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. zarzuelazen:

    In order to get a definite specific physics outcome, you need observers (Mind) to actually make observations using the wave-function (Math).

    Physicists get really, really, really tired of dealing with the misconception that “observation” has anything whatsoever to do with conscious agents. They uniformly regret the choice and persistence of the word, “observation.”

    Suffice it to say that, if your conception of the world either incorporates or results in an intimate correlation between quantum wave function collapse and intelligent observation, your conception is deeply flawed and the fact of that correlation should be taken as demonstration of a “reducto ad absurdam” showing you made a worng turn somewhere.

    If you like, I can attempt my own layman’s delivery of why this is the case…but, due to the fact that I’m a mere layman, it will only be fruitful if you’re willing to work with me and grant that it really is the case. If you’re not willing to grant me that starting point, I’ll have to point you to real physicists and physics educators (such as Sean) who keep beating this point to death.

    The shortest of versions is that everything related to Quantum Mechanics can be demonstrated in the lab without recourse to intelligent observers, that intelligent observers are irrelevant to our understanding of the physics, and that the brains of intelligent observers are so large and hot that classical Newtonian Mechanics is by far the overwhelmingly dominant description — quantum phenomenon don’t even have the theoretical chance to present themselves at the scale of brains.

    That, and you could take a survey of professional physicists and physics professors and discover that the overwhelming majority laugh off suggestions that consciousness is even remotely involved — and that’s even amongst any Neoplatonists you might identify.

    Indeed, the only sorts of people you find who take that sort of thing seriously are the mystics and the quacks — with a particularly strong nexus centered around Deepak Chopra.

    Cheers,

    b&

  2. Simon Packer
    I’m not sure if I would assign too much Bayesian probability to the likelihood of a deity emerging as we gain more knowledge of vacuum energy and error prone asynchronous data links.

  3. Simon Packer,
    If you like Bayesian reasoning, you should try reading Richard Carrier’s “proving history” an “on the historicity of Jesus”.

    He makes a pretty good case for the non-historicity of Jesus.

  4. Dear Bloggers and Lurkers,
    *- ; I’ve got to say that I’m sadly disappointed by most all the posts here – on all sides of the discussion. I’ve been involved in and listened to 5 decades of the same recursive points of view, entrenched championing of ideologies and purported ‘truths’, endlessly and arrogantly written by the religious and the non-religious alike. And, well, to some of you, your experiences and logic-ridden conclusions and belief biases, may seen the end-all be all of ‘reality’ and any other way of thinking or belief or understand is . . . error. But in the final conclusion, can any of you, with largess and gracious acceptance of the ‘scope of all things possible’, come up with a model of existence that embraces and incorporates and includes ALL of what has been written about here?
    .
    *-* By mutual experience, we already live in a universe that accommodates all these different percepts and understandings. And the preposterousuniverse.com notion under Sean Carroll, is already looking to trying to span and embrace – not exclude or preclude – points of view and rigorous knowledge – hard won and achieved.
    .
    *-* So why don’t all of you give the benefit of the doubt to your personal adversaries and start to discuss . . . how is it that the diversity of ideas and points of views co-exist? What aspects are testable and what aspects forever metaphysical, beyond testing? If we accept god-personalities in the story of existence, and science explorations have brought us to one possibility that there was a ‘initiating event’ prior to which nothing existed at all, then part of the god-personality model has to include the notion that all personalities, the brief mortal ones and the god-eternal one, had to have pre-existed before the big-pop; with everything . . . as it was to come into existence .. . was effectively ‘waiting in the wings’ … off stage of the future universe.
    .
    *-* Why are you all Judeo-Christian-Islamist protagonists or anti-thesists? Why aren’t you giving deference or respect to other cultures’ creation-stories? Is there a remnant seed of important information and relations, cloaked in mythos stories telling, that resides in some of those “searches for reality” that our pre-ancestors thought about, talked about, wrote about?
    .
    *-* It’s great that there is passion here. But its passion for the limited and exclusionary. Yet again. Get over yourselves. Your knowledge and understanding journies haven’t even begun yet . .as much as you each think you’ve reached the ultimate precipices of your individual mountains of information, nee data. Stop buttressing ideas-fortresses walls. Look for bridges. Explore novelties and alternative arrangements of the data. Ptolemy wasn’t ‘wrong’, centuries of people survived and advanced, knowing when to plant crops and prepare for winters and all sorts of things using his model of the universe. Successfully. Copernicus simply re-organized the same information – in a different way. Allowing us to realize more things about the universe -off- of the planet. Do we arrogantly call Ptolemy ‘stupid’? that he was ‘wrong’? Some may. I don’t. Neither would I dismiss Newton, after Einstein. Copernicus ‘stepped outside’. Einstein ‘stepped outside’.
    .
    *-* Are any of -you- ready to . . . ‘step outside’?
    .
    *-*

  5. James Rose

    Sorry, I don’t accept that there is any meaningful reason to build bridges with anything that goes beyond naturalism. There is just no reason to do so.

    To some extent you seem to engage in the faulty reasoning which inspired Isaac Asimov to write his legendary essay on “The Relativity of Wrong”. You should check it out: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

    Asimovs essay may also help some to understand how Sean can claim that our current knowledge of the core theory is sufficient to account for everything which is relevant to our existence here on earth and what that actually means. It means that Sean’s claim will also be true a million years from now (provided anyone is still around with a working brain)

  6. James Rose:

    But in the final conclusion, can any of you, with largess and gracious acceptance of the ‘scope of all things possible’, come up with a model of existence that embraces and incorporates and includes ALL of what has been written about here?

    Naturalists would agree in an heartbeat that there’s a great deal we don’t know — and most of us would not only be happy with the statement that we’ll never know everything, as well as with the statement that omniscience itself is an incoherent concept.

