The Big Picture: The Talk

I’m giving the last lecture on my mini-tour for The Big Picture tonight at the Natural History Museum here in Los Angeles. If you can’t make it, here’s a decent substitute: video of the talk I gave last week at Google headquarters in Mountain View.

The Big Picture | Sean Carroll | Talks at Google

I don’t think I’ve quite worked out all the kinks in this talk, but you get the general idea. My biggest regret was that I didn’t have the time to trace the flow of free energy from the Sun to photosynthesis to ATP to muscle contractions. It’s a great demonstration of how biological organisms are maintained through the creation of entropy.

152 Comments

152 thoughts on “The Big Picture: The Talk”

  1. Ah well, Ben, you very kindly made my point for me.
    You state” “Gödel, and especially his Incompleteness Theorem, is entirely silent on and irrelevant to Platonism. ” Actually, both are covering the same ‘set relations’. And indeed, as you re-iterate for me, the ‘light’/’color’ qualia is only observably present -external- to the skin boundary. Irrespective of what wave length is beamed at it, and reflected away from. There is no ‘false premise’ in my analysis, only clinical partitioning of domains, and from that, what phenomena occur on different sides of the boundary.

    In your vernacular .. the Platonic apple will never ‘know’, recognize, or have access to the phenomena that, in the context of an external universe, it displays a property labeled . . ‘color; “Apple’ and “color” are not conjoint sets. There is no such thing, therefore, as a Platonic “Ideal Apple” .. -complete with- (externally) observed visible wavelength qualia.

    But then, to insist that Platonic ‘Ideal apple(s)’ DO have concurrent color, simply means that there is a moot but distinct challenge to the incompleteness theorems. Hanging disturbingly out there without explanation of proof. A nasty bit of critical logic avoidance.. I’d rather shine a light on it and see where the new thought line leads. But then again, a lot of brilliant and well placed academic minds circa 1905-1923 discounted the proposition of relativity too. Only Dirac and a few others were open enough to consider the matter – plausible, besides . . possible.

  2. James Rose:

    But then, to insist that Platonic ‘Ideal apple(s)’ DO have concurrent color, simply means that there is a moot but distinct challenge to the incompleteness theorems.

    I’m sorry, but you’ve lost me.

    It is my position that Platonism is incoherent and not worth attempting to redeem in any significant way, even if some Platonic superficialities might be convenient in casual conversation. If you think I’m asserting that Platonic apples have concurrent color, you’ve completely misunderstood me — as, indeed, I’ve no clue what a Platonic apple is suppose to be, or what it would mean for a color to be concurrent. Might as well be speaking astrology or alchemy for all the sense that sentence makes to me.

    Are you the one insisting that Platonic apples are real and have some sort of “concurrent color”? If so, you’ll have to start by demonstrating the reality of Platonic apples — at least, if you want me to take you seriously….

    And, before you take comparisons with Einstein too seriously…I would caution you that those same minds that laughed at him also laughed at Bozo the Clown. Most of those whom nobody understands really are incoherent. The true geniuses are able to convince others without resort to complaints that nobody understands them.

    Cheers,

    b&

  3. Simon Packer
    I don’t think you’ve really grasped the idea of evolution.

    Demanding an answer to when a certain stage in evolution was reached is pretty meaningless since evolution, generally speaking happens in very tiny steps. Particularly when you start talking about the organisms making conscious decisions about wanting to survive. Heck I don’t even think most humans of today actively engage in that sort of thinking unless they are suicidal. The organism itself isn’t consciously involved in EBNS. EBNS just happens. The entire idea is that increased levels of the more primitive concept of “awareness” is a rather obvious positive determinant of an organism’s ability to survive. The organism with the more aware brain avoids being eaten. The organism with the more emotional brain gets more and better mating opportunities. The organism with the better planning brain more easily survives climatic extremes. The organism with the better caring brain achieves higher survival rates for their offspring.

    As long as the brain feature you find astounding could somehow be linked to survival, reproduction and survival of offspring, evolution would be sure to select for organisms having brains with those properties. An ability to feel instinctive fear would be an obvious candidate for something to evolve early in an evolutionary sense. It’s HIGHLY beneficial for survival.

    The fact that those mental properties are extremely complex is completely irrelevant as long as a stepwise evolutionary path with incremental benefits can plausibly be traced back perhaps to a single cell which gained some signaling property. Perhaps fossils aren’t the place to look for details of brain development, since brains are soft tissue. I’m not an evolutionary biologist, but I would think that studies of the development of brains in different species of currently living organisms can give us plenty of answers as to when certain parts of the brain developed and allow us to learn about which inherent features of the brain was then most likely supported.

    I don’t understand why you need to mystify such words as “emotion, empathy, analysis, intuition, humour and artistry”. They’re positively charged words which are fairly applicable to discussions about an emergent emotional ontology of the brain. But they are just words. Some human languages might not even have applicable translations of these words. Attempting elevate humanly created words into something more than just that, has always annoyed me when reading everything from Plato to Chomsky.

  4. Ben says:

    “Gödel, and especially his Incompleteness Theorem, is entirely silent on and irrelevant to Platonism. Simply because Gödel established that there are things we will never know does not mean that the unknown therefore has some sort of existence.”

    In fact, Godel converted to Platonism as a direct result of his own work. Yes, Kurt Godel became a Platonist! Here was Gödel’s argument for Platonism:

    In any sufficiently complex formal system, there are some truths that can be stated in the language of that system, but not *provable* within that system. So some math truths have ‘slipped the net’ of the human mind! Every time Godel tried to entirely ‘capture’ math truths in some formal system, some truths slipped the net!

    If math was just a descriptive language created by humans, then it should be entirely comprehensible to humans. But some math truths must always keep ‘slipping the net’ of any formal system invented by humans (as established by the Godel theorems). Godel’s conclusion was that, therefore math *does* have an objective Platonic existence outside the human mind.

    Ben says:

    “It is my position that Platonism is incoherent and not worth attempting to redeem in any significant way, even if some Platonic superficialities might be convenient in casual conversation.”

    In the modern form of Platonism, only *mathematical* (abstract) truths are granted timeless Platonic existence. I think you would find this modern platonism far harder to rebut than the ancient one. Probably the strongest case for it has been made by the mathematician Roger Penrose – try his book ‘The Emperor’s New Mind’ for the arguments.

    You can disagree with mathematical platonism, but it’s definitely not incoherent. In a recent survey of the world’s top philosophers by David Chalmers, a majority agreed that mathematical platonism was true!

  5. Perhaps I could ask Ben when you thinks reductionism will have ‘arrived’, i.e. be seen unambiguously as ‘wholly correct’? Do you already think it is?

    On the consciousness thing, I still see a cause/effect dilemma for EBNS, even if it is a contrary slope and not an on/off absolute.

