Journeyman Philosopher

Schrodinger’s philosophy (absolutely nothing to do with cats)

2009-11-15T12:19:00.030+11:00

I mentioned in my last post, a recent acquisition: What is Life by Erwin Schrodinger. This is a book that I’d heard about on more than a few occasions, so expectations were high, and I can honestly say it doesn’t disappoint. It says a lot that the copy I have is the eighteenth edition published in 2008, and it was originally published in 1944.

It started off as a series of lectures for the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at Trinity College, Dublin in February 1943. He then added an epilogue, On Determinism and Free Will. This segues into another essay (book really) called Mind and Matter which is another set of lectures delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1956. The collection is bookended by a one-page Forward written by Roger Penrose in 1991, and Autobiographical Sketches, written as a virtual appendix by Schrodinger himself in November 1960.

Erwin Schrodinger is most famously known for the set of equations that bear his name, formulated in 1925/6 and for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1933. They are the fundamental equations for quantum mechanics, arguably no less important than Einstein’s equations of relativity that I discussed in my previous post.

This collection is essentially a book on philosophy, that starts off by explaining the role of statistics in physics, then the role of quantum mechanics in evolutionary biology, then a philosophical discourse on mind that leads to a discussion on religion and finally epistemology. It’s a slim volume, a little over 150 pages long (leaving aside his autobiographical sketches). Yet I would recommend that all philosophers and students of philosophy should read it. To quote Paul Davies on the back cover:

“In these little books [Schrodinger] set down … most of the great conceptual issues that confront the scientist who would attempt to unravel the mysteries of life. This combined volume should be compulsory reading for all students…”

According to Penrose’s Forward, this book influenced J.B.S. Haldane and Francis Crick. Considering that it’s over 60 years old and was written before the discovery of DNA, it gives a remarkable insight into the role of mutations in evolutionary biology. Not only that, but Schrodinger explains the role of quantum mechanics in creating mutations. But he begins by explaining how virtually all of physics is statistical, giving examples ranging from Brownian motion, to the physics of magnetism, to radioactivity. His salient point is that, in each of these cases, no one can say when an individual element (atom) might change or react, but statistically they all follow strict mathematical rules. This is a mystery that struck me when I studied physics in high school, and here is a Nobel Prize winning physicist confirming what I thought then: it’s a facet of nature that defies our intuitive logic yet it’s been proven in virtually every arena of physics. We can’t predict the outcome of an individual element but we can predict the overall outcome with preternatural accuracy. He also explains the role of scale: the magnitude of numerical atoms or molecules that make up the smallest physical entities, which is what gives statistical power to many of nature’s dynamics.

Schrodinger then addresses the fundamentals that make life unique, including the fact that every cell contains the ‘code’, effectively the ‘blueprint’ that determines every facet of an organism like us. Remember, this is decades before the structure of DNA was discovered, yet Schrodinger explains how ‘isomers’ can create a code analogous to the way Morse code can be created by just dots and dashes, and this code determines how a life form functions, appears and grows.

His book is full of these little treasures – so obvious when he points them out – yet never really contemplated by most of us. One name that keeps appearing throughout this volume is Ludwig Boltzman, whom Schrodinger considered of no less significant to our knowledge of physics than Planck or Einstein. He explains the contribution that Boltzman made to thermodynamics, and entropy in particular, including the simple mathematical equation that encapsulates it. He also explains the role this has on the ‘arrow of time’. Few people appreciate that entropy determines the direction of time in physics, not relativity nor quantum mechanics. This was first pointed out to me by Penrose, in his book The Emperor’s New Mind. But Schrodinger covers it better still (only in the second part on Mind). He explains it by evoking statistical outcomes and the very simple analogy of shuffling a pack of cards. How many times would you need to shuffle a pack to get it in the right order. In effect this is entropy, and it’s like trying to reorganise the molecules of a broken egg to return it to its unbroken state.

On the subject of life and entropy, he addresses the fact that life alone seems to defy the second law of thermodynamics (actually, it doesn’t, otherwise we wouldn’t die). Nevertheless, life has a dynamism unlike non-organic molecular structures that defies our intuition. Schrodinger introduces the term, ‘negative entropy’, to explain how organisms increase the entropy of the environment; effectively the expense they impose for keeping themselves alive, whether they be primates like us, or bees, or trees in a forest.

In his short treatise on Determinism and Free Will, which he writes as an ‘Epilogue’ to the first set of lectures, he ventures, without apology, into the metaphysical, and acknowledges an influence by Aldous Huxley, specifically his The Perennial Philosophy. Early in this essay he says: “…I wish to emphasize that in my opinion , and contrary to the opinion upheld in some quarters, quantum indeterminancy plays no biological relevant role … except perhaps by enhancing their purely accidental character in such events as meiosis, natural and X-ray-induced mutation and so on…”

I find this a strange declaration, since he had just elaborated at length on the role of quantum mechanics in mutations, which are the causal factors in evolutionary biology, with natural selection being nature’s scythe so to speak. In the previous passage to the one quoted, Schrodinger emphasises that quantum mechanics is ‘statistico-deterministic’, which means that determinism is not completely eliminated by quantum phenomena as many people seem to believe. However, mutations are purely chance and, importantly, rare events, which Schrodinger explains in detail in the body of his lectures, so biological evolution is far from deterministic at its root cause.

It’s impossible in the space I’ve allotted myself here, to do justice to Schrodinger’s book, but whilst it’s full of gems from the opening pages, it’s towards the end that it becomes truly philosophical. Schrodinger tackles the problem of mind in a way that one rarely finds. For a start, he points out that we tend to ignore ‘the elephant in the room’, though, of course, he doesn’t use that phrase, whereby it’s only through mind that the universe has any meaning at all. And that, when we examine the universe - exactly in the way he has throughout the book - we effectively pretend that mind is not part of it. I’ve attempted to address this myself in a previous post on Subjectivity: The Mind's I (June 09). Schrodinger uses the term ‘objectivation’ which he’s obviously coined himself to highlight this point. He alludes to religion (specifically the Eastern religion of the Upanishads) by postulating that there is ‘one mind’ not many, without which the universe would not exist, not because it requires a God to create it, but because, there would be no reason for it to exist without mind. I may not be doing him justice here, so I would beg you read his words yourself, but that’s how I interpret him. I can actually see his point, and I’ve made similar arguments myself: without consciousness there is no point to the universe at all. I need to point out, by the way, that Schrodinger rejected orthodox religion early in his life, and he makes almost no reference to God, except, at one point, to acknowledge: "when God is experienced.. he must be missing in the space-time picture" just like our minds are.

He talks at length about 3 philosophers he considers significant: Plato, Kant and Einstein, all relating to epistemology. In regard to Plato, he gives easy-to-follow examples in both geometry and arithmetic to demonstrate “...true relations whose truth is not only unassailable, but is obviously there forever; the relations held and will hold irrespective of our inquiry into them. A mathematical truth is timeless, it does not come into being when we discover it.”

Then he proceeds to Kant, giving one of the best accounts I’ve read concerning Kant’s controversial views on space and time, which leads to the discussion on the ‘arrow of time’ (and Boltzman’s resolution that I referenced earlier). “He [Kant] would show plainly that space was necessarily infinite and believed firmly that it was in the nature of the human mind to endow it with the geometrical properties summarized by Euclid.”

This leads to Einstein who revealed that space and time are not independent as Kant thought, and is not Euclidean either. However, Schrodinger makes the following point: “Einstein has not – as you sometimes hear – given the lie to Kant’s deep thoughts on the idealization of space and time; he has, on the contrary, made a step towards its accomplishment.”

I’m not sure I agree with Schrodinger on this particular point. Space and time do exist outside the human mind – in fact, space-time is arguably the very fabric of the universe – which, on the surface, does put the lie to Kant’s interpretation as I’ve read it in his Critique of Pure Reason. Having said that, Schrodinger does argue that it is only mind that sees time as past, present and future, and that is an insight that is undeniable as it is obvious. It brings us back to the question: what meaning does the universe have without mind? Einstein showed that time is (relativistically) dependent on the observer, and to that extent, one could say relativity theory supports Kant’s contention of time being internal.

Lastly, Schrodinger touches on a point that is at once obvious, yet rarely, if ever, contemplated, which he calls: “The Mystery of the Sensual Qualities”. In particular, he discusses colour and sound, and he discusses both of them in depth, explaining that, whilst they are both frequency-dependent, the means in which we perceive them and they are propagated are entirely different. For example, colours of quite different frequencies can be mixed to produce a new colour of a frequency that is identical to a single colour of the same frequency and we can’t sense the difference. On the other hand, when sounds of different frequencies are mixed, as in music, we have no trouble in delineating them. But that’s not the main point he is making. The main point is that, whilst we can perform experiments with instruments to give ‘objective’ analysis of colours and sounds, we can’t objectively identify the sensing of them – that is entirely a ‘subjective’ affair. I’ve made this point myself in other posts. It’s why I argue that AI will never ‘sense’ colours and sounds like we do. In fact, it’s why I argue that AI will never have ‘mind’. Schrodinger argues this point better than any other author I’ve read. Of course, he makes no mention of AI, even though Turing had already set that ball rolling in Schrodinger’s own time.

In his autobiographical notes, Schrodinger explains how he learnt English (from an Aunt) even before he had learnt to write German. (He also mentions in passing that his mother’s Aunt had ‘six Angora cats’, which is the only reference to cats in the entire volume.) He was conscripted in the first World War, but spent World War 2 in Dublin; in fact, from 1939 through to 1956, for which he considered himself very fortunate. He called it “My Long Exile, but without the bitter association of the word, as it was a wonderful time.”

Schrodinger’s transcribed lectures are provocative, erudite and articulate. He makes you think deeply about topics and philosophical issues that are common place yet are fundamentally and inexplicably profound. It is one of the best philosophical books I’ve read and I’m surprised it’s not a prescribed text, though perhaps it is in some parts of the world. I know I will read it again.

Many people, in fact most, whether they be scientists, philosophers or theologians, will disagree with Schrodinger. But that’s not the point. The point is that he makes you think about issues you believe you have resolved when you almost certainly haven’t.

Einstein’s Code and Kerr’s Solution

2009-11-08T15:17:00.020+11:00

When I started this blog, over 2 years ago now, I never anticipated picking up ‘followers’ and now I feel the need to maintain some sort of standard. For those who do follow this blog, it is obvious that I don’t comment on a regular basis (although I do on other people’s blogs) but that I only write when something especially attracts my attention. It’s becoming increasingly a blog where I want to share rare intellectual discoveries rather than express my opinions, though I do that as well.

Two recent such discoveries, are Cracking the Einstein Code by Fulvio Melia and What is Life by Erwin Schrodinger. The second book is a classic that I’ve wanted to read for a long time, while the first was an unexpected discovery. This post will focus on Melia’s book, subtitled, Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics, and Schrodinger’s tome will probably be a subject for a future post.

Melia’s book is largely concerned with a little-known aspect of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (yes, it deserves capitals): a Kiwi called Roy Kerr, in 1963, unlocked the code inherent in Einstein’s 6 field equations that gave a description of space-time for a rotating body, which is the normal reality for massive bodies in the universe, from planets like ours to entire galaxies.

Now I need to say at the start, that whilst I write on esoteric topics, my knowledge is limited in the extreme, unlike the authors whom I read. Anyone following recent comments on this blog will notice that a generous intellect, called Timmo, has made critical comments on 2 of my former posts (Quantum Tunneling, Oct. 09 and Nature's Layers of Reality, May 09). I wish to acknowledge Timmo’s contribution and I welcome someone who really does know what they’re talking about when it comes to physics.

What I especially like about Melia’s account is that he acknowledges all the other people who contributed to the success of relativity theory (specifically, the General Theory), most of whom I’d never heard of. Like many people, I thought that Einstein’s theory had come effectively fully-fledged from his own mind. I wasn’t aware that there was a history of significant contributions from its conception right up to 1963, almost a decade after Einstein’s death.

Firstly, there is David Hilbert (who is extraordinarily famous in mathematics) and who had a correspondence with Einstein and helped him to develop his field equations. In fact, according to Melia, Hilbert actually published the equations on 20 November 1915, 5 days before Einstein, which led to an argument over priority. However, Einstein wrote a letter of reconciliation on 20 December in the same year, which Melia quotes from.

But even Hilbert “could not overcome a serious problem – how to demonstrate that energy is conserved in Einstein’s theory.” From a conceptual point of view, this had always troubled me about relativity, and it wasn’t until I read Feynman’s account in Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, that I believe I understood it. What I didn’t know, before reading Melia’s account, is that a woman, Emmy Noether, who worked with Hilbert at Gottingen University, was the one who resolved this issue by introducing symmetries in connection with conservation laws, specifically conservation of momentum and energy. To paraphrase Melia, Newton’s second law relates changes in momentum to a force; Noether’s Theorem shows how a change in our frame of reference and Newton’s second law are effectively the same thing. (Different frames of reference refer to different observers moving about at different velocities – with no absolute frame of reference, conservation of energy and momentum becomes an issue.)

Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is premised on the ‘Principle of Equivalence’. Standing in a stationary elevator car in earth’s gravity is equivalent to being accelerated in an elevator car ‘vertically’ in gravity-free space (vertical, in this context, means being pulled from above our heads so our feet are pressed against the floor of the car). Gravity is felt as a force, by us on earth, only because we are stopped from falling. In free fall, no one feels a force being exerted on them, whether they are in a space ship orbiting the earth or jumping off a cliff. This is the key conceptual point to grasp about Einstein’s theory of gravity (which is the General Theory of Relativity). In free fall there is no force, even though this is counter-intuitive when you are earth-bound, because we rarely experience free-fall for any meaningful period of time without dying.

I don’t claim to understand Noether’s Theorem, but I understand its significance. Noether died relatively young in America at age 53, 2 years after escaping Nazi Germany, and Einstein wrote a moving tribute to her in the New York Times (1935). Melia quotes physicists, Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill, from their book, Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe: “..certainly one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics…” And I had never even heard of her.

Likewise, I’d never heard of Roy Kerr before reading Melia’s book, yet his contribution to relativistic physics is arguably no less significant. According to Melia, Kerr’s Theorem is the fundamental methodology used to investigate black holes (theoretically) to this day.

Kerr completed his undergraduate course at Canterbury University in Christchurch NZ (enrolling at the age of 16 and going straight into 3^rd year mathematics). Canterbury is also where Ernest Rutherford started his academic career (Rutherford uncovered the secrets of the atom: that it was mostly empty space, amongst other things). Kerr then went on to Cambridge to study pure mathematics. His doctoral thesis supervisor was Professor Philip Hall, “one of the century’s greatest mathematicians”, according to Melia, and “Britain’s greatest algebraist”. Hall realised that Kerr’s abilities were singularly impressive but his knowledge incomplete. He set him 3 problems in ‘group theory’, including the ‘Axiom of Choice’, which is a fundamental component of ‘set theory’. Kerr dealt with this and the second problem with relative ease, but the third problem, called the ‘Burnside Conjecture’ was beyond him. Following his admission of defeat, Hall apparently lectured him on the subject for an hour but didn’t tell him that the problem had never been solved. In fact, a decade later, someone managed to prove that the conjecture was false by counterexample.

Unaware of this (at the time), Kerr decided that pure mathematics wasn’t his forte and so went into applied mathematics instead, specifically relativistic physics. It is well known (amongst people who take an interest in physics) that Karl Schwarzschild was the first to provide a solution to Einstein’s field equations for the simplest, idealised scenario of a completely symmetrical sphere in a vacuum. He was a Professor of Potsdam University but formulated his solution whilst serving on the Russian front in WW1. He became ill soon after and died after returning home, but his name remains forever associated with black holes, which are a natural theoretical consequence of his solution.

Kerr’s solution (known as Kerr’s Theorem) was not realised until 1963 when he was at the University of Texas, Austin, which had major ramifications for relativistic physics, in particular black hole physics, that are still with us today. Kerr’s monumental breakthrough was overshadowed by the discovery of quasars, a source of radio waves of unprecedented energy. In 1963, the Parkes radio telescope (in Australia) was used to employ a method postulated by British astronomer, Cyril Hazard. His method was simple but ingenious: to use the moon eclipsing the radio signal to exactly pinpoint the source in the night sky. This allowed astronomers to locate the ‘light’ source of the radio waves and thus use spectroscopy to determine its distance from us.

Spectroscopy analyses the exact wavelengths of light emitted by a distant star, and from the Doppler shift we are able to determine how fast they retreat from us and thus how far away they are. There is a direct proportional relationship between how fast stars retreat and how far away they are using Hubble’s constant, named after Edwin Hubble who first discovered this phenomenon.

The first quasar, 3C273, was discovered by Maarten Schmidt at the Palomar Observatory in California, but because they were only seen as radio sources, spectroscopic analysis was not possible until a light source could be found to be directly associated with the radio source. Hence Hazard’s brilliant idea, subsequently employed at Parkes, to pinpoint quasar 3C273. And it was Schmidt who did the spectroscopic analysis, revealing that the light was red-shifted by an enormous 16% making it much further away then anyone had imagined.

During the 1960s, Australia was at the forefront of radio astronomy, and I remember in 1966, when satellites first linked up to produce the world’s first global televised transmission, the Beatles sang All You Need is Love to a worldwide audience simultaneously. Australia’s major contribution was to show the furthest known object in the universe being tracked by the Parkes’ radio telescope. This telescope featured in the movie The Dish, an Australian-made comedy starring another Kiwi, Sam Neill, which was a comedic rendition of Parkes’ role in broadcasting the first pictures from the moon landing in 1969. It also played a role in the Apollo 13 rescue mission, being the means to communicate the time to fire its retro rockets which allowed the astronauts to return to earth rather than bouncing off the atmosphere or diving too deep and burning up. The angle of descent was critical to their survival, and the ‘dish’ played a small, and little-known, but crucial role. (Unlike the rest of this exposition, nothing in this paragraph comes from Melia's book)

The curious aspect of Schmidt’s discovery is that, at the very first Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics in 1963, Kerr gave a 10minute lecture on his Theorem, which was virtually ignored because all the participants were far more interested in the recently discovered quasar. Yet Kerr’s Theorem gave the only relativistic solution to spinning black holes, which is exactly what quasars are.

Melia is meticulous in his coverage of all the people who contributed to our understanding of relativistic physics, both theoretically and experimentally. Not only the well known ones like Karl Schwarzschild, John Wheeler, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking, but unknown heroes like Noether and Kerr. He also mentions an Australian, Brandon Carter, who used Kerr’s Theorem to show that a ‘time loop’ (or 'time machine') could theoretically be generated beyond the event horizon of a rotating black hole. (But it only works in a vacuum, which makes it a catch-22 time machine.)

The significance of Kerr’s solution is that every significant physical body we know of in the universe is rotating, so Schwarzschild’s solution would almost certainly never be applicable to reality. Kerr’s solution reveals that there are, in fact, 2 event horizons for a rotating black hole. The event horizon is where the escape velocity from a black hole becomes the speed of light so nothing can escape from it. But a spinning black hole literally drags space-time around with it, which creates an inner and outer event horizon – don’t worry, I don’t understand it either. When a body crosses the first event horizon, the parameters of space and time are reversed: space becomes time-like and time becomes space-like. This is because time freezes at the event horizon for an outside observer and the external time becomes infinite from the inside. Time becomes space-like in that it becomes static and infinite, if I interpret it correctly. When an object crosses the second event horizon they reverse again so that ‘inside’ a spinning black hole, space and time become theoretically normal again. Of course, no one knows how true this really is. The other problem is that these theoretical considerations all assume a vacuum which is not the case if something is actually ‘crossing over’. To this day, there are no solutions to Einstein’s field equations for a non-vacuum – that is, for example, inside an object like the earth or the sun – only for outside in space.

That effectively is the limit of my understanding of this subject, even after reading Melia’s book. The story of Kerr himself is no less interesting. One gets the impression that, despite his obvious talents, he was not cut out for high level academia. He did not publish everything he uncovered, and he was not competitive in the sense that he sought to outdo his rivals at every opportunity, nor was he one for self-promotion. He left America in 1971 to take up a position of Head of Mathematics in the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. After his close friend and associate, Alfred Schild, died in 1977, Kerr virtually stopped visiting the US. He received the Hughes Medal from the Royal Society in 1984, the highest accolade he has received.

Roy Kerr writes his own afterward in Fulvio Melia’s book (they are good friends), in which he talks about the difficulties in attempting to get the advanced education he badly needed in 1950s New Zealand. But after going to Cambridge in the UK and the University of Texas in Austin, he believes he was fortunate in that he never had any mentors, as they would have undoubtedly led him away from the path that led to his groundbreaking discovery.

Watching Watchmen

2009-10-11T12:44:00.016+11:00

Yes, I know it was released over 6 months ago, but I’ve just seen it. I don’t normally review movies on this blog – in fact, I’ve only done it once before: Man on Wire (refer The philosophy of Philippe Petit, Oct. 08), and that’s a completely different kettle of cinematic and philosophical fish.

But Watchmen is such a good movie on so many levels, and it encapsulates so much of the American psyche, especially the not-so-recent paranoia of the Cold War, as well as our universal infatuation with violence. And the cinematic references: Apocalypse Now and Dr. Strangelove being the most obvious; both relevant to the cold war era. I am an outsider, regarding America, so my perspective may be different to those who imbibe and live its culture every day.

In Australia it got great reviews, with one notable exception: Evan Williams panned it for its gross glorification of violence as he saw it. Even the pacifists in this movie seem to thrive on violence. One can’t help but compare it to Sin City, which is an iconic movie for technical reasons rather than story content, not to mention a stellar cast. It was clearly influenced by Quentin Tarantino, whereas Watchmen probably owes more to the Matrix trilogy. But both films explore the moral landscape and both are based on comic books or graphic novels. It seems that this genre is becoming increasingly obsessed with violence, with a particular emphasis on the ‘graphic’ in graphic novel, and this is reflected in the movie renditions of the same.

I think the violence in movies has had one tragic consequence in real life. In the last 5 years, in Australia, there has been an increase in alcohol-fueled street violence with people receiving life-long and life-losing injuries. I think movies portray an unrealistic expectation that you can belt the crap out of someone and only inflict superficial injuries. In the case of super-heroes, the story can justify it, but the violence is part of the entertainment in these movies – it doesn’t really condemn it the way we do in real life. Cinema has replaced the Roman gladiators without the leftover corpses upsetting our sense of fun.

One of the characters in the movie, The Comedian, is quite literally a psychopath, yet he is clearly tolerated by his brethren because he’s on the side of 'good'. He is an allegory for the darker side of the American psyche, in particular, what Dick Cheney referred to as the ‘dark side’ of foreign operations. There is a scene in a bar in Vietnam where The Comedian shoots a pregnant woman, apparently pregnant with his child, but first he delivers a diatribe on why he hates her country, even though he’s supposed to be there to ‘help’ it.

Back in America, he continues the same psychopathic behaviour towards what he sees as America’s internal enemies. The Comedian pretty well encapsulates the contradictions that the rest of us wrestle with when we observe the dialectic in America between extreme right wing and liberal politics that inevitably overflows onto the global stage.

I’ve said in a previous post on Storytelling (Jul.09) that comic books are our equivalent to Greek mythology, and, like all mythology, allegory should be its core ingredient. In this regard, I felt Watchmen doesn’t disappoint, especially with the character, Doctor Manhattan. Named after the Manhattan project (as the movie reveals for those who don’t make the connection) which effectively ended WWII with the construction and deployment of the atomic bomb.

One of the advantages of reviewing a film so long after its release is I don’t feel guilty about giving away the ending. Doctor Manhattan effectively becomes an allegory for God, especially when it’s his ability to destroy on a cataclysmic, even biblical, scale that finally achieves world peace. This is a particularly pessimistic view of humanity, exemplified by the Bible in my view. We are inherently self-destructive by nature and only a fear of a superhuman (therefore supernatural) force can stop us from achieving our genetically determined destiny (in biblical terms, original sin). So, in a way, it’s a cautionary tale – but the moral of the tale in my view is that paranoia is what will lead to our self-annihilation and not Divine vengeance.