    In start contrast, the typical theological position is that the favored local deity is all-knowing, and represents an all-encompassing “Theory of Everything.”

    If we accept god-personalities in the story of existence

    But why on Earth should we do such a thing? Not only is there no evidence that would support such acceptance, we have overwhelming evidence against accepting that idea.

    Nobody, best I know, has ever seriously proposed that gods must be invoked to explain why things fall down; it’s always been understood that that’s simply what happens to unsupported objects. But for a long time it was supposed that the gods were responsible for shepherding the Planets in their motions across the night sky…until Newton showed us that they’re simply falling down in much the same way that apples fall off trees. Even Newton famously invoked a god to solve the multi-body problem to avoid the system falling into chaos, but we’ve dispensed with that need as well. After Newton, gods were still invoked to explain the diversity of life on Earth…but Darwin showed that’s the result of a process that needs no more gods to explain than gravity. Since Darwin, the gods have been pushed back all the way to the origins of existence…but, even there, Lawrence Krauss has famously recently shown that even that needs no gods to explain.

    And through it all, the personalities of the gods have shrunk and become ever more diffuse and evanescent. Let’s go ahead and posit a god, a new god that caused nature to be what it is such that Kraussian Nothingness should naturally evolve into low-entropy states from which universes Big Bang into existence. Never mind the lack of evidence and absurdity of such a proposal; let’s run with it. Of what hypothetical relevance could such a deity be? It is literally, as a theologian might state with misplaced pride, beyond all time and space — but that’s a two-way street. It doesn’t interact with anything within several layers of singularity from us, and we don’t interact with it. Indeed, it’s even less relevant to humanity than all the fictional characters in all our story books, religious or otherwise. At least we can pretend to have relationships with such fictional characters!

    science explorations have brought us to one possibility that there was a ‘initiating event’ prior to which nothing existed at all

    Eh, that’s a rather poor characterization of the current state of understanding. We know that the Big Bang evolved from a state of profoundly low entropy; that much is plain and beyond reasonable dispute. What led to that state of low entropy is where things get fuzzy…but most physicists are leaning in the direction of a cosmic multiverse in which the sorts of quantum fluctuations we observe on microscopic scales occasionally also happen on macroscopic scales. In these formulations, either time or space or both is infinite, with time potentially infinite to the past as well as the future. Regardless, the notion of “nothing existed at all” is extremely ill-defined and almost certainly not sustainable. That’s especially true given the fact that the total energy of the universe has been observed to be zero, meaning that all of our existence is, in one very meaningful conception, a fluctuation of “nothing.”

    Why are you all Judeo-Christian-Islamist protagonists or anti-thesists?

    Simple demographics. There’re more “nones” than any single Christian denomination in the States, and more Christians than “nones” and “others,” and more Jews than all the other “others” combined.

    Why aren’t you giving deference or respect to other cultures’ creation-stories?

    Because they’re every bit as absurd as the familiar ones…and lack the patina of respectability granted by familiarity. Both the Hindu and the Sikh find it bizarre that anybody would take seriously the proposition that the Milky Way is literal milk spurted from Hera’s breast — as do you, I dare say.

    Do we arrogantly call Ptolemy ‘stupid’? that he was ‘wrong’? Some may. I don’t. Neither would I dismiss Newton, after Einstein. Copernicus ‘stepped outside’. Einstein ‘stepped outside’.

    The stark difference is that Western religious thought is stubbornly Aristotelian. Newton was not “stupid” or “wrong” for failing to anticipate modern physics. But you live in a world where we know better — and you would be both stupid and wrong to insist, in this day and age, that Newton can explain the complexity of the world as we understand it today. Sure, centuries ago people were able to plant crops using Ptolemaic astronomy. But good luck convincing NASA to use epicycles to program their next extraplanetary mission.

    All that writ, it seems to me you’ve spectacularly missed the point of Sean’s latest book. He’s not looking to find some sort of halfway-to-crazy-town middle ground between science and religion. Rather, he’s facing reality straight on and observing that everything we cherish about being human is not only fully supported by observations of reality but profoundly enriched by it. We should not flinch from reality and retreat into the arms of imagined friends; rather, we should embrace reality, welcome it for what it is, and use our knowledge of it to mold our little corner of it to our liking.

    (And, even if Sean wouldn’t phrase things like that I’m phrasing it like that. But I’m pretty sure Sean would be okay with the way I phrased it.)

    Cheers,

    b&

  7. Simen:

    It means that Sean’s claim will also be true a million years from now (provided anyone is still around with a working brain)

    A very minor clarification of that statement, to get to the essence of what Asimov wrote.

    Sean’s Big Equation will be just as good at explaining reality at applicable scales in a million years as it is today. However, chances are superlative that, if there are any intellectual descendants of humans at that time, they will have even better methods of explaining reality. Newton’s equations are just as true and useful today, so long as you’re limiting yourself to human-scale phenomena — and they’ll also be just as true in a million years. Neither Newton nor Sean’s Big Equation is an accurate description of the dynamics of a black hole. We can hope to have such a description in much less than a million years from now, and we can similarly hope that that description will prompt as much of a change in perspective from our current understanding as modern physics prompted over Newtonian physics. But Newton and Sean will remain as valid as they are today forever.

    Cheers,

    b&

  8. Ben:

    “Physicists get really, really, really tired of dealing with the misconception that “observation” has anything whatsoever to do with conscious agents. They uniformly regret the choice and persistence of the word, “observation.” ”

    The bottom-line is that the randomness in quantum mechanics allows for a tiny non-zero probability of levitating apples. If you take Sean’s multiverse theory seriously (that there do exist alternative universes where different possible outcomes happen), then in some tiny fraction of alternative universes, there will be observers that see apples levitate.

