Is there a cosmic purpose? Is our part in it a chimera?

 I’ve been procrastinating about writing this post for some time, because it comes closest to a ‘theory’ of Life, the Universe and Everything. ‘Theory’ in this context being a philosophical point of view, not a scientifically testable theory in the Karl Popper sense (it can’t be falsified), but using what science we currently know and interpreting it to fit a particular philosophical prejudice, which is what most scientists and philosophers do even when they don’t admit it.
 
I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos, some of which attempt to reconcile science and religion, which could be considered a lost cause, mainly because there is a divide going back to the Dark Ages, which the Enlightenment never bridged despite what some people might claim. One of the many videos I watched was a moderated discussion between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson, which remained remarkably civil, especially considering that Peterson really did go off on flights of fancy (from my perspective), comparing so-called religious ‘truths’ with scientific ‘truths’. I thought Dawkins handled it really well, because he went to pains not to ridicule Peterson, while pointing out fundamental problems with such comparisons.
 
I’m already going off on tangents I never intended, but I raise it because Peterson makes the point that science actually arose from the Judea-Christian tradition – a point that Dawkins didn’t directly challenge, but I would have. I always see the modern scientific enterprise, if I can call it that, starting with Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, but given particular impetus by Newton and his contemporary and rival, Leibniz. It so happens that they all lived in Europe when it was dominated by Christianity, but the real legacy they drew on was from the Ancient Greeks with a detour into Islam where it acquired Hindu influences, which many people conveniently ignore. In particular, we adopted Hindu-Arabic arithmetic, incorporating zero as a decimal place-marker, without which physics would have been stillborn.
 
Christianity did its best to stop the scientific enterprise: for example, when it threatened Galileo with the inquisition and put him under house arrest. Modern science evolved despite Christianity, not because of it. And that’s without mentioning Darwin’s problems, which still has ramifications today in the most advanced technological nation in the world.
 
A lengthy detour, but only slightly off-topic. There is a mystery at the heart of everything on the very edge of our scientific understanding of the world that I believe is best expressed by Paul Davies, but was also taken up by Stephen Hawking, of all people, towards the end of his life. I say, ‘of all people’, because Hawking was famously sceptical of the role of philosophy, yet, according to his last collaborator, Thomas Hertog, he was very interested in the so-called Big Questions, and like Davies, was attracted to John Wheeler’s idea of a cosmic-scale quantum loop that attempts to relate the end result of the Universe to its beginning.
 
Implicit in this idea is that the Universe has a purpose, which has religious connotations. So I want to make that point up front and add that there is No God Required. I agree with Davies that science neither proves nor disproves the existence of God, which is very much a personal belief, independent of any rationalisation one can make.
 
I wrote a lengthy post on Hawking’s book, The Grand Design, back in 2020 (which he cowrote with Leonard Mlodinow). I will quote from that post to highlight the point I raised 2 paragraphs ago: the link between present and past.
 
Hawking contends that the ‘alternative histories’ inherent in Feynman’s mathematical method, not only affect the future but also the past. What he is implying is that when an observation is made it determines the past as well as the future. He talks about a ‘top down’ history in lieu of a ‘bottom up’ history, which is the traditional way of looking at things. In other words, cosmological history is one of many ‘alternative histories’ (his terminology) that evolve from QM.
 
Then I quote directly from Hawking’s text:
 
This leads to a radically different view of cosmology, and the relation between cause and effect. The histories that contribute to the Feynman sum don’t have an independent existence, but depend on what is being measured. We create history by our observation, rather than history creating us (my emphasis).
 
One can’t contemplate this without considering the nature of time. There are in fact 2 different experiences we have of time, and that has created debate among physicists as well as philosophers. The first experience is simply observational. Every event with a causal relationship that is separated by space is axiomatically also separated by time, and this is a direct consequence of the constant speed of light. If this wasn’t the case, then everything would literally happen at once. So there is an intrinsic relationship between time and light, which Einstein had the genius to see: was not just a fundamental law of the Universe; but changed perceptions of time and space for different observers. Not only that, his mathematical formulations of this inherent attribute, led him to the conclusion that time itself was fluid, dependent on an observer’s motion as well as the gravitational field in which they happened to be.
 
I’m going to make another detour because it’s important and deals with one of the least understood aspects of physics. One of the videos I watched that triggered this very essay was labelled The Single Most Important Experiment in Physics, which is the famous bucket experiment conducted by Newton, which I’ve discussed elsewhere. Without going into details, it basically demonstrates that there is a frame of reference for the entire universe, which Newton called absolute space and Einstein called absolute spacetime. Penrose also discusses the importance of this concept, because it means that all relativistic phenomena take place against a cosmic background. It’s why we can determine the Earth’s velocity with respect to the entire universe by measuring the Doppler shift against the CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation).
 
Now, anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of relativity theory knows that it’s not just time that’s fluid but also space. But, as Kip Thorne has pointed out, mathematically we can’t tell if it’s the space that changes in dimension or the ruler used to measure it. I’ve long contended that it’s the ruler, which can be the clock itself. We can use a clock to measure distance and if the clock changes, which relativity tell us it does, then it’s going to measure a different distance to a stationary observer. By stationary, I mean one who is travelling at a lesser speed with respect to the overall CMBR.
 
So what is the other aspect of time that we experience? It’s the very visceral sensation we all have that time ‘flows’, because we all ‘sense’ its ‘passing’. And this is the most disputed aspect of time, that many physicists tell us is an illusion, including Davies. Some, like Sabine Hossenfelder, are proponents of the ‘block universe’, first proposed by Einstein, whereby the future already exists like the past, which is why both Hossenfelder and Einstein believed in what is now called superdeterminism – everything is predetermined in advance – which is one of the reasons that Einstein didn’t like the philosophical ramifications of quantum mechanics (I’ll get to his ‘spooky action at a distance’ later).
 
Davies argues that the experience of time passing is a psychological phenomenon and the answer will be found in neuroscience, not physics. And this finally brings consciousness into the overall scheme of things. I’ve argued elsewhere that, without consciousness, the Universe has no meaning and no purpose. Since that’s the point of this dissertation, it can be summed up with an aphorism from Wheeler.
 
The Universe gave rise to consciousness and consciousness gives the Universe meaning.
 
I like to cite Schrodinger from his lectures on Mind and Matter appended to his tome, What is Life? Consciousness exists in a constant present, and I argue that it’s the only thing that does (the one possible exception is a photon of light, for which time is zero). As I keep pointing out, this is best demonstrated every time someone takes a photo: it freezes time, or more accurately, it creates an image frozen in time; meaning it’s forever in our past, but so is the event that it represents.
 
The flow of time we all experience is a logical consequence of this. In a way, Davies is right: it’s a neurological phenomenon, in as much as consciousness seems to ‘emerge’ from neuronal activity. But I’m not sure Davies would agree with me – in fact, I expect he wouldn’t.
 
Those who have some familiarity with my blog, may see a similarity between these 2 manifestations of time and my thesis on Type A time and Type B time (originally proposed by J.M.E. McTaggart, 1906); the difference between them, in both cases, being the inclusion of consciousness.
 
Now I’m going to formulate a radical idea, which is that in Type B time (the time without consciousness), the flow of time is not experienced but there are chains of causal events. And what if all the possible histories are all potentially there in the same way that future possible histories are, as dictated by Feynman’s model. And what if the one history that we ‘observe’, going all the way back to the pattern in the CMBR (our only remnant relic of the Big Bang), only became manifest when consciousness entered the Universe. And when I say ‘entered’ I mean that it arose out of a process that had evolved. Davies, and also Wheeler before him, speculated that the ‘laws’ of nature we observe have also evolved as part of the process. But what if those laws only became frozen in the past when consciousness finally became manifest. This is the backward-in-time quantum loop that Wheeler hypothesised.
 
