The Human World in the Physical Universe: Consciousness, Free Will and Evolution

Rowman and Littlefield (2001)

Nicholas Maxwell

Preface
How can we understand our human world, embedded as it is within the physical universe,
in such a way that justice is done both to the richness, meaning and value of human life on
the one hand, and to what modern science tells us about the physical universe on the other
hand? That is the problem I tackle in this book.
My obsession with this problem goes back to my childhood. It emerged out of a
passionate, childish need to understand. I can remember, at four years old, lying awake in
bed one evening, wondering how space could come to an end. I decided that it must end
with an impenetrable wall. And then the awful thought occurred: what lies behind the wall?
I had discovered for myself a basic problem of cosmology. At about the same time, I can
remember getting into a furious argument with my father about why the sky is blue. It is
blue, I had decided, because the air is very faintly blue, and when you look up at the sky,
because the air stretches away for as far as we can see, we see the sky as blue. For some
reason my father disagreed with this theory which, to me, seemed entirely convincing.
Two years later, I got into another argument with my father. How, I asked him, do they
manage to make the thin tubes that form the filaments of electric light bulbs? Filaments of
light bulbs are not tubes, he told me, but thin wires made of solid metal. I scornfully
dismissed this idea. How on earth could electricity flow through the light bulbs if the
filaments are not tiny tubes? But gradually I began to realize that my Dad did know what he
was talking about, and somehow, electricity could flow easily through solid metal.
I was hooked. I wanted to understand how everything worked: motor cars, steam engines,
telephones, but above all natural phenomena, the universe. I was given introductory science
books to read. Before long I was struggling with Jeans and Eddington, and later Fred Hoyle.
When I was about ten, Penguin Science News 2 appeared, devoted to nuclear physics and the
atom bomb, which I read, fascinated and horrified. I read there that, in certain
circumstances, for example in the sun, hydrogen atoms could be combined to form helium,
with an enormous release of energy. I became very worried that an atomic explosion would
turn the oceans into a hydrogen bomb, destroying the earth, and me with it.
From my reading of Jeans, Eddington and Bertrand Russell's ABC of Relativity I
discovered I lived in a world almost unimaginably different from the way the world
appeared, and from the way almost everyone assumed it to be. There is no such thing as
solid matter, I discovered. Solid objects are made of atoms, and atoms are mostly empty
space. Time and space turn out to have extraordinary properties. If someone shoots past you
very fast, close to the speed of light, in a rocket ship perhaps, their length in the direction of
motion shrinks, time goes slow, and they become much more massive, as observed by you.
Furthermore, and even more mysteriously, space turns out to be curved. And the ultimate
mystery, the basic particles out of which everything is made, electrons, protons and neutrons,
are not particles at all, but waves of probability.
It was the utter mysteriousness of all this that appealed to me, to my imagination. I
decided that I would be a theoretical physicist, and devote my life to discovering the ultimate
secret of the universe. But from Eddington I learnt that "God is a mathematician", the key to

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the nature of the physical universe being mathematics. So, at school, I threw myself into
mathematics, and discovered an almost even greater mystery. Mathematics establishes
definitive knowledge about entities that no one has ever seen: points, lines, planes, numbers,
the x's and y's of algebra, and other invisible, intangible entities, utterly ineffable and
esoteric.
From all this it may seem that I was, as a child, quite obnoxiously precocious. Far from
it! I failed my eleven plus twice. Later, I decided that my desperate, childish desire to
discover the secret of the universe was born of an all too human frailty. I felt unloved; I
would therefore discover the ultimate nature of the universe, tell everyone of my discovery,
and be loved for ever. Such can be the underlying motivations for launching an adult career!
I do remember, however, at about nine, fiercely telling myself that, whatever happened, I
must allow nothing to distract me from the all-important task of discovering what kind of
universe this ultimately is. To live, and to die, and not to know what kind of world we are
in, seemed to me then the ultimate horror, the absolute waste of one's life.
But then along came adolescence, and it began to seem to me that the inner worlds of
people were of far greater significance than the nature of the physical universe. At home
there was a vast store of literature to be read: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Stendhal, D. H.
Lawrence, Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Kafka. I
devoured it all, averaging, at one time, about fifteen novels a week. This was my world. I
knew about these dramas, these passions, these intensely imagined worlds, these insights into
the inner worlds of people. There was vivid mystery here to rival anything depicted by
physics or mathematics. Dostoevsky and Kafka, especially, seemed to me to open up entirely
new, awe-inspiring universes, echoing dimly remembered dreams of passion and terror. For
two days I lived in the world of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov; it was the real world that
had become a dream, a faint, unreal shadow of itself.
I would be a writer, and unflinchingly explore the depths of the human psyche; I would
create a world more vivid, more solid, imbued with more passion and insight, than reality
itself. (Not for a moment did I think psychology, or some other social science, could make
significant discoveries about human nature.)
But, in the meantime, the educational system had labelled me a scientist, and not an arts
person. Off I went to do mathematics at University. Mathematics is easy, I thought; I will
devote myself to writing my novels. In fact mathematics turned out to be both hard and
hollow: it seemed to me to amount to no more than playing intricate, arbitrary games with
symbols. And I had no idea what to write about. I did not know how to fabricate in order to
tell the truth (which is what good fiction amounts to). Despite passing all my exams, my
grant was abruptly stopped because I did not attend enough lectures, and I left in disgrace,
my life, it seemed, in ruins.
I then had the gruesome experience of enduring National Service. During that time, I
came to a decision. I am not a genius. I have failed as theoretical physicist, and I have failed
as novelist, but I am interested in philosophy. So, I will do philosophy for three years at
some University, and then join the grey shuffle of ordinary life, and become a bank clerk
(which is how I conceived life not devoted to something creative).
It was after my first year at Manchester University, during the Summer vacation, that I
had my great revelation - or what seemed a great revelation at the time. Having fallen into
despair at the grinding emptiness of academic philosophy, I took a Summer job in a factory,
and in the evening noted down my thoughts and feelings in a diary. Over a period of two or

