result from errors during DNA replication – with some of these DNA sequence changes selected by random natural conditions – and voila! we arrive at the complex material being, me, that is typing these words to communicate truths about itself to other human beings! We will dissect the improbability of these untenable positions in later chapters as we apply the basic metaphysical concepts of existence/essence, matter/form, substance/accident, act/potency, and the four causes to specific situations such as the origin of life.

CHAPTER 14 IGNORING THE BASICS: HOW DID WE GET WHERE WE ARE NOW?

Aristotle’s insights are unique among the edifices of Western achievements in that they may have been forever lost during the so-called Dark Ages had his works not been “rescued” by non-Europeans (please see Note #3). Fortunately for the world, Arabic philosophers in the Middle East and in Muslim-ruled Spain kept the flame alive and provided commentaries on Aristotelian thought. Prominent among these philosophers were Ibn Sina (Latinized as Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes). They applied Aristotelian metaphysics to provide rational bases that were aligned with their Muslim faith. When Islamic rulers became less tolerant of rational discourse as applied to religion, Aristotelian thought waned in the Islamic civilization, but fortunately the torch was passed (back) to Western civilization. The books of Aristotle and commentaries by Islamic scholars were translated into Latin and studied by Western Christian scholars. Prominent among them was St. Thomas Aquinas, who used Aristotelian thought extensively in his writings and provided commentaries. In addition to updating metaphysics to incorporate new knowledge accumulated since the time of Aristotle, Aquinas also provided a major enhancement to metaphysics: emphasizing the importance of existence as the fundamental aspect of being, and not just something to be taken for granted. Aquinas’s interpretations and updating of Aristotelian metaphysics reigned as the summa of human knowledge for several centuries, uniting all disciplines including theology under one umbrella. The first erosions of faith in Aristotelian metaphysics came from the corridors of faith itself. Dogmatic faith always has an uneasy relationship with rational enquiry. The initially tolerant Muslim rulers in Baghdad and Granada were succeeded by less tolerant rulers who ultimately banished the application of rational methods to articles of faith from the public sphere. While the Catholic Church embraced the marriage of faith and reason at least in theory, there were rumblings of discontent

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with the company of reason in the halls of faith from the 14th century onwards. William of Ockham initiated this sundering of knowledge into different domains by separating faith from all other knowledge.7 In medical school, we had heard of “Ockham’s razor,” the concept of parsimony in logic, to search for simple rather than complex solutions. In medicine, this was interpreted as searching for one simple and unifying diagnosis to explain the constellation of symptoms, signs and laboratory tests, rather than settling for multiple diagnoses, and also to settle for a more common diagnosis than exotic ones. For Ockham, metaphysical approaches to reality were unnecessarily complex. His stingy logic could not accommodate the concept of the “universal,” the universal being an entity that was common to many individual beings and was abstracted from them. The universal is a necessary embarkation point for the journey of knowledge – such as the universal concept of a horse or “horseness” that we abstract from observing the individual characteristics of many different horses and observing the commonalities between them. This is required for any knowledge of the world to proceed, but Ockham could not reconcile with this idea. He concluded that it was better to think that the individual being was the only real thing, and the so-called universal terms were just names – names we more or less invented to allow us to debate about these matters. The name given to this unfortunate detour of knowledge was nominalism, from nomen = name. It is not clear that Ockham completely denied the existence of universals – he just didn’t want to mess with them, and just like how many contemporary scientists may tacitly accept the fact that we exist and ignore the fact of existence, ignore the question of why there is something rather than nothing, Ockham tacitly may have accepted universals, but chose to eliminate the concept of the universal in his description of human knowing. The concept of universals, however, is obviously crucial to modern natural sciences. So you may wonder how Ockham could have much affected the course of knowledge. The parsimonious approach, which did not explicitly allow knowledge except that gained by direct observation of an object, denied universals and severely undermined metaphysics as the First Philosophy. By extension, it denied principles intuitively known and common to all being as the starting point for science. While this variant approach did not impede the progress of natural science, and may have helped science advance initially, the long-term consequence was to unmoor science from its primordial foundations! A major reason for this anti-metaphysical stance that started with William of Ockham was the discomfort with allowing human reason any

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say in matters of faith. To many Church luminaries, the deployment of Aristotelian metaphysics to underpin all knowledge, including theology, suggested the mingling of pagan elements with true Christian faith. It was easier to eschew the rational basis of faith altogether than engage in complex philosophizing about the nature of God and other articles of faith. Hence with the bridge (metaphysics) being made a casualty, a rift ensued between reason and faith, with all of human civilization paying the price and continuing to pay the price for the sundering of human knowledge into irreconcilable spheres with no bridge between them, devoid of a solid foundation on which all could stand. So it was that metaphysics was either rejected, or accepted as something that was there, but could be ignored, both in the study of faith and in the practice of the search for truths about the natural world. This was the approach taken by the initiators of the Scientific Revolution in the West. Francis Bacon (Novum Organum), standing on the shoulders of predecessors such as Robert Grosseteste, inaugurated the pragmatic approach to metaphysics by acknowledging that formal and final causes existed, but since they were complicated and difficult to decipher with the experimental techniques being developed, it was best to concentrate on material and efficient causes, it was optimal to focus on just the immediate empirically verifiable causes of a being or a change.8 The aim of such an enterprise was not certain knowledge of the kind Aristotle wanted to achieve, but knowledge that allowed the mastery of nature for practical use. This has been the underlying imperfect foundation of what we know as the modern scientific enterprise from the 16th century till now – a foundation that is not certain, and hence not truly a foundation. In spite of the incredible advances in knowledge of how nature worked and the harnessing of nature to benefit humans, the early heroes of the Scientific Revolution still retained the idea of a common knowledge as evidenced by the title of Isaac Newton’s seminal work Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, by which he indicated that he was elucidating some principles of natural philosophy by using mathematical tools. So the early proponents of the Scientific Revolution subscribed to the idea of metaphysical, common sense-ible knowledge, but chose to give it a respectful acknowledgment and to keep a “healthy” distance from it. Modern science was thereby born without a true philosophical foundation. Its aim of pragmatic knowledge, of harnessing the powers of nature, was certainly not hampered so far by the lack of a metaphysical or philosophical foundation. Any issues due to this lack of a foundation, this lack of abandoning certainties in the pursuit of knowledge, of abandoning the question “why?” unless there was some material benefit to knowing the

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answer, did not impede the exponential progress of what became termed modern science. The problems would not manifest themselves till much later. There were Empiricists who tried to base all knowledge on empiric observation, cardinal among them being David Hume. According to Hume, as we discussed before, even cause and effect were just observations that by happenstance, occurred in a regular sequence. Hume even reduced our “self” to just a stream of events strung together, with no real “string” connecting the events. Of course, Hume had no answer to why certain events always occurred in a regular sequence, or if he himself felt that whatever he thought or experienced did not belong to a specific person, in which case David Hume would just disappear into the background and we should not take his thoughts or writings into serious consideration as being the thoughts or writings of David Hume the person. The first casualty of the abandonment of certainty by the jettisoning of metaphysics was the concept that we could arrive at any truths by rational enquiry. Skepticism had always lurked around since systematic human inquiry started with the Pre-Socratic Greek Philosophers, and made inroads periodically into mainstream thought. It was always a strangely comforting default position – why bother too much if you can never know anything for certain. The great 17th century scientist and mathematician Rene Descartes decided to apply his genius to address the invariable ingress of skepticism that he could not reconcile with his need for some measure of certainty in his scientific enquiries into the workings of nature.9 He took skepticism head on by starting from the ultimate doubt – that he himself existed. His answer is summarized by one of the most famous Latin sentences in history “Cogito Ergo Sum,” i.e., “I think, therefore I am.” From this certainty of his existence concluded from his own thought he reasoned to the existence of God and the conviction that God would not deceive him of what his senses were perceiving, and hence he could explore the natural world with certainty and use his senses and his thought for empiric investigation into the nature of the world. To answer the obvious question that arose from these musings – How were the world of nature and the world of his thought connected? – Descartes separated mind from matter, and thereby inaugurated dualism in the modern world, the idea that there were two separate entities in a human person. The problem for dualism was how the connection happened. Descartes came up with the solution of the pineal gland, a small subsection of the brain, as the seat of the mind. Of course, this was incorrect and Cartesian dualism still is devoid of any real proof. While this philosophical construct starting from his own doubt

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and thought was satisfactory for Descartes to continue to practice his religion and his science, separately and equally, this clearly was an untenable position for the true pursuit of certain knowledge. The world of knowledge, instead of being grounded in the concept of material realm with the addition of the non-material realm if necessary, to together explain all existing beings, was again split into the material realm, with materialism as the underlying foundation, and idealism, with nonmaterialist, mind-dependent reality as the underlying premise. So, we can see that the mechanism of splitting human knowledge into the materialistic vs. idealistic framework had continued from the contraposition of the ideas of Democritus and Leucippus against those of Plato onwards to the modern era and continues today – it is a Gordian knot inherent to the way the human mind works that has unfortunately been summarily cut to ease the way, but not providing a real solution. The real solution lay in Aristotle’s synthesis that provided a middle way between materialism and idealism, but it always seemed to be prevented from taking root by the false certainties offered by materialism and idealism. The next major attempt to provide a firm foundation for human knowledge came from Immanuel Kant. He attempted to provide a synthesis of mind-dependent knowledge and sense-dependent knowledge by postulating that while we did receive our knowledge through our sense organs, our minds have a priori categories into which we put the sensederived information to then create knowledge, i.e., that reality as we saw it was not truly independent of our thinking, but was fashioned by our thinking. Kant proposed that the actual reality of being, while existent as analyzed by metaphysics, was beyond the reach of the human mind. By trying to create a new approach to the study of being in itself, Kant more or less ensured the banishment of metaphysics (deemed to deal with unknowable concepts) from the mainstream of human inquiry, and accelerated the trend that had started from the time of Ockham. The inconsistency of Kant’s approach was demonstrated by W. Norris Clarke’s analysis of interpersonal relations10 – if in a conversation with another person, what you were hearing were your mind’s construct of what the other person was saying and vice versa, all interpersonal communication would cancel each other into incoherence and become a travesty and an impossibility. At the risk of oversimplification, we could reduce the history of human thought into a move away from Aristotelian realism towards the opposite poles of idealism and materialism, or a movement away from being and existence towards becoming and change. Clearly, materialism and becoming are winning the day today – and one of the major reasons,

