The other day I mused on Twitter about three big origin questions: the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin of consciousness. Which isn’t to say they are related, just that they’re all interesting and important (and currently nowhere near solved). Physicists have taken stabs at the life question, but (with a few dramatic exceptions) they’ve mostly stayed away from consciousness. Probably for the best.
Here’s Ed Witten giving his own personal — and characteristically sensible — opinion, which is that consciousness is a really knotty problem, although not so difficult that we should start contemplating changing the laws of physics in order to solve it. Though I am more optimistic than he is that we’ll understand it on a reasonable timescale. (Hat tip to Ash Jogalekar.)
[Video has been removed, sorry]
Anyone seriously interested in tackling these big questions would be well-served by acknowledging that much (most? almost all?) progress in science is incremental, sneaking up on major discoveries by a series of small steps rather than leaping right to a dramatic new paradigm. Even if you want to understand the origin of the universe, it might behoove you to think about some more specific and tractable problems, like the nature of quantum fluctuations in inflation, or the emergence of spacetime in string theory. If you want to understand the origin of consciousness, it’s a good strategy to think about something like our perception of color, with the idea of working your way up to the more challenging issues.
Conversely, it’s these big questions that attract crackpots like honey attracts flies. I get a lot of emails (and physical letters) from cranks, but they never have a new theory of the branching ratio of the Higgs boson into four leptons; it’s always about the nature of space and time and everything. It’s too easy for anyone to have an opinion about these big questions, whether or not those opinions are worth paying attention to.
All of which leads up to saying: it’s still worth tackling the big questions! Start small, but think big. Because they are so hard, it’s too easy to make fun of attempts to solve the biggest questions, or to imagine that they are irreducibly mysterious and will never be solved. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we had quite compelling pictures of the origin of the universe, life, and consciousness within the next hundred years. But only if we’re willing to tackle the big problems seriously.
Marc Geddes says, “Only mathematical Platonism has any hope of providing a genuine theory of everything. That is to say, *given* that reality is explicable at all, *then* mathematical Platonism must be true. If you deny mathematical Platonism (either because you believe in materialism or supernatural idealism) then, you are denying that reality is fully explicable.”
But why is mathematical Platonism a full explication. One must ask, what mathematics? Peano arithmetic? Set theory? Analysis? What logic? Intuitionist? Para-consistent? Free? Non-monotonic? And how does it explain anything? Mathematics starts from some axioms and by some rules of inference proves theorems. So the propositions that are provable in some axiom system are implicit in the axioms and rules. When you’ve assumed those axioms and rules you’ve assumed your answers – which is know as begging the question.
Science avoids begging the question precisely because it relies on empiricism and ostensive definitions. Empiricism doesn’t assume any particular matter; it only assumes a shared external reality. Materialism is just a useful working hypothesis and exactly what counts as “matter” is theory dependent. Mathematics is just language refined to avoid contradiction.
I feel we are still exploring within that limited area of accessible knowledge I talked about. This is manifested by the prevalence of circular arguments. We lack an absolute datum. Is it mathematical? We have no proof. Is it empirical? At the end of the day we are mostly pragmatists. We accept abstract constructs largely because they accord with the real world. Yes we do pure math but it generally is only a step or two from familiar concepts we can envisage with our pictorial imagination. And that imagination is surely limited by our human space/time environment from birth. To penetrate beyond all this might take revelation in condescension of a higher being, and not relentless analysis by a lower one.
I expect you can guess where I am coming from.
Brent Meeker says: “Mathematics starts from some axioms and by some rules of inference proves theorems. So the propositions that are provable in some axiom system are implicit in the axioms and rules. When you’ve assumed those axioms and rules you’ve assumed your answers – which is know as begging the question.”
Well of course, as a Platonist I would disagree that this is what constitutes mathematics. If Platonism is correct, then we have to distinguish between the mathematical *objects themselves* (which would have an objective reality) and human *descriptions* of them (which are the language we use to describe the putative objects). Brent’s characterization above only captures the latter – he’s describing a formal method that logicians would use – a means of selecting a language for mathematical discourse.
Of course we do not yet fully what mathematics really is, but there’s no shortage of proposals…personally I think ultimately mathematical objects are *sets*, but that’s just a bet guess. There’s no shortage of candidates.
