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.
Well, bloggers, I will make this the last time I post here on this purported “science” blog site. The ‘consciousness’ topic-line is somewhat interesting, but parochial, with no real novel or creative analyses being put forth. Just lots of regurgitation of what people heard and took away from college lecture hall sessions, notes duly taken or typed, and memorized.
*-* My major disappointment is the other topic-line dissolution into the same centuries old pallaber of Godhead religion(s) versus testable relations events (aka ‘science’). The “random relations” story model of existence, versus the ‘recurrent and predictable relations’ model of existence .
*-* I am an analyst in ‘dynamic relations/processes’. I make observations first, and if enough correlations present themselves, then and only then, do I suggest process models, if and only if there is a way to actively test and re-research the past observations data, and, see if inductive reached -further processes can be projected~predicted.
*-* Anything that deals with a pre-given whole cloth story of relations and processes, which demands that -anything- and everything else that happens afterwards , must and absolutely must, conform with the initial story~model (eg, a circle or square that -must- map perfectly into some random imagined dodecahedron space), is really really suspect to my way of thinking.
*-* The only allowance or saving grace that I can extend to such pre-built ‘theories of existence’, is for you to find haven and safety in a certain 20th century science notion: quantum mechanics.
*-* “Faith pseudo-science” really has no place at the table of scientific research and exploration. “Faith pseudo science” is a randomly organized way of thought – valuable in its own right for calming human fears and trusting in some random inscrutable rationale for how and why things happen in the world. I’e., it makes people feel good and offers a safety line that human sentient lives aren’t random, and have a meaning for existing, even if such a ‘meaning’ can’t be proved or explained or justified to meager human brains and thoughts. The rationale and purpose and frame(s) of reference always exist in the higher-realm godhead domain(s). Beyond humanity’s ability to reach, except to acquiesce to, cower to, accept its capriciousness . . and vow eternal honorifics to.
*-* Science, as humans are trying to practice it, has nothing to do with that realm of experience. Science is the slow and methodical exploration of -how- things happen in existence. There is no interest in the “meaning of life”, “the purpose of existence”. All of that, god bless you, is reserved to the domain-across-the-bridge, where Faith Pseudo-Science thinkers practice their rationales and stories and conclusions.
*-* Neither community can talk about their neighbor-across-the-bridge ‘s concerns or understandings.
*-* But, as a ‘peace-offering’ from the science community, to the faith community, I offer for your consideration, the recognition that QM, quantum mechanics, embodies an interesting aspect that seems to match faith-based notions of events and functions. The -fact- that science mathematics and physics embody a mystery domain . . where .. disjoint for causal associations with anything else in the universe, things happens, entities pop into observable existence without explicit, constrained and well defined causal justification. They ‘just happen’. The same way that ‘people heal from life dangerous injuries’, mysteriously and miraculously, when nothing more tangible and causal happens, than a thought . . . “I believe”. An out of proportion or balanced ‘price of admission’ to stay in the land of the living. Wonderful. Soul satisfying. Random, but with some tinge of support for: humans are here, not just to explore existence, but to experience the meaning of existence in some ‘ultimata’ way. Even our deaths ‘have purpose’. And its as mysterious and imperfectly unpredictable as . . . quantum mechanical events.
*-* Wishing you all your self-satisfying ‘happy lives’, you people. You god rejecting math-scientists, and you god loving faith pseudo-scientists (all reverence to Mary Baker Eddy).
James:
The “Core Model,” as summarized by Sean’s Big Equation, is the result of the ultimate example of such a process. Nothing in the entire history of humanity comes anywhere close in terms of its predictive abilities and consistency in testing. And this extends all the way from the subatomic scales probed at the LHC (e.g., the Higgs) to high-redshift universal scales (e.g., α, the fine-structure constant). As such, naturalism is the conclusion, not the a priori assumption, of the results of that investigation.
This is incorrect. All formulations of Quantum Mechanics are purely deterministic, though all (of course) explain why observations are, in practice, unpredictable. Sean’s favorite, Everettian Many-Worlds, makes it obvious how to resolve that seeming dichotomy. However, all other formulations also resolve it equally deterministically.
“They ‘just happen’ is a valid explanation, but not in the sense that you continue with. Things “just happen” in the sense that they “just fall down.” Drop your keys and Newtonian Gravity sufficiently dominates all other factors that it’s all you need to predict when they’ll hit the floor. Drop a feather and you need to add in some rather sophisticated aerodynamics and the like, but the basic principle is the same, only with a lot more variables. That same mindless “just happens” applies to all other phenomena, even including life and consciousness —
— again, which we know to be true because of all the myriad ways the Core Theory has been tested.
As Sean very eloquently demonstrates in his latest book, you don’t need to rely on incorrect misunderstandings of reality to come to the conclusion that life is worth living to its fullest. Indeed, by far the strongest case I’ve ever heard made for that conclusion derives from naturalism and the fact that this is all we’ve got. Not that it would change the truth of things were defeatism the conclusion from naturalism…but it really does puzzle me that there’s all this wailing and moaning about how horrible a naturalistic universe must be when it’s so much better than all the hypothesized supernaturalistic ones….
Cheers,
b&
Ben said:
“If information had some sort of non-physical manifestation, you should be able to separate the physics from the information and vice-versa. However…”
…however….the existence of quantum mechanical wave functions do indeed prove that information can be separated from the physical world 😉
In my humble option, when we discovered QM wave functions, we caught pure information ‘with it’s hand in the cookie jar’ so to speak.
The fact of the matter is that no physical interpretation can be given to the wave functions…they are indeed pure information. And this ‘pure information’ must be real (it can’t just be in the mind of an observer), because it does influence the results of physics experiments.
