Mechanical vs Conscious Cosmos

by Asa Boxer

Welcome to Barstool Bits, a weekly short column meant to supplement the long-form essays that appear only two or three times a month from analogy magazine proper. You can opt out of Barstool Bits by clicking on Unsubscribe at the bottom of your email and toggling off this series. If, on the other hand, you’d like to read past Bits, click here.

---

Last week, I touched upon the notion of mechanical accidentalism, but I didn’t take the time to explain what it is, so I’ll briefly address that now. Mechanical accidentalism is essentially Newtonian physics applied to organic life. The idea is that all matter must obey the laws of physics and since organic matter is made of the same stuff as rocks and planets, it too must obey the same laws. (Keep your eye on the bouncing analogies!) In other words, the assumption is that organic life is mechanical. (Why no gear-and-steam-powered machines have self-assembled in the universe doesn’t seem to present a problem to scientistic Darwinism, but it probably ought to.)

For contrast, it is worth touching on the heresy of vitalism that posits instead a vital, life-element; that is, a kind of primary organic substance not governed entirely by Newton’s laws. An attenuated version of vitalism proposes an inner tendency—as we touched upon last week. And as we saw last week as well, Darwin rejected any and all inwardness as destructive to his whole doctrine, which is what I’m calling, mechanical accidentalism.

But for mechanical accidentalism to work, we need gradualism. In other words, the primary assumption, which proceeds from Newton—supposedly by inductive reasoning—turns out to be a little shy of induction and requires a wee crutch. Darwin needs to slip in another primary assumption: a stable, hundreds-of-millions of years on planet Earth and its attendant, just-as-stable solar system. Without hundreds-of-millions of years of goldilocks conditions, gradualism fails, and the subtle work of inert knockings about to accidentally engineer life and evolution from single-cell organisms to the variety of life as we know it by natural selection is dead in the water.

Unfortunately for Darwinists—who waited for over a hundred years for confirmation (their second coming along with the missing link)—the fossil record does not support gradualism. Here’s archaeologist, Martin Sweatman in his piece for analogy magazine on Göbekli Tepe:

Over the following few hundred years, science developed an alternative ‘gradualistic’ view of prehistory supported by its own dogma. Craters were thought to be formed by volcanoes; abrupt transitions in the fossil record were thought to be caused by wholesale erosion; and massive deposits of sediment were thought to be blown by the wind. Cosmic impacts, extinction-level events and mega-tsunami were ruled out. Earth was a safe haven—a paradise—and we needn’t worry ourselves over those serpentine comets that slink through the inner solar system with their immensely long and bright tails.

Dissenters of this orthodoxy were side-lined or even ridiculed. Such was the passion with which the gradualistic dogma was held. It was unthinkable that science could have made a worse job of understanding our past than religion. But all that has now changed. Slowly the scientific evidence for immense global catastrophes, as well as somewhat smaller ones, has emerged and must be accepted. Gradualism in science is now dead and buried.

The alternative to gradualism is known as catastrophism, the notion that the cosmos and our solar system are far from stable and that life on our planet came into being in fits and starts. The fossil record reveals periods of mass extinctions and periods of massive, spontaneous explosions of life. As Sweatman puts it: “Championed by Darwin, gradualism has infected all academia. And yet it is actually a crazy extrapolation. No scientist today would dare to propose it.”

So the cornerstones of Darwinism—gradualism and mechanical accidentalism—are spurious. And it should come as no surprise because Darwin’s theory of evolution is one of those pesky historical sciences for which we cannot develop any direct lab experiments along with their bias-correcting control studies and verification protocols. Therefore these Darwinist doctrines were never scientific facts. They have always been tentative propositions, and one would expect from secular minded folk that inconclusive premises would be grounds for uncertainty and would hardly support the sort of arrogance one finds among combative new atheists. I mean think about it: this issue has been adjudicated in courts of law! Darwinism is taught to children and young adults as fact and settled science, and no alternatives will be countenanced, certainly none that might introduce an inner tendency because that would supposedly admit God through a back door.

If we boil it down, the analogy in play when invoking mechanical accidentalism is that the evolution of Man is a microcosm of the evolution of the Newtonian, Big Bang Universe. So despite their apparent fussiness, these theorists haven’t diverged from Platonism, the Kabbalists and Church narratives as far as they might like to think. From a mathematical or purely logico-formulaic perspective, all they’ve done is switch out one variable for another: G_od for C_hance. Admittedly this alteration does lead us down a divergent metaphysical path, but Man is still made in the image of the Cosmos. There is no escaping the logic of this conclusion.

And this conclusion upsets the narrative that TheScience™ promulgates, especially where consciousness and qualitative experience are concerned because the implications are not that there is no interiority or that consciousness is an aberration arising from an accident, but that consciousness is inherent to the cosmos. At least, this is the conclusion one must come to if one is being consistent with the analogy.

And this brings us round to the crux of today’s discussion. One of the central tales of TheScience™ is that consciousness (along with its inner world) is a dubious epiphenomenon of neural activity and all qualia—colour, odour, taste, texture, intuition, beauty, love—are illusions; therefore all human activity that is not concerned with bland materialism uncontaminated by these salty impositions is of little value; and there is no purpose to life other than self-replication and survival.

Harsh, goes the (supposedly) heroic reasoning, but true. To overcome nihilism and its attendant barbarism, we may indulge some practical ethics and allow ourselves a detached sense of wonder at such an improbable coincidence of accidents. In fact our ethics are a wonder in themselves, a kind of transcendence arising accidentally out of the evolution of group behaviour.

Even if one were to admit a conscious cosmos, one would be hard pressed to argue for an ethical cosmos. Such an argument would be as absurd as arguing for an ethics among billiard balls. And let’s dismiss out of hand that the analogy we reach for (for some reason) when it comes to physics is “laws,” which admit some measure of ethics, even if the ethics in play are not social.

So runs the Darwinist doctrine (the inconvenient issue of our metaphors laid aside). If you disagree, your epistemology is flawed, your sense of reality unhinged and you’re beneath contempt because all of these conclusions arise from obvious inductive reasoning. Never mind that these conclusions collapse in a self-contradictory muddle upon inspection, for how can any conclusions be of value if consciousness is an illusion? Wouldn’t that imply that reasoning itself is a mirage? And how can science remain relevant if our means of observation are an illusion of consciousness?

Now I’ve wandered into the problematic quicksand of ethics and run out of time for this week’s Barstool Bit. So that will be our cliff-hanger. . . Until next week. Vale!

---

Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.