Materialism can’t work for the reason I summarized in my above post. Materialism can only supply *causal* explanations, but causal explanations cannot answer the big questions (physical explanations *must* always have unexplained elements -either (i) an unexplained infinite regress, (ii) an inexplicable causal loop which violates the principle of causality or (iii) an unexplained first cause). So *if* we think that answers to big questions are possible at all, *then* we must reject materialism.
Mathematics is human invention and it works on human scale. “one banana and one banana is two banana” is where the mathematics starts. It assumes that ideas of “one” and “and” make sense.
Mathematics is very successful at describing the universe on our scales but it starts to malfunction whenever we start going away from that.
Just compare the simplicity of newtonian mechanics’ equations with einstein’s relativity. Sure, Einstein’s equations are still relatively simple and beautiful, but they’re already order of magnitude more complex. When we go to quantum world, we again cross one or two orders of magnitude in complexity of mathematics needed to describe it. And when we go towards serious attempts at extending that, another “quantum leap” awaits us.
In the real world, it’s usually obvious that if you need to use your tools in very sophisticated ways to achieve your goal, you’re using wrong tools. That might pretty well be the situation with mathematics.
With regard to the “origin of the universe,” any duly conservative scientist will acknowledge that this may be a wrong question right off the bat.
Current standard cosmological theories hinge on the correctness of General Relativity (GR), i.e., the accepted standard theory of gravity. But the empirical basis of GR exhibits a huge blind spot.
Concerning the mysteriousness of gravity and how it fits in with the rest of physics, experimentalist, Eric Adelberger has stated: “It seems very likely that we are missing something huge in physics.” The huge missing thing, when it is finally found, may well affect our understanding of gravity in a way the causes major revisions to our cosmological ideas—especially as to the idea that the universe has an origin.
The “blind spot” alluded to above has nothing to do with the “branching ratio of the Higgs boson,” nor any other evidence involving high-energy collisions and extreme states of matter cranked up in humanity’s largest machine. It has to do with the everyday state of ordinary matter, and can be observed by building an apparatus aptly called a Small Low-Energy Non-Collider.
The idea to conduct such an experiment was first proposed by Galileo in 1632. In terms of GR, it would test the prediction that the rates of clocks decrease to a minimum at the center of a massive body. In terms of Newtonian gravity, it would test the prediction that a test object dropped into a hole through a larger body oscillates in the hole. Modern physics possesses no direct empirical evidence to support either of these predictions. In our store of empirical evidence we find only a big question mark with regard to gravity-induced motion inside the most ponderous half of the gravitational universe.
Presently, the result of this experiment is routinely presumed to be known. Sean Carroll often asserts the empirical ideals of science, yet he is among those who (at least tacitly) denies the value of living up to these ideals with regard to Galileo’s experiment.
It seems very likely that we are missing something huge in physics. That huge thing will not be found by looking in small places. Not in the debris in particle collisions, nor in the tiny deviations from standard GR predicted by the plethora of “incremental” variations thereof.
If simple scientific curiosity to look inside matter—the huge place where we have not yet looked, where we have not yet tested our theories of gravity—is not sufficient motivation to fulfill the spirit of Galileo by doing his experiment, then contemplating a radical alternative may add motivation:
http://www.gravitationlab.com/Grav%20Lab%20Links/SGM-CN-and-DE-3-22-11.pdf
This alternative is consistent with all observations in support of GR, yet it predicts that the universe does not have an origin.
Even if the result of Galileo’s experiment confirms the standard prediction, then we would at least gain the right to cite empirical evidence when the question comes up, instead of the present stance of religiously pretending to know.
I think there’s a very simple answer to the question ‘what is consciousness?’: It’s a language! If you view consciousness as ‘a language’, then I think even a bright 5-year old should have no problem understanding what consciousness is, let alone someone like Ed Witten.
I repeat my very simple answer: ‘Consciousness is a language!’
I think this perfectly captures the essence of consciousness. It’s not a thing, it’s an informational process. And it’s not something that’s objective…it’s a construction of our own minds. Our mind has constructed a symbolic method of representing reality, and we interpret this as ‘consciousness’. The mind substitutes things in reality with symbols, and it assigns meaning to these symbols ….yes, this is the representational theory of consciousness.