The Bell theorems show that attempts to give a physical interpretation to the wave function all fail, because they conflict with ‘the principle of locality’. If you assume that there’s an underlying physical reality behind the wave-functions, then the bell theorems show that this implies faster-than-light influence, which contradicts relatively theory – ergo this underlying physical reality doesn’t exist – proof by contradiction.
It’s true that the ‘Many Worlds’ interpretation of QM does manage to recover ordinary physics from the wave-functions, but in my opinion it does this by slipping in ‘extra’ elements that aren’t actually part of physics – namely it has to introduce methods of calculating the probabilities of what alternative branches we are actually in – for instance, the ‘Born’ rule that you mentioned. (See my comments in earlier post and your reply – in my opinion things like the Born rule are actually a theory of perception in disguise).
zarzuelazen:
…only in the same sense that planetary orbits have no physical interpretation — for all the exact same reasons you give for QM wave functions. Yet we know that, in fact, those ellipses are merely descriptions of the paths traced by the planets as they fall down their respective gravitational potentials…which immediately tells us that the exact same applies to the parabolas traced by thrown balls.
And at that level, it should again become blindingly obvious that, once again, the math is simply a description. There’s no mathematical parabolic rail that an athlete constructs and attaches the ball to; the ball does what balls do, and the parabola is a very convenient linguistic shorthand for characterizing their motions.
If anything, the opposite must be true, for M-W is, far and away, the most stripped-down of the interpretations — but never mind that; you miss my important point.
You’re indicating you’re okay with my point that M-W is a purely deterministic model. The point I’m trying to make is that the other formulations are equally deterministic. There’s no dice-throwing in the other methods of deriving the Born Rule — though, of course, again, all have some sort of “veil” that can’t be peered through (else they wouldn’t match observation and we’d therefore know they were incorrect). For example, the pilot wave in those interpretations which have one is fully deterministic.
I must also note the striking similarity between your “Maths of the gaps” and theological “gods of the gaps.” In ancient times, many considered water fundamental. When we learned that it could be split into hydrogen and oxygen, we not only then assumed that the elements were elemental, we even gave them that name! And after the elements, we continued to fail to learn our lesson. Next up was the atom, whose name was adopted from the ancient Greek atomists; this time, the atom was assumed fundamental. Then came the fundamental particles…but we got that one worng, too, because protons and neutrons are actually not fundamental but rather composites made of quarks. And today we know that particles themselves aren’t actually particles, but rather localized potentialities in associated universe-spanning Laplacian fields. It’s the interactions of the up- and down-quark fields mediated by the strong force field that we observe as an atomic nucleus.
Are those fields themselves actually, honestly, this time for real, fundamental? Nobody can answer that question.
But the one thing we can be certain of is that the math we use to describe those fields is exactly that — a description.
…and, more to the point, we already know that our description is incomplete. It breaks down when you put everything together and turn the knobs to 11, to the point that we know that we don’t know how black holes work. That is, we know that we can accurately describe the behavior of the photon field here on Earth, but we don’t even know if “photon field” makes any sense in the context of a black hole — and if it doesn’t there, it ultimately (heh!) doesn’t here on Earth, either.
But even if and when we do figure out stuff like black holes, we still know that the math itself isn’t fundamental…because we already know that it’s not. Take any math you think is fundamental, and it’s trivial to tweak it to come up with something that’s equally mathematically valid but has no bearing on reality whatsoever. If nothing else, change the umpteenth brazilian least significant digit of the charge of the electron and you’ll get a description of an universe that’s functionally indistinguishable from reality but that’s not real. And you can’t appeal to the math to tell you which is correct; you’ve got to check reality and align your description of it to your observations.
That again again should be another huge clue that the math isn’t fundamental — else you could tweak the math and reality would follow. But, of course, the only actual way to tweak the math is by first tweaking reality…at which point it again becomes obvious that the math is descriptive, not proscriptive.
Ultimately(!), when it comes right down to it, the only way that you can justify your reification of math is through resort to the same class of intellectual hubris that led the ancients to conclude that the Earth was the center of the Universe and Man was the pinnacle of Divine Creation. In reality, the Universe cares not one whit how we wish to describe it. It simply is what it is, and it’s up to us to come up with the best description we can if we wish to understand it.
Something further to chew on…many people go on about the “unreasonable effectiveness of math” and related ideas…but they miss the blindingly obvious point that, were math not effective we wouldn’t waste our time with it. If we could do better science by communicating with interpretive dance rather than math, you can be certain that scientists would be the best ballet masters and that people with an intellectual bent similar to yours with respect to math would be waxing poetical about how the Universe is “really” some sort of cosmic dance.
Indeed…that would be a good exercise for you. When I hear propositions such as yours that the math of quantum mechanics is fundamental, it’s as bizarre and incomprehensible to me as a similar proposition that Hip-Hop Dance is fundamental. Each proposition — to me, at least — is an equally absurd non-sequitur, and you’ll have about as much luck convincing me of the fundamental nature of Hip-Hop Dance as you will of the fundamental nature of math. If you can put yourself in a similar perspective, you’ll either become convinced to my position or you’ll be in a better position to convince me to yours.
Cheers,
b&
Ben said:
“When I hear propositions such as yours that the math of quantum mechanics is fundamental, it’s as bizarre and incomprehensible to me as a similar proposition that Hip-Hop Dance is fundamental.”
I’m going to wrap up the debate – I feel I’ve made a strong case for ‘augmented naturalism’ ; but I’ll leave you with a quick summary of what motivated my theory:
It seems to me, that if we are ever to get a *full* explanation of reality, then at some level, there needs to be some sort of circularity built-in to the universe (in some sense, the universe needs to ’cause’ itself, by looping back on itself).
Now it may be that it’s simply impossible to fully understand reality; perhaps there are brute facts we just have to accept. But , I said *what if* and then explored the scenario : I said, what *would* reality need to look like *assuming* it is possible to fully explain it.