  6. Ben says:

    “where’s the “Mind” in the Earth’s core magneto? If you want to impose your “Mind” layer on that model as what the geophysicist thinks of the Earth…great, but you’re now doing psychology, as the geophysicist herself is utterly irrelevant to the dynamics of the planet.”

    Yes, the idea of mind being fundamental needs panpsychism to work – there has to be some sort of mental properties in everything (or most things). Sounds implausible at first yes, but when you consider the importance of ‘Information’ to modern physics, you have to start to wonder. Treating the world as ‘information’ has led to substantial success in physics with explaining black holes for instance, and once you realize that ‘information processing’ is going on all over the place, well is panpsychism really so hard to believe? As to the Earth’s core magneto – could it be the energy source for Gaia? 😉

    Ben says:

    “Isn’t it at least as hubristic on your part to claim “Mind” as an essential component of reality as it once was to claim the Earth as the center of Creation, and that the Earth was Created just for the purpose of providing eternal Salvation for Mankind?”

    Perhaps, but the mind is what we use to understand reality in the first place. The ultimate nature of reality is hardly something we can ever see directly – we are only ever seeing reality through the categories in our own mind. The ‘virtual reality’/computer-simulation thing really has to make me start to wonder whether even the ‘physical’ world is just another particular category of thought.

    Then you have all the puzzles of quantum mechanics where it has proved surprisingly hard to remove the ‘observer’ from the equation. The most popular interpretation, the Copenhagen Interpretation, says that classical ‘physical reality’ is not really meaningful until an observer defines an experimental setup, performs a ‘measurement’, and ‘observes’ the result.

    The ‘Many Worlds’ interpretation championed by Sean Carroll is supposed to have succeeded in removing the observer from the equation, the trouble is, that it doesn’t actually explain the macroscopic world we see, and just ‘filli-busters’ on wave function collapse by pushing off superposition on to an ever-expanding ‘environment’ – in fact in practice an observer is still needed to see a definite outcome.

    In quantum mechanics, the mere process of ‘learning new information’ about a quantum system seems to be enough to collapse the wave-function! So just what are these mysterious ‘wave-functions’ in quantum mechanics then? They don’t seem to be physical at all, they just seem to represent ‘information’ (see last sentence). This seem to push us towards mathematical platonism again, since this non-physical ‘abstract information’ still seems to be very real, in the sense that decides the results of physics experiment!

  7. Simen S

    ‘EBNS just happens.’

    Are you taking this as an immutable truth and insisting all other evidence is forced, however implausibly, to fit in with it? That would be how biological evolutionary theory looks to me.

    So biological systems self -assemble from the atomic/molecular available material and some of these aggregations turn out to be better adapted to their environment so survive longer before decay. In due course some even develop the facility to self-replicate but there are small mistakes in the process. But these turn out to produce survival enhancements in the replicated assembly in some cases. Again, the environment, which by now includes other similarly evolving assembles, screens out those best able to survive, i.e. the longest lived before decomposition. Gradually these entities become more and more sophisticated (knowing, after Dawkins, that ‘sophisticated’ is merely an anthropomorphism…with Dawkins you need to be told when an anthropomorphism is legitimate and when it is not….) until at some point they even develop an internal computational system which allows them to process their own survival advantage….etc etc etc. and here we are..!!!

    I just don’t even start to buy it all…. I believe in population drift by selection within a stable, defined species and that is all the EBNS I am prepared to swallow. The problem with evolutionary timescales is that they are not nearly long enough….The other problem with EBNS is that I don’t think it would actually happen however long you left things. Not unless genetic processes and outcomes were designed.

    In terms of the detail required within my picture above, show me please how additional phenotype complexity is plausibly coded for, in order to be selected (and selection happens at phenotype level) especially with a complex, self-contained system not found in another species. I have found absolutely nothing in the material that is even vaguely convincing here, though I need to look at Jerry Coyne. Usually there is a small paragraph with some vague assurances in it out of all proportion to the scale of the problem. For example Ernst Mayr says ‘mutations continually replenish the variability of the gene pool’. How? Why? Why in a way that make viable elaborations of the phenotype? Meyr provides one paragraph on page 120 of the book ‘What Evolution Is’ and it is vague enough to be pretty meaningless.

    Science is susceptible to human nature. I see fashion, pride and fear at work in academia.

  8. zarzuelazen:

    So some math truths have ‘slipped the net’ of the human mind!

    Since when has it been reasonable to assume that the default state for human minds should be omniscience? And how could the fact that our minds are limited even hypothetically have bearing on the question of Platonism? “I don’t know, ergo Plato”?

    If math was just a descriptive language created by humans, then it should be entirely comprehensible to humans.

    If steam locomotives were created by humans, then humans should be able to outrun them. If computers were created by humans, then humans should be able to beat them at chess. If English was created by humans, you should be able to understand the US tax code.

    The mystic layer you keep insisting on applying to the Incompleteness Theorem tells me you don’t understand it at all.

    One of the simplest demonstrations of the truth of the Incompleteness Theorem is with a typical example of the type of statement that cannot be proven: “This sentence cannot be proven to be true.” Let’s pretend you come up with some brilliant proof that that sentence is true — but what have you proven? The truth of the sentence, namely, that it cannot be proven to be true. Yet this process pretty clearly demonstrates that it really is the case that the sentence can’t be proven to be true, which tells us that it is true, even though we can’t prove that it’s true.

    And it’s also trivial to demonstrate that there’s an infinite number of such truths: “It is true that, although one and one are two, this sentence cannot be proven to be true.”

    A key element of Gödel’s proof is that such truths can sometimes be proven, but not by all systems. My own favorite example of that is a line of iambic pentameter of mine own invention: “All but God can prove this sentence true.” That’s a truth that you and I can prove with ease, but the allegedly-omnipotent cannot. Never mind God making a stone too heavy for he himself to life; here we have created a stone that we can lift but God cannot.

    In the modern form of Platonism, only *mathematical* (abstract) truths are granted timeless Platonic existence.

    So, presumably, 1 + 1 = 2 has timeless Platonic existence.

    If I have one apple and add to it another apple, I clearly have two apples. But if I start with no apples, what one am I adding to which other one, and what do I then have two of?

    That’s the problem with Platonism.

    Remove the math from my apple example, and we still clearly have apples; the math is simply a convenient way of describing the scene. But if we remove the apples and leave the math, we’re left with nothing.

    So:

    apples + math = apples
    apples – math = apples
    math + apples = apples
    math – apples = nothing

    Even a first-year logician should be able to recognize that the only solution to those relations is therefore:

    math = nothing

    Cheers,

    b&

  9. Simon:

    Perhaps I could ask Ben when you thinks reductionism will have ‘arrived’, i.e. be seen unambiguously as ‘wholly correct’? Do you already think it is?

    We know with absolute certainty that such knowledge is impossible — and that it is impossible for any entity, regardless of any claims that might be made of, for example, omniscience. Indeed, the very notion of a “most fundamental” form of reality is incoherent.

