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You have brains in your head,
You have feet in your shoes,
You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.

–  Dr. Suess

Why does an orderly world appeal to us? Most obviously, with order comes predictability. And back through the dark hallways of our evolution, predictability clearly had survival value. If a heavy coconut has just snapped off a tree I am standing beneath, it is beneficial for me to be able to estimate its future trajectory and know whether I should step to the left or the right to avoid getting my skull crushed. Likewise, the ability to predict the time of nightfall, so that I can retire safely to my cave, or the ability to predict the seasons, so that I can plant and harvest, or the ability to predict rain.

Order and predictability also confer a measure of control over this baffling cosmos we find ourselves in. The Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer, in his exhaustive study The Golden Bough: the Roots of Religion and Folklore (1890), documents the way that early human societies employed magic and ceremony in an attempt to control nature. The Bantus in Botswsana burned the stomach of an ox in the evening because they thought the black smoke would gather the clouds and cause the rain to come. Here is another account, in Frazer’s words:

In New Caledonia when wizard desires to make sunshine, he takes some plants and corals to the burial ground and makes them into a bundle, adding two locks of hair cut from s living child, also two teeth or an entire jawbone from the skeleton of an ancestor. He then climbs a high mountain whose top catches the first rays of the morning sun.

The great mythologies of the world, dating back to the Babylonian Enuma Elish, were not only stories about the creation and behavior of the universe. They were also attempts to understand the cosmos, and through that understanding to have some measure of control.

The ability for humans to control the world around them, or at least to be free from the vagaries of the gods, can be seen in the “atomic hypothesis” of Democritus (460 BC – 370 BC), Lucretius (99 BC – 55 BC), and others. According to that hypothesis, the world is made out of atoms – tiny, indestructible objects. (It was not until the twentieth century that the atomic hypothesis was proved true with certainty and atoms first measured.) The Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius suggested that the power of the gods over us mortals is limited by the constancy of atoms. Atoms could not be created or destroyed, said Lucretius. The gods could not make objects suddenly appear out of nothing or vanish into nothing because all things are made out of atoms, and the number of atoms remains constant. From Lucretius’ epic poem “The Nature of Things” (De Rerum Natura):

For surely a dread holds all mortals .  .  . because they behold many things happening in heaven and earth whose causes they can by no means see, and they think them to be done by divine power. From which reasons, when we shall perceive that nothing can be created from nothing, then we shall at once more correctly understand from that principle [the atomic hypothesis] what we are seeking, both the source for which each thing can be made and the manner in which everything is done without the working of gods.

I would suggest that the entire history of science can be interpreted as a modern attempt to gain some control over nature – not necessarily to order up rain or sunshine (even modern scientists have difficulty predicting the weather), or to free us from the power of the gods, but to satisfy some deep psychological need to master the world around us. I am no psychologist myself, but, like many of us, I have experienced the pleasure of putting together a swing set for my children, opening up the box with its jumble of screws of various lengths, nuts, struts, and other unrecognizable parts, following the detailed and logical instructions, and seeing the final product emerge. Psychologists Lauren Leotti, Sheena Ivengar, and Kevin Ochsner, in a paper titled “Born to Choose: the Origins and Value of the Need for Control,” write that:

Belief in one’s ability to exert control over the environment and to produce desired results is essential for an individual’s well being. It has been repeatedly argued that the perception of control is not only desirable, but it is likely a psychological and biological necessity.

These psychologists go on to say that the desire for control is associated with the benefit of making personal choices. (The power to make choices is invoked in the lines from Dr. Seuss at the beginning of this section.) Brain research by James Bjork, Daniel Hommer, and others shows that the striatum area of the brain is activated more strongly by actively choosing (controlling) rewards than by passively receiving rewards.