    The fact of the matter is, any theory of physics can be divided into *two parts* – a math part, and a part that connects the math to actual physical observables. A physics theory can’t actually predict anything unless, at the end of the day, it links the abstract concepts in the theory to actual concrete observables (sensory data) that can be detected, wouldn’t you agree? And it’s in 2nd step (how a physics theory connects the abstract concepts to actual observables), that some psychology inevitably gets slipped into physics.

    This is particularly clear in quantum physics, where the ‘wavefunction’ doesn’t describe anything remotely like what we actually see – it’s says cats can be ‘alive and dead at the same time’ for heavens sake! So, in fact, in order to actually use the wave-function to predict anything, it needs substantial subjective ‘interpretation’ to link it actual concrete observables.

    The multiverse idea (including the ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’ that Sean likes), tries to avoid any need for talking about consciousness by postulating that all possible outcomes happen in alternative universes. However this only disguises the problem – in fact the need for talk about human perceptions comes ‘roaring back’ as soon as you try to use the theory to actually predict anything.
    This is a quote from physicist Roger Penrose (page 784, ‘The Road To Reality):

    ‘we must bring in the perceptions of some human experimenter to make sense of how the formalism (of quantum physics) relates to this observed real world’.

    In ‘The Many Worlds Interpretation’, the need to talk about human perceptions comes ‘roaring back’ in the form of what is known as ‘the measure problem’. If there are many alternative universes, then we need some method of calculating the probabilities that we (as observers) are going to find ourselves in particular universes right? After all, there are some observers in alternative universes that are going to see all sorts of ‘crazy town’ stuff (like levitating apples). If we get the probability calculations wrong, we can’t predict what we’re going to actually see.

    Physicists’ desperate attempts to avoid talk of consciousness by using ‘The Many Worlds’ interpretation fail. The need for talk of consciousness comes roaring back into physics in the form of the ‘problem of measure’ (Google it if you’re not familiar with the term!). This should be the big warning sign that consciousness is indeed a fundamental property of reality.

  9. Ben Goren
    Yes, that is essentially it. We may extend our knowledge, but within its currently known scope of validity, Core theory will still be as valid as ever. And since – last time I checked – there weren’t any black holes in proximity to my consciousness, the Core theory is in principle fully sufficient to account for what’s going on at the sub-atomic level.

    I personally find the idea that Core theory and experimental results in particle accellerators rules out the existence of potentially relevant new “zilbot” particles as explained by Sean, quite convincing.

  10. zarzuelazen:

    If you take Sean’s multiverse theory seriously (that there do exist alternative universes where different possible outcomes happen), then in some tiny fraction of alternative universes, there will be observers that see apples levitate.

    This is a popular conception of the implications of Many Worlds. However, I’m 99 44/100% sure that it is, in fact, a misconception. I’ve made a private inquiry to Sean asking for his input.

    In the case of a levitating apple, even whilst you might propose a “random” coordinated change in position of all the constituent particles of the apple, those particles are still going to be interacting with the Earth’s gravitational field as normal. Long before you get to macro scales, you’re into arenas where you’re effectively — I think, and this is part of my inquiry to Sean — invoking “Zilbot” particles to explain what’s going on. I’m reasonably confident that Sean would take credible evidence of an apple “spontaneously” levitating due to “random” quantum fluctuations as evidence that everything we think we understand about physics is completely incorrect — and not in the “Einstein fills in edge cases Newton missed” sense, either.

    This is particularly clear in quantum physics, where the ‘wavefunction’ doesn’t describe anything remotely like what we actually see – it’s says cats can be ‘alive and dead at the same time’ for heavens sake!

    Though that was Schrödinger’s purpose in proposing the thought experiment, to demonstrate the absurdity of the idea of superposition, no modern physicist I’m aware of would actually describe the situation as such. Sean’s position would come closest; in Many-Worlds, there’re lots of branches with an alive cat and lots with a dead cat, so, in that sense, the cat is both alive and dead — but there’s nothing special about the cat in that instance.

    Plus, there’s no way to actually construct the experiment in a way that the requisite isolation could be attained, as the cat and the box and the room with the box and everything else is entangled with the system; decoherence would be effectively instantaneous.

    The multiverse idea (including the ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’ that Sean likes), tries to avoid any need for talking about consciousness by postulating that all possible outcomes happen in alternative universes.

    Yes, but with two very important caveats.

    First is that not everything imaginable is possible. I’m pretty sure your levitating apple fits into this category.

    Second is that not everything possible happens with the same frequency. Sean recently pointed me to the Born Rule and how it can be derived in Many-Worlds. The quick summary would be that, if an event has a 10% chance of happening, you’ll wind up with at least ten branches, only one of which has the event. This multiplies rapidly; it would be much more like having 10E42 branches total and the event only happening in 10E41 of them.

    Physicists’ desperate attempts to avoid talk of consciousness by using ‘The Many Worlds’ interpretation fail.

    Quite the contrary. If you take for granted that, with very minor and specific and limited and well-identified exception, Quantum Mechanics “simplifies” to Newtonian Mechanics at human scales, then quantum weirdness becomes irrelevant to consciousness. Brains are entirely classical entities, and no amount of quantum weirdness is going to “bubble up” in such a way that even a single neuron is going to misfire — not in any of the Many Worlds or any variations on that theme.

    If you really want to personally experience the sort of “anything” that is “possible” with Many Worlds, you need to use something like the Universe Splitter iPhone app:

    http://cheapuniverses.com/universesplitter/

    That should give you a good sense of the scale and range of “anything goes” possibilities. As you should quickly figure out, the “anything” that’s actually permitted is, in fact, quite limited. You could try to commit to either levitating an apple with your mind or “jumping” to a branch where the Moon really is made of green cheese…but, if you run the experiment, you’ll discover that neither actually happens. But, if you’ve got both an apple and and orange on the table in front of you and you follow the Splitter’s directive of which to eat, yes, there really will be a macro-scale difference in the Many Worlds subsequently.

