The Mysterious Flame by Colin McGinn, subtitled Conscious Minds in a Material World, was recommended to my by The Atheist Missionary (aka TAM) almost 2 years ago, and it’s taken me all this time to get around to reading it.
But it was well worth the effort, and I can only endorse the recommendation given by The New York Times, as quoted on the cover: “There is no better introduction to the problem of consciousness than this.” McGinn is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, with a handful of other books credited to him. Mysterious Flame was written in 1999, yet it’s not dated by other books I’ve read on this subject, and I would go so far as to say that anyone with an interest in the mind-body problem should read this book. Even if you don’t agree with him, I’m sure he has something to offer that you didn’t consider previously. At the end of the book, he also has something to say about the discipline of philosophy in general: its history and its unique position in human thought.
Most significantly, McGinn calls himself a ‘mysterian’, who is someone, like myself, as it turns out, who believes that consciousness is a mystery which we may never solve. Right from the start he addresses the two most common philosophical positions on this subject: materialism and dualism; demonstrating how they both fail. They are effectively polar opposite positions: materialism arguing that consciousness is neuronal activity full stop; and dualism arguing that consciousness is separate to the brain, albeit connected, and therefore can exist independently of the brain.
Materialism is the default position taken by scientists and dualism is the default position taken by most people even if they’re not aware of it. Most people think that ‘I’ is an entity that exists inside their head, dependent on their brain yet separate from it somehow. Many people, who have had out-of-body experiences, argue this confirms their belief. On the other hand, scientists have demonstrated how we can fool the ‘mind’ into thinking it is outside the body. I have argued elsewhere (Subjectivity, June 2009) that ‘I think’ is a tautology, because ‘I’ is your thoughts and nothing else.
McGinn acknowledges that consciousness is completely dependent on the brain but this alone doesn’t explain it. He points out that consciousness evolved relatively early in evolution and is not dependent on intelligence per se. Being more intelligent doesn’t make us more sentient than other species who also ‘feel’. He attacks the commonly held belief in the scientific community that consciousness just arises from this ‘meat’ we call a brain, and to create consciousness we merely have to duplicate this biological machine. I agree with him on this point. Not so recently (April 2011), I challenged an editorial and an article written in New Scientist inferring that sentience is an axiomatic consequence of artificial intelligence (AI): 'it’s just a matter of time before we will be forced to acknowledge it'. However, the biological evidence suggests that making AI more intelligent won’t create sentience, yet that’s exactly what most AI exponents believe. As McGinn says: ‘…sentience in general does not involve symbolic manipulation’, which is what a computer algorithm does.
McGinn argues that the problem with consciousness is that it’s non-spatial and therefore could exist in another dimension. This is not as daft as it sounds, because, as he points out, an additional dimension could exist without us knowing it and he references Edwin A. Abbott’s famous book, Flatland, to make his point. I’ve similarly argued that quantum mechanics could be explained by imagining a hidden dimension, so I’m not dismissive of this hypothesis.
The most important point that McGinn makes, in my opinion, is a fundamental one of epistemology. We humans tend to think that there is nothing that exists that is beyond our ultimate comprehension, yet there is no legitimate cognitive reason to assume that. To quote: ‘We should have the humility, and plain good sense, to admit that some things may exist without being knowable by us.’
This came up recently in an online discussion I had with Emanuel Rutten (Trying to define God, Nov. 11) who argued the opposite based on an ‘all possible worlds’ scenario. And if there were an infinite number of worlds, then Rutten’s argument would be valid. However, projecting what is possibly knowable in an infinite number of worlds to our specific world is epistemological nonsense.
As McGinn points out, most species on our planet can’t comprehend gravity or how the stars stay up in the sky or that the Earth goes around the sun – it’s beyond their cognitive abilities. Likewise there could be phenomena that are beyond our cognitive abilities, and consciousness may be one.
Roger Penrose addresses this epistemological point in Chapter 1 of Road to Reality, where he admits a ‘personal prejudice’ that everything in the natural world is within our cognitive grasp, whilst acknowledging that others don’t share his prejudice. In particular, Penrose contends that there is a Platonic mathematical realm, which is theoretically available to us without constraint (except the time to explore it), and that this Platonic realm can explain the entire physical universe. Interestingly, McGinn makes no reference to the significance of mathematics in determining the epistemological limit of our knowledge, yet I contend that this is a true limit.
Therefore, I would argue, based on this hypothetical mathematically cognitive limit, that if consciousness can’t be determined mathematically then it will remain a mystery.
Even though McGinn discusses amnesia in reference to the ‘self’, he doesn’t specifically address the fact that, without memory, there would be no ‘self’. Which is why none of us have a sense of self in our early infancy because we create no memories of it. It is memory that specifically gives us a sense of continuity of self and allows us to believe that the ‘I’ we perceive ourselves to be as an adult is the same ‘I’ we were as children.
I’ve skipped over quite a lot of McGinn’s book, obviously, but he does give arguably the best description of John Searle’s famous Chinese Room thought experiment I’ve read, without telling the reader that it is John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment.
At the end of the book, he devotes a short chapter to ‘The Unbearable Heaviness of Philosophy’ where he explains how ‘natural philosophy’ diverged from science yet they are more complementary than dichotomous. To quote McGinn again:
‘Science asks answerable questions… eliminating false theories, reducing the area of human ignorance, while philosophy seems mired in controversy, perpetually worrying at the same questions, not making the kind of progress characteristic of science.’
Many people perceive and present philosophy as the poor orphan of science in the modern age, yet I’m unsure if they will ever be completely separated or become independent. Science reveals that nature’s mysteries are endless and whilst those mysteries persist then philosophy will continue to play its role.