If we view consciousness as ‘a language’, then I think it should immediately become clear that its mistake to think of consciousness as a ‘single thing’ – there would likely be a number of distinct types of consciousness, and each might require quite different explanations for a full understanding. Language after all, is not a static single thing, there are many different languages, each of which can grow and change.
And what is the purpose of a language? To enable different agents to talk to each other. It’s exactly the same for our mind, which is not a single ‘thing’, but consists of many different ‘agents’ (or sub-personalities if you like). All of these internal multiple personalities in our minds need a way of talking to each other , and that way is the language we call consciousness.
So call the press (and for goodness sake get the news to Ed Witten!), the problem of consciousness is solved! 🙂
I’m with Joan Hendricks, but I make a distinction between consciousness and self awareness.
I prefer to think of consciousness as “program run”, but for a controller of a special kind. I have a PLC that was developed Bart Schroeder and Paul Handley in NZ. Look up Cleverscope to see Bart’s pet product area. This PLC had a very special feature they called the connect plane. In this plane you can link sensors to outputs via a range of filters and or parameter blocks in a manner that allows them to float and react with their environment without program intervention. Separately it has a multitasking program environment that operates independently of the connect plane but can reference the connect plane and change its parameters on the fly. This is the very simple equivalent to an insect’s brain which I would argue is adequately conscious, until it stops moving. Self awareness is a whole other matter, which I also have no problem appreciating.
The bit that blows my mind is vision, that is just an spectacular piece of natural engineering, right along with the body’s chemistry. Stuff like this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3fOXt4MrOM
Awesome.
After the physics is done, the chemistry begins. Entropy.
There is this famous phisicist who, I believe, had a short period of alcohol abuse. This genius had a treatment with the famous psychoterapeut Carl Gustav Jung. That´s Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli would say about a question very badly stated by some guy: “That´s not even wrong”. Very peculiar this phisicist! Pauli would also say about Quantum Physics: “The physicist who thinks he knows quantum physics, does not really understand it!” What do I get from that apparent nonsense?! This: even though nobody really understood quantum physics, it proved to be the most successful field of physics ever! The same is valid for the question of consciousness: even though we cannot define it as clearly as we would like according to scientific method we can use it like the scientist uses quantum physics. We just have to realize these as axiomatic: 1. Any animal has some kind consciousness; 2. while a species endures it exists; 3. when a species disappears it does not exist anymore. From that we can deduce that species are in a direct relation with very DEFINITE STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS. These STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS (species) are not abstract entities, to the contrary, they are the objective material science works with!
Excuse-me guys: from a strong point o view “ANY LIVING BEING HAS GOT SOME KIND OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Now, from a VERY STRONG POINT OF VIEW even a STONE has got some kind of consciousness. This should come from the strongest PRINCIPLE OF EQUIVALENCE (Einstein´s) ever:
THE REASON IT [EXISTENTIAL QUANTUM] ACTS IS THE SAME IT EXISTS!
(Baruch Spinoza)
@Richard Benish: since sphere of any size (except black holes and neutron stars) is made of atoms which could be considered small massive spheres, there’s no real problem to calculate motion of an object through that hole as motion of the same object along a trajectory on the exterior of many smaller spheres which together build up the large sphere with a hole. Since it’s outside of all of them and that behavior is (even according to your hypothesis) well understood, there’s no reason why it should behave any different than how “the result of this experiment is routinely presumed to be known”.
Hello guys, I’m new here, and still unsure if this is right the place to pose a question seemingly semantical but having huge explanatory implications.
What always pique my curiosity is the interminable, “scientifically-informed” debate on the question of the universe’s origin when asked in the context of the “God question”.
it appears to me both theists and atheists treat the question “where did the universe come from?” to mean “where did everything come from?”, whereas many physicists increasingly use the word “universe” in a less than “everything” sense when they, for example, talk about the multiverse, baby universes and such things. for such physicists the question “whence the universe” becomes very different from “whence everything”, and if the universe is not defined as “everything”, doesn’t it mean this word “universe”, being no longer semantically equivalent to “everything”, no longer holds any metaphysical interest, since the focus must now lie instead on the “multiverse” (if defined as ‘the totality of every physical thing that exists’)?
therefore, isn’t someone who uses Big Bang Cosmology to argue for or against God, simply talking past the theorist who entertains talk of “multiverse”, since they no longer use the word “universe” in the same sense? in other words the real philosophically-interesting question is no longer “where did the universe come from?” but “where did the multiverse come from?”.
which means, does it not, that if we are to entertain any talk of multiverse at all, wherein our causally-isolated universe is just one among many, BIG BANG COSMOLOGY IS SIMPLY NO LONGER METAPHYSICALLY IRRELEVANT, since it no longer addresses the question of ultimate origins (the universe being no longer ultimate in such a talk)?
