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.
Sean,
– Fine remarks. Your awe and respect for the “gloriously greater supernatural realm” (I would prefer the adjective ‘pan-natural’ realm) is valid and appreciated. But humans, as any living creature with its own particular physiology and sensoria and neurology, will of course be limited, vis a vis , the ‘totality of existence’. The wonderful thing is, that we don’t know our potential capacities for functional abilities or expanded awareness vis a vis that ‘grandeur’ . . . the 4 minute mile was considered ‘beyond human physical ability’ for a long time, until effort and dreams broke the ‘zeno’ barrier.
– Don’t we have tools now that supercede our physionomy? Where we trust the data and information as if they were natural extensions of our own natural physicality.
– What I find wonderful is that the desire to explore and understand ‘more’, also has to be a behavior that comes out of the fundamental structure, relations and potential … of the universe we find ourselves in. Even your demeaning remarks and point of view, where you want to favor the glory of creation, over humankind’s apparent mapping of empirical consistency and dependability to our self-relating ways, all of these ways-of-thinking-aboute-existence have to come out of foundational dynamics, relations and processes that preceded us.
– Being humble, in the acknowledged presence of a universe that is ‘greater’ than us, is ok.
– But somehow, for some reason yet unspecified, natural living systems morphed and changed and explored ‘possibilities of form and function’ .. until we find ourselves at the current tip of one of those paths of exploration. Not of our predecessors ‘choice’, but at least of their effort for while they lived. All we are doing, with science, with theorizing and testing, is explore our potential ‘in life’; Maybe our Godelian limitations and boundaries are further out beyond us from where we are now.
– And no one is demeaning the ‘beyond’ or the supernatural. For right now, many of those relations and understandings are just ‘beyond where we are now’ in our mental awareness and explaining. And all we can do it ask questions. Humanity is driven to move beyond awe and dumb-struck appreciation ( where ‘dumb’ is not ‘stupid’, but ‘voiceless’ .. as in ‘deaf and dumb’). We literally ‘have no words’ for many things we see, appreciate and recognize as being here in the universe with us.
– We are not being anthropomorphic or arrogant, we would just ‘like to have the words’ to talk about the things we experience. And yes, at times, we are stuck with meager self-reflexive tautologies . . . circular arguments. But if we carry a lighter heart, sometimes even our own ignorance can be respected.
– A friend of mine was a news reporter and mountain climber. His name is Karl Horeis, his family name meaning ‘high strider’, which led him to getting into mountaineering in order to ‘live up to his family name”. He wasn’t a ‘scientist’ per se, or in any stretch of the imagination, but he had a fine perspective on life and our relationship to existence. His favorite remarks to people who felt like that hadn’t achieved much in their lives, was to say to them “Congratulations !!!! You’ve reached the farthest known moment in time and human history !!! Feel proud!”
– Sure we are ‘limited’, Sean. But why not use our capacity to ask questions and seek answers? Even our earliest ancestors, hundreds of thousands of years ago, had their own views and understandings and spirituality; their own religious models and explanations. But guaranteed, they felt awe in the face of ‘the vastness’. No less in intensity than we still do today. We just don’t know how much is ‘forever beyond us’, forever ‘supernatural’. What we do know is that some of what used to be supernatural, is now . . . natural.
– And so we continue the exploration. Hopeful of finding answers vis a vis ‘how’ existence works (lower case ‘w’ of why). The upper case w . . . “Why” is there existence (and its forms)? is there for everyone and everything to consider, if possible. The big ‘Why’ and the little ‘why’ don’t preclude one another. I would hope people don’t get lost in the trap of trying to equate the Big w with the Little w. They are different, even though they are co-companions. co-present, and in some partial ways . . . similar. (Check out the Aristotelian “Causes”, to get a better breakdown than I can otherwise try to re-identify and re-define.) :-))) Jamie
OUCH did I boo-boo. I wrote Sean … meant SIMON
– Jamie, 9red faced)
I have to say after reading the first half of the book, “I can’t wait until we study the electromagnetic properties of ceramics!” It really didn’t sound like much when a scientist used that argument to prevent the LHC from being built in Texas, but if you think about it, ceramics are strange. If you microwave a ceramic dish, it does not become heated by the electromagnetic radiation. If you put ceramics under a lamp, it will be heated up by rays in the visible light spectrum. That doesn’t seem like it would be easy to explain without changing something we “know” about everyday physics.
James
I am not against pushing the frontiers of our knowledge and understanding. I see physics as currently probably probing toward a God-ordained veil between the natural and supernatural realms. I expect reductionism to approach a brick wall. The wall may have the look of growing complexity and fragmentation in physics models rather than a beautiful core model.
It is indeed astonishing that we got as far as we have with an analytic understanding of the underlying fabric of our present physical existence.