Right at the end of the book, McGinn makes a pertinent observation: that our DNA code contains the answer to our mystery, because consciousness is a consequence of the genetic instructions that make every sentient creature. So our genes have the information to create consciousness that consciousness itself is unable to comprehend.
Saturday 17 December 2011
Friday 25 November 2011
Dr. Noel Fitzpatrick
This is one of the most inspiring interviews I’ve heard, with an Irish vet, nonetheless. Fitzpatrick is best known for being the first vet to attach bionic legs (prostheses) to the hind quarters of a cat, called Oscar, who famously gained most of his mobility again, even to the extent of being able to scratch himself in the way that cats do. You can see how mobile he is here. He lost his legs and one of his nine lives, one would expect, when he tangled with a combine harvester in Jersey, I believe.
But Fitzpatrick has quite a lot to say on topics that go beyond veterinary science, including education, unconditional love and our relationship with animals in general.
In particular, his take on veterinary science that includes non-scientific methods, his belief that human and animal medical science would both benefit if they were done in concert, synergistically, and that the heart is just as important as the head. Fitzpatrick is one of those rare people who lives what he preaches and we could all benefit from his example.
Note: Interview is only available for a limited time.
But Fitzpatrick has quite a lot to say on topics that go beyond veterinary science, including education, unconditional love and our relationship with animals in general.
In particular, his take on veterinary science that includes non-scientific methods, his belief that human and animal medical science would both benefit if they were done in concert, synergistically, and that the heart is just as important as the head. Fitzpatrick is one of those rare people who lives what he preaches and we could all benefit from his example.
Note: Interview is only available for a limited time.
Monday 14 November 2011
Trying to define God
This post arose from a lengthy discussion I had with Emanuel Rutten, who claims he has a ‘proof’, using modal logic, that God ‘necessarily exists’. The discussion started on Rust Belt Philosophy and then transferred to Rutten’s own blog. I’m naturally wary of anyone who claims they can prove God exists with nothing but logic, because it defies all epistemological sense. You can prove mathematical conjectures or solve puzzles using logic but everything else requires evidence.
For example, string theory is the latest contender for a so-called ‘theory of everything’ (really a theory of quantum gravity) which makes some extraordinary predictions, like the universe exists in 11 dimensions, of which all but 3 of space and 1 of time are ‘rolled up’ so as to be undetectable. Now, while no one challenges the mathematics behind the theory, no one claims it’s ‘necessarily true’ because there is no evidence to date to support it.
And, whilst I admit that Rutten is much cleverer than me, I think his proof is more sophistry than philosophy, and I’ve told him so on his own blog. Rutten’s argument should really be an argument about logic not religion. If his argument didn’t contain the word ‘God’, no one would give it a second thought and, certainly, no one would take it seriously. But because his argument in logic is an argument for the existence of God, it becomes a religious argument, especially since as a result of his own defence, it becomes clear that his ‘proof’ is critically dependent on how one defines God.
Rutten defines God as both ‘personal’ (meaning sentient) and ‘first cause’. Change this definition and his proof becomes one of negation instead of necessity. In particular, if one defines God as being non-sentient (but still first cause) then God goes from being necessarily existent to impossible to exist (according to Rutten’s own defence). The reason being that a sentient God ‘knows that God exists’ in ‘some possible world’ and a non-sentient God can’t possibly know. So the difference between God necessarily existing in all possible worlds (including ours) and impossibly non-existing is whether God knows that God exists (is sentient) or not. This is the corollary from the 2 conclusions of his own argument: one saying God must necessarily exist and one saying God can’t possibly exist, depending on how God is defined. Therefore God exists but only if God knows that God exists (is sentient). This is circular.
One of the reasons that no one has ever proved that God exists is because, by definition, God is immaterial and, according to most accounts, exists outside our universe. This means that God is not amenable to the scientific method. If God exists then he, she or it, only engages with the universe through the human brain, which is why God is totally subjective, just like colour. I’ve explained this before in an earlier post (God with no ego, May 2011). Colour is purely a psychological phenomenon that only exists in some creature’s mind, but it has an external cause, which is light reflected off objects. Now some may argue that the ‘experience’ of God may also have an external cause, but the difference is that colour can be tested (even for other species) whilst there is no test for God.
An essential part of Rutten’s argument is ‘first cause’, but so-called ‘personal first cause’ can only be found in mythology. As far as science goes, the only thing we can say about first cause is that it was a quantum phenomenon and quantum phenomena are amongst the greatest mysteries of the universe. I’ve written posts expounding on cosmological theories that contend the universe is ‘something from nothing’, including Alan Guth’s inflationary model, the Hartle-Hawking model and Roger Penrose’s cyclic universe. Paul Davies in his book, God and the New Physics, expounds on Alan Guth’s ‘free lunch scenario’, explaining that ‘….all you need are the laws [of nature] – the universe can take care of itself, including its own creation.’
And this seems to be the only pre-requisite for the universe to exist: that the laws of nature, that we understand through the universal language of mathematics, must be either imminent or necessarily entailed in the universe’s own birth. Without an intelligence like ours to comprehend them, nothing in the universe would even know they exist. This leads to the possible contemplation of the ‘anthropic principle’, but that’s a topic for a future post.
In Mar. 2009, I reviewed Mario Livio’s book, Is God a Mathematician? in which Livio suggests that the Pythagoreans would have said that God is the mathematics, and that probably makes more sense than the notion of personal first cause.