I contend that QM can only describe the future (an idea espoused by Feynman’s collaborator, Freeman Dyson), meaning that Schrodinger’s equation can only describe the future, not the past. Once a ‘measurement’ is made, it no longer applies. Penrose explains this best, and has his own argument that the ‘collapse’ of the wave function is created by gravity. Leaving that aside, I argue that the wave function only exists in our future, which is why it’s never observed and why Schrodinger’s equation can’t be applied to events that have already happened. But what if it was consciousness that finally determined which of many past paths became the reality we observe. You can’t get more speculative than that, but it provides a mechanism for Wheeler’s ‘participatory universe’ that both Davies and Hawking found appealing.
 
I’m suggesting that the emergence of consciousness changed the way time works in the Universe, in that the past is now fixed and only the future is still open.
 
Another video I watched also contained a very radical idea, which is that spacetime is created like a web into the future (my imagery). The Universe appears to have an edge in time but not in space, and this is rarely addressed. It’s possible that space is being continually created with the Universe’s expansion – an idea explored by physicist, Richard Muller – but I think it’s more likely that the Universe is Euclidean, meaning flat, but bounded. We may never know.
 
But if the Universe has an edge in time, how does that work? I think the answer is quantum entanglement, though no one else does. Everyone agrees that entanglement is non-local, meaning it’s not restricted by the rules of relativity, and it’s not spatially dependent. I speculate that quantum entanglement is the Universe continually transitioning from a quantum state to a classical physics state. This idea is just as heretical as the one I proposed earlier, and while Einstein would call it ‘spooky action at a distance’, it makes sense, because in quantum cosmology, time mathematically disappears. And it disappears because you can’t ‘see’ the future of the Universe, even in principle.

Addendum 1: This excerpt from a panel discussion shows how this debate is unresolved even among physicists. The first speaker, Avshalom Elitzur (who is also referenced in one of the videos linked in the 2nd last paragraph of the main text) probably comes closest to expressing my viewpoint.

In effect, he describes what I expound on in my post, though I'm sure he wouldn't agree with my more radical ideas - the role of consciousness and that entanglement is intrinsically linked to the edge of time for the whole universe. However, he does say, 'In some profound way the future does not exist'. 

Addendum 2: I came across this article in New Scientist, which you might not be able to access if you're not a subscriber (I have an online subscription). Basically, the author, Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, argues that 'classical time' arises from quantum 'entanglement', citing Alessandro Coppo. To quote:

This may mean that if we perceive the passage of time, then there is some entanglement woven into the physical world. And an observer in a universe devoid of entanglement – as some theories suggest ours was at its very beginning – would have seen nothing change. Everything would be static.

Science and religion meet at the boundary of humanity’s ignorance

 I watched a YouTube debate (90 mins) between Sir Roger Penrose and William Lane Craig, and, if I’m honest, I found it a bit frustrating because I wish I was debating Craig instead of Penrose. I also think it would have been more interesting if Craig debated someone like Paul Davies, who is more philosophically inclined than Penrose, even though Penrose is more successful as a scientist, and as a physicist, in particular.
 
But it was set up as an atheist versus theist debate between 2 well known personalities, who were mutually respectful and where there was no animosity evident at all. I confess to having my own biases, which would be obvious to any regular reader of this blog. I admit to finding Craig arrogant and a bit smug in his demeanour, but to be fair, he was on his best behaviour, and perhaps he’s matured (or perhaps I have) or perhaps he adapts to whoever he’s facing. When I call it a debate, it wasn’t very formal and there wasn’t even a nominated topic. I felt the facilitator or mediator had his own biases, but I admit it would be hard to find someone who didn’t.
 
Penrose started with his 3 worlds philosophy of the physical, the mental and the abstract, which has long appealed to me, though most scientists and many philosophers would contend that the categorisation is unnecessary, and that everything is physical at base. Penrose proposed that they present 3 mysteries, though the mysteries are inherent in the connections between them rather than the categories themselves. This became the starting point of the discussion.
 
Craig argued that the overriding component must surely be ‘mind’, whereas Penrose argued that it should be the abstract world, specifically mathematics, which is the position of mathematical Platonists (including myself). Craig pointed out that mathematics can’t ‘create’ the physical, (which is true) but a mind could. As the mediator pointed out (as if it wasn’t obvious) said mind could be God. And this more or less set the course for the remainder of the discussion, with a detour to Penrose’s CCC theory (Conformal Cyclic Cosmology).
 
I actually thought that this was Craig’s best argument, and I’ve written about it myself, in answer to a question on Quora: Did math create the Universe? The answer is no, nevertheless I contend that mathematics is a prerequisite for the Universe to exist, as the laws that allowed the Universe to evolve, in all its facets, are mathematical in nature. Note that this doesn’t rule out a God.
 
Where I would challenge Craig, and where I’d deviate from Penrose, is that we have no cognisance of who this God is or even what ‘It’ could be. Could not this God be the laws of the Universe themselves? Penrose struggled with this aspect of the argument, because, from a scientific perspective, it doesn’t tell us anything that we can either confirm or falsify. I know from previous debates that Craig has had, that he would see this as a win. A scientist can’t refute his God’s existence, nor can they propose an alternative, therefore it’s his point by default.
 
This eventually led to a discussion on the ‘fine-tuning’ of the Universe, which in the case of entropy, is what led Penrose to formulate his CCC model of the Universe. Of course, the standard alternative is the multiverse and the anthropic principle, which, as Penrose points out, is also applicable to his CCC model, where you have an infinite sequence of universes as opposed to an infinity of simultaneous ones, which is the orthodox response among cosmologists.
 
This is where I would have liked to have seen Paul Davies respond, because he’s an advocate of John Wheeler’s so-called ‘participatory Universe’, which is effectively the ‘strong anthropic principle’ as opposed to the ‘weak anthropic principle’. The weak anthropic principle basically says that ‘observers’ (meaning us) can only exist in a universe that allows observers to exist – a tautology. Whereas the strong anthropic principle effectively contends that the emergence of observers is a necessary condition for the Universe to exist (the observers don’t have to be human). Basically, Wheeler was an advocate of a cosmic, acausal (backward-in-time) link from conscious observers to the birth of the Universe. I admit this appeals to me, but as Craig would expound, it’s a purely metaphysical argument, and so is the argument for God.
 
The other possibility that is very rarely expressed, is that God is the end result of the Universe rather than its progenitor. In other words, the ‘mind’ that Craig expounded upon is a consequence of all of us. This aligns more closely with the Hindu concept of Atman or a Buddhist concept of collective karma – we get the God we deserve. Erwin Schrodinger, who studied the Upanishads, discusses Atman as a pluralistic ‘mind’ (in What is Life?). My point would be that the Judea-Christian-Islamic God does not have a monopoly on Craig’s overriding ‘mind’ concept.
 
A recurring theme on this blog is that there will always be mysteries – we can never know everything – and it’s an unspoken certitude that there will forever be knowledge beyond our cognition. The problem that scientists sometimes have, but are reluctant to admit, is that we can’t explain everything, even though we keep explaining more by the generation. And the problem that theologians sometimes have is that our inherent ignorance is neither ‘proof’ nor ‘evidence’ that there is a ‘creator’ God.
 
I’ve argued elsewhere that a belief in God is purely a subjective and emotional concept, which one then rationalises with either cultural references or as an ultimate explanation for our existence.

Addendum: I like this quote, albeit out of context, from Spinoza:: "The sum of the natural and physical laws of the universe and certainly not an individual entity or creator".

Zen and the art of flow

 This was triggered by a newsletter I received from ABC Classic (Australian radio station) with a link to a study done on ‘flow’, which is a term coined by physiologist, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, to describe a specific psychological experience that many (if not all) people have had when totally immersed in some activity that they not only enjoy but have developed some expertise in.
 