Finally, we humans, with our highly evolved three pounds of gooey grey matter, are pattern makers and pattern seekers. A psychiatrist friend of mine, thinking that I had too much time on my hands, kindly gave me a thick book titled Existential Psychotherapy, by Irvin Yalom, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University. Professor Yalom is an acolyte of the Gestalt psychologists. Those thinkers hold that we naturally and unavoidably tend to organize all experience into meaningful patterns. When a picture of random dots is presented to us, we parse it into figures and background. When we see a broken circle, we mentally complete the circle. When we see odd behavior in people, we struggle to place it within some rational system. Professor Yalom writes that when incoming stimuli don’t form patterns, “one feels tense, annoyed, and dissatisfied .  .  .  We experience dysphoria [unease and anxiety] in the face of an indifferent, unpatterned world and search for patterns, explanations, and the meaning of existence.”

One can see our desire to make patterns in our architecture, and in our art.

Patterns are evidently part of our aesthetics as well as our attempts to find and create order in the world.

So, we like patterns. We like order. We like a lawful nature. We like predictability. And what of our minds? Are not our minds merely brains – collections of neurons that store and pass along information in the form of chemicals and electrical ticks, all subject to Coulomb’s Law and the other mandates of science? Taking the laws of nature and the physicality of the world to their natural conclusion, shouldn’t our thoughts and behavior be completely predictable given a large enough computer? If so, then there should be no such thing as irrational behavior. Everything that we think, everything that we say and do in the future should follow inexorably from the past condition of our brain and the grinding on of the laws.

 No, no, no! shrieks the unnamed narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. In this short novel, one of the first modern literary explorations of the contradictory nature of the mind, the narrator rails against the reason of the intellectual establishment and the standard bearers of civilization: 

this gentleman will at once expound to you, with great eloquence and clarity, precisely how he must needs act in accordance with the laws of reason and truth .  .  . and then, exactly a quarter of an hour later, without any sudden, extraneous cause, but precisely because of something within him that is stronger than all his interests, he’ll cut quite a different caper, that is, go obviously against what he himself was just saying: against the laws of reason, against his own profit; well, in short, against everything .  .  . He will [do anything to] indeed satisfy himself that he is a man and not a piano key .  .  .  . And more than that: even if it should indeed turn out that he is a piano key, if it were even proved to him mathematically and by natural science, he would still not come to reason, but would do something contrary on purpose, solely out of ingratitude alone; essentially to have his own way.

Doestoevsky acknowledges the irrational, unpredictable nature of human beings. We may love order and rationality and laws of nature in the physical world, he says, but we do not want those laws applied to our own minds. We will have freedom at any cost. We delight in discovering a rational universe as long as we ourselves are exempt from the rules. We worship order and rationality, but we also have a fondness for disorder and irrationality, especially applied to ourselves.

I can imagine a futuristic “mind-body” experiment: An intelligent person is placed in a soundproof and sealed room, with minimal sensory input from the external world, and asked a series of questions concerning emotional, aesthetic, and ethical issues. Difficult questions. Suppose also that before entering the room, our test subject’s brain is completely examined so that the chemical and electrical state of each neuron is measured and recorded, something that in principle could be done. Then, the puzzle is: Given a very large computer and the known laws of nature, can we predict the person’s answer to each of the questions?  

Although I am a scientist myself, I would hope not. I cannot explain exactly why. I do believe that the physical universe is governed completely by rational laws, and I also do believe that the body and mind are purely physical. Furthermore, I don’t believe in miracles or the supernatural. But, like Dostoevsky’s character, I cannot bear the thought that I am simply a piano key, thinking and doing what I must when I’m struck. I want some kind of unpredictability in my behavior. I want freedom. I want some kind of  “I-ness” in my brain that is more than the sum of neurons and sodium gates and acetylcholine molecules, a captain who can make decisions on the spot – good or bad decisions it doesn’t matter.

Finally, I believe in the power of the mysterious. Einstein once wrote that “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” I celebrate the lawfulness of the cosmos. I celebrate the power of science. At the same time, I believe that it is bracing and vital to live in a world in which we do not know all the answers. I believe that we are inspired and goaded on by what we don’t understand. And I hope that there will always be an edge between the known and the unknown, beyond which lies strangeness and unpredictability and life.