It just seems to me that, if I temporary adopt the humanist-naturalist-reductionist position, then
1) We are still a very long way from having arrived at a convincing merely naturalistic worldview
2) Most naturalists believe we have evolved in a manner consistent with stochastic constraints. We would therefore almost certainly be in no logically necessary position to derive satisfactory conclusions about the framework within which we evolved. Internal consistency, a requirement of good science, seems a good guide and indicator of a valid worldview, but it is violated by the above assumptions. More generally, how do we know that we know our own limitations? And therefore the reliability of our conclusions?
3) One might even suspect that our ability to get thus far reflects a special gifting from a greater conscious design agency.
Sean seems to see the evidence pointing toward atheistic naturalism. I acknowledged that this is born, in his case, of a far superior knowledge of, and probably aptitude toward, physics, compared to mine. I have read and appreciated ‘The Particle at the End of the Universe’ and am working through ‘From Eternity to Here’.
Personally, with all the unresolved dilemmas in math and physics, and the problems with evolution by natural selection (see for example the newly published ‘The Paradox of Evolution’ for some serious and basic questioning by a professional of the current situation there) and the abiogenesis issue, I just don’t agree with Sean there.
It is incumbent on the naturalist to provide a rigorous, self-complete picture, or something close, to try to prove his point. Sean, I’m sure, has attempted to provide this in the new book; I confess I haven’t read it as yet. Holders, like myself, of the alternative theistic perspective (acknowledged and rejected by Sean in this post) may see the natural as a partial projection of the supernatural. Perfectly valid within its limits, but woefully incomplete in ultimate reality and implication.
Simon Packer:
I see physics as currently probably probing toward a God-ordained veil between the natural and supernatural realms.
Even should that be the case, we already know that the “veil” is perfectly impermeable in both directions. Nothing in the natural realm can even hypothetically interact with the supernatural, and, equally, nothing in the supernatural realm can even hypothetically influence the natural. Sean gives the quick explanation for this in the video of his presentation at Google: claiming otherwise is equivalent to stating that the folks at CERN missed a particle with a mass less than 125 GeV/c^2.
An analogy might help.
We know today that there are no “lost” continents, such as was Atlantis was once believed to exist. Indeed, for that matter, there aren’t even any remaining unknown tributaries to the Amazon. There are certainly lots of things about the Earth we don’t know; one particularly exciting example is the dynamics of the magnetic field. But the Earth’s geography, including undersea geography, is completely mapped…and nothing we learn about geomagnetics is going to redraw the map.
Claiming that the gods and their realms are real and have some sway over humans, in this day and age, is as absurd as proposing we send forth fleets of our best sailing ships to search for Atlantis.
And as for your misunderstandings of Evolution, I would direct you towards a superlative book by a friend of Sean’s, Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne. As with physics, there’s lots of exciting stuff still to discover in biology…but the fact that we are distant cousins to redwood trees will no more change than the fact that stuff on Earth falls down at about 10 m/s^2.
Cheers,
b&
Hi Ben,
I really take issue with you when you keep pointing out how great ‘core theory’ is.
I totally agree that no force or particles in the everyday world have been missed. There is no ‘supernatural stuff’ that interacts with the everyday world in that fashion. But this is a very naĂŻve, ‘straw-man’ characterization of those proposing that extra ‘non physical’ properties may need to be added our explanations of reality. Such properties certainly would *not* take the form of particles or forces acting in space . Think about it. If there were things that did that , they would actually *be* part of the physical world, by the very definition of ‘physical’. So no, any extra ‘non physical properties’ certainly wouldn’t take that form at all.
Remember the example I gave in the other thread of the mathematical truth “6*4=24”? You agreed that was true, and that there was an empirical way of verifying it , but mathematics certainly doesn’t take the form of extra forces or particles acting in space! The point I’m getting at, is that any extra ‘non-physical’ properties would *not* be things as simple as extra forces and particles. They would be an entirely *new* mode of explanation, one that would not necessarily contradict ‘core theory’ at all.
Like you, I’m reasonably sure that there is no supernatural realm. But ‘augmented naturalism’ (where you have to add extra ‘non-physical’ properties that would none the less still obey natural laws) is still a possibility.
I notice Sean’s work involves trying to explain to how space and time ’emerges’ from quantum wave-functions. That is to say, Sean is trying to ‘reduce’ space and time to quantum wave-functions. Surely if reductionism was entirely correct, he should have no trouble with this at all? So what’s the hold up? đ
Living here in the Anthropocene epoch of geological time, I’m hoping for a future edition of the book that engages with emergent levels above the primordial biological cell. Yes, you can handwave “evolution”, but there’s a lot that is known about multicellularity and the interaction of individuals as populations in the “modern synthesis” of post-Darwinian evolutionary theory. However even the most advanced evolutionary theories seem to go silent once there are intelligent individuals that are able to learn from each other. From populations of learning individuals we get “culture”, and culture begets language which begets mathematics and physics treatises and philosophizing about consciousness, and it begets economics, which begets industrialization, which begets CO2 and other forms of pollution that are rapidly changing the thermodynamic properties of the atmosphere, i.e. changing global climate.
