Women and Physics, Philosophy and Cyberspace

by

Russell Blackford

(first published 1999 in Quadrant magazine)

Margaret Wertheim's first book, Pythagoras' Trousers: God, Physics and the Gender Wars, established her current high profile as a feminist intellectual with an intimate knowledge of the mathematical and physical sciences. No doubt she will obtain even greater prominence as a result of her recently published and strongly promoted The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Wertheim's talents include the ability to find catchy titles, while the explanatory sub-titles of her books demonstrate that she is dealing with subject matter of intrinsic interest and great importance. Furthermore, despite some stylistic criticisms that can be made, her work is accessible and highly entertaining.

To her considerable credit, Wertheim writes with a strong sense of narrative engagement and compelling illustration. She strives to explain difficult ideas and any unclarity is generally in the ideas themselves, rather than in the presentation. In both of her books, she displays a pleasing ability to relate major thinkers to each other in an integrated history of ideas—Nicholas of Cusa, Copernicus, Kepler, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Hobbes, Kant, Hubble, Einstein and beyond. She discusses their particular contributions assuredly and with enough detail to hold a reader's interest. She can convey the gist of Einsteinian relativity or hyperspace theory, or whatever the topic might be. The more recent book's historical discussion repeats much of that in Pythagoras' Trousers, but it does provide a plausible and pleasurable account of how artists, scientists and philosophers contributed to Western conceptions of space.

Although Wertheim's books take a strong position that is not far distant from that of many academic feminists, they are remarkably free of unnecessary jargon. I commend them to anyone who wants a painless overview of the history of rational inquiry, as well as a relatively clear encapsulation of mainstream feminist thinking at the end of the 1990s.

The positive characteristics I have described make Margaret Wertheim a popular, powerful and intellectually seductive writer, and she has been lionised by the literary press, at least in Australia. It is, therefore, all the more important that her work not be allowed to stand without attracting severe criticism for the dubious theses it advocates and the flimsy grounds on which it advocates them.

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Despite its evident strengths, Wertheim's style is sometimes distracting or irritating—partly because her approach to grammatical niceties is rather slipshod. Most gratingly, she imagines that the words "phenomena", "media", and "millennia" are singular nouns and uses them repeatedly in that way, as in the dreadful expression "a millennia and a half". She is also one of those writers who crank out ugly sentences because they imagine that the phrase "as such" means the same as "accordingly" or "therefore". More idiosyncratically, she has a penchant for surrounding words and phrases in distancing quotation marks—scare quotes—and this relates to what is wrong with the substance of her work.

In her defence, it might be said that the more recent book, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, is largely about concepts that are "spatial" only by metaphor or analogy, so the quotation marks have a legitimate job to do when placed around words such as "space". However, the device is overused in both books. The very first paragraph of Pythagoras' Trousers has all of the following in scare quotes: "reality", "stories" and "age of science". Almost every page of The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace makes liberal use of scare quotes, often in contexts that are quite remote from the book's governing theme of various literal and metaphorical conceptions of space.

The author thus dissociates herself from many of the expressions that she uses, creating a tone that is presumably meant to unsettle our assumptions about the boundary between the "real" (to reflect her own usage) and the metaphorical or (to introduce some scare quotes of my own) the "spiritual". Whatever her intention, however, the main effect is to add to a general appearance of New Age flakiness.

This is enhanced by another annoying Wertheimism, the numerous sentences that commence with the phrase "It is no coincidence that . . ." or a synonymous expression, usually with only a shadowy explanation as to what relationship between the phenomena concerned is actually being asserted. In The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, Wertheim concludes by asking, rhetorically, "Can it be a coincidence that we have invented a new immaterial space at just this point in our history? At just the point when many people are longing once more for some kind of spiritual space?" Such flourishes tempt the reply: "Yep. Sure sounds like a coincidence."