    This ties very closely with the discussion about Gödel, as it’s the intimately-related work by Turing which tells us this should be the case.

    So, just to get it off the table, I’m personally quite satisfied with the picture of the fundamental nature of reality that we’re converging towards thanks to the work of Sean and his colleagues. There’s lots of really exciting stuff we know we still haven’t discovered; however, at the same time, we’ve already gone quite a number of “layers” “deeper” than anybody living even a few mere centuries ago could possibly dreamt of. What’s not to love about that? How could I not be proud of the work my fellow humans have achieved?

    But, it is also the case that everything might be just some sort of grand illusion. We could be in a Matrix-style simulation — or even, per Saint Randall, just a bunch of rocks:

    https://xkcd.com/505/

    Or maybe I’ve been raised on an Holodeck, or maybe the CIA has contracted with aliens to use their mind rays to control me via my dental implants, or whatever.

    While most of us can recognize why this should be so on a personal level, many still cling to the thought that there’s some absolute and reliable way of uncovering the ultimate nature of reality, even if such would be beyond mere mortals. So, to demonstrate why even that’s not the case, permit me to construct a theological allegory.

    One day Satan calls up Jesus and says, “Oh, Jesus! I’m so sorry. I’ve finally seen the Light and I understand how I’ve sinned against you all these ages. I repent, and shall sin no more. Won’t you, in your infinite grace, forgive me?”

    Jesus, being no fool, doesn’t take Satan at his word and instead puts him to the test. Jesus constructs an alternate reality just like our own, but puts Satan in Jesus’s role as the all-interpreting Word who Spoke this alternate reality into existence. There, Satan is all-powerful, but his powers are limited to this alternate reality so as to protect the real reality. If Satan uses this power wisely, Jesus knows Satan is true to his word and will therefore grant him forgiveness.

    …but Satan, of course, is no fool. If he knows that this is just a test, he’ll be on his best behavior. As such, the simulation must be perfect, such that Satan really does think that he, Satan, was the ultimate creator and so on.

    Jesus, being actually omniscient, clearly has some way of knowing the ultimate nature of reality. To make the discussion easy, let’s pretend it’s a magic decoder ring. Satan, of course, is going to need a similar magic decoder ring.

    And here’s where the rubber meets the road. Satan is going to have to be absolutely convinced that his magic decoder ring is trustworthy and infallible, else the test is worthless. And, at the same time, Satan’s magic decoder ring must lie about the true nature of reality, else the test is again worthless. If either point fails, Satan knows he’s being watched and he acts as he wants Jesus to think of him, not as he really is.

    …but, now, how is Jesus to know that his own secret decoder ring is to be trusted? Either Jesus can construct a seemingly-trustworthy ring that can’t be trusted, in which case Jesus’s own ring can’t be trusted; or Jesus can’t construct such a ring, in which case Jesus couldn’t have gotten his own ring in the first place. Either way, no such ring could possibly exist.

    (For a more formal treatment of why this is the case, see the most popular proof of Turing’s Halting Problem. The TLDR is that ultimate reality is no more discoverable than there exists a general-purpose solution to the Problem.)

    As such, Jesus himself has no way of ruling out the possibility that Satan is the Ultimate Creator and has set up a nice playground for Jesus where Satan can get his kicks setting up Jesus for ultimate failure. And neither of them can rule out the possibility that they’re both just characters in some teenaged hyperintelligent shade of the color blue’s smartphone game.

    And if even the gods themselves are hopeless to divine the ultimate nature of reality, of what sense could it possibly make to even pretend that such a concept even has any meaning in the first place?

    …but then, of course, after all those flights of fancy, we should come to our senses, recognize that, when you drop your keys, they fall down at about 10 m/s^2, and the rest of physics through the Higgs and so on is amazingly wonderfully testable and confirmable, and that we have no affirmative reason to even suspect any paranoid conspiracy deception is at hand. As such, we should take diversions such as this as reason to stop worrying about the “ultimate” nature of reality, but also not waste time worrying if some unevidenced and unprovable conspiracy (especially including the popular religious ones) is somehow supposed to be the ultimate-ultimate reality.

    Cheers,

    b&

  10. zarzuelazen:

    Yes, the idea of mind being fundamental needs panpsychism to work

    In which case, it can and should be dismissed immediately and with prejudice. It’s certainly fun to pretend that the rocks can be our friends, but no adult should take seriously the proposition that “mind” is in any way an useful description of them.

    Sounds implausible at first yes, but when you consider the importance of ‘Information’ to modern physics, you have to start to wonder.

    To reify descriptions as you continue to do is, still and again, to mistrake the map for the territory.

    Go ahead, construct a mathematically-perfect computer model of whatever slice of reality you might care to simulate. You’re citing the math as proof or evidence of your Platonism, right?

    Now, take away the computer. Where’s your math gone? Where’s the simulation?

    Write down the math on a chalkboard. (Sure, you’ll need a chalkboard bigger than the galaxy just to write a small bit of the math, but we’ll pretend.) Now take away the chalkboard. Where’d the math go?

    Perhaps, but the mind is what we use to understand reality in the first place.

    The mind reflects reality. What you’re proposing is no less than that the world you see in the mirror is more real than the world itself.

    Then you have all the puzzles of quantum mechanics where it has proved surprisingly hard to remove the ‘observer’ from the equation.

    Sean is much better equipped to address this much-too-popular misconception than I am, but the observer in quantum mechanics is a most unfortunate term that has never ever from the very beginning had anything even remotely to do with consciousness. Unless you think that it’s a telescope’s objective (the eyepiece) that does the seeing for you when you look through the telescope, you have no cause to think that the detector in a physics experiment does the observing for you in the physics lab, either.

    The ‘Many Worlds’ interpretation championed by Sean Carroll is supposed to have succeeded in removing the observer from the equation

    No, that’s not what it was intended to do and it’s not what it does.

    So just what are these mysterious ‘wave-functions’ in quantum mechanics then?

    Again, this is Sean’s remit, and he’s far better at explaining it than I am. So permit me to encourage you to go to the “videos” section of Sean’s home page and watch everything physics-related.

    The two-second introduction is that Laplace reformulated Newtonian gravitation into a field. Imagine overlaying a 3D grid on all of space. In each cell, write down the vector (magnitude plus direction) of the gravitational pull at that point. In many places, the magnitude will be quite close to zero; however, here on the surface of the Earth, it’s equal to 1G and pointed to the center of the Earth. This is the gravitational field.

    All particles (such as electrons and quarks) and all forces (such as electromagnetism and gravity) can be expressed as such fields. An individual electron is a wave in the electron field, and it can create an harmonic resonance in the electromagnetic field. The electromagnetic field can similarly create an harmonic resonance in the photon field, which is how you can create light from electricity.

    Quantum field theory is the study of the properties and interrelationships of all those fields.

