I’ve just read a recently published book, The Universe Speaks in Numbers; How Modern Maths Reveals Nature’s Deepest Secrets by Graham Farmelo. The title says it all really, but the content takes you places you’ve probably never been, intellectually. This book, possibly more than any other book I’ve read, gives you access to the minds of the superstars in theoretical physics, both past and present, but mostly present. It’s like listening to a group of virtuoso musicians and becoming aware of how inadequate you are in the presence of such talent.
It’s written in an historical context, from Newton through Maxwell to Einstein, but rather than lingering in the so-called golden age of physics, it focuses on the last 50 years.
Farmelo covers what he calls ‘the long divorce’, a term coined by Freeman Dyson, covering much of the latter 20th Century, when pure mathematicians and theoretical physicists, not only avoided each other, but were not very accommodating of each other’s contributions.
That all changed very late in the 20th Century, and since then there has been a synergy that has benefited both disciplines. The problem is that theoretical physics has leapfrogged ahead of experimental physics, and, consequently, physicists at the leading edge of high energy physics have become more dependent on mathematical solutions to provide veracity to their ideas. ‘High energy’ means highly confined dimensions, so we are talking about the smallest constituents of matter we currently know or can imagine.
I’ve made the point in previous posts that the ultimate arbiter of truth is evidence, but Farmelo’s book has made me re-evaluate that position. Instead of testing theories with experiments that can’t be performed, theoretical physicists simply adhere to 2 founding principles: quantum mechanics and special relativity. Because those 2 specific theories have been experimentally tested in extremis, they simply ensure that any new theory, no matter at what level, or using whatever mathematical tools they have, must meet both criteria.
The book necessarily covers string theory, from its inception to its current status. But what I found most fascinating was all the discoveries that seemed to have occurred on the side so-to-speak, where mathematics appears to continually underlie the fundamentals of nature in unexpected ways.
I admit to being a sceptic of string theory, due to its 6 additional dimensions that can’t be observed and its plethora of 10500 universes. But I must also admit that the people exploring this mathematical world leave me stranded when it comes to intellectual wizardry.
Farmelo repeatedly refers to 2 talks given by Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac, respectively, where they effectively gave a call-to-arms, arguing that mathematics is the key to new theories in physics, with experimental physics providing confirmation rather than having the leading role. Whether by design or accident, this is how physics has evolved in the last 5 decades. As Farmelo expounds, not everyone has been happy with this development, yet there have been successes.
To give one example, mathematical devices called twistors (developed by Roger Penrose in the 1960s) have led to providing accurate predictions in the amplitudes of scattering gluons, which are the mediating particles for quarks in atomic nuclei. This short description belies the convoluted story, involving many theorists in the UK and the US, and the many unexpected discoveries made along the way; including a connection with a mathematical object discovered by Hermann Grassmann in 1844, called eponymously a Grassmannian. It led to another mathematical object called an 'amplituhedron'. One of the co-discoverers, Nima Arkani-Hamed (an American born Iranian, at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study) said:
This is a concrete example of a way in which the physics we normally associate with space-time and quantum mechanics arises from something more basic.
The ‘something more basic’ is only known mathematically, as opposed to physically. I found this a most compelling tale and a history lesson in how mathematics appears to be intrinsically linked to the minutia of atomic physics.
In the same context, Arkani-Hamed says that ‘the mathematics of whole numbers in scattering-amplitude theory chimes… with the ancient Greeks' dream: to connect all nature with whole numbers.’
There is an assumption by non-physicists that the role of mathematics in understanding nature is a consequence of the fact that we need to measure everything. A common criticism is that people who emphasise the role of mathematics in their theories have ‘mistaken the map for the terrain’.
Einstein was probably the first to use mathematics alone to sculpture a theory independently of observation and experimentation, when he developed his masterpiece, the general theory of relativity. It was his mathematical prediction that gravity would bend light that clinched his theory when few people believed that relativity reflected reality.
In reference to the abovementioned metaphor about the ‘map and terrain’, there is an axiomatic inference that the map is derived from ‘surveying’ the terrain. However, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the map is discovered before the terrain is even 'explored', which turns the metaphor on its head. It’s not a metaphor I would choose to use, but if you insist, you might have to consider the possibility that the map pre-exists the terrain.
In reference to the title, I’ll retell a joke by mathematical physicist, Robbert Dijkgraaf, from the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study:
What is the difference between a physicist and a mathematician?
A physicist studies the laws that God chose for nature to obey.
A mathematician studies the laws that God has to obey.
Friday, 2 August 2019
Wednesday, 24 July 2019
Sometimes being paranoid is healthy
Not that long ago I wrote a post about how the technology of surveillance and its ever-increasing role in policing was overtaking fiction. As a sometime science fiction writer, it comes with the territory to explore future societies. In my fiction, I really don’t attempt to forecast the future, I simply use a fictional social landscape to explore ideas and, in particular, relationships with advanced technology. There is an element of fantasy in my stories as well.
All governments know the importance of controlling information, called ‘controlling the narrative’, which is why an independent media is essential to a democracy, and it’s also why the most totalitarian governments find ways to imprison journalists who challenge the ‘party narrative’. In the current political climate throughout the Western world, opinions have become polarised on almost every issue, and, as someone recently pointed out, media outlets have become default political mouthpieces. Followers on both sides of politics now want to silence or muzzle media sources that disagree with their particular political point of view.
Very recently, in Australia, following a surprising election win by an incumbent conservative government, media outlets were raided (both public and commercial sources) including an award-winning female journalist’s home. This rang alarm bells from all sides of media. The timing was significant because the 2 different news stories went to air more than a year earlier, yet the raids occurred within a week of winning an election. The Government claims the raids were independent of them; so aren’t they lucky the raids didn’t occur the week before the election instead of the week following.
In the case of the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Federal Police officers sat in a room and went through emails and edited them, apparently. Effectively changing records to suit their purpose. If this happens in a democracy, what happens in totalitarian regimes. (Well, journalists are put in jail or assassinated in some cases, like Russia).
Now imagine a future society where everyone is tracked by facial recognition and everyone has a social ‘rating’ which determines what buildings they can enter, what job they can apply for and even what transport they can board, be it a train or a plane. Did I say future? This is already happening in the most populous nation in the world. It’s well known that this same nation controls very exactly what information people can access.
It was less than 20 years ago, when there was a ‘Y2K’ scare, predicting that important utilities and infrastructure would fail when computer clocks ticked over to the year 2000, because their clocks didn’t go beyond that date. As it turned out, the scare was ill-founded, but it highlighted how dependent we are on the internet infrastructure, and how vulnerable it could be in a future transcontinental conflict.
Most people are blissfully unaware of how our computing systems are based on 2 formats that go back decades – Microsoft and Apple – so it would be virtually impossible to introduce a new system from scratch. But what if the internet infrastructure became just as dependent on one system, and as their monopoly grew over the entire world, how hard it would be to ‘disconnect’.
Now, also imagine if the infrastructure that everyone depended on was run by one of the most totalitarian regimes in the world, who had a paranoid obsession with the control of information.
All governments know the importance of controlling information, called ‘controlling the narrative’, which is why an independent media is essential to a democracy, and it’s also why the most totalitarian governments find ways to imprison journalists who challenge the ‘party narrative’. In the current political climate throughout the Western world, opinions have become polarised on almost every issue, and, as someone recently pointed out, media outlets have become default political mouthpieces. Followers on both sides of politics now want to silence or muzzle media sources that disagree with their particular political point of view.
Very recently, in Australia, following a surprising election win by an incumbent conservative government, media outlets were raided (both public and commercial sources) including an award-winning female journalist’s home. This rang alarm bells from all sides of media. The timing was significant because the 2 different news stories went to air more than a year earlier, yet the raids occurred within a week of winning an election. The Government claims the raids were independent of them; so aren’t they lucky the raids didn’t occur the week before the election instead of the week following.
In the case of the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Federal Police officers sat in a room and went through emails and edited them, apparently. Effectively changing records to suit their purpose. If this happens in a democracy, what happens in totalitarian regimes. (Well, journalists are put in jail or assassinated in some cases, like Russia).
Now imagine a future society where everyone is tracked by facial recognition and everyone has a social ‘rating’ which determines what buildings they can enter, what job they can apply for and even what transport they can board, be it a train or a plane. Did I say future? This is already happening in the most populous nation in the world. It’s well known that this same nation controls very exactly what information people can access.
It was less than 20 years ago, when there was a ‘Y2K’ scare, predicting that important utilities and infrastructure would fail when computer clocks ticked over to the year 2000, because their clocks didn’t go beyond that date. As it turned out, the scare was ill-founded, but it highlighted how dependent we are on the internet infrastructure, and how vulnerable it could be in a future transcontinental conflict.
Most people are blissfully unaware of how our computing systems are based on 2 formats that go back decades – Microsoft and Apple – so it would be virtually impossible to introduce a new system from scratch. But what if the internet infrastructure became just as dependent on one system, and as their monopoly grew over the entire world, how hard it would be to ‘disconnect’.
Now, also imagine if the infrastructure that everyone depended on was run by one of the most totalitarian regimes in the world, who had a paranoid obsession with the control of information.
Sunday, 21 July 2019
Religion and politics in secular society
This is a letter I wrote to The Weekend Australian, Christmas 2017, so 18 months ago. There was a side-debate at the time, during the same sex marriage debate about ‘religious freedom’. It seemed to me that ‘religious freedom’ was ‘code’ for freedom to discriminate against gays and lesbians, and it’s not over. From what I’ve read and seen, the only arguments against same sex marriage came from conservative religious figures (some being politicians) even if they claimed it was about ‘the sanctity of marriage’.
The letter below alludes to that debate, even though the topic is much broader. It’s really about a perceived conflict between secularism and Christianity in Western societies, including Australia. There is a recurring argument that our Christian heritage provides the moral fabric of our society with the inference that, without it, we’d lose our moral compass. If that was true, and we really followed Christ’s calling, we wouldn’t treat refugees the way we do. In fact, our 2 most conservative Christian leaders, in recent times, have been the most ruthless advocates for persecuting refugees, and of fomenting xenophobic sentiment in the electorate.
The names referenced in the letter below, are journalists or commentators. The Australian is a Murdoch publication, so it has conservative political leanings.
Both Paul Kelly and John Carroll in separate articles (Weekend Australian, Enquirer, 23-24 Dec.2017) seem concerned that the modern secular world that dominates Western societies, and therefore Australia, has forgotten, even ‘turned its back’ on our Christian heritage. I’m officially retiring age, so I grew up in post-war Australia when going to Sunday School and scripture classes (in public schools) was still considered part of a child’s education (neither of my parents were religious; they just thought it was the cultural norm). Strangely, I don’t lament the loss, for want of a better word, the Church’s role in political and secular life, epitomised by the divide between Catholics and Protestants that dominated even the small country town where I grew up.
I found the greater part of Paul Kelly’s lengthy editorial a stimulating read, even when I might proffer alternative views, but his commentary on High Court judge Dyson Heydon’s concerns about the future of Christianity in this country, I found alarmist to say the least: “The question for the West is how it retains its civilisational heritage if it abandons beliefs in its Christian ethic or, indeed, if its political culture begins to assault that ethic.” Without referencing them specifically, he’s obviously referring to the passing of the recent same-sex-marriage bill in Federal Parliament and the euthanasia bill in the Victorian State Parliament. Both of these have provoked ‘concerns’ from the Catholic church, in particular, who are effectively under siege for the sins they committed in the previous generation.
Personally, I think it’s a landmark moment that gays and lesbians now have the same rights as heterosexual couples. A law that has symbolic and pragmatic importance for the people it affects, and absolutely no effect on the people who oppose it. No one is being forced to have same-sex marriage – it’s a choice. Kelly and his fellow detractors will talk about religious freedom, but it’s only an issue for the people who, for whatever reason, think that homosexuals and lesbians should stay in the closet, or at least, stay out of our churches. If it comes to a choice – and it shouldn’t – between gay and lesbian rights and religious freedom, then it’s a no brainer for most Australians, including the ones like myself, who are heterosexual.
To give credit to The Australian, on the same page as John Carroll’s very lengthy piece on Christmas and the declining relevance of Jesus’ story to most Australians, there is a piece by Helen Dale, who explains, at some length, the pagan roots of Christmas that most Australians are either unaware of or blissfully apathetic about. This created a counter-perspective that was running through my head even while I was reading Carroll’s thesis.
Don Cupitt, a theologian, turned philosopher and author, is a bit of an iconoclast when it comes to religion and Christianity in particular. He’s made the salient point that humanist morality really started with the novel, where moral dilemmas and issues concerning good and evil were resolved without invoking a Deity or scripture. Carroll, to his credit, makes a similar point about the role of literature and popular culture in stimulating our psyche in this regard, without resort to prescriptive Christian ethics. He then goes on to say: “Further, we have now had 150 years of gloomy prediction that the death of God would lead to political anarchy and the moral collapse of the West. That has simply not eventuated.”
For Carroll, the Jesus story is all about imbibing us with meaning, and that is what we are losing. The point is that the Jesus story is mythology and when I was a child, undergoing the religious education I mentioned in my introductory paragraph, I really believed the stories were true, because at that age we believe whatever adults tell us. Like many of my generation, I grew up disillusioned in my mid teens, when I realised the stories were not only mythologised but defied rational analysis. And that is the real reason that Christianity has lost its meaning for most people with a Western education.
In the Review section of the same issue of the Weekend Australian, John Carey reviews a book by Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, where he charters the literary history of the book of Genesis, from its origins in The Epic of Gilgamesh to Augustine’s seminal re-interpretation as signifying the ‘Fall of Man’. I’m not sure if it’s Carey’s or Greenblatt’s insight, but one of them points out the logical inconsistency in the morality tale: “For if God was all-knowing, why did he forbid Adam and Eve to eat the fruit, knowing they would disobey? Why did he create them at all, since he intended to kill them?”
Both Carroll and Kelly refer to the heritage or legacy that Christian ethics has provided to Western cultures. Well, historically, so-called Christian ethics has created a lot of bigotry, wars, genocide and inquisitional torture. Many contemporary commentators point to the current issues surrounding Islam, claiming that the religion itself is flawed. Well, if Islam is flawed then so is Christianity.
