For many people, the phenomenon of consciousness is the best evidence we have that there must be something important missing in our basic physical description of the world. According to this worry, a bunch of atoms and particles, mindlessly obeying the laws of physics, can’t actually experience the way a conscious creature does. There’s no such thing as “what it is to be like” a collection of purely physical atoms; it would lack qualia, the irreducibly subjective components of our experience of the world. One argument for this conclusion is that we can conceive of collections of atoms that behave physically in exactly the same way as ordinary humans, but don’t have those inner experiences — philosophical zombies. (If you think about it carefully, I would claim, you would realize that zombies are harder to conceive of than you might originally have guessed — but that’s an argument for another time.)
The folks who find this line of reasoning compelling are not necessarily traditional Cartesian dualists who think that there is an immaterial soul distinct from the body. On the contrary, they often appreciate the arguments against “substance dualism,” and have a high degree of respect for the laws of physics (which don’t seem to need or provide evidence for any non-physical influences on our atoms). But still, they insist, there’s no way to just throw a bunch of mindless physical matter together and expect it to experience true consciousness.
People who want to dance this tricky two-step — respect for the laws of physics, but an insistence that consciousness can’t reduce to the physical — are forced to face up to a certain problem, which we might call the causal box argument. It goes like this. (Feel free to replace “physical particles” with “quantum fields” if you want to be fastidious.)
- Consciousness cannot be accounted for by physical particles obeying mindless equations.
- Human beings seem to be made up — even if not exclusively — of physical particles.
- To the best of our knowledge, those particles obey mindless equations, without exception.
- Therefore, consciousness does not exist.
Nobody actually believes this argument, let us hasten to add — they typically just deny one of the premises.
But there is a tiny sliver of wiggle room that might allow us to salvage something special about consciousness without giving up on the laws of physics — the concept of downward causation. Here we’re invoking the idea that there are different levels at which we can describe reality, as I discussed in The Big Picture at great length. We say that “higher” (more coarse-grained) levels are emergent, but that word means different things to different people. So-called “weak” emergence just says the obvious thing, that higher-level notions like the fluidity or solidity of a material substance emerge out of the properties of its microscopic constituents. In principle, if not in practice, the microscopic description is absolutely complete and comprehensive. A “strong” form of emergence would suggest that something truly new comes into being at the higher levels, something that just isn’t there in the microscopic description.
Downward causation is one manifestation of this strong-emergentist attitude. It’s the idea that what happens at lower levels can be directly influenced (causally acted upon) by what is happening at the higher levels. The idea, in other words, that you can’t really understand the microscopic behavior without knowing something about the macroscopic.
There is no reason to think that anything like downward causation really happens in the world, at least not down to the level of particles and forces. While I was writing The Big Picture, I grumbled on Twitter about how people kept talking about it but how I didn’t want to discuss it in the book; naturally, I was hectored into writing something about it.
But you can see why the concept of downward causation might be attractive to someone who doesn’t think that consciousness can be accounted for by the fields and equations of the Core Theory. Sure, the idea would be, maybe electrons and nuclei act according to the laws of physics, but those laws need to include feedback from higher levels onto that microscopic behavior — including whether or not those particles are part of a conscious creature. In that way, consciousness can play a decisive, causal role in the universe, without actually violating any physical laws.
One person who thinks that way is John Searle, the extremely distinguished philosopher from Berkeley (and originator of the Chinese Room argument). I recently received an email from Henrik Røed Sherling, who took a class with Searle and came across this very issue. He sent me this email, which he was kind enough to allow me to reproduce here:
Hi Professor Carroll,
I read your book and was at the same time awestruck and angered, because I thought your entire section on the mind was both well-written and awfully wrong — until I started thinking about it, that is. Now I genuinely don’t know what to think anymore, but I’m trying to work through it by writing a paper on the topic.
I took Philosophy of Mind with John Searle last semester at UC Berkeley. He convinced me of a lot of ideas of which your book has now disabused me. But despite your occasionally effective jabs at Searle, you never explicitly refute his own theory of the mind, Biological Naturalism. I want to do that, using an argument from your book, but I first need to make sure that I properly understand it.
Searle says this of consciousness: it is caused by neuronal processes and realized in neuronal systems, but is not ontologically reducible to these; consciousness is not just a word we have for something else that is more fundamental. He uses the following analogy to visualize his description: consciousness is to the mind like fluidity is to water. It’s a higher-level feature caused by lower-level features and realized in a system of said lower-level features. Of course, for his version of consciousness to escape the charge of epiphenomenalism, he needs the higher-level feature in this analogy to act causally on the lower-level features — he needs downward causation. In typical fashion he says that “no one in their right mind” can say that solidity does not act causally when a hammer strikes a nail, but it appears to me that this is what you are saying.
So to my questions. Is it right to say that your argument against the existence of downward causation boils down to the incompatible vocabularies of lower-level and higher-level theories? I.e. that there is no such thing as a gluon in Fluid Dynamics, nor anything such as a fluid in the Standard Model, so a cause in one theory cannot have an effect in the other simply because causes and effects are different things in the different theories; gluons don’t affect fluidity, temperaturs and pressures do; fluids don’t affect gluons, quarks and fields do. If I have understood you right, then there couldn’t be any upward causation either. In which case Searle’s theory is not only epiphenomenal, it’s plain inaccurate from the get-go; he wants consciousness to both be a higher-level feature of neuronal processes and to be caused by them. Did I get this right?
Best regards,
Henrik Røed Sherling
Here was my reply:
Dear Henrik–
Thanks for writing. Genuinely not knowing what to think is always an acceptable stance!
I think your summary of my views are pretty accurate. As I say on p. 375, poetic naturalists tend not to be impressed by downward causation, but not by upward causation either! At least, not if your theory of each individual level is complete and consistent.