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in addition to the amazing progress in natural sciences, is the quasiphilosophical and quasi-scientific stance known as Darwinism. Darwinism is different from the remarkable theory proposed by Darwin, a theory that remains one of the towering achievements of modern science. Darwin’s impact on the direction taken by human knowing in general is enormous, even if he had not intended to do so. It completed the “Copernican revolution” displacing the Earth and the human from any privileged position in the universe. We will discuss evolution in detail later, but basically Darwinism took Darwin’s postulates about evolution and extrapolated them into a construct in which some basic laws and a lot of chance events drove the evolution of life and humans without any predetermination of efficient causes whatsoever. We are the product of a series of chance occurrences that led to the remarkable coming into being of a rational free-living life form that could state with certainty that we were the products of chance! Darwinism claimed to remove final cause, purpose, from all of nature, positing that all occurrences were random chance events and selection by nature of whatever changes allowed survival and perpetuation of the species. Finally, materialism had come to full fruition. And that has been the state of modern human knowledge among most who opine on it, from Darwin’s day till now. With the exclusion of metaphysics from the Scientific Revolution and with the establishment of Darwinian evolutionary mechanism, Western thinking in general has shifted from a focus on being to a focus on becoming, as detailed by Franklin L. Baumer in Modern European Thought. Why anything at all exists has been forgotten or taken as a brute fact, and the emphasis is on the idea that the universe is continually in evolution. While this certainly has not impeded scientific progress thus far, it does veer from the course that science was set on at its beginning – to get to the bottom of why the universe existed with a multitude of beings in it, and to understand each being in its entirety. With newer technologies such as cloning and gene editing of embryos poised to affect the very nature of human life itself, it is time to recover the Aristotelian principles of human knowledge. Science is certain knowledge through knowing all the causes. Neither can science abandon formal and final causes in its search for greater knowledge, nor can science claim certainty when certainty does not exist (such as in Darwinism). Modern science must acknowledge uncertainty where uncertainty exists. The concept of form and formal cause seem unnecessary to modern empirical scientists; however, all technology and mass production are based on creating a form that is duplicated many times over in factories. The intense focus on material and

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efficient causes has garnered extraordinary dividends, as shown by the rapid advances in scientific progress. Without concerning itself with final and formal causes, science has discovered laws underlying nature and significantly mastered nature for the benefit of humanity. However, science itself has created techniques that have led to the large-scale slaughter of human beings. And now that science has reached the very core of human beings through techniques such as cloning, gene editing, and euthanasia, it is important to apply Aristotelian principles to science, especially sciences concerning or affecting the human being, so that we can be certain about our scientific knowledge of the human being, and how to apply this knowledge for the betterment of humanity. It is very likely that the unfortunate banishment of metaphysics from human knowledge may be because it was perceived to impede the progress of natural sciences. The use of metaphysics by the institutional Church to explain articles of faith may also have contributed to the decline of metaphysical thinking in modern scientific circles. Instead of offering guard rails and avenues for the acquisition of knowledge, metaphysics may have dictated what can and cannot be studied and known at the inception of the Scientific Revolution, engendering resistance to its efforts to offer a proper foundation for the Scientific Revolution. Whatever the reasons, it is imperative that metaphysics take its rightful and proper place in the realm of human knowing. For that to result, metaphysics must be contemporized to today’s world and state of knowledge. That is the premise of this book.

CHAPTER 15 QUANTUM MECHANICS: NOT SO MECHANICAL

Quantum mechanics, which burst upon the world in the early 20th century, rudely interrupted the steady mechanical progress of modern science and forced a relook at “old” Aristotelian foundations. Mekhane (Greek) and mechanismus (Latin), from which the word mechanism is derived, all gravitate to the same concept – the idea of predictable structure, organization and behavior. As applied to human knowledge, it implies that all of nature is like a machine, something with an underlying predictable structure waiting to be discovered – for that predictability to be harnessed for human benefit. With the Scientific Revolution (circa mid 1500s to 1700), the knowledge pursued was one of mechanism, of laws and principles that completely explained everything in the world, such that based on the current conditions, you could predict what would happen in the future, and thereby what had happened in the past to lead up to this point. Predictability with accuracy, and repeatability, were the cornerstones of this experimentally grounded worldview. Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation were an epitome of this quest. Now that motion of bodies, small and large, including our own Earth, could be understood in terms of mathematical laws and predicted, it seemed that all of nature would capitulate to mechanism. In fact, a French philosopher named Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-51) even wrote a treatise titled The Machine Man, signaling that human knowledge was going to reduce even the human being that created human knowledge into a predictable machine. Of course, we humans have resisted being reduced to automatons – is it possible that the lack of monotonous predictability of human behavior contrary to the theoretical yearning of economists might have its foundations in the unpredictability of reality at the basic level? As the Scientific Revolution progressed, further discoveries were made that showed that electricity and magnetism were related force fields that were also regulated by laws. Light was reduced to an electromagnetic wave. It seemed that all of matter and energy and their interactions were interpretable

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by mathematical equations that predicted how matter and energy behaved in the space they were embedded in, and the time that flowed forwards in an absolute manner. However, as science progressed and we learned more, we started to rediscover the importance of Aristotelian metaphysical commingled participatories such as act/potency and existence/essence to make the empirically uncovered reality intelligible. The first cracks in this sedate edifice of constancy and predictability were produced by the theory of relativity proposed by Albert Einstein.11 The starting point of his revolutionary ideas were from the fact that light travelled at a constant speed regardless of the circumstance. Regardless of how fast a body is moving, light emitted from that body will still be observed to have the same speed. By a series of thought experiments backed by up mathematical formulations, Einstein showed that to keep the speed of light constant, space and time would have to contract or dilate! Thereby space and time, till then thought of as absolute entities that were separate from each other, were united into a single space-time matrix to allow the speed of light to be constant. Gravitation was not an “attraction” between two bodies; rather, it was a warp in the space-time matrix that caused a body to move around another body. Einstein predicted that such a warping of space-time around a large body would cause bending of light as it traversed the warped space. This was in fact proven by Arthur Eddington in 1919 during a solar eclipse. Newtonian mechanics was upended. But nature still seemed predictable. In fact, the most famous equation of all time is E (energy)=m (mass) x c (speed of light)2, whereby Einstein showed that matter and energy are interconvertible in a predictable manner. Forces and fields that seemed continuous and describable by wave functions seemed to connect matter to form a predictable universe. But starting at the beginning of the 20th century, a series of discoveries put an end to the easy predictability of nature.12 Max Planck, from his studies of black body radiation, conclusively proved that heat energy came in discrete little packets called quanta, and not a continuous wavelike form as thought of before. Einstein showed that similarly, light, long thought of to be a wave (although Newton had proposed that light was composed of “corpuscles”), had in fact a discrete nature and was composed of particles called photons. So, what was light, a wave or a particle? The first astonishing finding of quantum mechanics was that entities in our material world could exist as particles or as waves. Experiments to investigate the wave nature of light showed that light possesses the classic characteristic of waves, i.e., interference. Two waves, with troughs and peaks, when they encounter each other, will lead to a

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situation where the troughs and peaks of one wave will augment (if two waves or crests meet) or diminish (if a wave and crest meet) the troughs and peaks of the other wave to create an “interference” pattern. In contrast, light can also behave as a barrage of particles called photons. Einstein won his only Nobel prize by investigating the curious photoelectric effect, in which light could be converted to electricity. He showed that this could be explained not by a light wave transferring its energy to an electron, but rather by thinking of light as a conglomeration of particles named photons, with individual photons hitting electrons and making them move, thereby initiating a current of electrons, the electric current. Light behaving as a wave and a particle wasn’t too bad to digest, wasn’t too much of a deviation from classical views of energy. But what about a particle like the electron? Investigation of the subatomic world showed very unusual findings. An electron could also act like a wave and a particle! If you fired an electron at two slits (the famous Double Slit experiment), it would go through both slits simultaneously and interfere with itself as a wave would do. If you fired an electron through one slit it would behave like a particle and hit the screen at a definite spot just like a particle would do! This showed that matter, at least at the sub-atomic level, seemed to exist as a wave or a particle, depending on whether you were trying to detect a wave or a particle! This “wave-particle” duality seemed to undermine the foundation of predictability that underlay classical science. Various theories have been put forward to explain waveparticle duality and other “strange” findings of quantum mechanics. One such explanation is that particles exist as a probability wave function, with varying probabilities of being found at various spots, and the very act of measurement “collapses” the wave function and makes the particle appear at a particular spot. Some have extended this idea to propose that the act of measurement makes the particle actual – and further proposed a role for the observer in making particles actual from their pre-existent wave functions. This gets into the realm of conscious observers being needed for making matter truly exist as particles. Very unusual concepts, far removed from the sedate mechanical universe that was hoped for at the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. Wave-particle duality has been shown with much larger particles than electrons – for example, with buckyballs (60carbon structures) and molecules that are part of chlorophyll and hemoglobin. In fact, the De Broglie equation formulated by Louis De Broglie demonstrates that any matter, however big, can be described in terms of a wave function. As shown by the equation Ȝ = h/mv Ȝ = wave length; h = Planck’s constant; m = mass of the particle; and v = velocity of the

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particle), since the numerator is the Planck’s constant, a very small entity (6.62607015×10í Joules‫ڄ‬Hertzí) and the denominator the mass of the particle, the wavelength of everyday objects is infinitesimally small and hence irrelevant. So, while there is a probability that Uncle Bob could pop into existence right near you, the probability of that happening is so infinitesimally small that it won’t happen unless both of you were alive for trillions of years! Similarly, you could behave as a wave and pass through two doors at once! But we are still left with the enigma of all the subatomic particles with very small masses that do have actual, demonstrable, wave-particle duality: how in the world do we have a (macro-level) world that seems to obey predictable rules applicable to actually existing particles when we know that underlying every object, there are countless numbers of subatomic particles that seems to exist as wave probability functions without a definite particle like existence? How am I able to type this sentence if I am composed of particles existing as wave probability functions and not as real particles? Another bizarre finding of quantum mechanics is quantum entanglement. This is the astonishing fact that the property of one particle influences the property of another particle even if they are far apart. If the property of one particle is measured, we know what the property of the other particle is, even if they are separated by long distances. It seems as though information about one particle influences information gathered by measurement of another particle. The instantaneous nature of this interaction means that information about one particle of the pair influences information about the other particle at a speed faster than light, a speed limit that is not to be crossed in the universe. Einstein, rightly, was so concerned about quantum entanglement, that he derisively called it “spooky action at a distance.” However, another giant of quantum mechanics, John Bell, proposed a theorem to test whether entanglement was real or whether it could be explained using classical statistical means. Experiments have more than once conclusively proved, based on Bell’s proposition, that quantum entanglement is real! There really seems to be spooky action at a distance! The unpredictability of quantum mechanics reaches a zenith in the Uncertainty principle proposed by Werner Heisenberg, which states that both the position and the momentum of a subatomic particle cannot be simultaneously and accurately measured. Measurement of one property will make measurement of another linked property inexact. One explanation is based on the methods of measurement. If you want to measure the position and velocity of an electron, we have to use light of a small wavelength and hence high energy. If we use light of small enough