Mathematics fulfills 3 of the criteria we normally assign to God: infinity, truth and independent universality. Infinity only makes sense in mathematics and, in fact, is unavoidable at every level; mathematics is the only realm where infinity appears to be at home. Mathematical truths are arguably the only objective truths that are both universal and dependable. And mathematics gives the impression of a universal independence to human thought and possibly the universe itself.
For example, string theory is the latest contender for a so-called ‘theory of everything’ (really a theory of quantum gravity) which makes some extraordinary predictions, like the universe exists in 11 dimensions, of which all but 3 of space and 1 of time are ‘rolled up’ so as to be undetectable. Now, while no one challenges the mathematics behind the theory, no one claims it’s ‘necessarily true’ because there is no evidence to date to support it.
And, whilst I admit that Rutten is much cleverer than me, I think his proof is more sophistry than philosophy, and I’ve told him so on his own blog. Rutten’s argument should really be an argument about logic not religion. If his argument didn’t contain the word ‘God’, no one would give it a second thought and, certainly, no one would take it seriously. But because his argument in logic is an argument for the existence of God, it becomes a religious argument, especially since as a result of his own defence, it becomes clear that his ‘proof’ is critically dependent on how one defines God.
Rutten defines God as both ‘personal’ (meaning sentient) and ‘first cause’. Change this definition and his proof becomes one of negation instead of necessity. In particular, if one defines God as being non-sentient (but still first cause) then God goes from being necessarily existent to impossible to exist (according to Rutten’s own defence). The reason being that a sentient God ‘knows that God exists’ in ‘some possible world’ and a non-sentient God can’t possibly know. So the difference between God necessarily existing in all possible worlds (including ours) and impossibly non-existing is whether God knows that God exists (is sentient) or not. This is the corollary from the 2 conclusions of his own argument: one saying God must necessarily exist and one saying God can’t possibly exist, depending on how God is defined. Therefore God exists but only if God knows that God exists (is sentient). This is circular.
One of the reasons that no one has ever proved that God exists is because, by definition, God is immaterial and, according to most accounts, exists outside our universe. This means that God is not amenable to the scientific method. If God exists then he, she or it, only engages with the universe through the human brain, which is why God is totally subjective, just like colour. I’ve explained this before in an earlier post (God with no ego, May 2011). Colour is purely a psychological phenomenon that only exists in some creature’s mind, but it has an external cause, which is light reflected off objects. Now some may argue that the ‘experience’ of God may also have an external cause, but the difference is that colour can be tested (even for other species) whilst there is no test for God.
An essential part of Rutten’s argument is ‘first cause’, but so-called ‘personal first cause’ can only be found in mythology. As far as science goes, the only thing we can say about first cause is that it was a quantum phenomenon and quantum phenomena are amongst the greatest mysteries of the universe. I’ve written posts expounding on cosmological theories that contend the universe is ‘something from nothing’, including Alan Guth’s inflationary model, the Hartle-Hawking model and Roger Penrose’s cyclic universe. Paul Davies in his book, God and the New Physics, expounds on Alan Guth’s ‘free lunch scenario’, explaining that ‘….all you need are the laws [of nature] – the universe can take care of itself, including its own creation.’
And this seems to be the only pre-requisite for the universe to exist: that the laws of nature, that we understand through the universal language of mathematics, must be either imminent or necessarily entailed in the universe’s own birth. Without an intelligence like ours to comprehend them, nothing in the universe would even know they exist. This leads to the possible contemplation of the ‘anthropic principle’, but that’s a topic for a future post.
In Mar. 2009, I reviewed Mario Livio’s book, Is God a Mathematician? in which Livio suggests that the Pythagoreans would have said that God is the mathematics, and that probably makes more sense than the notion of personal first cause.
Mathematics fulfills 3 of the criteria we normally assign to God: infinity, truth and independent universality. Infinity only makes sense in mathematics and, in fact, is unavoidable at every level; mathematics is the only realm where infinity appears to be at home. Mathematical truths are arguably the only objective truths that are both universal and dependable. And mathematics gives the impression of a universal independence to human thought and possibly the universe itself.
Tuesday 25 October 2011
Shame, shame, shame!!!
I managed to write an entire novel without resorting to an exclamation mark, so it’s an indication of my indignation that I’ve used them with such extravagance in the above title.
On this week’s 4 Corners programme, which provides the best investigative journalism in the country, they uncovered the extraordinary damage our government does to refugees in the name of border protection.
Former Australian of the Year, Patrick McGorry, called our detention centres ‘mental-illness factories’ and the 4 Corners programme demonstrated that beyond contention. Meanwhile, other media outlets in Australia, continue to feed the Australian public’s paranoia that refugees get a free ride at our expense. The truth is that we treat refugees, who have committed no crime, worse than the worst criminals in the country.
And this is because politicians from both of our major parties believe it’s necessary to win the xenophobic vote. Fear is always a good vote winner, which is why capital punishment in the US has the history it does. And the media also know that fear sells air-space on television and radio and print-space in newspapers, so they are more than happy to jump on the bandwagon and help the politicians manipulate public opinion.
The height of the politicians’ hypocrisy (on both sides) is that they claim they are creating a ‘deterrent’ which will stop refugees from endangering their lives by crossing the Indian Ocean in ‘leaky boats’. They don’t acknowledge the fact that people only risk their lives in such circumstances because the risk of losing one’s life by staying where they are is even greater. Many of the refugees questioned have lost close relatives to political violence, so it is not safe for them to stay in their country of origin.
The most interesting aspect of all this is that it’s only refugees who arrive by boat who are put in detention. Those who arrive by aeroplane are treated entirely differently. Why is this so? You may well ask. It’s because those who arrive by plane attract no media attention whatsoever, whereas those who arrive by boat get all the media attention and therefore must be vilified by our politicians to show how ‘tough’ they are.
