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.

The Lagrangian – possibly the most fundamental mathematical principle in physics

This is something I wrote on Quora, which was ‘upvoted’ by a physics tutor (Mike Milner) and someone with an MSc (Dimitrios Kalemis), which gives it some credence.

I’ve written about all of this before in previous posts, but probably not as succinctly, which hopefully makes it easier to follow.


How does an electron know beforehand that it's a single slit or double slit so it decides whether to create an interference pattern or not?

Obviously it doesn’t. It’s like asking how does a ball thrown in the air know what path to follow? These 2 questions have more in common than you might think.

There is a fundamental principle in physics called the principle of least action, and Richard Feynman used it to describe the trajectory of a ball in a gravitational field and also as the basis for his path integral method of quantum mechanics (QM).

The principle of least action is that the difference between the potential energy and the kinetic energy of a particle will always be a minimum and, mathematically, this is called a Lagrangian. In his book, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, Feynman demonstrates how this applies to a body in a gravitational field when it follows the path dictated by a geodesic, which, in Einstein’s theory of relativity, is the path of maximum relativistic time. It turns out that this is the shortest path and also the path of least action, as determined by the Lagrangian.

Feynman gives the following analogy. Imagine a lifesaver needing to run along a beach and then swim out to rescue a bather in distress in the surf. The lifesaver could run along the beach (at a diagonal) until he (or she) is perpendicular to the swimmer in the waves and swim out. Or the lifesaver could run straight into the surf and swim diagonally to the swimmer. But the optimum path is something in between these 2 and that’s the path of least action or least time. It’s also the path of light when it refracts through glass or any other medium.

It was Paul Dirac who originally wrote a Lagrangian for QM and Feynman used his result to derive Schrodinger’s equation. Feynman’s approach to the 2 slit problem or any other QM problem was to combine all the possible paths the electron (or a photon) could take. By ‘combine’ this means adding all the phases of the wave function, most of which cancel each other out. Then, using Born’s rule, he derived the probabilities of where the electron would hit the screen on the other side of the slit(s).

In his book, QED, he provides a graphic demonstration using this method to derive the path of a photon hitting a mirror. He says ‘the light goes where the time is least.’

In response to your specific question, the electron’s path is only determined retrospectively after it hits the screen on the other side of the slit(s). Freeman Dyson (who collaborated with Feynman) argues that QM cannot describe the past but only the future. So prior to the electron hitting the screen, QM describes the probabilities of where it will go, which is mathematically dependent on it being able to go everywhere at once. If there are 2 slits then this means it can go through both and if there is only one slit then it can only go through one. So the observation made retrospectively confirms this.

Addendum: Sabine Hossenfelder gives a much more erudite exposition in this video. And I agree with her - it's the closest we have to a 'theory of everything'.