The study was performed by Dr John Kounios from Drexel University's Creative Research Lab in Philadelphia, who “examined the 'neural and psychological correlates of flow' in a sample of jazz guitarists.” The article was authored by Jennifer Mills from ABC Classic’s sister station, ABC Jazz. But the experience of ‘flow’ just doesn’t apply to mental or artistic activities, but also sporting activities like playing tennis or cricket. Mills heads her article with the claim that ‘New research helps unlock the secrets of flow, an important tool for creative and problem solving tasks’. She quotes Csikszentmihalyi to provide a working definition:
 
"A state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it."
 
I believe I’ve experienced ‘flow’ in 2 quite disparate activities: writing fiction and driving a car. Just to clarify, some people think that experiencing flow while driving means that you daydream, whereas I’m talking about the exact opposite. I hardly ever daydream while driving, and if I find myself doing it, I bring myself back to the moment. Of course, cars are designed these days to insulate you from the experience of driving as much as possible, as we evolve towards self-driving cars. Thankfully, there are still cars available that are designed to involve you in the experience and not remove you from it.
 
I was struck by the fact that the study used jazz musicians, as I’ve often compared the ability to play jazz with the ability to write dialogue (even though I’m not a musician). They both require extemporisation. The article references Nat Bartsch, whom I’ve seen perform live and whose music is an unusual style of jazz in that it can be very contemplative. I saw her perform one of her albums with her quartet, augmented with a cello, which made it a one-off, unique performance. (This is a different concert performed in Sydney without the cellist.)
 
The study emphasised the point that the more experienced practitioners taking part were the ones more likely to experience ‘flow’. In other words, to experience ‘flow’ you need to reach a certain skill-level. In emphasising this point, the author quotes jazz legend, Charlie Parker:
 
"You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practise, practise, practise. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail."
 
I can totally identify with this, as when I started writing it was complete crap, to the extent that I wouldn’t show it to anyone. For some irrational reason, I had the self-belief – some might say, arrogance – that, with enough perseverance and practice, I could ‘break-through’ into the required skill-level. In fact, I now create characters and write dialogue with little conscious effort – it’s become a ‘delegated’ task, so I can concentrate on the more complex tasks of resolving plot points, developing moral dilemmas and formulating plot twists. Notice that these require a completely different set of skills that also had to be learned from scratch. But all this can come together, often in unexpected and surprising ways, when one is in the mental state of ‘flow’. I’ve described this as a feeling like you’re an observer, not the progenitor, so the process occurs as if you’re a medium and you just have to trust it.
 
Dr. Steffan Herff, leader of the Sydney Music, Mind and Body Lab at Sydney University, makes a point that supports this experience:
 
"One component that makes flow so interesting from a cognitive neuroscience and psychology perspective, is that it comes with a 'loss of self-consciousness'."
 
And this allows me to segue into Zen Buddhism. Many years ago, I read an excellent book by Daisetz Suzuki titled, Zen and Japanese Culture, where he traces the evolutionary development of Zen, starting with Buddhism in India, then being adopted in China, where it was influenced by Taoism, before reaching Japan, where it was assimilated into a sister-religion (for want of a better term) with Shintoism, which is an animistic religion.
 
Suzuki describes Zen as going inward rather than outward, while acknowledging that the two can’t be disconnected. But I think it’s the loss of ‘self’ that makes it relevant to the experience of flow. When Suzuki described the way Zen is practiced in Japan, he talked about being in the moment, whatever the activity, and for me, this is an ideal that we rarely attain. It was only much later that I realised that this is synonymous with flow as described by Csikszentmihalyi and currently being examined in the studies referenced above.
 
I’ve only once before written a post on Zen (not counting a post on Buddhism and Christianity), which arose from reading Douglas Hofstadter’s seminal tome, Godel Escher Bach (which is not about Zen, although it gets a mention), and it’s worth quoting this summation from myself:
 
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.

The universal quest for meaning

I’ve already cited Philosophy Now (Issue 162, June/July 2024) in my last 2 posts and I’m about to do it again. Every issue has a theme, and this one is called ‘The Meaning Issue’, so it’s no surprise that 2 of the articles reference Viktor Frankl’s seminal book, Man’s Search for Meaning. I’ve said that it’s probably the only book I’ve read that I think everyone should read.
 
For those who don’t know, Frankl was an Auschwitz survivor and a ‘logotherapist’, a term he coined to describe his own version of existential psychological therapy. Basically, Frankl saw purpose as being the unrecognised essence of our existence, and its lack as a source of mental issues like depression, neuroticism and stress. I’ve written about the importance of purpose previously, so I might repeat myself.
 
One of the articles (by Georgia Arkell) compares Frankl’s ideas on existentialism with Sartre’s, and finds Frankl more optimistic. I know that I’m taking a famous line out of context, but I feel it sums up their differences. Sartre famously said, ‘Hell is other people’, but Frankl lived through hell, and would no doubt, have strongly disagreed. Frankl argued that we can find meaning even under the most extreme circumstances, and he should know.
 
To quote from Arkell’s article:
 
Frankl noted that the prisoners who appeared to have the highest chance of survival were those with some aim or meaning directed beyond themselves and beyond day to day survival.
 
Then there is this, in Frankl’s own words (from Man’s Search for Meaning):
 
…it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner-decision and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally then, any man can, under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually.
 
I should point out that my own father spent 2.5 years as a POW in Germany, though it wasn’t a death camp, even though, according to his own testimony, it was only Red Cross food parcels that kept him alive. He rarely talked about it, as he was a firm believer that you couldn’t make the experience of war, in all its manifestations, comprehensible to anyone who hadn’t experienced it. But in light of Frankl’s words, I wonder now how my father did find meaning. There is one aspect of his experience that might shed some light on that – he escaped no less than 3 times.
 
My father was very principled, some might say, to a fault. He volunteered to stay and look after the wounded when they were ordered to evacuate Crete, because, as he said, it was his job (he was an ambulance officer in the Field Ambulance Corp). That action probably later saved his life, but that’s another story. Also on Crete, while trying to escape with another prisoner with the help of a local woman (it was always the women who did this, according to my father), they were discovered by a German, whilst hiding. My father gave himself up so the other 2 could escape. The Australian escapee made it back home and was able to tell my grandmother that her son was still alive (she only knew he was missing in action). But the 3 attempts I mentioned all happened after he was taken to Germany, and on one occasion, the Commandant asked him, why did he escape? My father answered matter-of-factly, ‘It’s my job’. Apparently, due to his sincerity (not for being a smart-arse), the Commandant chose not to punish him.
 
So, I think my father survived because he stuck to some core values and principles that became his own rock and anchor. His attempts to escape are manifestations of his personal affirmation that he never lost hope.
 
Frankl understood better than most, because of his lived experience, the importance of hope to a person’s survival. As an aside, our (Australian) government has a very deliberate policy of eliminating all hope for asylum seekers who arrive by sea. I think it’s so iniquitous, it should be a recognised crime – it goes to the heart of human rights. Slightly off-topic, but very relevant.
 
Loss of hope is something I’ve explored in my own fiction, where we witness its loss like a ball of tightly wound string slowly unravelling (not the metaphor I used in the book), as a key character is abandoned on a distant world (it’s sci-fi, for those who don’t know). I’ve been told by at least one reader that it’s the most impactful section in the book. True story: I was once sitting next to someone on a bus who was up to that part of the book, and as he got up to leave, he said, ‘If she dies, I’ll never speak to you again.’
 
See how easily I get side-tracked - my mind goes off on tangents – I can’t help myself. I’m the same in conversations.
 
Back to the topic: the other article in Philosophy Now that references Frankl, Finding Meaning in Suffering, by Patrick Testa (a psychiatric clinician with a BA in philosophy and political science) also quotes from Man’s Search for Meaning:
 
There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are nothing but defense mechanisms or reaction formulations…  But for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my defense mechanisms, nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my reaction formulations. (Emphasis in Testa’s quote)
 
This quote was the original trigger for this essay, as it leads me to consider the role of identity. I’ve long argued that identity is what someone is willing to die for (which Frankl specifically mentions), therefore willing to kill for. Identity is strongly related to ‘meaning’ for most people, albeit at a subconscious level. For some people, their identity is their profession, for others it’s their heritage, and for many it’s their political affiliation. The point about identity is that it both binds us and divides us.
 