It turns out that the only way a full explanation of reality would ever be possible is if reality ‘splits’ into more than one property (or element) , and then there has to be a ‘circular loop’ at some level, so that each element of reality can ’cause’ or ‘explain’ the existence of the others. In fact, I found that you need for reality to have a minimum of *3* different elements for this to work without paradox.
The need for a ‘circular loop’ means that these fundamental elements would need to have the really bizarre feature you’ve pointed out: at the deepest level, they need to serve a double-purpose. Each element needs to act as *both* a map (a ‘description’) *and* a territory (an objectively existing ‘thing’ in itself). Yeah, it’s bizarre, but that doesn’t it’s incoherent.
Now perhaps you can understand my suspicion when I see exactly 3 elements (or properties) that have exactly the characteristics listed above (information, consciousness, matter).
Here are 3 things that *seem* to have a radically different character, yet are also closely related. Here are 3 things that seem to have exactly the bizarre characteristic we need: they can act as *both* a way of talking about reality (a map or description) *and* a fundamental objective thing in themselves ( a territory).
Hopefully you can see, this is just too much of a coincidence! Here we have 3 things (matter, consciousness, information) that just happen to have exactly what I was looking for to introduce a circular loop into my theory and allow me to get a complete explanation of reality.
Any way, I’ll leave you with that as food for thought.
Cheers, and thanks for the good debate!
zarzuelazen:
Ah — that would explain a lot.
A “full” explanation of reality is not only impossible; the very idea is itself incoherent. No matter how fundamental you think your understanding is, it’s always possible that there could be another perfectly-undetectable layer behind it. And this applies not only to “mere” humans, but also hyperintelligent shades of the color blue as well as any deity with any sort of imagined superpower somebody might wish to propose. Claiming the ability to know if you’ve reached the most basic level of reality is no more coherent than claiming to have a general-purpose solution to Turing’s Halting Problem.
Let’s assume that your tripartite model is an accurate accounting of that which lies behind the Core Theory. How do you know that those three you-would-suppose-fundamental elements aren’t themselves made of something even more fundamental? How do you know that they’re not something that Alice’s Red King idly Dreamed? And even if you managed to somehow make it past your tripartite elements to the King, how do you know that he’s not a character in the Matrix, and so on?
And the second half of the bit I quoted is even more significant — for, indeed, it’s nothing more than yet another variation on the Aristotelian Prime Mover argument that Christians love to use as the foundation for, “…ergo, Jesus.” But the problem is that it’s an archetypal example of bad logic, of special pleading. We already know that Aristotelian Metaphysics has nothing whatsoever to do with reality, so we can trivially dismiss any conclusions based on it the same way we dismiss claims that you have to keep pushing on stuff to keep it moving. But this particular argument is self-defeating, and trivially demonstrably so. If the universe itself needs a cause, and your tripartite model constitutes that cause…then your tripartite model itself is every bit as much in need of a cause. You of course claim that your tripartite model doesn’t need a cause; however, that itself would constitute evidence disproving the very premise that you used to justify its existence in the first place: some things don’t have causes, and before looking for what caused something we’d first have to figure out whether it even had a cause or not. Or, maybe your tripartite model does have a cause, and the cause has a super-cause and so on…but the resulting infinite regress itself doesn’t have a cause, again invalidating the initial premises.
Aristotelian thinking is very seductive and subtle, in no small part because of how good a fit it is with everyday experience. Stones really do fall faster than feathers, and you really do have to keep pushing on your coffee cup if you want to slide it across the table, and “because I want to drink some tea” really is a good answer to the question of why the water is boiling.
But the reason why Aristotelian thought is so useful in those contexts is because of the pervasive underlying assumptions made based on the nature of the contexts. The friction of the medium of air that we move in accounts for terminal velocity; we’re in close proximity to the (relatively) strong gravitational field of the Earth; we’re in close enough proximity to the Sun that there’s a very useful entropic gradient that can power life; and we’re in close enough proximity to the universal low entropy conditions of the Big Bang for there to be an arrow of time. Given all those contexts (and many other similar and / or derived ones), and Aristotelian explanations have about as much descriptive and predictive power as Euclidean geometry. But, just as Euclidean geometry breaks down the instant you lift your paper off the table, especially if you warp it ’round a globe…so, too, is Aristotelian Metaphysics extremely fragile and ill-suited to extrapolation.
So, again, take this fragment:
No, there doesn’t — and Aristotle was the last major thinker who could reasonably justify such a claim. Once we made it to Newton, and especially to Laplace, your dreaded “brute fact” has been the gold-standard go-to explanation for everything.
Why do the planets have the orbits they do? Because of the local gravitational gradients. It don’t get more “brute fact” than that…
…and if that works overwhelmingly spectacularly well for all of physics from Newton to Einstein to Schrödinger to the Core Model, what makes you think not only that it’s a failed model, but that the old model that it replaced is the right one after all?
Come to think of it, I have a good challenge for you.
Formulate your tripartite model in conditions not in proximity to a condition of low entropy. Can you even express how a “mind” is supposed to have thoughts and memories if it’s lacking an entropic arrow of time? Can you even construct a “mind” without an entropic gradient to draw from?
Big hint: when attempting to answer this question, contemplate why tape recorders have erase heads, and the significance of the logical XOR function with respect to both data storage and one-time pads. What role is entropy playing in all those cases?
Cheers,
b&
Great talk – I am now reading the book!
A thought on time travel. It must be impossible. All the atoms and molecules in our bodies have existed since the birth of the solar system. At any point in the past, the atoms would be spread around the world in animal, vegetable and mineral matter. If we were to go back in time – it would mean that every atom in our body would have to exist twice.
