The confessions of a self-styled traveller in the world of ideas

Every now and then, on very rare occasions, you have a memory or a feeling that was so long ago that it feels almost foreign, like it was experienced by someone else. And, possibly it was, as I’m no longer the same person, either physically or in personality.

This particular memory was when I was a teenager and I was aflame with an idealism. It came to me, just today, while I was walking alongside a creek bed, so I’m not sure I can get it back now. It was when I believed I could pursue a career in science, and, in particular, physics. It was completely at odds with every other aspect of my life. At that time, I had very poor social skills and zero self-esteem. Looking back, it seems arrogant, but when you’re young you’re entitled to dream beyond your horizons, otherwise you don’t try.

This blog effectively demonstrates both the extent of my knowledge and the limits of my knowledge, in the half century since. I’ve been most fortunate to work with some very clever people. In fact, I’ve spent my whole working life with people cleverer than me, so I have no delusions.

I consider myself lucky to have lived a mediocre life. What do I mean by mediocre? Well, I’ve never been homeless, and I’ve never gone hungry and I’ve never been unable to pay my bills. I’m not one to take all that for granted; I think there is a good deal of luck involved in avoiding all of those pitfalls. Likewise, I believe I’m lucky not to be famous; I wouldn’t want my life under a microscope, whereby the smallest infraction of society’s rules could have me blamed and shamed on the world stage.

I’ve said previously that the people we admire most are those who seem to be able to live without a facade. I’m not one of those. My facade is that I’m clever: ever since my early childhood, I liked to spruik my knowledge in an effort to impress people, especially adults, and largely succeeded. I haven’t stopped, and this blog is arguably an extension of that impetus. But I will admit to a curiosity which was manifest from a very young age (pre high school), and that’s what keeps me engaged in the world of ideas. The internet has been most efficacious in this endeavour, though I’m also an avid reader of books and magazines, in the sciences, in particular.

But I also have a secret life in the world of fiction. And fiction is the best place to have a secret life. ELVENE is no secret, but it was written almost 2 decades ago. It was unusual in that it was ‘popular’. By popular, I don’t mean it was read by a multitude (it unequivocally wasn’t), but it was universally liked, like a ‘popular’ song. It had a dichotomous world: indigenous and futuristic. This was years before James Cameron’s Avatar, and a completely different storyline. I received accolades like, ‘I enjoyed every page’ and ‘I didn’t want it to end’ and ‘it practically played out like a movie in my head’.

ELVENE was an aberration – a one-off – but I don’t mind, seriously. My fiction has become increasingly dystopian. The advantage of sci-fi (I call mine, science-fantasy) is that you can create what-if worlds. In fact, an Australian literary scholar, Peter Nicholls, created The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and a TV doco was made of him called The What If Man.

Anyway, you can imagine isolated worlds, which evolve their own culture and government, not unlike what our world was like before sea and air travel compressed it. So one can imagine something akin to frontier territories where democracy is replaced by autocracy that can either be beneficiary or oppressive or something in between. So I have an autocracy, where the dictator limits travel both on and off his world. Where clones are exploited to become sex workers and people who live there become accustomed to this culture. In other words, it’s not that different to cultures in our past (and some might say, present). The dictator is less Adolf Hitler and more Donald Trump, though that wasn’t deliberate. Like all my characters, he takes on a life of his own and evolves in ways I don’t always anticipate. He’s not evil per se, but he knows how to manipulate people and he demands absolute loyalty, which is yet to be tested.

The thing is that you go where the story and the characters take you, and sometimes they take you into dark territory. But in the dark you look for light. “There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in” (Leonard Cohen). I confess I like moral dilemmas and I feel, I’ve not only created a cognitive dissonance for one of my characters, but, possibly, for myself as a writer. (Graham Greene was the master of the moral dilemma, but he’s in another class.)

Last year I saw a play put on by my good friend, Elizabeth Bradley, The Woman in the Window, for Canberra REP. It includes a dystopian future that features sex workers as an integral part of the society. It was a surprise to see someone else addressing a similar scenario. The writer was Kiwi, Alma De Groen, and she juxtaposed history (the dissident poet, Anna Akhmatova in Stalin’s Russia) with a dystopian future Australia.

I take a risk by having female protagonists prominent in all my fiction. It’s a risk because there is a lot of controversy about so-called ‘culture appropriation’. I increase that risk by portraying relationships from my female protagonists’ perspectives. However, there is always a sense that they all exist independently of me, which one can only appreciate if you willingly enter a secret world of fiction.