But if you were to ask someone what their identity is, they might well struggle to answer – I know I do – but if it appears to be threatened, even erroneously, they will become combative. Speaking for myself, I struggled to find meaning for a large portion of my life, seeking it in relationships that were more fantasy than realistic. I think I only found meaning (or purpose) when I was able to channel my artistic drives and also express my intellectual meanderings like I’m doing on this blog. So that axiomatically becomes my identity. I’ve written more than once about the importance of freedom, by which I mean the freedom to express one’s thoughts and any artistic urges. Even in my profession (which is in engineering), I found I was best when left to my own devices, and suffered most when someone tried to put me in a box and confine me to their way of thinking.
 
I can’t imagine living in a society where that particular freedom is curtailed, yet they exist. I would argue that a society where its participants can’t flourish would stagnate and not progress in any way, except possibly in a strictly material sense. We’ve seen that in totalitarian regimes all over the world.
 
Lastly, one can’t leave this topic without talking about religion. In fact, I imagine that many, on reading the title, would have expected that would be the starting point. I’ll provide a reference at the end, but very early on in the life of this blog, I wrote a post called Hope, which was really a response to a somewhat facile argument by William Lane Craig that atheists can’t possibly have hope. I don’t think I can improve on that argument here, but it also ties into the topic of identity that I just referred to.
 
Apart from identity, which is usually cultural, there is the universal regard for human suffering. As pointed out in the articles I cited, suffering is an unavoidable aspect of life. The Buddhist philosophy makes this its starting point – It’s the first of the Four Noble Truths, from which the other 3 stem. I expect a lot of religions have arisen as a means to psychologically ‘explain’ the purpose of suffering. It’s also a feature of virtually all fiction, without a religious argument in sight.
 
But it’s also a key feature of Frankl’s philosophy. Arguably, without suffering, we can’t find meaning. I’ve argued previously that we don’t find wisdom through learning and achievements, but through dealing with adversity – it’s even a specific teaching in the I Ching, albeit expressed in different words:
 
Adversity is the opposite of success, but it can lead to success if it befalls the right person.
 
I expect many of us can identify with that. Meaning can be found in the darkest of psychological places, yet without it, we wouldn’t keep going.
 
 
Other posts relevant to this topic: Homage to my Old Man; Hope; The importance of purpose; Freedom, justice, happiness and truth; Freedom, a moral imperative.
 

Sigmund Freud’s and C.S. Lewis’s fictional encounter

Last week I went and saw the movie, Freud’s Last Session, where Anthony Hopkins plays Freud, when he was in London on the very cusp of WW2 and dying of cancer of the mouth, and Mathew Goode plays the Oxford Don, C.S. Lewis. It’s a fictional account, taken from a play I believe, about their meeting at Freud’s home. Its historical veracity is put into question by a disclaimer given after the movie proper finishes, saying that it’s recorded that Freud did, in fact, meet an Oxford Don, but whose identity was never revealed or confirmed.
 
It's the sort of movie that would attract people with a philosophical bent like myself. I thought the cinema better attended than I expected, though it was far from full. Anthony Hopkin’s Freud is playful in the way he challenges Mathew Goode’s Lewis, whilst still being very direct and not pulling any punches. There is an interruption to their conversation by an air-raid siren, and when they go into a bunker, Lewis has a panic-attack, because of his experience in the trenches of WW1. Freud helps him to deal with it in the moment.
 
I’ve read works by both of them, though I’m hardly a scholar. I actually studied Freud in a philosophy class, believe it or not. I’m better read in Jung than Freud. I think Lewis is a good essayist, though I disagree with him philosophically on many counts. Having said that, I expect if I’d met him, I’d have a different opinion of him than just his ideas. I have very good friends who hold almost exactly the same views, so you don’t just judge someone for what they believe, if you get to know them in the flesh.
 
And that’s what came across in this hypothetical exchange – that you have 2 intellectuals who can find mutual respect despite having antithetical views about God and religion and other things, like homosexuality. On that last point, Sigmund’s daughter, Anna, was in a relationship with a woman, which Freud obviously didn’t approve of. In fact, the father-daughter relationship in the movie, was portrayed as very Freudian, where they both seemed to suffer from an unhealthy attachment. Nevertheless, Anna Freud went on to make a name for herself in child psychoanalysis, and there’s a scene where she has to deal with an overbearing and arrogant young man, and her putdown made me want to clap; I just wish I could remember it. Anyway, Anna’s story provides a diversionary, yet not irrelevant, subplot, which makes the movie a bit more than just a two-hander.
 
There are scenes where Mathew Goode’s Lewis has dreams or visions and finds himself in a forest where he comes across a deer and one where he sees a bright overwhelming light. There was a sense in these scenes that he felt he was in the presence of God, and it made me realise that I couldn’t judge him for that. I’ve long argued that God is a personal experience that can’t be shared, but we overlay it with our cultural norms. It was in these scenes that I felt his character was portrayed most authentically.
 

In the beginning there was logic

 I recently read an article in Philosophy Now (Issue 154, Feb/Mar 2023), jointly written by Owen Griffith and A.C. Paseau, titled One Logic, Or Many? Apparently, they’ve written a book on this topic (One True Logic, Oxford University Press, May 2022).
 
One of the things that struck me was that they differentiate between logic and reason, because ‘reason is something we do’. This is interesting because I’ve argued previously that logic should be a verb, but I concede they have a point. In the past I saw logic as something that’s performed, by animals and machines as well as humans. And one of the reasons I took this approach was to distinguish logic from mathematics. I contend that we use logic to access mathematics via proofs, which we then call theorems. But here’s the thing: Kurt Godel proved, in effect, that there will always be mathematical ‘truths’ that we can’t prove within any formal system of mathematics that is consistent. The word ‘consistent’ is important (as someone once pointed out to me) because, if it’s inconsistent, then all bets are off.
 
What this means is that there is potentially mathematics that can’t be accessed by logic, and that’s what we’ve found, in practice, as well as in principle. Matt Parker provides a very good overview in this YouTube video on what numbers we know and what we don’t know. And what we don’t know is infinitely greater than what we do know. Gregory Chaitin has managed to prove that there are infinitely greater incomputable numbers than computable numbers, arguing that Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem goes to the very foundation of mathematics.
 
This detour is slightly off-topic, but very relevant. There was a time when people believed that mathematics was just logic, because that’s how we learned it, and certainly there is a strong relationship. Without our prodigious powers of logic, mathematics would be an unexplored territory to us, and remain forever unknown. There are even scholars today who argue that mathematics that can’t be computed is not mathematics, which rules out infinity. That’s another discussion which I won’t get into, except to say that infinity is unavoidable in mathematics. Euclid (~300 BC) proved (using very simple logic) that you can have an infinite number of primes, and primes are the atoms of arithmetic, because all other numbers can be derived therefrom.
 
The authors pose the question in their title: is there a pluralism of logic? And compare a logic relativism with moral relativism, arguing that they both require an absolutism, because moral relativism is a form of morality and logic relativism is a form of logic, neither of which are relative in themselves. In other words, they always apply by self-definition, so contradict the principle that they endorse – they are outside any set of rules of morality or logic, respectively.
 
That’s their argument. My argument is that there are tenets that always apply, like you can’t have a contradiction. They make this point themselves, but one only has to look at mathematics again. If you could allow contradictions, an extraordinary number of accepted proofs in mathematics would no longer apply, including Euclid’s proof that there are an infinity of primes. The proof starts with the premise that you have the largest prime number and then proves that it isn’t.
 