That was a lot better than I expected it to be. You’re a good presenter as well. I did watch it all but it’s possible this one came up and was answered, but in what sense is your basic description, that you use to then demonstrate your point that all we’re doing is overlaying narratives. What prevents *that* from being another narrative? And if it is, how do you know that you meaninglessness is the base description below? I mean, you don’t have know, but what is the reasoning?
Ingslot:
An excellent question!
The simple answer is that we have no evidence to even suspect that such would be the case. Further, if it did turn out to be the case, it would be a most radical departure from everything else we’ve observed.
“Meaning” itself only has meaning to conscious agents. Indeed, that could almost (but not quite) serve as a definition of consciousness — an entity that creates meaning.
But we already know that the layer right below consciousness is mere biology; your own visual system is basically just a refinement of a mechanism practically indistinguishable from the one that causes sunflowers to track the Sun. And below biology is chemistry; below chemistry is atomic physics; below atomic physics is quantum field theory.. Each layer underneath is simpler than the one above. Consciousness can only even be sustained in principle when all of the underlying pieces come together in the right way.
So, for there to be meaning and consciousness underneath quantum field theory, there’d have to be a massive reversal of the trend, a jump in complexity to a degree unimaginably past anything in either our experience or imagination — a mind bigger than the universe…which would require a brain (computer / whatever) far bigger still.
…but even that’s just pushing the goalposts back. What’s this universal mind made of? What form does its neurons / transistors take? At which point, we’re off to the races again.
Supernaturalists, of course, posit disembodied minds, but those claims can and should be dismissed as casually as their physical equivalents of perpetual motion machines. As the bumper sticker says, in this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Cheers,
b&
Ben:
“Claiming the ability to know if you’ve reached the most basic level of reality is no more coherent than claiming to have a general-purpose solution to Turing’s Halting Problem.”
I never claimed certainty, that is indeed impossible. All I claim is that it may be possible to have a model that is entirely circular, in the sense that every concept in the model is explained by other concepts in the model. But of course even then, there would be no certainty that the model is correct.
Ben:
“Let’s assume that your tripartite model is an accurate accounting of that which lies behind the Core Theory. How do you know that those three you-would-suppose-fundamental elements aren’t themselves made of something even more fundamental?”
I’m not sure that you’ve grasped the model I’m putting forward 😉 In my model, reality is entirely circular. This means that there is *no* ‘fundamental level’, you can go on breaking down my elements to infinity, and find that they all ‘contain’ each other, in an infinite regress. Let me demonstrate:
(1) Information = {consciousness, matter}
(2) Consciousness = {information, matter}
(3) Matter = {consciousness, information}
The equations above define each element (left-hand side of equations) in terms of what they are made of (right-hand side of equations). And each element is made of the others!
For example, if you try to break down consciousness in my model, you find that it’s composed of information and matter (equation 2 above). So try to break down that next layer of information and matter. Information is composed of…..consciousness and matter (equation 1 above). Matter is composed of….consciousness and information (equation 3 above). So try breaking down that next layer… and so on ad infinitum, it’s an infinite regress, there is no bottom.
Take a look at this psychedelic video for a graphic rendering of the idea (this is really trippy):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbQh1I_uvjo
Ben:
“If the universe itself needs a cause, and your tripartite model constitutes that cause…then your tripartite model itself is every bit as much in need of a cause.”
Yes, see above. The model itself is explained by….the model itself….it’s an infinite regress.
“Once we made it to Newton, and especially to Laplace, your dreaded “brute fact” has been the gold-standard go-to explanation for everything.”
You are confusing the underlying laws of nature (the model) with specific contingent outcomes of the laws (actual empirical observables). Of course specific outcomes can be ‘brute facts’, but the underlying principles need not be. The whole of science is based on the idea that we can find deeper principles that explain things, and we don’t just settle for brute facts.
Of course you are correct that there is no actual logical (a-priori) reason for thinking that everything can be explained. I’m not claiming that there is. I’m saying that *if* there exists a model that can explain everything (and that’s a huge ‘if’ of course), *then* it would look just like my theory.
My question is this: Sean Carroll’s argument necessarily involves a ‘basis’ description of reality, which is referenced by what he quite reasonably terms ‘narratives’. What I want to ask is on what grounds does Carroll say that his underlying basis description is not another narrative? It seems to me the strongest part of his case, is the concept of narratives. But I don’t yet see a powerful reason to exempt his basis description (whether implicit or explicit) as non-narrative
As a possible leaving gesture, I thought I’d summarize my thoughts. Some of these had already crystallized out for me during the comment session following the Don Page post on Christianity. Here goes.
Science is both a method and a body of possible knowledge supposedly derived using that method. What constitutes ‘pseudo-science’ needs looking at rationally. The phrase should not be an emotive appeal to orthodoxy or a simplistic reductionist/atheist battle-cry.
Some of that ‘scientific body of knowledge’ is highly questionable. The reasons for that may be because: it pushes the plausibility of the method a long way by using repeated unproven assumptions; there is little directly relevant observable data; there are substantial detailed hurdles to seeing the theorem under consideration as the definite mechanism underlying the relevant observations; there is no definitive and precise mathematical model to authenticate the mechanism suggested; there are viable alternative mechanisms to the one proposed.
To rule out mechanisms because they are not understood at all is not inherently logical, and therefore, not really scientific. In other words, science needs to keep a realistic eye on its possible limitations as a tool to reach all truth.
Most science practitioners and observers of scientific endeavour probably agree that a mathematical model giving predictive precision, combined with readily repeatable experiments or measurements, give science the highest level of plausibility and reliability. Typically, these areas are incorporated into the sphere of activities we call ‘engineering’. On a personal note, I have substantial practical experience in electronics engineering for manufacture in telecoms and aerospace.