Unfortunately far too much of mainstream economics is math that is based on obviously invalid assumptions to the point of being “not even wrong”, and most of the rest is pre-scientific squabbling about whether Keynes or Hayek or Marx really understood the true truth about money and wealth and the role of government in managing them. I’ve found a few economists who are grasping at the edges of theories that make contact with the rest of the big picture, but they are few and far between.
zarzuelazen, an awful lot hinges on your use of the term, “non-physical.” If you want to describe temperature as non-physical, I could probably go along with what you’ve written. But I think pretty much everybody would agree that describing temperature as “non-physical” is at best unusual and misleading.
You won’t find temperature in Sean’s Big Equation. What you’ll find is that, after you plot out the waveforms of all the particles in (for example) a gas in a steady state, though the particles move around over time, the total kinetic energy remains constant — and, therefore, the average also remains constant. That average value is very conveniently referred to as the temperature. And as a result of various other factors, you can very usefully refer to the temperature as a shorthand in all sorts of situations where you’re interested in the average kinetic energy of particles of a system.
The same applies up the ladder. Weather pretty much entirely reduces to the temperature, wind velocity, and percentage of water in the local atmosphere. Climate reduces to weather. If you want to think of temperature as non-physical, you could equally think of climate as non-physical…but, again, only if you wanted to strangely confuse everybody.
Because the LHC found the Higgs and nothing unexpected, we know that all “higher-level” phenomena similarly reduce. Political science reduces to sociology reduces to psychology reduces to brain anatomy reduces to chemistry reduces to Sean’s Big Equation, in a very broad and rough outline.
You can sometimes have higher levels of abstraction that apply equally well to many different types of lower levels of abstractions, which can be convenient. Your Web browser doesn’t care if the server it’s getting the page from is Intel-based running Windows and SQL Server or ARM-based running BSD and Postgres, just as your local criminal code presumably doesn’t care what color your eyes are. But all that’s going on there is a recognition that sometimes the same big patterns emerge out of different components. For example, circles and hexagons will both naturally stack in the same honeycomb pattern — as will all sorts of other geometric figures.
But to make the leap to declaring such symmetries as somehow “non-physical”…well, again, at absolute best, it really doesn’t help anything.
Cheers,
b&
Ben
I will have a another look at what Sean says, I have read him say the same before here. I have the greatest difficulty believing what you both seem to believe when our present physics is clearly so contextual and fails to focus down to a fundamental model. Sean’s core equation is a patch-up of contextual theories. It may be a satisfactory patch-up for some purposes, but we all know it is not a rigorous final answer.
We need to define what would be natural/supernatural. We do not really understand so many high level phenomena. For example, we do not really understand why some creatures heal but only to a certain level in the natural order. We do not derive these outcomes rigorously from physics or even biochemistry. If a starfish grew a new leg, we would call it ‘natural’. If a cat did, we wouldn’t. We are talking empirical expectation. We can say certain high level phenomena are consistent with what we know of physics. Rigorous causality from that physics is something else.
I’ll call ‘supernatural’ that which violates very strong expectation in the everyday world. I believe in the supernatural in that sense.
I’ll hedge my bets on whether the supernatural consists in that which is so far undetected within SM/GR physics, and/or, after zarzuelazen, totally unsuspected interactions with that model through mechanisms we are inherently blind to but that nevertheless result in that model being upheld to within our present powers of investigation.
‘Physical’ is a term we use for what we currently understand to be the structural foundation underlying our experienced reality. Yesterday’s non-physical of course may become ‘physical’ as ‘physics’ advances. The terms ‘physical’ and ‘non-physical’ are ultimately subjective.
Interactions through known or unknown particles and coupling mechanisms I would think were still a possibility. As zarzuelazen says, we may be looking inside the box of what we already see and how we already think.
The relationship between higher level phenomena (e.g. sociology, biology, the supernatural if you believe in it) and our current picture of the physics fabric they work within is interesting. Again, no-one can pretend the picture we have is a continuum of understanding from quarks to kiwis, though reductionists like to spin it in that direction. Whether the gaps in understanding are logistical or of another nature we do not know, because the logistical hurdles of measurement and computation are insurmountable any time soon. Instead, we describe things using our own conscious terms of expression. We use words born of our consciousness to conglomerate situations of exceedingly high observational and computational complexity.
You imply I don’t understand biological evolution. Which version? No-one ‘understands’ it. They may understand the basic idea, as I do. It has massive problems with plausibility when we come to detailed outplay of its basic mechanisms. I say that have begun to read Ernst Meyr again.
Simon Packer:
Then you’re insisting on an irrelevancy.
You don’t need a Planck-scale map of the Solar System in order to navigate your way to the corner drugstore, and nothing you find in such a map is going to cause you to revise your schematic-style street map that you use to get to the drugstore.