I agree with their point that reason and logic are not synonymous, because we can use reason that’s not logical. We make assumptions that can’t be confirmed and draw conclusions that rely on heuristics or past experiences, out of necessity and expediency. I wrote another post that compared analytical thinking with intuition and I don’t want to repeat myself, but all of us take mental shortcuts based on experience, and we wouldn’t function efficiently if we didn’t.
 
One of the things that the authors don’t discuss (maybe they do in their book) is that the Universe obeys rules of logic. In fact, the more we learn about the machinations of the Universe, on all scales, the more we realise that its laws are fundamentally mathematical. Galileo expressed this succinctly in the 17th Century, and Richard Feynman reiterated the exact same sentiment in the last century.
 
Cliffard A Pickover wrote an excellent book, The Paradox of God And the Science of Omniscience, where he points out that even God’s omniscience has limits. To give a very trivial example, even God doesn’t know the last digit of pi, because it doesn’t exist. What this tells me is that even God has to obey the rules of logic. Now, I’ve come across someone (Sye Ten Bruggencate) who argued that the existence of logic proves the existence of God, but I think he has it back-to-front (if God can’t breach the rules of logic). In other words, if God invented logic, ‘He’ had no choice. And God can’t make a prime number nonprime or vice versa. There are things an omnipotent God can’t do and there are things an omniscient God can’t know. So, basically, even if there is a God, logic came first, hence the title of this essay.

Our eternal fascination with Light and Dark

 Someone on FaceBook posted one of those inane questions: If you could delete one thing in the world what would it be? Obvious answers included war, hate, evil, and the like; so negative emotive states and consequences. My answer was, ‘Be careful what you wish for’.

What I find interesting about this whole issue is the vicarious relationship we have with the ‘dark side’ through the lens of fiction. If one thinks about it, it starts early with fairy tales and Bible stories. Nightmares are common in our childhood where one wakes up and is too scared to go back to sleep. Fear is an emotion we become familiar with early in our lives; I doubt that I was an exception, but it seems to me that everyone tries to keep children innocent these days. I don’t have children, so I might have it wrong.

 

Light and dark exists in the real world, but we try to keep it to the world of fiction – it’s a universal theme found in operas, mythologies and TV serials. I write fiction and I’m no exception. If there was no dark in my stories, they’d have no appeal. You have to have nemeses, figures of various shades of grey to juxtapose the figures of light, even if the light shines through flawed, imperfect glass.

 

In life we are tested, and we judge ourselves accordingly. Sometimes we pass and sometimes we fail. The same thing happens with characters in fiction. When we read a story we become actors, which makes us wonder how we’d behave in the same situation. I contend that the same thing happens in dreams. As an adult, I’ve always seen dreams as what-if scenarios and it’s the same with stories. I’ve long argued that the language of stories is the language of dreams and I think the connection is even stronger than that. I’m not surprised that storytellers will tell you that they dream a lot.

 

In the Judaeo-Christian religion I grew up with, good and evil were stark contrasts, like black and white. You have God, Christ and Satan. When I got older, I thought it a bit perverse that one feared God as much as Satan, which led me to the conclusion that they weren’t really that different. It’s Christ who is the good guy, willing to forgive the people who hate him and want him dead. I’m talking about them as fictional characters, not real people. I’m sure Jesus was a real person but we only have the myth by which to judge him.

 

The only reason I bring all this up, is because they were the template we were given. But fearing someone you are meant to love leads to neurosis, as I learned the hard way. A lot of people of my generation brought up the next generation as atheists, which is not surprising. The idea of a judgemental, schizophrenic father was past its use-by-date.

 

There is currently a conflict in Ukraine, which has grabbed the world’s attention in a way that other wars have not. It’s partly because of our Euro-centric perspective, and the fact that the 2 biggest and world-changing conflicts of the 20^th Century both started in Europe. And the second one, in particular, has similarities, given it started with a dictator invading a neighbour, when he thought the world would look the other way.

 

There is a fundamental flaw in the human psyche that we’ve seen repeated throughout history. We have a tendency to follow charismatic narcissistic leaders, when you think we should know better. They create an army (not necessarily military) of supporters, but for whom they have utter contempt. This was true of Hitler, but also true of Trump and Putin.

 

Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, like Trump, became a TV celebrity, but in a different vein. He was a satirical comedian who sent up the country’s leader, who was a Russian stooge, and then ran for office where he won by 70%. I believe this is the real reason that Putin wants to bring him down. If he’d done the same thing in Russia, he would have been assassinated while still a TV personality. It’s well known that Putin has attempted to assassinate him at least twice since the invasion, but assassinating opponents in a foreign country is a Putin specialty.

 

Zelenskyy and Putin represent, in many Western people’s minds, a modern day parable of good and evil. And, to me, the difference is stark. Putin, like all narcissists, only cares about himself, not the generals that have died in his war, not the barely out of school conscripts he’s sent into battle and certainly not the Russian people who will suffer enormous deprivations if this continues for any length of time. On the other hand, Zelenskyy doesn’t care about his self-preservation, because he would rather die for a principle than live the rest of his life in shame for deserting his country when it needed him most. Zelenskyy is like the fictional hero we believe in but know we couldn’t emulate.

 

It's when we read or watch fiction that the difference between right and wrong seems obvious. We often find ourselves telling a character, ‘don’t do that, don’t make that decision’, because we can see the consequences, but, in real life, we often seem to lose that compass.

 

My father was in a war and I know from what he told me that he didn’t lose that particular compass, but I also know that he once threatened to kill someone who was stealing from the wounded he was caring for. And I’ve no doubt he would have acted on it. So his compass got a bit bent, because he’d already seen enough killing to last several lifetimes.

 

I’ve noticed a theme in my own writing, which is subconscious, not intentional, and that is my protagonists invariably have their loyalty tested and it ends up defining them. My villains are mostly self-serving autocrats who have a hierarchical view of humanity where they logically belong at the top.

 

This is a meandering post, with no conclusion. We each of us have ambitions and desires and flaws. Few of us are ever really tested, so we make assumptions based on what we like to believe. I like something that Socrates said, who’d also been in battle.

 

To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to appear to be.

Grayling railing against God (I couldn’t help myself)

 I’ve just read A.C. Grayling’s book, The God Argument; The Case against Religion and for Humanism (his emphasis). It’s really a polemic against all deistic religions, even though he claims it’s not a polemic, while acknowledging it probably comes across as one. 

His basic argument, which he iterates in many different ways, is that any belief in God or Gods is irrational, starting with the gods of Norse and Greek mythology and including the Biblical God. It’s a sound argument, because, depending on your culture, you tend to treat one variant as fiction and the other as having personal and spiritual significance. Grayling doesn’t address it in this way: instead, arguing that a belief in God is no different to a belief in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy; one you grow out of and the other you don’t. The inference is that you are immature or unintelligent or, at best, delusional.

 

I’ve said before that all the Gods I know about have cultural ties and that includes the Abrahamic one. But comparing them to Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy is like comparing them to fictional characters like Superman and Tarzan, or Luke Skywalker. So, what’s the difference? The difference is in the potency that you give them. A God or Goddess is something internal that only has meaning for you. I’ll return to this idea throughout, because I think that God has no meaning outside someone’s mind. 

 

I rejected the biblical God in my teens, after a childhood spent immersed in its teachings. But the decision was more an emotional one than an analytical one. Grayling acknowledges, by the way, that religious belief is emotional, which, for him, is just another reason to dismiss it. I rejected God because I grew to really, really dislike Him. He was the worst type of tyrant: he ruled by fear and terror; he practised genocide on a global scale (the Noahic flood); he sent his ‘children’ to everlasting torment for disobedience; he tortured Job to win a bet with the Devil. Oh, almost forgot: he was going to get Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, to test his loyalty.

 

I once commented that the question: Does God exist? is the wrong question. The real question, which enters the consciousness of any rational person is: What’s the point? Is there a higher purpose to our existence? This is what religions have attempted to address, and in consequence, some have invoked deities.

