1.3.1 The Forever Road

Imagine a long straight road through the universe, called the Forever Road. Cars can drive on this road, forever if they want, but they must always go in only one direction, at a constant speed. Somewhere along the Forever Road is a way station, with a single observer. He must note the time each car passed the way station and the speed it was traveling. From noting just these, time at way station and speed it is possible to know the complete past and future travel history of any car. If say, the car arrived at the way station at 10.00 a.m. traveling at 100 kilometers per hour, at 8.00 a.m. that day the car was 200 kilometers before the way station. And if the next way station is 500 kilometers further on, the car will not reach it until 3.00 p.m. and so on.

Physically, the Forever Road cannot exist. For a start, the universe does not exist "forever", and there could never be a practical road across the universe like a car could drive on. But not so long ago people did believe that the universe was infinite in time and place, and that all particles in the universe moved through it in accordance with the newly discovered laws of mechanics, based on Newton's theories of gravity and mechanical motion. Around the time of Napoleon, there was also a revolution in science, and the great French scientist-mathematician Simon de Laplace (1749-1827) set out to investigate how a particle would actually move through such a universe. He discovered, incredibly, that every particle did move along a "Forever Road"! So if one measured motion of the particle at any point its motion could be calculated out for all time. Laplace's theories had an enormous impact on science, mathematics, technology, philosophy, and culture. His equations say, are used today for calculating the trajectories of modern day space vehicles. And despite that some of his ideas eventually proved wrong modern day aeronautics, telecommunications, space exploration, and planetary astronomy and would not be possible without the theories of Laplace.

Now, because Laplace was such a clever mathematician the "Forever Road" in his universe did not need to be long and straight, nor did the way station have to exist at one particular place, and objects did not have to move at constant speed. Instead, any particle we examine with Laplace's equations follows a curved path through space-time, depending on the physical forces constraining the path. It is like watching a "twister" roller coaster ride. The roller coaster follows a unique path through space-time, constrained by gravity, friction, the contours of the rails, and the mass and energy of the vehicle motion.

In this book we will give this path through space-time, or any path an object is constrained to follow a special name. We will call the path the geodesic of the object. Now, in a strict sense this term only applies to an object moving freely though space under the pull of gravity, like a planet or an asteroid. Also very strictly, this term is only human lexicon. Many forces act on moving bodies apart from gravity, and it would be impossible to calculate them all. So, a geodesic is really only a track through space that humans could compute with present knowledge, and even then it does not mean it is the natural geodesic. The calculation could be wrong, or ignore small effects. But, very loosely, if somebody always eats Corn Flakes for breakfast that person might claim "that is my geodesic" if this term becomes fashionable. Of course, the Theory of Options will teach that frivolities such as what people have for breakfast are not geodesics at all. They are human options. But yes, the term will be used in this more general sense throughout this book.

What then, is the true human geodesic?

Well, it will take the whole book to explain, but consider a few more terms. Firstly, the "Forever Road" is only in two dimensions; time, and a place along the road. But Laplace's equations are multidimensional. They can calculate a geodesic in any number of dimensions. Mathematically, every particle has several degrees of freedom, like an airplane that can roll, pitch, and yaw. But for our discussion we take the major dimensions as dimensions as four. This is three dimensions of movement, up or down, forward or back, left or right, and one dimension of time, past or future. Yet, whatever other freedoms they have humans do not appear to enjoy any freedom of movement in the dimension of time. Time in four dimensions is the expansion of the universe, or its increase in 'radius' since the Big Bang and humans are carried along embedded in time. This means that of the four dimensions of physical existence we are constrained in at least one of them, time, and only enjoy freedom of movement in the other three dimensions. To use a two-dimensional analogy, humans are like an ant on the surface of an expanding balloon. The ant can move in two dimensions anywhere on the surface but in the third dimension in which the balloon is expanding, the ant has no volitional control.