Hugh Mackay, in his book, Right & Wrong; How to Decide for Yourself, warns of the dangers of believing that God is on your side, because then anything can be justified, which is what we’ve witnessed both historically and contemporarily.
Addendum: The same day I posted this, I read an article in the Australian Weekend Magazine (July 20-21, 2019) about Israel Folau and the issue of religious freedom. Folau is a star rugby player with the Australian Rugby Union team and famously posted a piece on Facebook that all homosexuals, adulterers, liars and various other sinners would go to Hell. What created a furor wasn’t so much what he said but that he was sacked from the team (his contract was terminated). I agree with former Australian Human Rights Commissioner, Gillian Triggs, that the Australian Rugby Union went outside their remit.
The incident has brought out the worst on both sides of the debate, and demonstrates what happens when you try to enforce what people are allowed to say in public. Peter Singer is another unexpected supporter of Folau's right to free speech. My attitude is that everyone should be allowed to make complete fools of themselves, whether they be sports stars, TV celebrities, politicians or even the President of the United States.
The letter below alludes to that debate, even though the topic is much broader. It’s really about a perceived conflict between secularism and Christianity in Western societies, including Australia. There is a recurring argument that our Christian heritage provides the moral fabric of our society with the inference that, without it, we’d lose our moral compass. If that was true, and we really followed Christ’s calling, we wouldn’t treat refugees the way we do. In fact, our 2 most conservative Christian leaders, in recent times, have been the most ruthless advocates for persecuting refugees, and of fomenting xenophobic sentiment in the electorate.
The names referenced in the letter below, are journalists or commentators. The Australian is a Murdoch publication, so it has conservative political leanings.
Both Paul Kelly and John Carroll in separate articles (Weekend Australian, Enquirer, 23-24 Dec.2017) seem concerned that the modern secular world that dominates Western societies, and therefore Australia, has forgotten, even ‘turned its back’ on our Christian heritage. I’m officially retiring age, so I grew up in post-war Australia when going to Sunday School and scripture classes (in public schools) was still considered part of a child’s education (neither of my parents were religious; they just thought it was the cultural norm). Strangely, I don’t lament the loss, for want of a better word, the Church’s role in political and secular life, epitomised by the divide between Catholics and Protestants that dominated even the small country town where I grew up.
I found the greater part of Paul Kelly’s lengthy editorial a stimulating read, even when I might proffer alternative views, but his commentary on High Court judge Dyson Heydon’s concerns about the future of Christianity in this country, I found alarmist to say the least: “The question for the West is how it retains its civilisational heritage if it abandons beliefs in its Christian ethic or, indeed, if its political culture begins to assault that ethic.” Without referencing them specifically, he’s obviously referring to the passing of the recent same-sex-marriage bill in Federal Parliament and the euthanasia bill in the Victorian State Parliament. Both of these have provoked ‘concerns’ from the Catholic church, in particular, who are effectively under siege for the sins they committed in the previous generation.
Personally, I think it’s a landmark moment that gays and lesbians now have the same rights as heterosexual couples. A law that has symbolic and pragmatic importance for the people it affects, and absolutely no effect on the people who oppose it. No one is being forced to have same-sex marriage – it’s a choice. Kelly and his fellow detractors will talk about religious freedom, but it’s only an issue for the people who, for whatever reason, think that homosexuals and lesbians should stay in the closet, or at least, stay out of our churches. If it comes to a choice – and it shouldn’t – between gay and lesbian rights and religious freedom, then it’s a no brainer for most Australians, including the ones like myself, who are heterosexual.
To give credit to The Australian, on the same page as John Carroll’s very lengthy piece on Christmas and the declining relevance of Jesus’ story to most Australians, there is a piece by Helen Dale, who explains, at some length, the pagan roots of Christmas that most Australians are either unaware of or blissfully apathetic about. This created a counter-perspective that was running through my head even while I was reading Carroll’s thesis.
Don Cupitt, a theologian, turned philosopher and author, is a bit of an iconoclast when it comes to religion and Christianity in particular. He’s made the salient point that humanist morality really started with the novel, where moral dilemmas and issues concerning good and evil were resolved without invoking a Deity or scripture. Carroll, to his credit, makes a similar point about the role of literature and popular culture in stimulating our psyche in this regard, without resort to prescriptive Christian ethics. He then goes on to say: “Further, we have now had 150 years of gloomy prediction that the death of God would lead to political anarchy and the moral collapse of the West. That has simply not eventuated.”
For Carroll, the Jesus story is all about imbibing us with meaning, and that is what we are losing. The point is that the Jesus story is mythology and when I was a child, undergoing the religious education I mentioned in my introductory paragraph, I really believed the stories were true, because at that age we believe whatever adults tell us. Like many of my generation, I grew up disillusioned in my mid teens, when I realised the stories were not only mythologised but defied rational analysis. And that is the real reason that Christianity has lost its meaning for most people with a Western education.
In the Review section of the same issue of the Weekend Australian, John Carey reviews a book by Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, where he charters the literary history of the book of Genesis, from its origins in The Epic of Gilgamesh to Augustine’s seminal re-interpretation as signifying the ‘Fall of Man’. I’m not sure if it’s Carey’s or Greenblatt’s insight, but one of them points out the logical inconsistency in the morality tale: “For if God was all-knowing, why did he forbid Adam and Eve to eat the fruit, knowing they would disobey? Why did he create them at all, since he intended to kill them?”
Both Carroll and Kelly refer to the heritage or legacy that Christian ethics has provided to Western cultures. Well, historically, so-called Christian ethics has created a lot of bigotry, wars, genocide and inquisitional torture. Many contemporary commentators point to the current issues surrounding Islam, claiming that the religion itself is flawed. Well, if Islam is flawed then so is Christianity.
Hugh Mackay, in his book, Right & Wrong; How to Decide for Yourself, warns of the dangers of believing that God is on your side, because then anything can be justified, which is what we’ve witnessed both historically and contemporarily.
Addendum: The same day I posted this, I read an article in the Australian Weekend Magazine (July 20-21, 2019) about Israel Folau and the issue of religious freedom. Folau is a star rugby player with the Australian Rugby Union team and famously posted a piece on Facebook that all homosexuals, adulterers, liars and various other sinners would go to Hell. What created a furor wasn’t so much what he said but that he was sacked from the team (his contract was terminated). I agree with former Australian Human Rights Commissioner, Gillian Triggs, that the Australian Rugby Union went outside their remit.
The incident has brought out the worst on both sides of the debate, and demonstrates what happens when you try to enforce what people are allowed to say in public. Peter Singer is another unexpected supporter of Folau's right to free speech. My attitude is that everyone should be allowed to make complete fools of themselves, whether they be sports stars, TV celebrities, politicians or even the President of the United States.
Sunday, 30 June 2019
What does logic reveal about reality?
This is about a loop in our universe (that includes us), and which I’ve long been fascinated by.
To quote from another post I wrote, The introspective cosmos:
We are each an organism with a brain that creates something we call consciousness that allows us to reflect on ourselves, individually. And the Universe created, via an extraordinary convoluted process, the ability to reflect on itself, its origins and its possible meaning.
This insight is also reflected in Eugene Wigner’s 2 miracles: the miracle that the Universe can be comprehended and the miracle that we have the ability to comprehend it to the degree that we do. Or as Einstein so famously said:
The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it’s comprehensible.
As Wigner explicitly stated and Einstein implicitly believed, the medium for that comprehension is mathematics. This loop, that I alluded to in my opening, is also implicit in Roger Penrose’s 3 worlds.
The question in the title was one I found on Quora. Most of the questions that Quora’s algorithms address to me are either too silly, or too specialist and esoteric for my capabilities to respond.
In this case, after reading the other answers, I thought they had largely missed the mark, and perhaps the point. The authors may draw the same conclusion about my answer.
I found that my answer went in a subtly different direction to what I intended, but resulted in a mini-epiphany. There is a limit to what we can know because there will always be a limit to the mathematics we know, which thus far determines what we know of the cosmos.
My answer to What does logic reveal about reality?
Fundamentally, it reveals that there are limits to what we can know.
Epistemology is the ‘theory of knowledge’ (dictionary definition) - effectively, the study of what we can know. Whereas ontology is defined as ‘the nature of being’, which, in effect, is what we call reality.
Since the Enlightenment, it’s become increasingly apparent that it’s our knowledge of mathematics that determines the limits of what we can know, both at the cosmological and the infinitesimal scale. But mathematics itself has epistemological limits according to Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem.
In effect, Godel proved that, in any axiom based mathematical system, there will be mathematical truths that we can’t prove. In practice, this means that there will always be mathematical truths that lie beyond what we currently know. In this context, ‘what we currently know’ is transient. So even though we may, and will, know more in the future, it will never be complete.
The point is that we use logic to reveal these mathematical truths and so the corollary to Godel’s theorem is that there will always be a limit to what that logic can reveal, no matter how much it has revealed already. Basically, we extend our knowledge by extending our axiomatic system. To give an example: by employing the new axiom, √-1 = i, we uncovered a whole new realm of mathematics.
Some centuries later, we then used that particular mathematics (called complex algebra) to describe a newly discovered phenomena called quantum mechanics (QM). In fact, without that knowledge (revealed by pure logic) quantum mechanics would never have been developed into a consistent and highly successful theory. And arguably, QM is ‘the evanescent substrate on which we all exist’ [or reality] to quote Clifford A Pickover.
And this is the loop: QM is the substrate of the Universe, which created humans which discovered an abstract mathematics, which not only describes, but prescribes the rules for QM.
To quote from another post I wrote, The introspective cosmos:
We are each an organism with a brain that creates something we call consciousness that allows us to reflect on ourselves, individually. And the Universe created, via an extraordinary convoluted process, the ability to reflect on itself, its origins and its possible meaning.
This insight is also reflected in Eugene Wigner’s 2 miracles: the miracle that the Universe can be comprehended and the miracle that we have the ability to comprehend it to the degree that we do. Or as Einstein so famously said:
The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it’s comprehensible.
As Wigner explicitly stated and Einstein implicitly believed, the medium for that comprehension is mathematics. This loop, that I alluded to in my opening, is also implicit in Roger Penrose’s 3 worlds.
The question in the title was one I found on Quora. Most of the questions that Quora’s algorithms address to me are either too silly, or too specialist and esoteric for my capabilities to respond.
In this case, after reading the other answers, I thought they had largely missed the mark, and perhaps the point. The authors may draw the same conclusion about my answer.
I found that my answer went in a subtly different direction to what I intended, but resulted in a mini-epiphany. There is a limit to what we can know because there will always be a limit to the mathematics we know, which thus far determines what we know of the cosmos.
My answer to What does logic reveal about reality?
Fundamentally, it reveals that there are limits to what we can know.
Epistemology is the ‘theory of knowledge’ (dictionary definition) - effectively, the study of what we can know. Whereas ontology is defined as ‘the nature of being’, which, in effect, is what we call reality.
Since the Enlightenment, it’s become increasingly apparent that it’s our knowledge of mathematics that determines the limits of what we can know, both at the cosmological and the infinitesimal scale. But mathematics itself has epistemological limits according to Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem.
In effect, Godel proved that, in any axiom based mathematical system, there will be mathematical truths that we can’t prove. In practice, this means that there will always be mathematical truths that lie beyond what we currently know. In this context, ‘what we currently know’ is transient. So even though we may, and will, know more in the future, it will never be complete.
The point is that we use logic to reveal these mathematical truths and so the corollary to Godel’s theorem is that there will always be a limit to what that logic can reveal, no matter how much it has revealed already. Basically, we extend our knowledge by extending our axiomatic system. To give an example: by employing the new axiom, √-1 = i, we uncovered a whole new realm of mathematics.
Some centuries later, we then used that particular mathematics (called complex algebra) to describe a newly discovered phenomena called quantum mechanics (QM). In fact, without that knowledge (revealed by pure logic) quantum mechanics would never have been developed into a consistent and highly successful theory. And arguably, QM is ‘the evanescent substrate on which we all exist’ [or reality] to quote Clifford A Pickover.
And this is the loop: QM is the substrate of the Universe, which created humans which discovered an abstract mathematics, which not only describes, but prescribes the rules for QM.
Sunday, 26 May 2019
Evolution of culture; a uniquely human adaption
I finally got around to reading Sapiens; A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, after someone lent me a copy. I’d already read and reviewed his follow-up book, Homo Deus, so I’m reading them in the reverse order. I have to say he makes bleak reading, yet you feel there’s a lot of truth in his words. Having said that, I still feel I can challenge him on some issues to provide a more optimistic outlook. He is both provocative and thought-provoking, which are not necessarily one and the same thing.
He makes the point, which I’ve long known, that what separates us from all other species is that we have undertaken a cultural evolution that has long overtaken our biological evolution. This was accelerated by the invention of script, which allowed memories to be recorded and maintained over generations, some of which have lasted millennia. Of course, we already had this advantage even before we invented script, but script allowed an accumulation of knowledge that eventually led to the scientific revolution, which we’ve all benefited from since the enlightenment and has accelerated in the last 2 centuries particularly.
One of Harari’s recurring themes is that much of our lives are dependent on fictions and myths, and these have changed as part of our cultural evolution in a way that we don’t appreciate. Jeremy Lent makes similar observations in his excellent book, The Patterning Instinct, though he has a subtly different emphasis to Harari. Harari gives the impression that we are trapped in our social norms and gives examples to make his case. He points out that past societies were very hierarchical and everyone literally knew their place and lived within that paradigm. In fact, the consequences of trying to live outside one’s social constraints could be dire, even fatal. The current paradigm, at least in Western societies, is one of ‘individualism’, which he also explored in his follow-up book, with the warning that it could be eroded, if not eliminated, by the rise of AI, but I won’t discuss that here.
He effectively argues that these ‘fictions’, that we live by, rule out the commonly held belief that we can change our circumstances or that there is an objective morality that we can live by. In other words, he claims our lives are ruled by myths that we accept without question, and the only thing that changes are the myths themselves.