Popular understanding likes to make hay of claims that, for example, Einstein proved Newton was worng. Indeed, Einstein did no such thing, and Newton (with some reconceptionalization from Leibniz) remains not only perfectly valid but, indeed, the overwhelmingly preferred way of understanding the world immediately around us. Newtonian mechanics breaks down at extreme scales that no human has ever personally experienced (though some indirectly-observable effects, such as lasers and GPS, are quite important to modern life), yes. But Newtonian mechanics does not break down, never has and never will, at human scales. And the realms where Sean’s Big Equation breaks down? They’re as far removed from those where you need Einstein and Heisenberg as those realms are removed from the Newtonian realm.
So, yes, we know for certain that we have an incomplete understanding of high energy and other exotic systems. We don’t know what goes on inside black holes or at galactic scales, and we’re not sure what, if anything, might come out of a particle accelerator significantly more powerful than the LHC. But you’re not inside a black hole; you’re not as big as a galaxy; and you’re not a particle accelerator.
As such, objections that we don’t understand such phenomena are entirely irrelevant…and, when it comes right down to it, suggesting that we don’t fully understand the physics of human (and beyond, to an extent) scales really is every bit as absurd as suggesting that maybe the Sun will rise in the West and apples might start falling up from the ground to affix themselves to trees.
Simply asking, “Which version?” tells me that what you’re thinking of as evolution has nothing whatsoever to do with biology and instead either comes from religious caricatures of biology or something indistinguishable from such. And, indeed, your entire confused diversion into limb regrowth reinforces that perception.
So permit me to again refer you to Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True, and suggest that you argue against it instead of whatever you might have read about evolution that William Dembski or Ken Ham or Ray Comfort and their ilk authored or inspired. Jerry (with Alan Orr, one of his doctoral students) quite literally wrote the book on Speciation, and his is the best introduction to biology available in the popular press. It’d be a pointless waste of my time to try to correct your hazy misunderstandings, but it’d be well worth yours to gain the knowledge to appreciate what biology is actually about.
You could, of course, also read Darwin’s seminal work. It’s long and the English is a bit archaic (though still quite readable and poetic) and it’s entirely missing Mendelian genetics (let alone DNA and genomics) and such, but it otherwise remains every bit as correct and useful as Newton’s Principia. Not exactly the best way for a modern student to get started, but the important stuff is all there.
Such is a profoundly unhelpful definition. For babies, the game of “Peek-A-Boo” would therefore be supernatural — as would be a smartphone to somebody living a century (maybe less) ago. It also implies that Newtonian Mechanics, for example, is a mere “expectation.” While, in one sense, “expectation” is a not unreasonable way begin to classify scientific theory, it is a most unreasonable way to end such a classification.
Indeed, the only way that Sean’s Big Equation could not be applicable and hold true would be if some sort of great conspiracy theory instead represents reality. You can invent an infinite variety of such conspiracy theories — you could be a brain in a vat, an agent of the Matrix, controlled by alien mind rays, being fed CIA drugs, a figment of the imagination of this-or-that god, whatever. Any and all (and, indeed, multiple Inception- style layers of such) could be the accurate description of reality. But there’s simply no evidence to support any of those hypotheses…
…and serious speculation that one, especially one in particular, might actually be true…well, such speculation is rightly dismissed as paranoid delusion. The theologian who thinks that Jesus Spoke the whole world into existence is exactly as much off the map as the guy on the street corner mumbling about Mossad controlling him through his dental implants.
Cheers,
b&
Brilliant. I am buying the book today.
Ben
Thanks for your response. I will look at the core theory equation in more detail. I went to pray for the sick at Grootes Schuur Hospital on Tuesday with a small group which includes a postgrad physics guy from the University of Cape Town. He had a T-Shirt on emblazoned with the Langrangian for the Standard Model! We saw one lady fairly sure her inflamed thyroid was healed more or less instantaneously and someone experience much greater pain-free mobility in a leg after a shattered pelvis. If you are ever in these parts….
I have read much of the Origin of Species. I am not a young earth creationist. My alignment is more with Michael Behe who has not been satisfactorily refuted IMO, Geoffrey Simmonds and Stephen Meyer. I find much popular level justification of EBNS comically simplistic and presumptuous. Searching Ernst Mayr ‘What Evolution Is’ for a satisfactory explanation of the means by which additional phenotype complexity is coded for in order to be selected, you get an essentially null result. Please tell me where to look. This one certainly flummoxed Dawkins. I am pretty sure there will be nothing new in Jerry Coyne but I may take a look..I like Sean’s stuff on the whole and he recommends it.
Cheers
I have often had prophetic dreams–my wife and a couple friends could verify this and though it is of little use trying to prove it here I will give an example: I had a dream that a manager I used to work with was telling me he had work opportunities for me. Upon waking I told my wife about it. Now I had not seen, spoken, or otherwise electronically been contact with this man for about five years and had no other dreams concerning him in that time frame. A few days later he calls me to talk about a couple things including work. This is not to invoke religion, God, or the supernatural but I am a little curious how information can go back in time through our brains…via entanglement? How does this line up with the arrow of time and entropy?