To ask a rhetorical question of my own, if the relationship that Wertheim thinks she has noticed is a causal one, not merely coincidental, in which direction does she believe the causation runs? She cannot seriously be suggesting that the invention of the Internet or the 1980s cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson and a few others somehow led to a longing in Western society for a "kind of spiritual space". Perhaps, then, she believes that the Internet and the early phase of cyberpunk were intended to fulfil a "spiritual" longing—perhaps a longing experienced by the Internet's military designers. But that would be a ridiculous fantasy.

If she does not have such causal relationships in mind, should we take this passage as a gesture in the direction of some vague and spooky concept such as Jungian synchronicity? I mean this question as a genuine one, for Wertheim's intention is unclear to me. What is clear, however, is that the inflated rhetoric—often hinting at mysterious connections that are never properly identified—adds to the impression that we are being handed the scorpion of irrationalism, of New Age mumbo-jumbo, rather than the nourishment of intellectual analysis.

Worse, in her eagerness to find these more-than-coincidental relationships in human history, Wertheim makes at least one elementary and glaring error that should never have found its way past Doubleday's editorial staff. It is an odd one from a writer who complains in her Foreword to Pythagoras' Trousers that physicists have little understanding of religion. In The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, she says, "It is no coincidence that the Bible begins with the phrase 'In the beginning was the Word.'"

The Bible does not begin with that phrase. Wertheim is thinking of the Gospel of St. John, which is not even the first book of the New Testament, let alone of the whole Bible. Moreover, this is not merely a typographical slip, for it is repeated much later in the book, and given a quite bizarre emphasis. "With these words," we are informed, "the ancient authors of the Hebrew scriptures acknowledge that before language there was, in effect, nothing." Of course, the Gospel of St. John is not part of what can properly be called "the Hebrew scriptures". Furthermore, in referring to the important Greek concept of the logos or word, the author of the gospel was certainly not advocating some Middle Eastern prototype of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language shapes reality, as Wertheim wants to argue. This is a truly fatuous attempt at Biblical exegesis.

In just a few hours of focused work, any editorial team could have improved The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace immensely. Indeed, I don't understand why that did not happen, and why a publisher of Doubleday's impressive status issued the book in what strikes me as a very raw form. Be that as it may, the idiosyncrasies of Wertheim's rhetoric, along with the kinds of mistakes that she makes, suggest that hers is an intelligence attracted by what Greg Egan has called "the saccharine poison of spirituality", but her "spiritual" yearnings lack the spine of any specific religious commitment or theological understanding.

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At this point, I want to concentrate on some of Wertheim's main ideas and their supporting argument, beginning with Pythagoras' Trousers, whose thesis seems to be that women avoid studying physics because they are alienated by its "quasi-religious" pretensions.

Wertheim repeatedly makes this arbitrary-sounding claim, but never with any convincing justification, as if stating it sufficiently often could make it true. She does put forward some considerations that suggest a particular problem of women's participation in academic physics, but she never analyses the dimensions of the apparent problem in a way that is even faintly adequate.

An underlying difficulty is that several strands of argument are intertwined in a manner that is not teased out to enable their logical relationships to be clearly understood or questioned. These strands include at least the following: the complex interrelationships in past centuries between rational inquiry into physical nature and the transcendent claims of religion; the current penchant of certain scientific popularisers for making spurious, far-fetched or merely opportunistic linkages between fundamental physics and religious concepts; the exclusion of women from physics (and many other fields of learning) in the past; and the current state of affairs where women may still be discriminated against in some corners of academia and, at any rate, appear to be choosing against careers in physics relative to other sciences and professions. Wertheim makes some reasonable points in relation to each of these strands. However, she fails to explain how she believes they are all logically related, leaving it to the reader to try to reconstruct an acceptable argument. I hesitate to do this, because it may well distort whatever position it is that she really holds.

If she believes that physics still has a substantive connection with genuine theological beliefs, as it did in the days of Galileo and Newton, and that this repels women, then I find her thesis very perplexing. It strikes me as unlikely in the extreme that women are less attracted to religion than are men; personal experience, anecdotal evidence, and such published statistics on religious belief and attendance as I have seen all suggest the exact opposite. If she has sociological data available to her suggesting that men are the more religious sex, she certainly does not provide it.