I take his point, but throughout history - at least from around 500BC - there have been iconoclasts who have challenged the reigning paradigm of their time. I will mention four: Socrates, Jesus, Buddha and Confucius. The curious point is that none of these wrote anything down (we only have their ‘sayings’) yet they are still iconic figures more than 2,000 years after their time. What they have in common is that they all challenged the prevailing ‘myth’ (to use Harari’s term) that there was a ‘natural order’ whereby those who ruled were ordained by gods, compared to those who served.
They all suffered for their subversions: Jesus and Socrates were executed, Confucius was exiled into poverty and the Buddha was threatened but not killed. Jesus challenged the church of his day, and that was the logical cause of his execution, not the blasphemy that he claimed to be ‘the son of god’. A lot of words were put in Jesus’ mouth, especially in the Bible. Jesus stood up for the disenfranchised and was critical of the church and the way it exploited the poor. He wouldn’t have been the only rabble-rouser of his time in Roman occupied Palestine but he was one of the most charismatic.
Buddha challenged the caste system in India as unjust, which made him logically critical of the religious-based norms of his time. He challenged the ‘myth’ that Harari claims everyone would have accepted without question.
Confucius was critical of appointments based on birth rather than merit and argued that good rulers truly served their people, rather than the other way round. Not surprisingly, his views didn’t go down very well with the autocracy of his time. He allegedly proposed the dictum of reciprocity: ‘Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself’. An aphorism also attributed to Jesus, which has more pertinence if one considers that it crosses class boundaries.
As for Socrates, I think he was the original existentialist in that he made a special plea to authenticity: ‘To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to appear to be.’ Socrates got into trouble for supposedly poisoning the minds of the young, but what he really did was to make people challenge the pervading paradigm of his time, including the dominion of gods. He challenged people to think for themselves through argument, which is the essence of philosophy to this day.
To be fair to Harari, he gives specific attention to the feminist paradigm (my term, not his, as I don’t see it as a fiction or a myth). But I do agree that money, which determines so much in our societies, is based on a very convenient fiction and a great deal of trust. Actually, some level of trust is fundamental to a functioning society. In fact, I’ve argued elsewhere that, without trust: truth, justice and freedom all become forfeit.
The feminist paradigm is very recent, yet essential to our future. I recently saw an interview with Melinda Gates (currently in Australia) who made the salient point that it’s contraception that allows women to follow a destiny independent of men. Not surprisingly, it’s the ‘independent of men’ bit that has created, and continues to create, the greatest obstacle to their emancipation.
One of the more interesting discussions, I found, was Harari’s argument that political ideologies are really religions. I guess it depends on how you define religion. This is how Harari defines it, simultaneously giving a rationale to his thesis:
If religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.
I’m not convinced that political ideologies are dependent on a belief in a ‘superhuman order’, but they are premised on abstract ideas of uncontested ‘truth’, and, in that sense, they are like religions.
Contrary to what many people think, political thinking of ‘right’ and ‘left’ are largely determined by one’s genes, although environment also plays a role. Basically, personality traits like conscientiousness and goal-oriented leadership over people-based leadership are what are considered right-leaning traits; and agreeableness and openness (to new ideas) are considered left-leaning traits. Neuroticism would probably also be considered a left-leaning trait. Notice that all the left-leaning traits are predominant in artistic or creative people and this is generally reflected in their politics.
Curiously, twin studies have shown that a belief in God is also, at least partly, a genetically inherited trait. But I don’t believe there is any correlation between these two belief systems: God and politics. I know of people on the political right who are atheists and I know people on the political left who are theists.
I know that in America there seems to be a correlation between the political right and Christian fundamentalism, but I think that’s an Americanism. In Australia, it has little impact. We’ve very recently elected a Pentecostal as PM (Prime Minister) but I don’t believe that had any bearing on his election. We’ve had two atheist PMs in my lifetime (one of whom was very popular indeed), which would be unthinkable in America. The truth is that in some cultures religion is bound irretrievably with politics, and it can be hard for anyone who’s lived their entire lives in that culture to imagine there are political regimes where religion is a non-issue.
And this brings me to Harari’s next contentious point:
Even though liberal humanism sanctifies humans, it does not deny the existence of God, and is, in fact, founded on monotheistic beliefs.
Again, I think this is a particular American perspective. I would argue that liberal humanism has arisen from an existentialist philosophy, even though most people, who advocate and follow it, have probably never studied existential philosophy. There was a cultural revolution in Western societies in the generation following World War 2, and I was a part of it. Basically, we rejected the Christian institutions we were raised in, and embraced the existentialist paradigm that the individual was responsible for their own morality and their own destiny. No where was this more evident than in the rise of feminism, aided ineluctably by on-demand contraception.
So contrary to Harari’s argument, I think the humanist individualism that defines our age (in the West) was inextricably linked to the rejection of the Church. None of us knew what existentialism was, but, when I encountered it academically later in life, I recognised it as the symptomatic paradigm of my generation. We had become existentialists without being ideologically indoctrinated.
I feel Harari is on firmer ground when he discusses the relationship between the scientific revolution and European colonial expansion. I’ve argued previously, when discussing Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct, that Western European philosophy begat the scientific revolution because, under Galileo, Kepler and Newton, they discovered the relationship between mathematics and the movements of stellar objects – the music of the spheres, to paraphrase the ancient Greeks. The Platonic world of mathematics held the key to understanding the heavens. Subsequent centuries progressed this mathematical paradigm even further with the discovery of electromagnetic waves, then quantum mechanics and general relativity, leading to current theories of elementary nuclear particles and QED (quantum electrodynamics).
But Harari makes the case that exploration of foreign lands and peoples went hand-in-hand with scientific exploration of flora, fauna and archaeological digs. He argues that only Europeans acknowledged that we were ignorant of the wider world, which led to a desire for knowledge, rather than an acceptance that what our myths didn’t tell us was not worth knowing or exploring. Science had the same philosophy: that our ignorance would lead us to always search for new theories and new explanations, rather than accept the religious dogma that knowledge outside the Bible was not worthy of consideration.
So I would agree there was a synergy here, that was both destructive and empowering, depending on whether you were the European conqueror or the people being subjugated and ruthlessly exploited for the expansion of empire.
Probably the best part of the book is Harari’s description of capitalism and how it has shaped history in the last 400 years. He explains how and why it works, and why it’s been so successful. He also points out its flaws and its dark side. The book is worth reading for this section alone. He also explains how the free market, if left to its own devices, would lead to slavery. Instead, we have the exploitation of labour in third world countries, which is the next best thing, or the next worse thing, depending on your point of view.
This logically leads to a discussion on the consumerism paradigm that drives almost everything we do in modern society. Economic growth is totally dependent on it, but, ecologically, it’s a catastrophe in progress.
One of his more thought-provoking insights is in regard to how communal care-taking in law enforcement, health, education, even family dynamics, has been taken over by state bureaucracies. If one reads the neo-Confucian text, the I Ching, one finds constant analogies between family relationships and relationships in the Court (which means government officialdom). It should be pointed out that the I Ching predates Confucius, but contemporary texts (Richard Willem’s translation) have a strong Confucian flavour.
I can’t help but wonder if this facilitated China’s adoption of Communism almost as a state religion. Family relationships and loyalties still hold considerable sway in Asian politics and businesses. Nepotism is much more prevalent in Asian countries than in the West, I would suggest.
One of my bones of contention with Harari in Homo Deus was his ideas on happiness and how it’s basically a consequence of biochemistry. As someone who has lived for more than half a century in the modern post-war world, I feel I’m in a position to challenge his simplistic view that people’s ‘happiness setting’ doesn’t change as a consequence of external factors. To quote from Sapiens:
Buying cars and writing novels do not change our biochemistry. They can change it for a fleeting moment, but it is soon back to its set point.
Well, it works for me. Nothing has given me greater long term happiness than writing a novel and getting it into the public arena – the fact that it’s been a total financial failure is, quite frankly, irrelevant. I really can’t explain that, but it’s probably been the single most important, self-satisfying event of my life. I can die happy. Also I enjoy driving possibly more than any other activity, so owning a car means more to me than just having personal transport. I used to ride motorcycles, so maybe that explains it.
I grew up in a volatile household, which I’ve delineated elsewhere, and when I left home, the first 6 years were very depressing indeed. Over decades I turned all that around, so I think Harari’s ‘happiness setting’ is total bullshit.
But my biggest disagreement with Harari, which I alluded to before, is my advocacy for existentialist philosophy which he replaces with ‘the religion of liberal individualism’. Even though I can see similarities with Buddhism, I wouldn’t call existentialism a religion. Harari pre-empts this objection by claiming all ideologies, be they political or cultural, are no different to any religion. However, I have another objection of my own, which is that when Harari talks about religion, he is really talking about dogma.
In an issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 127, Aug/Sep 2018), Sandy Grant, who is a philosopher at University of Cambridge, defines dogma as an ‘appeal to authority without critical thinking’. I’ve previously defined philosophy as ‘argument augmented by analysis’, which is the antithesis of dogma. In fact, I would go so far as to say that philosophy has been historically an antidote to religion, going all the way back to Socrates.
Existentialism is a humanist philosophy (paraphrasing Sartre) but it requires self-examination and a fundamental honesty to oneself, which is the opposite of the narcissism implied in Harari’s religion of self-obsession, which he euphemistically calls ‘liberal individualism’.
Harari is cynical, if not dismissive, about the need for purpose in life, yet I would argue that it’s fundamental. I would recommend Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a holocaust survivor and psychologist, who argued that we find meaning in relationships, projects and adversity. In fact, I would contend that the whole meaning of life is about dealing with adversity, which is why it is the theme of every work of fiction ever recorded.
If I go back to the title of this post, which I think is what Harari’s book is all about, there is a hierarchy of ‘needs’ (not Maslow’s) that a society must provide to ensure what Harari calls ‘happiness’, which is not so much economical as psychological. Back in July 2015, I wrote one of my 400 word mini-essays in response to a Question of the Month in Philosophy Now. The only relevant part is my conclusion, which effectively says that a functioning society is based on trust.
You can’t have truth without trust; you can’t have justice without truth; you can’t have freedom without justice; and you can’t have happiness without freedom.
I think that succinctly answers Harari’s thesis on happiness. Biochemistry may play a role, but people won’t find happiness if all those prerequisites aren’t met, unless, of course, said people are part of a dictatorship’s oligarchy.
A utopian society would allow everyone to achieve their potential – that’s the ideal. The most important consequence of an existentialist approach is that you don’t forfeit your aspirations for the sake of family or nation or church or some other abstract ideal that Harari calls religion.
While on this subject, I will quote from another contributor to Philosophy Now (Issue 110, Oct/Nov 2015), Simon Clarke, who is talking about John Stuart Mill, but who expresses my point of view better than I can.
An objectively good life, on Mill’s (Aristotelian) view, is one where a person has reached her potential, realizing the powers and abilities she possesses. According to Mill, the chief essential requirement for personal well-being is the development of individuality. By this he meant the development of a person’s unique powers, abilities, and talents, to their fullest potential.
He makes the point, which I’ve long known, that what separates us from all other species is that we have undertaken a cultural evolution that has long overtaken our biological evolution. This was accelerated by the invention of script, which allowed memories to be recorded and maintained over generations, some of which have lasted millennia. Of course, we already had this advantage even before we invented script, but script allowed an accumulation of knowledge that eventually led to the scientific revolution, which we’ve all benefited from since the enlightenment and has accelerated in the last 2 centuries particularly.
One of Harari’s recurring themes is that much of our lives are dependent on fictions and myths, and these have changed as part of our cultural evolution in a way that we don’t appreciate. Jeremy Lent makes similar observations in his excellent book, The Patterning Instinct, though he has a subtly different emphasis to Harari. Harari gives the impression that we are trapped in our social norms and gives examples to make his case. He points out that past societies were very hierarchical and everyone literally knew their place and lived within that paradigm. In fact, the consequences of trying to live outside one’s social constraints could be dire, even fatal. The current paradigm, at least in Western societies, is one of ‘individualism’, which he also explored in his follow-up book, with the warning that it could be eroded, if not eliminated, by the rise of AI, but I won’t discuss that here.
He effectively argues that these ‘fictions’, that we live by, rule out the commonly held belief that we can change our circumstances or that there is an objective morality that we can live by. In other words, he claims our lives are ruled by myths that we accept without question, and the only thing that changes are the myths themselves.
I take his point, but throughout history - at least from around 500BC - there have been iconoclasts who have challenged the reigning paradigm of their time. I will mention four: Socrates, Jesus, Buddha and Confucius. The curious point is that none of these wrote anything down (we only have their ‘sayings’) yet they are still iconic figures more than 2,000 years after their time. What they have in common is that they all challenged the prevailing ‘myth’ (to use Harari’s term) that there was a ‘natural order’ whereby those who ruled were ordained by gods, compared to those who served.
They all suffered for their subversions: Jesus and Socrates were executed, Confucius was exiled into poverty and the Buddha was threatened but not killed. Jesus challenged the church of his day, and that was the logical cause of his execution, not the blasphemy that he claimed to be ‘the son of god’. A lot of words were put in Jesus’ mouth, especially in the Bible. Jesus stood up for the disenfranchised and was critical of the church and the way it exploited the poor. He wouldn’t have been the only rabble-rouser of his time in Roman occupied Palestine but he was one of the most charismatic.
Buddha challenged the caste system in India as unjust, which made him logically critical of the religious-based norms of his time. He challenged the ‘myth’ that Harari claims everyone would have accepted without question.
Confucius was critical of appointments based on birth rather than merit and argued that good rulers truly served their people, rather than the other way round. Not surprisingly, his views didn’t go down very well with the autocracy of his time. He allegedly proposed the dictum of reciprocity: ‘Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself’. An aphorism also attributed to Jesus, which has more pertinence if one considers that it crosses class boundaries.
As for Socrates, I think he was the original existentialist in that he made a special plea to authenticity: ‘To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to appear to be.’ Socrates got into trouble for supposedly poisoning the minds of the young, but what he really did was to make people challenge the pervading paradigm of his time, including the dominion of gods. He challenged people to think for themselves through argument, which is the essence of philosophy to this day.