There are 2 things that make Watchmen an exceptional movie. Firstly, it’s cinematic rendering is close to perfect. A combination of film noir and graphic realisation that sets the standard above anything else I’ve seen, including The Matrix and Sin City. But it’s the rendering of the characters that really sets this movie above the norm for comic book movies. The romance between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre is completely believable. Only Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns compares in the genre and Singer is a master storyteller. But all the characters, in particular, the deeply, psychically wounded Rorschach, have a psychological depth one doesn’t expect in these movies. Again, I would reference Singer’s original X-Men as one of the few comparable movies in the genre, and of course Heath Ledger’s memorable rendition of The Joker in The Dark Knight.

But it’s as allegory for the American psyche, in all its contradictions, that I feel this movie delivers. It competes with Apocalypse Now and Dr. Strangelove on that level, both of which it unashamedly honours, and that’s the highest praise I can give it.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the soundtrack - from Philip Glass to Leonard Cohen to Bob Dylan to Jimi Hendrix - what more could one ask for?

Quantum Tunneling

2009-10-04T21:10:00.026+11:00

In some respects this logically follows on from a post I wrote in July this year, Quantum Mechanical Philosophy, which is one of the more esoteric essays I’ve written on this blog. Hopefully, this essay will be less so, as the source material is well written and aimed at the uninitiated.

But I need to recount the gist of that post to make the relevant connection: specifically, the enigmatic Bell’s Theorem or Bell Inequality. To summarise, Bell’s Theorem arose from a thought experiment created by Einstein in an attempt to prove Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics (the famous ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’) wrong.

The thought experiment was elaborated upon by Podolsky and Rosen, so it became known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen or EPR experiment. It examines the purported ‘action-at-a-distance’ phenomenon predicted by quantum physics for certain traits of particles or photons, which Einstein described, quite accurately, as ‘spooky’. If you have 2 particles with a common origin (could be photons with opposite polarisation or subatomic particles like electrons with opposite ‘spins’), then separate them over any distance whatsoever, you will not know what the spin or polarity, or whatever quantum mechanical trait you are measuring, is, until you take the actual measurement. The ‘spooky’ bit is that as soon as you make the measurement the ‘twin’ particle will instantaneously become the opposite. Before the measurement or observation is made the particles are in, what’s called, a ‘superposition’ of states – it can be either one or the other.

Einstein realised that this conjecture contradicted his special theory of relativity, which states that no signal or means of communication between particles of any kind can travel faster than the speed of light, which had already been confirmed by experiment. John Bell developed a mathematical equation that analysed correlations of hypothetical results from the thought experiment that would categorically prove either Einstein or Bohr wrong.

Alain Aspect developed a real experiment to test Bell’s Inequality (made the thought experiment actually happen) and proved Einstein wrong (long after Einstein had died, by the way).

As I point out in that previous post, the upshot of this is that either faster-than-light actions are possible (called non-locality) or there is no objective reality. Non-locality is self-explanatory (you can’t communicate faster than the speed of light) but no objective reality means that the thing doesn’t exist until someone measures it or takes an observation. I discuss this in more detail (lots of detail) in my previous post, but that’s effectively the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics: at the subatomic scale, particles don’t exist until they are measured or observed. A less extreme and more popular interpretation is that they remain in a superposition of states until they interact with something else. If you want to delve deeper, read my previous post, but you may be none the wiser. The philosophical implications of this have never been truly resolved.

My conclusion was to accept non-locality (faster-than-light connections) in order to keep objective reality, and I made specific reference to David Bohm’s unpopular interpretation, known as the ‘hidden variables theory’. Bohm believed that there was a hidden set of parameters that govern the particles which we can’t see or detect.

To quote David Deutsch (who doesn’t agree with Bohm at all): ‘A non-local hidden variable theory means, in ordinary language, a theory in which influences propagate across space and time without passing through the space in between.’

And this leads me to quantum tunneling, because that’s exactly what quantum tunneling does, only it happens over short distances, not the distances used in the EPR experiment, which could theoretically include the other side of the universe.

I’ve just read an excellent book on this subject, Zero Time Space subtitled, How Quantum Tunneling Broke the Light Speed Barrier, authored by Gunter Nimtz and Astrid Haibel. Originally published in German in 2004, it was published in English in 2008. This book could be read by people with only a rudimentary knowledge of physics, as it contains only a few simple equations, among them Planck’s equation: E = hf where E is energy, f is frequency of a ‘wave’ and h is Planck’s constant, 6.6 x 10^-34 Js (Joules seconds). The authors also include Snell’s law of refraction and the universal wave equation of wavelength times frequency equals velocity (I can’t find the symbol, lambda, for wavelength, in my arsenal of fonts). One of the annoyances is that there is a type-setting error in this particular equation (in the book). If someone is going to include equations, especially for people unfamiliar with them, I wish they could at least get them checked during type-setting. The same applies to Richard Feynman’s excellent book on relativity theory, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces where I found 3 type-setting errors amongst the equations scattered throughout the book. In both cases the books are aimed at people who are not familiar with the material, which means they won’t know the errors are there.

Putting that one (some may say petty) criticism aside, it’s a very good book on quantum mechanics for people who know very little about physics. It includes a short history of physics leading up to Einstein’s theories of relativity (with particular reference to the Special Theory) as well as quantum mechanics. They do this because the whole point of the book is to highlight how quantum tunneling breaks Einstein’s special theory of relativity, and therefore reinforces non-locality, as I described in my previous post. So the authors go to some pains to give the reader an overview of both Einstein’s theory and quantum mechanics, in conjunction with the historical context. It’s very well done.

Nimtz and Haibel, by the way, make no reference to Bell’s Theorem, as it would probably confuse readers who are unfamiliar with it – I hope I haven’t put people off by referencing it here. Having said that, they do discuss ‘entanglement’ towards the end of their book, which is the state I described above concerning ‘twin’ particles interacting at a distance. In particular, they raise this phenomenon in their lengthy discussion on causality, as they are at pains to explain that ‘tunneling’ does not affect causality as some people might be led to believe. Even so, it still manages to confound common sense, as I explicate below.

In the forward to the book, they briefly discuss the ‘myth… about the half-life of knowledge… It suggests that our knowledge is being declared invalid every five years by new knowledge.’ They then go on to dispel the most common representation of that myth: ‘Newton’s theory of gravitation is still valid, even in the light of the theory of relativity… Einstein’s theory has extended theory rather than disproved Newton’s theory.’

I made the same point in my essay on The Laws of Nature (March 08), explaining that Einstein’s equations reduce to Newton’s when certain parameters become negligible. The authors raise this point, because, whilst quantum tunneling appears to contradict Einstein’s special theory of relativity, in their own words: ‘Einstein deals with free space, whereas tunneling is not free space.’ In other words there are constraints on relativity theory in the same way that there are constraints on Newton’s theory, but there are various aspects of nature where one is more significant than the other. It’s one of the reasons that I’m a bit sceptical about a grand unified theory (GUT), a meta-theory of everything. Many people would love to prove me wrong, and a part of me would like to see that, but another part wouldn’t because I don’t believe there will ever be an end to physics.

During this discussion they make another statement, relevant to the stability of scientific knowledge: ‘Mathematical proof has been regarded since Pythagoras and Plato as eternal, metaphysical truth.’ A statement I would agree with. For example, Reimann geometry hasn’t displaced Euclidean geometry, it has just extended our knowledge, both of the mathematical world and the physical world (through Einstein’s theory of General Relativity).

I’ve discussed on other posts, the relationship between mathematics and the natural world (refer The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, March 09), but no where is that more significant than in quantum mechanics. QED (Quantum Electrodynamics), for which Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itoro Tomonaga jointly won the Nobel Prize, is the most successful theory of all time. Without mathematics, quantum mechanics would be indecipherable, quite literally. Intriguingly, there are imaginary numbers in quantum theory that are completely relevant to quantum tunneling. Without imaginary numbers (created by the square route of -1, called i) quantum mechanics would never have been articulated as a meaningful theory at all.

As Nimtz and Haibel point out, it is the imaginary component of the equation that does the tunneling. When this was first derived, people just assumed that these imaginary components were unnecessary remnants of the mathematics, but that’s not the case. When tunneling occurs there is an interface where part of the signal is reflected and part is transmitted through ‘the tunnel’. The part that is reflected is mathematically ‘real’ and the part that is transmitted is mathematically ‘imaginary’. (I've since been informed this is not correct - refer Addendum 2 below.) A tunnel, by the way, is a barrier, where the particle or wave theoretically can’t travel, because it doesn’t have enough energy. The authors point out that it even occurs in the sun, otherwise the fusion, which gives us sunlight, would never occur. I should add that quantum tunneling is a feature of all transistor devices. In fact, it's the very feature that makes transistors work (called 'tunnel diode' by Nimtz and Haibel).

Both of the authors have performed experiments, to not only detect quantum tunneling, but to also measure the time elapsed. As predicted by Thomas Hartman in 1962, there is a time elapse at the ‘entrance’ to the tunnel, or the ‘interface’, between the medium and ‘the tunnel’, but the actual time spent in the tunnel is zero. This is called the Hartman effect. To quote the authors: ‘So the wave packet spreads in the tunnel in zero time and is everywhere from the entrance to the exit. This non-local phenomenon makes one feel eery.’ An understatement, if I’ve ever read one.

One of the authors, Gunter Nimtz, participated in an experiment that tunneled Mozart’s symphony in g-minor through a waveguide at superluminal speed: 4.7 times the speed of light. The elapsed time occurred at the entrance to the tunnel, as predicted by Hartman, not in the tunnel itself. In an exposition, that I will not try to repeat here, the authors explain how this quirk of nature (the elapsed time at the entrance to the tunnel) allows superluminal communication without impacting causality. The speed in the tunnel is infinite – as the Americans like to say: go figure. The title of the book, Zero Time Space, is therefore entirely appropriate.

They end the book with a brief description of wormholes and hypothetical warp drives, beloved of Sci-Fi writers, like me, that require exotic negative gravity amongst other improbabilities.

Of all the incredible manifestations of the universe, only consciousness is arguably more inexplicable or more mysterious (but no more weird) than quantum phenomena. If we didn’t observe it, no one would believe it. And if we didn’t have the mathematics to describe it, no one would be able to fathom it, even remotely.

Addendum 1: I came across this - it's very entertaining as well as informative.

Addendum 2: I would like to acknowledge Timmo (refer comments thread below) who has valiantly tried to correct all my mistakes. In particular, that the imaginary component of Schrodinger's equation plays no greater role in tunneling than the real component, if I understand Timmo correctly. Also he points out that tunneling and non-locality are independent phenomena, and possibly I misled people on that point.

He also corrects some faux pas I made concerning the Lorenz transformation and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem in response to comments I've made since the post was posted.

I confess I don't know as much as I appear to, and I wish I understood more than I actually do.

And I would like to thank Timmo for reminding me of how much I don't know.

Utopia or dystopia

2009-09-10T10:13:00.020+10:00

I’ve written on this subject before (Living in the 21^st Century, Sep.07; and The Problem with Democracy, Jun.08 ) but a recent conversation (with Dino at Coffee Plus) in combination with reading about ‘dystopian fiction’ as a subgenre of science-fiction, has led me to revisit it. A lengthy essay I wrote called Human Nature (back in Nov.07) may also be relevant to this topic.

I’ve been reading The Science Fiction Handbook by M. Keith Book and Anne-Marie Thomas, which is a very erudite analysis of various ‘seminal’ works of science-fiction along with their authors. In particular, their analysis of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy (which I haven’t personally read) that works on the premise that humans appear genetically predisposed for self-destruction. H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine is another example, though Wells’ exploration is different: humans evolve into 2 species, the Morlocks and the Eloi, that symbiotically exist in an extreme master-slave relationship, or predator-prey relationship to be more exact.

But Butler’s scenario is that our hierarchical nature, in combination with our competitiveness and addiction to capitalism, will inevitably lead to overpopulation, war and nuclear destruction. I’m not so pessimistic, and perhaps Butler isn’t either – after all, it’s a cautionary tale. I’ve left out the main plot, an alien invasion by the ‘Oankali’, who incorporate their DNA into ours and create a new species, which is the major premise of the trilogy (or so I believe).

In an issue of COSMOS earlier this year, there was a feature article on the overpopulation of Earth and the consequences thereof. As I said in the introduction, I’ve raised this issue in earlier posts. The COSMOS article used an island metaphor which I thought was very apt. We are turning our planet into an island, but once we have over-resourced it we don’t have another island to go to. There are some people who believe that planetary colonialism will save us, but, if that’s the case, it means we haven’t addressed the problem, and, worse still, we aren’t seeking a solution.

There have been a number of mass-extinctions in Earth’s history, not just the dinosaurs, but at no other time has the rate of global species extinction been as high as it is now, and the cause is obvious: it is us. This is just one symptom, like climate change, that we are simply too successful (as a species) for our own good. If a species at the top of the food chain eats all the food then it ensures its own extinction. In effect, that’s what we are doing despite all of our harvesting techniques. We cannot live on this planet with only a handful of species to sustain us – it doesn’t work like that. Biodiversity means a healthy planet, and it’s no exaggeration to say that we are behaving like a disease.

In the last century, we have demonstrated, beyond dispute, that capitalism is the most successful economical model ever devised. But it, too, is too successful for its own good. In the recent economic crisis we have seen how the smallest dent in ‘growth’ is considered devastating. Unfortunately, economic growth means growth of everything, including: products, housing, infrastructure and, of course, people. You don’t have to have a PhD to see where this will eventually lead us, yet everyone appears to be in denial.

The ideal economic climate, as the recent ‘downturn’ revealed, is to maximise employment to maximise spending to maximise consumerism to maximise production to maximise employment, in an ever increasing cycle with no limit except the Earth’s capacity to sustain it. And it’s the last bit that everyone conveniently ignores.

As my friend Dino pointed out, in the ideal economy everyone should be in debt, which is what makes it so susceptible to bust-boom cycles, that we take for granted as being part of our modern environment. There is another side to this as well: I’m talking from my privileged position of being a member of a Western democratic society. We still live in a feudal society where the privileged few live at the expense of the massive poor, only the feudalism occurs on a global scale not a national one, so we don’t notice it so much. But just look at Africa and some South East Asian countries where goods and resources are provided at dirt-cheap prices for our wealthy consumption. The free-market is supposed to ‘flatten’ this inequality out, but I only see the converse: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer – the gap widens.

But even in our special, privileged society so many people are not satisfied; in fact, they actually hate their jobs, yet will be demonstrably upset if their job is taken away from them. Our world, in short, is full of contradictions, yet no one seems to notice, or, if they do, they pretend they don’t exist.

I strongly believe that the 21^st Century is going to be crunch time, whether we want to face it or not, but it’s hard to imagine anything is going to change until nature forces us to. The result, I fear, will be wars on a scale we’ve never before witnessed, which leads one to consider Butler’s speculative fiction.

In an early post on this blog, I wrote an essay on Evil (Oct.07), whereby I proposed a thesis that evil is a logical consequence of our evolutionary heritage to be territorial, which is not unique to the human species. Predators are territorial for the very reason I gave above: they need to control their resources, and they do so by rejecting intruders. This is true of lions, magpies, apes and humans, along with innumerable other species. So humans are xenophobic by nature, as history demonstrates, but there is a counter-culture to this. Humans are also highly empathetic, as are other species as well, which creates a natural antithesis to xenophobia and has allowed us to develop multi-culturally in many parts of the globe. But it’s the constraint on resources that can turn tolerance into intolerance more quickly than you can say refugees.

In my essay on Human Nature, I make the point that there are 3 human traits that have shaped our modern world. The first is our need for social contact, without which, we wouldn’t even have language; fundamental to our ability to think. But this also leads to the tribalism and its inherent problems that I alluded to in the previous paragraph. The second trait is the natural search for leadership in any group endeavour. Our hierarchical nature, that Butler apparently sees as a genetic fault, is actually a strength if one allows the group to choose their own leader, which is the fundamental dynamic of democracy. The third is that every individual has a tendency to achieve their best in their chosen field. This wasn’t always the case, and still isn’t in many cultures, where discrimination based on class, wealth and sex were the biggest obstacles and still are in some places.

I don’t have any easy answers to this, but I see some contradictions that may eventually resolve themselves when we are forced to face them. There is no utopia, I only see evolution, but it may well be Kuhnian rather than Darwinian. To obtain a sustainable future without losing our ability for creativity and material progress will require a change to the paradigm of infinite growth, and that means population growth must become stabilised. In many Western cultures this has already happened with the changing role of women, and this should not be reversed. Feminism, in its own way, may well save the planet, but it won’t be enough. The economic paradigm needs to change so that recycling replaces raw materials, with incentives to have long-lasting products in lieu of short-life ones that currently drive the capitalist machine. Sustainability will be forced upon us, and it’s technologically achievable, but politically difficult. Corporations have demonstrated by their activities in third world countries that they are simply amoral without regulations to enforce environmental and health compliances. A more global society is slowly changing this ethic but by how much and how soon is not easy to judge.

Economic growth needs to be decoupled from population growth but there is no sign this is achievable and no one is attempting to provide a model that may facilitate it. I feel this is the biggest dilemma that we face as a global community. Technology will slowly erode the most mind-numbing and health-debilitating occupations, so humans can do what they do best, which is to think creatively, solve problems both individually and collaboratively, and facilitate with others. And machines will do the things that they are good at: crunch astronomical numbers, do repetitive tasks at high speed and precision, and work tirelessly with no sleep and without complaint at jobs we disdain. This is the future that I try to project into my science-fiction where the word economy doesn’t even exist – but that’s a real utopia.

Addendum: The COSMOS article that I linked is actually from 2005 (Issue 3) but it's possibly even more relevant. Please read it.

The Existential God

2009-09-01T17:48:00.013+10:00

I was introduced to Don Cupitt on Stephen Law’s blog, about a year ago, or even earlier, when he provided a link to a radio interview with Cupitt on a BBC philosophy programme. Cupitt is a theologian, and he was being quizzed on his particularly unorthodox view of God, which, from memory, was more humanist than sacred.

More recently, I acquired his book, Above Us Only Sky, followed by a Chinese hieroglyph, which I assume means ‘sky’. Inside, the book is subtitled, The Religion of Ordinary Life, which pretty well sums up Cupitt’s entire philosophy. The book’s title is obviously a direct reference to the line in John Lennon’s song, Imagine, which also includes the line, ‘And no religion too’, and, despite being a theologian, that line could equally apply to Cupitt’s book. Right at the start of his book, he provides 27 points in, what one might call, a manifesto for living. Point 22 is headed:

“Even the Supreme Good must be left behind at once.

I, all my expressions, and even the Summum Bonumm, the Supreme Good itself, are all of them transient. Eternal happiness may be great enough to make one feel that one’s whole life has been worthwhile, but it is utterly transient. Let it go!”

His book, as the above quote exemplifies, is even more humanist than his interview, and, in fact, I would call it existentialist, hence the title of this post. I have also called myself existentialist on more than one occasion, but then so is Viktor Frankl in my view, who is not entirely an atheist either. Existentialism is not synonymous with atheism, by the way, but most theists think it is. By existentialist, I mean that we are responsible for our own destiny, which makes God less significant in the overall scheme of things. In other words, a belief in God is less relevant when one considers that moral choices, and any other choice for that matter, are completely dependent on the individual. I take the extreme view and suggest that we are responsible for God rather than God is responsible for us, but that’s so heretical I’ll desist from pursuing it for the sake of continuity.

But Cupitt’s book was a genuine surprise, because, despite its glib title, it’s actually a very meaty book on philosophy. For a start, Cupitt puts emphasis on language as the prism, or even filter, through which we analyse and conceptualise the world. To quote his point 6:

“Life is a continuous streaming process of symbolic expression and exchange.

The motion of language logically precedes the appearing of a formed and ‘definite’ world. It is in this sense that it was once said that ‘In the beginning was the Word’.”

I don’t entirely agree with him, concerning his implication that language determines our reality, but I need to digress a bit before I can address that specifically.

A central tenet of his thesis is that our Platonic heritage of a ‘perfect’ world is an illusion that we are only just starting to shed. Life is exactly what we get and that’s all it is. His philosophy is that once we realise this ‘truth’, we can live the ‘religion of ordinary life’ as his title suggests, and his manifesto specifies. In fact, he argues that this is what we already do in a secular humanist society, but we just don’t articulate it as such. Curiously, I made a similar point in a post I wrote on this blog almost 2 years ago, titled, Existentialism: the unconscious philosophy (Oct.07). Basically, I contended that, following the global Western cultural revolution of the 1960s, we adopted an existentialist philosophy without specifying it as such, or even realising it. We effectively said that we are responsible for our actions and their consequences and God has very little to do with it. I believe Cupitt is making a similar point: we achieved a revelation that humanity’s future is in our hands, and, unless we accept that responsibility, we will fail it.

But it’s in his discussion on rejecting Plato and the illusion that we inherited from him, that he returns to the significance of language:

“You can have more-or-less anything, provided only that you understand and accept that you can have it only language-wrapped – that is, mediated by language’s secondary, symbolic and always-ambiguous quality.” (Emphasis in the original.)

In highlighting this point, I’ve skipped a lot of his text, including an entire chapter on ‘Truth’ and a discussion on Descartes, and, in particular, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant famously contends that we will never understand the ‘thing-in-itself’, which is a direct reference to Plato’s ‘Forms’.

Like many dissertations on epistemology, Cupitt glosses over the significance of mathematics, which is arguably the most stubborn relic of Plato’s philosophy, and one that effectively side-steps Cupitt’s ‘language-wrapped’ dependence that I quoted above. I’m not a physicist but physics has interested me my whole life, and I’ve long believed that, as a discipline, it provides us with the best means of interpreting the universe and revealing its mysteries. In fact, without physics, our knowledge of the universe would still be stuck in the dark ages. But Cupitt alludes to a deep scepticism when he describes it thus:

“The physicist sets out his definitions of matter, space and time, then his laws of motion, and then his formulae for making calculations. But when he has developed his system of mathematical physics – a system of ideas – how is he to prove that there is a Real World out there of which the system is true and to which it applies? …whence do all its ideas get their ‘objective reality’?”

In other words, Cupitt is sceptical that a ‘system of ideas’, even one imbedded in mathematics, can provide an ‘objective reality’. But there are 2 points that Cupitt fails to address in his dissertation on ‘truth’ and ‘language’. Firstly, mathematics is not a language in the normal sense, although many people refer to it as if it is. Mathematical symbols are a language of sorts, but the concepts they represent, and, in particular, the relationships that mathematics describes are the closest we will get to ‘“God-given” truth’ to quote Roger Penrose (The Emperor’s New Mind). In other words, they have a universal quality unlike any other epistemic system that we know of, that arguably contain truths independent of the human mind. Now, I know many philosophers dispute this, but mathematical ‘truths’ (wherever they come from) are arguably the only abstract truths we can rely on, and do rely on all the time, in every technological marvel we exploit.

So mathematics provides us with ‘truths’ as well as a window into the ‘reality’ of the universe that we would never otherwise possess. It is on this point that I believe Cupitt and I epistemologically differ.

But it’s not epistemology per se that Cupitt is challenging when he explicates: ideas are ‘language-wrapped’; he has a deeper, theological motive. He points out how absurd it is to think that God provided us with scriptures using a language humans invented. Especially since God should be outside language in the same way ‘He’s’ supposedly outside the very universe in which we exist. What’s more, Cupitt challenges the very notion that our experience of ‘God’ by praying can be validated without language. I believe Cupitt makes a very good point here: if our ideas are language-wrapped then so is our idea of God.