After reading the book twice and wrestling with the argument, I have become convinced that this is not what Wertheim means—though the inclusion of much of the detail in Pythagoras' Trousers makes little sense on any other basis. Still, I'm sure she knows that even the most shameless and annoying popularisers of modern physics do not seriously connect its laws and hypotheses with orthodox Christian theology. Her real, if poorly articulated, complaint is that physics alienates women by its tendency to slide into philosophy.

Despite various acknowledgments of private discussions and correspondence with her sister, a professional philosopher, Wertheim appears to have a distaste for philosophical attempts at understanding and to attribute the same distaste to other women. She does not appear to accept that there might be a legitimate area of inquiry lying beyond the limits of empirical science—though taking into account well-established scientific theory—yet not identified with the teachings of religious authorities. The entirety of analytical philosophy, especially metaphysics and philosophy of religion, is something that she has difficulty even naming. When she does refer to efforts at inquiry in these areas, she sounds decidedly hostile.

This note also comes out in her defence of the Church's treatment of Galileo, which she attempts to justify on the basis that Galileo had no incontrovertible proof of the heliocentric theory. To some extent, Wertheim's approach is a legitimate corrective to the usual hagiography about Galileo. At least by its own lights, the Church acted intelligently and leniently, while Galileo displayed a touch of duplicity and arrogance. Yet, Wertheim cannot appreciate that Galileo had cogent grounds for believing in the heliocentric theory, grounds that fell short of "proof", certainly, but were based on a more rationally convincing linkage with empirical observation than were arguments for an Earth-centred universe.

Her attitude to rational inquiry beyond the strict bounds of what can be empirically settled leads her into a total rejection of philosophy of religion and to a New Age approach to the relationship of religion and science. This is epitomised by her cloying pronouncement that "there are many different ways of knowing".

Wertheim's distaste for philosophical, especially metaphysical, thought is evident in her antagonism toward the building of high-energy particle accelerators to test the most fundamental theories of physics, those which drift closest to the domain of metaphysics. Let me confess that, given the many other worthy demands on government revenue, I have some sympathy for limiting the public expenditure that can be lavished on particular research proposals. But Wertheim never considers the possibility of economic and social benefits from pumping money into the innovative milieux that should accompany giant scientific projects. More importantly, she is sufficiently interested in particle physics to wish that it could be done cheaply, but is out of sympathy with the urge to find deeper explanations of natural events, explanations that push on into a zone where ideas from physics and metaphysics can fraternise.

Wertheim seems to believe that women in general share her sensibility. Thus her argument about why women choose not to study physics might actually be strengthened by data suggesting that they prefer conventional religious beliefs and traditions to the philosophical consideration of issues such as space, time, causation and deity. She could then argue that the historical dominance of physics by men has given it a metaphysical tinge of a kind that women find alienating.

I hesitate to reconstruct Wertheim's thesis in this way because she never develops it in such steps or with such terminology, though it would have been easy and obvious to do so. Yet, this is the most plausible version I can offer of what she might mean. Her numerous references to the "quasi-religious" aspect of physics could thus be read as referring simply to the inevitable dialogue between scientists inquiring into the basic laws of physical nature and philosophers speculating about metaphysical questions. That, however, would be a far less sensational way than the ones she has chosen to express her dislike of contemporary physics.

Assume for the moment that Wertheim is onto something. Once the issue is stated in clearer terms, the question is not whether physics can have its metaphysical growths removed, as if by a cosmetic surgeon, to make it more attractive to women. Rather, how can we encourage more women to be interested in the rational study of metaphysical questions that confront and fascinate every society, but have become more complex, technical and scientifically informed in our own?

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Is Wertheim onto something, or not?