To be fair to Harari, he gives specific attention to the feminist paradigm (my term, not his, as I don’t see it as a fiction or a myth). But I do agree that money, which determines so much in our societies, is based on a very convenient fiction and a great deal of trust. Actually, some level of trust is fundamental to a functioning society. In fact, I’ve argued elsewhere that, without trust: truth, justice and freedom all become forfeit.
The feminist paradigm is very recent, yet essential to our future. I recently saw an interview with Melinda Gates (currently in Australia) who made the salient point that it’s contraception that allows women to follow a destiny independent of men. Not surprisingly, it’s the ‘independent of men’ bit that has created, and continues to create, the greatest obstacle to their emancipation.
One of the more interesting discussions, I found, was Harari’s argument that political ideologies are really religions. I guess it depends on how you define religion. This is how Harari defines it, simultaneously giving a rationale to his thesis:
If religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.
I’m not convinced that political ideologies are dependent on a belief in a ‘superhuman order’, but they are premised on abstract ideas of uncontested ‘truth’, and, in that sense, they are like religions.
Contrary to what many people think, political thinking of ‘right’ and ‘left’ are largely determined by one’s genes, although environment also plays a role. Basically, personality traits like conscientiousness and goal-oriented leadership over people-based leadership are what are considered right-leaning traits; and agreeableness and openness (to new ideas) are considered left-leaning traits. Neuroticism would probably also be considered a left-leaning trait. Notice that all the left-leaning traits are predominant in artistic or creative people and this is generally reflected in their politics.
Curiously, twin studies have shown that a belief in God is also, at least partly, a genetically inherited trait. But I don’t believe there is any correlation between these two belief systems: God and politics. I know of people on the political right who are atheists and I know people on the political left who are theists.
I know that in America there seems to be a correlation between the political right and Christian fundamentalism, but I think that’s an Americanism. In Australia, it has little impact. We’ve very recently elected a Pentecostal as PM (Prime Minister) but I don’t believe that had any bearing on his election. We’ve had two atheist PMs in my lifetime (one of whom was very popular indeed), which would be unthinkable in America. The truth is that in some cultures religion is bound irretrievably with politics, and it can be hard for anyone who’s lived their entire lives in that culture to imagine there are political regimes where religion is a non-issue.
And this brings me to Harari’s next contentious point:
Even though liberal humanism sanctifies humans, it does not deny the existence of God, and is, in fact, founded on monotheistic beliefs.
Again, I think this is a particular American perspective. I would argue that liberal humanism has arisen from an existentialist philosophy, even though most people, who advocate and follow it, have probably never studied existential philosophy. There was a cultural revolution in Western societies in the generation following World War 2, and I was a part of it. Basically, we rejected the Christian institutions we were raised in, and embraced the existentialist paradigm that the individual was responsible for their own morality and their own destiny. No where was this more evident than in the rise of feminism, aided ineluctably by on-demand contraception.
So contrary to Harari’s argument, I think the humanist individualism that defines our age (in the West) was inextricably linked to the rejection of the Church. None of us knew what existentialism was, but, when I encountered it academically later in life, I recognised it as the symptomatic paradigm of my generation. We had become existentialists without being ideologically indoctrinated.
I feel Harari is on firmer ground when he discusses the relationship between the scientific revolution and European colonial expansion. I’ve argued previously, when discussing Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct, that Western European philosophy begat the scientific revolution because, under Galileo, Kepler and Newton, they discovered the relationship between mathematics and the movements of stellar objects – the music of the spheres, to paraphrase the ancient Greeks. The Platonic world of mathematics held the key to understanding the heavens. Subsequent centuries progressed this mathematical paradigm even further with the discovery of electromagnetic waves, then quantum mechanics and general relativity, leading to current theories of elementary nuclear particles and QED (quantum electrodynamics).
But Harari makes the case that exploration of foreign lands and peoples went hand-in-hand with scientific exploration of flora, fauna and archaeological digs. He argues that only Europeans acknowledged that we were ignorant of the wider world, which led to a desire for knowledge, rather than an acceptance that what our myths didn’t tell us was not worth knowing or exploring. Science had the same philosophy: that our ignorance would lead us to always search for new theories and new explanations, rather than accept the religious dogma that knowledge outside the Bible was not worthy of consideration.
So I would agree there was a synergy here, that was both destructive and empowering, depending on whether you were the European conqueror or the people being subjugated and ruthlessly exploited for the expansion of empire.
Probably the best part of the book is Harari’s description of capitalism and how it has shaped history in the last 400 years. He explains how and why it works, and why it’s been so successful. He also points out its flaws and its dark side. The book is worth reading for this section alone. He also explains how the free market, if left to its own devices, would lead to slavery. Instead, we have the exploitation of labour in third world countries, which is the next best thing, or the next worse thing, depending on your point of view.
This logically leads to a discussion on the consumerism paradigm that drives almost everything we do in modern society. Economic growth is totally dependent on it, but, ecologically, it’s a catastrophe in progress.
One of his more thought-provoking insights is in regard to how communal care-taking in law enforcement, health, education, even family dynamics, has been taken over by state bureaucracies. If one reads the neo-Confucian text, the I Ching, one finds constant analogies between family relationships and relationships in the Court (which means government officialdom). It should be pointed out that the I Ching predates Confucius, but contemporary texts (Richard Willem’s translation) have a strong Confucian flavour.
I can’t help but wonder if this facilitated China’s adoption of Communism almost as a state religion. Family relationships and loyalties still hold considerable sway in Asian politics and businesses. Nepotism is much more prevalent in Asian countries than in the West, I would suggest.
One of my bones of contention with Harari in Homo Deus was his ideas on happiness and how it’s basically a consequence of biochemistry. As someone who has lived for more than half a century in the modern post-war world, I feel I’m in a position to challenge his simplistic view that people’s ‘happiness setting’ doesn’t change as a consequence of external factors. To quote from Sapiens:
Buying cars and writing novels do not change our biochemistry. They can change it for a fleeting moment, but it is soon back to its set point.
Well, it works for me. Nothing has given me greater long term happiness than writing a novel and getting it into the public arena – the fact that it’s been a total financial failure is, quite frankly, irrelevant. I really can’t explain that, but it’s probably been the single most important, self-satisfying event of my life. I can die happy. Also I enjoy driving possibly more than any other activity, so owning a car means more to me than just having personal transport. I used to ride motorcycles, so maybe that explains it.
I grew up in a volatile household, which I’ve delineated elsewhere, and when I left home, the first 6 years were very depressing indeed. Over decades I turned all that around, so I think Harari’s ‘happiness setting’ is total bullshit.
But my biggest disagreement with Harari, which I alluded to before, is my advocacy for existentialist philosophy which he replaces with ‘the religion of liberal individualism’. Even though I can see similarities with Buddhism, I wouldn’t call existentialism a religion. Harari pre-empts this objection by claiming all ideologies, be they political or cultural, are no different to any religion. However, I have another objection of my own, which is that when Harari talks about religion, he is really talking about dogma.
In an issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 127, Aug/Sep 2018), Sandy Grant, who is a philosopher at University of Cambridge, defines dogma as an ‘appeal to authority without critical thinking’. I’ve previously defined philosophy as ‘argument augmented by analysis’, which is the antithesis of dogma. In fact, I would go so far as to say that philosophy has been historically an antidote to religion, going all the way back to Socrates.
Existentialism is a humanist philosophy (paraphrasing Sartre) but it requires self-examination and a fundamental honesty to oneself, which is the opposite of the narcissism implied in Harari’s religion of self-obsession, which he euphemistically calls ‘liberal individualism’.
Harari is cynical, if not dismissive, about the need for purpose in life, yet I would argue that it’s fundamental. I would recommend Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a holocaust survivor and psychologist, who argued that we find meaning in relationships, projects and adversity. In fact, I would contend that the whole meaning of life is about dealing with adversity, which is why it is the theme of every work of fiction ever recorded.
If I go back to the title of this post, which I think is what Harari’s book is all about, there is a hierarchy of ‘needs’ (not Maslow’s) that a society must provide to ensure what Harari calls ‘happiness’, which is not so much economical as psychological. Back in July 2015, I wrote one of my 400 word mini-essays in response to a Question of the Month in Philosophy Now. The only relevant part is my conclusion, which effectively says that a functioning society is based on trust.
You can’t have truth without trust; you can’t have justice without truth; you can’t have freedom without justice; and you can’t have happiness without freedom.
I think that succinctly answers Harari’s thesis on happiness. Biochemistry may play a role, but people won’t find happiness if all those prerequisites aren’t met, unless, of course, said people are part of a dictatorship’s oligarchy.
A utopian society would allow everyone to achieve their potential – that’s the ideal. The most important consequence of an existentialist approach is that you don’t forfeit your aspirations for the sake of family or nation or church or some other abstract ideal that Harari calls religion.
While on this subject, I will quote from another contributor to Philosophy Now (Issue 110, Oct/Nov 2015), Simon Clarke, who is talking about John Stuart Mill, but who expresses my point of view better than I can.
An objectively good life, on Mill’s (Aristotelian) view, is one where a person has reached her potential, realizing the powers and abilities she possesses. According to Mill, the chief essential requirement for personal well-being is the development of individuality. By this he meant the development of a person’s unique powers, abilities, and talents, to their fullest potential.
Thursday, 9 May 2019
The Universe's natural units
It’s well known that Einstein’s general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics (QM) are incompatible. Actually, Viktor T. Toth (IT pro and part-time physicist) claims ‘incompatible’ is a misnomer, in as much as:
We can do quantum field theory just fine on the curved spacetime background of general relativity.
Then he adds this caveat:
What we have so far been unable to do in a convincing manner is turn gravity itself into a quantum field theory.
These carefully selected quotes are from a recent post by Toth on Quora where he is a regular contributor. His area of expertise is in cosmology, including the study of black holes. On another post he explains how the 2 theories are mathematically ‘incompatible’ (my term, not his):
The equation is Einstein’s field equation for gravitation, the equation that is, in many ways, the embodiment of general relativity:
Rμν−12Rgμν=8Ï€GTμν.
The left-hand side of this equation represents a quantity formed from the spacetime metric, which determines the “deformation of spacetime”. The right-hand side of this equation is a quantity that is formed from the energy, momentum, angular momentum and internal stresses and pressure of matter.
He then goes on to explain that, while the RHS of the equation can be reformulated in QM nomenclature, the LHS can’t. There is a way out of this, which is to ‘average’ the QM side of the equation to get it into units compatible with the classical side, and this is called ‘semi-classical gravity’. But, again, in his own words:
…it is hideously inelegant, essentially an ad-hoc averaging of the equation that is really, really ugly and is not derived from any basic principle that we know.
Anyway, the point of this mini-exposition is that there is a mathematical conflict, if not an incompatibility, inherent in Einstein’s equation itself. One side of the equation can be expressed quantum mechanically and the other side can’t. What’s more, the resolution is to ‘bastardise’ the QM side to make it compatible with the classical side.
You may be wondering what all this has to do with the title of this post. The fundamental constant at the heart of general relativity is, of course, G, the same constant that Newton used in his famous formula:
On the other hand, the fundamental constant used in QM is Planck’s constant, h, most famously used by Einstein to explain the photo-electric effect. It was this paper (not his paper on relativity) that garnered Einstein his Nobel prize. It’s best known by Planck’s equation:
E = hf
Where E is energy and f is the frequency of the photon. You may or may not know that Planck determined h empirically by studying hot body radiation, where he used it to resolve a particularly difficult thermodynamics problem. From Planck’s perspective, h was a mathematical invention and had no bearing on reality.
G was also determined empirically, by Cavendish in 1798 (well after Newton) and, of course, is used to mathematically track the course of the planets and the stars. There is no obvious or logical connection between these 2 constants based on their empirical origins.
There is a third constant I will bring into this discussion, which is c, the constant speed of light, which also involves Einstein, via his famous equation:
E = mc2
Now, having set the stage, I will invoke the subject of this post. If one uses Planck units, also known as ‘natural units’, one can see how these 3 constants are interrelated.
I will introduce another Quora contributor, Jeremiah Johnson (a self-described ‘physics theorist’) to explain:
The way we can arrive at these units of Planck Length and Planck Time is through the mathematical application of non-dimensionalization. What this does is take known constants and find what value each fundamental unit should be set to so they all equal one. (See below.)
Toth (whom I referenced earlier) makes the salient point that many people believe that the Planck units represent the physical smallest component of spacetime, and are therefore evidence, if not proof, that the Universe is inherently granular. But, as Toth points out, spacetime could still be continuous (or non-discrete) and the Planck units represent the limits of what we can know rather than the limits of what exists. I’ve written about the issue of ‘discreteness’ of the Universe before and concluded that it’s not (which, of course, doesn’t mean I’m right).
Planck units in ‘free space’ are the Universe’s ‘natural units’. They are literally the smallest units we can theoretically measure, therefore lending themselves to being the metrics of the Universe.
The Planck length is
1â„“P=1.61622837∗10−35m
And Planck time is
1tP=5.3911613∗10−44s
If you divide one by the other you get:
1â„“P/1tP=299,792,458m/s
Which of course, is the speed of light. As Johnson quips: “Isn’t that cool?”
Now, Max Planck derived these ‘natural units’ himself by looking at 5 equations and adjusting the scale of the units so as they would not only be consistent across the equations, but would non-dimensionalise the constants so they all equal 1 (as Johnson described above).
In fact, the definition of the Plank units (except charge) includes both G andh (which is h/2Ï€). I checked the relationship between h and G, by calculating G from h, knowing the Planck units for length and time. In effect, I reverse-engineered the calculation, having to find the Planck mass from h then putting it into the formula for G.
The point is that I was able to derive G from h using Planck units. The Universe lends itself to portraying a consistency across metrics and natural phenomena based on units derived from constants that represent the extremes of scale, h and G. The constant, c, is also part of the derivation, and is essential to the dimension of time. It’s not such a mystery when one realises that the ‘units’ are derived from empirically determined constants
We can do quantum field theory just fine on the curved spacetime background of general relativity.