 

Grayling, in a philosophical sleight of hand, categorises some Eastern philosophies, like

Buddhism and Confucianism as not being religions, because they don’t invoke gods. I think it’s fair to categorise Confucius as a philosopher in the same mould as teachers like Plato and Aristotle. But, like Jesus, both Buddha and Confucius had disciples, and they were all iconoclasts, challenging the social mores of their day, which they believed to be unfair and iniquitous. In fact, I would put Jesus in the same category as Buddha, Confucius and Socrates, who were all persecuted for challenging the status quo.

 

But Grayling conveniently overlooks that the Chinese, who adopted both Buddhism and Confucianism, culturally worshiped their ancestors, which is surely a religious practice. Perhaps Grayling doesn’t know many Chinese, whereas I have lived with Chinese individuals, and they definitely have deities as part of their traditional culture.

 

I’ve argued previously that science is neutral on the existence of God. In other words, science does not rule out a ‘creator’, yet there is obvious conflict between science and religious texts. Science is an epistemology and religion is not – they don’t compare. Some people argue that religion explains what science cannot, but that’s an argument from ignorance. There will always be things we don’t know – I’ve written extensively on that point – but no religious text can provide an explanation to a question that contemporary science can’t answer.

 

I think the notion of an omniscient God has problems with logic. Clifford A Pickover wrote a very thought-provoking book, The Paradox of GOD and the Science of Omniscience. To give examples: even God doesn’t know the last digit of pi, because it doesn’t exist; and God can’t make a prime number non-prime. Some people argue that God created logic and I argue that God is restrained by logic the same as us. The Universe obeys logic not because God created the logic but because logic transcends the Universe.

 

When I say that science does not rule out ‘God’, I mean it doesn’t rule out a ‘purpose’ that may be beyond our kin. We really don’t know. That doesn’t make me agnostic, as I don’t believe in an anthropomorphic creator, but neither does it mean that people who do, are axiomatically irrational, as Grayling contends. I’ve argued before that, in fact, it’s a non sequitur to believe the God you find inside your mind is the creator of the entire universe.

 

The major problem I have with polemical texts against religion is that, whether intentional or not, they promote intolerance. Back in 2010, I quoted Grayling where he seemed to be promoting religious tolerance.

 

And people who didn't have a religious commitment wouldn't mind if other people did privately and they wouldn't attack or criticise them. 

So there was an unwritten agreement that the matter was going to be left quiet. So in a future where the religious organisations and religious individuals had returned to something much more private, much more inward looking, we might have that kind of public domain where people were able to rub along with one another with much less friction than we're seeing at the moment.

 

I believe this is fundamentally the society I live in (in Australia) where, for the most part, people don’t care what you believe, and where religion is not part of our political landscape. In fact, despite having religion as part of my education, I was brought up with the tacit understanding that religious belief was personal and therefore only shared with others under the mutual understanding that it was confidential and deeply private. A secular society is not an atheistic society; it’s a tolerant society or it doesn’t work. 

 

I know people with completely different religious beliefs to me, best friends, in fact. What’s more, in our current society, I’d say political beliefs are far more divisive than religious beliefs. It puts a lie to the argument, proposed by Grayling and other militant atheists, that if we eliminated religion, ‘at its root’, then we would overcome the world’s conflicts. It’s not only simplistic, but naive, even dangerous. Religion does contribute to conflicts but only when it is politicised, which is what we witness in places where religion demarcates territorial disputes or differences in status. Religion is just one marker of ingroup-outgroup discrimination, with race, language and wealth being more likely contenders.

 

Grayling is contemptuous of people who adapt their religious beliefs to their circumstances, arguing that they ‘cherry-pick’ and are ‘hypocrites’. Well, I readily admit that I cherry-pick all the time - just read my blog - but I don’t see that as hypocrisy.

 

Don Cupitt provides a different perspective, which is the opposite point of view:

 

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.

 

Grayling addresses the teleological arguments and the ontological argument and the cosmological argument, all in some detail, which I won’t go into. Paul Davies spent considerable time on them as well in his book, The Mind of God. 

 

But there is one argument that Grayling addressed which I found interesting, and that was Plantinga’s version of the ontological argument based on modal logic. I’ve come across this before, which is based on the premise that if something necessarily exists in a possible world then it must exist in all possible worlds (my emphasis). The problem is with the premise that God must necessarily exist in a possible world. I’ve always thought that this argument is somewhat circular, because it seems to assume that God necessarily exists, which is what it’s trying to prove, via logic alone. Grayling goes into it in some detail and claims that Plantinga eventually gave it up, falling back on an even less credible argument that we know that God exists in the same way we know that the past exists. I may have oversimplified it, but that’s the analogy that Grayling used.

 

The teleological argument comes from Aristotle, as Grayling expounds, because he argued that everything manmade has a ‘final cause’, which is the cause that prompted someone to make it, and you could apply this to the whole universe. I have my own response to this. If humans are the ‘final cause’ of God’s ‘creation’, then, without humans, God has no reason to exist. And this leads me to argue a reverse logic that God is dependent on humans rather than the other way round.

 

This is related to the fine-tuned argument that the Universe is ‘just right’ for complex life to emerge and leads to the anthropic principle. Grayling doesn’t mention the anthropic principle, probably because it tacitly allows teleology back into the picture. Grayling makes an analogy by saying that his antecedents only existed so he could exist, which is a good argument. But the point I like to make is that without conscious entities, the Universe may as well not exist. And we are special in as much as we have the unique ability to comprehend the Universe, as Einstein famously pointed out. Or, as Paul Davies said, ‘we can unravel the plot’. The alternative is what Davies calls the ‘absurd universe’, which appears to be the one Grayling plumps for: we give it a meaning because we are predisposed to providing meanings, but there is no reason to think one should exist. 

 

But this goes to the heart of the debate for me. The whole reason we have religion of any type is because humans wondered if there was something beyond the mortal realm. No one can answer that, but it’s why we created gods in all their manifestations. So gods become a part of a collective consciousness, which is why they can seem real to us. In this context, God is a projection that we laden with all our prejudices and hopes beyond death. One cannot dissociate any notion of God from the human psyche, as Ludwig Feuerbach pointed out in the 19^th Century. God is always in human image, not the other way round. Grayling doesn’t discuss this at all, but I fail to see how one can address God independently of a human context. In effect, we get the God we deserve. And by God, I mean the ideal we imagine we should aspire to. This is why we deify mortal humans like Jesus and Buddha, because they represent an ideal that they could only achieve beyond death.

 

The second half of his book talks about humanism. He spends a chapter on the importance and interdependence of authenticity and truth, and another on human rights. They remind me of my 3 rules for humans. He spends an entire chapter on the ethics of sexual conduct and how it’s been perverted by civilised societies. The book is worth acquiring for that alone.

 

Anyone who reads my blog, knows that I think God is subjective, not objective. Anyone who is a believer, will tell you that God came to them, meaning that God only exists in their mind, not out there. I have no issue with this idea of God; but it’s not what religions tell you. Anyone who has a religious experience is an iconoclast, including Jesus and Buddha. I think the idea that God evolves as a product of our consciousness is far more logical than the idea that He (why he?) created us in his image, as potential companions.

 

I make a distinction between non-theists and atheists. In Australia, there are a lot of non-theists, meaning they don’t care what you believe. Going by this tome (2013), Grayling is ‘anti-theist’, though he claims it’s not a religious belief; it’s the opposite of belief. However, his polemic indicates that he cares about whether someone believes in God or not and, like Dawkins, Harris and others, he proselytises atheism. This is not a non-theistic attitude. Anti-theism may not be a religion, but it’s anti-religious in its rhetoric.

 

I will leave the last word to Einstein, who talks about religion with no mention of God.

 

The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimely reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.