    Note that quantum field theory doesn’t care one whit what the fields themselves are made of; it’s only attempting to describe the observed behavior — an attempt it succeeds spectacularly at. Maybe these fields are themselves nothing but tidal pools on Mount Olympus; maybe they’re digital approximations in a bunch of rocks. Much more likely, the folks at CERN will come up with something less fantastical but far more interesting — and, more importantly, actually supported by evidence. Or maybe that’s really all there is, and the fields, whatever it is that they are, are ultimately fundamental and indivisible.

    But, to emphasize: quantum field theory does a superlative job at describing what we see, and in a perfectly agnostic manner as to whatever the “lower” layer might be made of.

    And that’s a good thing.

    Mechanical engineers only very indirectly care about the atomic structure of the stuff they design, and Newtonian Mechanics is similarly agnostic about atomic physics. Sure, there’re edge cases, especially involving materials design — but that’s also when you start shifting from Newtonian physics to chemistry (which itself still doesn’t care much about atomic physics). Another edge case, nanomaterials, and you might start pulling in Quantum Mechanics, and so on — but the mechanical engineer isn’t going to care about any of that, and will only want to know what the tensile strength (e.g.) of this fancy new material is so he can figure how much of it he needs to build this new bridge.

  11. Simon:

    ‘EBNS just happens.’

    Are you taking this as an immutable truth and insisting all other evidence is forced, however implausibly, to fit in with it?

    To be clear, all explanations ultimately end in, “…just happens.” Even (nay, especially!) classical Christian theology ends such. Why did Jesus Speak the World into Existence? He just did, and no further explanation is necessary.

    The difference with naturalists is twofold.

    First, we’re only giving credence to claims of existence when there’s positive evidence to support such claims.

    And, perhaps more importantly, most of us have long since abandoned Aristotelian modes of thought that demand reasons for everything, a cause for every effect.

    Why do things fall down? Because of Newtonian gravity as better understood as a Laplacian potential field. There’s no more “cause” in the fall of an object than there is in the decay of a extra-atomic neutron; it just happens.

    And even if things fall because Jesus pushes them down, and neutrons decay because Jesus zaps them with his Good Evil Eye, how have you addressed the “why” question? Why did Jesus push down the apple? Maybe because he wanted to make some applesauce…but why did he want applesauce?

    As most children of a certain age eventually figure out, the “why” game has truly infinite regress — at which point, “because that’s the way it is” becomes an equally valid answer for every question of, “Why?” at every level.

    Yes, there’re contexts in which it’s incredibly useful to wonder why or to pretend causality or the like. But it’s also useful to pretend that the white background on which you read these words isn’t panchromatic but is instead a carefully-balanced spectrum with three relatively narrow bright spectral spikes and huge swaths of dark between. Pretenses are useful in their contexts but can be trivially abused…so why should you be surprised when the “Why?” pretense breaks down in the same way it always has since you first played that game with your parents?

    So biological systems self -assemble from the atomic/molecular available

    Your equation leaves out the energy input from the Sun. When you add that into the equation, the magic vanishes.

    I just don’t even start to buy it all…. I believe in population drift by selection within a stable, defined species and that is all the EBNS I am prepared to swallow.

    Then you’re left with the insurmountable problem of identifying and defining barriers by which small drifts can accumulate over time. Worse, we’ve got the fossil record (whales are a wonderful example) that demonstrates very viscerally how populations drift very slowly, yes, but the result of those drifts takes you from a single sorta-horse-like animal (that definitely wasn’t a modern horse!) to all the dolphins and whales and porpoises we see today. But at no point was there anything in the fossil record other than very minor drifting, with each pair of temporally-adjacent fossils almost plausibly swappable until put into the larger context.

    I need to look at Jerry Coyne

    Yes, you do. You really, really, really, really do.

    For example Ernst Mayr says ‘mutations continually replenish the variability of the gene pool’. How? Why?

    I haven’t read his book, but each human typically has some dozens of unique mutations simply from cellular damage (radiation, chemical free radicals, whatever). But, at least as importantly, there’s all sorts of novel ways that sexual pairings of genes can add diversity. There’s lots of plasticity in the gene pool, as superbly evidenced by dogs. Teacup Poodles and Great Danes both trace their ancestry back to wolves and could maybe interbreed with human assistance, but I don’t think much of that diversity is explained by mutation. Much of that plasticity is already there in the wolf genome.

    …but, backtracking a moment. We know that dogs evolved from wolves, because we intelligently designed them and have the records that we did so. And anybody who encountered a Teacup Poodle and a Great Dane would classify them as related-but-clearly-different. Wild cats exhibit similar diversity, and lions and tigers can even interbreed. Do you doubt that they’re different species, or that they’re also related? We can trace the evolutionary history to see that cats and dogs are also related, but more distantly, and that, similarly, humans and apes are cousins, that apes and monkeys are cousins, that carnivores and primates are cousins, and that even marigolds and mollusks and malaria and mammals are cousins.

    ‘Tis both wondrous and ennobling to recognize one’s kinship with a Great Redwood, and equally humbling to see the same kinship in the banana slug feasting on the detritus on the forest floor.

    Cheers,

    b&

  12. Ben

    I will not try to persuade you using analytic reductionism or logic in general to believe Christianity. I am merely pointing out that reductionism is full of pretty big holes, and IMO thoroughly derailed in places. I don’t fit God in the gaps, I see him as behind everything with an altogether greater mind and freedom to act. Fortunately, he is also completely good in his intentions. Because of his character, I am able to rest in very incomplete understanding. If you wanted to, and are willing to use everyday human logic, then try the evidence for the Resurrection of Christ, as Don Page and others including myself have suggested. All analysis in the absence of human experience leads to paradoxes, arbitrary assumptions, confusion, when taken too far.

    I like Sean’s initial discussions in ‘From Eternity to Here’ on Boltzmann entropy because they are decently realistic, i.e. he is rigorous in facing loopholes, simplifications and arbitrary judgments. This is a lot easier with relatively simple proof scenarios from physics. I find this sort of rigour lacking in the EBNS stuff. I could be patronizing and suggest it is because biologists look at a done deal and categorize and describe things more than they look for thorough, detailed mechanistic pathways, but I won’t….I’m much too nice. Anyway you might say something about me…

    Most people surely make day-to-day decisions by trusting others to some extent, and using their minds to some extent. We make mistakes. We don’t understand everything. I believe Christianity is accessible at that level. I have a prior bias. I don’t like atheistic reductionism.

    Cheers

  13. Simon:

    I don’t fit God in the gaps, I see him as behind everything with an altogether greater mind and freedom to act. Fortunately, he is also completely good in his intentions.

    Richard Dawkins’s favorite question is the only rebuttal required: How do you know that? You will inevitably discover that the standards by which you claim that knowledge not only would fail to convince anybody else not already convinced, they also fail to convince you when applied to other religious claims.

    If you wanted to, and are willing to use everyday human logic, then try the evidence for the Resurrection of Christ, as Don Page and others including myself have suggested.