Then he adds this caveat:
What we have so far been unable to do in a convincing manner is turn gravity itself into a quantum field theory.
These carefully selected quotes are from a recent post by Toth on Quora where he is a regular contributor. His area of expertise is in cosmology, including the study of black holes. On another post he explains how the 2 theories are mathematically ‘incompatible’ (my term, not his):
The equation is Einstein’s field equation for gravitation, the equation that is, in many ways, the embodiment of general relativity:
Rμν−12Rgμν=8Ï€GTμν.
The left-hand side of this equation represents a quantity formed from the spacetime metric, which determines the “deformation of spacetime”. The right-hand side of this equation is a quantity that is formed from the energy, momentum, angular momentum and internal stresses and pressure of matter.
He then goes on to explain that, while the RHS of the equation can be reformulated in QM nomenclature, the LHS can’t. There is a way out of this, which is to ‘average’ the QM side of the equation to get it into units compatible with the classical side, and this is called ‘semi-classical gravity’. But, again, in his own words:
…it is hideously inelegant, essentially an ad-hoc averaging of the equation that is really, really ugly and is not derived from any basic principle that we know.
Anyway, the point of this mini-exposition is that there is a mathematical conflict, if not an incompatibility, inherent in Einstein’s equation itself. One side of the equation can be expressed quantum mechanically and the other side can’t. What’s more, the resolution is to ‘bastardise’ the QM side to make it compatible with the classical side.
You may be wondering what all this has to do with the title of this post. The fundamental constant at the heart of general relativity is, of course, G, the same constant that Newton used in his famous formula:
On the other hand, the fundamental constant used in QM is Planck’s constant, h, most famously used by Einstein to explain the photo-electric effect. It was this paper (not his paper on relativity) that garnered Einstein his Nobel prize. It’s best known by Planck’s equation:
E = hf
Where E is energy and f is the frequency of the photon. You may or may not know that Planck determined h empirically by studying hot body radiation, where he used it to resolve a particularly difficult thermodynamics problem. From Planck’s perspective, h was a mathematical invention and had no bearing on reality.
G was also determined empirically, by Cavendish in 1798 (well after Newton) and, of course, is used to mathematically track the course of the planets and the stars. There is no obvious or logical connection between these 2 constants based on their empirical origins.
There is a third constant I will bring into this discussion, which is c, the constant speed of light, which also involves Einstein, via his famous equation:
E = mc2
Now, having set the stage, I will invoke the subject of this post. If one uses Planck units, also known as ‘natural units’, one can see how these 3 constants are interrelated.
I will introduce another Quora contributor, Jeremiah Johnson (a self-described ‘physics theorist’) to explain:
The way we can arrive at these units of Planck Length and Planck Time is through the mathematical application of non-dimensionalization. What this does is take known constants and find what value each fundamental unit should be set to so they all equal one. (See below.)
Toth (whom I referenced earlier) makes the salient point that many people believe that the Planck units represent the physical smallest component of spacetime, and are therefore evidence, if not proof, that the Universe is inherently granular. But, as Toth points out, spacetime could still be continuous (or non-discrete) and the Planck units represent the limits of what we can know rather than the limits of what exists. I’ve written about the issue of ‘discreteness’ of the Universe before and concluded that it’s not (which, of course, doesn’t mean I’m right).
Planck units in ‘free space’ are the Universe’s ‘natural units’. They are literally the smallest units we can theoretically measure, therefore lending themselves to being the metrics of the Universe.
The Planck length is
1â„“P=1.61622837∗10−35m
And Planck time is
1tP=5.3911613∗10−44s
If you divide one by the other you get:
1â„“P/1tP=299,792,458m/s
Which of course, is the speed of light. As Johnson quips: “Isn’t that cool?”
Now, Max Planck derived these ‘natural units’ himself by looking at 5 equations and adjusting the scale of the units so as they would not only be consistent across the equations, but would non-dimensionalise the constants so they all equal 1 (as Johnson described above).
In fact, the definition of the Plank units (except charge) includes both G and
The point is that I was able to derive G from h using Planck units. The Universe lends itself to portraying a consistency across metrics and natural phenomena based on units derived from constants that represent the extremes of scale, h and G. The constant, c, is also part of the derivation, and is essential to the dimension of time. It’s not such a mystery when one realises that the ‘units’ are derived from empirically determined constants
Addendum: For a comprehensive, yet easy-to-read, historical account, I’d recommend John D. Barrow’s book, The Constants of Nature; From Alpha to Omega.
Addendum (13 April 2023): According to Toth, the Planck units don't provide a limit on anything:
...the Planck scale is not an inherent limit of anything. It is simply the set of “natural” units that characterize Nature.
So the Planck scale is not a physical limit or a limit on what can be observed; rather, it’s a limitation of the theory that we use to describe the quantum world.
Read his erudite exposition on the subject here:
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-Planck-length-the-smallest-measurable-length-Why-cant-it-be-smaller/answer/Viktor-T-Toth-1
Friday, 3 May 2019
What is the third way?
This is the latest Question of the Month from Philosophy Now. I should point out that my last entry didn’t get published. After a run of something like 5 in a row, that was a bit of a perspective-changer. I had been getting cocksure. So I have 7 out of 9 published and now aiming for 8 out of 10. But 7 out of 10 is still a good result over a period of around 10 years. I should point out that I don’t enter every single one of them. I pick and choose, which skews my chances of success.
The ‘third way’ referenced in the question is basically a reference to an alternative societal paradigm to capitalism and communism. I expect that most, if not all responses will be variations on a 'middle way'. But if there is a completely out-of-the-box answer, I’ll be curious to read it. So, maybe the way the question is addressed will be just as important, if not more important, than the proposed resolution.
I think this is the most difficult question Philosophy Now has thrown at us in the decade or two I’ve been reading it. I think there definitely will be a third way by the end of this century, but I’m not entirely sure what it will be. Is that a copout? No, I’m going to attempt to forecast the future by looking at the past.
If one goes back before the industrial revolution, no one would have predicted that feudalism would not continue forever. But the industrial revolution unintentionally spawned two social experiments: communism and capitalism that spanned the 20th Century. I think one can fairly say that capitalism ultimately prevailed, because all communist inspired revolutions became State-run oligarchies that led to the worst excesses in totalitarianism.
What’s more, we saw more societal and technological change in the 20th Century than all previous history. There is no reason to believe that the 21st Century won’t be even more transformative. We are currently going through a technological revolution in every way analogous to the industrial revolution of the 19th Century, and it will be just as socially disruptive and economically challenging.
Capitalism has become so successful globally, especially in the high-tech industries, that corporations are starting to eclipse governments in their influence and power, and, to some extent, now embody the feudal system we thought we’d left behind. I’m referring to third world countries providing exploited labour and resources for the affluent elite, which includes me.
There is an increasing need to stop the wasteful production of goods on the altar of economic growth. It’s not only damaging the environment, it increases the gap between those who consume and those who produce. So a global economy would give the wealth to those who produce and not just those who are their puppet masters. This would require equitable wealth distribution on a global scale, not just nationally.
Future technologies will become more advanced to the point that there will be a symbiosis between humans and machines, and this will have a dramatic impact on economic drivers. A universal basic income, which is unthinkable now, will become a necessity because so many jobs will be AI executed.
People and their ideas are only considered progressive in hindsight. But what was radical in the past often becomes the status quo in the present; and voila: no one can imagine it any other way.
Addendum: I changed the last sentence of the third-last paragraph before I sent it off.
The ‘third way’ referenced in the question is basically a reference to an alternative societal paradigm to capitalism and communism. I expect that most, if not all responses will be variations on a 'middle way'. But if there is a completely out-of-the-box answer, I’ll be curious to read it. So, maybe the way the question is addressed will be just as important, if not more important, than the proposed resolution.
I think this is the most difficult question Philosophy Now has thrown at us in the decade or two I’ve been reading it. I think there definitely will be a third way by the end of this century, but I’m not entirely sure what it will be. Is that a copout? No, I’m going to attempt to forecast the future by looking at the past.
If one goes back before the industrial revolution, no one would have predicted that feudalism would not continue forever. But the industrial revolution unintentionally spawned two social experiments: communism and capitalism that spanned the 20th Century. I think one can fairly say that capitalism ultimately prevailed, because all communist inspired revolutions became State-run oligarchies that led to the worst excesses in totalitarianism.
What’s more, we saw more societal and technological change in the 20th Century than all previous history. There is no reason to believe that the 21st Century won’t be even more transformative. We are currently going through a technological revolution in every way analogous to the industrial revolution of the 19th Century, and it will be just as socially disruptive and economically challenging.
Capitalism has become so successful globally, especially in the high-tech industries, that corporations are starting to eclipse governments in their influence and power, and, to some extent, now embody the feudal system we thought we’d left behind. I’m referring to third world countries providing exploited labour and resources for the affluent elite, which includes me.
There is an increasing need to stop the wasteful production of goods on the altar of economic growth. It’s not only damaging the environment, it increases the gap between those who consume and those who produce. So a global economy would give the wealth to those who produce and not just those who are their puppet masters. This would require equitable wealth distribution on a global scale, not just nationally.
Future technologies will become more advanced to the point that there will be a symbiosis between humans and machines, and this will have a dramatic impact on economic drivers. A universal basic income, which is unthinkable now, will become a necessity because so many jobs will be AI executed.
People and their ideas are only considered progressive in hindsight. But what was radical in the past often becomes the status quo in the present; and voila: no one can imagine it any other way.
Addendum: I changed the last sentence of the third-last paragraph before I sent it off.
Friday, 26 April 2019
What use is philosophy?
Today I received my copy of Philosophy Now (Issue 131, April/May 2019), a UK based periodical I subscribe to.
Leafing through its pages, I came across the Letters section and saw my name. I had written a letter that I had forgotten about. It was in response to an article (referenced below), in the previous issue, about whether philosophy had lost its relevance in the modern world. Did it still have a role in the 21st Century of economic paradigms and technological miracles?
There are many aspects to Daniel Kaufman’s discussion on The Decline & Rebirth of Philosophy (Issue 130, Feb/Mar 2019, pp. 34-7), but mine is the perspective of an ‘outsider’, in as much as I’m not an academic in any field and I’m not a professional philosopher.
I think the major problem with philosophy, as it’s practiced today as an academic activity, is that it doesn’t fit into the current economic paradigm which specifically or tacitly governs all value judgements of a profession or an activity. In other words, it has no perceived economic value to either corporations or governments.
On the other hand, everyone can see the benefits of science in the form of the technological marvels they use every day, along with all the infrastructure that they quite literally couldn’t live without. Yet I would argue that science and philosophy are joined at the hip. Plato’s Academy was based on Pythagoras’s quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. In Western culture, science, mathematics and philosophy have a common origin.
The same people who benefit from the ‘magic’ of modern technology are mostly unaware of the long road from the Enlightenment to the industrial revolution, the formulation of the laws of thermodynamics, followed closely by the laws of electromagnetism, followed by the laws of quantum mechanics, upon which every electronic device depends.
John Wheeler, best known for coining the term, ‘black hole’ (in cosmology) said:
We live on an island of knowledge surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
I contend that the ‘island of knowledge’ is science and the ‘shore of ignorance’ is philosophy. Philosophy is at the frontier of knowledge and because the ‘sea of ignorance’ is infinite, there will always be a role for it. Philosophy is not divorced from science and mathematics; it’s just not obviously in the guise it once was.
The marriage between science and philosophy in the 21st Century is about how we are going to live on a planet with limited resources. We need a philosophy to guide us into a collaborative global society that realises we need Earth more than it needs us.
Leafing through its pages, I came across the Letters section and saw my name. I had written a letter that I had forgotten about. It was in response to an article (referenced below), in the previous issue, about whether philosophy had lost its relevance in the modern world. Did it still have a role in the 21st Century of economic paradigms and technological miracles?
There are many aspects to Daniel Kaufman’s discussion on The Decline & Rebirth of Philosophy (Issue 130, Feb/Mar 2019, pp. 34-7), but mine is the perspective of an ‘outsider’, in as much as I’m not an academic in any field and I’m not a professional philosopher.
I think the major problem with philosophy, as it’s practiced today as an academic activity, is that it doesn’t fit into the current economic paradigm which specifically or tacitly governs all value judgements of a profession or an activity. In other words, it has no perceived economic value to either corporations or governments.
On the other hand, everyone can see the benefits of science in the form of the technological marvels they use every day, along with all the infrastructure that they quite literally couldn’t live without. Yet I would argue that science and philosophy are joined at the hip. Plato’s Academy was based on Pythagoras’s quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. In Western culture, science, mathematics and philosophy have a common origin.
The same people who benefit from the ‘magic’ of modern technology are mostly unaware of the long road from the Enlightenment to the industrial revolution, the formulation of the laws of thermodynamics, followed closely by the laws of electromagnetism, followed by the laws of quantum mechanics, upon which every electronic device depends.
John Wheeler, best known for coining the term, ‘black hole’ (in cosmology) said:
We live on an island of knowledge surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
I contend that the ‘island of knowledge’ is science and the ‘shore of ignorance’ is philosophy. Philosophy is at the frontier of knowledge and because the ‘sea of ignorance’ is infinite, there will always be a role for it. Philosophy is not divorced from science and mathematics; it’s just not obviously in the guise it once was.
The marriage between science and philosophy in the 21st Century is about how we are going to live on a planet with limited resources. We need a philosophy to guide us into a collaborative global society that realises we need Earth more than it needs us.
Thursday, 4 April 2019
Is time a psychological illusion or a parameter of the Universe?
I’ve recently read Paul Davies latest book, The Demon in the Machine (released in Feb) and I would highly recommend it.
We have reached a stage in politics and media generally that you are either for or against a person, an idea or an ideology. Anyone who studies philosophy in any depth realises that there are many points of view on a single topic. There are many voices that I admire yet there is not one that I completely agree with on everything they announce or proclaim or theorise about.
Paul Davies new book is a case in point. This book is very intellectually stimulating, even provocative, which is what I expect and is what makes it worth reading. Within its 200 plus pages, there was one short, well-written and erudite passage where I found myself in serious disagreement. It was his discussion on time and its relation to our perceptions.
