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As we seniors get a bit long in the tooth, there descends upon us a seemingly unavoidable compulsion to take stock of our lives. What few things have we managed to accomplish? What might we have done differently? Who, if anybody, will remember us three or four generations from now? What does it all mean? Or, as my friend and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein would put it, What matters? It can be an unpleasant exercise. More preferable, perhaps, might be a slow continuation of putting one foot in front of the other without looking back or ahead.

Right at the start of this examination, I am nearly stopped in my tracks by the fact that I am simply a collection of atoms and molecules. Material. Of course, all living things are a rather special arrangement of atoms and molecules. A human being is different from a rock. Nevertheless, I am an assembly of atoms and molecules, and at some point in the rapidly approaching future that special arrangement will disassemble. My thoughts and memories will end. I will dissolve into the unimaginable abyss of Nothingness. My atoms will blend with the soil and the oceans and the air, with no clue that they were once part of me.

That said, those atoms and molecules, while in the brief but special arrangement that is me, have been capable of some pretty amazing stuff.  Consciousness. Feelings of connection to other living things and to the cosmos. Appreciation of beauty. Creation of beauty. Awe. I call myself a “spiritual materialist.” That is, I believe that the world is made of atoms and molecules and nothing more, but I also believe that we human beings can have transcendent experiences.

One of those experiences is the creation of this blog, “The Artful Cosmos,” which is part of my own taking stock in my senectitude. I invented the title in haste, as some vague reference to spiritual materialism, but I now think I should revisit it.

In what sense is the cosmos “artful”? To answer that question, I am led to ask: What is “art”? With apologies to all professional art historians, aestheticians, museum curators, and artists themselves, I will offer my own definition of art: an object or concept that is considered beautiful and emotionally evocative, and was created with that intention. Accordingly, “art” requires two things: an intentional creation, and an observer to judge that creation beautiful and emotionally evocative.

First, beauty. What do we consider “beautiful,” and why? Coppery clouds. The winding swirl of a seashell. The splaying of hues in a rainbow. The reflection of stars on the skin of a still pond at night. I would suggest that much of nature we consider beautiful because we are part of nature. We grew up in nature, evolutionarily speaking. An attentiveness to nature clearly had survival value. In habitat selection, for example. Of course, there’s also a cultural component to the notion of beauty, especially when it comes to the physical beauty of people: Elongated ear lobes are considered beautiful by the Masai in Kenya. In Mauritius, obesity in women is considered beautiful, and brides-to-be are force fed 15,000 calories a day to fatten them up. But some concepts of beauty seem universal and almost certainly byproducts of traits with survival benefit. The botanist and geneticist Hugo Iltis (1882 – 1952) wrote that “Man’s love for natural colors, patterns, and harmonies  . . . must be the result of natural selection through eons of mammalian and anthropoid evolution.”

It is not hard to argue that an appreciation of color and form may have had survival benefit in its relation to sexual attraction. Both Darwin and Freud opined that our sense of beauty originated as a strategy to promote reproduction. In Descent of Man, Darwin writes: “When we behold a male bird elaborately displaying his graceful plumes or splendid colours before the females, whilst other birds, not thus decorated, make no such display, it is impossible to doubt that she admires the beauty of her male partners.”  Freud was reluctant to comment on the meaning of beauty, except in its relation to sex: “Psychoanalysis has less to say about beauty than about most things. Its derivation from the realms of sexual sensation is all that seems certain .  .  .  Beauty and attraction are first of all the attributes of a sexual object.”

Now, I come to the other aspect of art and its relation to my title “The Artful Cosmos.” Creation of beauty with intentionality. The cosmos certainly has plenty of beauty, both natural and human-made. Was that beauty created with intentionality? Many people, perhaps most people, would say “Yes” and refer to an all knowing, all powerful, and purposeful Creator. I respect that belief, but I do not share it. All kinds of beauty can and do arise completely from the “unintentional” workings of the laws of nature.