Australia’s bush fires; 2019-2020

The one word that was used over and over again to describe this ongoing event over a period of 4-5 months was ‘unprecedented’. Australia is a continent unique in the world, not just because of its fauna and flora, but also because of its landscape and its weather. 

We are the second driest continent in the world (after Antarctica) and our river systems are unique. In the northern hemisphere, ‘flow ratios’ (maximum to average flows) for rivers and natural waterways are in the order of 10 to 1, but in Australia they are in the order of 100 to 1. We have the largest overflows on our dams compared to other countries. We are a country of droughts and floods, and bush fires are a part of the environment ever since I can remember in my half a century (and more) of living here.

Having said all that, in the 200 plus years since 'White European settlement’, no one had witnessed anything of this magnitude and ferocity in Australia, over this period of time and over such a large area of the country. ‘Unprecedented’ is the absolutely right word to describe this event.

Personally, I know of no one who was directly impacted by the fires. Correction: I know of one person who sustained property damage and whose business was affected, but who experienced no serious loss. I spent the Christmas, New Year period in an area directly affected called the Southern Highlands of NSW (it gets a special mention in the imbedded video) and I saw firsthand the aftermath of a very small part of this whole catastrophe. Also, I have a niece who works full time in the RFS (Rural Fire Service) in NSW. She works in logistics, and I didn’t see her this Christmas.

One has to make special mention of the people, many of whom are unpaid volunteers, we call the ‘fireys’ who risk their lives to save people and their property. I can’t watch this video without ‘tearing up’ in places. Once you start watching, you’ll find it very compelling viewing, and you’ll find it hard, if not impossible, to stop watching for its 48 min duration.

Four Corners is a renowned investigative programme in Australia that has won numerous awards for excellence in TV journalism. The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) has taken the unusual step of posting this episode on YouTube the day after it went to air (3 Feb 2020). Normally, you can’t view this outside Australia, but this is far too important for the world not to see.

I hope this is a turning point in the world’s consciousness on the subject of climate change. It’s a contentious subject, even in Australia, even after this event, but I’ve expressed my views on it, on this blog, as early as a decade ago.

This post is directly relevant to my previous post, if you haven’t read it.

Our heritage; our responsibility

I was going to post this on FaceBook, as it's especially relevant to current events happening right across Australia: unprecedented bush fire season; like hell on Earth in some places. FB is not really a forum for philosophical discourse, but I might yet post it.

There is an overriding sensibility (not just in the West either) that Man has a special place in the scheme of things. Now, I’m going to be an existential heretic and assume that we do. We are unique in that we can intellectually grasp the very scale of the Universe and even speculate about its origins to the extent that we have a very good estimate of its age. To quote no one less than Einstein: “The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it’s comprehensible.” And the point is that it’s comprehensible because of ‘Us’.

As Jeremy Lent points out in his book, The Patterning Instinct; A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, the belief that we are made in God’s image has created a misguided notion that the Universe (and Earth, in particular) was made especially for us.

As I said in my introduction, I’m willing to go along with this, because, if we take it seriously, it has even more serious ramifications. Assuming that there is a creator God, who made ‘Man’ in ‘His’ image, then ‘He’ has bequeathed us a very special responsibility: we are the Earth’s caretakers. And, quite frankly, we’re doing a terrible job.

The irony of this situation is that it would appear that atheists take this responsibility more seriously than theists, though I’m happy to be proven wrong.

The answer to this is also in my introduction, because we have the intellectual ability to not only read the past, but predict the future. It’s our special cognitive skills in ‘comprehensibility’ that give us the ‘edge’. In other words, it is science that provides us with the means to protect our heritage. We are currently doing the exact opposite.

Unlike a lot of people, I don't claim that atheism is superior to theism or vice versa. This is just an argument to demonstrate that either position can lead to the same conclusion.

Is the Universe conscious?

This is another question on Quora, and whilst it may seem trivial, even silly, I give it a serious answer.

Because it’s something we take for granted, literally every day of our lives, I find that many discussions on consciousness tend to gloss over its preternatural, epiphenomenal qualities (for want of a better description) and are often seemingly dismissive of its very existence. So let me be blunt: without consciousness, there is no reality. For you. At all.