Part of the issue is, as often happens, an inconsistent use of a natural-language word, in this case “cause.” The kinds of dynamical, explain-this-occurrence causes that we’re talking about here are a different beast than inter-level implications (that one might be tempted to sloppily refer to as “causes”). Features of a lower level, like conservation of energy, can certainly imply or entail features of higher-level descriptions; and indeed the converse is also possible. But saying that such implications are “causes” is to mean something completely different than when we say “swinging my elbow caused the glass of wine to fall to the floor.”
So, I like to think I’m in my right mind, and I’m happy to admit that solidity acts causally when a hammer strikes a nail. But I don’t describe that nail as a collection of particles obeying the Core Theory *and* additionally as a solid object that a hammer can hit; we should use one language or the other. At the level of elementary particles, there’s no such concept as “solidity,” and it doesn’t act causally.
To be perfectly careful — all this is how we currently see things according to modern physics. An electron responds to the other fields precisely at its location, in quantitatively well-understood ways that make no reference to whether it’s in a nail, in a brain, or in interstellar space. We can of course imagine that this understanding is wrong, and that future investigations will reveal the electron really does care about those things. That would be the greatest discovery in physics since quantum mechanics itself, perhaps of all time; but I’m not holding my breath.
I really do think that enormous confusion is caused in many areas — not just consciousness, but free will and even more purely physical phenomena — by the simple mistake of starting sentences in one language or layer of description (“I thought about summoning up the will power to resist that extra slice of pizza…”) but then ending them in a completely different vocabulary (“… but my atoms obeyed the laws of the Standard Model, so what could I do?”) The dynamical rules of the Core Theory aren’t just vague suggestions; they are absolutely precise statements about how the quantum fields making up you and me behave under any circumstances (within the “everyday life” domain of validity). And those rules say that the behavior of, say, an electron is determined by the local values of other quantum fields at the position of the electron — and by nothing else. (That’s “locality” or “microcausality” in quantum field theory.) In particular, as long as the quantum fields at the precise position of the electron are the same, the larger context in which it is embedded is utterly irrelevant.
It’s possible that the real world is different, and there is such inter-level feedback. That’s an experimentally testable question! As I mentioned to Henrik, it would be the greatest scientific discovery of our lifetimes. And there’s basically no evidence that it’s true. But it’s possible.
So I don’t think downward causation is of any help to attempts to free the phenomenon of consciousness from arising in a completely conventional way from the collective behavior of microscopic physical constituents of matter. We’re allowed to talk about consciousness as a real, causally efficacious phenomenon — as long as we stick to the appropriate human-scale level of description. But electrons get along just fine without it.
Moe,
I give people their due. It is just that making grand speculations from limited data is a common practice, from religion, to politics, to epicycles. I see the “fabric of spacetime” as a physical explanation for the math of Relativity on a par with a cosmic clockwork universe as a physical explanation for the math of epicycles. Epicycles were highly predictive and laid the groundwork for significant parts of geometry and mechanical engineering, through the building of clocks, but the theories for its basis and effectiveness proved overly speculative.
On a personal level, don’t plan on making a career out of theorizing about time traveling through block time, or multiple universes, etc. It has the signs of a theory too far, or at least one not likely to draw much funding and you might well find yourself in a conceptual cul de sac.
I’m sure you doubt me now, but when you are my age you will understand wisdom is not so much learning many different things, as it is seeing the same things from many different angles.
John,
Don’t worry. I also remember learning about relativity back in the 70s. I don’t think my age has much to do with this.
Also, I won’t make a career out of theorizing about block multiple worlds. There are plenty of physicists doing it much better than I ever could. I will keep on with my day job as a structural molecular biologist. I’ll just read their papers.
Moe,
Sorry about that.
Just out of curiosity, how do you reconcile “block time” with biology?
I’ve argued the problem with time is we experience it as a sequence of events and so think of it as the point of the present moving from past to future, which physics codifies as measures of duration, as though duration is some underlaying property. Logically the evidence compels the argument that change turns future into past(tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns) and duration is simply the present state, as these events coalesce and dissolve.
The energy being conserved as the present, means the past is consumed by the present.
Is there any field where it is more evident that the past is consumed by the present, than biology?
This would make time more like temperature, than space and as a biologist, you likely recognize thermodynamics as foundational to change.
Not to step on anyone’s toes, but I don’t think physics should monopolize the understanding and explanation of time, especially with such an unwieldy and monochromatic concept as this extension of space.
John,
“Just out of curiosity, how do you reconcile “block time” with biology?”
I think the illusion of “time passing” just occurs, similar to the illusion of motion when still photos are rapidly flicked on when watching a film.
To simplify greatly, you might easily imagine how a 2D block of squares 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels on your computer. Now imagine that each of the 1000000 squares can be either black or white.
Now you create a set consisting of each possible 1000×1000 2D image. This doesn’t take any thought at all, a very simple program can perform this, and there would be no intelligence implied in the output at all.
But, within that set of images, if you could pull out and arrange millions of single images, such that you could re-create absolutely any film possible, (after that films had been compressed to 1000×1000 pixels in black or white). There would be zero difference in the final product.
Now add a few more squares to each side, and image that a color was encoded by each square, such that the information for each square needed a few more bits to create, but still every possility was included in the set of all possible squares. The set would now contain every youtube video ever posted in the past and every one that ever will be posted. No intelligence is required in making the images, they are just the set of all possible 2D images.
The same set could be produced by flipping a coin over and over to generate the bits for each square in each 2D image of the set. Eventually you would have all if the images, but some more than once. The only thing that drives which images are more common in this ‘randomly generated’ set is entropy of information.
You can expand upon this in your imagination, such that you could generate not 2D images, but 3D images (spaces). You could then (having infinite resources) imagine making 4D sets, which is basically a set of every 4D film possible from all the 3D spaces.