It’s unbelievable that our politicians can be so morally bankrupt, but the desire to win office, and stay in office, corrupts moral principles to the worst degree. As long as the public are unaware or unempathetic to our treatment of refugees, then politicians will do nothing to uphold their charter to treat them humanely. In fact, they will do the opposite because it will win them votes.
Addendum: It’s been demonstrated by neurological investigation that when people experience emotional pain it affects the exact same part of the brain, and to the same degree, as if they experience physical pain. This is why people self-harm when they are exposed to long term emotional stress, because the physical pain becomes a substitute for the emotional pain. This seems perverse, yet it’s been known to occur with animals as well (kept in captivity in stressful conditions).
When refugees self-harm, the idiot commentators, amongst others, tell us that they are seeking attention. Mental-health professionals know better: these people are at the extremity of their sanity and our government’s polices keep pushing them over the edge. This is arguably the most shameful behaviour one can witness in a 21st Century liberal democracy.
On this week’s 4 Corners programme, which provides the best investigative journalism in the country, they uncovered the extraordinary damage our government does to refugees in the name of border protection.
Former Australian of the Year, Patrick McGorry, called our detention centres ‘mental-illness factories’ and the 4 Corners programme demonstrated that beyond contention. Meanwhile, other media outlets in Australia, continue to feed the Australian public’s paranoia that refugees get a free ride at our expense. The truth is that we treat refugees, who have committed no crime, worse than the worst criminals in the country.
And this is because politicians from both of our major parties believe it’s necessary to win the xenophobic vote. Fear is always a good vote winner, which is why capital punishment in the US has the history it does. And the media also know that fear sells air-space on television and radio and print-space in newspapers, so they are more than happy to jump on the bandwagon and help the politicians manipulate public opinion.
The height of the politicians’ hypocrisy (on both sides) is that they claim they are creating a ‘deterrent’ which will stop refugees from endangering their lives by crossing the Indian Ocean in ‘leaky boats’. They don’t acknowledge the fact that people only risk their lives in such circumstances because the risk of losing one’s life by staying where they are is even greater. Many of the refugees questioned have lost close relatives to political violence, so it is not safe for them to stay in their country of origin.
The most interesting aspect of all this is that it’s only refugees who arrive by boat who are put in detention. Those who arrive by aeroplane are treated entirely differently. Why is this so? You may well ask. It’s because those who arrive by plane attract no media attention whatsoever, whereas those who arrive by boat get all the media attention and therefore must be vilified by our politicians to show how ‘tough’ they are.
It’s unbelievable that our politicians can be so morally bankrupt, but the desire to win office, and stay in office, corrupts moral principles to the worst degree. As long as the public are unaware or unempathetic to our treatment of refugees, then politicians will do nothing to uphold their charter to treat them humanely. In fact, they will do the opposite because it will win them votes.
Addendum: It’s been demonstrated by neurological investigation that when people experience emotional pain it affects the exact same part of the brain, and to the same degree, as if they experience physical pain. This is why people self-harm when they are exposed to long term emotional stress, because the physical pain becomes a substitute for the emotional pain. This seems perverse, yet it’s been known to occur with animals as well (kept in captivity in stressful conditions).
When refugees self-harm, the idiot commentators, amongst others, tell us that they are seeking attention. Mental-health professionals know better: these people are at the extremity of their sanity and our government’s polices keep pushing them over the edge. This is arguably the most shameful behaviour one can witness in a 21st Century liberal democracy.
Saturday 22 October 2011
The dawn of the human mind
It’s an extravagant statement to make, bordering on hyperbole, yet, after seeing Werner Herzog’s documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the Chauvet cave, discovered in 1994, one struggles to find words befitting the discovery. The first thing that strikes you as soon as you see the images (in 3D) is how modern they look. You can understand why the first reaction from academia was that they were a hoax, not 34,000 years old as has been verified by carbon dating.
The significance of this film is that it will probably be the only one ever made. The caves are closed to the public, only selected scientists and academics can gain access and only at certain times of the year. The caves were hermetically sealed off by a landslide and that’s the only reason we have this preservation of ancient rock art executed during the ice age when we co-inhabited Europe with Neanderthals. I say ‘we’ because they are the common ancestors to most of the peoples in the world today. The human genome project has revealed that we all came out of Africa, including all indigenous tribal people, and Asians as well as Europeans.
One of the archaeologists, a young man with a science background, who spent 4 continuous days in the cave, tells of the emotional impact they had on him beyond his expectations. In particular, they filled his dreams with the animals he saw. He said he dreamt of lions, both depicted and real-life forms. He remarked upon the emotional and subliminal connection that they could still make with humans living over 30,000 years after they had been created. When I was a child (pre-adolescent) I used to draw animals all the time – they were my favourite subject – concordant with a fascination with animal life in general. I was fortunate enough to live near the bush (as we call it in Oz) with a creek running alongside our house that plummeted into a deep gorge, not that far from where we lived.
This connection and this fascination with wild animals is something that we’ve lost. For these people, one feels it was spiritual, and that’s not just a projection. Herzog went to a lot of trouble to place this particular artwork into a much broader context. Talking with a number of academics, it became clear that 30-40,000 years ago in ice-gripped Europe, art, in all its manifestations that we know today, flourished. In particular, there are numerous figurines, especially of the female form, and bone flutes from the same age. So we know that both graphic and sculptural art flourished as well as music, and we can assume that so did storytelling, mythmaking and religion. Many people make a connection between art and religion, and I think one can safely say that they were born at the same time. They both deal with the subconscious and our dreamworld. An archaeologist at another site, produced a bone flute made from the radius bone of a vulture with 4 holes drilled in it. He played The Star Spangled Banner (though he was obviously not American) to demonstrate that these ice-age humans used the same musical scale that we use today.