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wavelength to measure the position of the electron with certainty, the energy of the photon will be so great as to change the energy and hence velocity of the electron. Conversely, if we use light of greater wavelength, we will be able to measure the velocity of the electron with greater certainty since the light waves won’t change the velocity of the electron, but we will lose the ability to precisely locate the electron since the wavelength will be much larger than the size of an electron. However, the uncertainty principle is not just about the difficulty of measurements at the subatomic level; it is a direct consequence of the wave properties of the subatomic world as described by quantum mechanics. According to Heisenberg’s principle, the mathematical product of uncertainties incurred during the measurement of two corresponding properties of a particle in the subatomic quantum world (such as position and velocity) is always a positive number – greater than one-half the Planck’s constant. Hence uncertainty is always present, and since Planck’s constant, though very small from a macroworld perspective, is large enough at the quantum subatomic level to make uncertainty a fundamental feature of the subatomic world. Now let us explore quantum mechanics from an Aristotelean metaphysical perspective. Act/potency did seem iffy from a classical mechanistic viewpoint. But wave-particle duality clearly shows that metaphysical understanding of reality, while not giving a predictive explanation, is closer to reality than the various attempts to explain this phenomenon. I mentioned before about the “measurement problem” and how a conscious observer has been postulated to “collapse” the wave function and make a particle real. But then what is meant by a conscious observer? Some have used the idea of a Supreme Being whose consciousness collapses wave function of particles. Another interpretation is the many worlds hypothesis – the idea that there are infinite worlds where the wave functions collapse into particles, which is obviously a theory that is unverifiable. While Aristotle proposed act/potency in relation to everyday objects, it seems that the concept is even more applicable to the quantum world. Similarly, existence and essence are also more evident from the quantum world. We could state that subatomic particles alternate between essence and existence as they move between wave probability function and actual existence as a particle. My point is that while the laws of classical physics and science seems to explain a lot about the world at the macro level, as we get into the world of sub atomic particles, the predictability seems to wane as shown by the Uncertainty principle, and phenomena appear that are strange from an empiric standpoint. Yet, these are well within the boundaries of an Aristotelian metaphysics. Hence, if

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Aristotelean metaphysics is established as the architectonic science that gives shape to other sciences, and we recognize that in our search for certain knowledge, we may conclude that some aspects of reality are not empirically verifiable.

CHAPTER 16 LIFE IS HARD

Life is hard. I am not talking just about teenage angst or job stress or midlife crisis. Life is killing to accomplish even for an amoeba. For life requires transcending the laws of physics and chemistry, because life does not naturally flow from the laws of physics and chemistry. Life uses the laws of physics and chemistry for its own ends, which I will discuss more in the next chapter. So, what is life? There is no commonly accepted answer. This is a question that has challenged many of the greatest minds, including some of whom you may not expect to wonder about life. For example, the great physicist Erwin Schrodinger, who provided some of the key mathematical foundations of quantum physics, wrote a book titled What is Life? So, what is life? One of the accusations against Aristotle was that he may have developed his concepts of reality, his metaphysics, based on the living world and tried to overfit these ideas onto the inert, inanimate world. It follows that Aristotle’s metaphysics might be an outstanding construct to examine the living world more than the mundane world governed by physical and chemical laws. What is life at its core? What separates life from non-living matter? You could reduce life further into “perpetuation of self,” the unique characteristic of continuing itself forever given the right conditions. When we examine non-virus living organisms, we find that they build other sub-characteristics on top of the fundamental characteristic of transcending the laws of physics and chemistry to perpetuate themselves. Characteristics such as sensing the environment at increasingly discriminatory and sophisticated levels, moving about to escape danger to itself and to even influence the environment, and also the ability to think, and understand, and manipulate the natural world and exercise freely willed actions to increase the chances of self-perpetuation. This brings back the question – why do living things desire to selfperpetuate? Can’t they just limit their efforts to individual survival? But back to the basics. How does life fit in with the inanimate natural world, governed by the impersonal laws of physics and chemistry. Not at all, I would say – the interactions between material and energetic

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elements of the universe don’t promote self-preservation or self-replication. In fact, life violates a sacrosanct law of physics – the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy, very loosely translated as the amount of disorder in a system, always increases in a closed system like the universe. So, a living system, which is the highest order that we can observe in the material universe, violates the second law of thermodynamics for itself in its effort to keep living (the second law as a whole is not violated, only locally within the living organism). A living system uses the low entropy energy coming from the sun, captured through photosynthesis and released into the cycle of life, to keep itself alive. A living system has to fight constantly to keep its overall entropy low while swimming in a universe that is moving towards more and more entropy. Another unusual aspect of the chemistry of life is its ability to not let all the chemical reactions in a living system to fall into an equilibrium state. An equilibrium state can be considered a stable state in which entropy has reached its highest possible value and hence the system settles into equilibrated existence. In a living system, multitudinous chemical reactions are sustained in non-equilibrium state, an endeavor that involves special mechanisms to catalyze chemical reactions by enzymes, as well as the addition of energy. So, life is about keeping entropy low and avoiding equilibrium, for when all the chemical reactions in the body reaches an equilibrium state and the physical and chemical interactions inside a living organism have settled into an equilibrium state and entropy is constant and high, the living organism resembles the inanimate world that it existed in, and this equilibrium state is called death. At the moment of death of a living organism, it looks the same as at the zeptosecond before, when it was alive – except that now all the chemical reactions are at equilibrium state. Another important aspect of life is that it operates on a code. To carry out all the tasks that are to be performed to keep the low entropy, non-equilibrium state that is needed to survive, a set of instruction codes are needed to take normally existing physical and chemical entities and convert them into proteins that serve various functions in building the edifice of life. The codes for this incredible process reside in the various nucleic acid molecules – DNA providing the basic code that gets transcribed into RNA, which gets translated into proteins. There is an incredible amount of complexity in how this process occurs beyond the simple DNA Ÿ RNA Ÿ Protein schema, but most importantly, life depends on a code. Now what is a code? Is that something that could generate itself from the inanimate world using the laws of physics and chemistry? The DNA code, or the genetic code, is also the mechanism of

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self-perpetuation. Again, reproduction is a very complex process, but the backbone is the DNA and how its constituents are arranged. And this DNA code needs to be reproduced with high fidelity for a single-celled living organism to self-perpetuate, or for multi-celled organisms to organize themselves into an independently living entity and for their selfperpetuation. For life to occur both the code, DNA, and its product, protein had to exist at the same time, since the enzymes that convert and replicate the code are all proteins! Classic chicken-or-egg problem! Indeed, the history of life teems with chicken-or-egg problems. Here’s another. A living cell, a single-celled organism, comprises internal constituents separated from the exterior by a cell membrane. This membrane is crucial to let in some things but not others. For most of the things that are outside the cell are toxic to the cell, including oxygen. Yes, the oxygen we all know is crucial for our life, is one of the most toxic molecules that exist, one that can destroy the molecular building blocks of life inside a cell, unless properly channeled to the mitochondria, the energy factory of the cell, where oxygen can be utilized properly to create energy to enable a living cell to be alive and to reproduce. A cell membrane also keeps out all but the necessary amount of water, funneled through channels called aquaporins – otherwise the cell would either shrink down or swell up beyond what is healthy for it. Then the question is: Did the cell originate without the membrane, or did the membrane originate magically without the cell and its coding mechanisms producing and organizing all the components of the membrane?13 Aristotelian concepts are well-fit to examine life and the kind of conundrums, such as those mentioned, that it poses. The metaphysical commingled and inseparable participatories of matter and form are useful in explaining life – the fact that there is a form that informs inert physical matter to organize itself into a self-preserving, self-perpetuating entity. There is no doubt that without this concept of form, we really cannot explain how a bunch of molecules can achieve such a miraculous fit to become a single living cell, let alone a complex living being. Think about yourself: how you exist as a thinking, acting human person who constantly makes decisions that not only affect other members of your own species but also the physical environment you exist in (e.g. climate change). The immense complexity that is you starts from a single cell. The sheer improbability of a single cell becoming you should astonish you. Form solves the problem, although where form comes from is certainly not solved. Think of the principle of non-contradiction: something cannot be living and not living at the same time and in the same respect. Something separates the living nature of a living organism from its living and dead

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states even though the physical matter may look the same. This “form” of life that organizes the matter is something we should investigate by using novel approaches such as network science, which explores the formation and behavior of networks of all varieties ranging from the networks that form between proteins inside a cell to human endeavors such as cell phone connectivity and social networks. And whenever you think of members of a species, such as ourselves, we have to invoke the idea of form – a form that is the same, with matter that makes each individual different. This is crucial when you think about the issue of racism – if you want to think of DNA as some aspect of the form, then there are vastly more differences in the sequence of DNA between members of an ethnic group within a race than between different races! The idea that human races are different based on genetics, which is the nefarious basis of eugenics, biological racism, and other abhorrent detours of science, could have been avoided had proper attention been paid to the metaphysical foundations of human knowing, which act as both guide and guard-rail. There are organisms that seem to inhabit the twilight zone between life and non-life: viruses, of whose existence we are acutely aware at the time of writing of this book. So maybe we should start at the level of virus ‘life’ before examining unadulterated life forms. The virus can survive by using the life machinery of other living cells within a living organism and replicate itself, and its replicated copies have to move from living organism to living organism to keep itself alive. To continue to perpetuate itself the virus needs to vary its own composition into forms that are likely to survive better in the cells of a living organism, defeating the organism’s defense mechanisms and also spreading the virus’s progeny from organism to organism. Looking at the virus’ behavior to mimic a living organism, we could conclude that life at its core could be considered as the cooperative behavior of inanimate structures to transcend the laws of physics and chemistry to survive and ultimately replicate. The co-participatories of essence and existence from Aristotelian metaphysics highlight the conundrum of how life came to exist. The “essence” of life - of maintaining low entropy in its corner of the universe, of avoiding equilibrium in all its physical and chemical reactions, of selfpreservation and self-perpetuation, of a code that has the instruction for self-preservation and self-replication – it is challenging to conceive of how all these could have come into existence from a physical world that inherently acts to abolish these features of life. Substance and accident are crucial to explain that a living organism is a continuous entity from its formation or conception to its death. This