In an earlier post (May 09) I referenced an essay by Raymond Smullyan called Is God a Taoist? In my post, I made a connection between Smullyan’s idea of God or Tao as ‘the scheme of things’ and the mathematical laws at different levels of scale that the universe appears to obey. This particular concept of an impersonal, non-language-wrapped God in combination with a Platonic mathematical realm is entirely compatible with Cupitt’s stated philosophy, though I doubt he would accept it. Cupitt provides an allegorical tale of a large group of Buddhist monks, one of whom gets up to speak about the Tao (Cupitt uses the term, ‘Supreme Good’), saying that: ‘No words can speak of it… It is beyond speech, it is even beyond all thought.’ When he sits down, another monk stands to address the same crowd: ‘Did the last speaker say anything?’

In a recent post on Storytelling (July 09), I made the point that without language we would think in the language of dreams, which is imagery and emotion. In fact, I argued that the language of dreams is the language of storytelling, only we are unaware of it. The story is ‘language-wrapped’ but the emotional content of the story is not, and neither is the imagery it conjures in our minds. Without these 2 components, the story is lifeless, just words on paper – it fails to engage the mind as story.

I’m not surprised that many cultures include dreaming as part of their religion – the American Indians are possibly the best known. Australian Aborigines use the term ‘Dream-time’ (at least, that’s its English translation) as the reference to their religion, full of mythical creatures and mythical tales. In recent posts on Larry Niven’s blog, there have been a couple of references to the comparison between religion and music that people often make. Many people have made the observation that music transcends language, and to some extent that is true. The only reason, we can say that, is because music moves us emotionally, and whilst language can describe those emotions it can’t convey them, whereas music can. So I would argue that religious experience is not language-wrapped in the same way that musical experience is not language-wrapped. Again, Cupitt would beg to differ. In fact, he would dispute the religious experience and call it illusion, and he is not alone. Most philosophers would agree with him completely.

Cupitt devotes an entire chapter to the subject, ‘Religion’, where he describes it as a ‘standard’ (as in a flag) to which people rally and identify, and, to which he rightly acknowledges, represents a view of God that is no longer tenable or of value. This is the religion that divides people and incorporates an infinite being who stands outside the world and judges us all. On this point, Cupitt and I are in agreement: it’s an entirely outdated, even dangerous, concept.

“…those who split the world between good and evil in effect split their own psyches too, and the puritans, the wowsers, the morality-campaigners, the condemners and the persecutors end up as unhappy people, Bible-bashers who are themselves without religion.”

This is the origin of the neurosis that made people of my generation revolt. Cupitt also makes reference to the 1960s when he describes the change in the zeitgeist that is effectively the theme of his book. Neurosis is like hypnotism – your brain tells you to do one thing but you do something else over which you feel you have no control. If you put your mind in a strait-jacket then it will revolt in a way that will shock you. Religion can do exactly that. To quote Cupitt again:

“In one form or another around the world, organized religion still manages to keep a large percentage of humanity locked in the most wretched mental poverty and backwardness.”

Cupitt goes on to express his individualistic philosophy that he calls ‘solar living’ (as in solo or solitary) but I would call existentialism, or a variant thereof. The fundamentals of his religious philosophy is to replace ‘God’ with ‘Life’, and rather than have a relationship between an earthly existence and an immortal one, to have a relationship between the individual’s life and the continuing stream of life that involves the rest of humanity.

My own approach is to refer to the internal and external world, which is the cornerstone of my entire world philosophy, but is effectively the same concept that Cupitt expresses here, albeit using different language. (Later in the book, Cupitt rejects the inner life concept altogether.) However, unlike Cupitt, I would contend that religion is part of one’s inner world rather than the external world. This makes religion completely subjective, and, in many respects, in conflict with organised or institutionalised religion. I’ve made this point before on previous posts, and Cupitt makes a similar point, arguably the most important in the book for me:

“The only ideas, thoughts, convictions that stay with you and give you real support are ones you have formulated yourself and tested out in your own life… In effect, the only religion that can save you is one you have made up for yourself and tested out for yourself: in short, a heresy.”

Cupitt always brings the discussion back to language, and this is the source of my personal dissent with his philosophy. He makes the apparently self-evident point: ‘…there is no meaning, no truth, no reality, and no knowledge without language.’ Which is true for us humans, cognitively, but the unstated corollary is that because none of these things can exist without language, they can’t exist without humanity either. This is the crux of his entire epistemological thesis.

Language is the most obvious bridge between our internal and external world, and almost nothing can be conveyed without language, but lots of things can be felt and experienced without the intervention of language. But Cupitt would argue that any experience is meaningless, quite literally, if it can’t be expressed in language. In other words, because it comes ‘language-wrapped’, that’s what makes it real. One needs to be careful here to distinguish epistemology from ontology, and I think the 2 are being confounded.

I think religion, as it is experienced by the individual, actually has little to do with language and more to do with emotion, just like music or even storytelling. As I described above, a story is written in words, but if it doesn’t transcend the words then it’s not a story. On the other hand, Cupitt argues, categorically, that there is nothing meaningful ‘outside language’.

Religion, and therefore God, is a psychological phenomenon, just like colour. Now, everyone thinks this is a misguided analogy, but colour does not exist out there in the external world, it only exists in your mind. What exists in the external world are light waves reflected off objects. You could probably build a robot that could delineate different wavelengths of light and associate a range of wavelengths with a label, like red for instance. But the robot wouldn’t actually see the colour red like you and I do. Some monkeys can’t see colours that we can see, because they only have bichromatic vision not trichromatic, but, if we genetically engineer them, they can. Yes, that’s a fact, not internet bullshit – it’s been done.

Anyway God is an experience that some people have that ‘feels’ like something outside themselves even though it only occurs in their minds. Many people never have this experience, so they don’t believe in God. The problem with this is that some of the people who think they have this experience believe that makes them superior to those who don’t, and likewise some of the people who don’t, believe they must be axiomatically superior to those who claim they do, because they’re obviously nuts.

Cupitt doesn’t address this, but I do because it’s what creates the whole divide that is actually so unimportant. I contend it’s like heterosexuals believing that everyone should be heterosexual, because it’s unimaginable to be anything else, and homosexuals arguing that everyone should be homosexual, even though they never do. But, in the same way that I think people who are heterosexual should behave as heterosexuals and people who are homosexual should behave as homosexuals, I believe that people who have an experience that they call God should be theists, and those who don’t should be atheists.

At the end of the day, I think God is a projection. I believe that the God someone believes in says more about them than it says about God (I’ve made this point before). That way people get the God they deserve. I call it the existential God.

I’ve now gone completely away from Cupitt’s book, but don’t be put off, it’s a very good book. And it’s very good philosophy because it provokes critical thinking. Another person would write something completely different to what I have written because they would focus on something else. This is a book to which, I admit, I have not done justice. It is worth acquiring just to read the essay he wrote for a symposium on Judaic Christian dialogue – not what people expected, I’m sure.

Cupitt ultimately argues for a universal morality that ignores identity of any kind, just like Lennon’s song. Accordingly, I’ll give Cupitt the last word(s):

“Our moral posture and practice must never be associated with a claim to be… an adherent of some particular ethnic or religious group, because all those who retreat into ‘identity’ have given up universal morality and have embraced some form of partisan fundamentalism – which means paranoia and hatred of humanity.”

“…any philosopher who is serious about religion should avoid all contact with ‘organized religion’. …Which is why, on the day this book is published, I shall finally and sadly terminate my own lifelong connection with organized religion.”

Memetics

2009-08-08T15:34:00.006+10:00

Susan Blackmore is a well-known proponent of ‘memes’, and she wrote an article in New Scientist, 1 August 2009, called The Third Replicator, which is about the rise of the machines. No, this has nothing to do with the so-called Singularity Prophecy (see my post of that title in April this year). I haven’t read any of Blackmore’s books, but I’ve read articles by her before. She’s very well respected in her field, which is evolutionary psychology. By the ‘Third Replicator’ she’s talking about the next level of evolution, following genes and memes: the evolution of machine knowledge, if I get the gist of her thesis. I find Blackmore a very erudite scholar and writer, but I have philosophical differences.

I’ve long had a problem with the term meme, partly because I believe it is over-used and over-interpreted, though I admit it is a handy metaphor. When I first heard the term meme, it was used in the context of cultural norms or social norms, so I thought why not use ‘social norms’ as we do in social psychology. Yes, they get passed on from generation to generation and they ‘mutate’, and one could even say that they compete, but the analogy with genes has a limit, and the limit is that there are no analogous phenotypes and genotypes with memes as there are with genes (I made the same point in a post on Human Nature in Nov.07). And Dawkins makes the exact same point, himself, in his discussion on memes in The God Delusion. Dawkins talks about ‘memplexity’ arising from a ‘meme-pool’, and in terms of cultural evolution one can see merit in the meme called meme, but I believe it ignores other relevant factors as I discuss below.

Earlier this year I referenced essays in Hofstadter and Dennett’s The Mind’s I (Subjectivity, Jun.09; and Taoism, May 09). One of the essays included is Dawkins’ Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes. In another New Scientist issue (18 July 2009), Fern Elsdon-Baker, head of the British Council’s Darwin Now project, is critical of what he calls the Dawkins dogma saying: ‘Metaphors that have done wonders for people’s understanding of evolution are now getting in the way’; and ‘Dawkins contribution is indisputable, but his narrow view of evolution is being called into question.’ Effectively, Elsdon-Baker is saying that the ‘selfish gene’ metaphor has limitations as well, which I won’t discuss here, but I certainly think the ‘selfish meme’ metaphor can be taken too literally. People tend to forget that neither genes nor memes have any ‘will’ (Dawkins would be the first to point this out) yet the qualifier, ‘selfish,’ implies just that. However, it’s a metaphor, remember, so there’s no contradiction. Now I know that everyone knows this, but in the case of memes, I think it’s necessary to state it explicitly, especially when Blackmore (and Dawkins) compare memes to biological parasites.

Getting back to Blackmore’s article: the first replicators are biological, being genes; the second replicators are human brains, because we replicate knowledge; and the third replicators will be computers because they will eventually replicate knowledge or information independently of us. This is an intriguing prediction and there’s little doubt that it will come to pass in some form or another. Machines will pass on ‘code’ analogous to the way we do, since DNA is effectively ‘code’, albeit written in molecules made from amino acids rather than binary arithmetic. But I think Blackmore means something else: machines will share knowledge and change it independently of us, which is a subtly different interpretation. In effect, she’s saying that computers will develop their own ‘culture’ independently of ours, in the same way that we have created culture independently of our biological genes. (I will return to this point later.)

And this is where the concept of meme originally came from: the idea that cultural evolution, specifically in the human species, overtook biological evolution. I first came across this idea, long before I’d heard of memes, when I read Arthur Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine. Koestler gave his own analogy, which I’ve never forgotten. He made the point that the human brain really hasn’t change much since homo sapiens first started walking on the planet, but what we had managed to do with it had changed irrevocably. The analogy he gave was to imagine someone, say a usurer, living in medieval times, who used an abacus to work out their accounts; then one morning they woke up to find it had been replaced with an IBM mainframe computer. That is what the human brain was like when it first evolved – we really had no idea what it was capable of. But culturally we evolved independently of biological evolution, and from this observation Dawkins coined the term, meme, as an analogy to biological genes, and, in his own words, the unit of selection.

But reading Blackmore: ‘In all my previous work in memetics I have used the term “meme” to apply to any information that is copied between people…’. So, by this definition, the word meme covers everything that the human mind has ever invented, including stories, language, musical tunes, mathematics, people’s names, you name it. When you use one idea to encompass everything then the term tends to lose its veracity. I think there’s another way of looking at this, and it’s to do with examining the root cause of our accelerated accumulation of knowledge.

In response to a comment on a recent post (Storytelling, last month) I pointed out how our ability to create script effectively allows us to extend our long term memory, even across generations. Without script, as we observe in many indigenous cultures, dance and music allows the transmission of knowledge across generations orally. But it is this fundamental ability, amplified by the written word, that has really driven the evolution of culture, whether it be in scientific theories, mathematical ideas, stories, music, even history. Are all these things memes? By Blackmore’s definition (above) the answer is yes, but I think that’s stretching the analogy, if, for no other reason than many of these creations are designed, not selected. But leaving that aside, the ability to record knowledge for future generations has arguably been the real accelerant in the evolution of culture, in all its manifestations. We can literally extend our memories across generations – something that no other species can do. So where does this leave memes? As I alluded to above, not everything generated by the human mind is memetic in my opinion, but I’ll address that at the end.

Going back to my original understanding of meme as a cultural or social norm, I can see its metaphorical value. I still see it as an analogy to genes – in other words, as a metaphor. Literally, memes are social norms, but they are better known for their metaphorical meaning as analogous to genes. If, on the other hand, memes are all knowledge - in other words, everything that is imbedded in human language - then the metaphor has been stretched too far to be meaningful in my view. A metaphor is an analogy without the conjunction, ‘like’, and analogies are the most common means to explain a new concept or idea to someone else. It is always possible that people can take a metaphor too literally, and I believe memes have suffered that fate.

As for the ‘third replicator’, it’s an intriguing and provocative idea. Will machines create a culture independently of human culture that will evolutionarily outstrip ours? It’s the stuff of science fiction, which, of course, doesn’t make it nonsense. I think there is the real possibility of machines evolving, and I’ve explored it in my own ventures into sci-fi, but how independent they will become of their creators (us) is yet to be seen. Certainly, I see the symbiotic relationship between us and technology only becoming more interdependent, which means that true independence may never actually occur.

However, the idea that machine-generated ideas will take on a life of their own is not entirely new. What Blackmore is suggesting is that such ideas won’t necessarily interact with humanity for selection and propagation. As she points out, we already have viruses and search engines that effectively do this, but it’s their interaction with humanity that eventually determines their value and their longevity, thus far. One can imagine, however, a virus remaining dormant and then becoming active later, like a recessive gene, so there: the metaphor has just been used. Because computers use code, analogous to DNA, then comparisons are unavoidable, but this is not what Blackmore is referring to.

Picture this purely SF scenario: we populate a planet with drones to ‘seed’ it for future life, so that for generations they have no human contact. Could they develop a culture? This is Asimov territory, and at this stage of technological development, it is dependent on the reader’s, or author’s, imagination.

One of Blackmore’s principal contentions is that memes have almost been our undoing as a species in the past, but we have managed to survive all the destructive ones so far. What she means is that some ideas have been so successful, yet so destructive, that they could have killed off the entire human race (any ideologue-based premise for global warfare would have sufficed). Her concern now is that the third replicator (machines) could create the same effect. In other words, AI could create a run-away idea that could ultimately be our undoing. Again, this has been explored in SF, including stories I’ve written myself. But, even in my stories, the ‘source’ of the ‘idea’ was originally human.

However, as far as human constructs go, we’re not out of the woods by a long shot, with the most likely contender being infinite economical growth. I suspect Blackmore would call it a meme but I would call it a paradigm. The problem is that a meme implies it’s successful because people select it, whereas I think paradigms are successful simply because they are successful at whatever they predict, like scientific theories and mathematical formulae, all of which are inherently un-memetic. In other words, they are not successful because we select them, but we select them because they are successful, which turns the meme idea on its head.

But whatever you want to call it, economic growth is so overwhelmingly successful: socially, productively, politically, on a micro and macro scale; that it is absolutely guaranteed to create the greatest catastrophic failure that the human race has ever witnessed. But that’s a subject for another post. Of course, I hope I’m totally wrong, but I think that’s called denial. Which begs the question: is denial a meme?

Einstein's words

2009-08-02T15:53:00.022+10:00

Today I bought a special edition of the science magazine, DISCOVER (July 2009), with the auspicious title, DISCOVER presents EINSTEIN. The magazine opens with an essay that Einstein wrote in 1931 (so before World War II). Or, at least, it was published in 1931, copyrighted by The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The essay is titled, The World as I see It, which one assumes was provided by Einstein himself.

For the rest of this post I will remain silent; I merely wish to present some very eloquent excerpts that provide an insight into Einstein’s personal philosophy.

How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though sometimes he thinks he senses it.

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. I am strongly drawn to a frugal life and am often oppressively aware that I am engrossing an undue amount of the labor of my fellow men. I regard class distinctions as unjustified and, in the last resort, based on force. I also believe that a simple and unassuming life is good for everybody, physically and mentally.

Schopenhauer’s saying “A man can do what he wants but not want what he wants” has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance. This realization mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of responsibility and prevents us from taking ourselves and other people all too seriously; it is conducive to a view of life which, in particular, gives humor its due.

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves – this ethical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed to me empty. The trite objects of human efforts – possessions, outward success, luxury – have always seemed to me contemptible.

I am truly a “lone traveler” and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude – feelings which increase with years. One becomes sharply aware, but without regret, of the limits of mutual understanding and consonance with other people. No doubt such a person loses some of his innocence and unconcern; on the other hand, he is largely independent of the opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows and avoids the temptation to build his inner equilibrium upon such insecure foundations.

My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle.

The led must not be coerced; they must be able to choose their leader. An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. Force attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels. For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to systems such as we see in Italy and Russia today.

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in fours to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; unprotected spinal marrow was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism – how passionately I hate them! How vile and despicable seems war to me! I would rather be hacked to pieces than take part in such an abominable business.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitutes true religiosity, and in this sense, and this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man.

I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

Interview with a disillusioned nun

2009-08-01T12:57:00.012+10:00

This is another radio interview (Friday 31 July 2009) which I strongly recommend, both inspiring and counter-expectative. (The link is only available for the next 2 weeks)

Dr. Colette Livermore worked with Mother Teresa's Order before leaving and studying to become a medical practitioner. She's written a book on her experiences titled, Hope Endures.

This is a repeat interview and I had heard it before. In between I read Robert Hutchison's book on Opus Dei, Their Kingdom Come, which I wrote about in another post in June this year, Politics in religion, religion in politics. In light of what I had learnt from Hutchison's book, Sister Colette's experiences in the Order made a lot more sense.

This is religion at its most perverse, where obedience is rated higher than normally-accepted standards of moral behaviour (it will make you fiercely angry). As Dr. Colette explains herself, it actually flies in the face of what Jesus taught.

You can download the audio as a podcast and listen to it whenever you want, but you won't get the musical selection. On the other hand, you can listen to it now and get the music as well. Either way, it's only available on line for the next 2 weeks. It is the 31 July interview in the list.

Storytelling, Art and the Evolution of Mind

2009-07-28T10:03:00.035+10:00

This is in response to a book, On the Origin of Stories by a Kiwi academic, Brian Boyd, subtitled Evolution, Cognition and Fiction. According to the back fly cover, Brian Boyd is ‘University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English, University of Auckland [and] is the world’s foremost authority on the works of Vladimir Nabokov.’

It’s an ambitious work in that Boyd attempts to explain, or, at best, understand, the role of art, and stories in particular, in the evolutionary development of the human mind. In this endeavour, he references the work of well-known exponents in the field, like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, but also many others.

Storytelling, or more specifically, literature, is a subject that attracted attention on Stephen Law’s blog earlier this month, and was taken up by others: Larry Niven and Faith in Honest Doubt are two that I’m aware of. Boyd’s book, like all good philosophical treatises, is provocative and introduces novel perspectives.

I’ll warn you in advance, that this is a very lengthy post, even by my standards. Having said that, I’ve written much longer treatises on the subject than this; so in some respects this could be considered the abridged version.

As a writer of fiction, and having once taught a course in fiction writing, I obviously have particular views of my own. I once wrote a letter to New Scientist (which was consequentially published) supporting the idea that art was like the ‘Peacock’s Tail’ in driving the development of the human brain. It’s an idea originally proposed by Geoffrey Miller, that art and intelligence evolved together in humans by ‘sexual selection’. Boyd makes the point that this is not the whole story and I suspect he’s correct, but I’m getting ahead of myself, so I will backtrack slightly.

Boyd’s book is broken down into 2 major parts (Book I & Book II), with the first part looking at evolution and cognition and art, and the second part looking at 2 iconic works in particular: Homer’s Odyssey and Dr Seuss’s Horton hears a Who! I’ll address Book I mainly, as it captures both the essence and the detail of Boyd’s ‘evolutionary’ thesis.

There are 2 main strands to his thesis on evolutionary human development: co-operation and ‘cognitive play’; the latter term being one that Boyd has coined himself to explain the origins of art per se. Co-operation, as Boyd expounds in detail, is a necessary attribute of any social species, of which there are innumerable examples in all areas of the animal kingdom from ants and bees to top predators. I won’t elaborate on this aspect of Boyd’s thesis, even though he returns to it often, but its significance to storytelling is that stories give ‘lessons’ in the role of co-operation or the consequences of betrayal – in other words, moral lessons. But this is only one component of a very complex picture.

Boyd’s elaboration on ‘cognitive play’ is far more interesting, if for no other reason, than it’s a novel concept that fits our experience and observations. He starts off by pointing out how play is an important part of the development of many species in that it tunes their sensory-motor responses and effectively ‘wires’ their brain in ways that are crucial for their survival as adults. The same, of course, is true for humans, but our development is particularly prolonged, and has been focused by cultural enhancements. And, in humans, the development of mental acuity is just as important (arguably even more important) as physical acuity, hence the role of cognitive play, which Boyd argues is the origin of art.

So cognitive play forms the same role as physical play observed in other species, only humans have taken it to another level, as we tend to do with anything mental. Boyd points out that singing in birds, or the ‘art work’ of a bower bird is another example, but these are examples of sexual selection behaviours, which may or may not be relevant to human artistic endeavours. In fact, Boyd argues that there are numerous examples of human art that are not performed or produced for sexual selection, which may be a by-product rather than the primary driver.

What he’s saying is that cognitive play, in the form of artistic, creative acts, is a means to ‘tune’ our brains for better cognitive skills rather than impress the opposite sex, though that does happen as we are all aware, but so does winning on the sports field.

And certainly, when we are children, we see art as playing, or certainly I did. Whenever I was given any spare time at all, I drew pictures and I drew compulsively right up to puberty when I lost interest altogether. So I see merit in Boyd’s notion of cognitive play, even if it’s based on my personal experience rather than objective observation.

Where I disagree with Boyd is in regard to what is the reward in art. Boyd argues that it is pattern that provides the pleasure (he says reward) and gives the example of music, as well as story. He explains how we have been ‘designed’ (he has no problem using the ‘d’ word in evolution, and neither do I) to look for patterns, and art rewards us in this regard. In music we anticipate the melody even when we listen to it for the first time and we find it unsatisfactory when it doesn’t meet our expectations of harmony or rhythm. The same is true of stories where we have expectations provided by plot development and are disappointed if our expectations are not met.

But, personally, I think Boyd is slightly off track here. What music and stories have in common is that they create tension and then resolve that tension. It is the resolution of the tension that gives the most satisfying reward. It’s unsurprisingly similar to the sexual experience, and in all cases we are rewarded with dopamine. It is no coincidence that the word ‘climax’ is used in all three contexts: music, stories and sex.

But there are other rewards: highly specific emotional rewards. I overheard a friend, recently recommending, to another friend, a book that she had read because it had aroused all her emotions. She said that it had made her laugh, cry, feel scared and angry. She had felt: compassion, sexiness, excitement, anxiety, despair and moral outrage; all in one book. Without, at least, some of these emotional rewards, stories would not hold our attention for long, if at all.

Speaking of attention, Boyd raises it as a special attribute, not just in reference to storytelling, but in regards to humanity in general. Attention seeking and attention sharing is apparent in infants from an early age, and, according to Boyd, is unique to humanity in its overriding dominance in infant behaviour. To quote: ‘Human one-year-olds engage in joint attention… indicating objects or events simply for the sake of sharing attention to them, something that apes never do. They expect others to share interest, attention, and response: “This by itself is rewarding for infants – apparently in a way it is not for any other species on the planet.”’ This last, indented quotation is Boyd quoting D.S Wilson quoting Michael Tomasello.