    Cheers,

    b&

  11. Simen S

    I see you did not attempt to answer my point of objection to EBNS.

    I don’t see a deity emerging through Bayesian reasoning. I see the Deity as having defined mathematical realities which allow Bayesian reasoning to be derived as a statistical tool. I believe it is Rev. Bayes whose theorem you are discussing, incidentally. The Bible will tell you that Christ in his deity not only set in motion the creation but upholds its existence by his word. I see him as Lord of time and space. Hebrews 1 in the NT discusses the deity of Christ, Hebrews 2 the humanity. The fact that he used mathematical law to do it, at least in part, tells me he knows a lot more about math than we do. Christ put on mortal flesh and grew up in a historical culture so Christ the man who walked the earth and rose from the dead probably was not conversant in modern physics.

    My point about data links is that the interaction between logic theory, conscious mind and physical reality is a fuzzy one, even in areas we like to think are completely deterministic. Here, the parameters (slightly simplified) are: me, conscious designer; sequential Boolean logic as the mathematical reality; and silicon semiconductors, quartz crystals; and a few other bits and bobs as the physical implementation.

    I am reading Sean on entropy and am more convinced than ever that what Heisenberg said about reality being inevitably filtered into something simplistic and incomplete by our human limitations and assumptions is something we need to bear in mind. The ‘observer/evaluator’ function in the acquisition of knowledge about final reality may be a simple outcome of a decoherence type effect in Quantum Mechanics, but, generally speaking, even if observers do not physically interact with eternal physical reality, then our manner of mental processing of actual reality IMO certainly does.

    There are a lot of books saying Jesus Christ didn’t exist. It is sometimes a way out for people who have examined the evidence for the resurrection and still don’t want to believe. It is a minority opinion, pretty much untenable IMO. Mythological figures and real human powerful reformers leave two very distinct patterns of influence on history. Try reading that Timothy Keller book if you are serious about having your soul saved.

    The starting point for this comment section for me was a statement by Sean making the common assertion that naturalistic evidence leads us away from belief in God. It therefore seems reasonable and relevant to discuss that point. Actually, I would say that the inclination of the human evaluator of the naturalistic evidence available to us, rather than the evidence itself, is the real factor. You will find PhD cosmologists and biologists who have become Christians and have revised their naturalistic worldview almost overnight.

  12. Simon Packer:

    I see the Deity as having defined mathematical realities which allow Bayesian reasoning to be derived as a statistical tool.

    Again, how do you know that? How do you know that any god was involved — and, even more to the point, how do you know that it was one from your hometown pantheon? To use that same pantheon, how do you know that Satan isn’t tricking you — or, for that matter, that Satan isn’t playing the same conspiratorial role to Jesus as you ascribe Jesus playing for the rest of us?

    And if you really do take Bayesian statistics seriously, you desperately need to read Richard Carrier’s peer-reviewed dissertation-length book, On The Historicity of Jesus. He sets everything out very neatly — and even the most breathlessly over-the-top apologetic tipping of the scales towards historicity still leaves a very low probability of historicity. A weighting an impartial historian would use results results in tens-of-thousands-to-one against odds. The best part is that he gives you the math in a way that you can trivially tweak to your heart’s content. You can adjust his weighting for the overwhelming mountain of evidence he analyzes (basically, everything written up through roughly the end of the first century, canonical or otherwise) if you think his analysis is off. You can add in additional factors if you think he missed anything.

    But, basically, anything short of an unapologetic conspiracy theory (Satan went through our history archives to trick us into thinking Jesus was fake) is going to come up far short of historicity.

    …which, incidentally, is the conclusion you’d draw just from reading Justin Martyr’s own exhaustive and exhausting rants against the “Sons of Jupiter.” It’s plain as day that the earliest Christians were regarded by everybody else as the same sort of raving loonies as you today would regard the latest comet-alien-Newage death cult.

    if observers do not physically interact with eternal physical reality

    …then either said “reality” is entirely imaginary or everything we think we understand about physics is entirely incorrect. Especially our best-evidenced concept of conservation / symmetry.

    That’s the point that the supernaturalists either don’t get or refuse to address. Humans and our world are made of quarks and electrons. Anything that interacts with quarks and electrons (at human scales) does so through gravity and electromagnetism. If your proposal doesn’t balance Newton’s equations — if, for example, your consciousness causes you to lift a sack of potatoes but isn’t fully accounted for by the high-school-level physics — then either your proposal is worng or all of physics is worng.

    Mythological figures and real human powerful reformers leave two very distinct patterns of influence on history.

    Yes, and Jesus is practically the perfect archetype of the mythological figure. For at least half a millennium before the Caesars, as evidenced by his inclusion in Zechariah (at the end of the Old Testament), Jesus had been a minor-but-important Jewish demigod — the architect of YHWH’s celestial temple, the Prince of Peace, he who was anointed (“christened”) / crowned with many crowns, and so on. None of his contemporaries even hinted at his actual manifestation — even as they continued to expand upon his theological significance. That is, at the same time Jesus was supposed to have been parading around Jerusalem turning wine into flying pigs, Philo was entirely oblivious to those events and instead was writing about how Jesus’s epithet of, “The Rising,” only made sense if one considered him an ancient archetype of this Logos that Philo was busy appropriating from Hellenism. No Christian even wrote Jesus’s biography or definitely put his earthly tenure in a particular place in time and space until Mark, writing at the tail end of the first century. If even a fraction of what Mark wrote, especially the bits about Pilate and the Sanhedrin, were close to true, the scandal would have been the talk of the town all throughout the Empire — and, yet, not even the Roman equivalent of today’s tabloid newspapers has even a peep. And, as I mentioned, when the Pagans did start to take notice, a century and more after the “fact,” Christians were just another bunch of crazy cultists with some bizarre superstitions.