However, we interpret the main thesis of Pythagoras' Trousers, one thing is obvious. The book provides no relevant data, one way or the other, that might tell us whether women actually are more or less religious than men, or whether they are more or less comfortable with metaphysical inquiry outside the boundaries of traditional religious belief. Wertheim does suggest that women identify more with their bodies than do men. In doing so, she relies in part on the preoccupation that they are expected to have with their personal appearance. But this is so tenuous an argument as to be risible.

She also uses the well-worn fact that Pythagoras and various male ascetics through history have identified women with, in effect, the temptations of the flesh. Viewed by modern eyes, this kind of misogyny is grossly unfair and transparently hypocritical, but it is certainly not evidence that women really are less attracted than men to belief in one or other kind of supernatural or metaphysical realm. Arguments like this are no substitute for solid data; without it, the thesis of the book seems like someone talking through her Pythagorean hat.

It's not as if there are no alternative explanations for the low participation of women in physics. Most obviously, as Wertheim herself states, "there continues to be a widespread belief that math is an inherently male activity and that men's minds are innately more suited to mathematical thinking than women's." I am glad to say that Pythagoras' Trousers contains some effective argument as to why this "widespread belief" is false, but even a false pattern of beliefs can exercise enormous influence on the way people are treated and the choices that they make. In addition, there was a history of exclusion of women from institutions of higher learning until well into this century, and it is certainly plausible that women experience difficulty breaking into areas that have traditionally been dominated by men, with entrenched cultures of male bonding and networking. On the face of things, all this provides a cluster of interrelated explanations as to why there are still so few female physicists, especially at high levels of the academy.

However, the genuinely challenging point that Wertheim makes is that women have been taking their place in the discipline of mathematics much more quickly than in physics, although the same factors should be operating. Thus, some additional explanation seems required. I expect, however, that the extra explanation is more likely to emerge from the work of a competent economist with skills in labour market analysis and similar areas than from speculations about whether women are repelled by disciplines with a "quasi-religious" character.

It would be interesting to know whether the discipline of physics is growing or declining in terms of student load, academic job vacancies, and vacancies in the labour market outside of academia. Whatever the answer, is there a consistent pattern in different countries? What about in the different geographical areas of the US? If the labour market for physicists is strong in some places, is this largely related to military research? Is there a relatively steady state of physics professors, compared with maths professors in the US, so that younger scientists who are slightly more likely to be women can't break in? Does a combination of effects create a situation where there are fewer role models for women in physics than in other sciences?

I don't know the answers, though I do know that physics is a discipline that has been faring poorly in attracting student preferences in Australia. The problem is that Wertheim, who has written a book largely devoted to this subject, does not seem to know many answers either. Yet, I cannot see how anyone could have an intelligent discussion about the relative participation of women in particular scientific disciplines without first conducting a thorough analysis of this kind. However interesting Wertheim's history of scientific ideas may be, it is no substitute for competent research on the scientific labour market.

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Whatever its faults, though, Pythagoras' Trousers is a more substantial work than The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace. Among the criticisms that can be made of the latter are its broken-backed structure. The author discusses medieval and Renaissance poets and visual artists, with no sustained account of the systematic thinkers of the time, theologians and philosophers, except for a relatively brief account of Nicholas of Cusa. Aquinas is not indexed or mentioned, despite his overwhelming importance as a Christian thinker in his day and since, one who developed sophisticated views about space, time and deity. Later in the book, by contrast, considerable detail is given to Newton, Kepler, Kant, Einstein and Hubble.

Furthermore, many specific criticisms could be made of the author's understanding of the history of ideas. To take just one example, I was surprised to see the claim that Descartes grounded reality in thought—a very shaky half-truth, even on the most charitable reading, since Descartes did not develop a philosophy of metaphysical idealism. Admittedly, he grounded knowledge of reality in his belief in a non-deceiving God; God's existence, in turn, was proved from the famous Cartesian starting point, the philosopher's inescapable awareness of his own thinking. However, a world of difference lies between this Cartesian epistemology and an idealist ontology. After reading The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, I suspect that Wertheim has only a foggy notion of any such distinctions.