I see that the âsimulation hypothesisâ is again becoming popular (thanks to Elon Musk this week).
Do you think that there could ever be a formal test that could actually decide this issue?
In my mind, there is some kind of fundamental flaw in assuming that an outside observer/designer would have to set up initial parameters that have to run through a simulation in time, if time is completely reversible for the âsimulationâ quantum interactions. But I guess that âoutside the simulation timeâ and âinside the simulation timeâ need not be related at all. And actually the simulated world wouldnât need to be at all similar to the ârealâ worldâŠ
On a totally unrelated note, would/does thinking about the world as a computer simulation allow any better paradigm for constructing hypotheses for real physics?
Simon:
The claimed efficacy of prayer for medical treatment has been overwhelmingly disproven. The cases fall into two broad classes: selection bias and fraud. I’m sure you’re familiar with revival tent faith “healers” who run carnie scams, with cohorts faking illness before dramatically casting away crutches and wheelchairs. The sorts of healing you yourself witness, when looked at as more than isolated incidents, turn out to be no statistically different from the general population. The difference is that you remember and assign special significance to the times when something good happened, and dismiss or explain away or forget all the other times when nothing happened or something bad happened. When it ends well, it’s a miracle; when nothing happens, it’s your fault because you didn’t pray hard enough; when it ends badly, the gods move in mysterious ways and we must strive to understand what place this misfortune holds in their grand plans for us. Or, “heads I win and tails you lose.” Add to the fact that we’re still in the infancy of medical science, that doctors are assumed infallible when they confidently predict near-certain doom but not in other circumstances…
…while stories such as you offer are certainly emotionally compelling, they’re not an accurate reflection of reality. Don’t get me worng — I think it’s wonderful that you spend time with people in hospitals. In doing so you bring them comfort and ease; you make the world a better place, especially where it’s not such a good place to begin with. But it’s you who’s doing the good work, not some phantasmagorical spirit from an alternate reality.
That lot uses the lottery paradox to “prove” non-existent teleology.
We’ve all read the back of the lottery ticket; the odds of winning are, roughly, several brazilian to diddly-squat. And, yet, every few weeks there’s a lottery winner.
If you’re not surprised at the fact that somebody keeps winning the lottery — and you shouldn’t be — then you also don’t need to put any special significance in the fact that the particular somebody who won was the one who won. Yes, for the winner there’s life-changing significance…but “Why me!?” is clearly a pointless question. If not that winner, then somebody else — and that person would be the one wondering, “Why me!?”
In the case of the Unintelligent Design crowd, we see that trivially demonstrated by the proponents getting all hyper-excited about some particular feature “unique” to one organism…while they completely ignore entire classes of other organisms that “solved” the same basic problem through different means. The human eye has some sort of special iridescent computability that couldn’t possibly have evolved? Then why did arachnids and cephalopods (and several others) independently evolve equal-if-not-better eyes that don’t even bother with the feature of the human eye under consideration? If there is an evolutionary advantage to sight — and there most emphatically is — then one should expect organisms with organs capable of giving sight; but the particular way that organ gets implemented is of much less significance.
The other faults of that lot are major and legion. They like to toss around big numbers but without any understanding of the size of the numbers they’re working with…when you have quadrillions of microorganisms with generational times of hours over a span of billions of years, the naive, unoptimized calculation of the size of the genetic search space dwarves their breathless big-eyed big-number rants…
…and it completely ignores the fact that the search isn’t random, that all life is ultimately powered by the huge bounty of low-entropy solar radiation beamed down upon us during the day that we can happily re-radiate at night as high-entropy waste heat.
Indeed, once you add that fact into your thinking, of just how amazing the Sun really is, the rest becomes obviously inevitable. Mix together an energy gradient like that with suitable raw materials in an hospitable environment with enough time, and the miracle would be life not evolving.
I can certainly understand Richard being flummoxed by that, because it doesn’t even parse in the first place. The most charitable reading I can give that is that it reifies information into something Platonic that it manifestly isn’t.
In another discussion, I noted that, for the longest time, the biggest scientific mystery was where the Sun goes at night. A caveman would be utterly unimpressed by your presentation of a Laplacian heliocentric model of the Solar System and the planets (including Earth) “falling down” their elliptical gravitational pathways; instead, he just wants you to point him to the spot on his hand-drawn map where he can find the cave the Sun sleeps in so he might steal some of its feathers for his headdress. After all, any fool can tell you that it’s the Sun that moves and the Earth that doesn’t (except in earthquakes), so all this nonsense of everything spinning (why don’t you get dizzy?) and falling (onto what?) in nothing (ha!) can be dismissed out of hand.
So…again. Start with Jerry’s book. When you’re done with it, you should see that the diversity of life on Earth is fully explained without resort to “specified irreducible complexity” or whatever buzzphrases ID advocates use — and, indeed, that they’re as incomprehensibly irrelevant as the Cave of the Sun is to a NASA launch director.
Cheers,
b&
Steve Mudge:
It doesn’t.