At the other extreme from ‘thoroughly and predictively modeled mathematically’ and ‘routinely used engineering model’ is what might rightly be called ‘tentative scientific hypothesis’, or, in the extreme, ‘failed hypothesis’. Opinions by the scientifically conversant (from science graduate upward, say) on Newtonian mechanics, Quantum mechanics and Special/General Relativity are that they are proven systems of hypotheses, albeit with question marks over their sphere of applicability and fundamental manner of working. Opinions by the same group on cosmology are far less consistent. Opinions, again by the same group, on Evolution by Natural Selection range from ‘proven beyond any reasonable doubt’ to ‘failed or failing hypothesis’.
Appealing to some arbitrary ‘science’/’pseudo-science’ divide is simply a smokescreen for the variability of scientific uncertainty.
The most questionable areas of the widely, but hardly universally, held conclusions of the scientific method are those relating to origins; cosmology and evolution by natural selection. Naturally enough, these are the areas where religion has the most to suggest.
There is no inherent and final divide between faith as a commodity and reason as a commodity within the human psyche. We all observe, reason or feel our way to a position of faith in something or someone.
Some people assume the physical/mathematical fabric of our existence is the most profound aspect of our existence.
Others assume this structural fabric of our existence is secondary to the experience of consciousness. Relationship, emotion, intuition, conviction, artistry and other facets of consciousness apart from the reductive analytical speak most persuasively about what is ‘real’ and ‘true’.
Most people act day-to-day as if the second where actually true. There is no final logical way to arbitrate between them. In general, religion works at the level of the second.
On a personal note, I believe Christianity because it I believe it represents by far the most convincing simultaneous solution to these various evidences and forms of enquiry that my consciousness presents.
Cheers
zarzuelazen:
Ah…Ouroboros.
Such circular reasoning was rejected by the ancients and I can’t think of any instances since then indicating we need to revise that rejection. That’s not cause to reject it out of hand; the ancients also had some other ideas they held equally dear that we today consider mere superstition and / or ignorance…but the fact that circularity remains strongly frowned upon should be immediate cause for a great deal of suspicion.
That’s perhaps especially true in this case. As you yourself note, the grand arc of physics to this point has led to constant discoveries of that which is even more fundamental. Your tripartite model, on the other hand, is self-contained in a way such that, either it is correct, in which case no further physics would exist outside of it, thereby cutting off further avenues of exploration; or it is incorrect as could be evidenced by discoveries inconsistent with the model.
But that then brings us to the even bigger problem…that your model is already inconsistent with evidence.
How is a mind supposed to have memories or do any thinking without an entropic gradient to work within? By what means did your mind create the universal low entropic conditions of the Big Bang? What sorts of thoughts is your mind thinking, and how do those thoughts interact with the stuff we see around us?
The Core Theory has all those bases covered, either solidly or plausibly. But I don’t see where your tripartite model even pretends to address such questions….
Cheers,
b&
Simon Packer:
Your caveat is poorly phrased.
All three forms of mechanics, Newtonian, Quantum, and Relativistic, are as thoroughly trustworthy models of reality as, “The Sun rises in the East.” We most emphatically do not have “question marks” over “spheres of applicability.” What we do have are regimes over which the models are applicable, and we can tell you precisely where the boundaries of the models lie. Your complaint is akin to saying that we have maps of England, Scotland, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, but that there are question marks about the spheres of applicability of those maps.
Consensus is near unanimous about the history of the Universe from some ludicrously small fraction of a second after its beginning to the present day — and that includes the Big Bang epoch. We can directly observe the Cosmic Microwave Background, which happened about a third of a million years after the Big Bang. As such, we have direct observations of all but the very first 0.003% or so of the history of the Universe, and no cosmologist even pretends to have any question about cosmology since the epoch of recombination. In that sense, Cosmology is a completed subject. The current task of cosmologists is to figure out the conditions that preceded the Big Bang epoch.
This is, frankly, a lie.
There are more scientists named, “Steve,” who have signed on to statements in support of Evolution than the Discovery Institute was able to find with any name to question Evolution. Only 30% of the DI signatories had doctoral (or equivalent) credentials in fields relevant to Evolution, whereas 60% of the “Steves” did — meaning that almost as many relevantly credentialed “Steves” supported Evolution as the DI could manage to find even including non-experts in unrelated fields.
To so grossly mischaracterize the overwhelming scientific consensus…well, your lie may be born of ignorance, but it is a lie nonetheless.
Of course, scientific consensus does not dictate reality. However, the only way that the 99 44/100% of scientists could be mistraken about the fundamental principles of modern biology would be if some profound conspiracy were at play. Yet, since the evidence in support of Evolution is so readily accessible and independently verifiable and overwhelmingly convincing, the only conspiracies possible are of the paranoid type — “Satan planted all that evidence to convince us of a lie,” that sort of thing. And while it’s true that you can’t disprove such conspiracies, it’s also true that there’re very good reasons why we overwhelmingly conclude that those who hold to them are in need of professional mental health services.
I would again urge you to read Jerry Coyne’s superlative book, Why Evolution Is True. in it he presents the evidence — multiple interlocking-yet-independent lines of evidence, from the geographical distribution of species to DNA sequencing to the geologic column to morphology to embryology to the fossil record to…well, obviously not all of everything because it’s an introductory text for a lay audience and there’s no way in such a text to, for example, lay out each and every human ancestor fossil ever found alone. But it really is as good an introductory text to the fundamentals of modern biology as anybody has ever written — and, again, this is from the same author who (with Alan Orr) literally wrote the definitive go-to peer-reviewed tome on Speciation. If you have a question on how new species form, Jerry is the Stephen Hawking of that branch of science.
May I suggest?
We’ve learned a lot in the past couple millennia. There was a lot of impressive stuff that came out of the Imperial Roman era, to be sure…but not everybody had yet even twigged to the notion that the Earth was round; the modern concept of inertia would have been nigh on incomprehensible to the most learned scholars of the day; and I don’t think anybody had realized that bats are mammals, not birds.
