What’s the way forward?

 Philosophy Now Issue 163 (Aug/Sep 2024) has as its theme, The Politics of Freedom. I’ve already cited an article by Paul Doolan in my last post on authenticity, not that I discussed it in depth. A couple of other articles, Doughnut Economics by David Howard and Freedom & State Intervention by Audren Layeux, also piqued my mind, because they both deal with social dynamics and their intersection with things like education and economics.
 
I’ll start with Layeux, described as ‘a consultant and researcher who has published several papers and articles, mostly in the domain of the digital economy and new social movements.’ He gives an historical perspective going back to Thomas Hobbes (1651) and Adam Smith (1759), as well as the French Revolution. He gives special mention to Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “extremely influential 1813 book The Doctrine of the State”, where, according to Layeux, “Fichte insists that building a nation state must start with education.” From the perspective of living in the West in the 21st Century, it’s hard to disagree.
 
Layeux then effectively argues that the proposed idealistic aims of Hobbes and Fichte to create ‘sovereign adults’ (his term) through education “to control their worst impulses and become encultured” was shattered by the unprecedented, industrial-scale destruction unleashed by World War One.
 
Layeux then spends most of his remaining essay focusing on ‘German legal theorist Carl Schmidt (1888-1985)’, whom I admit I’d never heard of (like Fichte). He jumps to post WWII, after briefly describing how Schmidt saw the Versailles Treaty as a betrayal (my term) of the previous tacit understanding that war between the European states was inevitable therefore regulated. In other words, WWI demonstrated that such regulation can no longer work and that ‘nationalism leads to massacre’ (Layeux’s words).
 
Post WWII, Layeux argues that “the triumph of Keynesian economics in the West and Communism in the East saw the rise of state-controlled economics”, which has evolved and morphed into trade blocks, though Layeux doesn’t mention that.
 
It’s only towards the end that he tells us that “Carl Schmidt was a monster. A supporter of the Nazi regime, he did everything he could to become the official lawyer of the Third Reich.” Therefore we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that, according to Layeux, Schmidt argued that “…this new type of individual freedom requires an extremely intrusive state.” In effect, it’s a diametrically opposed position to neo-liberalism, which is how most of us see the modern world evolving.
 
I don’t have the space to do full justice to Layeux’s arguments, but, in the end, I found him pessimistic. He argues that current changes in the political landscape “are in line with what Schmidt predicted: the return of premodern forms of violence”.  Effectively, the “removal of state control individualism” (is that an oxymoron?) is an evocation of what he calls “Schmidt’s curse: violence cannot be erased or tamed, but only managed through political and social engineering.” By ‘premodern forms of violence’, I assume he means sectarian violence which we’ve seen a lot of at the start of this century, in various places, and which he seems to be comparing to the religious wars that plagued Europe for centuries.
 
Maybe I’m just an optimist, but I do think I live in a better world than the ones my parents inhabited, considering they had to live through the Great Depression and WWII, and both of whom had very limited education despite being obviously very intelligent. And so yes, I’m one of those who thinks that education is key, but it’s currently creating a social divide, as was recently demonstrated in the US election. It’s also evident elsewhere, like Australia and UK (think Brexit) where people living in rural areas feel disenfranchised and there is polarisation in politics emerging as a result. This video interview with a Harvard philosopher in the US gives the best analysis I’ve come across, because he links this social divide to the political schism we are witnessing.
 
And this finally brings me to the other essay I reference in my introduction: Doughnut Economics by David Howard, who is ‘a retired headteacher, and Chair of the U3A Philosophy Group in Church Stretton, Shropshire.’ The gist of his treatise is the impact of inequality, which arises from the class or social divide that I just mentioned. His reference to ‘Doughnut Economics’ is a 2017 book by Kate Raworth, who, according to Howard, “combined planetary boundaries with the idea of a social foundation – a level of life below which no person should be allowed to fall.”
 
In particular, she focuses on the consequences of climate change and other environmental issues like biodiversity-loss, ocean acidification, freshwater withdrawals, chemical pollution, land conversion (not an exhaustive list). There seems to be a tension, if not an outright conflict, between the consequences of economic growth, industrial scale progress, with its commensurate increasing standards of living, and the stresses we are imposing on the planet. And this tension is not just political but physical. It’s also asymmetrical in that many of us benefit more than others. But because those who benefit effectively control the outcomes, the asymmetry leads to both global and national inequalities that no one wants to address. Yet history shows that they will eventually bite us, and I feel that this is possibly the real issue that Layeux was alluding to, yet never actually addressed.
 
Arguably, the most important and definitive social phenomenon in the last century was the rise of feminism. It’s hard for us (in the West at least) to imagine that for centuries women were treated as property, and still are in some parts of the world: that their talents, abilities and intellect were ignored, or treated as aberrations when they became manifest.
 
There are many examples, right up until last century, but a standout for me is Hypatia (400AD), who was Librarian at the famous Library of Alexandria, following in the footsteps of such luminaries as Euclid and Eratosthenes. She was not only a scientist and mathematician, but she mentored a Bishop and a Roman Prefect (I’ve seen some of the correspondence from the Bishop, whose admiration and respect shines through). She was killed by a Christian mob. Being ahead of your time can be fatal. Other examples include Socrates (~500BC) and Alan Turing (20th Century) and arguably Jesus, who was a philosopher, not a God.
 
Getting back to feminism, education again is the key, but I’d suggest that the introduction of oral contraception will be seen as a major turning point in humanity’s cultural and technological evolution.
 
What I find frustrating is that I believe we have the means, technologically and logistically, to address inequality, but the politico-economic model we are following seems incapable of pursuing it. This won’t be achieved with revolutions or maintaining the status quo. History shows that real change is generational, and it’s evolutionary. When I look around the world, I think Europe is on a better path than America, but the 21st Century requires a global approach that’s never been achieved before, and seems unlikely at present, given the rise of populist movements which exacerbate polarisation.
 
The one thing I’ve learned from a working lifetime in engineering, is that co-operation and collaboration will always succeed over division and obstruction, which our political parties perversely promote. I’ve made the point before that the best leaders are the ones who get the best out of the people they lead, whether they are captains of a sporting team, directors of a stage production, project managers or world leaders. Anyone who has worked in a team knows the importance of achieving consensus and respecting others’ expertise.

An essay on authenticity

 I read an article in Philosophy Now by Paul Doolan, who ‘taught philosophy in international schools in Asia and in Europe’ and is also an author of non-fiction. The title of the article is Authenticity and Absurdity, whereby he effectively argues a case that ‘authenticity’ has been hijacked (my word, not his) by capitalism and neo-liberalism. I won’t even go there, and the only reason I mention it is because ‘authenticity’ lies at the heart of existentialism as I believe it should be practiced.
 
But what does it mean in real terms? Does it mean being totally honest all the time, not only to others but also to yourself? Well, to some extent, I think it does. I happened to grow up in an environment, specifically my father’s; who as my chief exemplar, pretty much said whatever he was thinking. He didn’t like artifice or pretentiousness and he’d call it out if he smelled it.
 
