Why, of course. (I think.)

I read a book called “On Being Certain” by Richard Burton (a college professor at Yale, not the dead actor) on a plane ride back from Paris recently, an environment that always encourages freedom of thought. I’m a voracious consumer of laymen’s books on recent advances in neuroscience, so I was familiar with all the authors he noted (including Stephen Jay Gould – another favorite of mine.) I’m also interested in physics, in particular quantum mechanics. And chaos theory. All this prelude is background for the line that popped into my head as I read his commentary:

“God doesn’t play dice. He is dice.”

What if random events, mutations, most of which are destroyed while a few are retained as the seeds of the next thing, represent the unifying nature of all things, including cognition? The notion is clear in evolutionary theory. Mutations are thrown into the environment where natural selection picks the lucky winners. This also applies to the evolution of language, which easily supports basic Gould tenets, such as punctuated equilibrium and the evolutionary tree being, in fact, more like a bush, with species as likely to simplify as “progress” into greater complexity. Chaos Theory holds to the power of statistical noise, wherein tiny bits of unresolved data can grow until it overwhelms the entire system. It also demonstrates that dynamic systems of all kinds, from weather to turbulence to the population curves of muskrats, share certain common principles, which you can express mathematically or graphically.

Quantum mechanics is riddled with interchangeable states of matter and energy, quantum leaps that seem to be caused by matter being observed (something I still find preposterous, despite the Nobel prize-winning calculations that prove it). What if changes in state are the consequence of miniscule bits of random mutation built into vast numbers of nearly instantaneous interactions between sub-atomic particles?

In all these cases, what’s required are extremely large numbers of actions, most of which behave within predictable parameters, with a tiny few that do not. And of these tiny few, an even tinier number survive and propagate – creating change.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, another pillar of quantum mechanics, requires that probabilities be contemplated in every calculation, since it is impossible to predict with certainty any given outcome. If it could be x, or it could be y, and we can’t say which, this suggests that the choice is random.

Burton touched on a mental game that I often play: think of the opposite state from the one you’re contemplating. Does it make sense? In this case, if there were no random mutations, there would be no change in biological systems. There would be no systems at all. If there were no changes to whatever came before the Big Bang, there would be no Big Bang. Speaking of which, whatever came before the Big Bang was not uniform, but rather “Lumpy” (a real term used by cosmologists). The irregularities allow for complexity, which allows for suns and planets and cosmic rays. Otherwise, we’d have a smooth, uniform and unchanging universe.

So, what if the seething neurochemical activity Burton defines as the hidden layer is, in fact, the production of millions of options which are then – in less than a nano second – weeded out, culled, selected and funneled into conscious thought in the same way millions of sperm are sent on a mission that only a few survive. The end product may not be optimum, because this approach isn’t perfectly efficient. The creature may be flawed in any number of ways. So with the thought. You might be right, or you might be wrong, or somewhere in-between.

My point isn’t necessarily theological, any more than Einstein’s original metaphor. But it seems to me that we’re only here because things are able to change, and that the mechanics of change require random mutations. This would seem to violate of the law of causality, but my thought is you can’t have evolved brains, quantum leaps or lumpy universes if the law is always strictly adhered to. There have to be loopholes. At the basic level of every dynamic system it seems to me things just happen. Tiny things. Maybe immeasurable, but because these things have no cause, they have a far greater impact on the stability of matter and energy, which results in change, which results in variable outcomes.

Back to cognition, this mechanism could explain how even the most brilliant thinking is imprecise in one way or another. That our consciousness evolves, usually toward better management of our lives, but not always. That some people are more creative than others, or more empathetic, or less emotionally developed (more or fewer random mutations).

To Burton’s point that we have to accept that there are limits in our ability to fully know our own minds, I think it’s quite true and supported by the evidence of how our brains evolved – through Gould’s punctuated equilibrium – in chunks, wherein the functions of the amygdala are so different from the pre-frontal cortex, that communication between the two are bound to be inefficient. The brain is an amazing organ, but it’s far from perfect, and in my view, its functionality might require a certain amount of imperfection.

To Burton’s greater point, I have no certainty at all about my ideas. The older I get and the more I learn the less certain I am about anything.