The same archaeologist, whom we met earlier in the film discussing his dreams, tells of an incident he saw in northern Australia (probably in a documentary) of an Aboriginal Elder showing someone some rock art from thousands of years earlier and explaining how it used to be maintained but now it’s not. He then proceeded to ‘touch it up’ or restore it. When the white man asked him if he was an artist. He said, no, he wasn’t the artist, the ‘spirit’ was. And this is something that all artists can identify with, like we are a medium for something beyond us, out there. This is the exact same sense that people have with religion. They were born at the same time in humanity: the dawn of the human mind.
The significance of this film is that it will probably be the only one ever made. The caves are closed to the public, only selected scientists and academics can gain access and only at certain times of the year. The caves were hermetically sealed off by a landslide and that’s the only reason we have this preservation of ancient rock art executed during the ice age when we co-inhabited Europe with Neanderthals. I say ‘we’ because they are the common ancestors to most of the peoples in the world today. The human genome project has revealed that we all came out of Africa, including all indigenous tribal people, and Asians as well as Europeans.
One of the archaeologists, a young man with a science background, who spent 4 continuous days in the cave, tells of the emotional impact they had on him beyond his expectations. In particular, they filled his dreams with the animals he saw. He said he dreamt of lions, both depicted and real-life forms. He remarked upon the emotional and subliminal connection that they could still make with humans living over 30,000 years after they had been created. When I was a child (pre-adolescent) I used to draw animals all the time – they were my favourite subject – concordant with a fascination with animal life in general. I was fortunate enough to live near the bush (as we call it in Oz) with a creek running alongside our house that plummeted into a deep gorge, not that far from where we lived.
This connection and this fascination with wild animals is something that we’ve lost. For these people, one feels it was spiritual, and that’s not just a projection. Herzog went to a lot of trouble to place this particular artwork into a much broader context. Talking with a number of academics, it became clear that 30-40,000 years ago in ice-gripped Europe, art, in all its manifestations that we know today, flourished. In particular, there are numerous figurines, especially of the female form, and bone flutes from the same age. So we know that both graphic and sculptural art flourished as well as music, and we can assume that so did storytelling, mythmaking and religion. Many people make a connection between art and religion, and I think one can safely say that they were born at the same time. They both deal with the subconscious and our dreamworld. An archaeologist at another site, produced a bone flute made from the radius bone of a vulture with 4 holes drilled in it. He played The Star Spangled Banner (though he was obviously not American) to demonstrate that these ice-age humans used the same musical scale that we use today.
The same archaeologist, whom we met earlier in the film discussing his dreams, tells of an incident he saw in northern Australia (probably in a documentary) of an Aboriginal Elder showing someone some rock art from thousands of years earlier and explaining how it used to be maintained but now it’s not. He then proceeded to ‘touch it up’ or restore it. When the white man asked him if he was an artist. He said, no, he wasn’t the artist, the ‘spirit’ was. And this is something that all artists can identify with, like we are a medium for something beyond us, out there. This is the exact same sense that people have with religion. They were born at the same time in humanity: the dawn of the human mind.
Sunday 16 October 2011
Where does time go? (in quantum mechanics)
For those who are unacquainted with my blog, I’m not a physicist, or academic of any kind; I’m a self-confessed dilettante. I’ve written on this topic before (The enigma we call time, Jul. 2010) and it’s one of my more popular posts, based on an article I read in Scientific American (June 2010).
This time I’ve been inspired by last week’s New Scientist (8 October, 2011), which was a ‘Special issue’ on TIME; The Most Mysterious Dimension of All. They cover every aspect of time, by various authors, from the age of the universe to our circadian rhythms and everything in between and even beyond. But there were 2 essays in particular that caught my attention and led me to revisit this topic from 12 months ago.
Firstly, a discussion on Time’s Arrow by Amanda Gefter, who points out that, whilst the 2nd law of thermodynamics provides our only theoretical link with time’s arrow, because entropy must always increase, it’s not the solution: ‘If only it were so easy. Unfortunately, the second law does not really explain the arrow of time.’
The point is that entropy is statistical, as Schrodinger pointed out in What is Life? (refer my post, Nov. 2009) as is most of physics, but it’s not a deterministic law like, for example, Einstein’s general theory of relativity. So even though we can say that overall entropy doesn’t go backwards any more than time does, we can’t provide a mathematical relationship that derives time from entropy. In my post on time last year I said: ‘It is entropy that apparently drives the arrow of time…’ Gefter’s exposition suggests that I might be overstating the case.
Gefter goes on to say: ‘The only way to explain the arrow of time, then, is to assume that the universe just happened to start out in an extremely unlikely low entropy state.’ I’ve discussed this before when I reviewed Roger Penrose’s book, Cycles of Time (Jan. 2011), who spends a great deal of space expounding on the significance of the second law to the universe’s entire history, including its future. This is a bit off-topic to my intended subject, so I won’t dwell on it, but, as Gefter points out, the standard explanation for the universe’s initial low entropy is inflationary theory. But then she adds this caveat: ‘Inflation seems to solve the dilemma. On closer inspection, however, it only pushes the problem back.’ In other words, inflation itself must have had a low entropy and the standard explanation is that there were multiple inflations creating a multiverse.
Einstein’s relativity theories tell us that time is observer-dependent, yet entropy and its role in the evolution of the universe suggests that there is an ‘entropic’ time that governs the universe’s entire history. Then there is quantum mechanics that has its own time anomalies in defiance of common sense and everyday experience (see below).