    You will find PhD cosmologists and biologists who have become Christians and have revised their naturalistic worldview almost overnight.

    Quite true.

    But it is also true — and no contradiction — that one of the best predictors of disbelief is academic and scientific achievement. That one holds at all levels; there’re more “nones” amongst those with high school diplomas than dropouts, and the members of the National Academy of Scientists are about as atheistic a lot as you’ll find. As with any sort of statistical sampling, there’re outliers…but, even amongst the outliers, the trend continues. Francis Collins is as staunch an anti-Creationist as you’ll find; save for his faith that Jesus really did visit a backwater corner of the Roman Empire early in the time of the Caesars, his Christianity is as close to deistic as a Christian can get. And LeMaitre, whose “primordial atom” got renamed “The Big Bang,” went out of his way to tell his own Pope to not equate it with the Creation of Genesis.

    So, in short…we have two radically divergent worldviews. One is that all physics experiments performed to date are trustworthy and that energy is conserved and reality is exactly as we’ve observed it to be; the other is that we’ve somehow managed to miss the herd of angry sea monsters rampaging in the room with us, as evidenced by a creative reinterpretation of Homer’s Odyssey.

    What I personally don’t get is this desire for something more. Is the Universe somehow lacking, somehow not enough for you? Have you never looked at the night sky and felt overwhelmed by its expanse and majesty? Have you never stopped to smell the roses? Have you never tasted chocolate on your lover’s lips? Have you never yourself created any art or luxuriated in the creative endeavors of others?

    And if you have, and even that wasn’t enough…what makes you think you’ll ever be satisfied, even if Peter Pan does rescue you from your deathbed and flies you away to Neverland?

    Cheers,

    b&

  13. Ben

    Well, my wife does like chocolate. And I am an amateur astronomer. However much I appreciate this creation, (Cape Town where I live now is a mixture of stunning beauty, considerable affluence and appalling squalor) I agree with CS Lewis, that there is a background sense that I was created for even more. My heart tells me there is more and I will exalt fully in it one day (in the sweet by and by… as they say). One day when the realities which transcend the core equation manifest to the redeemed. Your mileage may differ.

  14. Interesting article on the 2015 Chemistry Nobel Prize, just sent to me by a PhD Zoologist friend.
    http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2015/popular-chemistryprize2015.pdf
    Cellular mechanisms for DNA repair. Seems to re-enforce Behe and make reductionist abiogenesis harder than ever to swallow. Also leaves a tension between supposed constructive mutation and a cell’s just discovered mechanisms to conserve the genome. For me, extremely clear re-enforcement for design. But if you don’t want to see it that way, experience tells me you won’t.

  15. Simon:

    My heart tells me there is more and I will exalt fully in it one day (in the sweet by and by… as they say).

    Sadly, your sentence perfectly illustrates the tragic perversion that is Pascal’s Wager.

    Its fallacious nature you yourself trivially demonstrate by your own indifference to the splendors awaiting fallen warriors in Valhalla. How can you be so blasé about the frigid horror of Nifhel? Is it not therefore prudent to embrace Thor and his paternal wisdom? His Valkyries will not be impressed by weak-minded fools who fall prey to Loki’s deceptions — especially the Christian blasphemies!

    But the true misfortune lies in the way that such futile fantasies “inspire” so many people to waste this, the one-and-only life we actually have. (Or, even if you wish to “hedge” your bets, the one-and-only life we can actually be confident in.)

    If naturalism is correct, and you live your life to the fullest, you’ve gotten the most out of a life well lived. If it’s correct but you pin your hopes on supernaturalism, you’ve denied yourself the opportunity to live up to your full potential. If naturalism is incorrect and you live your life to the fullest, either the gods are noble and will respect your achievements or they won’t — and, if they don’t, they demonstrate their fundamental enmity with humanity. But living your life with the hope of supernaturalism doesn’t do you any good even if it’s true — again, as evidenced by the fact that you’re not a Teutonic Pagan, nor a Muslim, nor an adherent of the umpteen-gagillion other religions ever invented. Pick the worng pantheon, and you’re simply condemning yourself to one of the Hells you incorrectly assumed were merely the stuff of faery tale.

    Cellular mechanisms for DNA repair. Seems to re-enforce Behe and make reductionist abiogenesis harder than ever to swallow.

    Half a millennium ago, Jesus was in the Heavens, presiding over the grand celestial dance. Then Newton looked for him there and we found Jesus missing. But that’s okay, because Jesus was still the force responsible for the origins of the species…until Darwin looked and, again, Jesus had apparently fled. For some time, Jesus was demoted to macroscopic biological features, especially eyes…but only amongst those who had failed to actually read Darwin and the passages where he showed that Jesus wasn’t there, either. Behe started his career insisting he had found Jesus hiding in the gap of the bacterial flagellum, but nobody rightly took him seriously — and I think even Behe himself has acknowledged that Jesus wasn’t ever there, in the first place.

    And now you would have us believe that the magical ever-shrinking Jesus has squeezed himself into the gap of the cellular machinery of the immune system.

    You’re apparently not aware that, at this level, it’s all just chemistry, with no more magical mystery at work than the baking soda volcanoes your schoolmates presumably brought to the science fair.

    Christians understandably get upset when non-Christians describe Christian apologetics as particularly shallow appeals to ignorance and superstition…but, really, how else are we supposed to understand it?