Kashua:
I doubt that you and I have the same interpretation of what it means for something to be “well understood.”
Having a hypothesis about the physical world does not mean that parts of the physical world covered by the hypothesis are “well understood” just because calculations lead to predictions about it—even if the predictions agree with observations. This is especially true for Quantum Theory, whose mysteriousness, in spite of its predictive success, is widely acknowledged.
In the present case, it is helpful to realize that General Relativity has yielded two solutions pertaining to how test objects move with respect to a uniformly dense sphere: The Schwarzschild exterior solution and the Schwarzschild interior solution. The exterior solution is arguably “well understood” and confirmed by many observations. Whereas the interior solution—though mathematically understood, has never been tested empirically.
One of the interior solution’s key predictions is that the rates of clocks inside the sphere decrease to a central minimum. Insofar as nobody knows what matter (via gravity) does to make clocks tick slow, and since we have no empirical evidence bearing on the question, this solution and its prediction are arguably shrouded in mystery. This consequence of a central clock rate minimum corresponds to the Newtonian prediction that a test object would oscillate between the extremities of a hole drilled through the sphere‘s center.
My hypothesis—which is based on an analogy initially used by Einstein between a rotating body and a gravitating body—is that from the surface inward, clock rates actually increase to a central maximum, not minimum. If this is true, then the test object will not oscillate in the hole.
Calculations made to argue otherwise are not supported by existing empirical evidence. They represent only extrapolations from a well-tested domain to a domain that has not been tested at all. Accepting such extrapolations as corresponding to physical reality before testing them would violate the ideals of science.
These ideals are well-captured by Herman Bondi, who wrote:
“It is a dangerous habit of the human mind to generalize and to extrapolate without noticing that it is doing so. The physicist should therefore attempt to counter this habit by unceasing vigilance in order to detect any such extrapolation. Most of the great advances in physics have been concerned with showing up the fallacy of such extrapolations, which were supposed to be so self-evident that they were not considered hypotheses. These extrapolations constitute a far greater danger to the progress of physics than so-called speculation.”
Sean Carroll has echoed this advice by writing:
“Sorry, but “thinking deeply” doesn’t cut it. People are not especially logical creatures, and we’re just not smart enough to gain true knowledge about the world by the power of reason alone. That’s why empiricism was invented in the first place.”
In the present case, “thinking deeply” and “the power of reason” are in the calculations. The result of Galileo’s experiment remains unknown because Nature has not yet been allowed to speak.
The argument that consciousness will not be explained by science because it might be too complex or mysterious is not a very good one. There is no reason why science cannot ultimately explain consciousness.
We are self aware thinking machines. How or Why, I am not sure, but I think in a thousand years other thinking machines (who we evolve into or create) will call us just that: self aware thinking machines.
I’ve just watched the Death is not Final debate which was exciting and illuminating.
Steven Novella’s explanation that our memory perceptions are a theatrical replay was centrally illuminating. I should have figured that out but very definitely did not in those terms. I’m not a mathematician or a computer programmer, but I am a creative product designer and manufacturer. In that role the most powerful PLC computer programme that I had to write was also the shortest. I needed to build a machine that needed to be programmed in situ, and adapted regularly to reflect changes in the material it had to handle. The solution was a teach and run machine which had what I call an action keypad, every function of the machine had a button. The programme was designed to read the keypad, and store the duration of each key press (the key presses each driving a function of the machine). So the programme was very simply, get port in, store to memory, store keypress duration, look for next keypress, repeat. to run the programme it was simply read memory, read duration, start timer, put port out until time duration ends, repeat. So when you put that notion together with
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3fOXt4MrOM
I can suddenly see how instinct can work. Equally I can see now how the mechanisms of long term memory can be constructed, and I can also see how memory can be transferred to a non biological format. In replay mode we are not as complicated as we assume that we are. Of course the machinery of living, adapting with our environment, learning, and determining what we should do next to better our experiences is very complicated, but not unfathomably so. The machine that I built was a sequential, digital device, our brains are an inherently biological, parallel and analogue devices with billions of processors working to establish our connection with our environment, but it does not come as any surprise to me that the decision centre of the brain is both primative and small
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/5062/20131125/brain-region-associated-with-decision-making-identified.htm
, that just confirms to me that all creatures make decisions, not just us.