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may be less applicable to simple living organisms such as a single-celled amoeba but is crucial to explain the most complex of (known) life forms – a human being. Think of yourself without the concepts of substance and accident – to paraphrase the words of David Hume, the British Empiricist, do you consider yourself as just a stream of thoughts and experiences, a situation with no “you” there? I don’t think so. You see yourself as a distinct entity, a substance, that unites all the various versions of you that you see in the photographs chronicling your life. Five-year-old you learning to play softball, 15-year-old musical you giving a piano concert, 22-year-old you with a college degree, 30-year-old-you with a successful career, and 35-year-old you as a mom to two cute kids, are all the same substance, that is, you, with various accidents of the sporty-you, musicalyou and so on adding more layers to the original substance that is you. And these changes from conception to death are accidental changes in the history of the substance that is you; the substantial change will come at your death, when the material components of your body will return to their primitive physical states. So, what are the causes of life? The material cause is no different than the material cause of anything that exists, even though the molecular structure of life on Earth has a heavy reliance on carbon-based molecules and on the presence of water molecules. As we discussed above, there must be a formal cause, a form that organizes the matter. We can think of the DNA code and its interpretation by subsequent mechanisms as part of the formal cause in the production of life from reproduction of a previously existing life form, but a true formal cause, we have to surmise, cannot arise from the matter itself, it has to transcend the laws of physics and chemistry to create a self-preserving and self-perpetuating organism. The formal cause has to organize all the matter, from the sub-atomic particles to the atoms, the molecules, and in the case of higher animals, the cells, organs, and organ systems into a single entity that acts in concert for one purpose, the self-preservation and self-replication of this single, unitary, entity. A huge and complex enterprise indeed. Aristotle called this formal cause the psyche or soul, without any religious connotations. Based on current science, it is difficult to consider the self-organization of matter into life to occur without a formal cause, albeit one that needs to be further elucidated. The efficient cause of life-forms is easier to think of, since as we see now, all life forms arise from other life forms by reproduction – hence the efficient cause is the parent cell, or in the case of sexual reproduction, parent organisms, with adequate nutrition and other ancillary efficient causes added on, helping the generation of new life. But this does not solve the problem of the efficient cause of the first life form, the first

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living cell. While many have attempted to create life from a soup of inert matter, none have succeeded. Some have postulated that if we conducted an experiment with infinite combinations of an infinite number of various matter particles, life would arise. But as Benedict Ashley (The Way towards Wisdom) comments, that is no explanation at all, since such an experiment is impractical. In fact, any explanation that has to invoke an infinite number of possibilities to explain something is no explanation at all. Now we come to the final cause. Why is there life on Earth? Yes, we understand that the elements required for life arose in the cores of stars by stellar nucleosynthesis and were dispersed through the universe by supernovae explosions, but what were the laws or conditions that channeled the physical forces of the universe towards the formation of the first living organism. We seem to have abandoned the search for final causes with a shrugging of the shoulder, as if to say that it is not important or that we will find out the final cause in due course via advances in science. Common sense-ible human knowledge clearly indicates that while life arose from material constituents, nothing in the laws that we know of suggests that any of them in combination would have given rise to a selfpreserving, self-replicating form of matter than seems to want to continue its imprint on the material world for eternity by its intrinsic orientation to reproduction. We are not invoking a Divine Designer of life, but just acknowledging that we have to explain the origin of life in terms of final causes, predeterminations of existing physical laws that would have led to the creation of the first complete living cell. Abandoning the search for formal and final causes does no service to human knowledge. First, we have to search for a formal cause. How is it that all the different material components are orchestrated for a single purpose, transcending the laws of physics and chemistry? Where is this formal cause located – in a specific part or in some sort of communication between all the component parts of an organism, maybe through quantum entanglement? Then we have to parse together all we know about all living organisms and the constituent molecules to find out the final cause or causes – the laws that cause the organization of the formal cause from the material components. A tall order maybe, but necessary nonetheless to truly and with certainty get the answer to the question: What is Life? If we cannot get a certain answer based on physico-chemical laws, we will have to accept that result and consider causes that lie outside the material realm.

CHAPTER 17 HIERARCHY OF LIFE: BOUNDARY CONDITIONS

More than five decades ago, the great chemist and polymath Michael Polanyi wrote an article in the prestigious Science magazine, titled “Life’s Irreducible Structure.”14 In the article, he gave some fascinating insights into life. Polanyi introduced the useful concept of ‘boundary conditions’ to the process of human knowing, thereby offering a way to deconstruct the complexity of life. He initiated his arguments from the premise of how a machine is constructed. In making a machine, we impose what Polanyi called boundary conditions on the laws of physics and chemistry to harness these physico-chemical laws to serve the purpose for which the machine was created. For example, this computer I am writing these words on is designed to harness various laws of both classical and quantum physics to create a machine that serves human purposes. “Boundary condition” is a term used by Polanyi to designate these transition points where a lower set of laws or principles are taken over by a higher set of laws or principles. These were simultaneously boundaries and control mechanisms: boundaries between one type of laws and another set, and also a control mechanism of the second, higher set of laws over the first set. In human language also, we use a similar mechanism, imposing successive “boundary conditions.” For example, words can be considered as boundary conditions imposed on guttural sounds produced by humans, and grammatical rules as boundary conditions imposed by us on words to form meaningful sentences. (Learning a new language and encountering what appears to be bewildering grammatical rules makes us acutely aware of the ‘impositional’ nature of grammar.) In Polanyi’s view, these higher principles or boundary conditions are new entities that are separate from the lower-level laws and principles. Polanyi postulated that the lower-level principles must have a certain degree of indeterminacy for a higher-level principle to control the lower level. What is meant by indeterminacy? It means that matter and energy do not follow completely predictable trajectories of existence. This is proven at the sub-atomic level as embodied

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in Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy. Similar examples exist in human activity. If you think about human language, we can create a huge, technically infinite variety of sounds from which the boundary condition of vocabulary can create a finite set of words. Even in a computer language based on a binary system, there is enough indeterminacy due to the infinite number of combinations of binary characters possible that we can write computer software such as the one I am using to write these words. The concept of boundary condition offers a metaphysical way to “deconstruct” life to allow examination from a scientific perspective. Of course, in the natural world, boundary conditions are not ‘imposed’ in the same way as the boundary conditions of language and technology that result from willed human actions. The idea of boundary condition is a useful way of conceptualizing the ascending hierarchy of complexity from the inanimate world of subatomic particles to the most complex material being we know, ourselves. Each boundary condition or higher-level harnesses, by as yet unknown mechanisms, the laws of the lower level to serve the higher level. Figure 1 shows this hierarchy of the various life forms in an inverted pyramid of life.15 At the lowest level, unicellular life forms emerge from matter and energy with the addition of a code, the genetic code, and gain the properties of self-preservation and selfperpetuation that inanimate matter does not by itself possess. Of course, how this happens, how the ‘boundary’ is traversed, is still unknown. As is described below, the ‘boundary’ may not be a sharp demarcation. Similarly, multicellular plant life harnesses the boundary conditions of self-preservation and self-perpetuation in addition to the physico-chemical laws already harnessed to create new boundary conditions that make sensation of the environment and production of food possible. Animals harness the principles of plant life and unicellular life and physicochemical laws to add boundary conditions that allow for more acute sensations, locomotor function, and brain functions that integrate sensory and motor functions to learn and adapt to the environment. And finally, human beings use all the principles of unicellular, plant and animal life to create rational and freely willed life. Evolution parallels this hierarchical organization of matter and energy and is the process that creates higher and higher boundary conditions leading to more and more complex forms of existence. When a living organism dies, all the boundary conditions disappear and the material components of the living organism, however simple or complex, returns to the unharnessed physico-chemical laws that rule all inanimate matter.

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Figure 1. Reproduced with permission from ‘Life's irreducible structure: Where are we, five decades later?’ (J. Joseph, Bioessays, 2020). BC = Boundary Condition.

We discussed DNA as a code that does not conform to the rules of physics and chemistry. By Polanyi’s criteria, DNA is also a boundary condition necessary for life. DNA is composed of four building blocks or nucleotides, and unlike many other biological molecules, DNA can have any sequence of arrangement of the four nucleotide bases similar to the arrangement of a binary code in a computer. Hence DNA imposes its own boundary conditions on the physico-chemical laws that determine the structure of a nucleotide to create an infinite number of possible sequences of its nucleotides, effectively making itself a code similar to the code used in a computer.

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Can the idea of boundary conditions be translated into a more contemporary formulation by metaphysical thinking to enable investigation? The answer is yes. The advent of the ability to collect large amounts of data from biological systems, high performance computing, and novel constructs such as network science allow us to explore these “boundary conditions.” Network science is a recent development that has demonstrated laws and principles underlying the formation of networks between entities as disparate as cell phone connections and protein-protein interactions. It is possible that boundary conditions between life and non-life include complex networks between all the biological molecules involved, i.e., a cell is a boundary condition of networks between all the biological molecules in a cell. Similarly, a hierarchy of networks as boundary conditions, i.e., networks being organized into higher-order networks, may be observed as we move from unicellular to multicellular to animal and ultimately human life. Boundary conditions are not discontinuities in the hierarchy of existence. Polanyi, in his seminal article, offers an ingenious solution to address this seeming discontinuity, a solution that also translates into experimental possibilities. As shown in Figure 1, he postulates boundary condition as not a discrete line of separation, but a gradation of control of the higher level over the lower level in which the control exerted by the higher level starts from point 0, or no control, increasing incrementally up to a maximum of 1, at which point the lower-level principles completely cede control to the higher principle. Polanyi proposed that by “detailing”, i.e., describing all the processes that occur at lower level or level 0 and “integrating,” i.e., trying to understand how the processes at the lower level are “taken over” by the higher principle(s), we could understand the boundary conditions in the hierarchy of life. When he proposed these concepts, empiric science did not have the tools to address these issues. In fact, molecular and cell biology was at an inchoate stage. But now, with the techniques at our hand, it is possible to study all the physico-chemical activities going on inside a single cell, and using network science, to examine how these processes integrate themselves into a network format. Boundary conditions can be considered to be the form that each level in the hierarchy of life possesses to convert their constituent matter into the particular life form. But even if we found out the structure of biological networks or “forms” that underlie each level of life, we will still need to find out how and why these networks form, what are the final causes. It doesn’t appear that we would easily reduce life into mathematical models.