    Especially when Christians and atheists alike agree on how ignorantly superstitious all the other religions are! I mean, it’s not like you seriously believe in multiple-armed blue-skin elephant-headed Hindu gods, right? Or the Egyptian myths about Horus masturbating the Earth into existence? Or believe that the Dalai Lama really is the reincarnation of whoever-it-is?

    Doesn’t Jesus as a microbiologist strike you as at least as absurd and incongruous as Kim Il-sung as a nuclear physicist?

    Cheers,

    b&

  16. Simon
    I don’t think I have anything to add to what Ben responded to you. Nice read, Ben

  17. Ben/Simen

    Well, I have made some points and suggestions for you to research or think about if you wish.

    This is not a religious forum and my convictions for your needs are orthodox Christian as I have already made clear; there are plenty of places to research that, should you wish, without me preaching in an unwelcome fashion here. Yes, I am a little saddened by your responses but not unduly upset and I’m used to it. Overall I’m reasonably encouraged as I’m reaching people for the gospel on other fronts.

    All the best to you both. We might differ right now on what that actually is…but I do mean it. Thanks for taking the time.

    Cheers.

  18. Simon,

    It’s been interesting. I admit I find your variant of apologetics somewhat fascinating.

    Not because I consider your arguments in any way convincing, but because you appear to show such sincere interest in science, yet you still fail to realize that the construed dissonances you perceive to be there, have all been imposed by yourself in your attempt to merge reality with your religion.

    If your were to HONESTLY consider the “what if” scenario in which there is no God and religion is in fact made up, I’m totally convinced you have the reasoning capabilities to see how all the pieces fit together in the same harmoniously beautiful and consistent way that we do. I think there is still hope for you 🙂

    As I think Sean is trying to communicate with his book, there is plenty of room for positive, meaningful and enjoyable living with lasting friendships and plenty of love and compassion even for people who fully embrace naturalism. Abandoning God does not make you into a morally misguided evildoer. What you are is up to you, and I’m sure you’ll do just fine.

    Good luck!

  19. Simon:

    There are plenty of places to research that, should you wish, without me preaching in an unwelcome fashion here.

    But that’s just it. I and nearly everybody else I’ve encountered on Teh Innertubes is already overwhelmingly familiar with, and typically intimately knowledgeable of, religious belief and claims. Indeed, surveys nearly always find that, on average, atheists are significantly more knowledgeable about religion than believers.

    It’s not the case that we’re atheists because we’ve never heard the Gospel, or because we’ve come at it with an a priori commitment to hedonism and depravity, or because a pet goldfish died and we’re angry at Jesus, or any of those crude caricatures. Indeed, a significant number of atheists were once the hardest of hard-core evangelicals, lifelong preachers with theological credentials from well-respected seminaries, and so on.

    We’re atheists not because we’re ignorant or spiteful; we’re atheists because we care passionately about our fellow humans and because the religions are wildly fantastical and overwhelmingly brutal and petty and vindictive.

    I mean, you wouldn’t send your own children to Hell simply because they ate something from the ‘Fridge they weren’t supposed to, right? And you wouldn’t send them to Hell for failing to worship you properly, or because they fell in love with somebody you disapprove of, or if they cursed you, or if they disowned you in favor of some other parental figure, and so on, right?

    So how can you possibly worship a god who does nothing but that sort of thing?

    And you think the factual claims of all the other religions are absurdly bogus and hardly worth a second thought, right? So why is it okay for you to laugh at the notion that Perseus was born of a virgin and the celestial father, but not okay for us to laugh at Jesus? Why do you get to be puzzled at the suggestion that Set will weigh your soul against a feather after you die, but we have to take seriously your assertion that Jesus will judge us without benefit of feather and scales when we die? Why is Horus masturbating the Earth into existence obscene, but Jesus breathing life into it perfectly reasonable?

    Above all…you’ve still not addressed what’s been my most important question: How do you know what you claim is true?

    You’ve repeated your claims, and you’ve referenced authorities who support your claims…but the only way that we’re supposed to verify the religious claims is through faith. Neither of us would by an used car on faith, so why do you buy an entire worldview on one?

    Us naturalists, in stark contrast, are overjoyed at opportunities to demonstrate why our confidence is justified. In high school, I myself recreated Newton’s experiments of rolling balls down inclined planes, and came up with the same answer for the acceleration of gravity as he did, within reasonable measurement error. Everybody else in my class did, too, and our answers were all consistent. Everybody I’ve ever spoken with who’s done the experiment agrees.

    Similarly, in other classes in high school and college, I’ve observed chemical buffer systems, estimated the temperature of absolute zero, observed the Jovian moons, correctly identified unknown samples based on their radioactive decay rates, plotted an analemma — all sorts of really fun stuff. Since leaving school, I’ve done a lot of work on color science and optics…I’ve done the double-slit thing and tied that in very neatly with diffraction gratings (which are “double” slits on steroids).

    Every time, my observations have been consistent with scientific theories, and all the theories are consistent with each other.

    Of course, there’s all sorts of fundamental stuff I’d love to observe but haven’t personally — such as the Cosmic Microwave Background. I need to find an Ham radio nut to help me with that. I think I know how to observe individual photons…if I can get that right, the obvious next step after that is direct observation of individual photons through a double slit. I really want to recreate Eratosthenes’s measurement of the Earth, and combine that with measurements of a lunar eclipse in order to measure the geometry of the Earth-Moon-Sun system.

    You’ll notice that the supernatural is never even hypothetically relevant to any of these observations. And everybody who’s ever attempted to apply similar standards to the supernatural has discovered naïve misunderstandings at best…but, overwhelmingly, outright fraud. And, when you attempt to fit the supernatural into the understanding we’ve built from the sorts of observations I’ve performed myself, you just simply can’t come up with any way that the supernatural could make sense. The closest you can come is to assume some sort of massive conspiracy whereby the primary goal of supernatural agents is to prevent, at all costs, anybody from reliably observing them…but how is that at all consistent with the religious claims on which calls for proselytizing are founded?