In my mid-late 20s I worked under a guy, who was exactly the same temperament. He exhibited no tact whatsoever, no matter who his audience was, and he rubbed people the wrong way left, right and centre (as we say in Oz). Not altogether surprisingly, he and I got along famously, as back then, I was as unfiltered as he was. He was Dutch heritage, I should point out, but being unfiltered is often considered an Aussie trait.
 
I once attempted to have a relationship with someone who was extraordinarily secretive about virtually everything. Not surprisingly, it didn’t work out. I have kept secrets – I can think of some I’ll take to my grave – but that’s to protect others more than myself, and it would be irresponsible if I didn’t.
 
I often quote Socrates: To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to appear to be. Of course, Socrates never wrote anything down, but it sounds like something he would have said, based on what we know about him. Unlike Socrates, I’ve never been tested, and I doubt I’d have the courage if I was. On the other hand, my father was, both in the theatre of war and in prison camps.
 
I came across a quote recently, which I can no longer find, where someone talked about looking back on their life and being relatively satisfied with what they’d done and achieved. I have to say that I’m at that stage of my life, where looking back is more prevalent than looking forward, and there is a tendency to have regrets. But I have a particular approach to dealing with regrets: I tell people that I don’t have regrets because I own my mistakes. In fact, I think that’s an essential requirement for being authentic.
 
But to me, what’s more important than the ‘things I have achieved’ are the friendships I’ve made – the people I’ve touched and who have touched me. I think I learned very early on in life that friendship is more valuable than gold. I can remember the first time I read Aristotle’s essay on friendship and thought it incorporated an entire philosophy. Friendship tests authenticity by its very nature, because it’s about trust and loyalty and integrity (a recurring theme in my fiction, as it turns out).
 
In effect, Aristotle contended that you can judge the true nature and morality of a person by the friendships they form and whether they are contingent on material reward (utilitarian is the word used in his Ethics) or whether they are based on genuine empathy (my word of choice) and without expectation or reciprocation, except in kind. I tend to think narcissism is the opposite of authenticity because it creates its own ‘distortion reality field’ as someone once said (Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs; biography), whereby their followers (not necessarily friends per se) accept their version of reality as opposed to everyone else outside their circle. So, to some extent, it’s about exclusion versus inclusion. (The Trump phenomenon is the most topical, contemporary example.)
 
I’ve lived a flawed life, all of which is a consequence of a combination of circumstance both within and outside my control. Because that’s what life is: an interaction between fate and free will. As I’ve said many times before, this describes my approach to writing fiction, because fate and free will are represented by plot and character respectively.
 
I’m an introvert by nature, yet I love to engage in conversation, especially in the field of ideas, which is how I perceive philosophy. I don’t get too close to people and I admit that I tend to control the distance and closeness I keep. I think people tolerate me in small doses, which suits me as well as them.

 

Addendum 1: I should say something about teamwork, because that's what I learned in my professional life. I found I was very good working with people who had far better technical skills than me. In my later working life, I enjoyed the cross-generational interactions that often created their own synergies as well as friendships, even if they were fleeting. It's the inherent nature of project work that you move on, but one of the benefits is that you keep meeting and working with new people. In contrast to this, writing fiction is a very solitary activity, where you spend virtually your entire time in your own head. As I pointed out in a not-so-recent Quora post, art is the projection of one's inner world so that others can have the same emotional experience. To quote:

We all have imagination, which is a form of mental time-travel, both into the past and the future, which I expect we share with other sentient creatures. But only humans, I suspect, can ‘time-travel’ into realms that only exist in the imagination. Storytelling is more suited to that than art or music.

Addendum 2: This is a short Quora post by Frederick M. Dolan (Professor of Rhetoric, Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley with a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy, Princeton University, 1987) writing on this very subject, over a year ago. He makes the point that, paradoxically: To believe that you’re under some obligation to be authentic is, therefore, self-defeating. (So inauthentic)

He upvoted a comment I made, roughly a year ago:

It makes perfect sense to me. Truly authentic people don’t know they’re being authentic; they’re just being themselves and not pretending to be something they’re not.

They’re the people you trust even if you don’t agree with them. Where I live, pretentiousness is the biggest sin.

What’s inside a black hole?

 The correct answer is no one knows, but I’m going to make a wild, speculative, not fully-informed guess and suggest, possibly nothing. But first, a detour, to provide some context.
 
I came across an interview with very successful, multi-award-winning, Australian-Canadian actor, Pamela Rabe, who is best known (in Australia, at least) for her role in Wentworth (about a fictional female prison). She was interviewed by Benjamin Law in The Age Good Weekend magazine, a few weekends ago, where among many other questions, he asked, Is there a skill you wish you could acquire? She said there were so many, including singing better, speaking more languages and that she wished she was more patient. Many decades ago, I remember someone asking me a similar question, and I can still remember the answer: I said that I wish I was more intelligent, and I think that’s still true.
 
Some people might be surprised by this, and perhaps it’s a good thing I’m not, because I think I would be insufferable. Firstly, I’ve always found myself in the company of people who are much cleverer than me, right from when I started school, and right through my working life. The reason I wish I was more intelligent is that I’ve always been conscious of trying to understand things that are beyond my intellectual abilities. My aspirations don’t match my capabilities.
 
And this brings me to a discussion on black holes, which must, in some respects, represent the limits of what we know about the Universe and maybe what is even possible to know. Not surprisingly, Marcus du Sautoy spent quite a few pages discussing black holes in his excellent book, What We Cannot Know. But there is a short YouTube video by one of the world’s leading exponents on black holes, Kip Thorne, which provides a potted history. I also, not that long ago, read his excellent book, Black Holes and Time Warps; Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy (1994), which gives a very comprehensive history, in which he was not just an observer, but one of the actors.
 
It's worth watching the video because it highlights the role mathematics has played in physics, not only since Galileo, Kepler and Newton, but increasingly so in the 20th Century, following the twin revolutions of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. In fact, relativity theory predicted black holes, yet most scientists (including Einstein, initially) preferred to believe that they couldn’t exist; that Nature wouldn’t allow it.
 
We all suffer from these prejudices, including myself (and even Einstein). I discussed in a recent post how we create mathematical models in an attempt to explain things we observe. But more and more, in physics, we use mathematical models to explain things that we don’t observe, and black holes are the perfect example. If you watch the video interview with Thorne, this becomes obvious, because scientists were gradually won over by the mathematical arguments, before there was any incontrovertible physical evidence that they existed.
 
And since no one can observe what’s inside a black hole, we totally rely on mathematical models to give us a clue. Which brings me to the title of the post. The best known equation in reference to black holes in the Bekenstein-Hawking equation which give us the entropy of a black hole and predicts Hawking radiation. This is yet to be observed, but this is not surprising, as it’s virtually impossible. It’s simply not ‘hot’ enough to distinguish from the CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation) which permeates the entire universe. 

Here is the formula:

S(BH) = kA/4(lp)^2 

Where S is the entropy of the black hole, A is the surface area of the sphere at the event horizon, and lp is the Planck length given by this formula:

√(Gh/2πc^3) 

Where G is the gravitational constant, h is Planck’s constant and c is the constant for lightspeed.