As I think this through let me attach a warning to the creators of robotic artificial intelligence. It is possible with relatively simple techniques to give robotic “agents” extreme capability with simple devices such as broad band radar and immediate interconnectivity, features that humans would not be able to compete against. What does that mean? Broad band radar is an electronic vision system (antanae power 1/5th of a watt) that can see over distance, be programmed on the fly to see a variety of physical properties, and see through many solid materials. Interconnectivity creates the possibility of a hive mind with system wide immediate perception. So when you give these abilities along with self determination to Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog, be sure that you know where the “sleep” switch is. The field of Robotics is evolving far faster than humans are.
What makes a machine be alive? when it does not stop when you want it to. What makes it conscious? when it makes its own plans and when you can’t possibly know what it is going to do next.
I admire Sean Carrol. He´s kind of a big science catalyst… It is no surprise that Sean fastened together the origin of universe, life and consciousness plus ED WITTEN´s viewpoint on unfolding the mystery of consciousness. Anyway, for Freud there is no coincidence for the unconscious mind! Taking the unconscious mind and coincidences again I believe that Sean Carrol would go for 30 years (not a 100!) before physics creates a model relating the three origins above. Sean would take a 100 to 200 years for teletransport though!
The real case is that in 1985, Witten gave an interview where he stated that he missed a fundamental principle like Einstein´s principle of equivalence. If he had bumped into that principle, string theory could, probably, gain a new refreshing perspective. THAT WAS THIRTY YEARS AGO! The point is that a lot of new and beautiful mathematics came along but NO NEW FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE. I am going to bring in here the ghost of Freud again: I doubt Witten would go after this new fundamental principle he´s mentioned. HE CANNOT. HE FELL IN LOVE WITH MATHEMATICS! Blame on Einstein! The truth is that Einstein was not not even a bad mathematician (just to laugh with Wolfgang Pauli) but his mental experiments furnished the most powerful principle of physics ever!! Even the best mathematician of the time, David Hilbert, who developed a theory of gravitation a week before Einstein´s, had to bow before the great genius!
BUT EVEN EINSTEIN FELL IN LOVE WITH MATHEMATICS… HE COULD SINCE HE HAD ALREADY GOT THE PHYSICAL TREASURE HE NEEDED!
To Richard Benis:
Very good your message sir! I am a profound religious person, but my religiosity is of that kind which finds its bearing on FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES!
Well I’ll cut to the chase here and even admit that I barely read some of the above comments but maybe the word consciousness is a mess to begin with, a holdover from medieval thinking like ‘religiousness’ or calling the human circulatory system ‘bloodishness’ or your HDTV ‘.teeveeishness’. No doubt there is a function occurring in the nervous system but the nervous system like the circulatory system is a multiplicity of organs but when you talk about the heart ‘muscleness’ trumps ‘bloodishness’. Like the physics problem discussed in the later blog entries philosophy helps to understand how language and all type of ontological & epistemic deficits send us off into wonderland.
To be more analagous, for the circulatory system there is a simple theory about the function of blood and the functions of the various organs which make up the system. For the nervous system there is simple straightforward theory for movement, motor function, perception and emotion but when we move into the higher integrated frontal lobe functions which initiate thought and language, the lack of understanding for a more fundamental function of neurons inner states leave us stranded for the time being.
I can see the difficulty and conundrums which people who lack my background in psychology, electrical engineering, systems engineering and computer science have.
A recent paper relevant to abiogenesis:
Common origins of RNA, protein and lipid precursors in a cyanosulfidic protometabolism
Bhavesh H. Patel, Claudia Percivalle, Dougal J. Ritson, Colm D. Duffy & John D. Sutherland
Nature Chemistry 7, 301–307 (2015) doi:10.1038/nchem.2202
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