I’ve recently started reading Professor Lisa Randall’s book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door; How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World. This is an excellent book, from what I’ve read thus far, for anyone wanting an understanding of how scientists think and how science works, without equations and esoteric prose. In her introduction, she tells us that after giving guest lectures for college students, the most common question is not about physics, but how old she is. She’s young, blonde and attractive: the complete antithesis of the stereotypical physicist. In her first chapter she explains the importance of scale in physics and how different laws, and therefore different equations, are applied according to the scale of the world one is examining. I’ve written about this myself in a post (May 2009), which is also one of my more popular ones. Obviously, Randall is far better qualified to expound on this than me.
She mentions, in passing, a movie, What the Bleep do we know? to illustrate the error in scaling quantum mechanical phenomena up to human scale and expecting the same rules to apply. I remember when this movie came out and thinking what a disservice it did to science and how it misrepresented science to a scientifically illiterate audience. I remember having to explain to friends of mine, how, despite the credentials of the people interviewed, it wasn’t science at all. It was just as much fantasy as my own fiction, perhaps more so.
And this finally brings me to the second essay I read in New Scientist, titled, Countdown to the Theory of Everything, because it is ‘time’ that creates the conceptual and theoretical hurdle to a scientific marriage between Einstein’s theory of general relativity (gravity) and quantum mechanics. And this is what scientists specifically mean when they refer to a ‘theory of everything’. To quote Amanda Gefter again: ‘…to unite general relativity with quantum mechanics, we need to work with a single view of time. But which one is the right one?’ And then she goes on to quote various exponents on the topic, like Carlo Rovelli at the Centre for Theoretical Physics at Marseilles: “For me, the solution to the problem is that at the fundamental level of nature, there is no time at all.”
And this led me to contemplate how the dimension of time effectively disappears in many quantum phenomena, and at best, becomes an anomaly. In both quantum tunneling and entanglement, time becomes inconsequential. Also, superposition, which is just as difficult to conceptualise as any other quantum phenomenon, actually makes sense if time does not exist: something exists everywhere at once.
In May this year, I wrote an exposition on Schrodinger’s equation, aimed at physics students, which has since become my most popular post. Now Schrodinger’s equation, in its most common form, is a time-dependent wave function, which belies the ideas that I’ve just outlined above. But Schrodinger’s equation entails the paradox that lies at the heart of quantum mechanics and time is part of that paradox. As Gefter points out: ‘Unlike general relativity, where time is contained within the system, quantum mechanics requires a clock that sits outside the system…’ The time in Schrodinger’s equation is the observer’s time and his equation tells us that the particle or photon that the wave function describes, actually ‘permeates all space’, to quote Richard Elwes in MATHS 1001. And as the standard, or Copenhagen, interpretation of quantum mechanics tells us, the observer is a key participant because it’s their measurement or observation that brings the particle or photon into the real world. At best, Schrodinger’s continuous time-dependent wave function can only give us a probability of its position in the real world, albeit an accurate probability.
Schrodinger realised that his equation had to incorporate complex algebra otherwise it didn’t work. I find it curious that only quantum mechanics requires imaginary numbers (square route of -1, i ). What’s curious is that i is not a number per se: you can’t count or quantify anything with i ; it’s more like a dimension. To quote Elwes again: ‘…our human minds are incapable of visualizing the 4-dimensional graph that a complex function demands.’ This is because the imaginary plane is orthogonal to the real number plane. Schrodinger’s equation only relates to the real world when you square the modulus of his wave function and get rid of the imaginary numbers.
I’ve argued in a previous post (Jun. 2011) that quantum mechanics infers a Platonic world like a substratum to the ‘classical physical’ world that we are more familiar with. Is it possible that in this world time does not exist? Penrose, in Cycles of Time, points out that we need mass for time to exist. This is because photons have zero time, which is why nothing can travel faster than light. However a photon in the real world has energy, which means it has a frequency, which means there must be time. Schrodinger’s equation includes energy times a wave function so all aspects are entailed in the equation. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle also demonstrates that there is a clear relationship between energy and time, in exactly the same way there is between space and momentum. As Richard Feynman points out, translation in space is linked to the conservation of momentum and translation in time is linked to the conservation of energy. So time and energy are linked in the classical world and Heisenberg’s equation tells us that they are linked quantum mechanically as well, but only through a particle’s emergence into the physical world, even if it’s a virtual particle.
But if quantum phenomena are time-dimensionless then photons are the perfect candidate. The entire universe can go by in a photon’s lifetime. The same happens at the event horizon of a black hole. Does this mean that the event horizon of a black hole is the boundary between the classical physical world and the quantum world?
In Nov. 2009, I reviewed Fulvio Melia’s book, Cracking the Einstein Code, which is effectively an exposition and brief biography of Roy Kerr, a Kiwi who used Einstein’s field equations to describe the space-time of a rotating body, which is the norm for bodies in the universe. Kerr’s theoretical examination of a spinning black hole led him to postulate that it would have 2 event horizons, and when a body crosses the first event horizon, the parameters of space and time are reversed: space becomes time-like and time becomes space-like. This is because time freezes at the event horizon for an outside observer and the external time becomes infinite from the inside. Time becomes space-like in that it becomes static and infinite.
This post can be put down to the meanderings of an under-educated yet intellectually curious individual. If time does not exist in the quantum world then it actually makes sense of things like superposition, quantum tunneling and entanglement, not to mention time-reversal as expounded by Feynman in his book, QED, using his unique Feynman diagrams. John Wheeler also postulated a thought experiment in which a measurement taken after a photon passes through a slit in Young’s famous experiment can determine which one it passed through. I believe this has since been confirmed with a real experiment. It would also suggest that a marriage between the quantum world and Einstein’s general theory of relativity may be impossible.