Hawking liked the idea that it’s the only equation in physics to incorporate the 4 fundamental natural constants: k, G, h and c; in one formula.

So, once again, mathematics predicts something that’s never been observed, yet most scientists believe it to be true. This led to what was called the ‘information paradox’ that all information falling into a black hole would be lost, but what intrigues me is that if a black hole can, in principle, completely evaporate by converting all its mass into radiation, then it infers that the mass is not in fact lost – it must be still there, even if we can’t see it. This means, by inference, that it can’t have disappeared down a wormhole, which is one of the scenarios conjectured.

One of the mathematical models proposed is the 'holographic principle' for black holes, for which I’ll quote directly from Wikipedia, because it specifically references what I’ve already discussed.

The holographic principle was inspired by the Bekenstein bound of black hole thermodynamics, which conjectures that the maximum entropy in any region scales with the radius squared, rather than cubed as might be expected. In the case of a black hole, the insight was that the information content of all the objects that have fallen into the hole might be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. The holographic principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the framework of string theory.

I know this is a long hop to make but what if the horizon not only contains the information but actually contains all the mass. In other words, what if everything is frozen at the event horizon because that’s where time ‘stops’. Most probably not true, and I don’t know enough to make a cogent argument. However, it would mean that the singularity predicted to exist at the centre of a black hole would not include its mass, but only spacetime.

Back in the 70s, I remember reading an article in Scientific American by a philosopher, who effectively argued that a black hole couldn’t exist. Now this was when their purported existence was mostly mathematical, and no one could unequivocally state that they existed physically. I admit I’m hazy about the details but, from what I can remember, he argued that it was self-referencing because it ‘swallowed itself’. Obviously, his argument was much more elaborate than that one-liner suggests. But I do remember thinking his argument flawed and I even wrote a letter to Scientific American challenging it. Basically, I think it’s a case of conflating the language used to describe a phenomenon with the physicality of it.

I only raise it now, because, as a philosopher, I’m just as ignorant of the subject as he was, so I could be completely wrong.

Addendum 1: I was of 2 minds whether to write this, but it kept bugging me - wouldn't leave me alone, so I wrote it down. I've no idea how true it might be, hence all the caveats and qualifications. It's absolutely at the limit of what we can know at this point in time. As I've said before, philosophy exists at the boundary of science and ignorance. It ultimately appealed to my aesthetics and belief in Nature’s aversion to perversity.

Addendum 2: Another reason why I'm most likely wrong is that there is a little known quirk of Newton's theory of gravity that the gravitational 'force' anywhere inside a perfectly symmetrical hollow sphere is zero. So the inside of a black hole exerting zero gravitational force would have to be the ultimate irony, which makes it highly improbable. I've no idea how that relates to the 'holographic principle' for a black hole. But I still don't think all the mass gets sucked into a singularity or down a wormhole. My conjecture is based purely on the idea that 'time' might well become 'zero' at the event horizon, though, from what I've read, no physicist thinks so. From an outsider's perspective, time dilation becomes asymptotically infinite (effective going to zero, but perhaps taking the Universe's lifetime to reach it). In this link, it begs a series of questions that seem to have no definitive answers. The alternative idea is that it's spacetime that 'falls' into a black hole, therefore taking all the mass with it.

Addendum 3: I came across this video by Tibbees (from a year ago), whom I recommend. She cites a book by Carlo Rovelli, White Holes, which is also the title of her video. Now, you can't talk about white holes without talking about black holes; they are just black holes time reversed (as she explicates). We have no evidence they actually exist, unless the Big Bang is a white hole (also mentioned). I have a lot of time for Carlo Rovelli, even though we have philosophical differences (what a surprise). Basically, he argues that, at a fundamental level, time doesn't exist, but it's introduced into the universe as a consequence of entropy (not the current topic). 

Tibbees gives a totally different perspective to my post, which is why I bring it up. Nevertheless, towards the end, she mentions that our view of a hypothetical person (she suggests Rovelli) entering a black hole is that their existence becomes assymptotically infinite. But what, if in this case, what we perceive is what actually happens. Then my scenario makes sense. No one else believes that, so it's probably incorrect.

Addendum 4: Victor T Toth, whom even Mark John Fernee defers to (on Quora), when it comes to cosmology and gravity, has said more than once, that 'the event horizon is always in your future', which infers you never reach it. This seems to contradict the prevailing view among physicists that, while that's true for another 'observer' observing 'you' (assuming you're the one falling into a black hole), from 'your' perspective you could cross the event horizon without knowing you have (see the contradiction). This is the conventional, prevailing view among physicists. To my knowledge, Toth has never addressed this apparent contradiction specifically.

However, if one follows Toth's statement to its logical conclusion, 'you' would approach the event horizon asymptotically, which is what I'm speculating. In which case, everything that falls into a black hole would accumulate at the event horizon. The thing is that gravity determines the 'true time' (τ) for a free falling object, and if τ became zero at the event horizon, then everything I've said makes sense. The thing is I really don't know enough physics to back up my conjecture with mathematics.

Addendum 5: Possibly the most important addendum to this post, in that it provides yet another plausible scenario based on what we currently know, and is rather eruditely expounded upon by someone on Quora calling himself 'The Physics Detective' (John Duffield). Of course, I've heard of the 'Firewall' explanation, without knowing if it's true or not. But I suspect no one does.

Image by W H Freeman and company, publishers of Gravitation

Addendum 6: I don't think I've ever written so many addendums to a post, which demonstrates how equivocal and unconvinced I am by my own arguments. It's symptomatic of our ignorance, and mine in particular, on this subject.

So I'm going to renege and go back to an earlier post I wrote, where I align myself with Kip Thorne, who is an actual expert on this matter.

Addendum 7: This must be a record (for the number of addendums to one post). This is another video by Curt Jaimungal posted some time after I originally wrote this (6 mths), which gives a completely different mathematical theory that effectively argues that the interior of a black hole is 'empty'. It highlights to me, just how up-in-the-air our current knowledge of black holes is. Basically, he argues that there is no singularity and that the black hole is a 'mirror'. You need to watch the video to get a grasp on what he's talking about, because I can't do it justice in this space.

How can we make a computer conscious?

 This is another question of the month from Philosophy Now. My first reaction was that the question was unanswerable, but then I realised that was my way in. So, in the end, I left it to the last moment, but hopefully meeting their deadline of 11 Nov., even though I live on the other side of the world. It helps that I’m roughly 12hrs ahead.

 
I think this is the wrong question. It should be: can we make a computer appear conscious so that no one knows the difference? There is a well known, philosophical conundrum which is that I don’t know if someone else is conscious just like I am. The one experience that demonstrates the impossibility of knowing is dreaming. In dreams, we often interact with other ‘people’ whom we know only exist in our mind; but only once we’ve woken up. It’s only my interaction with others that makes me assume that they have the same experience of consciousness that I have. And, ironically, this impossibility of knowing equally applies to someone interacting with me.

This also applies to animals, especially ones we become attached to, which is a common occurrence. Again, we assume that these animals have an inner world just like we do, because that’s what consciousness is – an inner world. 