My views are not orthodox, even heretical, but they are consistent with what I know and with the rest of my philosophy. The question has religious overtones, but I avoid all theological references.

This is the original question:

Is the universe all knowing/conscious?

And this is my answer:

I doubt it very much. If you read books about cosmology (The Book of Universes by John D Barrow, for example) you’ll appreciate how late consciousness arrived in the Universe. According to current estimates, it’s the last 520 million years of 13.8 billion, which is less than 4% of its age.

And as Barrow explains, the Universe needs to be of the mind-boggling scale we observe to allow enough time for complex life (like us) to evolve.

Consciousness is still a mystery, despite advances made in neuroscience. In the latest issue of New Scientist (21 Sep 2019) it’s the cover story: The True Nature of Consciousness; with the attached promise: We’re Finally Cracking the Greatest Mystery of You. But when you read the article the author (neuroscientist, Michael Graziano) seems to put faith in advances in AI achieving consciousness. It’s not the first time I’ve come across this optimism, yet I think it’s misguided. I don’t believe AI will ever become conscious, because it’s not supported by the evidence.

All the examples of consciousness that we know about are dependent on life. In other words, life evolved before consciousness did. With AI, people seem to think that the reverse will happen: a machine intelligence will become conscious and therefore it will be alive. It contradicts everything we have observed to date.

It’s based on the assumption that when a machine achieves a certain level of intelligence, it will automatically become conscious. Yet many animals of so-called lower intelligence (compared to humans) have consciousness and they don’t become more conscious if they become more intelligent. Computers can already beat humans at complex games and they improve all the time, but not one of them exhibits consciousness.

Slightly off-topic but relevant, because it demonstrates that consciousness is not dependent on just acquiring more machine intelligence.

I contend that consciousness is different to every other phenomena we know about, because it has a unique relationship with time. Erwin Schrodinger in his book, What is Life? made the observation that consciousness exists in a constant present. In other words, for a conscious observer, time is always ‘now’.

What’s more, I argue that it’s the only phenomena that does – everything else we observe becomes the past as soon as it happens - just take a photo to demonstrate.

This means that, without memory, you wouldn’t know you were conscious at all and there are situations where this has happened. People have been rendered unconscious, yet continue to behave as if they’re conscious, but later have no memory of it. I believe this is because their brain effectively stopped ‘recording’.

Consciousness occupies no space, even though it appears to be the consequence of material activity – specifically, the neurons in our brains. Because it appears to have a unique relationship with time and it can’t be directly measured, I’m not averse to the idea that it exists in another dimension. In mathematics, higher dimensions are not as aberrant as we perceive them, and I’ve read somewhere that neuron activity can be ‘modelled’ in a higher mathematical dimension. This idea is very speculative and I concede too fringe-thinking for most people.

As far as the Universe goes, I like to point out that reality (for us) requires both a physical world and consciousness - without consciousness there might as well be nothing. The Universe requires consciousness to be self-realised. This is a variant on the strong anthropic principle, originally expressed by Brandon Carter.

The weak anthropic principle says that only universes containing observers can be observed, which is a tautology. The strong anthropic principle effectively says that only universes, that allow conscious observers to emerge, can exist, which is my point about the Universe requiring consciousness to be self-realised. The Universe is not teleological (if you were to rerun the Universe, you’d get a different result) but the Universe has the necessary mathematical parameters to allow sentient life to emerge, which makes it quasi-teleological.

In answer to your question, I don’t think the Universe is conscious from its inception, but it has built into its long evolutionary development the inherent capacity to produce, not only conscious observers, but observers who can grasp the means to comprehend its workings and its origins, through mathematics and science.

Why is time called a dimension when time is always now?

This is another question posted on Quora, which attracted 100+ answers, apparently, of which mine is a modest contribution.

I’m not presenting anything new here that I haven’t discussed before. But there is a benefit in polishing one’s ideas so that they are more succinctly expressed and, hopefully, easier to follow.

I should point out that, aside from my exposition on Einstein’s theories of relativity, these ideas are not orthodox: specifically, my views on QM and ‘now’.



This is a good question that I’m sure will garner a variety of answers. Even among physicists, the nature of time and our experience of it is a debatable topic. Einstein’s theories of relativity changed our understanding of time irrevocably, but possibly created more mysteries than they resolved.