CHAPTER 18 BIOLOGY OF LIFE: DOGMA OF LINEARITY YIELDS TO COMPLEXITY

As in physics with the advent of quantum mechanics, the rapid advances in cell and molecular biology have shed significant light on the workings of life, but also revealed the enormous complexity that underlies life processes. The question now is, do the findings of molecular biology support a mechanical, materialist view of life? We have found that underneath the sedate appearance of a cell lies a seething collection of billions of molecules working together to achieve a common purpose. As I will detail in this chapter, the spectacular advances in cell and molecular biology have not, contrary to expectations, confirmed a mechanical, materialistic viewpoint of life. I will posit, rather, that the discoveries of the past decades fit more into an Aristotelian metaphysical framework. The triumphs of human understanding of cell and molecular biology may appear to have abolished the need for any metaphysics, with just matter and its inherent properties explaining the complexity of life from the workings of a single cell to the intricate life of a human being. That would have been correct if all cellular processes fit into a neat linear set of reactions that were interconnected in a predictable manner. After the discovery of DNA structure and how the DNA code was transcribed into messenger RNA which was translated into proteins, the “building blocks” of life, a central dogma of biology was postulated, which stated: DNA Ÿ RNA Ÿ Protein. Now we know that the process of making a protein from DNA code is vastly more complex than suggested by the simple linear progression of the central dogma of biology. In fact, we have concluded quite the opposite. We now know that the decoding of the sequence of coding bases in the DNA sequence is a very complex process that differs even between cells in the same organism. The deciphering of the genetic code showed a complexity of the human and other genomes (genome = sum total of DNA code) well beyond what may have been expected. Only a small fraction (1%) of the DNA sequence in the human genome codes

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for about 20,000 known proteins. The rest, i.e. 99% of the human DNA code, likely serves various functions that contribute to the unfolding of the ‘form’ of the human person, functions that we are still trying to unravel by studying the five-foot long stretch of human DNA. Similarly, when examining cellular processes, we started with the simple linear concept of one protein or such molecule binding to its receptor and setting forth a series of reactions in the cell collectively termed signaling mechanisms, that ultimately altered a specific property or properties of the cell. This yielded initial results in terms of development of drugs targeting specific molecules and tests for diseases. But again, we found that there was no linear set of reactions with predictable connections with other reactions. We find that even a single cell is a vast cauldron of billions of molecules undergoing trillions of reactions in a vast network of interconnected processes. There is some compartmentalization of this vast network of interconnected processes into specific areas of a cell, but they remain part of the vast interconnected network. Networks seems to underlie the “form” that leads to life emerging from material entities. The sequencing of the human genome generated great excitement based on the possibility that we would be able to decipher the human organism and its state of health and disease, and thereby cure disease. However, after two decades of research, it is clear that this reductionist approach will not bear fruit. We find that cellular processes do not work in isolation. Perturbation of one signaling pathway seems to affect many others. Changes in one organ, the heart, as in heart failure, causes changes in multiple organ systems. Hence, it is clear that genes, signaling pathways, and organ systems are interconnected in one or more closely interacting networks. Network science is a recent development which has discovered some laws underlying networks. Starting with analysis of commonplace networks such as cellphone connectivity, network science has discovered laws underlying seemingly random processes, indicating that networks form as interconnected hubs. Network analysis has been extended to the biomedical field showing networks between proteins, and also networks connecting seemingly disparate diseases that may have as yet undiscovered biological connections. Life processes by definition supersede physical laws: metabolism, self-preservation, and replication, which are cardinal features of life forms, require activities, such as catalysis, that operate in contravention of normal physical laws. Life requires intercellular and interorgan communication that allow a living organism to not be at the mercy of physical laws or the physical environment. As scientist-philosopher Polanyi suggested, life has an irreducible structure, as we discussed in the previous chapter, requiring

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boundary conditions that harness the laws of inanimate nature. Life consists in a hierarchy of boundary conditions that harness all the laws below. Hence in man, the boundary conditions harness all the laws stretching down from animal to plants to unicellular organisms to inanimate matter, and creates a rational animal. Finally, the pattern of DNA bases or genetic code is also a boundary condition: as mentioned previously, genetic code is a code precisely because it does not follow the laws of physics and chemistry. The fact that we can have any sequence of the nucleotide bases adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine in a DNA sequence without constraints imposed by laws of physics and chemistry means that DNA sequence is similar to my typing the letters on my computer – I can type any sequence of letters without any constraints (although based on the rules of vocabulary and grammar, I may choose to type in a certain sequence). Hence the more we study cellular life processes, the more we realize that we are unable to find discrete biological modules that fit together into a nice “cell machine.” Rather, we find a vast network of interconnected processes. There seems to be something that integrates the functioning of a cell to promote a primary function of life – selfpreservation against the tendency of the constituents of the cell to obey physico-chemical laws which do not care about whether the cell survives or not. In the concepts of Polanyi we discussed previously, we cannot escape the notion that all these physico-chemical processes must somehow be integrated for one purpose by a cause – this fits well into the concept of “form” that Aristotle described. The search for the best way to explain how a cell does what it does cannot be satisfied by just describing the various processes that go on inside the cell, although that is certainly also important in increasing our understanding and for potential diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Without a separate ‘formal cause’ that brings the ‘form’ of the cell out of all the myriad physico-chemical processes that occur inside the cell, it is difficult to state that we have achieved certain knowledge of how a cell works. Empiric science should investigate the form and formal cause of life starting with a single cell, as I described in the previous chapter. The process of detailing all reactions inside a cell and using the principles of network science to understand how these processes are integrated would be a useful path towards understanding the fundamental principles of life. But then again, why the formal cause operates as it does, in a predetermined manner, would require explanation.

CHAPTER 19 EVOLUTION: NOT THE COMPLETE ANSWER

Darwin’s theory of evolution is a towering achievement of science. But we have to assess how this theory may have been carried by his devotees, beyond what is supported by evidence, to novel areas and to degrees of certainty that its cautious proponent may not have wanted to venture into. Evolutionary thought and Darwinian mechanisms have profoundly influenced scientific thought, and have moved science from studying being in the process of change to primarily examining the process of becoming, i.e., change under the influence of material forces. Evolution of life on earth has been a very slow process of increasing complexity. Darwinism postulates that random genetic variations combined with random processes of natural selection leads to evolution of new and better species. Variations with better fitness for survival and reproduction are preferentially selected. This is all there is to explain how, from the primeval soup of elementary particles generated by the Big Bang, the human species with its ability to reason and propose the theory of evolution came into being approximately 14 billion years later. Given a long enough time, random variation and selection based on fitness to survive and reproduce is all there is to the immense variety of life. Of course, this theory does not attempt to answer how life originated, only how various life forms came about. But from a metaphysical perspective, it is more of a historical analysis of how evolution happened rather than a true understanding as to why it happened. As Darwin himself said, it was difficult for him to understand how his own theory could explain the development of complex organs like the eye or of the emergence of the faculty of sight. From a true metaphysical perspective, we need to find causes that we are certain apply to all beings and processes; i.e., we need to find out why evolution occurred in the manner it did. One obvious issue that is clear from current studies of the human genome is the huge gap that exists between a change in a nucleotide sequence of the human genome and the change in the final characteristics of the human person, what we term the ‘phenotype’ (from

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Greek phaino = to appear). What this means is that random mutations cannot be equated to a change in the biology of the organism that affects reproductive fitness and then falls under the influence of natural selection. Rather, what natural selection in the Darwinian sense acts on is the whole organism, that is the result of massive parallel processes that leads to tens of thousands of proteins which are further modified and trillions of cells that result from these processes that act together to form the living organism. So, we can see that random mutation that changes single nucleotides in the sequence of DNA is very unlikely to be the source of the variation that leads to the kind of changes that progressed from bacteria to Einstein. And we can affirm only those aspects of the theory of evolution for which certain evidence exists. We cannot allow the extension and extrapolation of the theory to support personal beliefs and ideas of scientists. The Aristotelian approach to knowledge requires that we achieve certain knowledge, and acknowledge if there is uncertainty, in which case it is not true knowledge. When we dissect evolution to its component parts, there are several processes we observe that are difficult to explain. There is clear evidence that small variations within a species are the result of random genetic mutations, and there is ample evidence for the processes of negative (elimination of harmful mutations) or positive selection (enrichment of beneficial mutations in the succeeding generations). However, it is not clear that random mutations and natural selection produce new species. Studies of Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) submitted to radiation produced random mutations but did not result in any beneficial characteristics. Small variations in genetic material, or microevolution, act mainly to prevent the propagation of deleterious mutations rather than create new forms. The variation in beak sizes of finches that Darwin observed on his famous trip to the Galapagos islands or the pollutioninduced changes in the color of moths are a long way from how new and complex species come into being. The creation of new species requires significant changes in genome content due to processes such as gene transposition, horizontal gene transfer, symbiogenesis, and genome duplication. Furthermore, there are three steps in the evolution of life that are such significant “jumps” that they are very difficult to explain by random events or by pure physico-chemical laws. These are: 1) formation of the first living organism from inanimate matter; 2) transition from plant to animal life; and 3) transition from animal life to human beings. Even if a scientist were able to show how organic material organizes itself under pre-specified experimental conditions to form a cell, that would only show how a rationally designed process may lead to the evolution of life – not

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that all of life’s history is just a random, chance, combination of macromolecules. And an experimental procedure where we test whether an infinite number of combinations of molecules result in a living organism is neither doable nor verifiable. There seem to be a directedness in evolution, wherein laws (such as DNA mutations occurring in a certain frequency in the genome), and normal natural phenomena that select beneficial variations, are combined with chance events that accelerate the process. A classic example of a chance event – albeit external – with significant consequences is the meteor incursion into the earth’s atmosphere that caused the Ice Age that led to the extinction of dinosaurs and allowed mammalian species to thrive. Another problem with evolution is that while gene mutations can change protein structure, protein function is dependent on proper organization of the protein into tertiary and quaternary three-dimensional structures, and these processes of protein folding are influenced by many external factors. Natural selection works on organisms. Hence it is not clear how a random mutation, with an unpredictable effect on the final structure and function of a protein, can be chaperoned by natural selection to produce the right type of protein. It has been estimated that to create even a simple protein consisting of 107 amino acids by random mutations, the time required to try every combination (1040 seconds) would be more than the age of the universe (1018 seconds)!16 And finally, evolution is possible because of the genetic code that determines, along with epigenetic modifications, how a living being is organized. The genetic code is an information coding mechanism. It is not clear how a random physical process or processes could lead to the development of a system of coding that is fundamental to life and evolution. In fact, as we have discussed, the genetic code is a code precisely because it does not obey the laws of physics and chemistry or of mathematical probability! To arrive at a true causal understanding of evolution, evolution is better examined using the four causes proposed by Aristotle. Certainly, this is a complex process that would be elucidated better as we acquire more empirical evidence about evolutionary processes. As in the case of many processes in the universe, the material and efficient causes are easier to pinpoint. We can state confidently that changes in the genetic material underlie the process of changes in the biological makeup of organisms, which if significant enough, can cause creation of new species. As we discussed, we still need to understand the exact genetic changes that occur during the creation of new species, especially the dramatic changes that chaperone the evolution from unicellular to multicellular plant life, plant life to animal life, and primate life to human beings. The efficient causes