And, unless I missed something truly spectacular in my last reading of the Gospels, the Jesus character said not one word even remotely hypothetically relevant to questions of physics or biology — at least, not in terms of anything we’d take seriously. Indeed, the story about the revivification of a putrid corpse (Lazarus) to the dismay of his family should be enough to tell you that the authors either had no understanding of biology or (more likely) were intentionally writing of things they knew were not true for rhetorical effect (the same way Superman is faster than a speeding bullet).
To therefore draw conclusions about reality from such fantasy written in an age of ignorance…frankly, I don’t get it. Honestly, I don’t even understand how you can keep a straight face when making such statements, or why you’d expect respect for such proclamations.
You know how bizarrely incomprehensible Muslims sound when they quote weird Q’ranic misconceptions of Galen’s anatomy as something we’re supposed to somehow be impressed with? Or how everybody nervously smiles and nods and tries to remain polite when Scientologists break out their E-Meters?
That’s no different from Christians who get their biology and cosmology from the Bible.
Cheers,
b&
Ben
Yes, agreed, there is something approaching a consensus about cosmology. Yes, the consensus fits with the observed CMB and other things like red shift. Yes, the (probably vast) majority of scientists believe in evolution by natural selection in some form or another, though I think I detect an increasing undercurrent of dissent even among the metaphysically uncommitted and atheistic (see ‘This Idea Must Die’ for a few notes of caution from main streamers to unambiguous endorsement of the theory). Regarding the spread of opinions, if not the weighting, I would say EBNS has a very wide range.
Regarding the scope of the three major models of dynamics, I am surprised you say that the spheres of applicability are precisely defined. For simple planet earth scenarios, generally yes. We can start to concoct an equation where their significance in the planet earth everyday is probably decently approximated. QFT does not use GR and so no-one pretends it is a complete model of reality. QM Decoherence is poorly defined and understood.
I have a first degree in Applied Physics with Electronics and Maths. I am aware that there has been not merely considerable, but astonishing progress in physics in the last 2000 years, particularly the last 500 or so, and the advent and progress of engineering, and especially semiconductors (the focus of my degree) has been faster still. Has the basic human moral condition changed? No. Not in the slightest. Is it set out most insightfully in the Bible? Without a doubt.
Do my ideas of big picture physics and its implications differ from those of (vastly more qualified) preposterous universe guest poster Don N Page? Yes. Do I, like him, believe Christ is the Son of God, taught definitively on the human condition and rose from the dead? Yes. Do my ideas about evolution differ from those of (vastly more qualified) Francis Collins? Yes. Does he, like me, believe Christ is the Son of God, taught definitively on the human condition, and rose from the dead? Yes.
Are Sean Carroll’s (vastly more informed than mine) ideas on what he calls the core model and his ideas of its implications near universally accepted by postgrad/fellow/professor level physicists? I don’t think so.
I can see that yes, there is a lot of consensus on the flow of entropy stacking up with Big Bang cosmology and our concept of time. Maybe it does, I just don’t know. And I have just read ‘from Eternity to Here’. O.K. I skipped a few bits. Sorry Sean.
Simon Packer:
Huh? If you understand the basics of the physics, the answer is trivial. Run the math for all three. At the scales of the everyday world, they come up with the same numbers within any appreciable margin of error. Go to small scales and you start to get divergences between Newton and QFT; when the difference is larger than the margin of error acceptable for your application, you’ve reached the limits of Newton. Same thing at large scales with Relativity.
It might not be very well intuitively grasped, but the math is spectacularly successful. Considering its success, one would be most hard pressed to come up with anything that’s better defined.
On the contrary. Nothing even remotely comparable to the modern concept of universal human rights existed in Imperial Rome. Sure, some subsets and basic principles trace their evolution back to then, but stuff like the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments at absolute best applied only to a very small elite set of powerful movers-and-shakers.
Seriously?
Just take the Ten Commandments, in which religious freedom is expressly forbidden and women are chattel property explicitly equated with livestock. Or take Matthew 10 in which Jesus came not to bring peace but a sword, to rip families asunder, and to send to Hell all those who dare love their families more than Jesus. Or the Ten Plagues, each of which represents an horrific and unconscionable and inexcusable war crime, some of which are worse than any actually recorded. Or Numbers 31, in which Moses and his merry men, on YHWH’s explicit orders and with his approval, kill all the Midianite adults, enslave all the boys, and turn all the pre-pubescent girls into sex slaves. Or even the Sermon on the Mount, where all men who’ve ever looked admiringly on a pretty woman and failed to immediately gouge out their own eyes are condemned to infinite torture.
If you truly get your morality from the Bible…
…but, of course, you do not. About the only people today that barbaric and immoral are those like DAESH and the Saudis, whose Q’ranic morality is every bit as abhorrent as Biblical morality.
Yes, you probably got a substantial portion of your morality from Sunday School classes, but even a casual recollection of the best-known stories from the Bible is enough to tell you that Sunday School morality has diddly-squat to do with Biblical morality — and it’s thanks to that fact that we can actually sleep well at night in a society where so many pledge allegiance to the cross.
Cheers,
b&
Ben
I will not pretend that the harsh judgments of God are easy to understand or accommodate mentally. It can be argued they are logically necessary. The reasons for this are discussed logically in many places, ‘Mere Christianity’ by CS Lewis is, as I said, a good start, or the Keller book ‘The Reason for God’, which gives succinct responses to many of these common objections. A good companion and counterpoint to popular level atheism. I did not go to Sunday School in the UK sense of kid’s Bible class; I became a Christian at university at age 19.
I acknowledged that NM and general relativity give pretty much the same answer in the everyday. Obviously, this is not the same thing as defining the limits of applicability of the two, though the maths is well understood for that. My understanding is that Standard Model QM does not really explain gravity, which is obviously an everyday phenomenon. There are fixes to model it within the SM but these do not properly incorporate GR effects and so there is no ability to define the scope of SM QM for accuracy regarding gravity and departures from Newtonian.