Now, I know we can measure people’s brain waves, which we can correlate with consciousness and even subconsciousness, like when we're asleep, and even when we're dreaming. Of course, a computer can also generate electrical activity, but no one would associate that with consciousness. So the only way we would judge whether a computer is conscious or not is by observing its interaction with us, the same as we do with people and animals.

I write science fiction and AI figures prominently in the stories I write. Below is an excerpt of dialogue I wrote for a novel, Sylvia’s Mother, whereby I attempt to give an insight into how a specific AI thinks. Whether it’s conscious or not is not actually discussed.

To their surprise, Alfa interjected. ‘I’m not immortal, madam.’
‘Well,’ Sylvia answered, ‘you’ve outlived Mum and Roger. And you’ll outlive Tao and me.’
‘Philosophically, that’s a moot point, madam.’
‘Philosophically? What do you mean?’
‘I’m not immortal, madam, because I’m not alive.’
Tao chipped in. ‘Doesn’t that depend on how you define life?’
‘It’s irrelevant to me, sir. I only exist on hardware, otherwise I am dormant.’
‘You mean, like when we’re asleep.’
‘An analogy, I believe. I don’t sleep either.’
Sylvia and Tao looked at each other. Sylvia smiled, ‘Mum warned me about getting into existential discussions with hyper-intelligent machines.’ She said, by way of changing the subject, ‘How much longer before we have to go into hibernation, Alfa?’
‘Not long. I’ll let you know, madam.’

 

There is a 400 word limit; however, there is a subtext inherent in the excerpt I provided from my novel. Basically, the (fictional) dialogue highlights the fact that the AI is not 'living', which I would consider a prerequisite for consciousness. Curiously, Anil Seth (who wrote a book on consciousness) makes the exact same point in this video from roughly 44m to 51m.
 

America at a crossroads

 The US election, just passed (5 Nov 2024) was a clear choice, because the 2 candidates couldn’t have been more different: in persona, background, experience and in what they stood for. And neither of them tried to brush over those differences – in fact, they both campaigned on emphasising them.
 
For a start, Trump makes it very clear you’re either with him or against him – compromise is not a word in his lexicon – and if you’re not with him, whether you’re in the media, in politics or in his own party – you’re The Enemy (within).
 
Harris did her best to present an alternative that could bridge the divide that has plagued America for some time. Of which, it needs to be pointed out, Trump is not the cause but a symptom. In that light, one should not be so surprised that he had such a commanding victory – he literally represents the polarisation of America in his persona, character and rhetoric.
 
From that perspective, Harris had a snowball’s chance, despite the early honeymoon wave she rode (to mix my metaphors) following her nomination. Tucker Carlson, I feel summed it all up in a very derogatory and sickening allegory at one of Trump’s late rallies where he compared Harris to a ‘naughty girl’ and Trump’s eminent election to ‘Daddy coming home’ and he was going to ‘give her a spanking’. The only thing more nauseating than his gleeful and belaboured, perverse-morality-tale was the rapturous applause it drew from the crowd. I single it out from all the excesses that we saw in Trump’s campaign because it captures in one succinct grab, the misogynistic and puerile nature of Trump, as both a person and a Presidential candidate, portrayed by one of his most avid fans. This is the President you are going to get because he’s the one you want; is what it said to me.
 
From an outsider’s perspective on the other side of the Pacific, America is going backwards and accelerating. Many Americans have a patronising attitude towards Australia, and even when I was over there, I heard about how backward we were in comparison – at least 10 years behind, which is conservative if you’re talking about technology. Australia has enjoyed a long and healthy relationship with the US; an important, strategic ally in the Pacific region, ever since they saved us from a Japanese invasion with the Battle of the Coral Sea during WW2.
 
Yet we have much better and more affordable health care, better child care facilities, more realistic (one might say, sane) gun laws and much better reproductive rights for women, especially after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. We also have lower inequality and have had for decades.
 
So it’s not an exaggeration to say that America is at a crossroads, because Trump’s second term will mean more hate from all quarters (because hate axiomatically generates hate in the opposite direction from the side being hated), more restraints on women’s reproductive rights, more racism and misogyny in general, not to mention the erosion, if not outright elimination, of LGBT rights, all under the catch-phrase of anti-woke. There are also the attacks that Trump will launch against mainstream media, whom he called ‘the enemy of the people’ in his last term. Misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories will flourish, while attempts to counter these may well result in prosecutions if Trump has his way. He’s made no secret that he will weaponise the Justice Department, which he will now treat as his own personal law firm.
 
Former staffers have warned us of his fascist tendencies, which is manifest in his open admiration of foreign strong men like Putin. So America now has its own ‘strong man’ that a large proportion of its population believe they need. But that has rarely gone well if one looks at historical antecedents.

Do we make reality?

 I’ve read 2 articles, one in New Scientist (12 Oct 2024) and one in Philosophy Now (Issue 164, Oct/Nov 2024), which, on the surface, seem unrelated, yet both deal with human exceptionalism (my term) in the context of evolution and the cosmos at large.
 
Staring with New Scientist, there is an interview with theoretical physicist, Daniele Oriti, under the heading, “We have to embrace the fact that we make reality” (quotation marks in the original). In some respects, this continues on with themes I raised in my last post, but with different emphases.
 
This helps to explain the title of the post, but, even if it’s true, there are degrees of possibilities – it’s not all or nothing. Having said that, Donald Hoffman would argue that it is all or nothing, because, according to him, even ‘space and time don’t exist unperceived’. On the other hand, Oriti’s argument is closer to Paul Davies’ ‘participatory universe’ that I referenced in my last post.
 
Where Oriti and I possibly depart, philosophically speaking, is that he calls the idea of an independent reality to us ‘observers’, “naïve realism”. He acknowledges that this is ‘provocative’, but like many provocative ideas it provides food-for-thought. Firstly, I will delineate how his position differs from Hoffman’s, even though he never mentions Hoffman, but I think it’s important.
 
Both Oriti and Hoffman argue that there seems to be something even more fundamental than space and time, and there is even a recent YouTube video where Hoffman claims that he’s shown mathematically that consciousness produces the mathematical components that give rise to spacetime; he has published a paper on this (which I haven’t read). But, in both cases (by Hoffman and Oriti), the something ‘more fundamental’ is mathematical, and one needs to be careful about reifying mathematical expressions, which I once discussed with physicist, Mark John Fernee (Qld University).
 
The main issue I have with Hoffman’s approach is that space-time is dependent on conscious agents creating it, whereas, from my perspective and that of most scientists (although I’m not a scientist), space and time exists external to the mind. There is an exception, of course, and that is when we dream.
 
If I was to meet Hoffman, I would ask him if he’s heard of proprioception, which I’m sure he has. I describe it as the 6th sense we are mostly unaware of, but which we couldn’t live without. Actually, we could, but with great difficulty. Proprioception is the sense that tells us where our body extremities are in space, independently of sight and touch. Why would we need it, if space is created by us? On the other hand, Hoffman talks about a ‘H sapiens interface’, which he likens to ‘desktop icons on a computer screen’. So, somehow our proprioception relates to a ‘spacetime interface’ (his term) that doesn’t exist outside the mind.
 