The upshot is that ‘attention seeking’ is one of the main drivers behind artistic endeavour and, based on personal experience, I would concur. Boyd quotes H.G. Wells: “Scarcely any artist will hesitate in the choice between money and attention.” Which explains why the great bulk of artists, now, and in antiquity, rarely received a livable income from their efforts. It’s a misapprehension, as I know from personal conversations, that artists seek fame to gain fortune, otherwise they’d all give up early. It’s equally misperceived that artists are happy to create works just for themselves or for the sake of the doing. Artists crave an audience above all else – it’s their whole raison d’etre.

Boyd talks about ‘creativity’ in Darwinian terms: how it’s almost a random process, or variations on accepted themes (like mutations) that get selected by the artist’s milieu or audience. He points out that it doesn’t have ‘value’ in biological terms but he gives examples of how it’s value-added in technology, and of how technology and art have had a symbiotic relationship (my terminology, not his). Printing allowed the production of novels that could be read in one’s own time, film technology gave us movies and recordings gave us music on-demand; these are all iconic examples.

But, to my mind, this strictly Darwinian interpretation underplays the role of imagination; although, to be fair to Boyd, he’s not dismissive of it, quite the contrary. Imagination is the ability to perceive some event or place or person that is not in the here and now. It could be in the past or the future, or another geographical location, or it could be completely fictional. As I pointed out in a previous post, we know that some animals have imagination, because they can imagine the outcome of a hunting strategy, otherwise how or why would they be able to do it? (Refer: Imagination, Mar. 08).

But we humans take imagination to another level, and art, all art, is effectively the projection of an individual’s imagination in the form of some external manifestation so that others can also experience it. In fact, this is as close to a definition of art as I can give. Imagination is the key to creativity – I find it impossible to conceive of one without the other. But imagination is also the key to the comprehension of a story (Boyd also appreciates this as I explicate below, though he uses different terminology).

After a lengthy exposition on the ‘theory of mind’: how it has evolved in primates and other species, and the stages it achieves at different ages in children, from causal inferences to the perception of others’ beliefs; Boyd eventually reveals an insight, that, as a writer, I already knew.

But first he explains the difference between semantic and episodic memory: the former dealing with facts and the latter dealing with events or experiences. Importantly, he references the work of Frederic Bartlett who made us aware that episodic memories are reconstructed in a way that we recollect the ‘gist’ of an event rather than any particular detail. Boyd points out that we reconstruct an episodic memory for its value in future encounters, rather than a need for knowledge per se, as we do with semantic memory.

Then he says: ‘Tellingly for this constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, imagining the future recruits most of the same brain areas as recalling the past… to provide a form of “life simulator” that allows us to test options without trying them in real life.’ (Italics in the original.) This, of course, is an accurate description of ‘fiction’, but it also occurs in dreams. As a writer, I’ve always known that the ‘medium’ for a story is not the words on the page, but the reader’s imagination, and, effectively, that is what Boyd is saying.

He makes the point even more emphatically when he quotes Barsalou: “As people comprehend a text, they construct simulations to represent its perceptual, motor, and affective content. Simulations appear central to the representation of meaning.” Boyd then goes on to explain how this specific human ability allows us to follow a particular character (he uses the word, agent) in a narrative. (I’ll come back to this when I discuss viewpoint.)

By the time Boyd starts to talk about narrative you’re well into the book, and what he’s really talking about is gossip, where we relate events to others concerning our interpretation of someone else’s viewpoint. Is this how fiction arose? I’m not sure. In the modern world it’s equivalent to journalism, and the differences between journalism and fiction are much greater than people realise. For a start, journalism is not art, and that’s a big distinction. Art must always engage one emotionally, and whilst both gossip and journalism can fulfill that function, fiction works on another level. Biography comes closest: a well-written biography can engage a reader as well as any fiction; but fiction is an art that few people master, in the same way that few people master musical composition. In fact, I would suggest that the difference between journalism and fiction is like the difference between someone performing a song and someone composing it.

I’ve always compared fiction writing to musical composition, even though I’ve done one and not the other. It’s just that writing fiction has more in common, in my mind, to music, than to writing non-fiction. Someone (I can’t remember who) said that all art comes back to music, or words to that effect, and, in my limited experience as an artist, I would have to agree. In fiction you create moods and emotions and responses, not unlike music, which is completely different to non-fiction. In journalism you can sometimes achieve the same, but it’s not the raison d’etre of journalism as it is in fiction.

Or is it? Consider that the ‘stories’ that attract attention are always the ones that horrify us, and if they don’t, the media ‘sensationalises’ them just for the sake of ‘good copy’. Just today, I heard an 8 minute interview with a survivor of the recent bombing in Indonesia, and it was the man’s authenticity and sincerity that engaged me. But why do I take this vicarious interest in someone else’s misfortune? Is this the same reason that I read fiction? Perhaps it is, but I expect not. If we can get all the vicarious emotive responses we need from all the world’s disasters then why do we need fiction? Boyd doesn’t address this, but maybe it’s unanswerable.

I have my own theory: fiction, from childhood to adulthood, is about escapism. People ‘indulge’ in fiction to escape. Therefore, in my view, it has more in common, historically, with mythology than gossip. Comic book superheroes are our equivalent to mythology, from Tarzan living with the apes to Superman who came from outer space to provide a moral code that is as indomitable as his abilities. So fiction arose from the imagination escaping way beyond the bounds of our mortal existence. But with subtlety and more down-to-earth realism it became our earliest model of psychology, which Boyd alludes to on more than one occasion. I’ve always contended that fiction is a mixture of reality and fantasy, and how it’s blended varies according to the genre and the author’s proclivities.

Boyd doesn’t use the word, escapism, but the term, ‘pretend-play’, as the catalyst for storytelling, along with the need for novelty and surprise, especially amongst young children. He points out that only humans can pretend something to be something else, like an analogy, and children demonstrate pretend-play, including pretend-attributed objects (like sticks for swords and guns) from a very early age. Pretend-play certainly exercises the imagination, and escapism is the logical consequence of that. Escapism alludes to setting the imagination free: allowing it to roam beyond the everyday. The imagination needs exercise, in the form of ‘cognitive play’ just like any other aspect of our physiology. So I believe Boyd has provided a valuable insight with this novel concept.

If fiction originally started as play in the form of drama, then Boyd’s contention that cognitive play is the root of fiction makes a lot of sense, though I don’t believe that’s what he had in mind. Performing as a character for an audience is certainly one of the best sources of natural opiates one can acquire, as I can attest from personal experience. Probably equivalent to performing on a sports field, though I’m not in a position to compare. But if fiction started off as performance, then it makes more sense to me than the idea that it originated from our propensity for gossip, and I expect Boyd would agree.

However, we tend to think that fiction started as an oral tradition, as Boyd explores in his analysis of Homer’s Odyssey, but that too is a performance, albeit of a different kind to acting out a drama. Few people appreciate the similarity between writing fiction and acting a role, yet it requires a writer to create the role in their head even before the actor has seen it. I’ve always believed that the mental process is the same for both. It requires them both to mentally step into someone else’s shoes. When a reader becomes engaged in reading a work of fiction they become the actor in their own mind, only they’re not consciously aware of it.

Boyd repeatedly makes allusions to empathy and ‘mirror neurons’ in his text. In the 25 June 2008 issue of New Scientist, under the heading, The Science of Fiction, they report on psychometric studies done to show how reading fiction improves empathy. The specific test for empathy was reading the emotional content of eyes revealed in a letter-box view. So you wouldn’t think that reading fiction would improve the reading of eyes, but it’s not so surprising when one considers that empathy is a pre-requisite for fiction to work at all. So reading fiction actually exercises our empathy.

In his analysis of Odyssey, I have a subtly different perspective to Boyd, whose exposition I won’t go into. This is such an iconic work, that ‘odyssey’ refers to a genre in its own right. It represents, in one epic work, the most universal theme of all stories: the hero overcoming a string of adversities to achieve a life-saving, even soul-saving, goal. I believe this is such a universal theme in fiction, because it’s how we all gain self-knowledge and wisdom, even though we rarely admit it. It’s Socrates’ adage about the unexamined life in a narrative form: it’s only when we are seriously challenged that we seriously examine ourselves. It’s a universal theme that can be found in all cultures, including the Chinese I Ching: ‘Adversity is the reverse of success, but it can lead to success if it befalls the right person.’ Those very words encapsulate the theme of almost any work of fiction one cares to nominate.

One of the aspects of fiction, that Boyd touches on obliquely, is our ability to follow its thread when our limited working memory doesn’t allow us to keep the whole work in our mind for the story’s duration. In fact, a lengthy novel can be read over days without us losing our way, like rejoining a path after having a night’s sleep. One reason is that a well-written story states its premise* early on, and Boyd gives the example of Odyssey where we know the goal from the beginning. But a more contemporary example would be J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, where she gives the premise for the entire 7 books in the first few chapters of the first book, so we know what it’s all about all the way through.

Subplots can be followed if they are all interwoven with the plot that the protagonist is following. In fact, every relationship in a story is its own subplot, and if all the relationships involve the protagonist then it’s no more difficult to follow than what we encounter in our own lives. And likewise, the hero’s journey is analogous to what we experience in real life, albeit the hero’s world is completely different to the one we live in. So when we read the story we are in the hero’s here and now, and we find that no more difficult than living in our own here and now. This is the power of human imagination - we can live a vicarious life as easily as we can live our own – escapism is fiction, or, more accurately, fiction is escapism, almost by definition.

On another level, there is a cognitive aspect to this that is more universal. We only comprehend new knowledge when we integrate it into existing knowledge. For example: we generally only understand a new word when it is explained using known words (just look up a dictionary). With a story, we are constantly integrating new knowledge into existing knowledge as the story progresses. So we are exercising a fundamental, uniquely human, cognitive skill while we are being entertained.

In his lengthy discussion on Odyssey, Boyd alludes more than once to every writer’s dilemma: how to meet the reader’s expectations, that the premise itself often creates, and also surprise them. Expectations are necessary if a storyteller wishes to engage their audience, but without surprises they will be less than satisfied. It’s the tension between plot and character that Boyd obviously appreciates, but struggles to articulate, that creates the dilemma, but also resolves it if the writer knows how. The plot provides the expectations and it’s the characters that provide the surprises – this is my own personal experience as a writer, and one of the secrets, I believe, of our craft. If a character surprises you as a writer, then you know they will also surprise the reader. The secret is to give your characters ‘free will’; that way they provide the spontaneity that differentiates fresh fiction from stale. Not all writers agree with me on this, but if my characters don’t take on a life of their own, then I know my story is not worth pursuing. (Refer my Dec.08 post, Zen; an interpretation, for an artist’s perspective, specifically Escher’s.)

This leads to another aspect of prose fiction, that Boyd explores in his analysis of Odyssey, which is multiple viewpoints. Good fiction doesn’t need a narrator, because it’s the characters that tell the story, which is another secret of the craft. Viewpoint should be internal not external, whether it be first person or third person intimate, and that is why they are the most popular viewpoints used in novels. Obviously, third person intimate allows greater flexibility and that’s why it is the most popular method of all. Character is the inner world and plot is the outer world, which makes plot synonymous with fate and character synonymous with free will; that is the secret of writing fiction in a nutshell.

This has been a much longer essay than I intended, but then fiction is a personal passion of mine, and Boyd’s tome covers an enormous territory.

However, there is still one aspect of fiction, specifically prose fiction, that hasn’t been addressed, and it’s not really addressed by Boyd either. He refers to ‘life-simulation’, as I mentioned earlier, which in effect is imagining future scenarios, which allows fiction to work, not only for the writer but also for the reader. What he doesn’t mention is the crucial role of imagery.

Right at the end of his book, Boyd discusses in some detail Dr. Seuss’s Horton hears a Who! which is a classic, and highly successful, children’s picture-book. Only once (in a radio interview with Margaret Throsby, ABC Classic FM) have I heard the issue raised as to why we progress from books with pictures to books without pictures, and it was raised by Margaret, from memory, not the interviewee, whom I’ve since forgotten.

I can still remember the first stories that entranced me, before I could read myself, and I believe it was the pictures, more than the words, that engaged me. (I also started drawing my own pictures from a very early age.) We had a series of classic fairy tales, in a comic book style, but with almost photographic-style coloured images, not cartoonish at all. But some of them I got my mother to read over and over again, though I used to look at the pictures while she read them.

Of course, when I was older, in the days before TV, I listened to radio serials and read comic books, which are closer to film than literature. Unlike other children, I would read the same comic over and over until I was well and truly sated with it. I liked the experience so much I would repeat it until it no longer engaged me.

But at some point, we make the transition to books without pictures, and we actually prefer them, because, for some reason, they engage us more. And I believe the reason is twofold. Firstly, we get inside the heads of the characters (via viewpoint as I mentioned earlier) in a way that can’t happen with comics, or even movies, and that is why books of fiction are not yet dead. Secondly, we eventually reach a point where it is just as satisfying to create our own pictures in our own mind, which, of course, we do without conscious effort. But it is like we learn to ‘translate’ words into the pictures of story, via our capacious and almost preternatural imaginations.

I made the point earlier, and in another post, that without the facility of imagination, no one would even be able to appreciate a story, let alone write one. But there is more: without the innate, indeed, prime-natural ability we have for imagery, cinema would have killed the novel a century ago (as I alluded to above). I’ve speculated previously that without language we would think in imagery. My evidence is dreams. We all dream in imagery and metaphor, and that is why stories are so easy for us. The language of story is the language of dreams.

* ‘Premise’, I’ve found in American texts on fiction, is often confounded with ‘theme’, even though dictionary definitions clearly delineate them. Premise is the foundation or starting point, both in the context of an argument or a story. Theme is a recurring motif, originally applied to music, but, in the context of a story, can be a message or a moral or an allegory or just an idea. The premise and the theme of a story can be the same, but mostly they’re not, and some stories don’t even have a substantial theme. But God help the reader of a story that doesn’t have a premise.

Quantum Mechanical Philosophy

2009-07-08T15:05:00.010+10:00

Following on from my last post, Subjectivity: The Mind’s I (Part 1), I read Paul Davies’ Other Worlds, for a couple of reasons. One, Hofstadter mentioned it in his ‘reflections’ that I referred to in that post, plus, I had recently come across it and already put it aside with the intention of re-reading it anyway. Also the subject of the post led me to contemplate the philosophical ramifications of quantum mechanics (hence the title), and Davies’ book was a good place to start.

As it turned out, I hadn’t read it, even though I’ve owned it for over 20 years, and I was confusing it with another one of his books, The Ghost in the Atom, which was a compilation of BBC interviews transcribed and published in the same decade (1980s). So, logically, I read them both.

Both of these were published in England before Davies came to Australia, where he wrote a string of books on philosophy and science: The Cosmic Blueprint (about chaos theory), The Mind of God (about cosmology), God and the New Physics (much the same territory as Dawkins’ The God Delusion, only written 20 years earlier, but with more depth in my view and a different emphasis), About Time (about time in every respect), The Origin of Life (about microbiology), and these are just the ones I’ve read. He now lives in America, as an astro-biologist with Arizona State University, and has since published The Goldilocks Enigma (about John Wheeler’s conjecture that the universe effectively exists as a cosmological-scale, quantum-phenomenal loop, and to whom Davies dedicated the book). This is arguably his best book, philosophically, because it entails a lifetime’s contemplation on science, epistemology and ontology.

At the top of my blog, I have scribed a little aphorism, which some may see as a definition for philosophy, but I see as a criterion. If you want a definition, I refer you to an earlier post: What is philosophy? (March 08) To quote: ‘In a nutshell, philosophy is a point of view supported by rational argument. A corollary to this is that it requires argument to practice philosophy.’ But in reference to my criterion, as well as my definition, Davies fulfils both of them admirably. It is impossible to read Davies without challenging your deepest held beliefs, especially about reality, the universe and our place in it. No, he’s not a science ‘heretic’, far from it: he just writes very well on difficult subjects about which he has a lot of knowledge.

The Ghost in the Atom (1986), has 2 authors credited: J. Brown and P.C.W. Davies. Brown was ‘Radio Producer in the BBC Science Unit, London’, whereas Davies was ‘Professor of Theoretical Physics [at] the University of Newcastle upon Tyne’. The book was a collection of radio interview transcripts (edited) of some very big names in physics: Alain Aspect, John Bell, John Wheeler, David Duetsch, David Bohm; and these are just the ones I’ve heard of. It also included: Rudolf Peierls, John Taylor and Basil Hiley; whom I hadn’t heard of. The interviews have been edited, but I get the impression from the book’s Forward that the text may actually contain more material than was originally put to air. I assume Davies was the interviewer in the programme, and he tended to play devil’s advocate to whomever he engaged. The book is a treasure, if for no other reason than some of these great minds are no longer with us.

In my encounters on the blogosphere, I’ve come across more than a few people who seem to think that philosophy has largely been overtaken by science, and any distinction is at best, academic, and at worst, irrelevant. But there are fundamental differences, as I recently pointed out in a comment on another post, The Mirror Paradox (July 08): science often deals in right and wrong answers, whereas philosophy often does not.

In a more recent post (Nature’s Layers of Reality) I made the point that ‘quantum mechanics is where science and philosophy collide, and philosophy is still all at sea.’ Quantum mechanics is arguably the most empirically successful meta-theory ever, so it’s been inordinately successful as a sieve for right and wrong answers. But philosophically it conjures up more questions than answers. (Davies makes the exact same point, albeit with more authority, in The Goldilocks Enigma.)

In a recent morning radio-interview with a populist science writer (I can’t remember his name), he gave the impression that there were no unresolved issues with quantum mechanics - that it is perfectly well understood - and by way of explanation, he told his interviewer that she could theoretically co-exist on the other side of the planet in a state of quantum super-position. So there: that demonstrates his point perfectly, doesn’t it?

In The Ghost in the Atom, Rudolf Peierls argues for the traditional Copenhagen interpretation, largely formulated and promoted by Niels Bohr, and, right at the start, Peierls bridles at the word ‘interpretation’, because, as far as he was concerned, there are no alternative ‘interpretations’. He also baulked at the word, ‘reality’, or at least, in the context of the discussion. To him, physics can only give a description, and, in the case of quantum mechanics, ‘reality’ is a misnomer.

In each of the interviews, the discussion tended to centre around John Bell’s famous theorem and Alain Aspect’s consequential experiment, which affirmed Bell’s ‘inequality’ as it is called. This originally arose from a famous thought experiment proposed by Einstein and elaborated on by Podolsky and Rosen, so it became known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen or EPR experiment. It examines the purported ‘action-at-a-distance’ phenomenon predicted by quantum physics for certain traits of particles or photons.

If you measure the trait of one of a pair of particles (of common origin), you instantaneously get the correlated result of its complementary partner, even though you couldn’t possibly know beforehand. In a very truncated nutshell, quantum physics says you won’t know what state either particle is in until you observe one of them or take a measurement of it, which will automatically affect the other particle, even if it’s on the other side of the universe. Einstein originally formulated this in a thought experiment to prove Bohr wrong, because, according to his own (proven) theory of special relativity, it should be impossible. John Bell worked out a mathematical theorem that would prove Einstein right or wrong, depending on a number of correlated outcomes. Alain Aspect then created a real experiment to test Bell’s theorem (made the thought experiment actually happen), which ultimately proved Einstein wrong and quantum theory correct. (This was long after Einstein had died, by the way.)

The various physicists, interviewed by Davies in The Ghost in the Atom, explained the outcome of Aspect’s experiment based on their (philosophical) interpretation of quantum physics. No one disputed the actual results.

John Wheeler, who was a protégé of Bohr’s, also defended the Copenhagen interpretation, but there was a subtle difference to Peirel’s interpretation as to what constituted an observation or a measurement. For Wheeler, the quantum ‘wave packet’ collapsed (into one state or another) when, for example, a photon changed the chemical composition of a film or set off a Geiger counter or a photon multiplier. But Peirel took Eugene Wigner’s extreme interpretation that the ‘collapse’ only occurred when the result was observed by a conscious observer. For Wigner, consciousness was intrinsically involved in forming ‘reality’, although Peirel argued that we can’t talk about ‘reality’ in this context, which was how he side-stepped the obvious conundrum this view posed (it verges on solipsism).

Wheeler took the more accepted or conventional view that quantum phenomena become ‘real’ when they interact with a ‘macro’ object. But Wheeler acknowledged that the choice of apparatus, or the preparation of the experiment affected the outcome. He argued that even if you made a ‘delayed-choice’ of what to measure, you would still get a quantum mechanical outcome. For example, in the famous Young double-slit experiment, if you measure or observe what goes through each slit, you won’t get the double slit interference that is observable when you choose not to ‘observe’ individual slits. Wheeler conjectured that this would still occur even if you made the measurement or observation after the photon or particle had traversed the slits, and he has since been proven correct. In other words, Wheeler is saying that you effectively create a causal effect backwards in time, quantum mechanically. But Wheeler goes further and conjectures that this would even happen on a cosmological scale if, instead of using 2 slits, you used a galaxy lensing light from a distant quasar to create interference or not. This is theoretically possible, if technologically impossible to confirm (at this point in time). It must be pointed out that this phenomenon does not allow communication backwards in time, so paradoxes of the sort that we often see in science fiction would not be possible, but it’s still very counter-intuitive to say the least.

David Deutsch defended the ‘many-worlds’ interpretation, originally proposed by Hugh Everett, which I referenced (via Hofstadter) in my last post. Deutsch’s interpretation is subtly different to Everett’s (in fact, many of the interviewees revealed the subtle variations that exist within this field) in that the worlds don’t bifurcate but are already in existence – not a huge step if there are an infinite number of them. But Deutsch did introduce a novel idea that the separate universes not only separate but also ‘fuse’, which is how he explained the interference.

In The Goldilocks Enigma (published 20 years later), Davies makes the observation that whilst the ‘multiverse’ started off as a quantum mechanical interpretation, it is now very popular amongst cosmologists in conjunction with the ‘anthropic principle’. Both Martin Rees (Just Six Numbers) and Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) appropriate it to explain our peculiarly privileged existence in the overall scheme of things. Not just our existence, but the existence of life in general.

The most interesting interviewee, from my perspective, both now and when I originally read the book about 20 years ago, is David Bohm. I’m a great fan of Bohm’s, if for no other reason than he defied McCarthy, even though it meant that he spent the rest of his life in England. He wrote a book on philosophy in his later years (but prior to this interview) called Wholeness and the Implicate Order, which I’ve read. Bohm is a great mind but not a great writer, which is unfortunate for laypeople like me. The advantage of the interview is that someone, as knowledgeable and astute as Davies, can draw out the ideas and the elaboration of the ideas that you long to comprehend. But it helps, in this case, if one understands the implications of the Bell inequality.

The Bell inequality can be distilled into the mandatory abandonment of one of two highly-cherished and long-assumed ideas: objective reality or the impossibility of non-local communication. Objective reality requires no explanation. But non-local communication (usually short-handed as non-locality) means the ability to communicate at faster-than-light-speed, which breaches Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Hence the reason that Einstein originally created the thought experiment which led to Bell’s theorem.

In ordinary parlance, non-locality refers to an unseen and undetectable connection between 2 objects separated in space and time, which is a more intuitive concept to grasp. Einstein called it: ‘ghostly action-at-a-distance’; which provides the title of the book.

In effect, Bohm is willing to entertain the possibility of non-locality in order to hang on to objective reality. He calls it a ‘hidden variables’ theory, but it is also known as the ‘quantum potential’ theory. The labels are unimportant; it’s the ideas he has behind them that I believe are worth pursuing. Like Bohm, I find it the easiest interpretation to live with, philosophically.