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as we now know them, are broadly speaking, environmental conditions. Both gradual environmental change as well as catastrophic events such as the Ice Age should be included in the class of “natural selection” postulated by Darwin. The boundary between material and efficient causes, which is always difficult to distinguish, is certainly blurred in the case of evolution. Also, evolution is dependent on reproduction, and the origin of self-replication is not easy to explain in terms of physicochemical laws. If we can prove that complex organs like the eye and complex beings like humans could be arrived at by random accumulation of mutations and selection by natural conditions, then we can conclude that we could stop at material and efficient causes. But we know, too, that each species has a form and that this progression of forms from simple to complex has ultimately resulted in an unusual and complex being: the human. The question is: Have the material and efficient causes operated entirely by chance combinations to create the life forms that we have today – especially the human being? Why would evolution not stop at the most successful life form, the bacterium, and why did evolution progress towards very complex life forms. Why in the world did evolution need to progress towards such a complex organism like the human being that is high-maintenance and now even adversely affecting the ecosystem of the earth by industrial development and pollution? (Not to mention the possibility of nuclear Armageddon.) Are there laws that guide the whole evolutionary process? Is evolution entirely explainable by rigid laws or is chance, i.e., the collision of multiple causal pathways, required for some of the most significant “jumps” in evolution? How is it that the evolutionary process led to a species, Homo sapiens, that seems least fitted for survival at its origin, with a lack of covering body hair to protect from the cold, lack of locomotive speed to escape from enemies, with a lack of innate instincts for survival unlike other animals, yet with some profound intellectual capacities for reason and language that were probably not very useful for survival at the inception of the species, but over millennia led to this species totally dominating the earth? A persuasive proposition for the process of evolution would be as follows: evolution is a process of unfolding of natural laws of the universe towards the creation of the human species, constrained by natural selection to eliminate sidetracks, and accelerated by events that occur by collision of multiple paths of causation. Of course, the material and efficient causes need to be elucidated more before we can understand the final cause, since the final cause is the predetermination of efficient causes to act in a certain manner. As we have seen, the claim that material and efficient causes of evolutionary

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processes are solely responsible for the creation of life and its evolution into Homo sapiens is not a certain conclusion. Any certainty Darwinists claim is an act of faith. To extend the concept of boundary conditions or higher principles forming a graded boundary between different life forms we encountered in a previous chapter, evolution could be conceived of as a progressive intensification of higher principles of life, a process in which higher levels are already present in rudimentary manifestations in lower forms of life. In such a schema, successive hierarches in life forms increase the independence of each level from its surroundings. To summarize, man, barring the discovery of extra-terrestrial forms of life, is the epitome of evolution. And if the evolution of life – and ultimately humankind – has happened despite the near impossibility of its happening, there must underlie some causes or sequence of causes that were inherently determined to push the process towards an inevitable conclusion, with chance events accelerating or retarding the progress, i.e., a final cause. And if we cannot pinpoint this ‘final cause’ now, we haven’t attained ‘certain’ knowledge, so let us at least acknowledge that lacuna. A metaphysics that accounts (rather, makes allowance for the possibility of a reason, purpose, and final cause) is better equipped to deal with the massive amounts of factual post-hoc knowledge about evolution that science has accumulated in the last two centuries.

CHAPTER 20 THE BIG BANG THAT SHATTERED ETERNITY

The Greek word for the universe is Kosmos, meaning order. Even an ancient seeker of knowledge, not equipped with all the experimental techniques and experimental evidence for laws governing the physical universe, seemed to grasp the idea that there is order in the universe. Hence, all the terms for what exists – such as universe and cosmos – suggest an intrinsic unity in spite of the enormous diversity of beings we see in the observable universe. For a long time, it was not clear whether the universe existed for eternity or for a finite period of time. From a physicalist standpoint, it would have been easy if the universe was found to have no beginning. Then we could just be satisfied that the universe and we exist, and move on to practical uses of the fact that we and the universe exist, and not worry about where the universe came from. A Belgian priest, George Lemaitre, first proposed the idea of a beginning to the universe, an idea that was derisively called the Big Bang by the famed astronomer Fred Hoyle, and the name stuck even after the mockery was ended by empiric proof.17 The fact that the universe had a beginning immediately leads to the conclusion that all we see was formed from the same origin. We and the stars in the sky are made of the same stuff. Hence there may be common principles underlying all of existing being, a fundamental premise of metaphysics. Currently physicists know of four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force. It is astounding that from these four fundamental forces, all the diversity we see in the universe organized itself. That itself inspires wonder. How can four fundamental forces “create” such a complex being as us, with rationality and free will? When we review the history of the universe, there are many things that evoke wonder. As we discussed before, in the early history of the universe, there were countless particles and anti-particles annihilating themselves into pure energy. None of us would be alive today had it not been for the fact that there was a minimalist victory of matter over antimatter. Scientists have discovered many underlying constants of nature, like the magnitude of the force of gravity, the mass of the electron, and the

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strength of the strong nuclear force, amounting to about 30 in number. Why these “lucky 30” are important is that if even one were slightly different, and I am talking about minute changes in minuscule entities, the universe would not have developed the way we have seen: no stars, no production of the heavier elements required for life, no planets habitable for life, and hence no life. Think about that – lucky for us! There are various terms to describe this fortuitous situation. Some call it “fine tuning”, the finessing of the universal constants – which immediately invokes a “Fine Tuner,” and accusations of introducing supernatural phenomena. A closely related principle is the “anthropic principle,” which has various forms, indicating in a “weak” or “strong” manner that since we, human observers, exist in our universe, there must be some factor or factors that make our universe inherently teleologically disposed to the creation of human life. Others may contend that these constants are just an accident of nature – we are accidental creatures brought about by the fortuitousness of constants and events governed totally by chance. As with Darwinism, the long time periods and the mist of pre-history can always be invoked in the defense of pure chance. An “innovative” solution is the “multiverse” theory, which states that there are infinite universes, and we happen to inhabit the universe with the right conditions to permit human life. The problem is that we cannot communicate with any of these purported universes, so we will never receive empirical proof of the existence of the multiverse. Does this make the positing of the multiverse more an act of faith than science?18 So we are left with the issue that in the only universe of which we know and can know, we have seen the unfolding of an incredible order, marshalled by the four fundamental forces and the cosmological constants working together, combined with chance events, to create an immense universe, in a corner of which human life has come into being. The facts we have to contend with are: the universe did begin at a point in time, and the fact that life and we exist is so improbable and could not have been predicted from the properties of the universe when it began, in the time frame the universe has existed. How does the universe appear in a contemporized Aristotelian framework? We have to wonder if there indeed is a final cause, a predetermination of efficient causes, that led to the conditions necessary for life and human life in at least one part of the universe. We have to wonder: why did we have to exist at all? Do we wonder because we happen to exist by chance, or do we wonder because we do believe that we were meant to exist from the beginnings of the universe?

CHAPTER 21 THE COMMON SENSE-IBLE HUMAN PERSON

A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.” (Stephen Crane, ‘A Man Said to the Universe’)

Now we come to the most complex being, the human. Unlike the outside world, we can analyze ourselves from within and without, subjectively and objectively. As a physician, I have an additional perspective from having taken care of thousands of patients and interacted with them and their families through the joys and tribulations of health and disease. You may have been a patient yourself at some point in your life, maybe multiple times. The word patient suggests a being who passively receives something from an actor or agent. Of course, that is not the way you think of a patient, or of yourself when you interact with doctors or the healthcare system. During medical interactions, we do not consider a human person as a conglomeration of particles and force fields malleable to our enforceable manipulations. We would be wrong to treat them as a collection of mechanical parts and not as unitary beings capable of making their own decisions about their health. Hence, in our everyday practice, we consider the human being a center of autonomous activity, not a compendium of molecules; so how can we ignore this explicit fact of human existence? If the human person is not a purely material being governed solely by random interactions of sub-atomic particles, then what is she? We observe ourselves as beings that ask the question “Why?” and to answer that question use instruments such as ideas, concepts, logic, language, etc. When I see a patient, I extract bits of information from taking an history and performing an examination. While there is a relation between the patient’s answers and what I perceive when I observe or examine the patient’s body, I am immersed in the world of ideas and concepts to ultimately come to deliberation on what the patient’s disease might be. Are ideas and concepts and logic I use as a physician just based

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on synaptic transmissions in a particular brain at a particular time. If so, then how is it possible that the same brain state can occur identically in millions of human brains? If it is a unique brain state, then how can it possibly correspond enough to be communicable to another person’s brain state to allow conversation about the idea? If our ideas are just the random output of a material organ, why give any credence to those ideas? It is difficult to conceive of ideas as just the product of a material brain state – hence we have to consider the possibility of a non-material part of the human being, that uses the brain for its activities, to generate ideas that are not rooted in physico-chemical laws, to reason, and to determine a unique course of action that is its own. So we have to contend with the proposition that the unifying form or the soul of a human being, since it uses its brain to create non-material entities such as ideas and concepts, might be a non-material entity itself. The idea of the human being having the ability to transcend material being is apparent from observing human actions and the trajectory of human history. The human being is very different from all other animals. The human is born with less instincts for survival than most other animals yet learns much more during its lifetime than other animals. And this learning is, as is evident from the premise of this book, not limited to adapting to changes in the environment for survival and reproduction of the individual human being. The transmission of this knowledge across societies and down generations is what has led to the dominance of the human species. If the human person is to be solely based on Darwinian mechanisms, we should seek only what is best for survival and perpetuation of ourselves. The human being certainly does seek “goods” that are meant for material comfort and reproduction. But the human also seeks goods that are not necessarily associated with physical well-being. Only the human is willing to die for an idea such as freedom, only a human will willingly sacrifice her life in a war for the idea of country, only a human will commit suicide relinquishing the greatest of material goods, life itself. Only humans indulge in recreational sex, and paradoxically, also embrace celibacy for religious reasons. Obesity might be an epidemic caused by domestication, as it is not observed in wild animals and only in domesticated animals and couch potatoes. Clearly, the human being works on the idea of “good” that is not fully consonant with material wellbeing – hence we have to acknowledge the possibility that there must be a part of the human being that is non-material that is itself oriented to non-material goods. Similarly, it’s possible that the human person’s proclivity to truth is the reason why a lie detector test, using physiological responses to probing questions, is successful in identifying liars. From a personal standpoint, we