He starts with Einstein’s well known quote: ‘The past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ It’s important to put this into its proper context. Einstein wrote this in a letter to a mother of a friend who had recently died. It was written, of course, not only to console her, but to reveal his own conclusions arising from his theories of relativity and their inherent effect on time.
A consequence of Einstein’s theory was that simultaneity was dependent on the observer, so it was possible that 2 observers could disagree on the sequence of events occurring (depending on their respective frames of reference). Note that this is only true if there is no causal relationship between these events.
Also, Einstein believed in what’s now called a ‘block universe’ whereby the future is as fixed as the past. Some physicists still argue this, in the same way that some (if not many) argue that we live in a computer simulation (Davies, it should be pointed out, definitely does not).
I’m getting off the track, because what Davies argues is that the so-called ‘arrow of time’ is an ‘illusion’, as is the ‘flow of time’. He goes so far as to contentiously claim that time can’t be measured. His argument is simple: if time was to ‘slow down’ or ‘speed up’ everything, from your heart rate to atomic clocks would do so as well, so there is no way to perceive it or measure it. He argues that you can’t measure time against time: “It has to be ‘One second per second’ – a tautology!” However, as Davies well knows, Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us that you can measure the ‘rate of time’ of one clock against another, and this is done and allowed for in GPS calculations. See my post on the special theory of relativity where I describe this very phenomenon.
Davies argues that there is no ‘backwards or forwards in time’ and the arrow of time is a ‘misnomer’, a metaphor we use to describe a psychological phenomenon. According to him, it’s our persistent belief in a continuity of self that creates the illusion of ‘time passing’. But I think he has it back-to-front. (I’ll return to this later.)
So, if there is no direction of time and no flow of time, how do we describe it? Well, one way is to talk about whether phenomena are symmetrical or asymmetrical in time. In other words, if you were to reverse a sequence of events would you get back to where you started, or is that even possible? Davies argues that entropy or the second law of thermodynamics accounts for this perception. But here’s the thing: without time, motion would not exist and causation would not exist; both of which we witness all the time. And if time does not ‘pass’ or ‘flow’, then what does it do?
Mathematically, time is a dimension, which even has a smallest unit, called ‘Planck time’. Davies says it’s not measurable, but we do, even to the extent that we derive an age of the Universe. John Barrow, in his The Book of Universes, even provides an estimate in ‘Planck units’. Mathematically, we provide 4 co-ordinates for any event in the Universe – 3 of space and 1 of time. And, obviously, they can all change, but time is unique in that it appears to change continuously.*
And time is ‘fluid’ for want of a better word. Its ‘rate’ can change in gravity and relativistically because the speed of light is constant. The speed of light is the only thing that stops everything from happening at once, and for a photon, time is zero. A photon traverses the entire universe in zero time (from the photon’s perspective).
But for the rest of us, time is a constraint created by light. Everything you observe has already happened because it always takes a finite amount of time (from your perspective) for the photon to reach you and nothing can travel faster than light (because it travels in zero time). This is the paradox, but it’s the relationship between light and time that governs our understanding of the Universe. If something speeds up relative to something else (you), then the light it emits increases in frequency if it’s coming towards you and decreases if it’s moving away. Obviously, the very fact that you can measure its frequency means you can measure its velocity (relative to you), which is meaningless without the dimension of time.
So note that all observations (involving light) mean that everything you perceive is in the past – it’s impossible to see into the future. So the ‘arrow of time’, that Davies specifically calls a ‘misnomer’, is a pertinent description of this everyday perception – we can only observe time in one direction, which is the past.
Davies explains our perception of time as a neurological effect:
It is incontestable that we possess a very strong psychological impression that our awareness is being swept along on an unstoppable current of time, and it is perfectly legitimate to seek a scientific explanation for the feeling that time passes. The explanation of this familiar psychological flux is, in my view, to be found in neuroscience, not physics. (emphasis in the original.)
I’ve argued previously that perhaps it is only consciousness that exists in a constant present. It is certainly true that only consciousness can perceive time as a dynamic entity. Everything around us becomes instantly the past like we are standing in a river where we can’t see upstream. It is for this reason that the concepts of past, present and future are uniquely perceived by a conscious mind. Davies effectively argues that this is the sole representation of time: that ‘time passing’ only exists in our minds and not in reality. But if our minds exist in a constant present (relative to everything else) then time does pass us by; and past, present and future is not an illusion, but a consequence of consciousness interacting with reality.
There are causal events that occur around us all the time, but, like a photographic image, they become past events as soon as they happen. I believe there is a universal ‘now’, otherwise the idea of the age of the Universe makes no sense. But, possibly, only conscious entities ride this constant now, which is why everything else is dynamically going past us in a literal, not just a psychological, sense. This is where Davies and I disagree.
Meanwhile, the future exists in light beams yet to be seen. Quantum mechanically, a photon is a wave function (ψ) that’s in the future of whatever it interacts with. A photon is only observed in retrospect, along with its path, and that’s true for all quantum events, including the famous double slit experiment. As Freeman Dyson points out, QM gives us probabilities which are in the future. To paraphrase: ‘quantum mechanics describes the future and classical physics describes the past’. Most physicists (including Davies, I suspect) would disagree. The orthodox view is that classical physics is a special case of quantum mechanics and, in quantum cosmology, time mathematically disappears.
Footnote: I should point out that Paul Davies is someone I’ve greatly admired and respected for many years.
*Paradoxically, at the event horizon of a black hole, time stops and we enter the world of quantum gravity. The evidence for black holes are accretion disks
where the matter from a companion star forms a ring at the event
horizon and emits high energy radiation as a result, which can be
observed. However, from everything I've read, we need new physics to understand what happens beyond the event horizon of a black hole.
Addendum 1: I've since resolved this paradox to my satisfaction: it's space that crosses the event horizon at c. Then I learned that Kip Thorne effectively provided the same explanation, demonstrated with graphics, in Scientific American in 1967. He cited David Finkelstein who demonstrated it mathematically in 1958.
Addendum 2: Regarding Addendum 1, I've revisited this and come up with an alternative scenario, which is not the conventional view, but is consistent with what we observe, nevertheless. The thing is that I don't see any observable or experimental way of resolving it. Almost all (but not quite all) of our knowledge concerning black holes, including Hawking radiation, is based on mathematical models. Empirical evidence comes from observing gravitational effects on objects orbiting black holes, cosmic jets and gravitational lensing.
Friday, 15 February 2019
3 rules for humans
A very odd post. I joined a Science Fiction group on Facebook, which has its moments. I sometimes comment, even have conversations, and most of the time manage to avoid conflicts. I’ve been a participator on the internet long enough to know when to shut up, or let something through to the keeper, as we say in Oz. In other words, avoid being baited. Most of the time I succeed, considering how opinionated I can be.
Someone asked the question: what would the equivalent 3 laws for humans be, analogous to Asimov’s 3 laws for robotics?
The 3 laws of robotics (without looking them up) are about avoiding harm to humans within certain constraints and then avoiding harm to robots or itself. It’s hierarchical with humans' safety being at the top, or the first law (from memory).
So I submitted an answer, which I can no longer find, so maybe someone took the post down. But it got me thinking, and I found that what I came up with was more like a manifesto than laws per se; so they're nothing like Asimov’s 3 laws for robotics.
In the end, my so-called laws aren't exactly what I submitted but they are succinct and logically consistent, with enough substance to elaborate upon.
1. Don’t try or pretend to be something you’re not
This is a direct attempt at what existentialists call ‘authenticity’, but it’s as plain as one can make it. I originally thought of something Socrates apparently said:
To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to seem to be.
And my Rule No1 (preferable to law) is really another way of saying the same thing, only it’s more direct, and it has a cultural origin as well. As a child, growing up, ‘having tickets on yourself’, or ‘being up yourself’, to use some local colloquialisms, was considered the greatest sin. So I grew up with a disdain for pretentiousness that became ingrained. But there is more to it than that. I don’t believe in false modesty either.
There is a particular profession where being someone you’re not is an essential skill. I’m talking about acting. Spying also comes to mind, but the secret there I believe is to become invisible, which is the opposite to what James Bond does. That’s why John Le Carre’s George Smiley seems more like the real thing than 007 does. Going undercover, by the way, is extremely stressful and potentially detrimental to your health – just ask anyone who’s done it.
But actors routinely become someone they’re not. Many years ago, I used to watch a TV programme called The Actor’s Studio, where well known actors were interviewed, and I have to say that many of them struck me with their authenticity, which seems like a contradiction. But an Australian actress, Kerry Armstrong, once pointed out that acting requires leaving your ego behind. It struck me that actors know better than anyone else what the difference is between being yourself and being someone else.
I’m not an actor but I create characters in fiction, and I’ve always believed the process is mentally the same. Someone once said that ‘acting requires you to say something as if you’ve just thought of it, and not everyone can do that.’ So it’s spontaneity that matters. Someone else once said that acting requires you to always be in the moment. Writing fiction, I would contend, requires the same attributes. Writing, at least for me, requires you to inhabit the character, and that’s why the dialogue feels spontaneous, because it is. But paradoxically, it also requires authenticity. The secret is to leave yourself out of it.
The Chinese hold modesty in high regard. The I Ching has a lot to say about modesty, but basically we all like and admire people who are what they appear to be, as Socrates himself said.
We all wear masks, but I think those rare people who seem most comfortable without a mask are those we intrinsically admire the most.
2. Honesty starts with honesty to yourself
It’s not hard to see that this is directly related to Rule 1. The truth is that we can’t be honest to others if we are not honest to ourselves. It should be no surprise that sociopathic narcissists are also serial liars. Narcissists, from my experience, and from what I’ve read, create a ‘reality distortion field’ that is often at odds with everyone else except for their most loyal followers.
There is an argument that this should be Rule 1. They are obviously interdependent. But Rule 1 seems to be the logical starting point for me. Rule 2 is a consequence of Rule 1 rather than the other way round.
Hugh Mackay made the observation in his book, Right & Wrong: How to Decide for Yourself, that ‘The most damaging lies are the ones we tell ourselves’. From this, neurosis is born and many of the ills that beleaguer us. Self-honesty can be much harder than we think. Obviously, if we are deceiving ourselves, then, by definition, we are unaware of it. But the real objective of self-honesty is so we can have social intercourse with others and all that entails.
So you can see there is a hierarchy in my rules. It goes from how we perceive ourselves to how others perceive us, and logically to how we interact with them.
But before leaving Rule 2, I would like to mention a movie I saw a few years back called Ali’s Wedding, which was an Australian Muslim rom-com. Yes, it sounds like an oxymoron but it was a really good film, partly because it was based on real events experienced by the filmmaker. The music by Nigel Weslake was so good, I bought the soundtrack. It’s relevance to this discussion is that the movie opens with a quote from the Quran about lying. It effectively says that lies have a habit of snowballing; so you dig yourself deeper the further you go. It’s the premise upon which the entire film is based.
3. Assume all humans have the same rights as you
This is so fundamental, it could be Rule 1, but I would argue that you can’t put this into practice without Rules 1 and 2. It’s the opposite to narcissism, which is what Rules 1 and 2 are attempting to counter.
One can see that a direct consequence is Confucius’s dictum: ‘Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself’; better known in the West as the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you’; and attributed to Jesus of course.
It’s also the premise behind the United Nations Bill of Human Rights. All these rules are actually hard to live by, and I include myself in that broad statement.
A couple of years back when I wrote a post in response to the question: Is morality objective? I effectively argued that Rule No3 is the only objective morality.
Someone asked the question: what would the equivalent 3 laws for humans be, analogous to Asimov’s 3 laws for robotics?
The 3 laws of robotics (without looking them up) are about avoiding harm to humans within certain constraints and then avoiding harm to robots or itself. It’s hierarchical with humans' safety being at the top, or the first law (from memory).
So I submitted an answer, which I can no longer find, so maybe someone took the post down. But it got me thinking, and I found that what I came up with was more like a manifesto than laws per se; so they're nothing like Asimov’s 3 laws for robotics.
In the end, my so-called laws aren't exactly what I submitted but they are succinct and logically consistent, with enough substance to elaborate upon.
1. Don’t try or pretend to be something you’re not
This is a direct attempt at what existentialists call ‘authenticity’, but it’s as plain as one can make it. I originally thought of something Socrates apparently said:
To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to seem to be.
And my Rule No1 (preferable to law) is really another way of saying the same thing, only it’s more direct, and it has a cultural origin as well. As a child, growing up, ‘having tickets on yourself’, or ‘being up yourself’, to use some local colloquialisms, was considered the greatest sin. So I grew up with a disdain for pretentiousness that became ingrained. But there is more to it than that. I don’t believe in false modesty either.
There is a particular profession where being someone you’re not is an essential skill. I’m talking about acting. Spying also comes to mind, but the secret there I believe is to become invisible, which is the opposite to what James Bond does. That’s why John Le Carre’s George Smiley seems more like the real thing than 007 does. Going undercover, by the way, is extremely stressful and potentially detrimental to your health – just ask anyone who’s done it.
But actors routinely become someone they’re not. Many years ago, I used to watch a TV programme called The Actor’s Studio, where well known actors were interviewed, and I have to say that many of them struck me with their authenticity, which seems like a contradiction. But an Australian actress, Kerry Armstrong, once pointed out that acting requires leaving your ego behind. It struck me that actors know better than anyone else what the difference is between being yourself and being someone else.
I’m not an actor but I create characters in fiction, and I’ve always believed the process is mentally the same. Someone once said that ‘acting requires you to say something as if you’ve just thought of it, and not everyone can do that.’ So it’s spontaneity that matters. Someone else once said that acting requires you to always be in the moment. Writing fiction, I would contend, requires the same attributes. Writing, at least for me, requires you to inhabit the character, and that’s why the dialogue feels spontaneous, because it is. But paradoxically, it also requires authenticity. The secret is to leave yourself out of it.
The Chinese hold modesty in high regard. The I Ching has a lot to say about modesty, but basically we all like and admire people who are what they appear to be, as Socrates himself said.