However, even in three dimensions human movement is limited. To return to the ant on the balloon, despite its freedom of two-dimensional movement it can only move a limited distance from where it is at in any one time. Normally, this would not be a problem, but remember the balloon is still expanding all the time the ant is considering where to go next. If the ant lived forever and the balloon did not expand the ant could eventually visit every 'coordinate' on the balloon's surface. But because the balloon is expanding he simply cannot be everywhere within a constrained time. For example, if you have never visited the Bahamas you might still make it before you die, but if you wanted to visit there before turning 25 and you are already 26, you just cannot do what you want in the time frame that you promised yourself. Yet it is worse than that. Humans say, can move up or down, but to do so we must fly in an airplane or dig a tunnel, both requiring more effort than two dimensional freedoms. Plus even when we move anywhere on the Earth's surface we face further physical constraints. However, regardless of practical constraints, there is also a theoretical constraint on how far we can ever travel in space-time, also time dependent. According to Einstein's Theory of Relativity we cannot travel faster than the speed of light. So as we look out from our point of observation we look backwards in time. This prevents us from viewing events in present time in the universe such as an intelligent species discovering radio, if the event is far away. Billions of light years away, right now, other beings might have discovered radio. But if it happened, it occurred elsewhere, cut-off from our "event-horizon" by the speed of light and expansion of the universe.

When physicists examine all possible interactions of existence they use a light cone diagram (see illustration). Notice there is a cone forwards from an instant of existence, but the real surprise is the backward looking cone. Any event outside of possible connection is 'elsewhere' in the future, but so it is also in the past! So clearly, we are not only limited to where we can go but also by where we could possibly have come from in the constraint against being everywhere at once. This limitation to where we might possibly have come from in a dimensional sense creates special problems for us when we try to retrace our evolutionary history. Biologists are lucky, they have many species to study, but cosmologists have only ONE universe. And in this ONE universe we have humans arrive at a certain point of four dimensional space-time at a time, 15 billion years, a location Local Group, Milky Way Galaxy, the Solar System, Planet Earth, but also in a certain biological form, arising from a particular sequence of evolution. Because there is only in ONE universe and because of the light cone limitations, unless we quickly find other intelligent life also at the 15 billion-year radius, so far we have not, something about our own history makes us unique. And this is where the concept of a geodesic of evolution and human behavior is important. Laplace's theory tells us that one segment of space-time is as good as any other. So, if we can calculate the geodesic by which humans traveled through their evolutionary past we can calculate where that geodesic will take us in future. Or, by understanding how the geodesic constrained us in the past we can know how it constrains us today, and from this determine our true human options.

But is such a calculation possible?

This is what the modern debate over human behavior is about. Over the last 20-30 years a growing body of knowledge has been applying biological methods to the analysis of behavior, though so far it has only applied with any success to animal behavior. An assumption of the new method is that a species that survives today is composed exclusively from descendants of individuals who made successful behavioral moves throughout the history of that species. This means that behavioral moves modern individuals make will be winning moves by decent, encoded in genes, because all the failed moves have been filtered out by the termination of the genetic line of unsuccessful individuals. The theory then teaches that it should be possible to 'calculate out' which one, from a set of moves, any modern individual will make in a behavioral situation, from considering that the genes the individual inherits will drive it to enact winning moves only. We saw in the example of sex life among birds how we can calculate the behavioral geodesic of groups of animals. Except while this theory has enjoyed successes, mainly with insect behaviors, it has also caused great controversy. Especially, without proving that the theory can apply to more complex species like chimpanzees, scientists from disciplines like sociobiology jumped the theory from success with insects to explaining human behavior. Only they did so with what has appeared muddled assumptions.

If anything, the gene flow equations offer only a single step solution to the problem of life, but it is not a complete one. For example, the equations apply to complex organisms who enact behaviors, so they cannot sensibly apply to prokaryote cells, plants, or strands of DNA, which are also life but do not have behaviors. At the other extreme, learned behavior is not so structured that we could not train an animal to act against any behavior an equation might predict. Lion cubs raised in activity must be taught to re-kill in the wild say, so observing a domestic lion cub would not give a correct calculation of its evolutionary origins. We also see in domestic animals highly modified behaviors that we can only explain via the history of the individual. A horse that nearly drowned as a foal might be afraid of water, despite that in evolution genes favored horses that were good swimmers. So, instead of just one set of equations for innate matter, and another for behavior, to capture all possibilities we would have to use a range of equations to describe a range of complexities. In this range of equations that can work for insects, birds and reptiles might have limited applicability among species with a high degree of learning such as lions, monkeys or dogs.