I think you can imagine, that with a small number of bits per pixel, and enough pixels, you could create a set of all possible finite universes.
Everything that could happen is encoded in the bits that make up the set, just like in the original 2D black and white squares. Somewhere in the set would encode the 4D ‘reality’ of myself at every instant in my life. Also included would be the 4D ‘realities’ of every alternative decision I have ever made.
There are, of course, many questions, the answers to which I could not pretend to know.
Ben G
LP: “SHOW ME ONE example of a physicist or engineer summming infinities ‘getting real work done.'”
BG: “Every single time they use The Calculus to do something like…you know? Sum the area under a curve?”
They obviously teach the integral calculus a bit differently where you come from. Where I come from nobody ever summed infinities. An example would be interesting. Also surprising. Show me one.
LP: “In terms of the universe, Spinoza would say it was (in its godlike function) ‘causa sui,’ needing no further explanation.”
BG: “But that’s either (take your pick) special pleading or an invalidation of your initial premise.”
The Littlewood anecdote demonstrated that, in a strictly logical context, not everything regressive leads to an infinite regress – sometimes a thing is its own explanation. I mentioned the example of Spinoza because some of the greatest scientists of the 20th century expressed an opinion that his world view was credible: notably Einstein (google “Einstein” + “Spinoza”).
BG: “If the Universe needs no further explanation,then we know that it is not true that everything needs an explanation; …we first must establish that which does and doesn’t need explanation.”
If you are saying that this wildly improbable universe requires no explanation, then, great, we can dispense with string theory, brane theory, multiverses of all kinds, loop quantum gravity, Bell’s inequality and all the rest of that stuff. But as you can see from that partial ist, physicists looking at the universe according to their own rules find it is in dire need of explanation. You’re way out on a limb.
The need for an explanation is also called the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and if you have examples universes, real or imagined, that work without PSR, I would be most grateful if you’d show me one.
BG: “Newton most emphatically established that there’s no Mover that Moves things in motion; inertia is why they keep moving, and ‘inertia’ is simply our language for the observation that that’s what things do.”
Let me get that right… “Inertia is why motion happens” (= “inertia is the explanation for motion”); but inertia is just what we call motion; therefore the explanation for motion is motion, which is an irreducible brute fact. I am glad you explained that. I had been labouring under the misapprehension that there was a calculated quantity called momentum causally involved in all Newtonian motion, which might unify all three states of motion in the Newtonian account (at rest, in uniform motion in a straight line, accelerating).
BG: “…if you’re going to continue to insist that we must explain everything in such Aristotelian terms, you can’t then turn around and pick and choose exceptions.” But Aristotle of course did so. He was responsible for the Prime Mover theory (which in Newtonian terms would be a theory of initial momentum). Of course he thought it might be a God, but stripped of cultural baggage the idea is sound; du Bois-Reymond famously made the origin of motion his second World Riddle, and listed it as “ignoramus et ignorabimus”. Roger Penrose has calculated the extent of the problem, and calculates that our universe (at the Big Bang) was wound up to a low entropy state with a probility of around 1 in 10^10^123 – quite a Prime Mover problem.
John:
The Heisenberg Uncertainty that’s at the heart of quantum fluctuations has nothing to do with Relativity. You’ll only confuse yourself if you try to tie the two together.
This is a variation on the common question of what happens when you turn on the headlights in your spaceship when you’re going almost the speed of light, coupled with the equally-common question of what happens when two almost-speed-of-light ships pass each other. The light from your headlights still goes forth at a third of a gigameter per second. The two ships see each other approaching and receding at close to a third of a gigameter per second, and just marginally faster than a nearby spaceship whose vector is the average of the two.
Note that I didn’t refer to the third spaceship as being “at rest.” There is no such thing as “at rest,” except for non-accellerating bodies with the same vectors (moving at the same speed in the same direction.
Imagine that you and I are magically transported to a toy universe with physics just like ours but nothing in it but two spaceships, one for each of us.
(The emptiness is so you can’t “cheat” by comparing with a familiar landmark, such as the Milky Way. If you observe the Milky Way all around you, and it’s “stretched out,” and the stars in one direction are blueshifted and those opposite redshifted, you can conclude either that every star in the Milky Way has independently accelerated, or that you have. The former is not a reasonable conclusion given what we know about the behavior of galaxies, but the latter is.)
And we’ll add one more wrinkle…acceleration is a special (or, rather General) condition that complicates things. So we don’t have to deal with it, we’ll imagine we go to sleep during any maneuvering.
So…imagine we start our time in this toy universe side-by-side, floating motionless with respect to each other. We then go to sleep, the autopilots do their thing (without telling us before or after what they did), and we wake up and look at each other.
There’re two basic possibilities when we wake up. Either we can both be again motionless relative to each other, perhaps with our positions jiggled around, or we can be in motion with respect to each other. You can imagine any series of maneuvers you like to bring us to those conditions, but it won’t affect the outcome. For the stationary case, the two rockets could match their maneuvers move-for-move; they could go in different directions and reverse their courses, they could both do nothing, whatever you like. For the moving case, the one could accelerate while the other does nothing, they could move in opposite directions, they could move in the same direction but at different rates, whatever.
When we wake up, if we’re motionless with respect to each other, our clocks match and we’re both standing still, best we can tell. No matter if we did or didn’t move, if we did or didn’t come to a stop.
If we’re moving with respect to each other, again no matter which scenario you want to imagine, then we’re both going to think that we’re at rest and the other one is moving. I’m going to see my clock running at its normal speed but your clock is going to appear to me to be slowed down — and you’re going to see your clock running normally but my clock will seem slow to you. If we’re approaching each other, we’ll both see the other as blueshifted; if we’re receding from each other, both will see the other as redshifted.