    This might not be the forum for this discussion, but it’s overwhelmingly clear that the Judeo-Christian pantheon is every bit as fantastic and unreal as the Greco-Roman one. We have all sorts of stuff from people who were in and around Judea in the first third of the first century who noticed none of the Jesus incident. This is of especial significance with respect to Philo of Alexandria. You might or might not be familiar with Jesus’z appearances as a Jewish demigod in the Hebrew Bible, especially in Zecharaiah 6 (which dates to about the sixth century BCE). Philo explicitly identified that Biblical Jesus with his reformulation of the Hellenistic Logos into Judaism. The very next surviving mention of Jesus in the historical record is the Pauline Epistles, in which Jesus is theologically identical to Philo’s Logos — and in which Jesus is never set in contemporary events. Jesus continues to evolve over the following decades until Mark wrote a palindromic Homeric epic setting Jesus in the distant-but-not-too-distant past; nearly everything after Mark either repeats or rebuts him. And Mark, writing after the fall of Jerusalem, is the earliest source we have for Jesus’s biographical details.

    This, of course, all comes before an analysis of the Gospels themselves, in which Jesus is revealed as the ultimate foe of all humanity, the warlord who will end the world in an all-consuming battle (Armageddon) — and for whom even death is not enough for his enemies, instead consigning his defeated foes to the infinite torture of Hell. He repeatedly and emphatically make this plain, such as in the allegory of Luke 19 (“But those mine enemies…”) and Matthew 10 (“I came not to send peace, but a sword”) — and, indeed, even the bizarrely-beloved Sermon On the Mount in which Jesus condemns to infinite torture all men who look admiringly upon a woman but fail to immediately thereafter gouge out their own eyes.

    You obviously reject outright the “historical” claims of all other religions, rightly observing overwhelming number of fatal flaws in their accounts. That you fail to reject Christian claims of historicity despite those claims being every bit as flawed can almost certainly be traced back to your parents teaching you to sing, “Jesus Loves Me,” when you were young — just as adherents of other religions were typically similarly indoctrinated.

    Most people surely make day-to-day decisions by trusting others to some extent, and using their minds to some extent. We make mistakes. We don’t understand everything.

    This is, of course, true — and it’s also why the scientific method is of such overwhelming importance. It is the only means ever demonstrated to be reasonably self-correcting, by constantly comparing its models against as-dispassionate-as-possible observations of what’s actually happening.

    In religion, faith is the ultimate virtue…but, in science, it is the one unforgivable sin.

    And, indeed, faith is abhorrent in all non-religious contexts, as well. If I urge you to have faith in me when I tell you to buy some Arizona oceanfront property or a real cherry of an used car or some stocks primed to soar, you’ll know instantly I’m trying to pull one over on you. You’ll trust me only to the extent that such trust is warranted by a rational analysis of objective observation — the exact foundation as science is built upon. But if I urge you to trust me that Jesus loves you and will comfort you in his bosom for eternity after you die, you’ll happily do so on nothing more than warm fuzzy feelings.

    You owe it to yourself to figure out if this double standard is truly warranted…and, perhaps more importantly, who it truly is who benefits from your faith in Jesus, as evidenced by the amount of money you’ve given to the priests encouraging said faith.

    Cheers,

    b&

  14. “Suppose that supernatural realm itself entails a supernatural being.” Suppose it doesn’t. POOF

  15. Ben

    This is not a religious forum and I do not wish to show contempt for it. Suffice to say my faith resonates with experienced reality and naturalism/atheism does not. I appreciate that the reverse is probably true for you at the moment.

    As to Richard Dawkins’s why?, I believe my Christian worldview to be rather more rational overall than his naturalistic one and for many reasons. His is also hollow and hopeless. I find a lot of his stuff ignorant, simplistic and blinkered. His caricature of faith/fact is just plain wrong. That’s not to say that many don’t display a faith of an unquestioning and unwarranted nature, whether religious, cultural, political or naturalistic. I’ll dig out Jerry Coyne if you’ll dig out ‘The Reason for God’ by Timothy Keller, or maybe the somewhat dated but still pretty penetrating ‘Mere Christianity’ by C.S. Lewis. I’d like to see if there’s anything really new in the Coyne book, or just more meandering around the bits that are essentially re-statements of orthodoxy whilst avoiding or minimizing the import of the really tricky stuff. For my part I think you’d be doing yourself a really big favour if you actually read Keller or Lewis for yourself and wrestle with them. There is a lot more of genuine substance in them than in any evolutionary/atheistic books I have looked at. I also recommend ‘Why Science does not disprove God’ by Amir D Aczel which tackles some of Dawkins and his ilks’ falsities after the publication of ‘The God Delusion’. The latter and ‘God is not Great’ by Hitchens are actually pretty flimsy in the light of say Lewis and both are ignorant of some basic evangelical theology. Most of their objections to faith are not new and have been answered years ago, in part at least.

    ‘In a lawsuit the first to speak seems right, until someone comes forward and cross-examines.’ Proverbs 18v17 NIV

    Personally I think you need a more solid, useful and hopeful worldview. One that is actually true, in the final and fullest sense of the word.

  16. Simon Packer
    If you’re into the 4000 year old earth fringe, then evolutionary timescales aren’t available to you, but then you’ve disconnected yourself from a lot of other knowledge.

    What Sean is trying to show in his book, is the beautifully CONSISTENT picture we have of all the underlying as well as emergent aspects of the world. All using naturalism.

    EBNS is one such thing. It’s fantastically consistent with our understanding of a host of other sciences like biology, chemistry, archaeology, geology, physics etc. All the pieces fit wherever we’re able to connect the dots. That’s what so beautiful.

    The fact that you’re unable to imagine one species evolving into another (e.g. as defined by specimens of the latter no longer reproducing offspring with specimens of the former) only boils down to a deficiency in your imagination.

    The genes code for what the organism is going to develop into as a mature organism, whether or not that organism successfully reproduces and creates successful offspring hence becomes a determinant for whether those particular gene sequences become part of later specimens.

    The fact that genes play this key role in biological life is covered by such overwhelming documentation, and is at the scientific core several different multi-billion dollar industries ranging from farming to medicine. Doubting the validity of it should be attributed with ridiculously low Bayesian probability. That is really all there is to EBNS. Genes as a determinant of inherited properties, the fact that independent or paired reproduction in some sense takes place, and time. If you have those three ingredients EBNS is just a logical consequence. If you accept those three ingredients as axioms, then EBNS essentially follows by deduction.

    Naturalism really isn’t impacted by whether you like it or not. We still have areas where new knowledge can and will be gained, but there is not a single shred of evidence (contrary to what I perceive to be your claims) that any of our current knowledge of emergent ontologies is incompatible with core theory.

  17. Simon:

    As to Richard Dawkins’s why?, I believe my Christian worldview to be rather more rational overall than his naturalistic one and for many reasons. His is also hollow and hopeless.