Even so, it is amazing that the behavior of living organisms can be calculated at all, because previously such calculations only worked with innate objects. But before we transfer a calculation which works for birds or insects to human behavior we must check that the underlying assumptions conform with other facts we know. For example, a Laplacian geodesic assumes one part of space-time as good as any other, but that might not be correct. As the universe expands its total store of excess energy goes down. So at one point of the expansion radius available energy, say for evolving new biological complexity, will be different from at another point. Another problem concerns additional degrees of dimensional freedom. So far we have only considered dimension in a geometric sense of providing coordinates in space-time, but there is an different way to consider dimensions. For example, Laplacian geodesics apply only to innate objects. But one quality of the innate world not properly understood in Laplace's day was that innate objects tend towards increasing disorder with time, in accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. However, living organisms have metabolism, which, while the organism is alive, drives it in a direction of increasing order with time. So if we gave an object an energy-complexity dimension the path it would track through space-time would be different between innate and living objects.

This difference between the space-time geodesics of living and innate objects becomes even more striking when living organisms can move with conscious direction. For example, the natural geodesic of objects is to fall downhill with gravity, but living organisms can move uphill, directing effort against the naturally constraining geodesic. Now in brute Darwinian selection behavior is constrained by selective pressures of fitness, where the term constrained means forced to follow a certain path, like physical objects being constrained by gravity. In Darwinian selection the track through behavioral space-time, which living creatures are constrained to follow is dictated by needs of food, survival and procreation. There is no escape from this, because any organism less adept at the struggle than any other will not procure surviving offspring. So, if an organism fails to follow the survival geodesic its living descendants will not exist for us to study. Roughly, if an organism arrives at point D, so its living descendent exits for us to study it, it must have passed through points A, B and C of the survival geodesic to get there. As with Laplacian geodesics one can calculate the behavior of an object in present time back to its behavior in the past, or perhaps even to a gene that produced the new behavior.

Still, a complication arises with human behavior, which has one further constraint. For example, if a meteorite entered the Solar system, and we measured its velocity and coordinates, we could use Laplace's equations to calculate where it had come from, and where it was heading. But if we discovered this object was a piloted rocket ship under intelligent control we could not assume its present trajectory had been or would always be maintained. This problem applies to observing the path through behavioral space-time of living organisms. Although an organism is alive we can still calculate its path through behavioral space-time by assuming Darwinian selection constrains its behavioral freedom to only certain available paths anyway. But with humans, morality imposes an additional constraint (and this is getting ahead of the argument) such that humans are forced to break from the Darwinian geodesic, and explore behavioral paths not dictated by Darwinian needs. The natural geodesic of water is to flow downhill, but if engineers encase water in a pipe, they can force it to flow uphill. (The Romans never knew this, which limited their options of how to use water.) Similarly, when we encase human behavior in the pipe of moral choice we constrain it to move in directions outside its Darwinian geodesic. Only because humans ultimately control direction of the morality 'dimension', morality itself becomes the mechanism by which humans obtain greater options of movement in three-dimensional behavioral space-time. This will be explained further in chapters on morality. However, while it is always hard to see how by constraining behavior, morality increases behavioral freedom, it does make sense from the perspectives of geodesics.

So, if we apply geodesics outside its original intention for innate objects only we must choose carefully which rules apply to which level of complexity. Everything in the universe is constrained by physical laws to follow a path, but organizational complexity utilizes more complex constraints to move different objects in different ways. The Second Law constrains innate objects to move towards increasing disorder, but metabolism constrains objects to move in paths seemingly contrary to that law. At the next level, metabolism constrains simple DNA strings to absorb and replicate blindly, but behavioral genetics constrains complex organisms to adopt survival strategies beyond the needs of blind replication. Finally, at the human level, new intelligence, social, and moral strictures force humans away from basic evolutionary survival strategies, into more complex paths of constraint. Humans say, constraint domestic animals to behave in certain ways outside of what behavioral genetics would predict, and so on. While human moral behavior, such as self-sacrifice or limiting procreation, drive humans far from a predictable behavioral path.