And, again, it matters not if only one of us accelerated, if both of us did, and so on; when we wake up and the acceleration is over, there’s no way to know what happened.
Modern physicists stand in stark contrast to those other examples. I keep urging you to replicate the experiments for yourself. And, whereas social sciences are happy to get “p = 0.05” as a measure of reliability, physicists go for five-or-more sigmas. With p = 0.05, if the results are random and you rerun the experiment 100 times, you’d expect to get the observation about five times. But with 5 σ, if the results are random, you’d have to rerun the experiment over 3,500,000 times to get that observation. The Higgs Boson (and, with it, the rest of the Core Theory) by now is over 6 σ, maybe approaching 7 σ. As in, had the LHC been in continuous operation since the Earth cooled, if the Higgs doesn’t exist, it would have taken until now for a stretch of observations falsely indicating the Higgs to have randomly occurred. That we found it instead basically the instant we turned the machine on we can be overwhelmingly confident is not a fluke.
How confident are you that the Sun rises in the East, that things fall when you drop them, and that the clear daytime sky is blue? Because that’s the sort of fully-justified confidence you should have in Sean’s Big Equation, and for similar reasons.
And do note that Sean is supremely careful to indicate the boundaries of the limits of our knowledge. We know that we don’t yet have good answers to dark matter, dark energy, black holes, the before-Inflation history of the Universe, and what (if anything) lies beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics. And lots more.
But, just as nothing the LHC ever finds is going to overturn the fact that the Sun rises in the East, things fall down, and the blueness of the sky, nothing is going to overturn Sean’s Big Equation, either. Just as Sean’s Big Equation “reduces” to easterly Sunrises, falling down, and blue sky, so, too, will any new physics “reduce” to Sean’s Big Equation.
It’s the way science has worked since the dawn of history. Aristotle reduces to geometry. Newton reduces to Aristotle. Relativistic and Quantum Mechanics reduce to Newton. String Theory and its competitors reduce to Relativistic and Quantum Mechanics. It has to, because we’ve already overwhelmingly established the validity of geometry — as you can independently verify for yourself.
Cheers,
b&
Moe:
I am extremely skeptical of the notion that any such sort of randomness is fundamental, at least in any meaningful sense. It essentially amounts to a claim of a zilbot particle.
Take the classic thought experiment of all the air in the room “randomly” migrating to the far corner, thereby asphyxiating you.
Were the motions of the air molecules truly random, we can trivially propose such as possible.
But the motions of the air molecules is very emphatically not random; they are entirely Newtonian and deterministic. They merely appear random because of the chaotic nature of the interactions.
To further demonstrate…let’s propose a toy universe which pops into existence in the condition supposed by the thought experiment: the room with all the air concentrated in one corner. But the molecules are in thermal motion, and will practically instantly start bumping into each other as in a colossal billiards ball break. Unless actively confined, they’re going to rush out to fill the room. After just a few seconds, the wind will die down and the room will be indistinguishable from what you’re experiencing right now.
And all of this is purely Newtonian, especially including the conservation of energy. Either the air in the initial compressed state was intensely hot at the start and has now returned to room temperature, or it was room temperature and it’s now sub-freezing in the room. Or it was a near-absolute-zero Bose-Einstein supermolecule initially, which simply fell due to gravity and now there’s a pool of liquid air on the ground that’s rapidly boiling as it absorbs heat from the floor.
To propose that such a state might naturally arise through randomness is to propose that Newton is invalid and that energy isn’t conserved in Newtonian-scale systems. And that’s an even less supportable proposal than Sean’s favorite zilbot particle.
It also runs counter to everything we’ve ever understood about physics, at least since Laplace made clear the consequences of Newton. There might be practical limits for predicting the future or past, but the actual evolution of the Universe is entirely deterministic. Even Everettian Many-Worlds is most emphatically not random; it is entirely deterministic, with each state evolving from and to the next according to Schrödinger’s Equation. Some states are more likely to be observed than others, and all possible evolutions evolve…but not all imaginable evolutions are possible. There is nothing in Schrödinger’s Equation, for example, as best I know, that permits a quark to spontaneously change into an electron, with that being the complete description. As in, no other interactions with other particles or fields or anything; just the quark being there one moment and, the next, it’s “randomly” turned into an electron.
So, while I can appreciate the benefit of thought experiments about the iteration and / or evolution of chaotic systems as if they were truly random, I reject the notion that true spontaneous randomness underlies reality.
Cheers,
b&
Logicophilosophicus:
I’m hoping you’re just being coy — though to what intended effect I’ve no clue.
The sum of the series 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32… is exactly 1. The series is infinite, and contains an infinite number of infinitesimals.
Then you’ve no cause to insist that anything requires explanation in the first place — and certainly no cause to insist that any particular imagined explanation exists until you’ve got evidence supportive of its existence.
Woah there…by what means have you concluded improbability? Have you observed other universes in sufficient numbers to statistically analyze them and determine probability distributions?
Some of your examples we have supportive evidence for. Others are reasonable extensions of theoretical frameworks which are overwhelmingly validated by evidence. But none are held with any sort of confidence at this time. We have good reason to suspect that we’ll gain confidence, perhaps overwhelming confidence, in one or more of those examples, but we’re not there yet. And we could very well wind up throwing out all of those.
In stark contrast, you’re asserting absolute certainty in a proposition which not only has no supportive evidence but is logically inconsistent with itself. Were there ever an extraordinary claim….
Aristotle was a superstitious and ignorant primitive who not only had no clue about Newtonian Mechanics but who explicitly rejected inertia and the conservation of energy that we now know to be inviolate at applicable scales. Modern philosophers who cite Aristotle as anything even vaguely resembling an authority are as far off the mark as theologians who similarly cite their favored holy scriptures. It’s a prime example of why I refer to philosophy as atheistic theology.