The closest I’ve ever seen to someone explaining my philosophy

 I came across this 8min video of Paul Davies from 5 years ago, where I was surprised to find that he and I had very similar ideas regarding the ‘Purpose’ of the Universe. In more recent videos, he has lighter hair and has lost his moustache, which was a characteristic of his for as long as I’ve followed him.

 

Now, one might think that I shouldn’t be surprised, as I’ve been heavily influenced by Davies over many years (decades even) and read many of his books. But I thought he was a Deist, and maybe he was, because not halfway through he admits he had recently changed his views.

 

But what makes me consider that this video probably comes closest to expressing my own philosophy is when he says that meaning or purpose has evolved and that it’s directly related to the fact that the Universe created the means to understand itself. Both these points I’ve been making for years. In his own words, “We unravel the plot”.

Or to quote John Wheeler (whom Davies admired): “The universe gives birth to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the universe.”

P.S. This is also worth watching: his philosophy on mathematics; to which I would concur. His metaphor of a 'warehouse' is unusual, yet very descriptive and germane in my view.

What is scientism?

 I’m currently reading a book (almost finished, actually) by Hugh Mackay, The Inner Self; The joy of discovering who we really are. Mackay is a psychologist but he writes very philosophically, and the only other book of his I’ve read is Right & Wrong: How to decide for yourself, which I’d recommend. In particular, I liked his chapter titled, The most damaging lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

You may wonder what this has to do with the topic, but I need to provide context. In The Inner Self, Mackay describes 20 ‘hiding places’ (his term) where we hide from our ‘true selves’. It’s all about living a more ‘authentic’ life, which I’d endorse. To give a flavour, hiding places include work, perfectionism, projection, narcissism, victimhood – you get the picture. Another term one could use is ‘obsession’. I recently watched a panel of elite athletes (all Australian) answering a series of public-sourced questions (for an ABC series called, You Can’t Ask That), and one of the take-home messages was that to excel in any field, internationally, you have to be obsessed to the point of self-sacrifice. But this also applies to other fields, like performing arts and scientific research. I’d even say that writing a novel requires an element of obsession. So, obsession is often a necessity for success.

 

With that caveat, I found Mackay’s book very insightful and thought-provoking – It will make you examine yourself, which is no bad thing. I didn’t find any of it terribly contentious until I reached his third-last ‘hiding place’, which was Religion and Science. The fact that he would put them together, in the same category, immediately evoked my dissent. In fact, his elaboration on the topic bordered on relativism, which has led me to write this post in response.

 

Many years ago (over 2 decades) when I studied philosophy, I took a unit that literally taught relativism, though that term was never used. I’m talking epistemological relativism as opposed to moral relativism. It’s effectively the view that no particular discipline or system of knowledge has a privileged or superior position. Yes, that viewpoint can be found in academia (at least, back then).

 

Mackay’s chapter on the topic has the same flavour, which allows him to include ‘scientism’ as effectively a religion. He starts off by pointing out that science has been used to commit atrocities the same as religion has, which is true. Science, at base, is all about knowledge, and knowledge can be used for good or evil, as we all know. But the ethics involved has more to do with politicians, lawmakers and board appointees. There are, of course, ethical arguments about GM foods, vaccinations and the use of animals in research. Regarding the last one, I couldn’t personally do research involving the harming of animals, not that I’ve ever done any form of research.

 

But this isn’t my main contention. He makes an offhand reference at one point about the ‘incompatibility’ of science and religion, as if it’s a pejorative remark that reflects an unjustified prejudice on the part of someone who’d make that comment. Well, to the extent that many religions are mythologically based, including religious texts (like the Bible), I’d say the prejudice is justified. It’s what the evolution versus creation debate is all about in the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation in the world.

 

I’ve long argued that science is neutral on whether God exists or not. So let me talk about God before I talk about science. I contend that there are 2 different ideas of God that are commonly conflated. One is God as demiurge, and on that I’m an atheist. By which I mean, I don’t believe there is an anthropomorphic super-being who created a universe just for us. So I’m not even agnostic on that, though I’m agnostic about an after-life, because we simply don’t know.

 

The other idea of God is a personal subjective experience which is individually unique, and most likely a projection of an ‘ideal self’, yet feels external. This is very common, across cultures, and on this, I’m a theist. The best example I can think of is the famous mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who believed that all his mathematical insights and discoveries came directly from the Hindu Goddess, Namagiri Thayar. Ramanujan (pronounced rama-nu-jan) was both a genius and a mystic. His famous ‘notebooks’ are still providing fertile material 100 years later. He traversed cultures in a way that probably wouldn’t happen today.

 

Speaking of mathematics, I wrote a post called Mathematics as religion, based on John Barrow’s book, Pi in the Sky. According to Marcus du Sautoy, Barrow is Christian, though you wouldn’t know it from his popular science books. Einstein claimed he was religious, ‘but not in the conventional sense’. Schrodinger studied the Hindu Upanishads, which he revealed in his short tome, Mind and Matter (compiled with What is Life?).

 

Many scientists have religious beliefs, but the pursuit of science is atheistic by necessity. Once you bring God into science as an explanation for something, you are effectively saying, we can’t explain this and we’ve come to the end of science. It’s commonly called the God-of-the-gaps, but I call it the God of ignorance, because that’s exactly what it represents.

 

I have 2 equations tattooed on my arms, which I describe in detail elsewhere, but they effectively encapsulate my 3 worlds philosophy: the physical, the mental and the mathematical. Mackay doesn’t talk about mathematics specifically, which is not surprising, but it has a special place in epistemology. He does compare science to religion in that scientific theories incorporate ‘beliefs', and religious beliefs are 'the religious equivalent of theories'. However, you can’t compare scientific beliefs with religious faith, because one is contingent on future discoveries and the other is dogma. All scientists worthy of the name know how ignorant we are, but the same can’t be said for religious fundamentalists.

 

However, he's right that scientific theories are regularly superseded, though not in the way he infers. All scientific theories have epistemological limits, and new theories, like quantum mechanics and relativity (as examples), extend old theories, like Newtonian mechanics, into new fields without proving them wrong in the fields they already described. And that’s a major difference to just superseding them outright.

 

But mathematics is different. As Freeman Dyson once pointed out, a mathematical theorem is true for all time. New mathematical discoveries don’t prove old mathematical discoveries untrue. Mathematics has a special place in our system of knowledge.

 

So what is scientism? It’s a pejorative term that trivialises and diminishes science as an epistemological success story.

Does infinity and the unknowable go hand in glove?

A recurring theme on my blog has been the limits of what we can know. So Marcus du Sautoy’s book, What We Cannot Know, fits the bill. I acquired it after I saw him give a talk at the Royal Institute on the subject, promoting the book, which is entertaining and enlightening in and of itself. I’ve previously read his The Music of the Primes and Finding Moonshine, both of which are very erudite and stimulating. He’s made a few TV programmes as well.

Previously, I’ve written blog posts based on books by Bryan Magee (Ultimate Questions) and Noson S. Yanofsky (The Outer Limits of Reason; What Science, Mathematics, and Logic CANNOT Tell Us). Yanofsky is a Professor in computer science, while Magee was a Professor of Philosophy (later a broadcaster and Member of British Parliament). I have to admit that Yanofsky’s book appealed to me more, because it’s more science based. Magee’s book was very erudite and provocative; my one criticism being that he seemed almost dismissive of the role that mathematics plays in the limits of what we can know. He specifically states that “...rationality requires us to renounce the pursuit of proof in favour of the pursuit of progress.” (My emphasis). However, pursuit of proof is exactly what mathematicians do, and, what’s more, they do it consistently and successfully, even though there is a famous proof that says there are limits to what we can prove (Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem).

Marcus du Sautoy is a mathematician, and a very good communicator as well, as can be evidenced on some of his YouTube videos, including some with Numberphile. But his book is not limited to mathematics. In fact, he discusses pretty much all the fields of our knowledge which appear to incorporate limits, which he metaphorically calls ‘Edges’. These include, chaos theory, quantum mechanics, consciousness, the Universe, and of course, mathematics itself. One is tempted to compare his book with Yanofsky’s, as they are both very erudite and educational, whilst taking different approaches. But I won’t, except to say they are both worth reading.