To quote David Deutsch, when he was discussing David Bohm’s interpretation with Davies: ‘A non-local hidden variable theory means, in ordinary language, a theory in which influences propagate across space and time without passing through the space in between.’

I couldn’t have expressed it better myself, and neither, I suspect, could Bohm.

Basically, Bohm is saying that there is something hidden underneath that we have not uncovered, which is why he uses the term ‘implicate order’. He gives the analogy of folding up a piece of paper and drawing lines on it, then, when you unfold it, you get a pattern. In quantum phenomena we see the pattern but not the ‘order’ underneath. My own interpretation is that quantum phenomena may be the surface effects of a hidden (or multiply-hidden) dimensions. Instead of many ‘hidden’ universes perhaps there are ‘hidden’ dimensions, but I suspect you would really only need one.

If you take a box and unfold it into 2 dimensions, you get a cross. If you go off the end of one of the branches of the cross in 2 dimensions, you would end up on the opposite branch if you were in 3 dimensions. An extra dimension allows you to ‘cut’ through space and time. Bohm even entertains the heresy of heresies that backward communication may be possible (within limitations). Bohm doesn’t discuss extra dimensions; it’s just my mind trying to come up with a ‘physical’ interpretation that would allow both non-locality and objective reality (I’m really not familiar enough with the physics to conjecture further).

The last person interviewed in the book is Basil Hiley, who worked with Bohm on the ‘quantum potential’ theory. He has come up with a mathematical interpretation using Schrodinger’s equations, in conjunction with a ‘quantum potential’ that allows non-locality (a sort of ‘absolute space-time [like] a quantum aether’ to use his own description) and, to quote: ‘[from] the statistical results of typical quantum experiments you find that they are still Lorentz invariant’ (they obey Einstein’s relativity theory).

When Davies quizzed Hiley about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Hiley attempted to explain it as a thermodynamic statistical effect. Davies then said, if that was the case, you wouldn’t need Planck’s constant, and Hiley said: ‘To me the value of Planck’s constant is not really relevant to quantum mechanics’, which is an extraordinary statement considering Planck’s constant is what initiated quantum theory in the first place. But to be fair to Hiley, he acknowledges this and makes the point that many people believe that if you brought Planck’s constant to zero you would get classical physics, but he asserts ‘nothing could be further from the truth.’

The value of Plank’s constant has always intrigued me: it places a limit on our ability to perceive the world. It also explains (to me) why quantum effects are scale dependent, though many people claim they are not, and mathematically that is true (hence the theoretical radio interviewer in superpositional states mentioned earlier). But perhaps, and this is a big perhaps from someone as ignorant as me, Planck’s constant determines the hidden dimension, if there is one. This is pure speculation and obviously incorrect, otherwise, I’m sure, someone would have explored it well before now.

Addendum: There is a detailed discussion on this topic in Scientific American, March 2009 issue. The online version can be found here. Where the article has attracted 152 comments to date.

Subjectivity: The Mind’s I (Part I)

2009-06-20T15:06:00.021+10:00

The title of this post is a direct steal from Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. The Mind’s I is the title of a book they published in 1981, a collection of essays by various authors with the subtitle: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul. I’ve added the prefix because subjectivity is a recurring theme, at least in Part I.

After each essay they give a little commentary, but it’s the essays themselves that stimulated me. I’ve already written a post on one: Is God a Taoist? by Raymond M. Smullyan (refer Socrates, Russell, Sartre, God and Taoism in May 09).

So I will provide here my most significant impressions, or resultant thoughts, that just 3 of these essays have provoked. These are just from Part I of the book (there are 6 Parts) so I may well continue this discussion in a later post.

Borges and I by Jorge Luis Borges is an essay where Borges attempts to discriminate between his subjective and objective self in an accessible and entertaining way. It highlights the point made by John Searle in his book, MiND, that what distinguishes consciousness from other phenomena, that we try to investigate and understand, is that it has a distinctly subjective element that can neither be ignored nor isolated - it defies objectification by its nature.

The Dalai Lama makes a similar point in his book on science and religion, The Universe in a Single Atom, where he contends that neurological investigations into consciousness, whilst extremely edifying and illuminating, are really not the whole story without taking subjective experience into account.

The essay also explores, in an indirect way, the difference between the way we perceive ourselves and the way others do. I've always maintained that the most psychologically healthy relationships (work, family or friendship) are where these 2 perceptions closely align.

In the next essay, extracts from D. E. Harding's On Having No Head, Harding starts with an epiphany he had whilst looking at the Himalayas:

‘Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, my manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it.’

This, in itself, is an interesting revelation, coming from a man who makes no claim to mysticism. This epitomises subjective experience in as much as it cannot be shared with another. It's like someone, who viewed the world in colour, trying to explain it to a population of people who only saw shades of grey.

Harding then goes on to describe a world in which his head doesn’t exist for him, though he acknowledges they exist for other people – a form of solipsism. What I find significant is that he is highlighting what I call the inner and outer world that we all have, which is central to my own philosophy. The metaphor of ‘having no head’ which he talks about ‘literally’ (even a mirror image is a hallucination) is the void that exists in one’s mind except one’s thoughts. We have senses, yes, of which sight is the most dominating, but, as he points out, there is no screen that we view, it is simply ‘I’ looking out – the inner world’s most tangible connection to the outer world.

In other posts (specifically, Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness, Feb. 09) I argue that AI will never have this subjective sense that we have. So whilst machines can, and will be built to, ‘sense’ their environments, they won’t ‘experience’ it the way we do, is my contention. Most philosophers and scientists (including Dennett and Hofstadter) disagree with me, but both Borge’s and Harding’s essays merely underline this distinction for me.

Rediscovering the Mind by Harold J. Morowitz takes a different tack altogether. Morowitz, I assume, is a psychologist, and he tackles both the biologist and the physicist, who take a reductionist view of the world, whereby they presume they can explain macro-phenomena via investigation of micro-phenomena. Central to Morowitz’s thesis is an epistemological loop created by the accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics that it requires macro intervention by a conscious mind to produce a measurable result. He quotes Nobel laureate, Eugene Wigner: “It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.” Because the biological reductionist reduces mind to neurons, thus molecules, thus quantum phenomena, Morowitz argues that we have a quantum mechanical epistemological loop from mind to quantum phenomena to mind.

The best analogy for superposition of states is one of those pictures that have 2 images intertwined, like the famous duck and rabbit combination that Wittgenstein once referred to, and there is even a Dali painting that uses it. The most effective ones are those utilising 2 contrasting tones where the shadow reveals one image and the light reveals another. The point is that your mind can only perceive one image or the other but not both at the same time, and you can even ‘switch’ between them. Well, quantum superposition is a bit like that (especially the famous Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment) but once you make the ‘measurement’ or the ‘observation’ you can’t switch back.

Hofstadter tackles this conundrum in his ‘Reflections’ of Morowitz’s essay by pointing out that the mysteries of consciousness and the mysteries of quantum physics are not the same. On this I would agree, but he hasn’t eliminated the conundrum or the epistemological loop. Hofstadter then explains quantum superposition of states, culminating in a description of Schrodinger’s (simultaneously live and dead cat) thought experiment, and a discussion on Hugh Everett III’s ‘many worlds interpretation’, which he describes as ‘this very bizarre theory’.

In fact, Hofstadter gives the best dismantling of Everett’s hypothesis that I’ve read, pointing out that there is a specific ‘subjective’ world that is the one you continue on in, that effectively eliminates all the other worlds. To quote Hofstadter: ‘The problem of how it feels subjectively is not treated; it is just swept under the rug.’ (Hofstadter’s italics)

I find it interesting that Hofstadter evokes ‘subjectivity’ to eliminate, in one stroke, Everett’s contentious interpretation. Having said that, Hofstadter expands on his theme, revealing, in prose I won’t attempt to replicate, how personal identity becomes meaningless in an ever bifurcating universe for each individual occupant.

But getting back to Morowitz, one of the salient points he makes is that the evolution of the universe is a series of discontinuities, starting with the Big Bang itself. A major jump in time, and the emergence of life is another discontinuity, followed by the emergence of consciousness. Morowitz even argues that humanity’s ability for inner reflection is another discontinuity again, though I’m sure many would contest this last hypothesis without necessarily contesting the previous ones.

But, also, one wonders if there is not a discontinuity between the quantum world and the so-called classical world, the organic and the inorganic, the sentient and the non-sentient. I think he has a point, when one looks at it from that perspective, ignoring the context of evolutionary time, that our reductionist philosophy, so prized by science in general, tends to ignore or brush aside.

I expect I will return to this subject in a later post.

Politics in religion, religion in politics

2009-06-12T19:34:00.012+10:00

This is an unusual post for me because it’s an unapologetic critique of an international political organisation. This organisation claims a moral, canonical and, even Divine, legitimacy, yet, according to the one (well researched) book I’ve read, some of its activities have been as nefarious as any secret service organisation in the world. But, even if these accusations proved untrue, I would still oppose this organisation on philosophical grounds, because it’s the antithesis of everything I believe in, and its manifesto is to win the hearts and minds of the future world of humanity.

The book is Their Kingdom Come; Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei by Robert Hutchison (1997,2006). According to the back cover, Hutchison is a journalist, born in Canada, but now living in Switzerland. He’s been a correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph and The Daily Telegraph, and won 4 National Business Writing Awards for articles published in the Toronto Financial Post. Certainly, his knowledge and insights into the financial world is one of the book’s compelling features.

Opus Dei came to international attention when Dan Brown published his bestseller, The Da-Vinci Code, an elaborate work of fiction based on a conspiracy theory concerning the supposed lineage of Jesus. Before that, few people knew that Opus Dei even existed, and that’s probably the way Opus Dei preferred it. Hutchison’s book is partly an unauthorised biography of ‘The Work’s’ founder, Jose Maria Escriva de Balaguer (1902-1975), and partly an expose of Opus Dei’s numerous ‘corporate’ adventures. Opus Dei is Latin for ‘God’s Work’, which some found a pretentious title even when it was formulated in 1930, especially since Escriva was still a young Catholic priest in Spain. But according to the official version, it really started on the day of The Feast of Guardian Angels, 2 October 1928, when he had a vision of Opus Dei: “as He wanted it, and as it would become according to His wishes down through the centuries”, which, according to Hutchison, is ‘the postulation for Jose Maria Escriva’s sainthood unveiled to the world more than fifty years later.’

Hutchison, henceforth refers to it as ‘The Work’, which apparently was Escriva’s own terminology. Escriva’s vision was that the secular population achieved ‘sanctity’ through doing ‘work’. But central to this vision was that ordinary people required ‘instruction’ as they couldn’t be left to work things out for themselves, which Escriva saw as the real danger facing humanity. This particular doctrine is a central tenet of the Catholic Church, especially when one considers how Papal authority attempts to intervene in the most intimate matters of people’s lives, specifically their sex lives. The Vatican’s attitudes towards homosexuality and birth-control are anachronistic at best and just plain immoral at worst.

But this is only one theme of Hutchison’s book, even if it be the one that I find most abrasive. It goes directly against my own existentialist leanings, and even rubs against my own experiences of religion as a child, and is one of the reasons I rejected it.

But a man has no greater zeal than when he believes he has a specific mission from God, and Escriva lived up to that expectation in spades. According to Hutchison, and other commentators, there are 2 faces to Opus Dei, and they are incongruent if not downright contradictory. For example: on the one hand Opus Dei ‘teaches’ the virtue of poverty, humility and piety, yet it wields financial clout that gives the impression of an international banking institution. Hutchison exposes some of the financial schemes that he believes Opus Dei, or personnel linked to Opus Dei, have been involved in, and cites his sources. But, even in my home town of Melbourne, I’ve seen the results of Opus Dei’s financial largesse first hand.

In the April 1, 2001 edition of The Age, Erica Cervini reports on a little-known, in-house political skirmish involving 2 archbishops with philosophical divergent views on Opus Dei: ‘Under the previous archbishop, Frank Little, Opus Dei was unable to get a foothold in the archdiocese.’ In the same article: ‘Opus Dei… has been invited by Dr. Pel to supply a priest to run St. Mary’s Star of the Sea parish in West Melbourne.’ Archbishop Pel left this legacy to Melbourne, just before taking up his position as Cardinal George Pel, Archdiocese of Sydney. Pel is a well known Catholic conservative, who publicly defends even the most controversial statements and proclamations of the Pope in the Australian media.

I have personally seen the money spent on St. Mary’s Star of the Sea, and I recently quipped to someone it was like ‘a little bit of Rome in Melbourne’. Melbourne, I have to say, though I’m not that well-traveled, is one of the most multi-cultural and liberalised secular cities of the world. Before Opus Dei took over, one could find literature at St. Mary’s explaining all the religions of the world – I have a pamphlet explaining Buddhism, quite succinctly and eruditely, and there were many others. In more recent times, the only literature I’ve seen is on how to join the priesthood. So it’s a complete change of ideology, and I have no problem using that word in this context.

Money is an efficacious means to influence and control people; it opens doors and creates obligations. There are a number of religious institutions that appreciate and utilise this simple methodology. Hutchison quotes Javier Sainz Moreno, Professor of Law at Madrid University, and outspoken critic of Opus Dei: “Opus Die knows very well that money rules the world and that religious hegemony of a country or continent is dependent upon obtaining financial hegemony…”

Of course, St. Mary’s Star of the Sea is very small beer compared to the examples that Hutchison provides. On page 164, he writes: ‘…its only interest is the spiritual well-being of its members, and it never interferes with their lives. It doesn’t own anything, certainly not a bank, and it never plays politics.’ Hutchison then proceeds to do his best to demonstrate the contrary to all these claims. In particular, he dedicates a large part of his book, and provides considerable detail, concerning the political and financial machinations that occurred during the 70s in Latin America; in particular, Argentina and Chile.

To appreciate the origins of Opus Dei’s political leanings, if not its ambitions, Hutchison starts at the beginning. In Escriva’s formative years, he had to flee for his life over the Pyrenees during the Spanish civil war when priests were being summarily executed, and nearly lost his life in the attempt. This made Escriva a life-long enemy of Marxism and socialism, and led to Opus Dei members getting government positions under Franco. During the Cold War, according to Hutchison, Opus Dei formed links with American intelligence agencies both in Europe and in Latin America. Yet Escriva states in 1970: “If Opus Dei ever played politics – even for a moment – I would have left the Work at that very moment of error.”

But it is in proselytism that Opus Dei, not only sees its ‘Work’, but where it places its greatest emphasis, at least, to its members, if not the public. It’s this double-sided nature of Opus Dei that makes it most open to criticism and distrust. Hutchison quotes from ‘a dossier prepared by a former numerary (Opus Dei member) John Roche: The single most important activity in the life of a member of Opus Dei is recruitment or ‘proselytism’.

Roche quotes from Escriva’s own ‘manual’ called the Cronica: ‘None of my children can rest satisfied if he doesn’t win four or five faithful vocations each year.’

According to Hutchison, Opus Dei denies the existence of the Cronica, yet Hutchison quotes freely from a text, that he claims to be the Cronica, throughout the book.

In other parts of the book, Hutchison reports on the psychological stress that members suffered, resulting from cognitive dissonance that unquestioning obedience can demand, especially when that obedience requires almost constant deception. According to testimony of ex-members, Opus Dei is indeed a sect, by any definition, and its members suffer accordingly. (See footnote at end.)

But the most damning testimony comes from Miguel Fisac, an architect and Escriva’s 9^th ‘Apostle’ who admonished himself when he finally left Opus Dei: “Now, Miguel, you will always tell the truth and you will try to be a good person, and nothing more.”

Fisac, who knew Escriva well, made the following revelation: “With the exception of Alvaro del Portillo, he never had a good word to say about anybody.” Alvaro del Portillo was Escriva’s personal confessor for 30 years, and became his successor when Escriva died in 1975. (The head of Opus Dei, as of 2001, was Bishop Jarvier Echeverria.)

Parts of Hutchison’s book read like an espionage thriller, that puts Dan Brown to shame, with at least two unsolved, yet related, murders, a number of suspicious deaths - most by heart attack and all opportunistic for their rivals – at least one suspected poisoning, and missing millions, involving banks with unknown stakeholders. Whilst Hutchison meticulously references his sources and carefully acknowledges what remains unknown or unproven, he leaves the reader in no doubt concerning his own opinions.

I have no need to add to the conspiracy theories concerning Opus Dei. Even at the most superficial level, Opus Dei is a political faction within an international political institution. The Vatican is effectively a ‘State’ within its own right; an oligarchy to all intents and purposes, and behaves like one. Opus Dei is the conservative faction of that state and has its own agendas that are far from transparent.

In 1982, Pope John Paul II officially proclaimed in an ‘Apostolic Constitution known as ut sit’ that Opus Dei was created ‘by Divine inspiration’, so it truly was a ‘Work of God’ and was now Canon law. As Hutchison points out, this makes Opus Dei ‘a state within the Church’ with its own authority to God independent of the Pope, which it could theoretically call upon if it ever saw fit. And what’s more it controls the Vatican finances, again, according to Hutchison, which makes it indispensable. The one consistent theme, that Hutchison maintains throughout his book, is the way Opus Dei uses financial muscle to get its own way.

Towards the end of the book, Hutchison deals with Islamic fundamentalism, which is perhaps the scariest part of the whole book. No Christian church will ever be able to have a dialogue with even moderate Muslims, while it insists that Jesus is the only path to spiritual salvation for the whole of humanity. One can see the distinct possibility of a collision between Christian and Islamic fundamentalism with the liberal, secular world caught in the middle, not only in Europe, which is Hutchison’s focus, but world wide. This doesn’t mean that atheism is the ideological answer to this collision; history shows that only moderates of both sides of any conflict can have a dialogue that will result in a pragmatic solution. I make this same point in a previous post (Left or Right, Feb.08).

In Hutchison’s last numbered chapter (I presume of the first edition), he reports on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Africa, Asia and Europe, and its inevitable collision course with the West, which I found amazingly prescient considering it was written prior to 9/11.

In the 2006 edition, he has written an epilogue that includes the canonisation of Escriva, as well as the most recent scandals and intrigues that have rocked the Church.

But its Opus Dei’s ‘opacity’ (Hutchison’s term) to the public and its firm belief that it is doing ‘God’s work’, quite literally, and therefore answers to no other law, that makes it so potentially dangerous. As Hugh Mackay points out in his book, Right & Wrong; how to decide for yourself, when you believe your personal morality is God’s law, you can justify any action, no matter how immoral that action may in fact be. ‘We are God’s chosen’ are the words of Opus Dei’s leaders in Rome, whom Hutchison claims he lived with for 4 years. “We have been chosen by God to save the Church”, Hutchison claims he was told ‘with utter conviction’.

You may wonder why I even bother to take an interest. There are 2 reasons: firstly, the philosophical premise that ordinary people should work things out for themselves is central to my own world view, and is the antithesis to Opus Dei’s philosophy; secondly, Opus Dei is a very secretive, almost clandestine organisation, commonly called the ‘White Mafia’, even by ordinary Catholics. And an institution - in particular - a religious institution that practices secrecy while feigning openness, must surely have hidden agendas, and therefore, repels trust.

In a much earlier post I talked about the importance of Trust (Apr.08) and how it was a requisite for the future beneficence of all humanity. Confucius (500BC) once contended that trust was the last commodity a leader could afford to lose. Opus Dei represents the complete opposite to trust, just through its very existence. A point that Hutchison makes as well.

I wish I could dismiss Opus Dei as a medieval anachronism, because that’s what I believe it is, but it plays a central role in Vatican politics. Its agenda is to infiltrate every institution of power in the Western World and the Developing World. The fact that it prefers this agenda to remain hidden is the real reason it should be exposed. Opus Dei and the Catholic Church both know this: if its real political ambitions were known, it would surely fail in today’s liberal, secular society.

As long as Opus Dei holds sway in the Vatican, the Catholic Church will remain a backward institution, out of time and out of place in the 21^st Century.

Footnote: For testimonies from ex-members, refer www.odan.org and here.

Interview with a Buddhist nun

2009-06-02T14:11:00.015+10:00

Robina Courtin is an Australian Buddhist nun, who’s lived in America for the last 15 years, and runs a prison ‘outreach’ programme, for want of a better term, which she initiated. (Actually called Liberation Prison Project and now also in Oz.)

I saw the movie she mentions, Chasing Buddha, in 2000, at a special screening where the filmmaker, her nephew (about 21 at the time) was present for a Q & A. I didn’t know she was an Aussie when I went to see the movie (I thought she must be American) but the movie opens with this off-screen voice in an Australian accent swearing like the proverbial trooper.

I remember that one member in the audience took offence, during the Q&A, saying she didn’t represent Buddhism at all. I think she’s changed even since the movie was made – in this interview (see the link below) she is less angry, though no less passionate. I can identify with that as well.

She has a very existentialist view of Buddhism, which is very similar to mine. I particularly agree with her existentialist interpretation of karma. Although I don’t agree with her ‘hypothesis’ that our current karma is a result of a past life. But her views on consciousness should not be summarily dismissed, even though they’re contrary to current Western thinking.

This link is only available for the next 2 weeks, and the interview is 55 mins long, but worth the time spent in my opinion. It's the Tuesday 2 June interview in the list. If you download it as an audio file, you can listen to it at your own leisure, but you won't get the musical selections, for copyright reasons.

I can identify to some extent with her childhood, both her attraction to religion and her trauma, though mine was not as intense, but it was soul-destroying or soul-damaging, albeit in a different way.

When you hear her sing, you wouldn’t know it was the same person.

Nature’s Layers of Reality: from Cosmology to QED to The Standard Model

2009-05-28T10:01:00.029+10:00

In my last post I referenced Kerson Huang’s book, Fundamental Forces of Nature: The Story of Gauge Fields. Huang starts with Newton’s equation, F=ma, and works through the history of physics right up to the so-called ‘Standard Model’. The theory of ‘gauge fields’ is effectively the theme of his book, which means that the best part of it is spent in the 20^th Century following the development of quantum mechanics.

What is significant is that, if one overlooks his short detour to include Relativity Theory, Huang traces the world of physics from the scale of our everyday world to a smaller and smaller scale, resulting in the ‘Standard Model’, which includes the innards of nuclear particles: quarks and gluons, amongst numerous others. The significance of scale is a particular feature of Huang’s treatise that he reveals right at the end. I said in my previous post that the book doesn’t include ‘String Theory’, but Huang does explain its origins, almost in passing.

Quantum mechanics is such a tantalising yet daunting area of the natural world for me. I’ve read Richard Feynman’s book, QED; The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), which explains everything and nothing. Feynman, who won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in this area, says right at the beginning that ‘no one understands quantum mechanics’, and I think that’s a very important point. QED (quantum electrodynamics) is the most successful theory ever (both Feynman and Huang, who quotes Freeman Dyson, agree on that) yet no one really understands how it works. Feynman’s book explains brilliantly, with no equations whatsoever, how one can work something out from the summing of ‘all possible paths’ to produce the path of ‘least action’; he even uses the analogy of a stopwatch to provide analogue phase changes (for each path) otherwise described by ‘complex algebra’ differential equations (the famous Schrodinger’s equation) that are used in real quantum mechanical calculations. But he doesn’t explain why we need to allow for ‘all possible paths’ in the first place, a consequence of the well-known, but enigmatic, superposition aspect of quantum phenomena. And no one else can explain it either, despite attempts to propose ‘many worlds’ interpretations and ‘Schrodinger Cats’ in simultaneous states of life and death. This is where philosophy and science collide, and so far, philosophy is still all at sea.

