Book Review : A Physicist Deals With Old Issues in New Ways

The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity by Heinz Pagels (Simon & Schuster: $18.95; 327 pages)

Every so often I read a book that is so good I wish I could have written it. “The Dreams of Reason” by Heinz Pagels is such a book.

Pagels, a physicist by training, has written a sweeping and breathtaking synthesis of science, philosophy of science, mind, brain, chaos and complexity, a book that pushes the frontiers of knowledge in the course of exploring the central questions of Western thought.

Need I say more? I cannot think of a serious idea or philosophical issue that Pagels does not touch. And very little that he touches is left unchanged.

This is not to say that Pagels resolves the central questions of philosophy and mind. These issues are essentially unresolvable. The debate over free will and determinism, for example, can never be settled. Do we have free will, or is it just an illusion? Could I have written the last sentence differently, or was it determined by the Big Bang that started the universe? No one can ever know.

But Pagels explores these and similar questions--along with many others--in refreshingly new ways. In each case, he poses the issue in crystal-clear language, considers the various answers that have been given over centuries, brings current scientific thinking to bear on them, assesses the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and then tells you what he thinks. He accomplishes this in a calm, dispassionate tone that is a celebration of the life of ideas.

Among the many topics that Pagels explores is the relationship between the sciences and the humanities--the two cultures. He argues--persuasively, I think--that a key difference between them is that the natural sciences deal with a reality out there that is independent of human beings. If life had never arisen on Earth, the planets would still be going around the sun, and the laws of physics would still hold.

The same cannot be said of art, literature, law and sociology, to name a few. These studies are more clearly constructs of the human mind, which physics and chemistry are not. Pagels takes issue with those who say that the sciences are also made up by people. He writes:

“Some philosophical and social thinkers emphasize that scientists promote certain values and interests (they do!), that science is subject to social and political forces (it is!), and that the supportive culture establishes the world view that makes scientific inquiry at all possible (it does!). Others, supporting this position, would agree, and argue that natural science is ‘a world’ standing alongside other worlds--music, art, literature, law--and that its claim to access an aboriginal reality is just a construct in the mind of scientists. However, when the claim is made that the natural sciences are nothing but a social enterprise alongside others, and which promote and articulate a view with no special claim to truth, then I draw the line. While our view of natural reality may be a construct, it is a construct that is like no other because it was not determined exclusively by us.”

Another Major Theme

Pagels relates this distinction between the two cultures to the distinction between mind and brain--another of his major themes. The brain is like the sciences--a physical reality; the mind is like the humanities--a human construct.

He devotes a large amount of space examining the mind-body problem, which is an old problem in philosophy, and he shows how all attempts to resolve it come up short. At base, however, he is a reductionist: Mind and brain are the same. Every thought, every emotion, every sensation, every nuance of experience corresponds to some physical state of the brain.

Now, you may legitimately ask, what does all of this have to do with “The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity”--the title of Pagels’ book? (The word computer hasn’t appeared once yet in this review.)

Well, after his heady and challenging romp through the central problems of thought, Pagels asserts that the computer is the tool with which scientists will answer these questions. Great advances in science require great new tools: the telescope, the microscope and now the computer.

“The computer, the instrument of the sciences of complexity, will reveal a new cosmos never before perceived,” Pagels says. “Because of its ability to manage and process enormous quantities of information in a reliable, mechanical way, the computer, as a scientific research tool, has already revealed a new universe. This universe was previously inaccessible, not because it was so small or so far away, but because it was so complex that no human mind could disentangle it.”

In the antepenultimate paragraph of this extraordinary book Pagels asserts: “The most dramatic impact of the new sciences will be to narrow the gap between the natural and the human world. For as we come to grasp the management of complexity . . . the traditional barriers--barriers erected on both sides--between natural science and the humanities cannot forever be maintained. The natural order of culturally constructed worlds, the order of human feelings and beliefs, will become subject to scientific description in a new way. Just as it did during the Italian Renaissance, a new image of humanity will emerge in the future as science and art interact in their complementary spheres.”

I’m not convinced that Pagels’ conclusions follow from his premises as surely as night follows day, but I loved taking the journey with him.