Video from Wednesday’s debate over “Death Is Not Final” is now up.
You’ll be happy to hear that the good guys “won.” In scare quotes because helping the world’s population understand that naturalism is the right way to view the universe is a long-term project that won’t be settled with a single debate. But Intelligence Squared does a fun thing where they ask people to vote before the debate starts, and then again afterward. We started out the night slightly behind in the polls, and by the time we were done we were slightly ahead. Mostly by peeling away the undecideds, as any savvy politician strives to do. [Update: oops, not right. See below.] So that counts as a victory — especially when the topic is one where many people (not all!) have fairly fixed opinions.
It was a pleasure to have Steve Novella as a partner. The man knows his neuroscience, as well as his debating. He did a great job making the single most important point for an issue like this: the mind is the brain, full stop. It’s hard to hear the case he makes and hold on to any contrary view.
I was slightly disappointed in the folks on the other side. Eben Alexander basically relied on two things. One was his personal story of having a Near-Death Experience while in a coma. Anyone who accepts that people can experience dreams or hallucinations will not be overly persuaded by that alone. The other was to throw up ideas like “quantum mechanics” and “the hard problem of consciousness” in an obfuscatory way, to give people license to believe that science doesn’t understand everything. Which is true! Science doesn’t understand everything. Which doesn’t change the fact that no serious researcher in quantum mechanics or the hard problem thinks that those ideas provide an excuse for believing in life after death.
Ray Moody was a very pleasant gentleman, someone you’d be happy to have a beer with and talk philosophy. But he did almost nothing to defend the proposition. I was expecting him to broaden the evidence from Alexander’s own case to many others, but instead he spoke in generalities about science and philosophy and logic, concluding essentially that it’s “conceivable” that a realm exists where souls can persist after death. Indeed it is. Many things are conceivable.
At the end of my opening talk I said that the choice here basically comes down to two options we can believe:
- Everything we think we understand about the behavior of matter and energy is wrong, in a way that has somehow escaped notice in every experiment ever done in the history of science. Instead, there are unknown mechanisms allow information in the brain to survive in the form of a blob of spirit energy, which can then go start talking to other blobs of spirit energy, but only after death, except sometimes even before death.
- Physics is right. And people under stress sometimes have experiences that seem real but aren’t.
In the light of the evidence, the choice is pretty clear. We’ll get there, a couple of percentage points at a time.
Update: I was too hasty in presuming that most of our increase came from swaying undecided voters. Here are the actual data:
As you can see, the undecideds actually broke almost equally for the two sides. Our glorious victory actually came from a combination of factors, including persuading some of the “For” voters to switch.
konst: I assume you´re a believer in an after-life. I often wonder what we do there. Is there a risk that it might get a little tedious after the first trillion years? Nothing “physical” there? That makes it potentially even more boring – no books, no TV, no games, no sex – what do we do with ourselves? In any case, what purpose can it have? So many billions of people there, their souls milling around, wondering what to do next. Or are they in a sort of state of suspended animation? That doesn´t sound like much fun either. What is the purpose of an after-life – can it have any purpose?
Re the first trillion years, I´ve a feeling that the standard response is that there is no time there. While time is certainly flexible in our Universe, so long as there are events, there must surely be time too? From any particular perspective, the events unfold in order and not all at once – so, time must exist, even if no-one bothers about measuring it.
@Robert and Konst: As I mentioned in my blog “ Hinduism for physicists” these religions believe in repeated reincarnation unlike Abrahamic religions where the belief is in one shot deal, i.e. one life and you go to heaven or hell depending on your deeds. Eastern religions give you multiple chances to wipe out your bad karmas with good karmas until your soul gets liberated (Moksha or Nirvana). So there is no question of what you do after death! Admittedly there is no scientific proof for either concept! While it is fine to study these things scientifically if possible, failure to observe scientifically does not mean impossibility. It may very well be difference between sensory and non-sensory perceptions. I have an open mind about such concepts. I do not necessarily believe or disbelieve in these concepts.
“First trillion years” — I like that. It might even be long enough for all of the protons to pop like so many soap bubbles, thus vindicating at least a part of string theory.
A trillion years could go by while you are dreaming (assuming the dreaming apparatus or mechanism, chemical or otherwise, could endure for that long), and it is doubtful you would even be vaguely aware of it.
For the record, I’m no atheist. I have late in life converted from Christianity to a faith that is infinitely more tolerant of the ways of science, and also much more tolerant of other beliefs. This tolerance is still a struggle sometimes– which I blame on the negative continuing influence of my previous culture.
Karl Popper seems to be the philosopher du jour of my previous culture, and even he was intolerant of intolerance. In that way, he is more like Bertrand Russell than he realized. The great thing about Popper is that you can pretty much remain ignorant about everything and anything, and that’s perfectly fine in his philosophy.