If you want an ancient philosopher to hold up, pick Democritus — but be careful to note that his ideas were only approximately and poetically correct, and not to be taken even remotely literally. Or you could praise Eratosthenes and his early successes at quantitative astronomy. Quite impressive for him to have gotten the geometry of the Earth – Moon system as close as he did with the equipment he had at hand! But please don’t cite the circumference of the Earth in stadia if you’re doing real work.
The extraordinarily low entropy of the Big Bang is the origin of the entropic arrow of time. And we do not currently have an explanation for it — though Lawrence Krauss has shown that it is consistent with, and perhaps expected from, our current understanding of physics.
To leap from that to anything resembling a Prime Mover is not only unsupportable, but the very height of anthropomorphic and anthropocentric primitive superstition.
Cheers,
b&
Moe,
I see reality as a polarity of energy and information. Information is static, otherwise it is statistical, or just fuzzy. Energy is dynamic, or potentially so. Consider that after a billion plus years of evolution, our bodies consist of an information processing function in the central nervous system and energy processing functions in the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems. Our mind processes information by digitizing, quantifying and qualifying it, out of the ambient energy. Ie, signal from the noise.
Energy manifests information and information defines energy, even if it is just the frequency and amplitude of waves. I don’t know of any form of information that doesn’t require some energy to manifest it, nor is there any form of energy that doesn’t manifest some quantity of information.
Consider that galaxies consist of radiation expanding out and mass falling inward, with endless feedback loops, as the form of mass is constantly absorbing and radiating energy. Which conversely pushes the mass around, either growing it, or breaking it down and radiating away. E=mc2 would mean that eventually all mass breaks down and radiates away the constituent energy. Could it be that eventually all energy can only radiate so far, before it quantifies back into very nebulous forms of mass, which start falling together and start the process over again. Possibly this might explain why the CMBR is so smooth, as there is a phase transition. As well as dark matter, being effects occurring before what would be recognized as mass. Even to the photon effect being a function of the absorption and emission of light, rather than how it travels. We can only measure light by absorbing it, thus any test shows a quantity, but it still creates wave effects in-between emission and absorption.
Then to everything from societies, as organic energy pushing out, while cultural and civil forms push back in, to consciousness as a form(electrostatic) of energy pushing out, while thoughts and feelings being the forms it settles into. To how society and economies function, with finance as circulation systems and governance as information feedback systems. Civil conflicts as forms of social mass encountering one another. Etc.
So naturally those who spend their lives studying information tend to see everything as information, while the energy is, quite naturally, slippery. Yet, like the brain relies on the body for nutrition, these lives can only occur within larger social groups that can financially support them.
Ben,
Yes, but does all that require the “fabric of spacetime,” as a physical explanation, or is it a mathematical structure, based on that very intuitive observation that time is a narrative flow and duration is evidence of some underlaying dimension, or is it a concept to model non-linear change?
We could use ideal gas laws to correlate temperature and volume and certainly temperature is inconceivable without some volume of space, with everything from pressure to vacuum as resulting effects, but we don’t think of temperature as an additional dimension, like time is treated.
Also, we could put two of your examples together, the doppler shifting of distant stars, with the spaceships approaching each other, to know which is moving, relative to the background.
Also, to use the twins example, there are ways to tell which clocks have been accelerated and thus are slower than other clocks. So to use a far fetched experiment, we could send lots of spaceships out and arrive back at a designated point after a long while, we could tell which one traveled the least, by being the one with the most time elapsed. So what are all the others moving relative to, if not the equilibrium in which that fastest clock has been the most balanced on?
Ben G
LP: “An example [of actually ‘summing infinities’] would be interesting. Also surprising. Show me one.”
BG: “The sum of the series 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32… is exactly 1. The series is infinite, and contains an infinite number of infinitesimals.”
First problem: the largest of these quantities is 1/2, which is not infinite. Your ‘example’ is actually trying to demonstrate something else, that mathematicians or physicists may sum an infinite number of finite quantities. So…
Second problem: the proof that 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8… = 1 doesn’t exist. The ‘proof’ actually shows by induction that by taking a sufficiently large number of terms of the series we can make the sum arbitrarily close to 1. The additions cannot be performed an infinite number of times. That was the point – no one has ever seen an ACTUAL infinity. You haven’t showed me one.
Wittgenstein complained, rightly, that Cantor’s and Dedekind’s model for the number continuum is a line. But that only works by axiomatically imposing the definition of a line as being made of an infinite number of dimensionless points. Why should Euclidean geometry be a model for number?
LP: “…sometimes a thing is its own explanation [the example was a tranlated footnote]”
BG (1): “Then you’ve no cause to insist that anything requires explanation in the first place…”
You’ve just made a fundamental logical error. That SOME things are self-explantory does not imply that ALL things are self explanatory. The example (the footnote) was self-explanatory by nature, visibly and obviously as described; the various embarrassingly independent elements of modern physics – mass, electrical charge, the fine structure constant, quantum entanglement, space-time, Planck’s constant, etc, etc) are none of them explanations by their nature.
BG (2) “… and certainly no cause to insist that any particular imagined explanation exists until you’ve got evidence supportive of its existence.”
I complained a few posts back that you asked for evidence, I went the bother of posting items of evidence, and you ignored them. Now you have gone a step further, asserting that what you have ignored does not exist. The only honest explanation for your attitude that I can think of would be solipsism – the lone ego.
If you are saying that this wildly improbable universe
BG: “…by what means have you concluded [that we live in a ‘wildly improbable’ universe]?Have you observed other universes in sufficient numbers to statistically analyze them and determine probability distributions?”