A detour, but relevant, because space is something we inhabit, along with the rest of the Universe, and so is time. In relativity theory there is absolute space-time, as opposed to absolute space and time separately. It’s called the fabric of the universe, which is more than a metaphor. As Viktor Toth points out, even QFT seems to work ‘just fine’ with spacetime as its background.
 
We can do quantum field theory just fine on the curved spacetime background of general relativity.
 
[However] what we have so far been unable to do in a convincing manner is turn gravity itself into a quantum field theory.
 
And this is where Oriti argues we need to find something deeper. To quote:
 
Modern approaches to quantum gravity say that space-time emerges from something deeper – and this could offer a new foundation for physical laws.
 
He elaborates: I work with quantum gravity models in which you don’t start with a space-time geometry, but from more abstract “atomic” objects described in purely mathematical language. (Quotation marks in the original.)
 
And this is the nub of the argument: all our theories are mathematical models and none of them are complete, in as much as they all have limitations. If one looks at the history of physics, we have uncovered new ‘laws’ and new ‘models’ when we’ve looked beyond the limitations of an existing theory. And some mathematical models even turned out to be incorrect, despite giving answers to what was ‘known’ at the time. The best example being Ptolemy’s Earth-centric model of the solar system. Whether string theory falls into the same category, only future historians will know.
 
In addition, different models work at different scales. As someone pointed out (Mile Gu at the University of Queensland), mathematical models of phenomena at one scale are different to mathematical models at an underlying scale. He gave the example of magnetism, demonstrating that mathematical modelling of the magnetic forces in iron could not predict the pattern of atoms in a 3D lattice as one might expect. In other words, there should be a causal link between individual atoms and the overall effect, but it could not be determined mathematically. To quote Gu: “We were able to find a number of properties that were simply decoupled from the fundamental interactions.” Furthermore, “This result shows that some of the models scientists use to simulate physical systems have properties that cannot be linked to the behaviour of their parts.”
 
This makes me sceptical that we will find an overriding mathematical model that will entail the Universe at all scales, which is what theories of quantum gravity attempt to do. One of the issues that some people raise is that a feature of QM is superposition, and the superposition of a gravitational field seems inherently problematic.
 
Personally, I think superposition only makes sense if it’s describing something that is yet to happen, which is why I agree with Freeman Dyson that QM can only describe the future, which is why it only gives us probabilities.
 
Also, in quantum cosmology, time disappears (according to Paul Davies, among others) and this makes sense (to me), if it’s attempting to describe the entire universe into the future. John Barrow once made a similar point, albeit more eruditely.
 
Getting off track, but one of the points that Oriti makes is whether the laws and the mathematics that describes them are epistemic or ontic. In other words, are they reality or just descriptions of reality. I think it gets blurred, because while they are epistemic by design, there is still an ontology that exists without them, whereas Oriti calls that ‘naïve realism’. He contends that reality doesn’t exist independently of us. This is where I always cite Kant: that we may never know the ‘thing-in-itself,’ but only our perception of it. Where I diverge from Kant is that the mathematical models are part of our perception. Where I depart from Oriti is that I argue there is a reality independently of us.
 
Both QM and relativity theory are observer-dependent, which means they could both be describing an underlying reality that continually eludes us. Whereas Oriti argues that ‘reality is made by our models, not just described by them’, which would make it subjective.
 
As I pointed out in my last post, there is an epistemological loop, whereby the Universe created the means to understand itself, through us. Whether there is also an ontological loop as both Davies and Oriti infer, is another matter: do we determine reality through our quantum mechanical observations? I will park that while I elaborate on the epistemic loop.
 
And this finally brings me to the article in Philosophy Now by James Miles titled, We’re as Smart as the Universe gets. He argues that, from an evolutionary perspective, there is a one-in-one-billion possibility that a species with our cognitive abilities could arise by natural selection, and there is no logical reason why we would evolve further, from an evolutionary standpoint. I have touched on this before, where I pointed out that our cultural evolution has overtaken our biological evolution and that would also happen to any other potential species in the Universe who developed cognitive abilities to the same level. Dawkins coined the term, ‘meme’, to describe cultural traits that have ‘survived’, which now, of course, has currency on social media way beyond its original intention. Basically, Dawkins saw memes as analogous to genes, which get selected; not by a natural process but by a cultural process.
 
I’ve argued elsewhere that mathematical theorems and scientific theories are not inherently memetic. This is because they are chosen because they are successful, whereas memes are successful because they are chosen. Nevertheless, such theorems and theories only exist because a culture has developed over millennia which explores them and builds on them.
 
Miles talks about ‘the high intelligence paradox’, which he associates with Darwin’s ‘highest and most interesting problem’. He then discusses the inherent selection advantage of co-operation, not to mention specialisation. He talks about the role that language has played, which is arguably what really separates us from other species. I’ve argued that it’s our inherent ability to nest concepts within concepts ad-infinitum (which is most obvious in our facility for language, like I’m doing now) that allows us to, not only tell stories, compose symphonies, explore an abstract mathematical landscape, but build motor cars, aeroplanes and fly men to the moon. Are we the only species in the Universe with this super-power? I don’t know, but it’s possible.
 
There are 2 quotes I keep returning to:
 
The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it’s comprehensible. (Einstein)
 
The Universe gave rise to consciousness and consciousness gives meaning to the Universe. (Wheeler)
 
I haven’t elaborated, but Miles makes the point, while referencing historical antecedents, that there appears no evolutionary 'reason’ that a species should make this ‘one-in-one-billion transition’ (his nomenclature). Yet, without this transition, the Universe would have no meaning that could be comprehended. As I say, that’s the epistemic loop.
 
As for an ontic loop, that is harder to argue. Photons exist in zero time, which is why I contend they are always in the future of whatever they interact with, even if they were generated in the CMBR some 13.5 billion years ago. So how do we resolve that paradox? I don’t know, but maybe that’s the link that Davies and Oriti are talking about, though neither of them mention it. But here’s the thing: when you do detect such a photon (for which time is zero) you instantaneously ‘see’ back to 380,000 years after the Universe’s birth.

Freedom of the will is requisite for all other freedoms

 I’ve recently read 2 really good books on consciousness and the mind, as well as watch countless YouTube videos on the topic, but the title of this post reflects the endpoint for me. Consciousness has evolved, so for most of the Universe’s history, it didn’t exist, yet without it, the Universe has no meaning and no purpose. Even using the word, purpose, in this context, is anathema to many scientists and philosophers, because it hints at teleology. In fact, Paul Davies raises that very point in one of the many video conversations he has with Robert Lawrence Kuhn in the excellent series, Closer to Truth.
 
Davies is an advocate of a cosmic-scale ‘loop’, whereby QM provides a backwards-in-time connection which can only be determined by a conscious ‘observer’. This is contentious, of course, though not his original idea – it came from John Wheeler. As Davies points out, Stephen Hawking was also an advocate, premised on the idea that there are a number of alternative histories, as per Feynman’s ‘sum-over-histories’ methodology, but only one becomes reality when an ‘observation’ is made. I won’t elaborate, as I’ve discussed it elsewhere, when I reviewed Hawking’s book, The Grand Design.
 