See: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/gardner_popper.html
@Robert and others,
I should have said the soul is not physical not the afterlife. Regarding the “first trillion years” I don’t know if time exists like the time now does but most scientist ignore even what physics say about time now anyways so why complain about how boring it sounds? Physics says time, past, present, and future exist concurrently and yet scientists, with the exception of a few, just ignore the math and create a make believe world where time flows from past to future or some now “moves in time” to the future. I guess most scientist just accept that on faith.
Most religions distinguish between “good” and “bad”. I have a problem with that, because I don´t believe that free will exists – and without free will, you can´t accuse anyone of being a “bad” person, any more than you can blame your car for being unreliable. I assume that by “free will” people mean more than that they don´t know what I´m going to do if I´m presented with a choice. I don´t in reality have choices. My mind, which is “me”, decides – and where did that come from? Did I have a choice about the mind I was born with and how events since then have shaped it? Is it that Mercedes´fault that someone in the factory forgot to check that screw in its steering, so the steering broke and it veered and killed the old lady at the bus stop.
@ Robert: I can answer your questions within the context of Hindu religion. Your past is sealed! There will be consequences because of your past karma. There is no way to stop them! This is like action and reaction of physics. There is no action in physics which does not have a reaction. But you do have a free will to change your future by good karma. As for other religions or atheists, I would let them answer these difficult questions.
No reputable physics I know of says that past, present and future exist concurrently. For one thing, it would violate so many conservation laws, to say nothing of symmetries; it simply makes no sense. The past is history. The present is where we all live. The future is no more or no less than whatever you and others decide to make of it.
You must be confusing the multiverse ideas of Leonard Susskind (which was, evidently some sort of elaborate ‘joke’, by the way) with a television series like ‘Sliders’ or something.
Free will happens each and every time you draw a breath of air, and subsequent events put in motion by you as a result of that, but only for as long as you are still able to do so. It isn’t very long, so exert some effort to make each one count.
One person’s (or even specie’s) good is, all too often, another one’s evil on a small world we are sharing on a temporary basis. Try and get along with as little inconvenience to the rest of us as possible, if you wish us not to spit on your grave, that is.
Physics does say past, present, and future exist concurrently but maybe a better word is block time. In physics 3d space and 1d time form a 4d spacetime continuum that behave as time linked to space. In that physics past, present , and future exist all at once. What symmetries and conservation laws would it violate?
This is somewhat off-topic but has some relevance to the afterlife and the soul and free will.
When you die and go to Heaven you become like Gods or become God like, by the power of God. One person who supposedly went there said that one of the highest levels was where you worked with God to create the physics of entirely new Universes, but to be honest I haven’t the slightest, except you do become like God. I guess you can do whatever you desire. Heaven is the eternal now, no past, no future, just now, it’s as if you have always just arrived, the eternal spring. No, you don’t get bored, everything is always new, you just can’t imagine it.
By the way, God sees all time past, present and future in a single instant.
@ Daniel Shawen -your statement:
“No reputable physics I know of says that past, present and future exist concurrently. For one thing, it would violate so many conservation laws, to say nothing of symmetries; it simply makes no sense.”
Well. In relativity, time coordinate is just like a space coordinate on a diagram. This is clearly stated in Sean’s books and articles. All the microscopic laws of physics (except a small part of weak interaction) are time reversal invariant. There is an unresolved conflict between them and the second law of thermodynamics which says that time flows in one direction during this phase of expanding universe. Nobody has any idea of what happened before big bang or if there are cycles of big bang and big crunch. Why entropy at the time of big bang was lower than today is also a puzzle. BTW at the point of singularity, the coordinate system collapses, i.e. space-time, past, present and future exist or do not exist simultaneously. Within a black hole, time and space exchange their role! There are all these puzzles with theories of modern physics.
I do agree with the last two paragraphs of your comment though, about free will and good behavior towards other people.
“Block time” is part of a branch of philosophy having to do with ideas about eternity, and part of its tenets is special relativity, but this isn’t physics.
The conservation of energy is violated in every one of the smallest increments of time during which, presumably, a past with all of its matter and energy content is somehow preserved and spun off into the multiverse. By the way, does it travel there in a straight line, or what’s the deal?
Philosophy, like most religions, is much, much older than physics. Some would argue scripture as though it were a physics textbook as well. It usually isn’t.
kashyap Vasavada: Here we are again! I´ll definitely read up a bit about Hinduism, when I finish work on my new website that I´m struggling with.
I really don´t think free will can exist in any meaningful way. I certainly cannot choose to write better than Shakespeare nor to think like Einstein. To paint like Monet would be way beyond me, no matter how much “choosing” I do, as would writing symphonies that Beethoven might be proud of.