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three weeks, the writing of this diary set off psychic explosion after explosion, the expanding
blasts of which transformed the world around me, as I experienced it, and changed my
subsequent life.
When we are born, I wrote in the diary, we do not know how to distinguish "me" from
"not me": there is just things happening. But then we do discover how to make the
distinction, and we discover we are tiny and vulnerable in a vast, strange, and sometimes
terrifying world. We falsely half remember the earlier state as a time when we were
"everything", and our life project, in one way or another, becomes to return to this earlier,
God-like state. One strategy is to try to convert the "not me" into "me", by conquering it,
knowing and understanding it, acquiring power over it, or even literally trying to swallow it.
Another standard strategy is to do just the opposite: shrink the "me" until it disappears, and
there is only "everything". This is the strategy of the mystic who seeks mystical union with
God; it is the strategy of the humble, and of those who commit suicide.
But both these conventional and absurd strategies rest on a mistaken view about the nature
of the "me", the nature of personal identity. Our identity is not what is inside us. What lies
within us is just as mysterious as what lies without us. Our identity exists in the interplay
between what lies within and without. If the distinction between "me" and "not me" is
depicted as a circle on a surface, the "me" is not, as we ordinarily assume, what lies within
the circle; it is rather the line of the circle itself. We should not, ludicrously, try to increase
the circle until, in the limit, everything is incorporated within it; nor should we, almost
equally ludicrously, try to decrease the circle until it becomes a dot and disappears and there
is just "everything": instead, we should "relax the muscles of identity" so that the line of the
circle becomes permeable, and there can be an easy interplay between what lies within and
without, and we become our authentic selves, without striving to expand until, in the limit,
we become everything, or shrink until we become nothing (and there is only everything).
My earlier projects to know and understand the nature of the universe by means of
physics, and to know and understand humanity by means of literature, now seemed variants
of the strategy to expand and expand the circle of identity. Pushed to the limits of absurdity,
it was as if my ultimate aspiration had been to become God. But an infinitely more
worthwhile goal lay before me, up till now neglected as worthless: to become myself. "The
riddle of the universe" I wrote "is the riddle of our desires". The fundamental question of
philosophy is not "How do I acquire knowledge?" but rather "What do I want? How should I
live?".
These ideas, which now seem to me somewhat absurd, exaggerated and dubious at best,
were for me, at the time, the stuff of my life; they were experienced and lived. Before these
"revelations", I had half believed in Descartes' picture of the self being the mind, linked to
the brain but utterly different from anything physical, the whole experienced world being
locked away within the prison of one's skull. This picture was shattered. What was within
was just as much a mystery as what lay without: "I" was the region of interplay between
these two mysteries. I became whatever I saw or experienced, my self being created and
dying many times during the day. In one of his letters, John Keats spoke of becoming the
bird he saw pecking on a path. That was how it now was with me. I would be whatever I
experienced: seeing a blade of grass, I became that blade of grass; talking with a friend, I
became that "talking with the friend". For six weeks it was as if I was high on some
hallucinatory drug: visions of exhilarating and terrifying intensity came before breakfast, and
throughout the day. I had become a prophet, and my prophecy was: be your own prophet,