Huang explains how it is the mathematical concept called the Lagrangian that defines the ‘Least Action’ or ‘Least Effort’ principle, effectively the Kinetic Energy minus the Potential Energy. But Huang filled in another piece of the puzzle for me when he explained that we go from one Lagrangian to another as we change the scale of our observations. Even now, this is something that I only vaguely understand, yet I feel it is very important, because I’ve always believed that scale plays a role in the laws of physics, and Huang has effectively confirmed that, and gives a potted history of its theoretical evolution.

In a very early post (Sep.07), The Universe’s Interpreters, I make the point that the natural world exists as worlds within worlds, almost ad-infinitum, and we humans have the unique ability (amongst Earth species) to conceptualise worlds within worlds, ad-infinitum, therefore giving us the privileged position of being able to comprehend the universe that actually created us.

Huang lists a host of people, including Murray Gell-Mann, Francis Low, David Gross, Frank Wilczek and David Politzer for demonstrating a logarithmic relationship between energy and the ‘coupling constant’ (charge). Energy increases for QED (electrons and photons) and decreases for QCD (quarks and gluons). Then, Nikolai Bogoliubov, Curtis Callan and Kurt Symanzik proposed the ‘Renormalisation Group Trajectory’ or RG trajectory including a mathematical equation to describe it. The RG trajectory (according to Huang) takes us from ‘Classical Physics to Quantum Mechanics to QED to Yang-Mills’ (nucleon physics) – increasing energy with decreasing scale. Kenneth Wilson realised that the so-called ‘cutoff’ in renormalisation parameters that changes with scale, and therefore changes the Lagrangian from one range of energies to another, has a physical basis. In other words, these physical laws expressed in mathematics only work within a parameter or range of scale and change when we go from one parameter of scale to another (Hang uses the term ‘crossover’). Each one, as Huang points out, initiated its own scientific revolution during our discovery process, but in reality, reveal to us different layers of nature. Huang also references Leo Kadanoff and Michael Fisher as also contributing to our understanding of RG trajectories.

As an aside, there is one mystery arising from quantum field theory, highlighted by Huang, that I had never heard of before: when time becomes purely imaginary it reduces quantum theory to statistical mechanics, so that time relates to absolute temperature. Actually, a very simple mathematical relationship involving t (time), T (Temperature), i (square route of -1), and h (Planck’s constant). It is tempting to think that this mathematical relation arises from the fact that entropy is the only physical law we know of that gives a direction to time, with entropy being related to temperature, but Huang doesn’t make this connection, so there probably isn’t one. (Entropy, or the second law of thermodynamics, is the only law in physics that insists on a direction for time; relativity theory and quantum mechanics both allow for time reversal – so that bit is true. Reference: Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind.)

Finally, noticeable by its absence in all this, is gravity, described brilliantly by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Gravity and general relativity is effectively the Lagrangian for cosmological scales, but, as everyone knows, there is no place for gravity in the Standard Model – Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity stands alone. The best exposition on relativity theory, that I’ve read (both the special and general theories) is by Richard Feynman in Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, where he describes the ‘Least Action’ principle in terms of relativistic energy or ‘maximum relativistic time’. This is intuitively opposite to the ‘principle of least time’, as postulated by Pierre de Fermat (in the 17^th Century) found in the optical phenomenon of refraction and now accepted as scientific fact, yet it is the same principle. Feynman demonstrates mathematically that the principle of maximum relativistic time (therefore ‘Least Action’) gives the correct trajectory of a projectile in flight in a gravitational field. As I describe in an earlier post (Mar.08) The Laws of Nature, Fermat’s principle in refraction and Feynman’s mathematical description of ‘Least Action’ in relativistic physics both relate to how the light or the projectile finds the ‘right’ path – the path that requires minimum effort, satisfying the Lagrangian: Kinetic Energy minus Potential Energy as a minimum. Feynman also demonstrates how quantum mechanics gives the answer that light follows the ‘least time’ principle using his analogue version of QED, in his book titled, QED (as I described above). So Feynman effectively demonstrates that the ‘Least Action’ principle applies consistently in relativity theory, classical optics and QED.

Huang gives very little space to ‘Grand Unifying Theories of Everything’ (known generically as GUT), but, of course, String Theory is the great contender. One of the best books I’ve read on String Theory is Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong; The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics. Woit covers much of the same territory as Huang in his explanation of gauge theories, quantum field theory and the Standard Model, but then continues onto String Theory, explaining how it became the latest paradigm in our search for theoretical answers (if not experimental ones) and, specifically, the role of Edward Witten in its evolvement. In fact, reading Huang’s book, and writing this post, has forced me to re-read Woit’s book. Woit, like Huang, is a physicist and a mathematician, and I am humbled when I read these guys. Unlike me, they actually know what they're talking about.

Whilst Woit is highly critical of String Theory (or string theories to be more accurate), he is deeply respectful of Witten, who was at Princeton at the same time as Woit.

One of the points that Woit makes is that String Theory evolved out of a ‘Bootstrap’ theory (also mentioned by Huang) developed by Geoffrey Chew in opposition to QCD and the highly successful ‘Standard Model’. This theory developed from an ‘S matrix theory’ that Woit is almost contemptuous of, because some of its followers, including Fritjof Capra, refused to admit its demise, even after the Standard Model became one of the great success stories in recent theoretical physics. Woit is particularly scathing of Capra’s The Tao of Physics. (Capra’s ideas, by the way, are not to be confused with Huang’s poetical allusion to Taoism, nor mine, that I discussed in the previous post.)

But ‘Bootstrap’ theory aside, Woit has other issues with String Theory and its derivatives, for which he provides an exhaustive and illuminating history. Woit readily admits, by the way, that if you want a more positive picture of String Theory there are other books available, by authors like Brian Greene and Michio Kaku, and he generously lists them (some of which I’ve read).

The biggest problem, according to Woit, is with ‘supersymmetry’, the ‘Holy Grail’ of String theory and its derivatives. To quote his concluding paragraph on its incompatibility with the Standard Model:

‘As far as anyone can tell, the idea of super-symmetry contains a fundamental incompatibility between observations of particle masses, which require spontaneous super-symmetry breaking to be large, and observations of gravity, which require it to be small or non-existent.’

Feynman, in a 1987 interview, the year before his death, was even more damning:

‘Now I know that other old men have been very foolish in saying things like this, and, therefore, I would be very foolish to say this is nonsense. I am going to be very foolish, because I do feel strongly that this is nonsense! I can’t help it, even though I know the danger in such a point of view.’

Woit does elaborate on one of the benefits of String Theory, which is the cross-fertilisation, for want of a better term, between physics and mathematics, that he believes was badly needed. In fact, he devotes considerable space to the interaction between mathematics and physics, both historically and philosophically.

One of the truly extraordinary features of mathematics is that it allows us to go intellectually and conceptually where we can’t go physically. One can’t help but wonder if Witten’s genius, along with others, hasn’t gone somewhere that the physical universe can’t follow. In a previous post (Mar.09), The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics (a quote from Eugene Wigner) I referenced Penrose’s 3 perspectives of reality: physical, mental and Platonic, where the Platonic realm is mathematical, therefore abstract. The mental (consciousness) arises from the physical, the Platonic from the mental, and the physical from the Platonic (not unlike a self-perpetuating Escher graphic). In other words, not everything Platonic relates to the physical, although if there are an infinite number of universes (the multiverse) then perhaps it does. But my point is that Witten and his colleagues may well be exploring a part of the Platonic realm that doesn’t relate specifically to ‘our’ universe.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the idea of a multiverse (very popular, I might add, and discussed by Woit) mathematics is comfortable with dealing with infinities and multiple dimensions in a way that we are not. The current version of String Theory (Superstring Theory or M Theory) requires 10 dimensions, which means that 6 spatial dimensions need to effectively disappear, or be so physically insignificant as to be invisible, even at the sub-nuclear level.

I, for one, am a little sceptical of a ‘grand unified theory of everything’ because history has shown that the resolution of one set of mysteries always uncovers others. We always think that we are at the final limit of nature’s secrets, yet we never are, and, obviously, never have been.

Huang’s exposition has highlighted the apparent reality that the laws of physics, therefore nature, are scale dependent. Many people overlook this, and talk about quantum physics as if it really works at all scales, including the one we are familiar with, and the mathematics doesn’t contradict this, just the reality we observe (refer Addendum 2 below, and Timmo's comments in the thread for a more knowledgable perspective). Penrose has argued that there is something missing in our knowledge to explain how classical physics ‘emerges’ from quantum mechanics, in a similar way that consciousness apparently ‘emerges’ from neuron activity. But the fact that physics has different laws at different levels reflects what we observe and is consistent with nature at all levels, including biology (refer my post in Feb.09 on Hofstadter’s book, Godel, Escher, Bach: Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness).

Therefore, I don’t expect we’ll find a ‘Theory of Everything’ that encompasses all levels of nature in one mathematical expression, but a lot of people, including many who work in the field, seem to think we will. The fact that we need to go to 10 or more dimensions to achieve this, makes it more speculative than physically probable, in my view. When I think of the 10 dimensions required, I’m reminded of all the epicycles that were needed to make Ptolemy’s model of the solar system compatible with observations.

I’m not saying we already know all the answers because we obviously don’t, but I am saying that maybe we never will. Every time we’ve uncovered one layer of reality we’ve found another layer underneath, or beyond. The Standard Model suggests we have finally reached rock bottom, but even if we have, the fact that there are mysteries still unsolved suggests to me that there are still further mysteries yet to be uncovered, because that’s the one consistency that the history of science has revealed thus far.

Addendum: There is an article in this week's New Scientist (30 May 2009) on how String Theory, or a variant of it has been useful, not in cosmology, but in condensed matter physics and high temperature superconductivity What string theory is really good for

Addendum 2: I want to thank Timmo for his valuable and knowledgable contribution that you can view in the thread of comments below. He provides more detailed information and analysis on Feynman's publications in particular.

Socrates, Russell, Sartre, God and Taoism

2009-05-14T09:01:00.014+10:00

An unlikely congregation, but bear with me and it will all become clear. Earlier this week I received 2 new books from Amazon UK: The Mind’s I, by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett; and Fundamental Forces of Nature; The Story of Gauge Fields, by Kerson Huang.

Huang is a Chinese born American, now Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at MIT, and 79 years old when he published this book in 2007. The book covers all of physics, in a historical, therefore evolutionary, context, from Newtonian physics (F= ma) up to QED (quantum electrodynamics) and beyond, though it doesn’t include String Theory. The presentation is very unusual, with equations kept deliberately minimalist, yet he manages to explain, for example, the subtle difference between Faraday’s equations and Maxwell’s (an extra term effectively) that led to the prediction of electromagnetic waves propagating at the speed of light. He also introduces mathematical concepts like Lagrangians and Hamiltonians early in his treatise; an unusual approach.

Its relevance to the title of this post is at the end, where he quotes a Taoist poet, Qu Yuan (340-278 BC) who wrote a series of questions called Tian Wen (Ask Heaven):

At the primordial beginning

Who was the Reporter?

Before the universe took shape.

How could one measure it?

(Huang also provides the original Mandarin.)

Then he quotes Russell on mathematical beauty:

A beauty so cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without gorgeous trappings or painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

He follows this quote with the following rumination of his own:

Physics is truth. It sails down a trajectory in the space of Lagrangians, when the energy scale shrinks from that set by the Big Bang.

I sometimes think that God is in the mathematics; I’ll explain myself at the end.

But the subject of this post really comes from an essay written by Raymond M. Smullyan (in Dennett’s and Hofstadter’s book) titled, Is God a Taoist?. It’s very cleverly written in the style of a Socratic dialogue between God and a mortal, who wants God to relieve him of free will. It reminds me of Sartre’s seminal essay, Existentialism is a humanism, with its famous quote: ‘man is condemned to be free’. I once wrote an entire essay founded on that quote alone, but that’s not the subject of this post.

Smullyan manages to cover an array of topics, including free will and morality, in which, via a lengthy Socratic dialogue, he concludes that the real virtue of free will is that it mandates responsibility for the infliction of suffering on others. In other words, you know when you’ve done it, and you will feel guilt and remorse as a consequence. This is not a verbatim interpretation, just my own summary of it. The dialogue effectively gets the mortal to admit this when God offers to free him of all guilt associated with his ‘free will’. So the choice then of allowing God to rid him of free will, and its consequences, becomes a moral choice in itself, therefore turning the moral dilemma back on itself.

But it’s the particular Eastern references in this essay that appealed to me, in which Smullyan incorporates the idea of God as a process. (A concept I’ve flirted with myself, though Smullyan’s concept is more Eastern in influence.)

To quote Smullyan’s God character in the dialogue:

My role in the scheme of things... is neither to punish nor reward, but to aid the process by which all sentient beings achieve ultimate perfection.

Then to elaborate:

…it is inaccurate to speak of my role in the scheme of things. I am the scheme of things. Secondly, it is equally misleading to speak of my aiding the process of sentient beings attaining enlightenment. I am the process. The ancient Taoists were quite close when they said of me (whom they called “Tao”) that I do not do things, yet through me all things get done. In more modern terms, I am not the cause of Cosmic Process. I am the Cosmic Process itself.

Smullyan, then (as God) quotes the Mahayana Buddhists:

The best way of helping others is by first seeing the light [in]oneself.

He also addresses the issue of personality (of God)

But the so-called “personality” of a being is really more in the eyes of the beholder than in the being itself.

I hope I haven’t been too disparate in this rendition of someone else’s essay. Hofstadter provides his own commentary at the end, with particular reference to the role of free will which he describes thus: ‘a person is an amalgamation of many subpersons, all with wills of their own.’ He says: ‘It’s a common myth that each person is a unity.’ I assume he’s talking about split brains, but I won’t explore that issue here, as Smullyan’s essay has other resonances for me. (I admit I'm not doing justice to Hofstadter, but I don't want to get distracted; maybe another post.)

I’ve said in previous posts that God is an experience, which is one reason I claim religion is totally subjective, because it’s an experience that can’t be shared – it’s unique to the person who has it and only they can interpret it. The essay by Smullyan makes only passing reference to this idea of God (when he discusses personality). I believe he’s referring to a more universal concept, but in an Eastern context rather than a Western one.

I can’t help but make a connection between Huang’s book and Smullyan’s essay, because they both relate to 2 of my lifelong passions: science and religion. Mathematics has given us such extraordinary insights into the physical processes of the universe, at every level, and the idea of God as the process itself, in which we play a very small part is an appealing one. And calling it the Tao, effectively rids it of human personality.

Most people would make no connection between these 2 ideas, but I sometimes think I am a Pythagorean at heart. Mathematics is such a magical medium that one cannot dissociate it from God, especially if God is the Tao, and Tao is ‘the scheme of things’.

Hope

2009-04-27T22:25:00.022+10:00

It so happens that this topic arose indirectly on 2 blogs I follow: Stephen Law and Larry Niven’s Rust Belt Philosophy (see my blog roll).

Larry’s reference can be found in his 500^th post, where he ‘deconstructs’ Dr. William Lane Craig’s argument that there is no hope without a belief in God. On Stephen’s site, a group was discussing the ethics of having or not having children, and hope came up in the context of what do we live for?

About 20 years ago, I started having conversations with a tobacconist in the underground section of Flinders Street Station in Melbourne, because my traveling companion used to buy cigarettes from him. How we got onto philosophical issues I have no idea – this was years before I actually studied philosophy – he was just a bloke who had one of those stalls with standing room only in the middle of a passing throng of busy commuters every morning. But we must have done, because he lent me a book called HOPE by Arnold Hutschnecker, which was a sizable tome and obviously one he valued.

Hutschnecker was an American physician turned psychologist and his book was effectively a collection of case studies carefully reworked for public consumption. I only remember 3 things from the book. Firstly, he starts the book by recounting how he faced a firing squad, in circumstances that I can’t remember except that it was early 20^th Century somewhere in Eastern Europe (obviously, he wasn’t actually shot, and I can’t remember how he escaped). Secondly, he worked on a programme under Richard Nixon to tackle problem gambling (according to references on the Internet he was good friends with Nixon). Thirdly, he proposed that there were 2 types of hope: active hope and passive hope. Active hope is where one perceives a goal and goes after it. Passive hope is when one buys their weekly Tatts ticket, or whatever, and waits for their ship to come in. He saw this distinction as particularly psychologically significant, and I think he treated all his cases around this dichotomy.

The other point that needs to be mentioned is how important hope is just for living. Suicide invariably results when an individual loses all hope: they can no longer see a future, or the one that they do see is so bleak that they literally can’t face it.

Lastly, I can’t ignore Dr. William Lane Craig’s particular version of hope, since it’s probably closer to Hutschnecker’s passive type than active type, though I’m sure Dr. Craig would disagree.

I actually submitted a challenge to Dr. Craig on his own Q & A site regarding this, but so far he’s failed to respond. I’m not that surprised - he’s done that before. Dr. Craig prefers people to ask him questions on what God thinks, to which he seems to believe, as well as some of the people who submit the questions, to be some sort of expert. He may yet prove me wrong.

Back to topic, Dr. Craig’s particular take on this subject is that it can’t be disassociated from the hope for eternal life. He quotes Russell, as well as referring to Sartre and Camus, as examples of how atheists must axiomatically view the world as one without hope.

Below is the quote from Bertrand Russell that Dr. Craig presents as his prize exhibit (my term, not his) that seals his case: Atheism is a philosophy without hope.

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; . . . that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

For a start, it’s worth pointing out that Russell is talking about humanity in general, with only an introductory reference to the individual for rhetorical effect. But more importantly, Russell is talking about reality rather than fantasy. It is truly humbling to realise that all the endeavours of humanity in all their glory will one day be no more. Dr. Craig, on the other hand, believes that all this glory will continue on in God’s kingdom, which is a hope of fantasy not reality. The biggest problem I have with the afterlife is the way some people (like Dr. Craig) seem to think they know exactly what it is and how it will feel to participate. I don’t mind if someone believes in an existence beyond death, I only mind that they place more importance on it than the life they are currently living.

Below is the argument I submitted to Dr. Craig.

You say: ‘if there is no God, there is no hope of deliverance from aging, disease, and death’. You must surely realise that the Buddha addressed this very issue 500 years before Jesus was even born, and founded a religion no less influential than Christianity, with no reference to God at all. The 4 Noble Truths that Gautama envisaged, arising from this reality, results in a psychological philosophy of ‘no attachment’, and, in particular, I would suggest, no attachment to the ego (the concept of 'no-self'), which is what death entails. (No, I’m not a Buddhist; I just acknowledge that his philosophy and influence is no less worthy of contemplation than Jesus’.)

So a belief in a life after death, that you espouse, arises from a specific hope that is obvious yet never articulated: the continuation of one’s personal ego. I think it is the giving up of this hope that is the real revelation, indeed, one could argue salvation, even from Russell’s rhetorical despair, at least psychologically. What you are offering, through your biblical bound philosophy, is the hope of the continuation of ego. On the contrary, I would argue that it is the psychological ‘letting go’ of one’s ego that provides the ultimate revelation and even spiritual freedom.

Unlike you, I don’t speculate about something of which I have no knowledge: a life after death. So I live my life in the knowledge that this is the only life I know and can influence. To do otherwise is to live a lie. And, believe it or not, in this intentional attitude of reality, rather than fantasy, I can find: ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control’ (a biblical quote cited by Dr. Craig, Galations 5.22), as do many people of various persuasions.

The problem with your idea of ‘hope’, even though you don’t spell it out, is that it’s based on the mythical concept of ‘original sin’. Your biblical bound philosophy insists that original sin is the impenetrable obstacle to all hope, except of course through Jesus. So if you want a mythical solution to enduring hope, the Bible provides it. Original sin, of course, was created by the very God through whom you find salvation, so I find it all a bit circular. Now you will say that God didn’t create original sin. No, he just created an intelligent, curious species called humanity and left them with the temptation of the tree of knowledge. Now, this is all metaphorical, as mythology always is, but if you equate metaphor with reality then you get the particular version of hope that you are writing about. And getting back to your quote from Russell, what he is really referring to is the logical end to all humanity rather than the individual. But, unlike yourself, he doesn’t seek solace or consolation from mythology.

Hope is what everyone lives with: hope to improve their life and the lives of others, spiritually and otherwise. No argument about that, but hope for the continuation of one’s ego beyond death is not necessarily a psychologically healthy one. It can lead to the most perverse behaviour, like flying loaded aeroplanes into occupied buildings. It can also lead to inquisitions and wars, and the demonisation of people with different religious views. History is full of the iniquitous deeds done in an attempt to fulfill that particular hope.

The Singularity Prophecy

2009-04-11T14:31:00.057+10:00

This is not a singularity you find in black holes or at the origin of the universe – this is a metaphorical singularity entailing the breakthrough of artificial intelligence (AI) to transcend humanity. And prophecy is an apt term, because there are people who believe in this with near-religious conviction. As Wilson da Silva says, in reference to its most ambitious interpretation as a complete subjugation of humanity by machine, ‘It’s been called the “geek rapture”’.

Wilson da Silva is the editor of COSMOS, an excellent Australian science magazine I’ve subscribed to since its inception. The current April/May 2009 edition has essay length contributions on this topic from robotics expert, Rodney Brooks, economist, Robin Hanson, and science journalist, John Horgan, along with sound bites from people like Douglas Hofstadter and Steven Pinker (amongst others).

Where to start? I’d like to start with Rodney Brooks, an ex-pat Aussie, who is now Professor of Robotics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’s also been Director of the same institute’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and founder of Heartland Robotics Inc. and co-founder of iRobot Corp. Brooks brings a healthy tone of reality to this discussion after da Silva’s deliberately provocative introduction of the ‘Singularity’ as ‘Rapture’. (In a footnote, da Silva reassures us that he ‘does not expect to still be around to upload his consciousness to a computer.’)

So maybe I’ll backtrack slightly, and mention Raymond Kurzweil (also the referenced starting point for Brooks) who does want to upload (or download?) his consciousness into a computer before he dies, apparently (refer Addendum 2 below). It reminds me of a television discussion I saw in the 60s or 70s (in the days of black & white TV) of someone seriously considering cryogenically freezing their brain for future resurrection, when technology would catch up with their ambition for immortality. And let’s be honest: that’s what this is all about, at least as far as Kurzweil and his fellow proponents are concerned.

Steven Pinker makes the point that many of the science fiction fantasies of his childhood, like ‘jet-pack commuting’ or ‘underwater cities’, never came to fruition, and he would put this in the same bag. To quote: ‘Sheer processing power is not a pixie dust that magically solves all your problems.’

Back to Rodney Brooks, who is one of the best qualified to comment on this, and provides a healthy dose of scepticism, as well as perspective. For a start, Brooks points out how robotics hasn’t delivered on its early promises, including his own ambitions. Brooks expounds that current computer technology still can’t deliver the following childlike abilities: ‘object recognition of a 2 year-old; language capabilities of a 4 year-old; manual dexterity of a 6 year-old; and the social understanding of an 8 year-old.’ To quote: ‘[basic machine capability] may take 10 years or it may take 100. I really don’t know.’

Brooks states at the outset that he sees biological organisms, and therefore the brain, as a ‘machine’. But the analogy for interpretation has changed over time, depending on the technology of the age. During the 17^th Century (Descartes’ time), the model was hydrodynamics, and in the 20^th century it has gone from a telephone exchange, to a logic circuit, to a digital computer to even the world wide web (Brooks’ exposition in brief).

Brooks believes the singularity will be an evolutionary process, not a ‘big bang’ event. He sees the singularity as the gradual evolvement of machine intelligence till it becomes virtually identical to our own, including consciousness. Hofstadter expresses a similar belief, but he ‘…doubt[s] it will happen in the next couple of centuries.’ I have to admit that this is where I differ, as I don’t see machine intelligence becoming sentient, even though my view is in the minority. I provide an argument in an earlier post (The Ghost in the Machine, April 08) where I discuss Henry Markram’s ‘Blue Brain’ project, with a truckload dose of scepticism.