    It is most emphatically not the case that the naturalistic perspective is hollow and hopeless. Indeed, you’d be most hard pressed to find anybody who lives (or lived) life with as much gusto as the vociferous “New” atheists, especially including Richard and Sean — as well as Christopher Hitchens, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Lawrence Krauss, Maryam Namazie, Sam Harris, and the others. I know Jerry Coyne personally, not intimately but casually, and I can assure you that he’s as vibrant and passionate a private figure as anybody you’ll ever meet.

    And, indeed: which is to give you more cause for fulfillment and hope: to invent and then follow your own passions, or to slavishly worship at the feet of an all-powerful entity who most certainly has no need of your help? It is the religious perspective which is woefully devalued and debasing — not the naturalistic one. Your purpose as a believer is dependent entirely on your hopes of correctly interpreting the wishes of your gods — and that, in turn, assumes that your gods have your best interests (and not their own) at heart. How sure are you that the Bible isn’t a cookbook? And even that, of course presupposes the Bible isn’t the ancient faery tale anthology it so clearly is.

    I’ll dig out Jerry Coyne if you’ll dig out ‘The Reason for God’ by Timothy Keller, or maybe the somewhat dated but still pretty penetrating ‘Mere Christianity’ by C.S. Lewis.

    I haven’t read Keller, but I’ve read Lewis and plenty others — including, of course, the Bible itself, as well as some Augustine, Martyr, Aquinas, Anselm, and more. And watched all sorts of debates and the like with William Lane Craig, David Bentley Hart, Jonathan Sacks, and more. When you understand why similar apologetics in support of Hinduism and its billion-plus faithful leave you yourself wincing in sympathetic embarrassment, you’ll understand why the Christian versions are equally sorry.

    In stark contrast, there is only one modern physics, geology, astronomy, biology, and so on. Controversy might accrue at the edges of knowledge, but the consensus of anything more than a few decades old in any of those fields is overwhelming. There simply is no Reformed Baptist Church of Climatology, Reformation of 1915, and therefore no heretic scum to push off bridges. Never will you find a chemist who questions the Periodic Table — and not because of divine revelation or the words of some authority, but because she herself independently reconfirms the validity of that theory every day in her work.

    Personally I think you need a more solid, useful and hopeful worldview.

    Ignoring the fact that, as I demonstrated above, mine truly is the more solid (evidence-based), useful (science is an amazing tool!) and hopeful (we can do far more with science than superstition) worldview…what matters is not which we find more comforting, but which is actually true. Whether one belief induces joy or another despair has no bearing whatsoever on the truth of either. The drunkard’s happiness in no way demonstrates the merits of alcoholism.

    One that is actually true, in the final and fullest sense of the word.

    See, that’s another fatal flaw in the religious perspective. The scientist frequently says, “Gee, I don’t know — but let me see if I can figure it out.” And scientists throughout history have a fantastic track record of figuring out more and more — even as there’s an awful lot that still remains mysterious. But the religious have their “faith” that “informs” them that their gods are the only answers that matter..so why should one even hypothetically need to investigate further? It’s just a waste of time when you already know that Jesus Spoke Life, the Universe, and Everything into existence.

    In reality, we don’t have access to any sort of ultimate truth — neither of us. What the religious do is invent a belief in some sort of absolute truth and, as with any good conspiracy theory, cling to it because it can’t be disproven. Rationalists, on the other hand, are content to admit that there’re things we don’t know, and are happy with “I don’t know” as the answer — and we’re especially adverse to inventing so-called “explanations” that have nothing to back them up, especially when those “explanations” themselves so radically and violently contradict that which we are reasonably confident we actually do know.

    Cheers,

    b&

  18. Ben says:

    “Write down the math on a chalkboard. (Sure, you’ll need a chalkboard bigger than the galaxy just to write a small bit of the math, but we’ll pretend.) Now take away the chalkboard. Where’d the math go?”

    Consider the state of the world extremely close to the big bang , perhaps just a fraction of a second afterwards…no large structures exist…there are no ‘aggregate properties’ of matter at all , since nothing has formed yet, not even atoms. In fact if Sean is correct, there is not even any solid matter at all to start with, just those strange ‘quantum wavefunctions’ from which everything else is supposed to emerge. So no ‘aggregates’ of matter exist at all yet right? But math is *still* there – 1+1=2 even under these extreme conditions. If that wasn’t true, Sean would be completely unable to use math to talk about the wave-functions at all! Take away all the matter, where did the math go? Answer: it’s still there.

    I don’t claim that ‘math is everything’, just that it has some sort of objective existence. It is only ‘strong platonism’ (that takes the extreme view that ‘math is everything’) that is in danger of degenerating into incoherence for the reasons you mention.

    Remember, my own theory of reality that I’ve talked about here on Sean’s blog granted fundamental reality to *all* 3 elements: Physics *and* Math *and* Mind. Imagine reality as a ‘3-legged table’, held up by these 3 elements. Attempting to ‘kick out’ (eliminate) any of these legs will indeed cause ‘the table to collapse’ (the explanation of reality to collapse into incoherence).

    Since you posted some ‘metaphysical’ equations, let me post my own.

    I advise Sean Carroll and yourself to sit back, drop some acid, look at my equations, and achieve enlightenment 😉

    (1) Physics + Math = Mind
    (This says that conscious awareness is a combination of matter and information)

    (2) Math + Mind = Physics
    (This says that matter is a combination of information and conscious awareness)

    (3) Physics + Mind = Math
    (This says that information is a combination of matter and conscious awareness)

    And yes, it *is* all just a big circle, with reality mirroring itself to infinity. There is nothing apart from ‘descriptions’ and ‘mirrors’. Eureka!

  19. Simen S/Ben

    I am not a YEC as I find the evidence seems to point elsewhere. We have no final time datum in physics, and the Hebrew word ‘yom’ used in early Genesis can equally mean ‘epoch’ and is used that way elsewhere in the OT. The solar system was our initial time datum but that appeared a few days into the creation account. Radiometric dating and the extent of the cohesion of the physics behind it are enough to make me think the earth is probably quite old.

    The Biblical account, as it relates to science, is a necessary condescension of an all-knowing God to a less-knowing humanity. King David perhaps believed that the sun had a tent to stay in at night (Psalm19v4-6). The Bible is primarily relational and moral, because although God is the master physicist, those things are most important and profound to him. God knows the difference between naive culturally-begotten ignorance and an inner disposition to deceit.

    Our evaluation of our physical context is just that. Our evaluation. Heisenberg seems to have seen this.

    ‘We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’

    and, related to our present overall worldview differences;

    The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.

