Bobby Azarian is a science writer with a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from George Mason University. His popular blog, The Mind in the Machine, is hosted by Psychology Today magazine.

In his 2022 book Romance and Reality, Azarian argues that "the universe is a self-organizing system, one that is moving toward increasing complexity and awareness." He writes...

It is a thrilling time to be alive—perhaps more so than any other time in human history. Right now, we are beginning to experience a paradigm shift, and it is a profound one. A paradigm is a general scientific worldview, and a paradigm shift occurs when new science forces us to adopt a different overall framework and perspective. Such a shift occurred when humanity learned that the earth was not the center of the universe, but instead a seemingly insignificant planet among countless others. Another major shift happened when Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection explained that all life in the biosphere evolved from a single common ancestor, that is, a single-celled organism.

While the paradigms that these discoveries ushered in taught us a lot about the universe and our origins, they helped shape a worldview that depicted life in the cosmos as accidental and utterly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. This view, which resonated with critics of religion and enemies of superstition, was reinforced by subsequent scientific breakthroughs and the popular philosophical interpretations of these new laws and processes.

For example, around the same time that Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species, scientists were formulating the second law of thermodynamics, a principle that created an overwhelmingly bleak cosmic narrative. Not only was the universe’s useful energy supply constantly being depleted—like a great engine running out of fuel—a new statistical understanding of the law seemed to imply that the world was continually becoming more disordered and random. If true, it would mean that all forms of complexity and organization, including intelligent life, are doomed to a transient and ultimately insignificant existence, cosmically speaking.

The significance of life took another blow around the mid-twentieth century. The discovery of the DNA molecule confirmed Darwin’s big idea: all forms of life in the biosphere, from hamsters to humans, were produced by a blind and mindless mechanical process that could be boiled down to replication with genetic mutation, which inevitably leads to speciation. While Darwin himself was careful not to assume that this was nature’s sole evolutionary mechanism, many proponents of his theory did just that. Since in their minds the creation of complex forms required biological evolution, the actual emergence of life came to be portrayed as the result of some improbable molecular collision rather than a lawful evolutionary process, like self-organization. In other words, life was a statistical fluke—a “cosmic accident” so unlikely that we should not expect it elsewhere in the universe.

This general sentiment was in line with the dominant scientific ideology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, known as reductionism, which proposed that reality could be best understood by breaking down all physical phenomena to their simplest parts and processes, so that we may observe the basic behavior of the fundamental constituents of nature in isolation. According to the gospel of reductionism, whenever possible, the social sciences and psychology should be reduced to biology, biology should be reduced to chemistry, and chemistry should be reduced to fundamental physics. Although the reductionist approach has been wildly successful, giving us most of our greatest physical theories, it created the impression that all life-forms, including humans, are nothing more than collections of atoms obligatorily following fixed and arbitrary mechanical trajectories, determined solely by math and not by mind.

As a result, the reductionist approach to science helped popularize the philosophical stance known as materialism, which holds that reality only consists of that which is physical. While this view helped further rid science of supernatural concepts like souls and spirits, classic materialism denied the existence of apparently immaterial things, like consciousness, and largely ignored the concepts of energy and information. In doing so, materialism reduced us to zombielike meat machines with no agency, feeling, or inner experience. To most materialists, life and mind are considered to be “epiphenomena” if acknowledged at all, which essentially means they don’t matter; they are just there. Any feeling of free will we might have when making a decision is merely an illusion. We are not the authors of our actions but passive observers who get constantly fooled by the brain into believing we’re not causally impotent.

Collectively, these intellectual advances formed what philosophers call the reductionist worldview. This paradigm was not satisfied merely with the removal of god and the soul from the physical picture—it also wanted to purge nature of all traces of purpose or progress. Regarding such important existential questions as “How did we get here?” and “Where are we going?” the reductionist worldview answers “luck” and “probably nowhere.” It was supremely rational to adopt this worldview, as that is how things first appear to those who have rightly abandoned explanations for natural phenomena that invoke the supernatural.

Romance and Reality, pp. 1-3

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