The universe is wildly improbable for you and any other physicalist (not necessarily for me) on its own terms, that is, in terms of the science used to understand it. Modern thermodynamics (i.e. since Gibbs and Boltzmann) is “STATISTICAL mechanics”. Any low entropy state is most likely to be a chance fluctuation, and since time (in that view – not mine) is reversible EXCEPT when DEFINED by increasing entropy, you expect the states of the universe after OR BEFORE such an exceptional state to be of higher entropy. I’m sure you know this – it is the basis of the “Boltzmann brains” – anything as low-entropy as a brain is much more likely to be a (relatively) lowish entropy fluctuation in its own right than an effect of a stupendously low entropy prior state. Some people assert the existence of Boltzmann brains (which is by the way ENTIRELY analogous to the idea that the earth emerged from a previous state of chaos just a few thousand years ago…) For me, the looniness of the idea shows that the premises must be flawed, and is further evidence for an it-from-bit style universe.
BG: “Aristotle was a superstitious and ignorant primitive who not only had no clue about Newtonian Mechanics but who explicitly rejected inertia and the conservation of energy…”
Yeah, its in his lost second book on Poetics: “I reject Newton’s First Law of Motion (1686) and Clausius’s First Law of Thermodynamics (1850).”
Aristotle was a genius. I suggest you at least read the Wikipedia article on “History of Scientific Method” to get a flavour of how important he was. Plato largely looked at the world in the light of his a priori reasoning; for Aristotle observation was the starting point, although it is true he was bloody-mindedly ignorant of the Higgs boson.
Enough is enough. To paraphrase Douglas Adams: So long, and no thanks for all the tosh.
“But that only works by axiomatically imposing the definition of a line as being made of an infinite number of dimensionless points.”
A dimensionless point, while an ideal of location, is still a multiple of zero and zero multiplied by infinity is still zero. So unless you give those points some incremental dimension, they don’t add up to anything.
“Why should Euclidean geometry be a model for number?”
Euclidian geometry is what people start with in kindergarten. A ruler, pencil and piece of paper. If it were foundational to nature, why are straight lines and right angles so rare in nature?
Thermodynamic cycles seem to be the most common feature of nature.
“Any low entropy state is most likely to be a chance fluctuation, and since time (in that view – not mine) is reversible EXCEPT when DEFINED by increasing entropy, you expect the states of the universe after OR BEFORE such an exceptional state to be of higher entropy.”
The assumption is that time is this foundational dimensionality we experience as duration and so a unit of time would be the same amount of duration whether measured from event a to b, or b to a. The reality is that what is measured is action and duration is simply the state of the present, as this action is occurring. The most basic characteristic of action is inertia and that is why time is asymmetric. The earth turns one direction, not any other, because of inertia.
John Merryman,
“but not all imaginable evolutions are possible. There is nothing in Schrödinger’s Equation, for example, as best I know, that permits a quark to spontaneously change into an electron”
Exactly. The lowest level ‘bits’ in each random set combine due to some basic rules/laws and then these larger combinations of the basic bits would make the higher order squares. Just like your computer browser takes several dozen bits to make each pixel of a full color photograph.
I didn’t say ‘everything happens’, I said ‘everything THAT IS POSSIBLE happens’. Many things are impossible, due to the most basic rules of converting bits into particles.
Many basic computer programs that simulate ‘life’ work like this. You have squares, and you have rules of interaction. Then, without it being explicit, certain combinations of squares in a certain pattern produce larger order structures that seem basic. However, in a larger game, without borders, these structures eventually interact in a way that causes them to become unstable and change into a different type.
The main point is that the total energy (the amount of squares that must have one of two states) is always the same, even in a set without any higher order structures at all. However, the entropy of information between different sets varies enormously.
As for you being skeptical about all the air going to one corner of the room. That is a very funny thing to be skeptical about. We actually are pretty sure that in our distant past, all of the energy in the universe was in one corner of ‘the room’, and it is now going toward a state of not being all in that corner of the room (so to speak).
When you look to the distant past, entropy was lower; much much lower. Are you denying this? And if we can agree on this fact, than what is your argument?
If you flip a coin 10 times on a row, sometimes you get 10 heads in a row. If you do it 1000 times, still you will sometimes fet 1000 head tosses. And with enough time, you could keep going up. Yet you are saying you don’t believe it is true!
We will probably never be able to directly observe the most basic level of reality. We can only hypothesize about how it works, by seeing what can and can not exist.
Moe,
I think you meant to address that to Ben.
As for entropy, which is more entropic; Particles expanding out to fill a volume, or settling down in a gravitational field? If you look out at galaxies, for instance, both happen, as radiation expands to fill space, while mass falls in on itself, so they move in opposite directions. Entropy seems to assume a linear quality of nature that may only be a function of the limits of our perception.
The Big Bang model simply assumes some proto-gravitational process must have coalesced the original point of cosmic radiation, from which this universe as singular entity expands. Now the cosmologists propose multiverses. Which naturally assumes some pan cosmic network, of which universes are the nodes, like higher order galaxies.
It is hard to escape that nature is cyclical, not linear.
John Merryman:
Information is that which is communicated. Claude Shannon showed us the hard, physical limits of communication.
No — at least, emphatically no in the context of physics.
That’s pure anthropocentricism. It only appears that way to you because you’re interpreting it as such. When the light from the Sun goes away from any object (including dust) in the Solar System, there’s umpteen brazilian jigglewatts of energy that’s not conveying any information at all because there’s nobody to receive the message.
(You could also refer to “information” in the sense used by physicists, which is the complete state of a system — the locations and momenta of all the subatomic particles, as a rough approximation. But that’s clearly not the context in which you’re using the term.)
That’s just entropy increasing. And the majority of that radiation heads in the direction of nothing at all, with the mass ultimately destined to either be converted to radiation that goes nowhere or to fall into a black hole (which might or might not constitute a destruction of its information in the sense used by physicists).