    And so, since this branch of the discussion seems to be drawing to a close, I’ll leave you with a very simple experiment that you yourself could participate in, one that would cause me, Sean, Richard Dawkins — basically everybody to at least take Christian claims seriously. We might not be wooed to Christ as a result; that might take more. But we’d at least know that you’re not blowing smoke up our nether-bits.

    The last chapter of Mark as found in most Bibles tells of Jesus’s Final Message to His Creation. He has been Resurrected in glory and all former doubters are believers. Just before Ascending, Jesus places upon them the Great Commission. But Jesus is, apparently, a good empiricist, and well aware of the position that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It’s pretty obvious that the Gospel claims are extraordinary, so Jesus tells his followers — that would be you — how to demonstrate the seriousness of the claims.

    The demonstration is actually rather eloquent and simple. Drink deadly poison, handle snakes without harm, heal the sick. If your faith is pure and strong, you shall do this; but, if you don’t actually believe, you either won’t try or you’ll try and fail.

    We already both know that you don’t actually believe, and the evidence you don’t believe is that you’re not going to perform this experiment.

    A footnote: many Christians wiggle out of this by correctly pointing out that this final chapter of Mark is a later (but still very early, contemporary with other parts of the New Testament) addition to the Gospel not part of the original writing. But if you choose to reject Jesus’s Final Message to His Creation on those grounds, you’re faced with an even worse dilemma: how can you trust any of the Bible? If that’s not a faithful recording of Jesus’s final hour on Earth, how did it wind up in the Bible to begin with — and why hasn’t Jesus done something to correct the record?

    It’s been my experience that Christians always disappear soon after I start referencing Mark 16, which is why I’ve since taken to leaving it to the end of such dialogues rather than chase all y’all away sooner. So, thanks for the discussion…and may you find it within your mind to reason yourself to reality. I promise you, though the water feels a bit cold when you first jump in and your toes won’t be anywhere near the bottom, the swimming is most fine, indeed!

    Cheers,

    b&

  20. Well, Ben, I made the mistake of seeing if things had wound down….I will talk theology until someone tells me off….

    Reading say Richard Dawkins, I don’t doubt that the man hates his own mental picture of what God might be like. Ultimately, the problem is either us or God, and I go for the latter. People often do care passionately for each other, but my experience is that our love is always distorted by selfishness. God has higher ideals for us. Times and places of external adversity highlight our failings more. Last night I was back in Grootes Schuur Hospital in Cape Town with a group of Christians. Modern South Africa is still divided, and there are very few white people now who are treated in these government hospitals; most have private health insurance. There is a very high level of violent crime and I have met medical interns who had come from the States to help learn gunshot trauma care. We have been visiting a gang member who was shot five times in the lower body. (Try googling for images on Lavender Hill Cape Town and you will get an idea of where we work. Some of the gorier images seem to have been removed). He has given his life to Christ and his internal wounds have started to heal. He had a large surgical access opening in his abdomen which was leaking, and is now healing up. There were several other knife and gunshot injuries in the trauma ward.

    I assume your furtive fridge incident is an allegory on Eden and The Trees of Life and Knowledge in Genesis Chapter 3.

    You seem to see God, as Dawkins does (in the sense of the picture you have of the God described in the Bible) as a capricious despot. You are missing the point altogether. We are the ones who end up as capricious despots, left to our own devices, not God. God wanted to save us from what he knew we could become, and now he wants to save us from what we have become. An underlying falsehood behind atheism (and any human condition, including religious affiliations, but outside of Christ) is the condition of self-deceived self-righteousness.

    The trees are about sharing in the life and love of God and constraining ourselves where God instructs us to (Life) or deciding for ourselves what will work best and be most enjoyable (knowledge of good and evil). We are locked into the second condition outside of Christ, and it leads to death. It is not an arbitrary and vindictive punishment, it is a consequence foreseen by our designer. Aquinas, Augustine, Lewis and Keller have a fair bit to say about all this. (Aquinas even used the term ‘scientia’ to denote cause and effect reasoning in his theology of the Fall).

    Regarding Mark 16, I believe disciples of Christ are protected from all manner of risk, such as poisoning, as they follow Christ. I emphasize disciple, not noncommittal church member. This is not about asking God to sing and dance at your command to prove a point. He is Sovereign, you are not. It is about a promise of protection as one does his will.

    Cheers

  21. Simon, you seem to have entirely missed what I labeled as my most important question. So permit me to ask it again, with even more emphasis:

    How do you know that what you claim is true!?

    In particular, you most casually dismiss huge swaths of the Bible (!) in favor of something that directly contradicts the plain text written therein. How do you know that YHWH and Jesusaren’t capricious despots, when the most famous stories in the Bible include the sacrifice of Isaac, the Flood, the Plagues, Lot, Sodom and Gomorrah, Armageddon, and so many similar others? Clearly, you’ve concluded that the Bible is a pack of lies when it comes to the overwhelming majority of the text…so how do you know that your theological claims are true?

    I told you the standard by which I and other scientists, amateurs like me as well as professionals, measure and adjust our beliefs: careful objective observation. I believe with a near-unshakable confidence that the acceleration of gravity near the surface of the Earth is (with rounding) ten meters per second per second because I’ve personally measured it and my measurements are consistent with reports from others.

    Let me be blunt. You’re putting forth all sorts of claims about the nature of the divine — the power to heal, a loving source of guidance, and so on. I don’t believe your reports, and I don’t trust you as a reliable source in such matters.