What’s instead going on is some selective memory editing. That is, you remember the one time that you thought of (or dreamt about) your long-lost friend shortly before he got back in touch with you…but you don’t pay any attention to all the other long-lost friends you thought of or dreamt about or came across an old letter from or what-not but they didn’t soon get back in touch with you.
When you factor all of everything together, you find that the frequencies of when people have experiences like what you describe very neatly match up with the combination of the frequencies that people think of long-lost friends and that they reconnect with long-lost friends.
…and then when you start adding all the cases — presumably not your case, but common nonetheless — that somebody remembers an old friend, reaches out to them, and subsequently learns about the latest significant new in that friend’s life…well, of course the friend has something significant going on right now — don’t we all always? And there’re so many patterns to what humans consider significant, and it’s so easy to create analogies…you dreamt of your friend wearing a pink skirt, called her up, and learned she just had a baby girl, but ignored the rest of the dream where she was dancing Hula on rollerskates across the Sea of Cortez whilst eating bacon-mango soufflĂ©….
Cheers,
b&
Tim:
It is conceivable that we could learn that we are inside a simulation, but it is logically impossible for us to definitely conclude that we are not inside a simulation — for the exact same reasons that Turning demonstrated that the Halting Problem can’t be solved. The simulation programmers would but have to add something to their simulation that would detect attempts to answer the question and ensure that the answer always came back negative. If nothing else, this could be accomplished by spawning off another simulation, seeing how things go in that one, and suitably altering ours with the knowledge they gain from that one.
However…this is the very definition of a paranoid conspiracy theory. It need not be a computer simulation we’re “trapped” inside; it could be the Matrix, or a Star Trek Holodeck, or we could be brains in a vat, or parts of Alice’s Red King’s Dream, or the CIA could be controlling us via our dental implants with their mind ray satellites, or whatever. And you can nest those however deep you want — we’re crazy homeless people beamed into the Holodeck, which itself is just a subroutine of the Matrix that Zhuangzi’s Butterfly dreamed while pretending it was Jesus.
Lacking evidence for any such deception, there’s no point in seriously speculating that one (which one?) might hold.
But wait! There’s more!
Even if there’s some conspiracy more fundamental to reality than the reality we perceive…the perpetrators of that conspiracy are in exactly the same position as we are. Sure, they might know that our reality is a deception…but, not only do they themselves not have any way of ruling out that they’ve been similarly deceived, they’re in the unfortunate position of knowing that such deception is practical. And those who deceive the deceivers are even worse off, because they know full well that multiple such layers of deception are to be expected.
As such, it doesn’t even make logical sense to refer to the “ultimate” nature of reality, any more than one can refer to a general algorithm that solves the Halting Problem. Or, even if we grant Christians (and similar theists) all they claim about one or more of their gods being the Ground Round of Reality that Spoke Existence into Being (or whatever the theological formulation is)…well, even if that is true, Jesus himself would have no way of ruling out the possibility that he himself is just a minor character in some teenaged hyperintelligent shade of blue’s smartphone app.
For further meditation, permit me to refer you to Saint Randall, chapter 505:
https://xkcd.com/505/
As a final note…I’ll point out that, conspiracy or not, the reality I perceive is far more wonderful than I have any right to demand. I am but an insignificant mote in a Cosmos at least a baker’s dozen billion years old billions of light years across, on a planet vastly more huge than I can possibly hope to thoroughly explore, and I get to spend the rest of my life with the woman of my dreams. Even if that’s somehow fake…well, it’s still a most beautiful and delightful work of art, and one that I get to personally enjoy. So what if it’s all just some alien kid’s science fair experiment? She did a damned good job, and I’m glad I get to be a part of it in such a personal way.
Cheers,
b&
Steve,
– Interesting question. I don’t have a knowledgeable remark in the context of ‘entanglement’, but you reminded me of something I wrote several years ago, when considering the so called ‘forward arrow of time’ versus ‘memory’. It seemed to me that ‘memory retrieval’ in the presence of ‘always moving “forward” time’, was like our minds/neurology essentially taking a concurrent side-tip ‘back in time’ to retrieve previously stored data, memories, associations, even while always moving forward in conversation, thought lines, ‘future responses’.
– The only way I could describe the simultaneity, was to admit that, even though we inexorably move ‘forward’ in clock-time, our minds were researching ‘backwards’ along other associative/causal meaningful links, to bring into current-context, old data and information .. to re-new relevance and associations.
– That’s sort of a jumbled grouping of our natural mental/neural activities .. searching the past, even while always ‘living forward’ . . and melding the streams and data together. I gave the activity a ‘cute’ english language anagram name: RECALL . . “Reverse Extrapolative CAusality Logical Linkage”.
– We partially (actually: ‘mainly’) “live in the past” .. that is, we think backwards and forwards at the same time, in order to coordinate and blend immediate actions with prior experiences.