Addendum 1: Earlier this year (May 2011) I reviewed John D. Barrow’s latest book, The Book of Universes, and I happened to revisit it and find this extremely relevant reference to the Hartle-Hawking universe devised by James Hartle and Stephen Hawking, using Feynman’s quantum integral method on a wave function for the whole universe.
What’s relevant to this post is that ‘[Hartle and Hawking] proposed an initial state in which time became another dimension of space.’
To quote Barrow’s interpretation:
‘Time is not fundamental in this theory. It is a quality that emerges when the universe gets large enough for the distinctive quantum effects to become negligible: time is something that arises concretely only in the limiting non-quantum environment. As we follow the Hartle-Hawking universe back to small sizes it becomes dominated by the Euclidean quantum paths. The concept of time disappears and the universe becomes increasingly like a four-dimensional space. There is no beginning to the universe because time disappears.’
What’s more: ‘…the transformation that changes time into another dimension of space corresponds to multiplying it by an imaginary number…’
This gives rise to what ‘Hartle and Hawking called the “no Boundary” state for the origin of the universe… Its beginning is smooth and unremarkable… In effect, the no-boundary condition is a proposal for the state of the universe if it appears from nothing in a quantum event. The story of this universe is that once upon a time there was no time.’
The only problem with this scenario, as Barrow points out, is that there is no big bang singularity, nevertheless it fits the idea that the quantum world doesn’t need time and the very early universe must have been a quantum universe at the very least.
Addendum 2: Also from Barrow (same book), I found this mathematical joke:
The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone through ninety degrees and try again. (Answer-phone message for imaginary phone numbers)
This time I’ve been inspired by last week’s New Scientist (8 October, 2011), which was a ‘Special issue’ on TIME; The Most Mysterious Dimension of All. They cover every aspect of time, by various authors, from the age of the universe to our circadian rhythms and everything in between and even beyond. But there were 2 essays in particular that caught my attention and led me to revisit this topic from 12 months ago.
Firstly, a discussion on Time’s Arrow by Amanda Gefter, who points out that, whilst the 2nd law of thermodynamics provides our only theoretical link with time’s arrow, because entropy must always increase, it’s not the solution: ‘If only it were so easy. Unfortunately, the second law does not really explain the arrow of time.’
The point is that entropy is statistical, as Schrodinger pointed out in What is Life? (refer my post, Nov. 2009) as is most of physics, but it’s not a deterministic law like, for example, Einstein’s general theory of relativity. So even though we can say that overall entropy doesn’t go backwards any more than time does, we can’t provide a mathematical relationship that derives time from entropy. In my post on time last year I said: ‘It is entropy that apparently drives the arrow of time…’ Gefter’s exposition suggests that I might be overstating the case.
Gefter goes on to say: ‘The only way to explain the arrow of time, then, is to assume that the universe just happened to start out in an extremely unlikely low entropy state.’ I’ve discussed this before when I reviewed Roger Penrose’s book, Cycles of Time (Jan. 2011), who spends a great deal of space expounding on the significance of the second law to the universe’s entire history, including its future. This is a bit off-topic to my intended subject, so I won’t dwell on it, but, as Gefter points out, the standard explanation for the universe’s initial low entropy is inflationary theory. But then she adds this caveat: ‘Inflation seems to solve the dilemma. On closer inspection, however, it only pushes the problem back.’ In other words, inflation itself must have had a low entropy and the standard explanation is that there were multiple inflations creating a multiverse.
Einstein’s relativity theories tell us that time is observer-dependent, yet entropy and its role in the evolution of the universe suggests that there is an ‘entropic’ time that governs the universe’s entire history. Then there is quantum mechanics that has its own time anomalies in defiance of common sense and everyday experience (see below).
I’ve recently started reading Professor Lisa Randall’s book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door; How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World. This is an excellent book, from what I’ve read thus far, for anyone wanting an understanding of how scientists think and how science works, without equations and esoteric prose. In her introduction, she tells us that after giving guest lectures for college students, the most common question is not about physics, but how old she is. She’s young, blonde and attractive: the complete antithesis of the stereotypical physicist. In her first chapter she explains the importance of scale in physics and how different laws, and therefore different equations, are applied according to the scale of the world one is examining. I’ve written about this myself in a post (May 2009), which is also one of my more popular ones. Obviously, Randall is far better qualified to expound on this than me.
She mentions, in passing, a movie, What the Bleep do we know? to illustrate the error in scaling quantum mechanical phenomena up to human scale and expecting the same rules to apply. I remember when this movie came out and thinking what a disservice it did to science and how it misrepresented science to a scientifically illiterate audience. I remember having to explain to friends of mine, how, despite the credentials of the people interviewed, it wasn’t science at all. It was just as much fantasy as my own fiction, perhaps more so.
And this finally brings me to the second essay I read in New Scientist, titled, Countdown to the Theory of Everything, because it is ‘time’ that creates the conceptual and theoretical hurdle to a scientific marriage between Einstein’s theory of general relativity (gravity) and quantum mechanics. And this is what scientists specifically mean when they refer to a ‘theory of everything’. To quote Amanda Gefter again: ‘…to unite general relativity with quantum mechanics, we need to work with a single view of time. But which one is the right one?’ And then she goes on to quote various exponents on the topic, like Carlo Rovelli at the Centre for Theoretical Physics at Marseilles: “For me, the solution to the problem is that at the fundamental level of nature, there is no time at all.”