However, I want to reserve my main criticisms for what I see as the book's key structural unit, chapter seven, entitled "Cyber Soul-Space". Like Pythagoras' Trousers, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace is historical in its approach, but the main title shows Wertheim's focus, which is on cyberspace as a technological heaven or a substitute for one, and it is in chapter seven that she attempts to unmask and challenge that idea. However, the chapter's thirty-odd pages contain only an elementary and naive critique of the cyberpunk fiction and transhumanist philosophy that are its author's main targets.

Unfortunately, Wertheim is not merely alienated by philosophical thinking—she is simply not very good at it. When she tries to take on the cyberpunks and transhumanists, she is out of her depth. The situation is not helped by her seeming ignorance of the most important work that she needs to examine. Take her knowledge of cyberpunk fiction, with its emphasis on postulated computational technologies that are supposed to interact with, augment or even replace the human brain. Once Wertheim tries to think beyond the early work of William Gibson, the most famous of the cyberpunk writers and the most stylistically brilliant, her account seems arbitrary. For example, she discusses an important early piece by Vernor Vinge, but does not mention his major fiction and non-fiction work of the 1990s, which has made him a transhumanist icon.

Unforgivably, she appears to have no knowledge of Greg Egan, an Australian author who is the most respected of the new crop of post-cyberpunks who have deepened and extended the early speculations of Gibson, Vinge, Bruce Sterling and others. Egan is far more steeped in real philosophy than Wertheim, and his fictional thought experiments are more intellectually productive than Wertheim's expressions of unearned scorn.

It should be acknowledged at this point that the ideas which Wertheim has chosen to attack in The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace only have to be stated to sound totally outlandish in any event, despite their increasing popularity among people with computer science backgrounds. Her main target is the idea that intelligent beings could exist purely in cyberspace, and that those beings might well be us, with our minds and selves "uploaded" onto immensely powerful futuristic computer hardware. Many people find this proposal so transparently absurd that they will not even countenance it.

Fair enough. Once such ideas are given serious contemplation, however, they need to be attacked or defended with serious arguments. This is something Wertheim is unable to do. For example, she is unable to keep in focus just what she is attacking. Let me explain this.

At one point, she describes what she sees as a paradox, that cyberpunk writers have imagined an existence in cyberspace which also includes bodily sensation. She goes so far as to say that the cyberspace enthusiast "wants his cake and to eat it too—to enjoy the pleasures of the physical body, but without any of its weaknesses or restrictions." Of course, Wertheim may be correct in her implicit and explicit statements that we will never have technology so powerful that it can simulate bodily sensations in cyberspace, but there is nothing paradoxical about wishing to develop such technology. Only someone dogmatically committed to the idea that all this is impossible would describe it as wanting to "have your cake and eat it too". It is, in fact, easy to imagine what would be involved. There is nothing contradictory about it; it is only a question of what will prove to be feasible with future technologies.

At this point of Wertheim's argument, she has made it reasonably clear that William Gibson and various others have imagined people being uploaded into computer hardware and immersed in the simulation of a full range of sensory experiences. Yet she states a couple of pages later that she "cannot imagine a worse fate than being downloaded into immortality in cyberspace", adding that she does not know what anyone would do in "cyber-eternity", since "There are only so many times you can read the complete works of Dante or Shakespeare or Einstein". These comments are as bizarre as her approach to the Bible. She has already shown us that what is being postulated is not some attenuated existence reading Dante and learning new languages, but a life rich in sensory experience, activity and company. It is one thing to doubt that the technology to simulate all this in virtual reality will ever be possible—again, fair enough. This is something else. It isn't even the scorpion of irrationalism; it is the twisting serpent of distortion.