I suppose it could be considered one of those “depends on what you mean by…” subjects. When I am faced with a choice, it´s my brain that decides – that is me. My brain is the result of the one I was born with plus all the things that have happened since to modify it, but there is no other “me” to control or modify this process. From a religious point of view, I suppose there is a “you” apart from your brain, though I don´t see how that would change my basic argument. It would simply move the argument from the brain to this other “you”. The only alternative I can see would be if “choices” were random – like spinning a coin (tho´even that´s not random!). I can hold up the bank and escape with a few million – or not. Random says sometimes I´d do it, others not. I´d say that my mind will always decide the same way, given the collection of circumstances at the moment of choosing.
Tony: You say: “By the way, God sees all time past, present and future in a single instant.”
All religions, I suppose, make assertions about the characteristics of their particular one and generally people don´t say: “Oh yes – how do you know?” In this case, for example, from where do you get the assertion you make above? How do you know?
@Daniel Shawen: Energy is not conserved in general relativity and in expanding universe. Sean has written blogs about this.This is very much current physics, not philosophy.
@ Robert: Let us separate the two things: one’s abilities and one’s free will in deciding about whether to do good or evil! Of course people are different in their abilities. Einsteins and Monets are rare. Science would say that your abilities depend on a complex of genetic inheritance you got and Hinduism would say it depends on your previous life karmas! I have a little bit of problem with genetic inheritance. It cannot explain why Einstein’s parents and his children were ordinary intellectually. There was just one big peak of intellectual genius in perhaps several generations. The free will choice you make whether to be good or bad is completely different, although some people may say that even that is also part of genetic inheritance or past karma.But I would vote in favor of free will. We have seen some kids, born in extreme poverty,with awfully bad parents, still come out and do superbly well in their life.
From The Onion ‘Budget Woes Force Heaven To Reduce Eternal Life To 500 Billion Years’. A spokesman said :’To help us meet the rising cost of maintaining Heaven as a lavish kingdom of perfection for all penitent souls, we will now be limiting believers to afterlives consisting of half a trillion years, an amount of time we still feel is quite generous’
@ Robert, I have a little book where Christ speaks to a woman, it’s called He and I. Read it. Maybe it’s what your looking for, maybe not. You can find it on Amazon. Is it her imagination, I absolutely don’t believe so, but you have to decide.
But whatever, someone should explain how life and intelligence and all the attributes that belong to animals and especially humans can spring from a universe that has none of these.
@kashyap
Thanks. I’ll go back and read a few more of Sean’s blog entries about conservation of energy vs. general relativity and acceleration at cosmological distances. The latter, for sure, since no one knows why it’s happening (or even if it actually is, in some circles).
FYI, my physics degree is from the University of Maryland (whose mascot is a tortoise named “Testudo”). Prior to reading Sean’s excellent “Particle at the end of the Universe”, and even giving a talk or two myself about it, I have changed my mind about many things. Where I was once convinced that it was “turtles, all the way down”, Sean has convinced me that it is “Higgs, all the way (well, most of the way) down”.
Miracles are before your eyes, everywhere you care enough to look. We walked on the moon, with computing hardware less powerful than the technology that is in your pocket. What’s that about walking on water again? Why was that so special?
Would it help if we did not expect them? That only happens to us once, when we are born.
@Daniel Shawen: It is a small world.I got Ph.D in Physics from Univ of Maryland in 1964. When did you get your degree? My guess is that you may be considerably younger than me. I am a retired physics professor in mid west. Anyway, although I do not agree with Sean’s views on religion, I do enjoy reading his physics blogs. I do not have any problem about learning physics from him. For me both science and religion have limitations and both are important.
If you could prove or almost prove that there was existence beyond the physical universe would you? In today’s increasing totalitarian governments is it better not to give them more tools of oppression and rather withhold knowledge they could use for more oppression?
kashyap: I´m still on about free will! There are relatively few tracks in my mind, which will soon be reduced to just the one.
I think you will agree that free will is controversial. I think it was Brian Greene who discussed it from a quantum point of view in The Fabric of the Cosmos and said finally that it “survives by the skin of its teeth. Maybe.” Or words to that effect.
The consequences of acknowledging that free will is an illusion would be unpleasant. We would no longer be able to say that Adolf Hitler should be chucked out of the golf club – we´d have to say: “Poor man! Call a doctor!” There would no longer be Right and Wrong from a moral point of view and clerics in most religions would have some difficulties.
Tony: Thanks for your suggested read. I´ve just Googled it and I see it´s famous, though I hadn´t heard of it. I´ll put it on my June list!
Re your comments on animals and humans in the Universe and where did they come from, I agree with you. I´d take it further and query how the whole Universe popped into existence from the absolute nothing for no reason.
Atheists on this and similar blogs have too a easy time of it. All they say is: “There´s no evidence that the Universe was created” – as though there´s loads of evidence for some alternative. Was it Created – or did it create itself from the total nothingness with all the laws of physics in place – or has it existed for all eternity in some form? There is no evidence for any of these, so atheists presumably therefore must think that the Universe doesn´t really exist. All three seem close to impossible to me.
Over the years, logic is starting to move me in the direction of “Must have been created”, though not by the God of any earthly religion.