One aspect of du Sautoy’s book, which is unusual, yet instructive, is that he consulted other experts in their respective fields, including John Polkinghorne, John Barrow, Kristof Koch and Robert May. May, in particular, did pioneering work in chaos theory on animal populations in the 1970s. An ex-pat Australian, he’s now a member of the House of Lords, which is where du Sautoy had lunch with him. All these interlocutors were very stimulating and worthy additional contributors to their respective topics.

Very early on (p.10, in fact) du Sautoy mentions a famous misprediction by French philosopher, Auguste Compte, in 1835, about the stars: “We shall never be able to study, by any method, their chemical composition or their mineralogical structure.” Yet, less than a century later, it was being done by spectroscopy as a virtually standard practice, which in turn led to the knowledge that the Universe was expanding consistently in all directions. Throughout the book, du Sautoy reminds us of Compte’s prediction, when it appears that there are some things we will never know. He also quotes Donald Rumsfeld on the very next page:

There are known knowns; these are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns, that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

At the time, people tended to treat Rumsfeld’s statement as a bit of a joke and a piece of political legerdemain, given its context: weapons of mass destruction. However, in the field of science, it’s perfectly correct: there are hierarchies of knowledge, and when one looks back, historically, there have always been unknown unknowns, and, therefore, it’s a safe bet they will exist in the future as well. In other words, our future discoveries are dependent on secrets the Universe has yet to reveal to us mere mortals.

Towards the end of his book, du Sautoy gets more philosophical, which is not surprising, and he makes a point that I’ve not seen or heard before. He argues that some things about the Universe, like time, and the possibility of a multiverse, might remain unknown without physically getting outside the Universe, which is impossible. This, of course, raises the issue of God. Augustine, among others, has argued that God exists outside the Universe, and therefore, outside time. Paul Davies made the same point in his book, The Mind of God, with specific reference to Augustine.

Du Sautoy, who is a self-declared atheist, contends that God represents what we cannot know, which is consistent with the idea that some things we cannot know, can only be known from outside the Universe. But du Sautoy makes the point that there is something that exists outside the Universe that we know and that is mathematics. He, therefore, makes the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that maybe we can replace God with mathematics. Curiously, John Barrow made the same mischievous suggestion in one of his books – probably, Pi in the Sky. According to du Sautoy, Barrow is a Christian, which surprised me as much as du Sautoy, given that you would never know it from his writings. While on the subject of God, John Polkinghorne is a well known theologian as well as a physicist. Again, according to du Sautoy, Polkinghorne contends that God could intervene in the Universe via chaos theory. I once made the same point, although I also said I didn’t believe in an interventionist God, as that leads to people claiming they know God’s will, and that leads to all sorts of acts done in God’s name, and we all know how that usually ends. The problem with believing in an interventionist God is that it axiomatically leads to people believing they can influence said God.

Getting back to the subject at hand, du Sautoy says:

If there was no universe, no matter, no space, nothing. I think there would still be mathematics. Mathematics does not require the physical world to exist.

Following on from du Sautoy’s book, I started re-reading Eli Maor’s book, e: the story of a number, which incidentally covers the history of calculus going back to the ancient Greeks and Archimedes, in particular. The Greeks had a problem in that they couldn’t acknowledge infinity – it was taboo. Maor believes that Archimedes must have known the concept of infinity because he appreciated how an iterative process could converge to a value, but he wasn’t allowed to say so. Even in the modern day, there are mathematicians who wish to be rid of the concept of infinity, yet it’s intrinsic to mathematics everywhere you look.

This is relevant because the very nature of infinity tells us that there will always be truths beyond our kin. You can use a Turing machine (a computer) to calculate all the zeros in Riemann’s hypothesis and, if it’s true, it will never stop. Now, du Sautoy makes an interesting observation about this (which he expounds upon in this video, if you want it firsthand) that it’s possible that Riemann’s hypothesis is unknowable. In fact, there’s a small collection of conjectures associated with prime numbers that fall into this category (the Goldbach conjecture and the twin-prime conjecture being another 2). But here’s the thing: if one can prove that the Riemann hypothesis is unknowable, then it must be true. This is because, if it was untrue, there would have to be at least one result that didn’t fit the hypothesis, which would make it ‘knowable’.

The unknowable possibility is a direct consequence of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. To quote du Sautoy:

Godel proved mathematically that within any axiomatic system framework for number theory that was free of contradictions there were true statements about numbers that could not be proved within that framework – a mathematical proof that mathematics has its limitations. (My empasis).

I highlighted that passage because I left it out when proposing a definition to someone on Quora, and as a consequence, my interlocutor tried to argue that my definition was incorrect. Basically, I was saying that within any axiomatic system of mathematics there are ‘truths’ that can’t be proven. That’s Godel’s famous theorem in essence and in practice. However, one can find proofs, in principle, by using new axioms outside that particular system. And we see this in practice. The axiom that geometry can be non-Euclidean created new proofs, and the introduction of √-1 created new mathematics, called complex algebra, that gave solutions to previously unsolvable problems.

Towards the end of his book, du Sautoy references a little known and obscure point made by the renowned logician Alonso Church, called the ‘paradox of unknowability’, which proves that unless you know it all, there will always be truths that are by their very nature unknowable.

In effect, Church has extended Godel’s theorem to the physical world. Du Sautoy gives the example of all the dice that are lost in his house. There is either an even number of them or an odd number. One of these is true, but it is unknowable unless he can find them all. A more universal example is whether the Universe is infinite or finite. One of these is true but it’s currently unknowable and may be for all time. Du Sautoy makes the point that if we learn it’s finite then it becomes knowable, but if it’s infinite it may remain forever unknowable. This is similar to the Riemann hypothesis being knowable or unknowable. If it’s false then the Turing machine stops, which makes it finite, but, if it’s true, it is both infinite and unknowable, based on that thought experiment. It was only at this point in my essay that I came up with its title. I’ve expressed it as a question, but it’s really a conclusion.

If we go back to Archimedes and his struggle with the infinite, we can see that probably for most of humankind’s history, the infinite was considered outside the mortal realm. In other words, it was the realm of God. In fact, du Sautoy quotes Descartes: God is the only thing I positively conceive as infinite.

I’ve long contended that mathematics is the only ‘realm’ (for want of a better word) where infinity is completely at home. In Maor’s book, at one point, he discusses the difference between applied mathematics and pure mathematics, and it occurred to me that this distinction could explain the perennial argument about whether mathematics is invented or discovered. But the plethora of infinities, which is also intrinsic to unknowable ‘truths’, as outlined above, infers that there will always be mathematical ‘things’ waiting to be discovered. What’s more, the ‘marriage’ between theoretical physics and pure mathematics has never been more productive.

Addendum 1: After writing this, I re-watched an interview with Norman Wildberger on the subject of infinity and Real numbers. Wildberger is an Australian mathematician with ‘unorthodox’ views on the foundations of mathematics, as he explains in the video.

Wildberger is not a crank: he’s an academic mathematician, who has unusual philosophical ideas on mathematics. He makes the valid point that computers can only work with finite numbers (meaning numbers with a finite decimal extension), and that is the criterion he uses to determine whether something mathematical is ‘real’. He says he doesn’t believe in Real numbers, as they are defined, because they are infinitely uncomputable.

In effect, he argues they have no place in the physical world, but I disagree. In chaos theory, the reason chaotic phenomena are unpredictable is because you have to calculate the initial conditions to infinite decimal places, which is impossible. This is both mathematical and physical evidence that some things are ‘unknowable’.

Addendum 2: Sabine Hossenfelder argues that infinity is only 'real' in the mathematical world. She contends that in physics, it's not 'real', because it's not 'measurable'. She gives a good exposition in this YouTube video.