The most significant revelation from Einstein’s mathematical formulations is the link between time and the finite speed of light. If the speed of light was not finite (i.e. instantaneous) then everything would happen at once. The speed of light, c, turns light into a 4th dimension (by ct) and in combination with the 3 dimensions of space creates a metric called spacetime. Whilst time and length can appear different to different observers in different frames of reference, the metric of spacetime is invariant.

You can see the dimension of time by looking at the night sky, because the stars you see are light years away. In the southern hemisphere (where I live) if you can get away from city lights, on a clear night, you can see the Magellanic clouds with the naked eye, which are over 150,000 light years away. In other words, you are looking at least 150,000 years into the past, and, in that context, time becomes a 4th dimension that you can actually see.

Because the speed of light is finite it means that everything you observe has already happened, which is why we never see the future. Einstein believed that the dimension of time was just as fixed as space and therefore the future already existed. This is called the ‘block universe’ interpretation, but quantum mechanics (QM) doesn’t support this view.

In fact, Freeman Dyson argues that QM can only describe the future, which would explain why we never actually observe a wave function (ψ), because it’s always in our future, and why we can only determine probabilities from a range of so-called superpositions. Note that only one of the superpositions becomes reality when the wave function collapses (or decoheres).

Erwin Schrodinger, in his book, What is Life? made the observation that consciousness exists in a constant ‘now’, and I contend that it’s the only thing that does. Everything else immediately becomes the past as soon as it happens, which is demonstrated every time someone takes a photograph.

In summary, the finite speed of light ensures that everything we observe is in the past which can be measured as a dimension of time. If consciousness is the only thing that exists in a constant present, then, it not only provides a continually changing reference point for past, present and future, it also explains the effect that everything is passing us by.

Universe origin theories

This is another mini-essay I posted on Quora in response to the following question(s):

Does the universe have a creator? Can the universe create itself? Is the universe cyclical? If the universe can create itself, will heat create a new universe after death?


No one can answer these questions definitively. A belief in a Creator has little to do with epistemology and more to do with cultural and religious beliefs. In other words, people find arguments, often based on known science, that support their core belief that there is a God and ‘He’ is the Creator of the Universe.

For example, it’s well known that there are dimensionless numbers that appear to be fine-tuned to allow complex life (meaning us) to exist. Jordan Ellenberg has written an excellent book called How Not to Be Wrong; The Power of Mathematical Thinking, where, among many other contentious topics, he discusses the ‘Bayesian inference of the existence of God’, whereby he shows that the Universe being a computer simulation has at least the same probability as it has being a divine intervention. He demonstrates that Bayesian statistics is heavily dependent on initial assumptions as well as data.

In conclusion, Ellenberg has this to say: As much as I love numbers, I think people ought to stick to “I don’t believe in God,” or “I do believe in God,” or just “I’m not sure”…. On this matter, math is silent.

The point is that whether there is a God or not, is not a question that science can answer, even though people on both sides of the debate use science to support their ‘belief(s)’. On the subject of Ellenberg’s book, very early on he talks about the statistical power inherent in the ‘law of large numbers’ and that ‘improbable’ and ‘impossible’ are mathematically distinct. The improbable invariably happens some where at some time, whereas the impossible has zero probability.

There are many speculative theories about the origin of the Universe. Alan Guth’s inflationary theory is the most popular, and according to Guth, could arise from ‘nothing’. He called it ‘the ultimate free lunch’. Paul Davies gives a very good account in his God and the New Physics (published over 30 years ago).

Roger Penrose argues for a cyclic universe or what he calls Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC): not one that contracts and bounces, but one that becomes full of Hawking radiation after all matter is drawn into black holes, which eventually evaporate. He argues that this would ‘reset’ the entropy of the Universe (if I understand him correctly). He discusses this in a mostly non-technical book called Cycles of Time.

Penrose won the 1988 Wolf Prize jointly with Stephen Hawking, and Hawking developed his own ‘origin cosmology’ with James Hartle, known as the Hartle-Hawking universe, whereby time was originally a 4th spatial dimension, which Hawking refers to as ‘imaginary time’ because you have to multiply it by i (√-1) to change it into ‘real time’. Basically, Hawking and Hartle argue that in the beginning there was no time (I know, it sounds like a contradiction); it’s called the ‘no boundary universe’.

So there are many possible scenarios according to some of the best and brightest in physics and cosmology. As for your last question, I don’t even know where to begin, but given how little we know about the Universe’s origins (as per above), I would say it’s unanswerable.