I see what you are saying Ben and I do scrutinize such events with that in mind and am quite familiar with the day to day mish-mash dream. These dreams ‘stand out’…or constellate to use a Jungian term. Another example–I’ve had dreams of my last four serious girlfriends—and some very specific information in them–a week or two before I met them. Again I can’t prove this to you, however there certainly is a lot of anecdotal evidence that this occurs in humans. I joke that I could have saved Stephen Hawking a Playboy subscription way back when. Seems like ripples in time from future events, like a pebble thrown into a pond, the waves ripple in all directions.
To everyone
* This blog group seems to have in its core vocal participants, the typical viewpoints found in the general culture at large. .. the religious; the science professionals who try to minimize religious aspects of human experience and thinking, and the ‘blenders’.
* I decided a long time ago, after giving deference and respect to the several points of view, that ‘taking a stand’, anywhere along that continuum, that spectrum, of ideas and ways of thinking, really wasn’t where I myself felt comfortable finding a location, for my own voice and point of view.
* I can only remind everyone that you are all searching for the exact same thing . . . to explain and make satisfyingly meaningful for yourselves, “Why” things happen the way they do, exist the way they do, function and perform the way they do, in this world.
* Stories, rationales, justifications, explanations, purposes and utilities. We are all looking for ‘answers’ that sufficiently ‘make sense to us’. Not all these different models and projected explanations, fit together very well, or at all. We all sort of hope that there is ‘one true~correct answer or explanation. And it gets tough to listen to, or accept, other options, when they are different from the one we’ve personally tended to follow and find acceptable. We chide and chafe at the competition, discount alternatives. It’s sad, but true. We seek satisfying ‘unity’ but are forced to face alternatives, options and diversities instead. There are a lot of well intention-ed, well meaning . . . points of view.
* The saving grace for me is, I see companion human beings hungry to live in a universe, a world, that ‘makes sense’, however, that ends up being organized, rationalized or intentioned. And that’s a positive thing about us, that we need to always applaud one another for: the searching.
* Now, to figure out where that drive and motivation comes from! Can that drive and desire be “sourced” from primal physiology and chemistry? đ That would be a nice association to identify. đ
James
Steve, I wouldn’t (much) question whether or not you’ve experienced what you have, and I’m reasonably confident that you’re faithfully reporting your understanding and recollection of those experiences.
But…as Father Feynman famously put it, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
In your case, we are left with two possibilities to consider.
The first is that everything we think we know about physics is fundamentally flawed, with the inevitable conclusion that every experiment we’ve ever performed (including those you should have made in your high school physics lab) has been misinterpreted or otherwise misleading…
…or that you’re experiencing some very well understood (but perhaps uncomfortable to acknowledge) psychological phenomena.
Perhaps an example a bit less emotionally charged would be helpful. Take the well-known MĂŒller-Lyer optical illusion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MĂŒller-Lyer_illusion
The analogy here would be either that every ruler ever used to examine the illusion has been flexible in exactly the way necessary to misreport lines of different lengths as being the same length, or that humans tend to perceive lines of the same length as being different when presented in certain contexts.
Everything you’ve written fits very nicely into an introductory-level understanding of human psychology, but violently contradicts what you’d learn in an introductory-level physics class. And that same pattern holds perfectly as you go beyond the novice level all the way to the top experts. Sean will be happy to tell you that what you describe is incompatible with everything he knows about physics, and a psychology professor colleague of his at Caltech would be equally happy with you to explain how perceptions such as yours arise without there actually being any time-reversing premonitions.
You’re certainly welcome to insist that both are worng…but prudence would dictate otherwise.
Cheers,
b&
James,
A rather squiddish man once observed that, if you “judiciously” take a midway position between a well-evidenced rational position and a primitive superstitious one, that just means you’re halfway to crazy town.
The difference between science and religion is that scientists have tried their damnedest over the years to prove themselves wrong, have often succeeded, and have abandoned and revised now-disproven beliefs. The religious, on the other hand, started at the same point as the scientists…but have held their original ideas sacred and refused to consider revising them even in the face of incompatible evidence.
Modern (and ancient!) Christian theology is basically Platonic Idealism set in a world of Aristotelian Metaphysics with human-like personifications of certain especially significant Ideals. You see this very well evidenced in the writings of Paul…just as Adam was the Platonic archetype of the human body, Jesus was the Platonic archetype of the human soul. Jesus as the Word that Spoke the world into existence is just the Prime Mover given a friendly face.
The problem with all that…is that it’s been centuries since we learned that things “just move” without a Prime Mover and that the notion of ideal forms can’t even be coherently expressed in the context of the history of life on Earth.
So…yes, we may all want to understand Life, the Universe, and Everything…but that doesn’t mean that all attempts to do so are created equal.
If you wish for your understanding of the Cosmos to be the most accurate possible reflection of the reality of the Cosmos as it actually is, prudence dictates that you should observe the Cosmos as it actually is, not as you wish it to be or think it must be, and adjust your understanding of it accordingly. That’s what science does. All theological notions of “should be” or philosophical claims of “must be” are discarded as soon as we have an observation of, “…but actually isn’t.”
