The sciences don’t have an answer for everything, of course. But they don’t even pretend to. There are tremendously deep questions that do not belong to the sciences, but to philosophy. A philosophy well informed by other disciplines of course, but it will not be science. It’s normal for us to get confused and think these questions are scientific, but we can spot them if we pay attention. A good trick is to check if they start with a “what is…”. For example: “what is time?” or “what is life?” These questions need to take into account what physics and biology have discovered, but they are more ontological than scientific, philosophical questions.
If we leave all these questions aside we will see that there are still important questions to be answered. It does not mean that we are totally lost, but they do address complex issues for which we are perhaps neither theoretically nor technologically prepared. Those are the questions that interest us, questions that not even the most advanced sciences have been able to fully unravel. And we do not mean to make a mockery of the sciences, far from it. Possibly it is a matter of time before we resolve these doubts and, precisely for this reason, it is especially interesting to have them located. We could make a very long list of open questions, but, under the unfair and subjective prism with which any list is made, we have selected the following five:
How it all started?
If we want to start at the beginning, we will have to ask ourselves how it all started. Although we will have to be careful, because we are already bordering on philosophical issues. We are not talking about the expansion of the universe explained by the Big Bang theories, we are talking about a true origin and even if there was one. Even if we want to be a little more restrained with our hopes, we could ask ourselves what came before that expansion. There are different fully scientific proposals that address this issue and that in turn ask whether the universe has always existed or not.
As we said, these questions need to be well informed by philosophy, but they are still scientific. For example, concepts such as “creation” (as we popularly understand it) are heavily influenced by Christian cosmogony. For many physicists and philosophers, it makes no sense to talk about “nothingness” and they assume that there is always something, that non-existence is not a property, as many medieval philosophers believed. Another question is whether at some point we will be able to get to know the answer. We don’t know, and that makes the question that much more interesting.
What is the universe made of?
You may have realized by now that all of these questions are tricky, because they are actually tightly packed, related sets of questions. In this case, when we ask ourselves what the universe is made of, we are mostly asking two things. On the one hand, what is 95% of what exists, because the type of matter that we know only represents 5%. The rest is dark matter and dark energy, substances whose existence we have inferred from strange events, but whose nature we still do not know.. We know that dark matter does not react to light, but it does to gravity and that it explains the movement of some stars around galaxies. Dark energy will be whatever is selling out the force of gravity and allowing the universe to expand.
The other big question that this question branches into is that of the basic bricks of our reality. We know that atoms are made of smaller particles and these, in turn, of even smaller ones. We call the latter “fundamental particles” because we don’t know anything more basic. Now… are they the last rung? What constitutes everything we know on the smallest possible scale? What is the smallest thing that exists? Will we ever know with enough certainty?
How did life appear?
The origin of life is another of those questions that worries us. There are many possible explanations, although there is no consensus. How do we go from the inert to the living? Was it a jump? Can it be progressive? Would we have problems recognizing the limit between what is alive and what is not? With viruses there is already some controversy and, although it is generally accepted that they are not alive, it makes us question whether our definition of “life” is like a political border, put up because it suits us (in this case intellectually), or like a mountain range, It’s there whether we want it or not.
Understanding how and where life formed is not an easy task, because not much of our most remote past is preserved and because we only know our case. And while it should be easier to figure out how the first viruses (whether they’re alive or not) came to be, we don’t seem to be clear either. Were they prior to life? Did they come after? Were they formed from the products of a cell? We still don’t have an answer, and even if we could show that it’s possible to make viruses from a cell, we’d still have reasonable doubts about whether that was the case for us. However, many experts assume that viruses have appeared several times during Earth’s history.
How does consciousness arise?
And, if the transition from non-life to life is unknown, so is the transition from non-consciousness to consciousness. There is no reason to believe in esoteric concepts such as panpsychism, whereby everything has some degree of consciousness, from stones to water. We assume that consciousness is something that emerges in systems whose parts, separately, would not have consciousness. It’s not magic, it’s something we observe with other properties. Hydrogen and oxygen do not wet, but together, in the right proportion, they do, because they form water. Consciousness could be something similar that arises from the union of elements capable of processing “information”, such as neurons.
This brings us to a second complementary question to “how exactly does consciousness arise?” and it is: “Can we give consciousness to a machine?”. At what point can we attribute consciousness to artificial intelligence? A perfect imitation of our mental processes… would it have a conscience? If there is no perceptible difference for us, does it matter if there is one or not? Thus, once again, we enter the fields of philosophy, but which derive from scientific and technological issues of the utmost current importance.
We’re alone”?
And finally, one of the most exciting questions of all. One that implies a certain adventure and that has caught the imagination of billions of people: We’re alone? Are there other life forms out there? We no longer speak of intelligent life forms, much less of civilizations. We settle for ways of life, whatever. Possibly, this is the easiest question to solve of all the ones we have raised, although not only our efforts will influence it, but also contingency. We have to find other living beings in the immensity of the cosmos and, if we find them, the question will have its answer but, if not, the doubt will remain.
Perhaps these extraterrestrial life forms have their own questions, and many of them may coincide with ours because, after all, we live in the same universe and we are worried about extremes: the beginnings, the endings, the points where everything changes forever. That is what the sciences study and, for this reason, they tell the greatest stories ever lived.
DON’T GET IT:
- When we talk about scientific philosophy, we are not referring to philosophy that follows a scientific method or that can be classified as science. Actually, it has nothing to do with this. “Scientific philosophy” would refer to a philosophy informed by the most advanced science of its time. It is important for philosophy to reflect on what time is, for example, but it will do little good to do so with its back turned to the theories of relativity. Thanks to it, we know how time behaves in certain cases and, if philosophical explanations cannot account for these situations that are not very intuitive, but equally real, they will possibly be pure talk.
REFERENCES (MLA):
- Dieguez Lucena, Antonio, and Vicente Claramonte Sanz. Current Philosophy of Biology.
- Fundamentals of quantum physics: Textbook for students of Science and Engineering (no date). Scholars Portal.
- Kaas, JH (2009) Evolutionary neuroscience. Oxford: Academic Press.
- Keeton, C. (2014) Principles of astrophysics: Using gravity and stellar physics to explore the cosmos. New York: Springer.
- Scharf, CA (2009) Extrasolar planets and astrobiology. Sausalito: University Science Books.
- VITTORIO, NICOLA (2020) Cosmology. Sl: CRC PRESS.
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