No. What you’re describing is an Universe with a negative curvature, which would eventually collapse back into a Big Crunch. That’s the one possibility we’ve ruled out with overwhelming certainty. Instead, the Universe is at least very close to flat, meaning that eventually everything is going to evaporate. It could possibly have positive curvature, which would instead result in a Big Rip, whereby space eventually expands fast enough that even atomic bonds would be sundered by the expansion.
The CMBR is very lumpy when viewed with modern instruments, and its particular anisotropy is perfectly predicted by the Big Bang Theory.
You’re proposing something akin to de Chardin’s “Omega Point,” which has no bearing on reality whatsoever.
Not to the background; relative to those distant stars. There isn’t any background — that’s the point I keep trying to make but you refuse to accept. As far as you can tell, the lot of you, stars and all, were actually ejected at 0.9999999c from the local galaxy by some super-powerful space aliens. Or they could be primordial. But you can’t tell because there’s no background against which to measure, no medium in which you’re all embedded. There’s just nothing. No Thing. Emptiness. Void. Absence of stuff.
You’re now getting into General Relativity rather than Special. The math gets much more complicated, but there still isn’t any secret medium lurking there just waiting for you to find it.
The cave in which the Sun sleeps at night.
(The non-snarky answer: their initial agreed-upon frame when they were all at relative rest when you started the experiment. But that’s still relative to nothing absolute.)
Cheers,
b&
Logicophilosophicus:
I’m sorry, but you’re either centuries out of date with your knowledge and understanding of math, or you’re applying the dictates of some primitive ancient superstition to decide what is and isn’t reasonable. Indeed, you’re just hung up here on Zeno’s paradox, which was a big problem for the ancients but which the rest of us have long since gotten over.
As our own host has demonstrated in his academic work, Boltzmann Brains aren’t a problem, save for William Lane Craig.
No, actually. Smarter than the average bear, sure — but he represented quite the step backwards for antiquity. As I already noted, his forebears were much closer to the right track than he, both in terms of methodology (Eratosthenes, and Archimedes, who did solid-if-primitive empirical work) and theory (Democritus, whose atomic theory much more closely resembles reality than Aristotle’s elemental theory).
And if we compare him with modernity…honestly? His knowledge of how the Universe works would be a perfect fit for the modern kid growing up in a lead-contaminated rural area who dropped out of his Christian fundamentalist home school to spend his days preaching at church.
I’m sure that’ll sound harsh to you. But remember that that’s basically an accurate description of the social and environmental conditions of the ancient world — including the lead contamination.
The same applies to the other ancients, of course. But at least they had the good sense to test their thoughts and / or the luck to think things on the right path.
I’ll give Aristotle one thing: he was a master rhetorician. Very skilled at the art of persuasion. But the take-away from that should be to learn from him how to persuade others, and not to be persuaded by him.
Cheers,
b&
Moe:
I’m not skeptical about the low entropy of the Big Bang — quite the contrary. But the physics of cosmogenesis are far removed from the physics of the air in your room.
Indeed, it is not at all difficult to imagine the regular Newtonian evolution of planetary-scale atmospheric systems having ebbs and flows that might result in, say, momentary high pressure in the far end of a cave followed by a low-pressure state at the mouth. That would superficially resemble the “random” migration of the thought experiment — but it’s clearly nowhere near random. And it’s also not happening, in that case, in a static state at equilibrium (as is the case with the air in your room).
Oh, I believe fully that any sufficient sequence of coin tosses is going to produce finite streaks of whatever length you wish, so long as you keep tossing long enough. The complete works of Shakespeare in ASCII, too, if you’re patient enough. Plus the complete works, only it’s Alice who has a famous soliloquy instead of Hamlet.
What I’m rejecting is the notion that such randomness underlies reality, at least in any meaningful sense.
Why?
For the same reason that I’m confident in the reality of the Higgs.
As I already noted, you’d have to have been running the LHC since the Earth cooled to even once get the observations we’ve gotten by random chance if the Higgs doesn’t exist, yet we got the observations the instant we turned the machine one.
So if I’m going to be confident that randomness is not a reasonable explanation for the Higgs (just in this one particular example), then I should have at least similar confidence that…well…randomness isn’t a reasonable explanation for the physics which produced the Higgs.
The only reason science works is because there are limits to that which is and isn’t possible. And we’ve got a damned good understanding of what those limits are and aren’t. Perhaps the best-understood of those limits is that air doesn’t randomly migrate within a room. Maybe not-air not-in not-rooms randomly migrates, but air in a room doesn’t.
And if an inevitable consequence of your theory is the random non-Newtonian migration of air in rooms, then we’ve already got the observations to know that your theory is as worng as any perpetual motion theory.
Cheers,
b&
John:
You’d have to crunch some serious math to answer that, and you’d need to have lots of specifics. How many particles, what volume, what’s creating the gravity, and so on?
But the way you’d go about it is to count the number of possible microscopic states which superficially resemble the specified conditions at the macroscopic level, and plug those numbers into the equation on the photo of Boltzmann’s gravestone at the top of Sean’s blog.
Eh…no. Very, very, very much no.
The Big Bang Theory starts with the initial condition of extraordinarily low entropy and works forward from there. (Or, rather, it works backwards from observed conditions to that state, before which the math stops making sense.) The Big Bang Theory is very explicitly silent as to what caused that initial low entropy state — and, indeed, it’s silent as to whether or not it even makes sense to ask such questions.
A very close parallel can be drawn with Darwinian Evolution. Abiogenesis is explicitly excluded from the Theory. The Theory only applies when you have slightly-imperfect replicators in a competitive environment. It does not tell you how to get to such an environment in the first place; it only describes what happens once you’re already there.