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discover for yourself your own true self, what you really desire in life.
In the end I found having a great message for the world such a contradiction that I finally
hit upon the idea: there are only stories or myths. One is that of science; another is that of
personal experience. It is vital not to take any of these myths too seriously. This was my
first, dreadful attempt at a solution to the problem of this book.
I vowed that when I got back to Manchester University in the Autumn, I would tell the
Philosophy Department about my earth-shaking discoveries of the Summer - especially, that
philosophy should be about how to live, and not about how to acquire knowledge. I found I
could not even open my mouth. Ecstasy gave way to persistent black despair.
The visions of the Summer of 1961 had gone, but I continued, somehow, to believe I had
discovered something of immense significance, even though now I no longer knew what it
was. I decided to devote my MA thesis to the question: How can the world of physics be
reconciled with the world of experience, feeling and art? I was aware that I was grappling
with the two worlds of my abandoned childhood megalomaniacal ambitions: to grasp the
physical universe by means of science, and to grasp the human world by means of the novel.
My initial idea: the world of physics is a myth, alongside other myths, and must not be
confused with truth and reality.
In those days philosophy in England was dominated by "Oxford" philosophy, conceptual
analysis in the manner of Wittgenstein, Ryle and Austin, the sterility of which filled me with
horror. However, I discovered the works of two contemporary philosophers which were of
great help to me.
The first was Karl Popper. Here was a philosopher concerned to tackle profound
problems with intellectual integrity (not being content to dissolve pseudo-problems). From
Popper's Conjectures and Refutations (1963) I learned, in particular, to abandon my idea that
scientific knowledge was no more than another myth. It was a moral argument of Popper's
that convinced me.
"The belief of a liberal - the belief in the possibility of a rule of law, of equal justice, of
fundamental rights, and a free society - can easily survive the recognition that judges are not
omniscient and may make mistakes about facts and that, in practice, absolute justice is hardly
ever realized in any particular case. But this belief in the possibility of a rule of law, of
justice, and of freedom, can hardly survive the acceptance of an epistemology which teaches
that there are no objective facts; not merely in this particular case, but in any other case: and
that the judge cannot have made a factual mistake because he can no more be wrong about
the facts than he can be right" (Popper, 1963, 5).
The scientific picture of the world could not be downgraded to mere myth; instead it had
to be treated as our best conjecture about the nature of the universe, which in broad outline, if
not in all its details, might well be true.
I revised my ideas. Physics, I decided, seeks truth, but not all the truth; it seeks to
discover only a selected aspect of all that there is. The world of human experience does not
feature within the physical account of things because it is deliberately excluded. At once,
two new questions arise. What precisely is the physical aspect of things? And what justifies
excluding the experiential from physics? My answers to these questions are spelled out in
chapter five.
The second philosophical work that helped me greatly was J. J. C. Smart's Philosophy
and Scientific Realism (1963). With great clarity and vigour, Smart defends the thesis that
there is nothing in existence over and above the physical. Here was a clear expression of the

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view that, for me, posed the problem: How to do justice to everything which physics (contra
Smart) leaves out? My MA thesis took the form of a critique of Smart. From the thesis I
extracted three papers which formed my first publications, and which, together, form my first
attempt at solving the problem of this book: "Physics and Common Sense" (1966), "Can
there be Necessary Connections between Successive Events?" (1968a), and "Understanding
Sensations" (1968b).
Naively, I thought that these publications would take the intellectual world by storm.
They disappeared without trace (although subsequently other philosophers did,
independently, spell out some of what I had to say). I decided that academic publishing had
more to do with promoting academic careers than communicating ideas and results. For a
time I published nothing further. But throughout the 1970's and 1980's I taught philosophy
of science to undergraduates and graduates at the University of London. These courses
included discussion of the problem tackled by this book. Gradually, my ideas evolved. In
particular, during this period, I came to appreciate the fundamental role that Darwin's theory
of evolution has to play in enabling us to understand how human life of value can exist
embedded in the physical universe. In this, I was influenced by Alistair Hardy's wonderful,
and much neglected book The Living Stream (1965), and by hints dropped in lectures by J. Z.
Young and Karl Popper.
This book is then, I confess, the outcome of pondering the problem it tackles for almost a
lifetime. It is the product of endless revisions of a vision experienced forty years ago. I
seem to have a somewhat disabling talent for absorbing into my makeup some of the most
basic conflicts of our culture, which then go to war within me: science versus the arts, reason
versus emotion, rationalism versus romanticism, fact versus value. Being philosophy, this
book is severely impersonal and deeply personal. It is the outcome of one person's attempt to
resolve some of the deepest contradictions in our world view.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Helena Cronin and Matt Iredale for helpful comments on early drafts of
chapters of the manuscript. I am grateful to John McDowell, Richard Gale, Rick Grush and
Peter Machamer for stimulating discussion in connection with themes of the book while I
was on a visit to the Center for the Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. I
am grateful to the British Academy for providing funds for the visit. Above all, I would like
to thank students who responded enthusiastically and critically to my lectures over the years
at University College London on themes of the book. Parts of chapter five were published in
Philosophy, vol. 75 (2000); I am grateful to the editor of that journal for permission to
reprint those parts here. I am grateful to Blackwell Publishers for permission to reprint parts
of chapter nine, which first appeared in Journal of Applied philosophy, vol. 17, (2000), the
Journal of the Society for Applied Philosophy. And I am grateful to the editor of The
Dalhousie Review for permission to reprint parts of chapter two, which first appeared in
volume 79, autumn 1999, of that journal.
London 30th August 2000