So far however, humans have only been able to calculate behavioral paths for animals, and mostly lower orders such as birds or insects. But suppose we could calculate out human behaviors including moral choices, what type of universe does that mean we live in? Do we go back to a modified universe of Laplace in which all paths of all objects can be calculated out for all time? Is there say, a potential single geodesic for the entire universe, from the instant of the Big Bang, even down to such triviality of what people actually do eat for breakfast?

Answers will be given in the forthcoming chapters, but roughly, there are three types of universes:

1. A fully constrained, or Laplacian Universe in which all events can be calculated out.
2. A fully unconstrained, fortuitous universe, in which few events could be predicted to have happened by a calculable method.
3. A partially constrained universe, which is the most likely one.

Ironically, there is no way to be absolutely certain which type of universe we live in, it is just that we have difficulties prescribing the type of universe at the extreme views. In the unconstrained, fortuitous universe we encounter a problem that despite its apparent randomness, the only universe we can learn something useful about is the one we occupy as the beings we are. And we can only learn something useful by assuming that certain regularities of time and space exist. On the other hand, in the fully constrained, Laplacian Universe, we encounter problems with the mathematical tools we use to investigate why the universe exists the way it does. Roughly, in a fully constrained universe we will ultimately encounter an equation that enforces its own creation, and we are not certain such an equation can exist. For these and other reasons, despite whatever universe actually exists, humans can only make rational sense out of a partially constrained universe. This will be a universe in which some actions are forced on us by the laws of existence, and cannot be altered by anything that humans do. But other actions are random, and might be slightly influenced one way or another by actions that humans take. How then, should we behave in such a universe?

Well, in any of the universes, however an organism is constrained to behave by additional complexity, the constraints will go if the complexity breaks down. If the pipe forcing water to flow uphill bursts the water will revert to its primitive geodesic and flow downhill again. Similarly, when an organism dies, it ceases to exhibit metabolism, and the organism as a unit reverts to biological decay and increasing disorder in time. With humans too, if a circumstance destroys the moral fabric constraining behavior, primitive behavior of embedded reflex will take over. Just as in the rocket ship, if you destroy its intelligent control mechanisms, its course reverts to a natural gravitational geodesic. However, this break down of behavior to more primitive levels also creates an opportunity with humans to build up behavior to higher levels of complexity as new information about how we behave is found. For example, a broad behavioral geodesic of humans is lack of concern for preserving the environmental habitat of our species. If we mapped this environmental impact of humans so far on the planet's ecosystem, the geodesic it has followed would show an alarming path. It would presage catastrophe to the world's ecosystem in time scales as short as centuries. But we are not constrained absolutely to follow a path to catastrophe. We do have options. Only we are not sure how many, or to which extent properties like human political will are constrained to follow predictable paths.

However, just as metabolism constrains matter to move against thermodynamic probability, and learning constrains higher organisms to move against the drives of reflex, so humans place additional constraints on behavior, forcing them to explore fresh behaviors. This constraint of human behavior is morality, and it can force humans to overcome the most primal reflexive needs, such as fear of death. Just as simple equations cannot explain observed behavior of organisms with a high degree of learning, so they cannot explain human behavior, which involves both learning and moral reasoning. But at is there some manner by which human behavior might be predicted? Again we must be careful because in a universe in which human behavior could be predicted too precisely humans would not enjoy any real options. However, once all the constraints on human behavior are known there to be some calculation by which a range of human behaviors could be calculated from any behavioral situation, with hopefully humans choosing the best options from the range.