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see a disconnect between material reality and functions of the brain. For example, I was once in a haunted house in an “Alley of horrors”, in which actors portraying murderous criminals leapt at you from dark alleys with murder weapons in hand. I was at the head of the line. Even though I knew that the alley posed no threat to me, I was very hesitant to move forward and was subject to constant irritated prodding from the people behind me! Here was a situation when the mind was clearly working on a non-material concept of danger, when no material danger existed. Detailed analysis of human intellectual function suggests a nonmaterial component acting through a material brain. As mentioned above, we not only extract sensory or perceptual images from the world around us, but create concepts from these perceptual images that are universal and not related to specific physical beings. Then we create relations between these concepts that allow us to create more complex concepts (e.g. rational man). Then we create relations between these complex relational concepts such as where, why, therefore, etc. This is followed by creating complex rules for relations between relational concepts such as rules of grammar, logic, mathematics, analytical geometry, algebraic equations, network science etc. It is difficult to demonstrate that these concepts, that are the basis of human rationality and human intellectual endeavors, can be generated by physical brain states that are grounded in physical processes. These activities are “trans-physical” and indicate the grounding of human intelligence in an entity that is not a material but a non-material substance. Hence the human being does not seem to be just a collection of atoms and molecules in random interaction. If we employ the Aristotelian principles of matter and form, we can consider the human being as a composite of material constituents and a form that includes a non-material element that accounts for human rationality. This form, or the human soul, is not separate from the material body but unifies the actions of the body. It acts through the human brain to perceive the world and to reason. This composite of the material body and the non-material soul forms the human person. Hence human personhood does not depend on the material state it is in – even when a human person is in a coma induced by anesthesia she remains a human person. The concept of substance as applied to the human being demonstrates that there is an entity that maintains its existence through various phases of existence, from the fertilized egg, through the embryonic phase, into adulthood and old age. Similarly, using the inseparable participatories of potency and act, we can surmise that it is the same human person who exists from conception to death, with the potency that allows the person to move into various states of actuality. While an embryo obviously does not have the brain and central nervous

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system to enable it to reason, it still remains a human being in potency who will develop the ability to reason. Substantial change occurs when a human being comes into existence at conception, and when a human being dies. At the moment of death, all the material constituents remain essentially the same as in the moment before, but a fundamental change occurs in which there is no unifying center of activity associated with the body anymore. The concepts of matter/form, substance/accidents, and act/potency help us to understand the true essence of the human being. The intent of this chapter is not to provide a definitive answer to what a human person is, what human nature is, where is the place of humans in nature, for human nature has been a perennial topic for millennia. To quote Thomas Henry Huxley, the English biologist who earned the moniker ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ as a fierce proponent of Darwinism, “The question of all questions for humanity, the problem which lies behind all others and is more interesting than any of them, is that of the determination of man’s place in nature and his relation to the cosmos.” The intent of this chapter is to exhort you to interrogate the human person that you are, using Aristotelian metaphysical principles, subjectively from within yourself, and objectively, from interpersonal interactions and the findings of the special sciences like neuroscience, and go where truth leads you, whether to concluding that all aspects of a human person are explained by pure material being, or to surmising that the form and formal cause of the human being, the human soul, also has non-material aspects. Considering these might enable a proper understanding of what a human person is.

CHAPTER 22 COULD THERE BE AN UNCAUSED CAUSE?

“Since there must always be motion without intermission, there must necessarily be something, one thing or it may be a plurality, that first imparts motion, and this first movement must be unmoved.” (Physics Book VIII Part 6) “But evidently there is a first principle, and the causes of things are neither an infinite series nor infinitely various in kind. For (1) neither can one thing proceed from another, as from matter, ad infinitum…, nor can the sources of movement form an endless series…. Similarly the final causes cannot go on ad infinitum.” (Metaphysics Book II part 2) “as we have said, one actuality always precedes another in time right back to the actuality of the eternal prime mover.” (Metaphysics Book IX part 8)

The most important questions we have to answer using common sense-ible human knowledge are whether the universe is self-explanatory, or based on the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason (or causation), whether it needs a cause that lies outside the universe. Do we accept the principle of causation, and conclude that any existing thing must either have a cause for its existence or must be self-caused? If we accept that premise, it leads us to the conclusion, stretching back across chains of causation, with each link an existing being that was caused by a preexisting being, till we have to necessarily end in a cause that was uncaused, unless the universe was eternal, which we know is not the case, since we now know that it originated 13.8 billion years ago out of nothing. There are many attempts to explain why a universe could arise seemingly out of nothing by redefining what that ‘nothing’ is or postulating an infinitely larger entity from which our universe originated in a bubble. Even if we did postulate (without proof) a regression of causes that predated the Big Bang, we are still left without an answer to the question: how did the first manifestation of matter and energy come about? The best answer is to postulate that there must be a cause that is uncaused, that existed by itself and is the cause of all the other entities and causes that have ultimately led to us coming into being and contemplating these

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questions. Some may derisively ask, “So who created the Uncaused Cause?” But that is precisely the point: there must be an Uncaused Cause for the existing world to make sense. An Uncaused Cause is the most common sense-ible way to explain our existence. But that doesn’t mean that we must refer all aspects of the universe to the action of the Uncaused Cause in all instances. What modern science has discovered and continues to discover, i.e., various laws underlying the universe, could be called secondary causes. There are plenty of secondary causes that carry on the great chain of causation that has led to us. The four fundamental causes, genetic changes that alter organisms, natural selection, chance events such as the asteroid hit that started the Ice Age, are all secondary causes that explain the progression of the changes in the universe, its evolution towards human life on Earth.19 Concluding that there is an Uncaused Cause does not in any way impede or hamper the progress of empiric science. But it adds to the universe the concept of non-material being, which runs parallel to the concept of the non-material human soul we encountered in the last chapter.

CHAPTER 23 BRAVE NEW WORLD OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

Every human should be empowered to inquire and know more about the world around her, about the events around her. No one should stop asking the question ‘Why?’ when they disembark from childhood but must continue to do so using the elemental principles Aristotle laid down for us many centuries ago. It is time for Everyhuman to reclaim the territory of human knowledge. It is time to ingrain in us the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason, the need to explain all beings by material, formal, efficient and final causes, and the need to explain some aspects of being by non-material entities and not restrict oneself to material entities, if necessary, to move towards certainty. Aristotelian metaphysics must be reestablished as the foundational science, the substratum upon which all human knowledge should be built. This approach does not encroach on the territories of special sciences, but rather, absorbs knowledge gained from these sciences to increase common sense-ible human knowledge applicable to all beings. It also evaluates the claims of each special discipline of science for certainty of its claims and postulates. When we look for knowledge, we should first search out certain knowledge. Certainty first, and if you cannot establish certainty, then assess probability. Every claim that anyone makes must be evaluated for certainty. Historical events must be verified by the analysis of the witnesses and ancillary evidence. Even purported miracles can be believed as certain if there is sufficient evidence to prove it with certainty, and as probable if there is reasonable evidence to prove such an occurrence and no evidence to disprove it. We must examine the certain claims of empirical scientists about the nature of the world, whether it is a certain fact that all aspects of the universe, its development, the formation of life, and the process of evolution, its culmination in the human being, the human being’s characteristic properties - whether these can all be explained purely as matter in motion. Nothing must be beyond the purview of common sense-ible science, accessible to everyone.

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Not just accepting knowledge for its practical benefit, but to search for true knowledge is the basis of common sense-ible human knowledge. This is a crucial departure from the operational philosophy of the modern scientific revolution as opposed to Aristotelian science, which we have relabeled as common sense-ible science. You may ask, what is the danger in following a utilitarian philosophy of knowledge, why can’t we just study material and efficient causes as Francis Bacon suggested and was made palatable by Descartes’ division of the spheres of matter vs. mind/soul? Why do you want to know everything with certainty? Why do you need to know the real causes of beings – and need to invoke a nonmaterial human soul or an Uncaused Cause or a concept of good that is not synonymous with material benefit? My first answer will be based on the response to the COVID-19 global pandemic. On one front, this was a remarkable feat of utilitarian science: the astounding development of COVID vaccines at a pace not imaginable even a few years ago. But the reluctance of vast numbers of people to accept the vaccines or the need for masking was also astounding. Conspiracy theories abounded, which, coupled with the ease of digital transmission of information, however dubious and with no safeguards, led to a parallel pandemic of misinformation. I believe that the foundations of this contemporary distrust of science has its origins in the lack of a true philosophical foundation for modern science. “Commoners” rebelled against what they perceived as elitism and overreach by the scientific community and against those they believed were profiting unduly from these ideas. The public believed that, as we have discussed, they had a rational and free human mind that was not shackled to the edicts of scientists. I believe that if scientists embraced the Aristotelian metaphysical principles that were the first principles of what we currently undertake as science, then they would have been able to convey this knowledge appropriately to the general public and engender wider acceptance of the public health responses to the pandemic. If scientists and public health officials acknowledged the uncertainties regarding how the virus spread and how to stop the spread, that masks may not be 100% effective in preventing the spread but had some effectiveness that could save lives, that vaccines are not fool proof with 100% efficacy and no risk but still provided the best path to containing the spread of this contagion, then we may have seen a less contentious response to the pandemic. Aristotelian metaphysics invokes an attitude of humility to scientific inquiry, avoiding any degree of hubris. This, I believe, is crucial to ensuring not only that scientists proclaim as certain only those facts that

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are certain, but will also augur well for a proper dialogue between scientists and the public. The other reason is that utilitarian science, as it studies the fundamental material properties of life, will discover techniques that will enable interference with life itself – before understanding with certainty what life is. Rapid advances in biotechnology have paid great dividends in improving health. But techniques such as human cloning and gene editing have raised ethical quandaries. From a purely materialistic standpoint, there is no reason to prohibit any procedure, including human cloning, since the human being is also matter in motion, and free to be manipulated by whatever material technique we discover. Biomedical ethics becomes an artificial construct if we do not ground it in certain knowledge about what a human being is. We have to fall back on common sense-ible science and ground biomedicine in first principles and in a metaphysical foundation that eliminates the artificial boundaries between medicine, biology, anthropology, ethics, etc., one that would allow the scientific community to advance science in consonance with what is best for the human person and hence for humanity. Thereby, we can avoid creating the “science without humanity” that Gandhi listed as one of “seven deadly sins”. A metaphysical foundation is also crucial when dealing with factors that touch the core of what a human being is, such as abortion, euthanasia, and homosexuality. While scientists, professional philosophers and theologians alike may debate when exactly life begins in a fetus, we can use the concepts of matter/form, act/potency, and the four causes to get an understanding of the span of life from fertilized egg to a human at the point of death. As we get more knowledge of what life actually is by exploring the boundary conditions between inanimate atoms and molecules that comprise the material cause of a living cell and the living cell itself, we will better deal with issues such as abortion and euthanasia. While there has been more public acceptance of homosexuality, there has not been a true metaphysical understanding of homosexuality. For that to happen, we need to first fully understand how human sexuality develops. We need to separate religious sentiment about homosexuality to carefully analyze it from a metaphysical knowledge structure – from the standpoint of material, formal, efficient, and final causes. For common sense-ible science to take hold by returning to its Aristotelian foundations, we have to change the way modern universities function. The university, like the universe, was meant to be a unifying place for the study and advancement of human knowledge. Unfortunately, the modern university has abandoned a unifying focus on knowledge,