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More fundamentally, I do not see how any progress can be made by a thinker who has failed to come to grips with so much important material. As I've mentioned, she has not read Egan or any of the other important post-cyberpunk writers. Nor is she familiar with the most significant philosophical writings that might illuminate the issues. It really is extraordinary that someone can attempt to debate the issue of whether computer consciousness is possible without analysing the arguments of John Searle and his critics. I also find it astonishing that someone could tackle the issue of whether the self could survive a transition to cyberspace, without coming to terms with Derek Parfit's enormously important work on the notion of the self . . . not to mention his philosophical critics. Yet, neither Searle nor Parfit is even mentioned in The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace; nor do the real arguments get any consideration.

At one stage, Wertheim does comment briefly on three important contemporary philosophers of mind, Daniel Dennett and Paul and Patricia Churchland. I quote the relevant passage in full to show how unsatisfactory it is:

It would, indeed, not be surprising if Dennett or austere computationalist philosophers such the Churchlands were scoffing about the half-baked concept of "self-space" (or, even worse, that of "cyber soul-space").

At one point, Wertheim refers disparagingly to what she calls "rampant materialist monism", and she makes it clear that she is opposed to scientific materialist accounts of nature and the mind. Though she writes as if she knows all about "materialistic monism" (at least of the rampant sort) and "Cartesian dualism", she displays no understanding of the complex array of views currently on offer about the mind and the self. Full-blown Cartesian dualism asserted that the mind or soul was a substantial but non-material entity, able to exist independently of any physical substrate. It is now difficult to find anybody who believes anything like this, though Wertheim herself may, since she specifically claims that mental states cannot be reduced to the operation of fundamental physical laws: "reality is not reducible to the laws of physics. Love, hate, fear, jealousy, delight, and rage—none of these can be accounted for by hyperspace equations."

But does she really believe, despite the evidence, that love, hate, fear and the rest could exist in a disembodied realm, outside the operation of the brain's neurophysiology? Or is she asserting the relatively modest thesis that these things could not be predicted from physical laws without additional knowledge of the circumstances in which mental states will "supervene" on the material? The latter position, which is more or less that of David Chalmers, is quite consistent with the belief that mental states are entirely and systematically dependent on complex physical events. More tellingly, it is also consistent with the possibility that mental states could be associated with events in non-biological systems such as computer hardware.

Wertheim's failure to understand the variety and subtlety of contemporary philosophical positions leads to serious errors such as the following:

It is nothing of the sort. An idea something like this is most likely to be held by someone who follows Derek Parfit in totally rejecting the existence of an immaterial entity such as the soul or the ego. If the self is merely a bundle of mental states that supervene on neurophysiological activity, it tempting to say that I would survive, as much as I ever do, if a set of mental states psychologically connected and continuous with mine could be "run" on a computer. By the way, it is not true that computer code is more "ephemeral" than the particular activities and configurations of the brain's neurons. On the contrary, computer code is easier to preserve. In a review of The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, Damien Broderick suggests that Wertheim means "ethereal", but this makes only slightly better sense.

I've already suggested that is difficult to find any philosopher who believes that a self or mind could exist without some physical substrate. The more interesting issue, one that divides Searle and Chalmers, is whether the physiology of the brain has unique properties that can sustain consciousness, or whether other forms of matter, configured in sufficiently complex ways, can do likewise. To interpret the latter view—that of Chalmers, but also that of Dennett and the Churchlands—as a repudiation of "rampant materialist monism" is confused rhetoric or wishful thinking.

Because she does not understand any of this, Wertheim hands out simplistic labels such as "materialism" and "dualism", as if such labelling were a respectable way of debunking someone's position. Indeed, much of her approach to intellectual argument is to try to discredit by association, pointing out resemblances or historical continuities between contemporary ideas and some of those put forward in the past by the likes of Pythagoras or Francis Bacon. Whether this practice is the scorpion of irrationalism or the serpent of distortion, it is not a legitimate way of responding to ideas that have moved on from their historical precursors and origins.

Despite the strengths of her work with which I began this article, much more is required of Wertheim if she is to be taken seriously by her opponents. As matters stand, she has little of substance to contribute to contemporary debates about physics, philosophy and cyberspace.

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