And this led me to contemplate how the dimension of time effectively disappears in many quantum phenomena, and at best, becomes an anomaly. In both quantum tunneling and entanglement, time becomes inconsequential. Also, superposition, which is just as difficult to conceptualise as any other quantum phenomenon, actually makes sense if time does not exist: something exists everywhere at once.
In May this year, I wrote an exposition on Schrodinger’s equation, aimed at physics students, which has since become my most popular post. Now Schrodinger’s equation, in its most common form, is a time-dependent wave function, which belies the ideas that I’ve just outlined above. But Schrodinger’s equation entails the paradox that lies at the heart of quantum mechanics and time is part of that paradox. As Gefter points out: ‘Unlike general relativity, where time is contained within the system, quantum mechanics requires a clock that sits outside the system…’ The time in Schrodinger’s equation is the observer’s time and his equation tells us that the particle or photon that the wave function describes, actually ‘permeates all space’, to quote Richard Elwes in MATHS 1001. And as the standard, or Copenhagen, interpretation of quantum mechanics tells us, the observer is a key participant because it’s their measurement or observation that brings the particle or photon into the real world. At best, Schrodinger’s continuous time-dependent wave function can only give us a probability of its position in the real world, albeit an accurate probability.
Schrodinger realised that his equation had to incorporate complex algebra otherwise it didn’t work. I find it curious that only quantum mechanics requires imaginary numbers (square route of -1, i ). What’s curious is that i is not a number per se: you can’t count or quantify anything with i ; it’s more like a dimension. To quote Elwes again: ‘…our human minds are incapable of visualizing the 4-dimensional graph that a complex function demands.’ This is because the imaginary plane is orthogonal to the real number plane. Schrodinger’s equation only relates to the real world when you square the modulus of his wave function and get rid of the imaginary numbers.
I’ve argued in a previous post (Jun. 2011) that quantum mechanics infers a Platonic world like a substratum to the ‘classical physical’ world that we are more familiar with. Is it possible that in this world time does not exist? Penrose, in Cycles of Time, points out that we need mass for time to exist. This is because photons have zero time, which is why nothing can travel faster than light. However a photon in the real world has energy, which means it has a frequency, which means there must be time. Schrodinger’s equation includes energy times a wave function so all aspects are entailed in the equation. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle also demonstrates that there is a clear relationship between energy and time, in exactly the same way there is between space and momentum. As Richard Feynman points out, translation in space is linked to the conservation of momentum and translation in time is linked to the conservation of energy. So time and energy are linked in the classical world and Heisenberg’s equation tells us that they are linked quantum mechanically as well, but only through a particle’s emergence into the physical world, even if it’s a virtual particle.
But if quantum phenomena are time-dimensionless then photons are the perfect candidate. The entire universe can go by in a photon’s lifetime. The same happens at the event horizon of a black hole. Does this mean that the event horizon of a black hole is the boundary between the classical physical world and the quantum world?
In Nov. 2009, I reviewed Fulvio Melia’s book, Cracking the Einstein Code, which is effectively an exposition and brief biography of Roy Kerr, a Kiwi who used Einstein’s field equations to describe the space-time of a rotating body, which is the norm for bodies in the universe. Kerr’s theoretical examination of a spinning black hole led him to postulate that it would have 2 event horizons, and when a body crosses the first event horizon, the parameters of space and time are reversed: space becomes time-like and time becomes space-like. This is because time freezes at the event horizon for an outside observer and the external time becomes infinite from the inside. Time becomes space-like in that it becomes static and infinite.
This post can be put down to the meanderings of an under-educated yet intellectually curious individual. If time does not exist in the quantum world then it actually makes sense of things like superposition, quantum tunneling and entanglement, not to mention time-reversal as expounded by Feynman in his book, QED, using his unique Feynman diagrams. John Wheeler also postulated a thought experiment in which a measurement taken after a photon passes through a slit in Young’s famous experiment can determine which one it passed through. I believe this has since been confirmed with a real experiment. It would also suggest that a marriage between the quantum world and Einstein’s general theory of relativity may be impossible.
Addendum 1: Earlier this year (May 2011) I reviewed John D. Barrow’s latest book, The Book of Universes, and I happened to revisit it and find this extremely relevant reference to the Hartle-Hawking universe devised by James Hartle and Stephen Hawking, using Feynman’s quantum integral method on a wave function for the whole universe.
What’s relevant to this post is that ‘[Hartle and Hawking] proposed an initial state in which time became another dimension of space.’
To quote Barrow’s interpretation:
‘Time is not fundamental in this theory. It is a quality that emerges when the universe gets large enough for the distinctive quantum effects to become negligible: time is something that arises concretely only in the limiting non-quantum environment. As we follow the Hartle-Hawking universe back to small sizes it becomes dominated by the Euclidean quantum paths. The concept of time disappears and the universe becomes increasingly like a four-dimensional space. There is no beginning to the universe because time disappears.’
What’s more: ‘…the transformation that changes time into another dimension of space corresponds to multiplying it by an imaginary number…’
This gives rise to what ‘Hartle and Hawking called the “no Boundary” state for the origin of the universe… Its beginning is smooth and unremarkable… In effect, the no-boundary condition is a proposal for the state of the universe if it appears from nothing in a quantum event. The story of this universe is that once upon a time there was no time.’
The only problem with this scenario, as Barrow points out, is that there is no big bang singularity, nevertheless it fits the idea that the quantum world doesn’t need time and the very early universe must have been a quantum universe at the very least.
Addendum 2: Also from Barrow (same book), I found this mathematical joke:
The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone through ninety degrees and try again. (Answer-phone message for imaginary phone numbers)
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