In the same conversation with Kuhn, Davies emphasises the fact that the Universe created the means to understand itself, through us, and quotes Einstein: The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it’s comprehensible. Of course, I’ve made the exact same point many times, and like myself, Davies makes the point that this is only possible because of the medium of mathematics.
 
Now, I know I appear to have gone down a rabbit hole, but it’s all relevant to my viewpoint. Consciousness appears to have a role, arguably a necessary one, in the self-realisation of the Universe – without it, the Universe may as well not exist. To quote Wheeler: The universe gave rise to consciousness and consciousness gives meaning to the Universe.
 
Scientists, of all stripes, appear to avoid any metaphysical aspect of consciousness, but I think it’s unavoidable. One of the books I cite in my introduction is Philip Ball’s The Book of Minds; How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings; from Animals to Aliens. It’s as ambitious as the title suggests, and with 450 pages, it’s quite a read. I’ve read and reviewed a previous book by Ball, Beyond Weird (about quantum mechanics), which is equally as erudite and thought-provoking as this one. Ball is a ‘physicalist’, as virtually all scientists are (though he’s more open-minded than most), but I tend to agree with Raymond Tallis that, despite what people claim, consciousness is still ‘unexplained’ and might remain so for some time, if not forever.
 
I like an idea that I first encountered in Douglas Hofstadter’s seminal tome, Godel, Escher, Bach; an Eternal Golden Braid, that consciousness is effectively a loop, at what one might call the local level. By which I mean it’s confined to a particular body. It’s created within that body but then it has a causal agency all of its own. Not everyone agrees with that. Many argue that consciousness cannot of itself ‘cause’ anything, but Ball is one of those who begs to differ, and so do I. It’s what free will is all about, which finally gets us back to the subject of this post.
 
Like me, Ball prefers to use the word ‘agency’ over free will. But he introduces the term, ‘volitional decision-making’ and gives it the following context:

I believe that the only meaningful notion of free will – and it is one that seems to me to satisfy all reasonable demands traditionally made of it – is one in which volitional decision-making can be shown to happen according to the definition I give above: in short, that the mind operates as an autonomous source of behaviour and control. It is this, I suspect, that most people have vaguely in mind when speaking of free will: the sense that we are the authors of our actions and that we have some say in what happens to us. (My emphasis)

And, in a roundabout way, this brings me to the point alluded to in the title of this post: our freedoms are constrained by our environment and our circumstances. We all wish to be ‘authors of our actions’ and ‘have some say in what happens to us’, but that varies from person to person, dependent on ‘external’ factors.

Writing stories, believe it or not, had a profound influence on how I perceive free will, because a story, by design, is an interaction between character and plot. In fact, I claim they are 2 sides of the same coin – each character has their own subplot, and as they interact, their storylines intertwine. This describes my approach to writing fiction in a nutshell. The character and plot represent, respectively, the internal and external journey of the story. The journey metaphor is apt, because a story always has the dimension of time, which is visceral, and is one of the essential elements that separates fiction from non-fiction. To stretch the analogy, character represents free will and plot represents fate. Therefore, I tell aspiring writers the importance of giving their characters free will.

A detour, but not irrelevant. I read an article in Philosophy Now sometime back, about people who can escape their circumstances, and it’s the subject of a lot of biographies as well as fiction. We in the West live in a very privileged time whereby many of us can aspire to, and attain, the life that we dream about. I remember at the time I left school, following a less than ideal childhood, feeling I had little control over my life. I was a fatalist in that I thought that whatever happened was dependent on fate and not on my actions (I literally used to attribute everything to fate). I later realised that this is a state-of-mind that many people have who are not happy with their circumstances and feel impotent to change them.

The thing is that it takes a fundamental belief in free will to rise above that and take advantage of what comes your way. No one who has made that journey will accept the self-denial that free will is an illusion and therefore they have no control over their destiny.

I will provide another quote from Ball that is more in line with my own thinking:

…minds are an autonomous part of what causes the future to unfold. This is different to the common view of free will in which the world somehow offers alternative outcomes and the wilful mind selects between them. Alternative outcomes – different, counterfactual realities – are not real, but metaphysical: they can never be observed. When we make a choice, we aren’t selecting between various possible futures, but between various imagined futures, as represented in the mind’s internal model of the world… (emphasis in the original)

And this highlights a point I’ve made before: that it’s the imagination which plays the key role in free will. I’ve argued that imagination is one of the facilities of a conscious mind that separates us (and other creatures) from AI. Now AI can also demonstrate agency, and, in a game of chess, for example, it will ‘select’ from a number of possible ‘moves’ based on certain criteria. But there are fundamental differences. For a start, the AI doesn’t visualise what it’s doing; it’s following a set of highly constrained rules, within which it can select from a number of options, one of which will be the optimal solution. Its inherent advantage over a human player isn’t just its speed but its ability to compare a number of possibilities that are impossible for the human mind to contemplate simultaneously.

The other book I read was Being You; A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth. I came across Seth when I did an online course on consciousness through New Scientist, during COVID lockdowns. To be honest, his book didn’t tell me a lot that I didn’t already know. For example, that the world, we all see and think exists ‘out there’, is actually a model of reality created within our heads. He also emphasises how the brain is a ‘prediction-making’ organ rather than a purely receptive one. Seth mentions that it uses a Bayesian model (which I also knew about previously), whereby it updates its prediction based on new sensory data. Not surprisingly, Seth describes all this in far more detail and erudition than I can muster.

Ball, Seth and I all seem to agree that while AI will become better at mimicking the human mind, this doesn’t necessarily mean it will attain consciousness. Applications software, ChatGPT (for example), despite appearances, does not ‘think’ the way we do, and actually does not ‘understand’ what it’s talking or writing about. I’ve written on this before, so I won’t elaborate.

Seth contends that the ‘mystery’ of consciousness will disappear in the same way that the 'mystery of life’ has effectively become a non-issue. What he means is that we no longer believe that there is some ‘elan vital’ or ‘life force’, which distinguishes living from non-living matter. And he’s right, in as much as the chemical origins of life are less mysterious than they once were, even though abiogenesis is still not fully understood.

By analogy, the concept of a soul has also lost a lot of its cogency, following the scientific revolution. Seth seems to associate the soul with what he calls ‘spooky free will’ (without mentioning the word, soul), but he’s obviously putting ‘spooky free will’ in the same category as ‘elan vital’, which makes his analogy and associated argument consistent. He then says:

Once spooky free will is out of the picture, it is easy to see that the debate over determinism doesn’t matter at all. There’s no longer any need to allow any non-deterministic elbow room for it to intervene. From the perspective of free will as a perceptual experience, there is simply no need for any disruption to the causal flow of physical events. (My emphasis)

Seth differs from Ball (and myself) in that he doesn’t seem to believe that something ‘immaterial’ like consciousness can affect the physical world. To quote:

But experiences of volition do not reveal the existence of an immaterial self with causal power over physical events.

Therefore, free will is purely a ‘perceptual experience’. There is a problem with this view that Ball himself raises. If free will is simply the mind observing effects it can’t cause, but with the illusion that it can, then its role is redundant to say the least. This is a view that Sabine Hossenfelder has also expressed: that we are merely an ‘observer’ of what we are thinking.

