The mystery of unwoven rainbows: Is there room for mystery in a mechanistic worldview?

This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at Aeon Conversations

One day science will identify the neural correlates of joy. But, I do hope that the rainbow will not be unwoven so completely. Until then - or even after that - the delicious mystery of how we relate to music will never fade away.

Salvador Dali, Dream of Venus (1939), Hiroshima Prefectural Art Gallery. Photo by Author

ystery will remain in this world for the simple reason that our understanding of reality is limited - below are some reasons for it - and may forever remain so. And we will continue to be curious about this world around us because that is what made us human in the first place.

The nature of reality:

Angles in Science, Credit: IGIT (Own work)/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0

Reality is much more than physical objects. We have abstract objects and structures that we cannot touch and feel directly. These include mathematics (which Colin McGinn felt formed a “third realm”) and logic and Platonic forms and ideas. “The fabric of reality,” Oxford physicist David Deutsch notes, “provides [only] a narrow window on the world of abstractions.” The best we can do is model these using our brains and machines.

Ilya Prigogine, the Belgian Nobel laureate, differentiates between “closed systems” - which operate like machines and can be understood from a mechanistic standpoint – and “open systems”. The former are only a small part of the universe. Prigogine tells us that most phenomena of interest to us are “open systems [which] exchange energy or matter (and information) with their environment. These include biological and social systems. Prigogine held that any attempt to understand such “dissipative structures” in mechanistic terms is “doomed to failure.”

Some argue that we live in a deterministic world. If such inexorable determinism were really true, “the world [would be] nothing but an immense tautology,” (as Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers observed) and it will be a boring place. Only an omniscient God - may be a hypothetical one as Laplace famously claimed that there is no need for a God in a deterministic universe - would be able to live with such ennui. However, the universe contains too many variables for everyday life to be entirely predictable to us mortals and hence the blessed continuance of mystery.

The limits of perception:

Credit: Bryan Derksen/Wikimedia Commons/CC-BY-SA-3.0

Even if all of reality were assumed to consist only of matter, we cannot ever directly perceive all of it. Quantum theory confirms that interference occurs for all type of particles, not only photons. Hence, there must be a multitude of neutrons and electrons, etc., for every neutron or electron visible to us. We can perceive each of these shadow particles only indirectly. Hence, reality is, as Deutsch stresses, “a much bigger thing than it seems, and… what we directly observe [is] the merest tip of the iceberg.”

The reality that is directly visible to us is circumscribed further owing to our biological limitations. For instance, we can see only a part of the electromagnetic spectrum and the range of human hearing is quite limited.

Nature, nurture and the neural correlates:

I have just finished listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and, as if on cue, my neighbour’s daughter has started on her piano lessons. Why do I experience such a poignant emotional response to the Choral Symphony while the piano sounds from next door feel so jarring? They are both meant to be what we understand as music which a reductionist will explain as an arrangement in some order of a sequence of sound frequencies. And I am sure one day science will even explain why the neural and physical correlates associated with the elation that I experience with the “Ode to Joy” are different from those of my other neighbour who prefers heavy metal to Haydn. (I do hope though that the rainbow will never be unwoven so comprehensively.) Until then - or even after that - the delicious mystery of how we relate to music will remain a mystery.