Robin Hanson is author of The Economics of the Singularity, and is Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University in Virginia. He presents a graph of economic growth via ‘Average world GDP per capita’ on a logarithmic scale from 10,000BC to the last 4 weeks. Hanson explains how the world economy has made quantum leaps at historical points: specifically, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution and the most recently realised technological revolution. The ‘Singularity’ will be the next revolution, and it will dwarf all the economical advances made to date. I know I won’t do justice to Hanson’s thesis, but, to be honest, I don’t want to spend a lot of space on it.

For a start, all these disciples of the extreme version of the Singularity seem to forget how the other half live, or, more significantly, simply ignore the fact that the majority of the world’s population doesn’t live in a Western society. In fact, for the entire world to enjoy ‘Our’ standard of living would require 4 planet earths (ref: E.O. Wilson, amongst others). But I won’t go there, not on this post. Except to point out that many of the world’s people struggle to get a healthy water supply, and that is going to get worse before it gets better; just to provide a modicum of perspective for all the ‘rapture geeks’.

I’ve left John Horgan’s contribution to last, just as COSMOS does, because he provides the best realism check you could ask for. I’ve read all of Horgan’s books, but The End of Science is his best read, even though, once again, I disagree with his overall thesis. It’s a treasure because he interviews some of the best minds of the latter 20^th Century, some of whom are no longer with us.

I was surprised and impressed by the depth of knowledge Horgan reveals on this subject. In particular, the limitations of our understanding of neurobiology and the inherent problems in creating direct neuron-machine interfaces. One of the most pertinent aspects, he discusses, is the sheer plasticity of the brain in its functionality. Just to give you a snippet: ‘…synaptic connections constantly form, strengthen, weaken and dissolve. Old neurons die and – evidence is overturning decades of dogma – new ones are born.’

There is a sense that the brain makes up neural codes as it goes along - my interpretation, not Horgan's - but he cites Steven Rose, neurobiologist at Britain's Open University, based in Milton Keyes: 'To interpret the neural activity corresponding to any moment ...scientists would need "access to [someone's] entire neural and hormonal life history" as well as to all [their] corresponding experiences.'

It’s really worth reading Horgan’s entire essay – I can’t do it justice in this space – he covers the whole subject and puts it into a perspective the ‘rapture geeks’ have yet to realise.

I happened to be re-reading John Searle’s Mind when I received this magazine, and I have to say that Searle’s book is still the best I’ve read on this subject. He calls it ‘an introduction’, even on the cover, and reiterates that point more than once during his detailed exposition. In effect, he’s trying to tell us how much we still don’t know.

I haven’t read Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, but I probably should. In the same issue of COSMOS, Paul Davies references Dennett’s book, along with Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach, as 2 of the 4 most influential books he’s read, and that’s high praise indeed. Davies says that while Dennett’s book ‘may not live up to its claim… it definitely set the agenda for how we should think about thinking.’ But he also adds, in parenthesis, that ‘some people say Dennett explained consciousness away’. I think Searle would agree.

Dennett is a formidable philosopher by anyone’s standards, and I’m certainly not qualified, academically or otherwise, to challenge him, but I obviously have a different philosophical perspective on consciousness to him. In a very insightful interview over 2 issues of Philosophy Now, Dennett elaborated on his influences, as well as his ideas. He made the statement that ‘a thermostat thinks’, which is a well known conjecture originally attributed to David Chalmers (according to Searle): it thinks it’s too hot, or it thinks it’s too cold, or it thinks the temperature is just right.

Searle attacks this proposition thus: ‘Consciousness is not spread out like jam on a piece of bread… If the thermostat is conscious, how about parts of the thermostat? Is there a separate consciousness to each screw? Each molecule? If so, how does their consciousness relate to the consciousness of the whole thermostat?’

The corollary to this interpretation and Dennett’s, is that consciousness is just a concept with no connection to anything real. If consciousness is an emergent property, an idea that Searle seems to avoid, then it may well be ‘spread out like jam on a piece of bread’.

To be fair to Searle (I don't want to misrepresent him when I know he'll never read this) he does see consciousness being on a different level to neuron activity (like Hofstadter) and he acknowledges that this is one of the factors that makes consciousness so misunderstood by both philosophers and others.

But I’m getting off the track. The most important contribution Searle makes, that is relevant to this whole discussion, is that consciousness has a ‘first person ontology’ yet we attempt to understand it solely as a ‘third person ontology’. Even the Dalai Lama makes this point, albeit in more prosaic language, in his book on science and religion, The Universe in a Single Atom. Personally, I find it hard to imagine that AI will ever make the transition from third person to first person ontology. But I may be wrong. To quote my own favourite saying: 'Only future generations can tell us how ignorant the current generation is'.

There are 2 aspects to the Singularity prophecy: we will become more like machines, and they will become more like us. This is something I’ve explored in my own fiction, and I will probably continue to do so in the future. But I think that machine intelligence will complement human intelligence rather than replace it. As we are already witnessing, computers are brilliant at the things we do badly and vice versa. I do see a convergence, but I also see no reason why the complementary nature of machine intelligence will not only continue, but actually improve. AI will get better at what it does best, and we will do the same. There is no reason, based on developments to date, to assume that we will become indistinguishable, Turing tests notwithstanding. In other words, I think there will always remain attributes uniquely human, as AI continues to dazzle us with abilities that are already beyond us.

P.S. I review Douglas Hofstadter's brilliant book, Godel, Escher, Bach: an Internal Golden Braid in a post I published in Feb.09: Artificial Intelligence & Consciousness.

Addendum: I'm led to believe that at least 2 of the essays cited above were originally published in IEEE Spectrum Magazine prior to COSMOS (ref: the authors themselves).

Addendum 2: I watched the VBS.TV Video on Raymond Kurzweil, provided by a contributor below (Rory), and it seems his quest for longevity is via 'nanobots' rather than by 'computer-downloading his mind' as I implied above.

Tampa revisited

2009-04-03T17:56:00.026+11:00

I never intended this to be a political blog, but the front page of this morning’s Age (Melbourne daily) reignited a righteous anger I first expressed in writing in 2001 (before 9/11). The article tells of how 2 Asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Tour Gul and Mohammed Hussain have been confirmed killed by the Taliban, after their application for asylum was rejected by the Australian government and they were deported (in 2002). I’m not an expert on international law, but I suspect Australia has breached UN Human Rights obligations in this regard. The gory details are that Tour Gul was shot through the head, and Mohammed Hussain was thrown down a well in front of members of his own family along with a grenade (according to The Age).

The Age had previously reported that 11 asylum seekers on Nauru (part of the Australian government’s notorious ‘Pacific solution’, following the Tampa incident) had been killed by the Taliban following their deportation. According to Phil Glendenning, director of social justice agency, The Edmund Rice Centre, ‘who spent six years traveling the world to investigate the fate of rejected asylum seekers… 11 deaths was a conservative figure.’

The Tampa incident involved a Norwegian container ship, captained by Arne Rinnan, who picked up refugees from a sinking ‘people smuggler’ vessel, after being notified of their plight by the RAAF, if I have the story right (a proper account can be found here). Then after he picked them up he was instructed to take them to Indonesia, not to Australia. That's right: after Australian authorities requested for someone to pick them up, the 'good Samaritan' was then told to take them away from Australian territorial waters, and thanks for your help.

This provided a grandstanding opportunity for Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, on the eve of an election to show how tough he was with refugees and win the xenophobic vote for Australia, after they had been primed by Pauline Hanson. The gutless opposition, knowing which way the votes were running, became the non-opposition and sealed their fate. Arne Rinnan was awarded a medal, by the way, in his own country. I thought he was the one decent and courageous soul to emerge out of the whole affair (after all he stood up to the Australian Government, even when bullied by our military). I was in America at the time of the election, and consequently wrote a letter to the re-elected Prime Minister expressing my personal disgust – something I had never done previously. (For you American readers, John Howard was later tagged 'the man of steel' by George W.)

I alluded very vaguely to this incident, or the social dynamics that surround it, in my closing arguments on an early post, Evil (Oct.07). What galls me is that we live such a privileged life yet we feel so threatened by these people who are literally in desperate straits. It makes me ashamed to be Australian, but it doesn’t surprise me. The Attorney General of the time, Philip Ruddock, seemed to take all these cases personally, and was determined to make any refugee’s life even worse than it already was. It was his unstated goal to make their life an absolute misery – I referred to him as the Australian Minister for Misery – and he did an exemplary job. The mental health damage he did to innumerable vulnerable people, including children, cannot be overestimated. Of course, these people have no vote, and no one to stand up for them, with a few outstanding exceptions, so the Government knew they could treat them like chaff.

Ex Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser (same political party as Howard), was one of the few to speak out, and made the point in an early interview, well before Tampa, when Pauline Hanson first rose to prominence: ‘Evil always arises when we blame all of a society’s ills on one group of people.’

The irony is that we now have troops in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban, whereas in 2002 it was considered a ‘safe’ country for these political asylum seekers, fleeing the enemy we are now mortally engaged with.

Addendum: it would be remiss of me not to mention some of the advocates as well as Malcolm Fraser; in particular, Julian Burnside QC. In 2005, some Liberal party backbenchers (same party as Howard) including Petro Georgiou and Judi Moylan (whom I corresponded with) put a bill through parliament that stopped children being kept in mandatory detention (as refugees). John Howard liked to tout the virtues of his Christianity and Christian values. It should be obvious from other posts on this blog, that I'm definitely not a Christian, but Howard's policy towards refugees was the antithesis of the Jesus character depicted in biblical stories, whether he be fictional or real.

The problems with fundamentalism

2009-03-15T12:25:00.014+11:00

It’s a sad indictment that I should feel it necessary to write this post, but the blogosphere, at least considerable sections of it, are full of it. Notice the use of the plural, though there is one specific problem that compounds all the others – it’s called intolerance. Not that long ago, in the land I inhabit, we had our own brush with intolerance that had ramifications right across the nation and across the political spectrum – she was called Pauline Hanson.

I’ve always had a tendency to analyse, even when the issues are emotive and personal. What I found interesting about the Pauline Hanson phenomenon is that she created intolerance in people like myself who are normally tolerant. Pauline Hanson taught me that I’m intolerant of intolerance. Pauline, a fish and chip shop proprietor, who became a parliamentarian, created a political storm that pretty well divided a country and even divided families. The link with fundamentalism is that fundamentalists, like Pauline Hanson, create intolerance on both sides.

This is why someone like Richard Dawkins, with whom I share many of his arguments, not only shows contempt for anyone with religious beliefs but contempt for anyone who is tolerant of people with religious beliefs (just read his introduction to the paperback edition of The God Delusion). So, whilst I support Dawkins in his fight against religious fundamentalism completely, I don’t support his fight against religion per se at all. I don’t agree with a black and white view of the world, that he tends to portray, which is divided between atheists and religious fundamentalists, and therefore one must take one side or the other. I wish to lay out my slate that there is a world that can include atheists and religious believers. My role models for this perspective are Karen Armstrong and the Dalai Lama.

I write a lot about science and mathematics on this blog, but almost every essay includes an aside to explain why the mysteries of the universe cannot be resolved by the invocation of God. It seems to me that many people don’t appreciate that a philosophical argument that uses science to support it, doesn’t necessarily turn it into a scientific argument. I believe that even Dawkins makes this error when he introduces the anthropic principle, in concert with the concept of the multiverse, as if it’s a scientific argument rather than a philosophical argument supported by both known and speculative science (The God Delusion). There is nothing wrong with Dawkins’ argument – it’s philosophical in the same way that Paul Davies produces an alternative philosophical argument in The Goldilocks Enigma, only, with Davies, one is more aware that it is philosophical. I make this distinction because many fundamentalists don’t seem to appreciate that a philosophical argument that includes scientific evidence or a mathematical proof is not of itself a scientific or mathematical proof. There are no philosophical proofs in my view (refer my Mar.08 post: What is philosophy?).

But I’m getting off the track before I’ve even started. If one reads a lot of science, like I do, then one sees a history of investigation at many levels where the solution of one mystery reveals other mysteries that we didn’t even know existed. I contend therefore, that it’s quite possible, even reasonable to assume, that we will never know all the mysteries of the natural universe, let alone resolve them. It is for this reason that any sceptic of science, which includes all religious fundamentalists that I’ve read or heard or argued with, can find a hole in any area of science, which they believe they can exploit.

It follows, according to their logic, that the answer to any mystery, still unresolved by science, can therefore be found in the Bible, as if the Bible has provided all the information we currently have on the natural world. Therefore the Genesis explanation, of man being made from dirt and woman from a man’s rib, overturns all the scientific evidence of biological evolution discovered in the last 2 centuries. ID and creationism are not about studying science, despite the camouflage rhetoric to the contrary, they are about proving that the Bible is true. For Christian fundamentalists, the Bible is the only source of truth in the earthly world. Despite all the discoveries of science, especially in the last 500 years, any conflict with biblical scripture, whether apparent or real, rules science invalid. It is on this battle-line that I firmly side with Dawkins.

Mathematics and physics are my private passion, and I’m currently reading about Paul Dirac’s discovery of an equation that didn’t just predict anti-matter but insisted upon its existence. In 1928, Dirac took the recently formed Schrodinger equations of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s equations of special relativity, and in resolving their apparent dichotomy, not only justified evidence already known yet unexplained (the magnetic moment of electrons), but predicted the electron’s anti-particle, the positron. This is an intellectual achievement that is monumental in its consequences, comparable to Einstein’s equation: E= mc². There is nothing in the Bible to compare with this. Imagine if the Bible told us that God created anti-matter alongside matter. On the contrary, the Bible tells us about a global flood that is physically impossible, a woman turned into salt, a child born from a woman who never had sexual intercourse, and I think the sun stops at some point, which was a particular point of contention that the Catholic Church had with Galileo in 1633 (ref: Livio, see previous post).

So while Christian fundamentalists want equal time to teach ID or creationism, or whatever they want to call it, in a science class alongside evolution, someone should point out to them the discrepancies between biblical myths and scientific theories, as well as the criteria involved (refer my Nov.07 post, Is evolution fact? Is creationism myth?).

My point is that yes, there are lots of questions still unsolved in science, including questions inherent in evolutionary theory, but the successes of science far outweigh any explanation of the natural world found in any religious text, so there is no logic, and absolutely no justification, in replacing science with a biblical account in any area of the sciences at all.

I contend that there are questions science can’t answer. Philosophical questions on why humans look for meaning in their lives or the resolution of moral dilemmas. This latter issue leads to the argument, that I’ve heard from a number of religious fundamentalists, that without a belief in God one is a moral relativist. I find this a truly bizarre conclusion and it’s always presented as if it’s self-evident – there can be no alternative. You either believe in God and have morals or you don’t believe in God and you’re amoral. They should read Hugh Mackay’s book, Right & Wrong; how to decide for yourself, which is the best book on the subject I’ve read.

There are a number of ways of looking at morality. For a start, you can read a book that prescribes everything you do, from how to treat slaves to whether you should eat pork, and what you can do on what days of the week, and also throws in 10 solid statements, or rules, on how to get along with your fellow man. But there are other approaches, like a meta-philosophical approach, attempted by people like John Stuart Mill, and before him, some ancients like Plato and Aristotle, and even a Chinese bloke called Confucius. Then there’s Hugh Mackay’s approach where you look at every situation on its merits and decide for yourself. No, that’s not moral relativism. Moral relativism is where you accept whatever any culture decides for itself, which may include cultural practices like the mutilation of girls’ genitalia at puberty, or the public beating of someone for selling meat on the wrong day of the week, or a woman having to be sacrificed at her husband’s funeral. That’s moral relativism; atheism is rarely a factor at all.

Then there is your conscience: one of the most misunderstood but most manipulated characteristics of human nature. Religious fundamentalists may tell you, or imply, that your conscience is God whispering in your ear, but in reality, your conscience is conditioned by your culture and your upbringing. Freud called it the super-ego. Your conscience is what made you feel guilty about masturbating when you were an adolescent – not God whispering in your ear at all, though it can be made to feel that way.

Hugh Mackay explains the dangers of taking your morals from God, because once you believe that, you can justify any action, like flying a fully loaded aeroplane into an occupied building. That is not an isolated example – just look at the Crusades, the Inquisition, and any number of atrocities justified in the name of God. Mackay is not anti-religion by any means, and explains that religion is more about finding meaning in your life.

Dawkins, if I read him correctly, is contemptuous of people finding meaning through religion. But according to Dawkins, we are just ‘gene-replicating organisms’, therefore any intellectual ruminations concerning our raison d’etre must be a waste of time. No, he’s never said that, but it’s the only logical conclusion: we live for our genes; they don’t exist for our benefit. So, I do see a role for religion, which makes me a bit of a weirdo. But at least I can acknowledge that my religion is nothing special compared to anyone else’s. You see, I grew up in a culture where religion was considered something very personal, like your most intimate thoughts, so you never discussed it unless you were invited to. I also realised that if everyone followed that precept then people with different religious views could get along just fine. In fact, I contend that everyone’s religious point of view is unique to them, so why should I intrude or insist that mine is better?

But this in itself begs another question: why do I argue with fundamentalists? Because fundamentalists believe the exact opposite to this: that everyone should believe the same thing, which is exactly what they believe, and, what’s more, they have the text to prove it. But this text, when taken literally, conflicts with current scientific thinking, so now we have scientists in opposition to all religious belief. As I said or alluded to at the beginning: intolerance breeds intolerance to itself.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

2009-03-02T17:48:00.020+11:00

This is a quote from Physics Nobel Laureate, Eugene Wigner, and it appears in the first sentence on the front fly leaf cover of Mario Livio’s book, Is God a Mathematician? On the back fly leaf cover we learn that ‘Mario Livio is a senior astrophysicist and head of the Office of Public Outreach at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.’ He’s also written a few other books on mathematics, including The Golden Ratio and The Equation That Couldn’t be Solved (neither of which I’ve read).

I use Wigner’s quote as the title of this post rather than the title of Livio’s book, because it’s the quote that he keeps returning to and attempting to address, rather than any real attempt to address the question on the cover of his book.

It’s a very good read: erudite, thought-provoking and as balanced as one could expect from someone who has their own philosophical standpoint. I’ve addressed this issue on 2 previous posts: Is mathematics evidence of a transcendental realm? (Jan.08) and Is mathematics invented or discovered? (Sep.07). The Jan.08 post is effectively a review of Gregory J. Chaitin’s book, Thinking about Godel and Turing, and the Sep.07 post is more of a critique, than a review, of George Lakoff’s and Rafael E. Nunez’s book, Where Mathematics Comes From. Livio gives a good account of Lakoff’s and Nunez’s views, but he doesn’t mention Chaitin (even in the bibliography).

I don’t wish to reiterate ideas I’ve already explored in those posts, but I do wish to say that Livio demonstrates why scholars like him publish books, and amateurs like me only publish on a blog.

Livio’s book covers topics as varied as statistics and probability theory, Euclidean and non-Euclidian geometry, and logic - all in revelatory detail, yet easy to read. The most interesting topic as far as I was concerned was on knots, and their application to biology and the most recent theoretical investigations in cosmology (string theory).

He also gives brief biographies on, what he considers to be, the giants of mathematics: Archimedes, Galileo, Descartes and Newton.

But it is an extended quote from Wigner that establishes the tone, if not the intent, of Livio’s treatise:

‘The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics to the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.’

Livio effectively encapsulates his position when he states that there are 2 aspects of mathematics which he calls: ‘active’ and ‘passive’. By ‘active’ he means the deliberate use of mathematics as a tool to investigate and understand natural phenomena. This aspect supports the view that mathematics is ‘invented’ rather than ‘discovered’. We humans, with our preternatural intellectual abilities, create mathematical models that provide accurate facsimiles of nature’s laws, and can even formulate predictions and forecasts by employing the ‘scientific method’.

To appreciate what Livio means by ‘passive’ it is best to quote his own words:

‘But there is a “passive” side to the mysterious effectiveness of mathematics, and it is so surprising that the “active” aspect pales by comparison. Concepts and relations explored by mathematicians only for pure reasons – with absolutely no application in mind – turn out decades (or sometimes centuries) later to be the unexpected solutions to problems grounded in physical reality!’

(I make a similar point, though not as eloquently, in my Mar.08 post, The Laws of Nature.)

Livio gives a number of examples of this ‘passive’ aspect of mathematics, but amongst the most commonly known are: Maxwell’s equations predicting electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light (an example of a pure mathematical construction predicting a yet-to-be discovered physical phenomenon); and Einstein using Riemann’s geometry to postulate his General Theory of Relativity (an example of pure mathematics employed for a completely unexpected natural phenomenon). One must remember that, no one, during Riemann’s time, thought the universe was other than Euclidean, which meant Riemann’s geometry was considered to be a purely intellectual recreation with no possible application in reality.

This leads to a view held by Roger Penrose, which is expounded upon in a couple of his books, The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind, and is also referenced by Livio, that there are 3 aspects of the world of mathematics, and they all interrelate. Penrose refers to them as the ‘Platonic world’, the ‘Mental world’ and the ‘Physical world’. He depicts their interrelationship pictorially, a bit like the rock, paper, scissors game. I will try and explain.

Human thought can grasp some of the Platonic world, but not all of it, which we apply to the Physical world, even though some of it seems beyond our abilities of comprehension. Likewise the Physical world seems to incorporate some of the Platonic world but not all of it. So far so consistent. The enigma is turned into the rock, scissor, paper analogy when one realises that the human mind is a product of the physical world, which can then comprehend the Platonic world, of which the Physical world is a ‘shadow’. This is effectively the way Livio explains it as well, but without the analogy.

This leads me to what I consider to be the greatest mystery of the Universe: that it created the means to comprehend itself. As Einstein famously said: ‘The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.’ Now I don’t know if Einstein was making a metaphysical statement, as he certainly wasn’t a Platonist like Penrose or his good friend and Princeton colleague, Kurt Godel. But without mathematics, it is clear that our comprehension of the universe would be severely limited indeed, and whether Einstein was referring specifically to that or not, I would suggest that his statement only makes sense in that context.

This leads to another point that Livio makes, almost in passing, but I consider to be highly relevant and it is to do with the most abused of concepts: ‘truth’.

I recently had an argument with someone (Armageddon Thru To You), who commented on Stephen Law's blog, and referred to ‘absolutes of truth’, which apparently override all so-called scientific truths. I contended that the only truths I can be sure of are mathematical truths, and he responded: ‘There are absolutes of truth that humanists cannot understand because they don't acknowledge the existence of a perfect being (God)’.

This is relevant to Livio’s book, because he spends 6 pages on the subject of Galileo’s famous confrontation with the Catholic Church in 1633. He ends this section with the following commentary:

‘Still, at a time when there are attempts to introduce biblical creationism as an alternative “scientific” theory (under the thinly veiled title of “intelligent design”), it is good to remember that Galileo already fought this battle almost four hundred years ago – and won!’

I make a similar reference to Galileo and compare it to the current ID/Creationism debate in my Nov.07 post, Is evolution fact? Is creationism myth?

These days, no one wants to get into an argument about whether the earth goes round the sun or not, so they think it’s irrelevant, but, as Livio points out, in 1600, the Catholic Church saw it as a direct intervention on its intellectual turf. It contradicted the Bible, and as far as they were concerned, the Bible was sacrosanct: the Word of God or ‘absolute truth’, to quote my aforementioned interlocutor. I’ve no doubt that there will come a day when evidence of evolution will be so monumental that only the most die-hard fundamentalists will question it – in other words, it will be no more contentious than Galileo’s position is today.

My point being that one can’t read a text like Livio’s and not be struck by how much we have learnt from the study of science, none of which appears in the Bible or any other religious text. An appeal to ‘absolute truth’ not only rings hollow in the face of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge, it reeks of credulity. Mathematics has provided us with more truths, both in abstraction and in physical reality, than any other endeavour. To attempt to trump it with ‘absolute truth’ is to make a mockery of the human intellect.