Simon Packer:
It is a most disturbing feature of Christianity that, the instant one challenges Christian claims of moral superiority, the response is that the all-powerful all-knowing all-loving god lacks the means and imagination to employ methods with more compassion than even the worst monsters of human history demonstrated.
If I told you of a military general who slaughtered the firstborn sons of all his enemies, you would not attempt to dismiss it as a difficult-to-understand logical necessity. And if I further added that this general had the power to accomplish his same goals with, for example, application of a safe-and-effective sleeping gas, you would conclude that I was just spouting propaganda for the monster. And if I let slip that the monster not only had mind control abilities but used them to make his enemy, who had been disposed to acquiescence, instead stand fast in opposition…you’d really think of me as dangerous.
The whole of the problem with Christianity (and similar religions) comes from presupposing the existence and beneficence of the pantheon and then concluding that the horrors perpetrated by the pantheon are actually good.
Again, Hitler kissed babies, and there’re a few lines in his Nazi party platform that everybody would heartily support. But we consider him powerfully evil despite those good things about him because he ruthlessly slaughtered so many innocents in an orgy of blood that nearly engulfed the whole world in death. YHWH is no different; sure, it’s nice that he told us to honor our parents and all, but that in no way excuses drowning all the kittens in the world — along with everything and everybody else.
If you’re claiming that the Core Model is incomplete, you’re crashing through an open door. But we know exactly at which scales and energies it gives correct results. And if you’re claiming that it’s therefore not an all-encompassing Theory of Everything…again, open door goes boom.
But the limits of the Core Model are so far outside the realm of humanity that those limits are utterly irrelevant. You might as well object that, because we don’t have real-time millimeter-scale maps of the seafloor, Atlantis could be real after all. We don’t need that level of explanation to rule out Atlantis; nor do we need that level of explanation to rule out Jesus and all the rest of the gods humans have ever worshipped. And, just as if Atlantis does turn out to be real, it could only be the result of some fanciful paranoid conspiracy theory (aliens cloak it from satellites and divert ships around it in a way that nobody can detect), so, too, would you have to resort to a comparable degree of insanity to explain the existence of gods, should they turn out to be real after all.
Cheers,
b&
Ben
As I said, you could try reading a bit more on Christian apologetics. When you see what people are capable of, and I do every week these days in a way I never did in the UK, you know as a minimum that the problem is not just God. And there are reasons to believe the problems are not God at all.
I will not attempt to arbitrate on the Core equation because I do not understand it well enough. I don’t get the impression you do either. But the standard model itself does not incorporate GR and GR is now relevant to daily life. It helps GPS how to work and tells us where the planets are going to be.
If you are a physicist it probably affect your everyday thought life……………………….
I think I have gone down this road with yourself far enough and it is becoming a bit of a stand-off.
Cheers
Ben:
“The Core Theory has all those bases covered, either solidly or plausibly. But I don’t see where your tripartite model even pretends to address such questions….”
Any theory of reality that says that everything is ‘physical’, simply can never explain why this particular property (‘physical’) exists in the first place, since there are no other properties the theory could refer to for an explanation.
Furthermore, core-theory is self-contradictory in its premises(that everything is physical), since core-theory *itself* is not physical, but mathematical. Thus, core-theory can’t explain it’s own existence.
Sean Carroll uses my tripartite model everyday, in the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. 😀
MWI is a perfect confirmation of my model – as I explained earlier in the thread, MWI actually refers to all 3 of my elements – ‘wave functions’ (pure information), ‘The Born Rule’ (perception/probabilities are mental properties – ‘The Born Rule’ is actually a theory of what conscious observers actually see) and the physical world (matter), which is only derived *after* combining wave functions (theory of information) with the Born rule (theory of perception) .
Consciousness doesn’t ‘interact’ with the physical world – as I explained, it’s already present within it (panpsychism), and works by generating information, not pushing particles around.
Woah — hold on a moment.
Physics, especially modern physics, doesn’t and never has made claims about everything. Any claims that even come close to being so sweeping always come with a disclaimer. In the case of Sean’s Big Equation, you could attribute to it a claim that everything in the Universe after the Big Bang, with the unlikely but possible exceptions of some really exotic environments such as black holes, behaves as if matter / energy / fields is all there is. The obvious conclusion is that reality is exactly as it appears to be, and it’s pointless to pretend otherwise unless new evidence is presented indicating otherwise. But no physicist would make such an universal unqualified claim as you’re putting forth.
Self-explanation has never been a feature, anticipated or desired or suggested or otherwise, of modern physics. And your Platonic reification of math is not only not supported by observation; it is contradicted by it. Without minds, there is no language, including the language of math. And without an entropic gradient, there cannot be minds, not even in principle. When we then look for the types of entropic gradients that can sustain minds, we find them only in brains and possibly computers.
This is most emphatically false, at every level, in any conceivable context.
Then your conscious decision to lift a sack of potatoes is entirely irrelevant to the subsequent motion of the potatoes?
b&
Simon Packer:
I have. William Lane Craig’s exculpation of the Midianite Massacre is every bit as stomach-turningly abhorrent as any Neo-Nazi screed blaming Jews for the Holocaust. “Evil” only begins to do justice to such propaganda.
Again again, the problem is presupposing the conclusions. Any truly moral human being will be horrified by the actions of the various gods and demigods in the Bible — whether or not it’s the fiction it so obviously is. The moral response to such stories is to unhesitatingly and unreservedly reject and condemn the actions so portrayed. Of course, you can’t do so and continue with a pretense that the gods of the Bible are exemplars of moral virtue — but neither can you continue with such a pretense and you yourself have legitimate claim to being a moral and compassionate human.