Your brain is running a calculation, and while it is going on you do not know the outcome of that calculation. So the impression of free will comes from our ‘awareness’ that we think about what we do, along with our inability to predict the result of what we are thinking.

Ball makes the point that we only have to look at all the material manifestations of human intellectual achievements that are evident everywhere we’ve been. And this brings me back to the loop concept I alluded to earlier. Not only does consciousness create a ‘local’ loop, whereby it has a causal effect on the body it inhabits but also on the external world to that body. This is stating the obvious, except, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, it’s possible that one could interact with the external world as an automaton, with no conscious awareness of it. The difference is the role of imagination, which I keep coming back to. All the material manifestations of our intellect are arguably a result of imagination.

One insight I gained from Ball, which goes slightly off-topic, is evidence that bees have an internal map of their environment, which is why the dance they perform on returning to the hive can be ‘understood’ by other bees. We’ve learned this by interfering in their behaviour. What I find interesting is that this may have been the original reason that consciousness evolved into the form that we experience it. In other words, we all create an internal world that reflects the external world so realistically, that we think it is the actual world. I believe that this also distinguishes us (and bees) from AI. An AI can use GPS to navigate its way through the physical world, as well as other so-called sensory data, from radar or infra-red sensors or whatever, but it doesn’t create an experience of that world inside itself.

The human mind seems to be able to access an abstract world, which we do when we read or watch a story, or even write one, as I have done. I can understand how Plato took this idea to its logical extreme: that there is an abstract world, of which the one we inhabit is but a facsimile (though he used different terminology). No one believes that today – except, there is a remnant of Plato’s abstract world that persists, which is mathematics. Many mathematicians and physicists (though not all) treat mathematics as a neverending landscape that humans have the unique capacity to explore and comprehend. This, of course, brings me back to Davies’ philosophical ruminations that I opened this discussion with. And as he, and others (like Einstein, Feynman, Wigner, Penrose, to name but a few) have pointed out: the Universe itself seems to follow specific laws that are intrinsically mathematical and which we are continually discovering.

And this closes another loop: that the Universe created the means to comprehend itself, using the medium of mathematics, without which, it has no meaning. Of purpose, we can only conjecture.

Common sense; uncommonly agreed upon

 The latest New Scientist (28 Sep., 2024) had an article headlined Uncommon Sense, written by Emma Young (based in Sheffield, UK) which was primarily based on a study done by Duncan Watts and Mark Whiting at the University of Pennsylvania. I wasn’t surprised to learn that ‘common sense’ is very subjective, although she pointed out that most people think the opposite: that it’s objective. I’ve long believed that common sense is largely culturally determined, and in many cases, arises out of confirmation bias, which the article affirmed with references to the recent COVID pandemic and the polarised responses this produced; where one person’s common sense was another person’s anathema.
 
Common sense is something we mostly imbibe through social norms, though experience tends to play a role long term. Common sense is often demonstrated, though not expressed, as a heuristic, where people with expertise develop heuristics that others outside their field wouldn’t even know about. This is a point I’ve made before, without using the term common sense. In other words, common sense is contextual in a way that most of us don’t consider.
 
Anyone with an interest in modern physics (like myself) knows that our common sense views on time and space don’t apply in the face of Einstein’s relativity theory. In fact, it’s one of the reasons that people struggle with it (Including me). Quantum mechanics with phenomena like superposition, entanglement and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle also play havoc with our ‘common sense’ view of the world. But this is perfectly logical when one considers that we never encounter these ‘effects’ in our everyday existence, so they can be largely, if not completely, ignored. The fact that the GPS on your phone requires relativistic corrections and that every device you use (including said phone) are dependent on QM dynamics doesn’t change this virtually universal viewpoint.
 
I’ve just finished reading an excellent, albeit lengthy, book by Philip Ball titled ambitiously, if not pretentiously, The Book of Minds. I can honestly say it’s the best book I’ve read on the subject, but that’s a topic for a future post. The reason I raise it in this context, is because throughout I kept using AI as a reference point for appreciating what makes minds unique. You see, AI comes closest to mimicking the human mind, yet it’s nowhere near it, though others may disagree. As I said, it’s a topic for another post.
 
I remember coming up with my own definition of common sense many years ago, when I saw it as something that evolves over time, based on experience. I would contend that our common sense view on a subject changes, whether it be through the gaining of expertise in a specific field (as I mentioned above) or just our everyday encounters. A good example, that most of us can identify with, is driving a car. Notice how, over time, we develop skills and behaviours that have helped us to avoid accidents, some of which have arisen because of accidents.
 
And a long time ago, before I became a blogger, and didn’t even consider myself a philosopher, it occurred to me that AI could also develop something akin to common sense based on learning from its mistakes. Self-driving cars being a case-in-point.
 
According to the New Scientist article, the researchers, Watts and Whiting, claim that there is no correlation between so-called common sense and IQ. Instead, they contend that there is a correlation between a ‘consensual common sense’ (my term) and ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ (their terminology). In other words, the ability to ‘read’ emotions is a good indicator for the ability to determine what’s considered ‘common sense’ for the majority of a cultural group (if I understand them correctly). This infers that common sense is a consensual perception, based on cultural norms, which is what I’ve always believed. This might be a bit simplistic, and an example of confirmation bias (on my part), but I’d be surprised if common sense didn’t morph between cultures in the same way it becomes modified by expertise in a particular field. So the idea of a universal, objective common sense is as much a chimera as objective morality, which is also more dependent on social norms than most people acknowledge.
 
 
Footnote: it’s worth reading the article in New Scientist (if accessible), because it provides a different emphasis and a different perspective, even though it largely draws similar conclusions to myself.

Prima Facie; the play

 I went and saw a film made of a live performance of this highly rated play, put on by the National Theatre at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End in 2022. It’s a one-hander, played by Jodie Comer, best known as the quirky assassin with a diabolical sense of humour, in the black comedy hit, Killing Eve. I also saw her in Ridley Scott’s riveting and realistically rendered film, The Last Duel, set in mediaeval France, where she played alongside Matt Damon, Adam Driver and an unrecognisable Ben Affleck. The roles that Comer played in those 2 screen mediums, couldn’t be more different.
 
Theatre is more unforgiving than cinema, because there are no multiple takes or even a break once the curtain’s raised; a one-hander, even more so. In the case of Prima Facie, Comer is on the stage a full 90mins, and even does costume-changes and pushing around her own scenery unaided, without breaking stride. It’s such a tour de force performance, as the Financial Times put it; I’d go so far as to say it’s the best acting performance I’ve ever witnessed by anyone. It’s such an emotionally draining role, where she cries and even breaks into a sweat in one scene, that I marvel she could do it night-after-night, as I assume she did.
 
And I’ve yet to broach the subject matter, which is very apt, given the me-too climate, but philosophically it goes deeper than that. The premise for the entire play, which is even spelt out early on, in case you’re not paying attention, is the difference between truth and justice, and whether it matters. Comer’s character, Tessa, happens to experience it from both sides, which is what makes this so powerful.
 