Take snowflakes for example. The beautiful six-sided symmetry of snowflakes does not require an intelligent and purposeful creator. It is a result of the angle between the two hydrogen atoms and oxygen atom in each water molecule and the bonding pattern of many water molecules in a crystal lattice. And that angle and bonding pattern follow from the basic principle that physical systems naturally attain shapes with the lowest possible energy. All forces naturally push things to their lowest energy. Due to the gravitational force, marbles on a flat table will eventually end up on the floor, a lower energy situation. Due to the electromagnetic force, soap bubbles form spheres, the shape of lowest energy. No intelligence or intentionality is needed to create these beauties, just as no intelligence is needed for generations of animals to develop traits suitable to their surroundings through the principle of natural selection.

In sum, with my definition of art, a thing can be beautiful but not be considered “art.” So, while paintings and symphonies, created with intention by human beings, are certainly works of art, I suggest that the cosmos as a whole is not. I am now thinking that my title “The Artful Cosmos” must refer more to the things created by intelligent beings within the cosmos than to the cosmos itself.

If the reader is not yet exhausted by these circuitous ruminations, I will end with one last thought, concerning beauty. I believe that the notion of beauty is a human construction. And now I return to my idea of spiritual materialism. Objects, whether sunsets or paintings or human bodies, are a collection of atoms and molecules. They are all material “things.” To deem those things beautiful or ugly or fanciful requires a judgement, and that judgment requires an observer.

Some years ago, the late, distinguished physicist John Wheeler proposed that the universe could not exist without observers. This bold conjecture, based loosely on some results from quantum physics, is called “the Observership Hypothesis.” It’s a fascinating and provocative notion, but completely without proof – in my view more poetry than science. My own opinion, and the opinion held by most scientists, is that there exists an external universe out there, independent of our minds and our observations of it. The universe would exist whether or not we or any life forms are present to observe it. In fact, in recent years physicists have realized that the laws of nature allow for many different kinds of universes, most without the special conditions needed for life to emerge – not simply life similar to that on Earth, but life of any form.

In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is not only expanding, but expanding at an increasing rate. That is, galaxies are flying away from each other at a speed increasing exponentially in time. As a result, in a mere 100 billion years, we and our local group of galaxies will be permanently cut off from the rest of the universe, as if we had fallen into a black hole. No light, energy, or anything else from the rest of the universe will ever reach us. (Our own sun, and all other stars, will have burned out before this time,) We will be imprisoned within a cell of limited size – large by earthly standards but small in cosmic terms. The night sky will become completely black, space will become colder and colder, and all remaining available energy will diminish to nothing. At some point thereafter, perhaps in another few hundred billion years, that will be the end of life – not just life like ours but all life. Such a final demise will occur not only in our cosmic neck of the woods, but everywhere in the universe. The universe will continue to churn along forever, for infinite time, but the “era of life” will have passed. At that point, observers will no longer exist in the cosmos. There will still be mountains and snowflakes and paintings, but no one will be around to pronounce them beautiful.

 The Buddhists emphasize the impermanence of all things in the cosmos. It is a simple idea, but one that conflicts with our human longing for something that lasts, for immortality, for some kind of eternity. With much struggle, I have come around to the view that the moment is all we have. Meaning must lie in the moment. The stars will eventually burn out. The era of life in the cosmos will eventually end. And, in the rapidly approaching future, my atoms will scatter with soil and ocean and air. Meaning, and mattering, are now.

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Notes

“Man’s love for natural colors .  .  .  ” “Why man needs open space: the basic optimum human environment,” by H. Iltis, in: The Urban Setting Symposium. S.H. Taylor, ed. (New London, CT: Connecticut College, 1980), pg. 3

“When we behold a male bird . . . ” The Descent of Man (1871), by Charles Darwin, Chapter III. “Sense of Beauty,” Great Books, op cit, vol. 49, pg. 301

““Psychoanalysis has less to say .  .  .  ” Civilization and its Discontents (1929), Sigmund Freud, Chapter 2. Great Books, op cit, vol. 54, pg 775.