    Whether you see naturalism as proceeding to inevitable success is subjective. Is Sean’s position (and similar ones) essentially a truthful representation of why we are here, or not? I say a definite ‘no’. I also doubt whether naturalists have an idea of their end-game. Ultimately they are arguing themselves into nothingness. Then they argue about what nothing is. I see a lot of cohesion in physics plus a lot of mysteries. Did anyone mention vacuum energy? I see complete implausibility in big picture naturalistic EBNS and I think a lot of others would if they seriously grappled with Behe, Symmonds and Meyer, filtering out hubristic brush-offs. To repeat, I see no remotely plausible mechanism which would cause viable and likely genetic coding for leaps in phenotype, particularly for Behe’s irreducibly complex phenotype systems, and more particularly when those systems are unique (or nearly so) to a particular organism. This is not detail, it is a go/no go hurdle. I have no squabble with EBNS as a postulated mechanism. Well worth checking out, well done Charles. But a postulated mechanism is not a proof. That is elementary philosophy of science. Now I am aware that there are Christian believers who swallow EBNS wholesale, and Francis Collins , former director of the Human Genome Project, is one. He became a Christian after seeing the differences in response to suffering among patients with and without Christian faith.

    I see inherent limitations in knowledge derived using axioms of logic. I have seen the physical problems of actually implementing even closed logic systems. I used to design telecoms systems and I know that there is no such thing as an error-free asynchronous data link. I discussed this recently with a former boss who is now a visiting professor and he says it is still true. I also do not see mistakes being the routine cause of functionality, as EBNS does. I see many pragmatic and ultimately arbitrary fixes in physics.

    Regarding our idea of cause and effect, and locality is built on cause-effect reasoning, Einstein said,

    If this axiom (locality) were to be completely abolished, the idea of the existence of quasienclosed systems, and thereby the postulation of laws which can be checked empirically in the accepted sense, would become impossible.

    We can argue for a multiverse and Aczel has a thing or two to say about the mathematical consistency of using it as a tool to overcome the improbability of our cosmic environment. Basically, naturalism is assumed by default once we decide to worship the scientific method, which, like it or not, takes on a cause-effect nature because that is how we humans see life. Actually Hebrew thought seems to have been a lot less timeline cause-effect than Greek thought.

    At the end, the pride of man (1 John 1v16) fuels a desire to be in final control and to have final understanding. But if we are eternal beings, a boredom and banality will set in with the status quo, after Nietzsche. A gnashing of teeth born of lost opportunity to grow into knowledge of a God who abides in a far greater reality space than our naturalism defines. God is richly relational and sees to the heart of our beings. This won Collins over; he could see the relational effects of faith, something much more profound than physical fabric, in humanity. God will only reject those who knowingly and persistently reject him.

  20. zarzuelazen:

    So no ‘aggregates’ of matter exist at all yet right? But math is *still* there – 1+1=2 even under these extreme conditions. If that wasn’t true, Sean would be completely unable to use math to talk about the wave-functions at all!

    But Sean’s still describing the wave functions, right? And the math is a valid description of the wave functions, no?

    Without those wave functions, what is your math describing?

    Now, to be fair, Lawrence Krauss has made a most wonderful case for the incoherence of “nothing” — namely, by demonstrating that, even after you remove all the “stuff” of a system, everything we know about the way reality works tells us that that’s an unstable condition and that you’ll eventually have something. And Lawrence has some elegant math that describes that phenomenon far more eloquently than this paltry paragraph can pretend to.

    So, in that sense, the philosopher’s conception of an absolute nothing, an all-encompassing state of barren void, is neatly done away with. and, as such, there’ll always be stuff to describe — and math is the best language we’ve come up with yet for precise description. As long as there’s something that you can describe, you can describe it with math.

    And, of course, as long as you’re around, you can use your math to describe things, so you’ll never be without your math.

    But, again. The apples don’t give a damn if you even exist to describe them, and if you should care to describe them, they don’t care if you describe them with English or math or interpretive dance.

    Physics + Math = Mind

    Trivially demonstrable false, unless you wish to attribute “Mind” to a physics textbook.

    Math + Mind = Physics

    Go ahead. Levitate that apple with your Mind and Math. Do that and I’ll be convinced.

    Physics + Mind = Math

    So, what “Math” did our ancient ancestors poof into existence when they started hurling spears? I’m unaware of any equations being written alongside cave art.

    b&

  21. Simon:

    We have no final time datum in physics, and the Hebrew word ‘yom’ used in early Genesis can equally mean ‘epoch’ and is used that way elsewhere in the OT.

    If you wish to suggest that the history of life on Earth can be fit into six Epochs consistent with Genesis, I must inform you that you could only do so if you’re barking mad. And I must also remind you that Genesis itself is largely a story about an enchanted garden with talking animals and an angry wizard, and you should be old enough by now to recognize that it is foolish in the extreme to contort your perception of reality to consistency with such unabashed faery tales.

    The Bible is primarily relational and moral

    The Bible, as pathetic it is a physics textbook, is a vastly more horrific moral guide.

    The Mosaic law is the epitome of barbarism, ordering brutal execution for offenses as trivial as picking up twigs on the wrong day of the week. Woman have the same status as livestock, and Enlightenment values such as religious tolerance are again cause for death. YHWH orders Moses to commit war crimes worse than any Hitler and the Nazis ever dared do, including the mass rape of every last pre-pubescent girl amongst the Midianites after the total annihilation of the adult population.

    Jesus in the New Testament is no better. The whole point of the story is that Jesus will soon initiate a final world-encompassing battle, Armageddon, in which he will lead his armies to slay all non-Christians — and death is not enough for his foes! Only the infinite torture of Hell will sate his vengeance. See Luke 19 where he uses an allegory to order Christians to get an head start on the bloodbath. See Matthew 10 for confirmation that he brings not peace but a sword. See the Sermon on the Mount for the sort of triviality that merits infinite torture — merely looking at a pretty woman and failing to immediately gouge out your own eyes is enough cause for doom. (This from a love god!?) Yes, yes — he had a couple nice platitudes here and there…but Hitler also kissed babies.

    a truthful representation of why we are here

    Asking a “why” question phrased like that presupposes Aristotelian metaphysics, which was demonstrated primitive superstition centuries ago.

    I also doubt whether naturalists have an idea of their end-game.

    Such teleological thinking is the antithesis of the scientific method. You’re clearly attempting to work towards a conclusion of, “ergo Deus.” Naturalists, on the other hand, are content to observe and draw conclusions based on observation, wherever those conclusions might lead, even if those conclusions are discomforting.

    I see a lot of cohesion in physics plus a lot of mysteries. Did anyone mention vacuum energy?

    Yes, there’s all sorts of things we don’t know — and that’s cause for excitement!

    But there’s lots we do know. An object dropped near the surface of the Earth will accelerate towards its center at about ten meters per second per second, with a few footnotes. Do you doubt this? If so, I encourage you to drop a brick on your foot until you no longer doubt it.