Of course, we’re interested in both abiogenesis and cosmogenesis, and Evolution and the Big Bang are pretty much settled sciences (with, of course, lots of details still to be filled in). So the sexy work in biology and cosmology is in those areas, where we’re (unsurprisingly) pretty sure that there’s a natural little-e evolution of the same underlying principles at work that manifests in perhaps surprisingly different appearances in those environments…but all that’s still very much a work in progress.
Some — indeed many, if not most — do indeed propose multiverses, but only because multiverses “popped out” of the best equations to date for describing what could have led to the Big Bang. But every proponent of multiverses will be very quick to point out their speculative nature to you. They might describe it as the best we’ve done to date, but, in the same breath, will note that we still don’t have any way to test the ideas. Some will then go on to speculate about how we might someday be able to test the ideas…but they’re still very much speculative.
But the Big Bang, at least back to the initial inflationary epoch, is not speculative. Nothing is 100% certain, but the margin of error for the Big Bang is close enough that I don’t feel like typing out all the nines I’d have to to give you the proper size of the error bars.
Cheers,
b&
You can see pretty easily that free will is a red herring in the question of the existence of downward causation, although it may motivate the question, by considering a computer that interacts with the world. At its fundamental level, a modern computer is “nothing more than” and nothing less than, a collection of imperfect silicon crystals connected by mostly copper wires (plus solder, insulators, etc.). The behavior of the computer is 99.9999999999% controlled by high-level commands, most importantly in the C and C++ languages, but also a bunch of others including Python, Java, and Javascript. Some of these commands achieve their “downward causation” offline by being “compiled” into intermediate virtual computers such as the Java JVM, while others compile into machine code. For other areas of the computer’s behavior, the downward causation is online and in real time, under the control of a language interpreter such as the Cpython runtime.
There’s no reason to believe that the causal structure of the human mind/brain system is fundamentally different (other than faith or confusion), with multiple levels of interpretation and causality flow occurring simultaneously, especially in the mind of a programmer who’s mentally executing his the program that he’s writing. The problem of identifying “the languages of the brain” is an old and very complex problem that is still actively being debated by philosophers and studied by neuroscientists, but there’s no question that natural language – English for me – is one of them, at least sometimes.
By the way, Searle, whose invention of the Chinese Room was a great insight in the study of consciousness, recently in a Google Talk captured on YouTube, talked as if he doesn’t understand the distinction between syntax and semantics, or the difference between the behavior of the world and the scientific laws that describe that behavior. The difference between them is critical to understanding consciousness and its relation to behavior, and this error or failure to communicate was a disappointment to me.
Well, after almost three hundred posts, I wonder if anyone of these guys that have posted so far do really possess consciousness at all. Worst: how can anyone really tell that I myself have consciousness? Well, not in the equations and in the math of all physical science, nor in any hint coming from chemistry, or from biology, or antropology, or sociology, etc.
.
Maybe one day we will learn how to tell these things. For now (and it has been this way for the last several millenia), the debate is truly over…
.
Julio Siqueira
juliocbsiqueira2012@gmail.com
http://www.criticandokardec.com.br/criticizingskepticism.htm
Ben,
” there’s umpteen brazilian jigglewatts of energy that’s not conveying any information at all because there’s nobody to receive the message.”
So if there is no reception, it’s just energy, Right? Like I was arguing, reality is this polarity of energy and form/information.
” And the majority of that radiation heads in the direction of nothing at all,”
Just a hypothetical; If the visible spectrum of light were completely shifted to the infrared and beyond it would be black body radiation and the CMBR is also black body radiation, the irregularities of which would be due to coming from specific sources.
“Not to the background; relative to those distant stars. There isn’t any background — that’s the point I keep trying to make but you refuse to accept.”
Keep in mind I’m not the one arguing for the entire universe as a single entity, you are. I’m the one saying space is infinite, redshift is optical, just like gravitational lensing and that cmbr is just light shifted completely off the visible spectrum, i.e. the solution to Olber’s paradox. So the only background is the visible sources of light.
“their initial agreed-upon frame when they were all at relative rest when you started the experiment. But that’s still relative to nothing absolute.)”
The speed of light is relative to the observer, yet if the observer is traveling at the speed of light, time stops. So my question is what is the other direction? When the observer has slowed to the point where its clock is moving fastest, before accelerating in the opposite direction and the clock starts to slow again.
“You’d have to crunch some serious math to answer that”
Along with a deeper understanding of gravity. If it is the inward curvature of space, you, for one, seem unwilling to accept that space would curve outward in the absence of mass and these two effects would balance. A logical Cosmological Constant. So if space is otherwise “flat” in the absence of mass and can only redshift due to doppler effect, wouldn’t that be assuming some “background medium” to space?
“The Big Bang Theory starts with the initial condition of extraordinarily low entropy and works forward from there.”
So I suppose God did it. That seemed to be LeMaitre’s assumption.
” the margin of error for the Big Bang is close enough that I don’t feel like typing out all the nines I’d have to to give you the proper size of the error bars.”
I’m still wondering how galactic space expands, but we have a standard speed of light that is independent of this expansion, against which to compare it.
John said:
The speed of light is relative to the observer…
COMPLETELY WRONG! It is an absolute, the same for every observer, proven by experiment after experiment. Until you understand this, you are wasting your time, and everyone else’s.
Neil,
The point is that every observer observes it at C, because in a moving frame, space and time “dilate.”
Also, it is referred to as a “constant,” not an absolute. My argument with Ben is that there is an absolute implicit in the vacuum, since a clock would be fastest at the state of absolute equilibrium.
If I’m wasting your time, go do something more important than argue on the internet.
If I’m wasting your time, go do something more important than argue on the internet.
Yes, you are right about that. So you have one thing right, at last.
Julio S
“I wonder…”
Then you are conscious.