    This is not a personal condemnation of you!

    I don’t trust you as a comparable authority on the acceleration of gravity, either!

    If you want to convince me, you need to provide me with a way for me to independently derive your same conclusions. And, as should be obvious, if I’m not going to trust the words you write on Teh Innertubes, I’m also (certainly!) not going to trust the words written millennia ago by pre-scientific nomads who hadn’t even yet entirely figured out the connection between health and hygiene.

    Nor, for that matter, would I even trust the claims of an entity appearing before me claiming divine authority — any more than you yourself would trust David Koresh or Sun Young Moon or the Dalai Lama.

    Sean can show you the evidence demonstrating the validity of Sean’s Big Equation as well as the evidence for why we should be confident that the entirety of human experience can be traced up and down the chain to and from it — how you get from sub-atomic physics to atomic physics to chemistry to the Ideal Gas Law to weather to climatology, for example, or how sociology is derived from psychology from biology from chemistry back to particle physics. That’s a significant part of his latest book, and I’ve provided my own layman’s recap in this discussion.

    But you shouldn’t trust Sean!

    Rather, you should verify his claims. Do measure gravitational acceleration for yourself, do plot planetary orbits, do perform the double-slit experiment, do perform the oil drop experiment, and so on. Eventually, you’ll see that, yes, all these claims really do hold up, and fit together without gaps that gods could hide in — but don’t trust us!

    So, again again again: How do you know your claims are true, and how am I supposed to verify them?

    What have you got that’s as reliable and unambiguous as rolling balls down an inclined plane?

    Cheers,

    b&

  22. Ben says:

    “If your proposal doesn’t balance Newton’s equations — if, for example, your consciousness causes you to lift a sack of potatoes but isn’t fully accounted for by the high-school-level physics — then either your proposal is wrong or all of physics is wrong.”

    I was never that impressed with this ‘straw man’ argument. Sure, it does refute the idea that consciousness is some sort of ‘stuff’ that pushes particles around (so it’s a good argument against a naïve form of supernaturalism), but it really doesn’t establish that consciousness is completely reducible to physics. It just means that if an extra role for consciousness is postulated, it needs to be something a lot more subtle than pushing particles around.

    I did come up with an idea that doesn’t require any laws of physics violations but still has a role for consciousness. Basically, my idea is that when consciousness interacts with matter, information is generated. No particles are pushed around or laws of physics violated. But consciousness still does something: it generates information!

  23. zarzuelazen:

    But consciousness still does something: it generates information!

    …except you’re now just pushing consciousness back to information, with all the remaining problems.

    You have information that there’re potatoes in the sack and you want to eat one for dinner. How does that information cause you to lift the sack onto the table?

    It actually does physically participate in the chain, if you understand this type of information properly.

    The perfect example here would be an Ye Olde Skchoole LP phonograph record. Especially with the oldest purely-mechanical wax cylinder versions, it’s obvious that the information of the sound pressure wave is recorded as a visibly-similar variable-width groove, and that running the recording process in reverse recreates the sound pressure wave at the time of the recording.

    Magnetic tape is very similar, except you’ve got a microphone where a diaphragm is attached to an electrified magnet creating a variable electrical current. That gets turned back into a magnetic field at the tape record head which polarizes magnetic particles in the tape — much like taking a lot of little bar magnets and carefully hand-arranging their direction. Playback is just the same process in reverse, where the read head gets electromagnetically disturbed by the tape, re-creating the original varying electrical current, which is wired up to a magnet attached to a diaphragm that vibrates the same way as the microphone did. We’ve now typically got some electrical amplification added to the mix, but even that’s straightforward: the variable low-power current is coupled with a steady high-power current in a way that the output of the high-power current is proportionally varied the same as the low-power current. The information is copied from the low-power wire to the high-power wire.

    And the audio CD is hardly any different. The microphone is hooked up to an electronic circuit called an analogue-to-digital converter that, at a very high rate of speed and resolution, measures the voltage coming from microphone in discrete amounts. The actual systems work with numbers so big that they’re awkward to deal with, but we can trivially construct a simplistic model to demonstrate…say, the input from the microphone maxes out at 4 volts and we’re sampling at two bits and 100 Hz. If at T=0.01 the electrical potential is 3.2V, the A/D converter rounds that to 3 and sends out a low voltage pulse followed by an high voltage pulse. If at T=0.02 the potential falls to 2.4V, the A/D converter sends out an high voltage pulse followed by a low voltage one. These pulses are used to turn a laser on and off. When the laser is on, it burns an hole in the aluminum coating of the CD; when it’s off, the aluminum is left intact. Playback is again the reverse, but with a much lower power laser…if this low-power laser shines on an intact spot, it gets reflected to a detector. It should be obvious how this creates a low / high voltage pattern that gets sent to a digital-to-analogue (D/A) converter which in turn changes those pulses into variable current that gets sent to an amplifier and speakers.

    Now, it is very useful for all sorts of contexts to treat the resulting pattern of high and low pits on the CD as a number and to do lots of math on that number. But, again, that math is only a descriptive language of this underlying physical process that resolves into microscopic holes in an aluminum sheet.

    Want proof?

    Toss the CD into the fire. Where’s the information gone? Where’s the music? Unless you’re Laplace’s Daemon (or have another copy somewhere), entropy prohibits its retrieval.

    If information had some sort of non-physical manifestation, you should be able to separate the physics from the information and vice-versa. However…

    …once again, that ultimately resolves to a claim of a Carrollian Zilbot particle. It’s a claim that’s never been demonstrated outside of fortune-teller’s tents and other houses of ill-repute, and no more deserving of further serious credence than those of spoonbending.

    Cheers,

    b&

Comments are closed.

Scroll to Top