Yet, while it does not profit us to study universes not exhibiting the characteristics of our one, and while we could imagine it, we would consider it most strange if there could exist another universe the same as ours exactly. We would be surprised in another universe of Brutus stabbed Caesar precisely on the Ides of March, or if beings in a similar form to humans existed at all. Imagining what is possible in "another" universe is often called 'replaying the tape'. A video tape yields exactly the same story no matter how many times it is replayed, but would that happen if the story of our universe were replayed on a cosmic scale? There is even a theory of cosmology that the universe endlessly "oscillates" between a 'Big Bang' and a 'Big Crunch', and then restarts the entire cycle over again. However, this theory has been criticized because a phenomena called photon drag would prevent the tape of the universe being replayed exactly each time. We therefore assume that while in our universe certain events occur in a prescribed or forced manner, other events occur in a random way. So we might conjecture that in a universe with the same physical properties as ours intelligent life could arise 15 billion years after the Big Bang. It might be carbon-based and oxygen-breathing, but it might not occur on a planet called Earth, with a star called the Sun, in the Milky Way galaxy. In a fully constrained universe it would, while in an unconstrained universe intelligent life might not arise at all!

So, the Theory of Options begins with the assumption that humans live in a partially constrained universe. This is a universe in which certain events happen particular ways due to the basic physics of how the universe exists. We expect that any universe, which we could imagine constructed from the same basic physics, would exhibit similar features to our universe. Roughly, such a universe would compose of atoms, stars and galaxies. It would begin as a 'Big Bang' explosion of space-time approximately 15 billion years before reaching its present size and composition, and as the universe expanded it would evolve elements containing up to 92 protons through naturally occurring processes of nature. What happens after that however, is more controversial. This is because in the universe which we occupy, 15 billion years after the 'Big Bang' we know that there appeared intelligent, carbon-based, oxygen breathing life on at least one planetary system composed of Type II material, orbiting a medium size sun. And while we can create a mathematical model of a universe in which intelligent life did not evolve in the 15 billion-year period, we could never create a scientific model of it. This is because without supposing the evolution of intelligent life we have no way to verify if the model is correct. Yet, humans have enough things to worry about as it is. Because the only universe that we know to exist is the one that we occupy as intelligent beings human options are best served by studying only a universe whose general features we can confirm by observation.

Yet even if the universe in which we live is partially constrained, because it allows intelligent life to evolve there is one more thing very important, which we may assume about it. Life evolved over billions of years, and is incredibly delicate, so while random variation produces life, evolution of life also depends on other properties of existence exhibiting regularity, repeatability and symmetry over long periods. Because of this regularity, evidenced by the fact that we exist at all, we can further assume that although our universe is only partially constrained, while the remainder of it is random, humans can nevertheless learn through their investigative tools what those constraints are. From this they can decide from which properties of the universe remaining which are random, or unconstrained, humans posses the options to change. While both these assumptions are widely if not universally held, the Theory of Options introduces a crucial third assumption. This is that while there are only a limited range of options for change in a partially constrained universe, humans will still try to maximize what those options are.

This need of humans to maximize options also has to do with the randomness of the universe. If the universe were fully constrained, evolution would have an easier task of it, because nature would itself find change and adaptation more easy to predict. Though one might cynically argue that a fully constrained universe would be so "smoothed out" that life would not encounter the variability to arise at all! Similarly, if the universe were fully unconstrained there would be little pay back to the evolutionary effort of nature to provide adaptive survival mechanisms for organisms, as extinction would be too random a process to invest evolutionary effort guarding against. But in a partially constrained universe, organisms have a chance of adapting for change. Only the period of random fluctuation in the universe must not overwhelm the repeatability and order conventional design mechanisms rely on.

This is what this book is about. It is not about geodesics as such, just as it is not about genes or biology, or the nature-nurture debate. It is about the extent to which humans have real choices, and what their true options are. We like to be told we have many freedoms, but freedom does not bring "freedom", it brings responsibility for our actions, and not everybody likes to hear that. The counter argument is that there is no point relying on freedoms which are a scientific illusion, so we must understand constraints first, to see if we have any true freedoms at all. The theme of this book is that understanding the constraints increases our options by showing us in which direction we should concentrate volitional effort. This is why we hope our universe is a partially constrained one.

We need to understand constraints because we do not wish to waste effort, but we assume that we as a species seek to understand constraints precisely because we wish to use that information to act upon our real choices.