We all wear masks, but I think those rare people who seem most comfortable without a mask are those we intrinsically admire the most.
2. Honesty starts with honesty to yourself
It’s not hard to see that this is directly related to Rule 1. The truth is that we can’t be honest to others if we are not honest to ourselves. It should be no surprise that sociopathic narcissists are also serial liars. Narcissists, from my experience, and from what I’ve read, create a ‘reality distortion field’ that is often at odds with everyone else except for their most loyal followers.
There is an argument that this should be Rule 1. They are obviously interdependent. But Rule 1 seems to be the logical starting point for me. Rule 2 is a consequence of Rule 1 rather than the other way round.
Hugh Mackay made the observation in his book, Right & Wrong: How to Decide for Yourself, that ‘The most damaging lies are the ones we tell ourselves’. From this, neurosis is born and many of the ills that beleaguer us. Self-honesty can be much harder than we think. Obviously, if we are deceiving ourselves, then, by definition, we are unaware of it. But the real objective of self-honesty is so we can have social intercourse with others and all that entails.
So you can see there is a hierarchy in my rules. It goes from how we perceive ourselves to how others perceive us, and logically to how we interact with them.
But before leaving Rule 2, I would like to mention a movie I saw a few years back called Ali’s Wedding, which was an Australian Muslim rom-com. Yes, it sounds like an oxymoron but it was a really good film, partly because it was based on real events experienced by the filmmaker. The music by Nigel Weslake was so good, I bought the soundtrack. It’s relevance to this discussion is that the movie opens with a quote from the Quran about lying. It effectively says that lies have a habit of snowballing; so you dig yourself deeper the further you go. It’s the premise upon which the entire film is based.
3. Assume all humans have the same rights as you
This is so fundamental, it could be Rule 1, but I would argue that you can’t put this into practice without Rules 1 and 2. It’s the opposite to narcissism, which is what Rules 1 and 2 are attempting to counter.
One can see that a direct consequence is Confucius’s dictum: ‘Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself’; better known in the West as the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you’; and attributed to Jesus of course.
It’s also the premise behind the United Nations Bill of Human Rights. All these rules are actually hard to live by, and I include myself in that broad statement.
A couple of years back when I wrote a post in response to the question: Is morality objective? I effectively argued that Rule No3 is the only objective morality.
Friday, 8 February 2019
Some people might be offended by this
I read an article recently in The New Yorker (Issue Jan. 21, 2019) by Vinson Cunningham called The Bad Place; How the idea of Hell has shaped the way we think. I think it was meant to be a review of a book, called, aptly enough, The Penguin Book of Hell, edited by Scott G. Bruce, but Cunningham’s discussion meanders widely, including Dante’s Inferno and Homer’s Odyssey, as well as his own Christian upbringing in a Harlem church.
I was reminded of the cultural difference between America and Australia, when it comes to religion. A difference I was very aware of when I lived and worked in America over a combined period of 9 months, including New Jersey, Texas and California.
It’s hard to imagine any mainstream magazine or newspaper having this discussion in Australia, or, if they did, it would be more academic. I was in the US post 9/11 – in fact, I landed in New York the night before. I remember reading an editorial in a newspaper where people were arguing about whether the victims of the attack would go to heaven or not. I thought: how ridiculous. In the end, someone quoted from the Bible, as if that resolved all arguments – even more ridiculous, from my perspective.
I remember reading in an altogether different context someone criticising a doctor for facilitating prayer meetings in a Jewish hospital because the people weren’t praying to Jesus, so their prayers would be ineffective. This was a cultural shock to me. No one discussed these issues or had these arguments in Australian media. At least, not in mainstream media, be it conservative or liberal.
Reading Cunningham’s article reminded me of all this because he talks about how real hell is for many people. To be fair, he also talks about how hell has been sidelined in secular societies. In Australia, people don’t discuss their religious views that much, so one can’t be sure what people really believe. But I was part of a generation that all but rejected institutionalised religion. I’ve met many people from succeeding generations who have no knowledge of biblical stories, whereas for me, it was simply part of one’s education.
One of the best ‘modern’ examples of hell or the underworld I found was in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novel series. It’s arguably the best graphic novel series written by anyone, though I’m sure aficionados of the medium may beg to differ. Gaiman borrowed freely from a range of mythologies, including Orpheus, the Bible (in particular the story of Cain and Abel) and even Shakespeare. His hero has to go to Hell and gets out by answering a riddle from its caretaker, the details of which I’ve long forgotten, but I remember thinking it to be one of those gems that writers of fiction (like me) envy.
Gaiman also co-wrote a book with Terry Pratchett called Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter (1990) which is a great deal of fun. The premise, as described in Wikipedia: ‘The book is a comedy about the birth of the son of Satan, the coming of the End Times.’ Both authors are English, which possibly allows them a sense of irreverence that many Americans would find hard to manage. I might be wrong, but it seems to me that Americans take their religion way more seriously than the rest of us English-speaking nations, and this is reflected in their media.
And this brings me back to Cunningham’s article because it’s written in a cultural context that I simply don’t share. And I feel that’s the crux of this issue. Religion and all its mental constructs are cultural, and hell is nothing if not a mental construct.
My own father, whom I’ve written about before, witnessed hell first hand. He was in the Field Ambulance Corp in WW2 so he retrieved bodies in various states of beyond-repair from both sides of the conflict. He also spent 2.5 years as a POW in Germany. I bring this up, because when I was a teenager he told me why he didn’t believe in the biblical hell. He said, in effect, he couldn’t believe in a ‘father’ who sent his children to everlasting torment. I immediately saw the sense in his argument and I rejected the biblical god from that day on. This is the same man, I should point out, who believed it was his duty that I should have a Christian education. I thank him for that, otherwise I’d know nothing about it. When I was young I believed everything I was taught, which perversely made it easier to reject when I started questioning things. I know many people who had the same experience. The more they believed, the stronger their rejection.
I recently watched an excellent 3 part series, available on YouTube, called Testing God, which is really a discussion about science and religion. It was made by the UK’s Channel 4 in 2001, and includes some celebrity names in science, like Roger Penrose, Paul Davies and Richard Dawkins, and theologians as well; in particular, theologians who had become, or been, scientists.
In the last episode they interviewed someone who suffered horrendously in the War – he was German, and a victim of the fire-storm bombing. Contrary to many who have had similar experiences he found God, whereas, before, he’d been an atheist. But his idea of God is of someone who is patiently waiting for us.
I’ve long argued that God is subjective not objective. If humans are the only connection between the Universe and God, then, without humans, there is no reason for God to exist. There is no doubt in my mind that God is a projection, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many variants. Xenophanes, who lived in the 5th century BC, famously said:
The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,
While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.
Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,
And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods
Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape
Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.
At the risk of offending people even further, the idea that the God one finds in oneself is the Creator of the Universe is a non sequitur. My point is that there are two concepts of God which are commonly conflated. God as a Creator and God as a mystic experience, and there is no reason to believe that they are one and the same. In fact, the God as experience is unique to the person who has it, whilst God as Creator is, by definition, outside of space and time. One does not logically follow from the other.
In another YouTube video altogether, I watched an interview with Freeman Dyson on science and religion. He argues that they are quite separate and there is only conflict when people try to adapt religion to science or science to religion. In fact, he is critical of Einstein because Dyson believes that Einstein made science a religion. Einstein was influenced by Spinoza and would have argued, I believe, that the laws of physics are God.
John Barrow in one his books (Pi in the Sky) half-seriously suggests that the traditional God could be replaced by mathematics.
This brings me to a joke, which I’ve told elsewhere, but is appropriate, given the context.
What is the difference between a physicist and a mathematician?
A physicist studies the laws that God chose for the Universe to obey.
A mathematician studies the laws that God has to obey.
Einstein, in a letter to a friend, once asked the rhetorical question: Do you think God had a choice in creating the laws of the Universe?
I expect that’s unanswerable, but I would argue that if God created mathematics he had no choice. It’s not difficult to see that God can’t make a prime number non-prime, nor can he change the value of pi. To put it more succinctly, God can’t exist without mathematics, but mathematics can exist without God.
In light of this, I expect Freeman Dyson would accuse me of the same philosophical faux pas as Einstein.
As for hell, it’s a cultural artefact, a mental construct devised to manipulate people on a political scale. An anachronism at best and a perverse psychological contrivance at worst.
I was reminded of the cultural difference between America and Australia, when it comes to religion. A difference I was very aware of when I lived and worked in America over a combined period of 9 months, including New Jersey, Texas and California.
It’s hard to imagine any mainstream magazine or newspaper having this discussion in Australia, or, if they did, it would be more academic. I was in the US post 9/11 – in fact, I landed in New York the night before. I remember reading an editorial in a newspaper where people were arguing about whether the victims of the attack would go to heaven or not. I thought: how ridiculous. In the end, someone quoted from the Bible, as if that resolved all arguments – even more ridiculous, from my perspective.
I remember reading in an altogether different context someone criticising a doctor for facilitating prayer meetings in a Jewish hospital because the people weren’t praying to Jesus, so their prayers would be ineffective. This was a cultural shock to me. No one discussed these issues or had these arguments in Australian media. At least, not in mainstream media, be it conservative or liberal.
Reading Cunningham’s article reminded me of all this because he talks about how real hell is for many people. To be fair, he also talks about how hell has been sidelined in secular societies. In Australia, people don’t discuss their religious views that much, so one can’t be sure what people really believe. But I was part of a generation that all but rejected institutionalised religion. I’ve met many people from succeeding generations who have no knowledge of biblical stories, whereas for me, it was simply part of one’s education.
One of the best ‘modern’ examples of hell or the underworld I found was in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novel series. It’s arguably the best graphic novel series written by anyone, though I’m sure aficionados of the medium may beg to differ. Gaiman borrowed freely from a range of mythologies, including Orpheus, the Bible (in particular the story of Cain and Abel) and even Shakespeare. His hero has to go to Hell and gets out by answering a riddle from its caretaker, the details of which I’ve long forgotten, but I remember thinking it to be one of those gems that writers of fiction (like me) envy.
Gaiman also co-wrote a book with Terry Pratchett called Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter (1990) which is a great deal of fun. The premise, as described in Wikipedia: ‘The book is a comedy about the birth of the son of Satan, the coming of the End Times.’ Both authors are English, which possibly allows them a sense of irreverence that many Americans would find hard to manage. I might be wrong, but it seems to me that Americans take their religion way more seriously than the rest of us English-speaking nations, and this is reflected in their media.
And this brings me back to Cunningham’s article because it’s written in a cultural context that I simply don’t share. And I feel that’s the crux of this issue. Religion and all its mental constructs are cultural, and hell is nothing if not a mental construct.
My own father, whom I’ve written about before, witnessed hell first hand. He was in the Field Ambulance Corp in WW2 so he retrieved bodies in various states of beyond-repair from both sides of the conflict. He also spent 2.5 years as a POW in Germany. I bring this up, because when I was a teenager he told me why he didn’t believe in the biblical hell. He said, in effect, he couldn’t believe in a ‘father’ who sent his children to everlasting torment. I immediately saw the sense in his argument and I rejected the biblical god from that day on. This is the same man, I should point out, who believed it was his duty that I should have a Christian education. I thank him for that, otherwise I’d know nothing about it. When I was young I believed everything I was taught, which perversely made it easier to reject when I started questioning things. I know many people who had the same experience. The more they believed, the stronger their rejection.
I recently watched an excellent 3 part series, available on YouTube, called Testing God, which is really a discussion about science and religion. It was made by the UK’s Channel 4 in 2001, and includes some celebrity names in science, like Roger Penrose, Paul Davies and Richard Dawkins, and theologians as well; in particular, theologians who had become, or been, scientists.
In the last episode they interviewed someone who suffered horrendously in the War – he was German, and a victim of the fire-storm bombing. Contrary to many who have had similar experiences he found God, whereas, before, he’d been an atheist. But his idea of God is of someone who is patiently waiting for us.
I’ve long argued that God is subjective not objective. If humans are the only connection between the Universe and God, then, without humans, there is no reason for God to exist. There is no doubt in my mind that God is a projection, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many variants. Xenophanes, who lived in the 5th century BC, famously said:
The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,
While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.
Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,
And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods
Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape
Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.
At the risk of offending people even further, the idea that the God one finds in oneself is the Creator of the Universe is a non sequitur. My point is that there are two concepts of God which are commonly conflated. God as a Creator and God as a mystic experience, and there is no reason to believe that they are one and the same. In fact, the God as experience is unique to the person who has it, whilst God as Creator is, by definition, outside of space and time. One does not logically follow from the other.
In another YouTube video altogether, I watched an interview with Freeman Dyson on science and religion. He argues that they are quite separate and there is only conflict when people try to adapt religion to science or science to religion. In fact, he is critical of Einstein because Dyson believes that Einstein made science a religion. Einstein was influenced by Spinoza and would have argued, I believe, that the laws of physics are God.
John Barrow in one his books (Pi in the Sky) half-seriously suggests that the traditional God could be replaced by mathematics.
This brings me to a joke, which I’ve told elsewhere, but is appropriate, given the context.
What is the difference between a physicist and a mathematician?
A physicist studies the laws that God chose for the Universe to obey.
A mathematician studies the laws that God has to obey.
Einstein, in a letter to a friend, once asked the rhetorical question: Do you think God had a choice in creating the laws of the Universe?
I expect that’s unanswerable, but I would argue that if God created mathematics he had no choice. It’s not difficult to see that God can’t make a prime number non-prime, nor can he change the value of pi. To put it more succinctly, God can’t exist without mathematics, but mathematics can exist without God.
In light of this, I expect Freeman Dyson would accuse me of the same philosophical faux pas as Einstein.
As for hell, it’s a cultural artefact, a mental construct devised to manipulate people on a political scale. An anachronism at best and a perverse psychological contrivance at worst.
Thursday, 24 January 2019
Understanding Einstein’s special theory of relativity
In imagining a Sci-Fi scenario, I found a simple way of describing, if not explaining, Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
Imagine if a flight to the moon was no different to flying half way round the world in a contemporary airliner. In my scenario, the ‘shuttle’ would use an anti-gravity drive that allows high accelerations without killing its occupants with inertial forces. In other words, it would accelerate at hyper-speeds without anyone feeling it. I even imagined this when I was in high school, believe it or not.