    And the extent of our knowledge, of things that we know as confidently as “things fall down,” is vast and overwhelming. If you agree that we are justified in our confidence that “things fall down,” you should have similar confidence that the Earth is about four and an half billion years old and that all life shares a common ancestor, and that Sean’s Big Equation can explain all the underlying physics of the history of the Earth.

    It can’t, as you point out, explain dark energy — but we know with as much certainty that “things fall down” that dark energy is irrelevant to the history of the Earth, save to the extent that physicists like Sean get really excited trying to figure out what it is.

    Behe’s irreducibly complex phenotype systems

    Behe is doing nothing more than looking at an archway, noting that removing any single stone of the arch would cause it to collapse, and concluding that it therefore could only have been constructed by magic. Every single case he’s ever claimed for “irreducible complexity” has been demonstrated to be such; some feature evolves initially, another feature evolves using the original feature, the original feature fades with time but leaving the new “irreducibly complex” feature.

    I see inherent limitations in knowledge derived using axioms of logic.

    Yes, and that’s a good thing. With but one single logical absurdity, you can justify any claim. Divide by zero just once and you can shake out the entire Rebel Alliance from Star Wars from the detritus. Intuiting entire pantheons from absurdity is child’s play.

    Perfect example: all the “first cause” arguments, whatever form they take. All come down to an Aristotelian superstition that abhors infinite regress. Follow the logic, and the blindingly obvious conclusion is that the premise of causality is fundamentally incoherent — something repeatedly empirically demonstrated, especially with respect to Quantum Mechanics. But apply special pleading and “ergo, Deus” practically instantly pops out.

    Basically, naturalism is assumed by default once we decide to worship the scientific method

    No; naturalism is the conclusion. All claims of the supernatural to date have been overwhelmingly demonstrated erroneous at best, and most commonly fraudulent. How many times must we investigate claims that somebody can speak with the dead only to discover bog-standard “cold reading” techniques at play before concluding that the dead don’t speak?

    At the end, the pride of man (1 John 1v16) fuels a desire to be in final control and to have final understanding.

    Theologian, heal thyself. You are the one insisting you have the ultimate final answers. Us naturalists are overjoyed to point out the limits of our knowledge — if for no other reason than that it tells us where we need to work hardest to push back those limits.

    But you’re trying to skip all that hard work and jump straight to, “ergo, Deus,” so you might pretend to “have final understanding”…and, for those typical of the priesthood over the millennia, to leverage that into “final control” over their flocks. After all, you daren’t question the gods, do you? And the priests are their official agents, so you mustn’t question them, either.

    That last paragraph, of course, is a summary of why religion has always been and will always be such a powerful force for evil in society. Authority must always be questioned — and the more powerful and established the authority, the greater the necessity it be questioned. The authority need not fear questioning; if the authority is trustworthy, the questions will always be answered in its favor. But religious authority draws the “faith” vail around itself, preventing questioning…which is how we get all the horrors the churches and mosques and what-not have perpetrated upon us over history.

    Cheers,

    b&

  22. Ben said:

    “Physics + Math = Mind
    Trivially demonstrable false, unless you wish to attribute “Mind” to a physics textbook.”

    Lets say I had a complete mathematical description of everything governing the workings of your brain. And I translated that into a computer program. Call that the ‘Ben’ program. There’s the math.

    Now for the physics: Take a really huge supercomputer.

    Now combine them. Run the ‘Ben’ program (Math) on the supercomputer (Physics). Hey presto… a real Mind will indeed be conjured into existence. An actual conscious copy of you (Ben).

    Physics + Math = Mind – **True** !

  23. zarzeulazen:

    Now combine them. Run the ‘Ben’ program (Math) on the supercomputer (Physics). Hey prestro… a real Mind will indeed be conjured into existence. An actual conscious copy of you (Ben).

    But your math still remains nothing more than a description of the physical configuration of the computer. The actual computer itself doesn’t need your math in order to do what it does; it “just does” it. And, indeed, there’re an infinite number of ways of mathematically describing what the computer is doing and an infinite number of ways of mathematically not describing what the computer is doing. Perl programmers especially appreciate this: TMTOWTDI, or, “there’s more than one way to do it.”

    Again with apples. I might have four apples on the table and place another six apples next to them. But if I use “6 * 9” for the math to describe the situation, that is clearly an incorrect description. “11 – 1” would typically be seen as an accurate but unhelpful description, though it might be useful if the context included “11 people wanting an apple but we’re one apple shy.” As such, again, there’s an infinite number of mathematical ways to describe the number of apples on the table…so which of those infinite ways are “real,” and why are they more real than the infinite number that aren’t real? And why are you privileging the mathematical descriptions at the expense of the English description — a description that, in this case, is likely to be far more useful, compact, and complete? Yet the fact that English is the better description than math clearly doesn’t mean that I actually have any apples on my table at the moment — as, indeed, there are none, and no amount of description in any form will cause apples to manifest.

    Similarly, Euclidean plane geometry is typically “good enough” for navigating at regional scales, but breaks down profoundly at global scales and isn’t even remotely relevant at relativistic scales — not to mention the fact that neither the math of Relativity nor Quantum Mechanics provide a valid description of the dynamics of a black hole. You would have us believe that Euclidean plane geometry still somehow remains really real…when, in fact, absolutely nothing is accurately described by it at the end of the day.

    I’m sure you’d agree with me if I told you that “uttermostly tow swqfrrtb hygramophobic” isn’t describing anything, that it describes nothing and therefore has no meaningful existence outside of the brute record of the string of letters. Erase this blog post (etc.) and what real existence is there for “uttermostly tow swqfrrtb hygramophobic”?

    Yet Euclidean plane geometry is no different. Just as you will never find anything that you can reasonably describe as “uttermostly tow swqfrrtb hygramophobic,” you will never find an actual Euclidean circle. Sure, you can find things that approximate an Euclidean circle, and you can use Euclidean math to describe them to a certain and otherwise understand a small subset of their properties. But they’re not Euclidean circles, and Euclid only describes (part of) what they actually are — and they remain with or without your description of them, regardless of how you formulate that description.

    Cheers,

    b&

  24. Ben said:

    “Math + Mind = Physics
    Go ahead. Levitate that apple with your Mind and Math. Do that and I’ll be convinced.”

    Everything in physics is ultimately governed by quantum mechanical wave-functions. Now these wave-functions themselves don’t describe physics as we understand it , they are purely mathematical – a strange state called a ‘superposition’ describing many different possible outcomes happening at once. According to the ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’ championed by Sean himself, this means that there exists alternative universes for every possible outcome.

    Now quantum mechanics allows for a degree of randomness, in terms of what observers will actually see. If you take an apple, there is a very tiny non-zero probability of it spontaneously levitating. So in a very tiny fraction of all the alternative universes, there exist observers that do see a levitating apple.

    In order to get a definite specific physics outcome, you need observers (Mind) to actually make observations using the wave-function (Math). Hey presto, some observers in alternative universes will indeed see a levitating apple.

    Math + Mind = Physics – **True**!

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