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resulting in multiple academic disciplines that proceed on their merry way, mostly independent of each other’s work. But this doesn’t make any sense from the perspective of human knowledge and knowing. It would be like the fable of the blind men and the elephant. Each studies just one aspect of the elephant and concludes that the elephant is all trunk or all tusk or all leg. This is what has happened to human knowledge – and we need to reverse this trend and work to “unify” knowledge in the university setting. Then, and only then, will a proper foundation be established for all knowledge, including all aspects of modern science, and the false divide between “common folk” and purveyors of knowledge be removed. So, what do we do, as proud embracers of our common human heritage, a heritage that started with our origins as a species, the heritage of common sense-ible science? We need to accept that all our knowledge starts with an analysis of what we can sense. What we can sense has come a long way from the times our ancestors roamed the plains of Africa. Now we have sophisticated instruments that can peer deeper inside a being and farther into the outer reaches of the universe. But we cannot abandon the principles of common sense-ible science. We must frame all of knowledge in the framework of metaphysical inseparable participatories and the four causes postulated by Aristotle. We should always look for certain knowledge of why things are the way they are. If we cannot achieve certain knowledge, we should look for the most probable causes. But most importantly, we must prevent anyone from falsely claiming certain knowledge, or from classifying something as unknowable – that is contrary to what it means to be a human being and our heritage of common sense-ible science. If we need to settle on the concept of nonmaterial entities and non-material causes to truly explain the universe or any being, we should do so. Then we will enter a brave new world of knowledge as a common heritage of all human beings, accepted by all, and ensure the betterment of all of humanity.

NOTES

Chapter 1 1. The rationale and methodology of the study is described in detail in the article Joseph et al. Pragmatic evaluation of events and benefits of lipid lowering in older adults (PREVENTABLE): Trial design and rationale. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 2023; 71(6): 1701-1713.

Chapter 3 2. The quotations from Aristotle’s Metaphysics are taken from the translation by W.D. Ross, 1908, which is in the public domain. Source: https://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/-384_-322,_ Aristoteles,_13_Metaphysics,_EN.pdf. This quotation is the beginning sentence in Metaphysics (Book I) 3. “Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages,” by Richard E. Rubenstein (Harcourt, 2003) details the story of how Aristotle’s thought was preserved and commented on by Muslim scholars and then rediscovered in the Western World, setting the stage for Western Science.

Chapter 4 4. The quotations from Aristotle’s Physics are taken from the translation by R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, which is in the public domain. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/physics.html

Chapter 5 5. The quotation from Categories are taken from The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Categories, translated by E. M. Edghill, which is in the public domain. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2412/pg2412-images.html#part01

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6. W. Norris Clarke’s The One and The Many (University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), is a very readable exposition of Aristotelian metaphysics as updated by St. Thomas Aquinas.

Chapter 14 7. These transitions in the history of knowledge are well detailed in books on philosophy such as Bertrand Russel’s The History of Western Philosophy (Simon & Schuster, 1967) and books on intellectual history such as Franklin L. Baumer’s Modern European Thought (McMillan Publishing Co., 1977). An excellent introduction to the transition from classical to modern concepts of human knowing is provided by John Lawrence Hill in After the Natural Law: How the Classical Worldview Supports Our Moral and Political Values (Ignatius Press, 2016), especially in Chapter 5 - The Birth of the Modern: Four Seminal Thinkers. The Lagoon : How Aristotle Invented Science (Penguin Books, 2015) by Armand Marie Leroi is an excellent exposition of how much modern science owes to Aristotle. 8. A scholarly account of the development of Western experimental science is provided by A. C. Crombie in Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (Oxford University Press, 1953). 9. It is worthwhile reading the writings of Descartes himself. The Discourse on Method and Metaphysical Meditations of Rene Descartes, translated by Gertrude Burford Rawlings (Walter Scott, 1900) is one among many translations available. 10. W. Norris Clarke explains this paradox in Chapter 2 of his book, Explorations in Metaphysics (University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).

Chapter 15 11. The best introduction to relativity may be Albert Einstein’s book, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (Princeton University Press, 2015), although many popular books explaining relativity have been published. 12. There are many excellent books that explain the fundamentals of quantum physics, Jim Al-Khalili’s Quantum: a guide for the perplexed

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(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012) provides an excellent and accessible introduction.

Chapter 16 13. Marcos Eberlin, in his book Foresight (Discovery Institute Press, 2019), details many examples of life’s complexity that are not explained by random mutations and natural selection, including the classic chicken and egg problem, the problem of the chicken and its egg!

Chapter 17 14. The full reference is Polanyi, M. (1968). Life’s irreducible structure: Live mechanisms and information in DNA are boundary conditions with a sequence of boundaries above them. Science, 160, 1308-1312. Not an easy read, but a seminal article from a great scientist. 15. The figure is taken from an article I wrote to detail and contemporize Polanyi’s article (ibid), and establish that his postulates retain their relevance in spite of incredible advances in science since the publication of his article. The full reference is Joseph J. (2021). Life’s irreducible structure: Where are we, five decades later? Bioessays. 2021 Jan;43(1):e2000250. doi: 10.1002/bies.202000250. Epub 2020 Nov 9. PMID: 33169412.

Chapter 19 16. David W. Swift, in Evolution under the microscope (Leighton Academic Press, 2002), discusses difficulties in explaining emergence of the diversity of life by evolution. The improbability of explaining even the origin of a molecule such as cytochrome C by random mutation and natural selection (p136-138) is a striking example of how progress in biology has not made evolution easier to explain.

Chapter 20 17. An excellent introduction to cosmology with technical details included is Cosmology for the curious (Springer, 2017) by Delia Perlov and Alex Vilenkin.

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18. Two books that draws clear attention to the inconsistencies in attempts by empiric science to completely explain the universe and human beings are Beyond Matter: Why Science Needs Metaphysics (Templeton Press, 2017) by Roger Trigg and Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist NeoDarwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press, 2012) by Thomas Nagel. Another book that shows how we must accept the limits of the scientific enterprise while simultaneously forging ahead is Marcelo Gleiser’s The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (Basic Books, 2014).

Chapter 22 19. Kenneth Miller’s Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (Harper Perennial, 2007) demonstrates how belief in evolution and belief in God are not mutually exclusionary.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING

Aristotelian basis of science Aristotle. Metaphysics, Categories, Physics, Posterior Analytics. The best option, in my opinion, is to go to the primary sources. There are excellent translations of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in the public domain; I recommend the W.D. Ross translation. Metaphysics does not provide a linear building up of concepts, since Aristotle’s extant writings mostly resemble contemporary lecture notes. I recommend that you read Metaphysics keeping the concepts I have outlined in this book in mind, so that you may gather concepts that will enable you to develop your own foundation of common sense-ible science. It is also useful to read Categories and Physics, and if possible Posterior Analytics to get a broader understanding of Aristotelian concepts. Excellent translations of these books are also in the public domain. Ashley, Benedict. The Way towards Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). A detailed introduction to what I would term “Applied Metaphysics,” or as the author describes, “An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics.” Aristotelian metaphysics as updated by St. `Thomas Aquinas is presented as applied to and embedded in all aspects of human knowledge. The author, by relating metaphysical concepts to contemporary academic disciplines, proposes that we need metaphysics as a unifying discipline, to truly unite human knowledge in the progress towards wisdom. Clarke, W. Norris. The One and the Many. A very accessible and contemporized primer on Aristotelian metaphysics as updated by St. Thomas Aquinas. Leroi, Armand Marie. The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. An unvarnished look at Aristotle’s legacy as the originator of Western Science. This book details how Aristotle, in spite of some spectacular inaccuracies, holds his own in the pantheon of Science’s greats.

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Bibliography and Further Reading

Rubenstein, Richard E. Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages. Engaging historical narrative of how Aristotle’s thought, long absent from Western intellectual culture, was kept alive and growing and contributed to Islamic culture, and how it burst upon Western intellectual life in the Middle Ages and forever changed Western thought.

History of human thought Baumer, Franklin J. Modern European Thought. A detailed analysis of what continued and what changed in European ideas about the perennial questions of God, nature, man, society, and history from 1600-1950. Crombie, A.C. Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700. A detailed description of the beginnings of modern experimental science in the 12th century and its progress down to Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. Hill, John Lawrence. After the Natural Law: How the Classical Worldview Supports Our Moral and Political Values While the focus of the book is on the impact of human thought on moral and political values, it provides an excellent introduction to the classical worldview of Plato and Aristotle grounded in metaphysical approach to knowledge, and describes how modern thinkers deliberately or inadvertently occasioned the removal of metaphysics from modern thought.

Critical appraisals of modern science Dougherty, Jude P. The Nature of Scientific Explanation (The Catholic University of America Press, 2013). Describes how science rests upon Aristotelian foundations and how science has inappropriately moved away from Aristotle over the last few centuries. Gleiser, Marcelo. The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning. Argues for the limitations of empiric science in providing ultimate answers and that these limitations are not just limitations of available experimental methods or the human intellect but may be due to the inherent nature of physical reality. Nagel, Thomas. Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Describes how

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physicalism does not fully explain the world. Starting with physicalism’s failure to explain as integral a part of nature as the mind, Nagel demonstrates how a purely mechanistic physicalist account of nature, devoid of purpose, poses significant difficulty in our understanding of the whole of nature and its processes. Trigg, Roger. Beyond Matter: Why Science Needs Metaphysics. Details how science implicitly engages in metaphysics to ground itself and how science cannot survive without first principles that are not empirically derived or verifiable.

Modern Physics and Cosmology The following three books provide accessible introductions to the three fundamental domains of modern physics. Al-Khalili, James. Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed. Einstein, Albert. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory Perlov, Delia & Vilenkin Alex. Cosmology for the Curious.

Biology and Evolution Eberlin, Marcos. Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose. Details how advances in knowledge of chemistry and biology of life makes it difficult to ascribe all of life and life processes to random chance. Miller, Kenneth. Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. Argues that, rather than the extremes of worldviews embraced by proponents and opponents of evolutionary theory, there is in fact a common ground between materialist and spiritualist outlooks. Swift, David. Evolution under the microscope. Using evidence from molecular biology, Swift demonstrates that progress of life on earth is not fully explained by current evolutionary theory alone.