Many Christians, and especially many Jews, are perfectly happy to so reject the Bible. They’re quite comfortable seeing it as the ancient faery tale anthology it so plainly is, and place little, if any, additional significance upon it as they would the Odyssey or any other such ancient text — or, for that matter, the more modern descendants of the genre, such as Shakespeare and Superman and Harry Potter. How they manage the disconnect from rejection of the Bible to, “…ergo, Jesus,” I’ve no clue; to me it seems obvious that, once you get that far, there’s no more reason to hold on to the last threads of the doll. But, regardless…they’re not claiming that massacre and slavery and rape are good and merciful and just if a sufficiently authoritative figure declares them to be, so I don’t worry much about them.
Yes, and there aren’t any gods lurking in Einstein’s equations any more than there were in Newton’s.
Yes, and that’s exactly the limit of how physics beyond the core model can interact with humans. If SUSY or string theory or even mind-of-the-Matrix theories turn out to be true, whatever forces / particles / fields / whatever we discover still won’t be able to bend spoons or cure cancer or talk to your dead auntie or dictate moral codes or help you find your keys or anything else ever to come out of religion or superstition. It’ll make a bunch of physicists drink champagne, and that’s about it.
Cheers,
b&
>‘The Born Rule’ is actually a theory of what conscious observers actually see
>>”This is most emphatically false, at every level, in any conceivable context.”
from Wikipedia: ‘The Born rule…gives the *probability* that a measurement on a quantum system will yield a given result”
The key word there is *probability*. What is a ‘probability’? Clearly it’s not something out there in the physical world, since the ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’ is entirely deterministic. So it can only be a mental property!
or how about this:
“…the *probability* that an *observer* finds itself in a certain branch”
Note the words ‘probability’ ( a mental property, see above) and ‘observer’ (another indirect reference to consciousness).
>Consciousness doesn’t ‘interact’ with the physical world
>>”Then your conscious decision to lift a sack of potatoes is entirely irrelevant to the subsequent motion of the potatoes?
b&”
Consciousness isn’t separate from matter – that doesn’t mean it’s entirely reducible to it. Draw 2 circles that overlap – let 1 circle represent ‘consciousness’, let the other circle represent ‘matter’. Just because the circles overlap doesn’t mean that they’re in a one-to-one match, but nor are they entirely separate, just look at a Venn diagram.
The theory of panpsychism associates consciousness with matter whilst at the same time allowing it to be something extra. There’s no logical problem with this, it’s entirely consistent.
zarzuelazen:
Now that’s a non-sequitur if I ever saw one. Russian Roulette is entirely deterministic, too — yet I hope you would have enough confidence in the fact that the bullet with an one-in-six probability of leaving the revolver’s barrel is sufficiently physical, not mental, to refrain from playing the game.
Indeed, especially in Many-Worlds, “probability” is an expression of ignorance, not the presence of some all-knowing mind. If it holds, when you do the double slit experiment, you know that the first electron through the slits will be observed both going to the left and to the right; you just don’t know which observation you’ll subsequently remember making. But the future “you” who observes the electron on the left has exactly as much claim to being the “real” you as the future “you” who observes the electron on the right, so the current “you” can rightfully claim that you’ll observe both — even though, afterwards, each of the “you”s only sees the one or the other.
Or: the probability that the electron will exit the left slit first is 100%, and the probability that it will exit the right slit first is also 100%, and the probability that you will make each measurement is 100%. But the probability that you will remember making both measurements is 0%, and the probability that you remember making the one or the other is 50%.
You’re still missing the point.
I don’t follow your proposal for chain of action, and I’m challenging you to help me understand it by asking you to help me follow the bouncing ball.
Can we agree that consciousness is a key component of the description of what’s going on when I lift a sack of potatoes?
If so, trace for me what happens after the consciousness bit. How do you get from the thought, “I want to lift the sack of potatoes,” to you holding the potatoes in the air with your arms?
It might or might not be logically consistent. But it does attribute consciousness to cat litter and belly button lint — a proposition so absurd I fail to see how it can be taken as anything other than the most obvious reducto ad absurdam demonstrating the falsity and / or uselessness of the proposition.
Cheers,
b&
Ben:
“But the future “you” who observes the electron on the left has exactly as much claim to being the “real” you as the future “you” who observes the electron on the right, so the current “you” can rightfully claim that you’ll observe both — even though, afterwards, each of the “you”s only sees the one or the other.”
“But the probability that you will remember making both measurements is 0%, and the probability that you remember making the one or the other is 50%.”
You are totally making my own points for me: that quantum mechanics includes a theory of perception 😉 Look at the expressions you used: ‘future you’, ‘real you’, ‘observes’ , ‘remembers’ etc. What you are talking about is actually a theory of mind.
Ben:
“Can we agree that consciousness is a key component of the description of what’s going on when I lift a sack of potatoes?”
Yes
Ben:
“If so, trace for me what happens after the consciousness bit. How do you get from the thought, “I want to lift the sack of potatoes,” to you holding the potatoes in the air with your arms?”
Look carefully at what has happened in the above sentence: you have implicitly switched between 2 different levels of abstraction: a description of the thoughts themselves (one level of abstraction about abstract concepts), and a description of a sack of potatoes being lifted (a *different* level of abstraction about physical things).
It’s in the ‘switch’ between the different levels of abstraction that consciousness makes its move 😉
What has to happen is that the higher level description (of abstract concepts) has to be translated to a lower level of description (action sequences, electrical signals to move muscles etc.). This ‘translation’ operation is equivalent to a transmission of information across different levels of abstraction
The ‘switch’ between levels of abstraction that got pulled involved the generation of an ‘extra’ piece of information: namely the rules that connect the higher level description to the lower level ones, and this ‘extra’ piece of info isn’t actually in the laws of physics.