The craft would still not be able to break the speed of light but it would travel fast enough that relativistic effects would be observable, both by the occupants and anyone remaining on the Earth or at its destination, the Moon.
So what are those relativistic effects? There is a very simple equation for velocity, and this is the only equation I will use to supplement my description.
Where v is the velocity, s is the distance travelled and t is the time or duration it takes. You can’t get much simpler than that. Note that s and t have an inverse relationship: if s gets larger, v increases, but if t gets larger, v decreases.
But it also means that for v to remain constant, if s gets smaller then so must t.
For the occupants of the shuttle, getting to the moon in such a short time means that, for them, the distance has shrunk. It normally takes about 3 days to get to the Moon (using current technology), so let’s say we manage it in 10 hrs instead. I haven’t done the calculations, because it depends on what speeds are attained and I’m trying to provide a qualitative, even intuitive, explanation rather than a technical one. The point is that if the occupants measured the distance using some sort of range finder, they’d find it was measurably less than if they did it using a range finder on Earth or on the Moon. It also means that whatever clocks they were carrying (including their own heartbeats) they would show that the duration was less, completely consistent with the equation above.
For the people on the Moon awaiting their arrival, or those on Earth left behind, the duration would be consistent with the distance they would measure independently of the craft, which means the distance would be whatever it was all of the time (allowing for small variances created by any elliptic eccentricity in its orbit). That means they would expect the occupants’ clocks to be the same as theirs. So when they see the discrepancy in the clocks it can only mean that time elapsed slower for the shuttle occupants compared to the moon’s inhabitants.
Now, many of you reading this will see a conundrum if not a flaw in my description. Einstein’s special theory of relativity infers that for the occupants of the shuttle, the clocks of the Moon and Earth occupants should also have slowed down, but when they disembark, they notice that they haven’t. That’s because there is an asymmetry inherent in this scenario. The shuttle occupants had to accelerate and decelerate to make the journey, whereas the so-called stationary observers didn’t. This is the same for the famous twin paradox.
Note that from the shuttle occupants’ perspective, the distance is shorter than the moon and Earth inhabitants’ measurements; therefore so is the time. But from the perspective of the moon and Earth inhabitants, the distance is unchanged but the time duration has shortened for the shuttle occupants compared to their own timekeeping. And that is special relativity theory in a nutshell.
Footnote: If you watch videos explaining the twin paradox, they emphasise that it’s not the acceleration that makes the difference (because it’s not part of the Lorentz transformation). But the acceleration and deceleration is what creates the asymmetry that one ‘moved’ respect to another that was ‘stationary’. In the scenario above, the entire solar system doesn’t accelerate and decelerate with respect to the shuttle, which would be absurd. This is my exposition on the twin paradox.
Addendum 1: Here is an attempted explanation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which is slightly more esoteric.
Addendum 2: I’ve done a rough calculation and the differences would be negligible, but if I changed the destination to Mars, the difference in distances would be in the order of 70,000 kilometres, but the time difference would be only in the order of 10 seconds. You could, of course, make the journey closer to lightspeed so the effects are more obvious.
Addendum 3: I’ve read the chapter on the twin paradox in Jim Al-Khalili’s book, Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics. He points out that during the Apollo missions to the moon, the astronauts actually aged more (by nanoseconds) because the time increase by leaving Earth’s gravity was greater than any special relativistic effects experienced over the week-long return trip. Al-Khalili also explains that the twin who makes the journey, endures less time because the distance is shorter for them (as I expounded above). But, contrary to the YouTube lectures (that I viewed) he claims that it’s the acceleration and deceleration creating general relativistic effects that creates the asymmetry.
Imagine if a flight to the moon was no different to flying half way round the world in a contemporary airliner. In my scenario, the ‘shuttle’ would use an anti-gravity drive that allows high accelerations without killing its occupants with inertial forces. In other words, it would accelerate at hyper-speeds without anyone feeling it. I even imagined this when I was in high school, believe it or not.
The craft would still not be able to break the speed of light but it would travel fast enough that relativistic effects would be observable, both by the occupants and anyone remaining on the Earth or at its destination, the Moon.
So what are those relativistic effects? There is a very simple equation for velocity, and this is the only equation I will use to supplement my description.
v = s/t
Where v is the velocity, s is the distance travelled and t is the time or duration it takes. You can’t get much simpler than that. Note that s and t have an inverse relationship: if s gets larger, v increases, but if t gets larger, v decreases.
But it also means that for v to remain constant, if s gets smaller then so must t.
For the occupants of the shuttle, getting to the moon in such a short time means that, for them, the distance has shrunk. It normally takes about 3 days to get to the Moon (using current technology), so let’s say we manage it in 10 hrs instead. I haven’t done the calculations, because it depends on what speeds are attained and I’m trying to provide a qualitative, even intuitive, explanation rather than a technical one. The point is that if the occupants measured the distance using some sort of range finder, they’d find it was measurably less than if they did it using a range finder on Earth or on the Moon. It also means that whatever clocks they were carrying (including their own heartbeats) they would show that the duration was less, completely consistent with the equation above.
For the people on the Moon awaiting their arrival, or those on Earth left behind, the duration would be consistent with the distance they would measure independently of the craft, which means the distance would be whatever it was all of the time (allowing for small variances created by any elliptic eccentricity in its orbit). That means they would expect the occupants’ clocks to be the same as theirs. So when they see the discrepancy in the clocks it can only mean that time elapsed slower for the shuttle occupants compared to the moon’s inhabitants.
Now, many of you reading this will see a conundrum if not a flaw in my description. Einstein’s special theory of relativity infers that for the occupants of the shuttle, the clocks of the Moon and Earth occupants should also have slowed down, but when they disembark, they notice that they haven’t. That’s because there is an asymmetry inherent in this scenario. The shuttle occupants had to accelerate and decelerate to make the journey, whereas the so-called stationary observers didn’t. This is the same for the famous twin paradox.
Note that from the shuttle occupants’ perspective, the distance is shorter than the moon and Earth inhabitants’ measurements; therefore so is the time. But from the perspective of the moon and Earth inhabitants, the distance is unchanged but the time duration has shortened for the shuttle occupants compared to their own timekeeping. And that is special relativity theory in a nutshell.
Footnote: If you watch videos explaining the twin paradox, they emphasise that it’s not the acceleration that makes the difference (because it’s not part of the Lorentz transformation). But the acceleration and deceleration is what creates the asymmetry that one ‘moved’ respect to another that was ‘stationary’. In the scenario above, the entire solar system doesn’t accelerate and decelerate with respect to the shuttle, which would be absurd. This is my exposition on the twin paradox.
Addendum 1: Here is an attempted explanation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which is slightly more esoteric.
Addendum 2: I’ve done a rough calculation and the differences would be negligible, but if I changed the destination to Mars, the difference in distances would be in the order of 70,000 kilometres, but the time difference would be only in the order of 10 seconds. You could, of course, make the journey closer to lightspeed so the effects are more obvious.
Addendum 3: I’ve read the chapter on the twin paradox in Jim Al-Khalili’s book, Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics. He points out that during the Apollo missions to the moon, the astronauts actually aged more (by nanoseconds) because the time increase by leaving Earth’s gravity was greater than any special relativistic effects experienced over the week-long return trip. Al-Khalili also explains that the twin who makes the journey, endures less time because the distance is shorter for them (as I expounded above). But, contrary to the YouTube lectures (that I viewed) he claims that it’s the acceleration and deceleration creating general relativistic effects that creates the asymmetry.
Saturday, 12 January 2019
Are natural laws reality?
In a not-so-recent post, I mentioned a letter I wrote to Philosophy Now challenging a throwaway remark by Raymond Tallis in his regular column called Tallis in Wonderland. As I said in that post, I have a lot of respect for Tallis but we disagree on what physics means. Like a lot of 20th Century philosophers, he challenges the very idea of mathematically determined natural laws. George Lakoff (a linguist) is another who comes to mind, though I’m reluctant to put Tallis and Lakoff in the same philosophical box. I expect Tallis has more respect for science and philosophy in general, than Lakoff has. But both of them, I believe, would see our ‘discovery’ of natural laws as ‘projections’ and their mathematical representation as metaphorical.
There is an aspect of this that would seem to support their point of view, and that’s the fact that our discoveries are never complete. We can always find circumstances where the laws don’t apply or new laws are required. The most obvious examples are Einstein’s general theory of relativity replacing Newton’s universal theory of gravity, and quantum mechanics replacing Newtonian mechanics.
I’ve discussed these before, but I’ll repeat myself because it’s important to understand why and how these differences arise. One of the conditions that Einstein set himself when he created his new theory of gravity was that it reduced to Newton’s theory when relativistic effects were negligible. This feat is quite astounding when one considers that the mathematics, involved in both theories, appear on the surface, to have little in common.
In respect to quantum mechanics, I contend that it is distinct from classical physics and the mathematics reflects that. I should point out that no one else agrees with this view (to my knowledge) except Freeman Dyson.
Newtonian mechanics has other limitations as well. In regard to predicting the orbits of the planets, it quickly becomes apparent that as one increases the number of bodies the predictions become more impossible over longer periods of time, and this has nothing to do with relativity. As Jeremy Lent pointed out in The Patterning Instinct, Newtonian classical physics doesn’t really work for the real world, long term, and has been largely replaced by chaos theory. Both classical and quantum physics are largely ‘linear’, whereas nature appears to be persistently non-linear. This means that the Universe is unpredictable and I’ve discussed this in some detail elsewhere.
Nature obeys different rules at different levels. The curious thing is that we always believe that we’ve just about discovered everything there is to know, then we discover a whole new layer of reality. The Universe is worlds within worlds. Our comprehension of those worlds is largely dependent on our knowledge of mathematics.
Some people (like Gregory Chaitin and Stephen Wolfram) even think that there is something akin to computer code underpinning the entire Universe, but I don’t. Computers can’t deal with chaotic non-linear phenomena because one needs to calculate to infinity to get the initial conditions that determine the phenomenon’s ultimate fate. That’s why even the location of the solar system’s planets are not mathematically guaranteed.
Below is a draft of the letter I wrote to Philosophy Now in response to Raymond Tallis’s scepticism about natural laws. It’s not the one I sent.
Quantities actually exist in the real world, in nature, and they come in specific ratios and relationships to each other; hence the 'natural laws'. They are not fictions, we did not make them up, they are not products of our imaginations.
Having said that, the wave function in quantum mechanics is a product of Schrodinger's imagination, and some people argue that it is a fiction. Nevertheless, it forms the basis of QED (quantum electrodynamics) which is the most successful empirically verified scientific theory to date, so they may actually be real; it's debatable. Einstein's field equations, based on tensors, are also arguably a product of his imagination, but, according to Einstein's own admission, the mathematics determined his conclusion that space-time is curved, not the other way around. Also his famous equation, E= mc2, is mathematically derived from his special theory of relativity and was later confirmed by experimental evidence. So sometimes, in physics, the map is discovered before the terrain.
The last line is a direct reference to Tallis’s own throwaway line that mathematical physicists tend to ‘confuse the map for the terrain’.
There is an aspect of this that would seem to support their point of view, and that’s the fact that our discoveries are never complete. We can always find circumstances where the laws don’t apply or new laws are required. The most obvious examples are Einstein’s general theory of relativity replacing Newton’s universal theory of gravity, and quantum mechanics replacing Newtonian mechanics.
I’ve discussed these before, but I’ll repeat myself because it’s important to understand why and how these differences arise. One of the conditions that Einstein set himself when he created his new theory of gravity was that it reduced to Newton’s theory when relativistic effects were negligible. This feat is quite astounding when one considers that the mathematics, involved in both theories, appear on the surface, to have little in common.
In respect to quantum mechanics, I contend that it is distinct from classical physics and the mathematics reflects that. I should point out that no one else agrees with this view (to my knowledge) except Freeman Dyson.
Newtonian mechanics has other limitations as well. In regard to predicting the orbits of the planets, it quickly becomes apparent that as one increases the number of bodies the predictions become more impossible over longer periods of time, and this has nothing to do with relativity. As Jeremy Lent pointed out in The Patterning Instinct, Newtonian classical physics doesn’t really work for the real world, long term, and has been largely replaced by chaos theory. Both classical and quantum physics are largely ‘linear’, whereas nature appears to be persistently non-linear. This means that the Universe is unpredictable and I’ve discussed this in some detail elsewhere.
Nature obeys different rules at different levels. The curious thing is that we always believe that we’ve just about discovered everything there is to know, then we discover a whole new layer of reality. The Universe is worlds within worlds. Our comprehension of those worlds is largely dependent on our knowledge of mathematics.
Some people (like Gregory Chaitin and Stephen Wolfram) even think that there is something akin to computer code underpinning the entire Universe, but I don’t. Computers can’t deal with chaotic non-linear phenomena because one needs to calculate to infinity to get the initial conditions that determine the phenomenon’s ultimate fate. That’s why even the location of the solar system’s planets are not mathematically guaranteed.
Below is a draft of the letter I wrote to Philosophy Now in response to Raymond Tallis’s scepticism about natural laws. It’s not the one I sent.
Quantities actually exist in the real world, in nature, and they come in specific ratios and relationships to each other; hence the 'natural laws'. They are not fictions, we did not make them up, they are not products of our imaginations.
Having said that, the wave function in quantum mechanics is a product of Schrodinger's imagination, and some people argue that it is a fiction. Nevertheless, it forms the basis of QED (quantum electrodynamics) which is the most successful empirically verified scientific theory to date, so they may actually be real; it's debatable. Einstein's field equations, based on tensors, are also arguably a product of his imagination, but, according to Einstein's own admission, the mathematics determined his conclusion that space-time is curved, not the other way around. Also his famous equation, E= mc2, is mathematically derived from his special theory of relativity and was later confirmed by experimental evidence. So sometimes, in physics, the map is discovered before the terrain.
The last line is a direct reference to Tallis’s own throwaway line that mathematical physicists tend to ‘confuse the map for the terrain’.
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