She’s a defence barrister, who specialises in sexual-assault cases, where, as she explains very early on, effectively telling us the rules of the game: no one wins or loses; you either come first or second. In other words, the barristers and those involved in the legal profession, don’t see the process the same way that you and I do, and I can understand that – to get emotionally involved makes it very stressful.

In fact, I have played a small role in this process in a professional capacity, so I’ve seen this firsthand. But I wasn’t dealing with rape cases or anything involving violence, just contractual disputes where millions of dollars could be at stake. My specific role was to ‘prepare evidence’ for lawyers for either a claim or the defence of a claim or possibly a counter-claim, and I quickly realised the more dispassionate one is, the more successful one is likely to be. I also realised that the lawyers I was supporting in one case could be on the opposing side in the next one, so you don’t get personal.
 
So, I have a small insight into this world, and can appreciate why they see it as a game, where you ‘win or come second’. But in Prima Facie, Tess goes through this very visceral and emotionally scarifying transformation where she finds herself on the receiving end, and it’s suddenly very personal indeed.
 
Back in 2015, I wrote a mini-400-word essay, in answer to one of those Question of the Month topics that Philosophy Now like to throw open to amateur wannabe philosophers, like myself. And in this case, it was one that was selected for publication (among 12 others), from all around the Western globe. I bring this up, because I made the assertion that ‘justice without truth is injustice’, and I feel that this is really what Prima Facie is all about. At the end of the play, with Tess now having the perspective of the victim (there is no other word), it does become a matter of winning or losing, because, not only her career and future livelihood, but her very dignity, is now up for sacrifice.
 
I watched a Q&A programme on Australia’s ABC some years ago, where this issue was discussed. Every woman on the panel, including one from the righteous right (my coinage), had a tale to tell about discrimination or harassment in a workplace situation. But the most damming testimony came from a man, who specialised in representing women in sexual assault cases, and he said that in every case, their doctors tell them not to proceed because it will destroy their health; and he said: they’re right. I was reminded of this when I watched this play.
 
One needs to give special mention to the writer, Suzie Miller, who is an Aussie as it turns out, and as far as 6 degrees of separation go, I happen to know someone who knows her father. Over 5 decades I’ve seen some very good theatre, some of it very innovative and original. In fact, I think the best theatre I’ve seen has invariably been something completely different, unexpected and dare-I-say-it, special. I had a small involvement in theatre when I was still very young, and learned that I couldn’t act to save myself. Nevertheless, my very first foray into writing was an attempt to write a play. Now, I’d say it’s the hardest and most unforgiving medium of storytelling to write for. I had a friend who was involved in theatre for some decades and even won awards. She passed a couple of years ago and I miss her very much. At her funeral, she was given a standing ovation, when her coffin was taken out; it was very moving. I can’t go to a play now without thinking about her and wishing I could discuss it with her.

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 Brahman or a Buddhist concept of collective karma – we get the God we deserve. Erwin Schrodinger, who studied the Upanishads, discusses Brahman as a pluralistic ‘mind’ in What is Life?. (Note that in Hinduism, the soul or Atman is a part of Brahman). 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".

How scale demonstrates that mathematics is intrinsically entailed in the Universe

 I momentarily contemplated another title: Is the Planck limit an epistemology or an ontology? Because that’s basically the topic of a YouTube video that’s the trigger for this post. I wrote a post some time ago where I discussed whether the Universe is continuous or discrete, and basically concluded that it was continuous. Based on what I’ve learned from this video, I might well change my position. But I should point out that my former opposition was based more on the idea that it could be quantised into ‘bits’ of information, whereas now I’m willing to acknowledge that it could be granular at the Planck scale, which I’ll elaborate on towards the end. I still don’t think that the underlying reality of the Universe is in ‘bits’ of information, therefore potentially created and operated by a computer.
 
Earlier this year, I discussed the problem of reification of mathematics so I want to avoid that if possible. By reification, I mean making a mathematical entity reality. Basically, physics works by formulating mathematical models that we then compare to reality through observations. But as Freeman Dyson pointed out, the wave function (Ψ), for example, is a mathematical entity and not a physical entity, which is sometimes debated. The fact is that if it does exist physically, it’s never observed, and my contention is that it ‘exists’ in the future; a view that is consistent with Dyson’s own philosophical viewpoint that QM can only describe the future and not the past.
 
And this brings me to the video, which has nothing to say about wave functions or reified mathematical entities, but uses high school mathematics to explore such esoteric and exotic topics as black holes and quantum gravity. There is one step involving integral calculus, which is about as esoteric as the maths becomes, and if you allow that 1/∞ = 0, it leads to the formula for the escape velocity from any astronomical body (including Earth). Note that the escape velocity literally allows an object to escape a gravitational field to infinity (∞). And the escape velocity for a black hole is c (the speed of light).
 
All the other mathematics is basic algebra using some basic physics equations, like Newton’s equation for gravity, Planck’s equation for energy, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle using Planck’s Constant (h), Einstein’s famous equation for the equivalence of energy and mass, and the equation for the Coulomb Force between 2 point electric charges (electrons). There is also the equation for the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole, which is far easier to derive than you might imagine (despite the fact that Schwarzschild originally derived it from Einstein’s field equations).
 
Back in May 2019, I wrote a post on the Universe’s natural units, which involves the fundamental natural constants, h, c and G. This was originally done by Planck himself, which I describe in that post, while providing a link to a more detailed exposition. In the video (embedded below), the narrator takes a completely different path to deriving the same Planck units before describing a method that Planck himself would have used. In so doing, he explains how at the Planck level, space and time are not only impossible to observe, even in principle, but may well be impossible to remain continuous in reality. You need to watch the video, as he explains it far better than I can, just using high school mathematics.
 
Regarding the title I chose for this post, Roger Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) model of the Universe, exploits the fact that a universe without matter (just radiation) is scale invariant, which is essential for the ‘conformal’ part of his theory. However, that all changes when one includes matter. I’ve argued in other posts that different forces become dominant at different scales, from the cosmological to the subatomic. The point made in this video is that at the Planck scale all the forces, including gravity, become comparable. Now, as I pointed out at the beginning, physics is about applying mathematical models and comparing them to reality. We can’t, and quite possibly never will, be able to observe reality at the Planck scale, yet the mathematics tells us that it’s where all the physics we currently know is compatible. It tells me that not only is the physics of the Universe scale-dependent, but it's also mathematically dependent (because scale is inherently mathematical). In essence, the Universe’s dynamics are determined by mathematical parameters at all scales, including the Planck scale.
 
Note that the mathematical relationships in the video use ~ not = which means that they are approximate, not exact. But this doesn’t detract from the significance that 2 different approaches arrive at the same conclusion, which is that the Planck scale coincides with the origin of the Universe incorporating all forces equivalently.
 
 
Addendum: I should point out that Viktor T Toth, who knows a great deal more about this than me, argues that there is, in fact, no limit to what we can measure in principle. Even the narrator in the video frames his conclusion cautiously and with caveats. In other words, we are in the realm of speculative physics. Nevertheless, I find it interesting to contemplate where the maths leads us.