The other two “disciplines” instead start with their models, their “first principles,” and attempt to derive reality from them. We know that can have certain limited applicability…but only after you’ve verified that the “first principle” in question is actually an accurate reflection of reality. “Everything that begins to move requires a mover” is not an accurate reflection of reality; we know this because of observations of quantum-scale phenomena and strongly suspect this due to our observations of the CMB. However, “discounting air resistance, objects dropped near Earth accelerate down at about ten meters per second squared,” is valid, as you yourself can fairly trivially confirm with independent observation.
That last bit is the key. Ask a theologian why bad things happen to good people and you’re told to trust that the gods the theologian speaks for (but whom you yourself can’t directly address) know what’s best for you. Ask Sean why he keeps banging on about the importance of the Higgs, and he’ll very happily give you a crash course on physics — one that would let you bootstrap yourself all the way from Newton to the LHC. Don’t believe the theologian? You’re urged to trust the considered conclusions of wiser heads who came before. Don’t believe Sean? He’ll tell you exactly what experiment he did to come to a particular conclusion and urge you to replicate his work to your satisfaction.
Only in the same sense that climate can be “sourced” from weather, which can be “sourced” from the ideal gas laws plus chemistry, which can be “sourced” from atomic theory, which can be “sourced” from Sean’s Big Equation, and so on.
In practice, just as climatologists mostly ignore the weather, the best way to “source” a drive and motivation to make sense of the world is to provide more than ample tax funding to public education and undirected scientific research….
Cheers,
b&
Ben,
* Actually, I’m do not take a ‘judicious’ midway position between the current camps of ‘sciences’ and ‘religions’. I’m a kladistic explorer, who is interest in processes and relationships of systems, not in any of the conventional~historical camps of thinking.
* Both science and religiosities have major deficits and holes — vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities of religious dogmas are well known. The vulnerabilities of science dogmas, less so. And little explored, despite the ‘pride’ of proof via testing/challenging.
* Science generally is becoming dependent on mathematical modeling, and all I hear constantly from the physics!cosmology community is ‘gosh, we keep hitting walls of ‘unwanted infinities’ and division by zero’, and were stuck. But never mind, we’ll invent ‘work-around’ theories and algorithms to avoid those infinities instead of addressing them.
* In other words, Ben, science is stymied and rutted in incomplete mathematics, and there doesn’t seem to be a mind on the planet willing or able to tackle those problems head on; explore math’s expansion that might lead to resolving the current obvious deficits~disconnects.
* I -am- working on that problem, and it’s -beyond- the sci-religions poles, not between them.
* A wholesale rebuilding of mathematics is needed; a wholesale expansion of religious entrenchments is needed. Conceptual Evolution – without fearing extinction or replacement – if better truths and proofs bear it out.
Ben
I have seen the clear cut miraculous, first hand. You can decide I am a liar or deluded of course. My wife was a senior nurse and manager in the UK National Health Service and she has also seen the outright miraculous. Same applies. Here, I use ‘miraculous’ to mean major departures from medical prognosis or outright supernatural re-creation. I am aware of the stereotypes you have used and of the fact that studies have been quoted by popular atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens showing no significant results.
The EBNS discussion is unlikely to resolve here. EBNS in the sense of population gene expression shift certainly happens. The problem of the development of genetic coding for new unique-to-organism complex phenotype systems is a particularly big hurdle for EBNS. For myself, and probably the authors I mentioned and many other people who have thought it through a bit, this one is an utterly and unambiguously insurmountable problem for naturalistic Darwinism. Your words do not alter my opinion there.
Cheers
James:
Such is not at all what I hear from physicists, especially including Sean. Indeed, Sean very comfortably and cheerfully embraces the infinite and its possibility. He might feel compelled to correct me, but I think it would be accurate to describe him as being very confident that space is infinite; would bet but not be confident that time is eternal to the past as well as the future; and have no trouble postulating the reality of an infinite number of very-real Everettian “Many” Worlds, possibly with a footnote that only a finite (but unimaginably vast) number are distinguishably realizable.
While I wish you the best of luck and would be delighted to see you win a Nobel (or Fields or whatever) associated with such a solution…I hope you’ll forgive me no small amount of skepticism that you’ll succeed. Indeed, I’d expect Sean to succeed at that long before you will, and I don’t think either Sean nor I think he would, though his students have a marginally better chance at success. Still, insights do sometimes come out of left field, and it’d be wonderful should your particular left field be the one to prove fruitful — I just wouldn’t bet on it, is all.
And, in the mean time…might I suggest? If you’re not already, get yourself up to speed such that you could do a peer review of Sean’s latest papers. I think you’d learn an awful lot of interesting stuff, have a lot of fun doing so…and also navigate your way through a lot of very sticky problems that others have already fought hard with and found solutions to. In addition, of course, to all the sticky problems they haven’t found solutions to!
Cheers,
b&