And this brings me to what I consider to be the most revelatory portion of Livio’s book. The relevance of the study of knots to our understanding of DNA. Livio explains how a mathematical ‘discovery’ by John Horton Conway in the 1960s also describes the way enzymes ‘unknot’ DNA to allow for ‘replication or transcription’ (Livio’s description).

DNA is one of the greatest mysteries of the universe – a code for life itself. It raises the metaphysical question of why does the universe exist? Most scientists and philosophers would say it is an accident. Paul Davies attempts to address this question in his book, The Goldilocks Enigma, by expanding on an original idea proffered by his mentor, John Wheeler, that there is a causal loop between conscious intelligence and the universe itself. In a way, it attempts to address the mystery I alluded to in Einstein’s famous quote: that the universe created the means to comprehend itself.

The answers to this question are neither biblical nor scientific – they are philosophical. And perhaps it’s best to quote Bertrand Russell from The Problems of Philosophy, exactly as Livio does in the closing paragraph of his book:

‘Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its question, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe, which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.’ (Emphasis is mine)

P.S. I sent this post as a link to Mario Livio, and I've posted his response in a comment below.

Addendum: I came across this very relevant quote in It Must be Beautiful; Great Equations of Modern Science, edited by Graham Farmelo (Granta books, 2002).

'One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulae have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.'

Heinrich Hertz, on Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism.

Artificial Intelligence & Consciousness

2009-02-14T21:06:00.052+11:00

This is perhaps the hardest of subjects to tackle. I’ve just finished reading Douglas R. Hofstadter’s book, Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, which attempts to address this very issue, even if in a rather unusual way.

Earlier in the same year (last year) I read Roger Penrose’s book, Shadows of the Mind, which addresses exactly the same issue. What is interesting is that, in both cases, the authors use Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem to support completely different, one could say, opposing, philosophical viewpoints. Both Penrose and Hofstadter are intellectual giants compared to me, but what I find interesting is that both apparently start with their philosophical viewpoints and then find arguments to support them, rather than the other way round. Hofstadter quotes, more than once, the Oxford philosopher, J.R. Lucas, whom he obviously respects, but philosophically disagrees with. Likewise, I found myself often in agreement with Hofstadter on many of his finer points, but still in disagreement with his overall thesis. I think it’s obvious from other posts on this blog, that I am much closer to Penrose’s philosophy in many respects, not just on AI.

Having said all that, this is a very complex and difficult subject, and I’m not at all sure I can do it justice. What goes hand in hand with the subject of AI, and Hofstadter doesn’t shy away from this, is the notion of consciousness. Can AI ever be conscious in the way we are? Hofstadter says yes, and Penrose, I believe, would say no. (Penrose effectively argues that algorithm-using machines – computers - will never think like humans.) Another person who has much to say on this subject is John Searle, and he would almost certainly say no, based on his famous ‘Chinese Room’ thought experiment. (I expound on this in my Apr.08 post: The Ghost in the Machine).

Larry Niven in one of his comments on his own blog, in response to one of my comments, made the observation that science hasn’t resolved the brain/mind conundrum, and gave it as an example of ‘…the impotence of scientific evidence to affect philosophical debates…’ (I’m sure if I’ve misinterpreted him, or quoted him out of context, he’ll let me know.)

To throw a googly into the mix, since Hofstadter first published the book 30 years ago, a lot of work has been done in this area, and one of the truly interesting ideas is the Bayesian model of the brain based on Bayesian probability, proposed by Karl Friston (New Scientist 31 May 08). In a nutshell, Friston proposes that the brain functions on the same principle at all levels, which is to make an initial assessment then modify it based on additional information. He claims this works even at the neuron level, as well as the cognitive level. (I report on this in my July 08 post titled, Epistemology; a discussion.) I even extrapolate this up the cognitive tree to include the scientific method, whereby we hypothesise, follow up with experimentation or observation, then modify the hypothesis accordingly.

Hofstadter makes a similar point about ‘default options’ that we use in everyday observations, like the way we use stereotypes. It’s only by evaluating a specific case in more detail that we can break away from a stereotypic interpretation of an event. This is also an employment of the Bayesian principle, but Hofstadter doesn’t say this because it hadn’t been proposed at the time he wrote it.

What Searle points out in his excellent book, Mind, is that consciousness is an experience, which is so subjective that we really don’t know if anyone else experiences it the way we do – we only assume they do. Stephen Law writes about this in his book, The Philosophy Gym, and I challenged him (by snail mail at the time) that this was a conceit on his part, because he obviously expected that people who read his book, could think like him, which means they must be conscious. It was a good natured jibe, even though I’m not sure he saw it that way at the time, but he was generous in his reply.

Descartes famous statement, ‘I think therefore I am’, has been pilloried over the centuries since he wrote it, but I would contend that ‘I think’ is a tautology, because ‘I’ is your thoughts and nothing else. This gets to the heart of Hofstadter’s thesis, that we, individually, are all ‘strange loops’. Hofstadter employs Godel’s Theorem in an unusual, analogous way to make this contention: we are ‘strange loops’. By strange loop, Hofstadter means that we can effectively look at all the levels of our thinking except the ground level, which is our neurons. In between we have symbols, which is language, which we can discuss and analyse in a dispassionate way, just like I’m doing now. I can talk about my own thoughts and ideas as if they weren’t mine at all. Consciousness, in Hofstadter’s model (for want of a better word) is the top level, and neurons are the hardware level. In between we have the software (symbols) which is effectively language.

I think language as software is a good metaphor but not necessarily a literal interpretation. Software means algorithms, which are effectively instructions. Whilst language obviously contains rules, I don’t see it as particularly algorithmic, though others, including Hofstadter, may disagree. On the other hand, I do see DNA as algorithmic in the way it creates organisms, and Hofstadter makes the same leap of interpretation.

The analogy with Godel’s Theorem is that, in any formal mathematical system, there will always exist a mathematical statement that expresses something about the system but can’t be found in the system, if I’ve got it right. In other words, there will always exist the possibility of a ‘correct’ mathematical statement that is not part of the original formal system, which is why it is called the Incompleteness Theorem – no mathematical formal system can ever be complete in that it will include all mathematical statements. In this analogy, the self or ‘I’ is like a Godelian entity that is a product of the system but not contained in it. Again, my interpretation may not be what Hofstadter intended, but it’s the best I can make of it. It exists at another level, I think is what Hofstadter would say.

In another part of the book, Hofstadter makes a direct ‘mapping’ which he calls a ‘dogmap’ (play on words for dogma) where he compares DOGMA I ‘Molecular Biology’ with DOGMA II ‘Mathematical Logic’, using Godel’s Theorem ‘self-referencing’ as directly comparable to DNA/RNA’s ‘self reproduction’. He admits this is an analogy but later acknowledges that the same mapping may be possible from Godel's Theorem to consciousness.

Even without this allusion by Hofstadter, and no Godelian analogy required, I see a direct comparison between the way DNA/RNA creates complex organisms and the way neurons create thoughts. In both cases there is a gulf of layers in between that makes one wonder how they could have evolved. Of course, this is grist for ID advocates and I’ve even come across a blogger (Sophie) who quotes Hofstadter to make this very point.

In one of my earliest posts on this blog (The Universe’s Interpreters, Sep. 07) I make the point that the universe consists of worlds within worlds, and the reason we can comprehend it to the extent that we do, is because we can conjure concepts within concepts ad infinitum. Hofstadter makes a similar point, though not in the same words, but at least 2 decades before I thought of it.

DNA/RNA exists at a level far removed from the end result, which is a living complex organism, yet there is a direct causal relationship. Neurons are cells that exist at a level far removed from the end result, which is consciousness, yet there is a direct causal relationship.

These 2 cases, DNA to complex organisms and neurons to consciousness, I think remain the 2 greatest mysteries of the natural world. To say that they can only be explained by invoking a ‘Designer’ (God) is to say we’ve uncovered everything we know about the universe at all of its levels of complexity and only God can explain everything else. I would call this the defeatist position if it was to be taken seriously. But, in effect, the ID advocates are saying that whilst any mysteries remain in our comprehension of the universe, there will always be a role for God. Once we find an explanation for these mysteries, there will be other mysteries, perhaps at other levels, that we can still employ God to explain. So the argument will never stop. Before Newton it was the orbits of the planets, and before Mendel it was the passing down of genetic traits. Now it is the origin of DNA. The mysteries may get deeper but past experience says that we will find an answer and the answer won’t be God (see my Dec .08 post: The God hypothesis; not).

As a caveat to the above argument, I've said elsewhere (Emergent phenomena, Oct. 08) that we may never understand consciousness as a direct mathematical relationship to neuron activity (although Penrose pins his hopes on quantum phenomena). And I'm unsure that we will ever be able to explain how it becomes an experience, and that's one of the reasons I'm sceptical that AI will ever have that experience. But this lack of understanding is not evidence of God; it's just evidence of our lack of understanding.

To quote Confucius: 'To realise that you know something when you do, and to realise that you do not know when you do not, this is knowing.' Or to quote his near contemporary, Socrates, who put it more succinctly: 'The height of wisdom is to know how thoroughly ignorant we are.'

My personal hypothesis, completely speculative with no scientific evidence at all, is that maybe there is a feedback mechanism that goes from the top level to the bottom level that we’ve yet to discover. They are both mysteries that most people don’t contemplate and it took Hofstadter’s book, written over 3 decades ago, to bring them fully home to me, and to appreciate how analogous they are: base level causally affects top level, yet complexity of one level seems independent to complexity of the other - there is no obvious 1 to 1 correlation. (Examples: it can take a combination of genes to express a single trait; there is not a specific 'home' in the brain for specific memories.)

I guess it’s this specific revelation that I personally take from Hofstadter’s book, but I really can’t do it justice. It is one of the best books I’ve read, even though I don’t agree with his overall thesis: machines will eventually think like humans, therefore they will have consciousness.

In my one and only published novel, ELVENE, there is an AI entity, Alfa, who plays an important role in the story. I was very careful in my construction of Alfa to demonstrate that he didn’t think like humans (yes, I gave him a gender and that’s explained) but that he was nevertheless extremely intelligent and able to converse with humans with cognitive ease. But I don’t believe Alfa was conscious albeit he may have given that impression (this is fiction, remember). I agree with Searle, in that simulated intelligence at a very high level will be achievable, but it will remain a simulation. AI uses algorithms and brains don’t – on this, I agree with Penrose. On the other hand, Hofstadter argues that we use rule-based software in the form of ‘symbols’, which we call language. I’m sure whoever reads this will have their own opinions.

Addendum: I've just read (today, 21 Feb.09) an article in Scientific American (January 2009) that tackles the subject: From Atoms to Traits. It points out that there is good correlation between genes and traits, and expounds on the latest knowledge in this area. In particular, it gives a good account (by examples) of how random changes 'feed' the natural selection 'engine' of evolution. I admit that there is still much to be learned, but, if you follow this topic at all, you will know that discoveries and insights are being made all the time.

The mystery of how genes evolved, as opposed to the organisms that they create, is still unsolved in my view. Martin A. Nowak, a Harvard University mathematician and biologist, profiled in Scientific American (October 2008) believes the answer may lie in mathematics: Can mathematics solve the origin of life? An idea hypothesised by Gregory J. Chaitin in his book, Thinking about Godel and Turing, which I review in my Jan.08 post: Is mathematics evidence of a transcendental realm?

Zen; an interpretation

2008-12-26T15:13:00.051+11:00

I recently bought a copy of Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Douglas R.Hofstadter. In fact, I bought the 20th anniversary edition, which includes an overview that effectively explains in synopsis each chapter of the book. The author did this, apparently, because he felt that so many people misinterpreted his intentions. The book is not about Zen at all, as he states himself, yet it’s his simplistic and dismissive representation of Zen that has prompted me to write this post (not quite true - see below).

Naturally, I had heard of the book and its companion, I am a Strange Loop, which I understand expands on some aspects of this one. I have acquired a copy of that as well, though I’m yet to read it. I think I’ve come across this book at just the right time for me. If I had read it 20 years ago (actually, originally published 30 years ago), I would have struggled with it. But, as it is, I think I’m reading it at just the right time of my philosophical development, especially in regard to mathematical philosophy. The book, which is quite lengthy and comprehensive, explores the very areas of philosophy that I’m interested in.

But whilst everything he says about logic is both enlightening and refreshing, as well as scholarly, I disagree with his interpretation of Zen, which he seems to portray as the antithesis of logic. It’s like he uses Zen as a reference for a perspective of non-logic, so his interpretation is that Zen is a 'non-state' (he elaborates on this later in the book). But I don't think Zen is about logic at all - in fact, it's a state of mind. My own interpretation is that Zen represents a particular state of mind when one is intensely involved in some activity. Now the activity could be physical, like tennis or playing cricket, or driving a car; or it could be mental like writing a story or painting a portrait, or playing a musical instrument.

What they all have in common is that it is a mental state where one feels removed, like one is totally involved yet one is ‘not there’, as virtuoso violinist and amateur surfer, Richard Tognetti, once said (no, he's not a Zen Buddhist to my knowledge). So it is a contradictory sense, or, at the very least, paradoxical. My own take on this is that one’s ego is not involved yet one feels totally engaged. It requires one to be completely in the moment, and what I’ve found in this situation is that time disappears. Sportsmen call it being ‘in the zone’ and it’s something that most of us have experienced at some time or another.

So I can understand why Hofstadter may interpret Zen as the representation of ‘contradiction’; even though it implies he’s never experienced a Zen state, or, if he has, he calls it something else. It is contradictory in explanation but not in experience. (To be fair, as I got further into the book, Hofstadter reveals that he knows a lot more about Zen than I first thought.)

Godel, Escher, Bach is an extraordinary and brilliant book, and I don’t wish to take anything away from Hofstadter’s achievement. He’s in another league to me altogether (after all, he has a PhD in solid state physics). For a start, he gives the best exposition of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem I've read, using a number of metaphors and allegorical dialogues, including one with Zen koans.

On the subject of Zen, I’m not a good practitioner, but I don’t try to be. From what I’ve read on Zen, it ideally requires ‘unattachment’, which also includes unattachment to goals and dreams. But without goals and dreams, what do people live for? So it seems contradictory to life, if one takes it literally. But, as a state of mind for when one is involved in an intense, challenging yet rewarding activity, it makes perfect sense. By the way, one only experiences a reward in this sense, when one is challenged. That’s why the most frustrating things in life are also the most rewarding. When one realises that, then one can achieve a sense of perspective as well as purpose. (I make a similar point in one of my earliest posts, The Meaning of Life, Aug.07.)

P.S. For all you pedants, 'unattachment' is not a 'proper' word (should be detachment) but in this context, detachment gives the wrong connotation. Unattachment means exactly that.

Addendum: I would challenge anyone to read Hofstadter's book without being forced to view things differently that they previously took for granted. I'm currently about one third through the book, and I am sure I will write another post on it when I'm finished.

Footnote: Daisetz Suzuki is the best writer on Zen I've read (in English). In particular, Zen and Japanese Culture (originally published 1959; my copy, 1973).

Addendum 2: I know, I keep adding to this when I should write another post, but my blog is not so much a journal as a collection of essays. On page 387 (Penguin 20th Anniversary Edition) Hofstadter quotes Escher: "While drawing I sometimes feel as if I were a spiritualist medium, controlled by the creatures I am conjuring up." I suspect many artists have felt this way, including myself when writing, and this is what I mean when I say the ego is not engaged. In fact, I have used this exact same description of my own writing on occasion. Australian actress, Kerry Armstrong, once made the point that acting doesn't involve the ego at all, quite the contrary, and I would make the same point about creating characters in fiction. So Hofstadter has described what I consider to be a Zen state of mind, by quoting Escher, but without realising it apparently.

For a more edifying discussion of Hofstadter's book, see the next post: Artificial Intelligence & Consciousness.

The God hypothesis (not)

2008-12-04T13:39:00.039+11:00

Normally, I leave my arguments on other blogs, on other blogs, but, on this occasion, I feel that this is such a widespread, fundamentally misunderstood philosophical issue, that I should address it here, on my own blog.

The argument took place on Dr. William Lane Craig's so-called 'Reasonable Faith' blog, and the original dialogue can be found here.

Larry Niven wrote his own commentary on it here, which is arguably more entertaining than the original (he didn't know the 'Paul' he was referring to was me).

Dr. Craig is careful about what he publishes, and he has his blog set up as a Q & A, which allows him to not only choose what he publishes, but to portray himself as an authority on whatever he cares to pontificate about. Naturally, he only publishes arguments that he believes make him look good, for which, the following submission didn't qualify.

Just so you appreciate the context: Dr.Craig laments the fact that the discipline of science only allows for 'naturalistic' explanations, so that, if there are 'non-naturalistic' explanations, we will never know the truth. In his own words, this is a 'methodological constraint' on science, imposed 'philosophically'. If you visit the above link, you will see that I specifically challenged him that he 'won't conjecture' where God may have intervened, and he evades the issue at first, but eventually says it depends on the gaps in the evidence (specifically fossil evidence).

Below is my third submission (following his response), which, not surprisingly, he didn't respond to; neither did he respond to the previous two. (I've edited out the intro which refers to the previous 2 submissions.)

(Addressed to Dr. Craig.)
Thinking about this some more, I realised that you haven’t thought this through at all.

Basically, you are saying that science restrains itself, philosophically, by only allowing for natural explanations. It could be far more (potentially) successful if it allowed for supernatural explanations – the so-called ‘God hypothesis’ (my terminology, not yours, but I’m sure you’ll agree that it fits your suggested philosophical approach to science).

My question is why isn’t the God hypothesis already applied? Quantum mechanics is an obvious area. No one understands quantum mechanics, as Richard Feynman famously said, and he should know: he won a Nobel Prize for giving us the best exposition we have so far. So it’s a perfect candidate for the God hypothesis: all quantum phenomena can now be explained as evidence of God’s intervention, including quantum tunneling, quantum effects at a distance and even Schrodinger’s cat; especially Schrodinger’s cat, I would suggest.

Extreme weather events are another perfect candidate for the God hypothesis, supported by evidence from the Bible as well, so it has to get a guernsey (an Aussie metaphor).

Four hundred years ago, the God hypothesis would have worked for planetary orbits – actually, I think it was the hypothesis at the time - then Newton came along, proposed the universal theory of gravity, and it went out of favour.

And now we have evolutionary theory as another possibility, especially as it involves complexity at many levels, from DNA to entire ecosystems, so it’s the perfect candidate. But what if in the future, someone discovers more about complexity – I mean totally unexpectedly, like the way Einstein discovered relativity - then I guess the God hypothesis would have to be dismissed; but, then, at least, we could still use it in the mean time.

The point is, as you explicated yourself, we don’t know where to apply it. And, guess what? We never will.

Regards, Paul.

Life, God, the universe and everything

2008-11-18T15:04:00.006+11:00

Recently, I was involved in a forum on Stephen Law’s web site (see my blog roll) which critiqued Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion. Stephen, in effect, set up a book club, whereby we went through all of Dawkins’ 10 chapters, one by one, over a period of about 12 weeks. My involvement was miniscule, and the nature of the beast meant that discussions went off on all sorts of tangents. Atheism reigned, as most of Stephen’s contributors, though not all, are staunch Dawkins’ supporters.

I should point out that I have used many of Dawkins’ arguments myself against religious fundamentalists, without knowing they were his. But I don’t share Dawkins’ apparent contempt for religion per se. In Australia, Dawkins tends to be seen as alarmist, but maybe it’s because the politics of religion, and the history of religion in politics, are different here. As Thomas Keneally (Booker prize-winning author of Schindler’s Ark) once said: Australians, generally, have a healthy disrespect for religion (or words to that effect).

I didn’t contribute much to Stephen’s forum at all, but somewhere in the midst of it I threw in a grenade by asking the existential question: ‘What’s the point?’

In addition to The God Delusion, I also read Paul Davies’ God and the New Physics, published in 1983, which covers much of the same material, some of it in greater depth if not greater overall length; but unlike Dawkins, Davies doesn’t have an axe to grind. It was after reading Davies’ book that I submitted the following comment.

‘The more I read about this and the more I contemplate it, the more I tend to conclude that the universe is not an accident. In other words, it’s purpose-built for life. This does not axiomatically lead to the existence of God, as both Paul Davies and Christian de Duve point out. The ‘God’ question is almost irrelevant; it’s the wrong question. The question should be: What’s the point?

Imagine the universe with no consciousness at all, and then ask yourself: what’s the point? There are only 2 answers to this question: there is no point; or the point is consciousness, because that’s the end result.’

Now, by asking the question in the paradoxical context of imagining there is no consciousness, it highlights the very enigma one is attempting to grasp. As someone pointed out, without consciousness, who asks the question?

The first response to this (on Stephen’s site) came from an ‘anonymous’ contributor, who seemed personally insulted, and, following a short diatribe, asked, ‘What’s wrong with no point?’ To which I responded, ‘Nothing wrong with no point. We agree to disagree.’ After all, I’d already said it is one of only two answers in my view. My antagonist allowed this through to the keeper (to use a hackneyed cricketing metaphor) and pursued it no further.

Recently, in another post, I speculated that we may never truly understand consciousness, because it is an emergent property, and we are now faced with the epistemological possibility that emergent properties may never be explained in terms of their underlying parts, at least, mathematically (see my Oct.08 post, Emergent phenomena).

But there is more to this: according to Dawkins, we are all just ‘gene-replicating organisms’; so consciousness is totally irrelevant – a byproduct of nature that allows us to ask totally irrelevant existential questions. I’ve said before that if we actually didn’t experience consciousness, science would tell us that it doesn’t exist, just like science tells us that free will doesn’t exist (see my Sep.07 post on Free Will). This suspicion was reinforced earlier this year, when I read an article by Nicholas Humphrey in SEED magazine, who concluded that consciousness is an illusion, and its sole (evolutionary) purpose is to ‘make life more worth living’, which could be translated into one word: ‘happiness’. So, syllogistically, one could conclude that happiness is an illusion too. As a pertinent aside, I wonder how Humphrey can distinguish his dreams from reality.

Paul Davies attempts to tackle this conundrum head-on in his book, The Goldilocks Enigma, and concludes, if I interpret him correctly, that the universe exists because we are in it - in a sort of causal loop. He’s elaborated on an idea originally formulated by his mentor, John Wheeler, more famously known for coining the term, ‘Black Hole’.

So in a way, Dawkins and Davies represent 2 polar views on this, and I tend to side closer to Davies. Davies, who is an astro-biologist, as well as a physicist and philosopher, says that he’s ‘agnostic’ about life existing elsewhere in the universe, but, while he may be scientifically agnostic, he’s said elsewhere that, philosophically, he favours it. Davies is far from a crank, I might add – even Dawkins treats him with respect.

In another post, earlier this year (Theism as a humanism, Aug.08), I postulated the completely ad-hoc idea that God is the end result of the universe rather than its progenitor. Now, I’ve said on many occasions, that the only evidence we have of God is inside our minds, not ‘out there’, yet the experience of God, because that’s what God is (an experience) always feels like it’s external. There is actually neurological brain-imaging evidence to support this (New Scientist, 1 Sep.2007, pp 32-6) by Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania, showing that ‘Religious feelings do seem to be quite literally self-less…’ In the same context, I’ve also quoted Ludwig Feuerbach: ‘God is the outward projection of man’s inner nature.’ My conclusion is that there are as many different versions of God as people who claim to experience him, her or it. So God is, at least partly, a projection.

Where is all this leading? Fuerbach’s assertion, and all our cultural attributions, would suggest that God is the projection of our ideals. But, if one takes Feuerbach’s postulate to its logical and literal conclusion, then God could be the emergent property of all of our collective consciousness. In that case, the universe really would have a purpose.