Church of the Churchless

A physicist demolishes the argument in favor of free will

Ian caused a tremendous amount of damage today. Countless cars were destroyed. Lots of homes and business were rendered unusable. Emergency 911 calls largely weren't responded to, because Ian created so much trouble over such a large area.

If Ian was a person, he'd be charged with innumerable crimes. But Ian was a massive Category 4 hurricane that struck Florida today, so there won't be any jail time for the perpetrator of all that havoc.

Watching cable news cover the hurricane, I was impressed (as I have been with previous hurricanes) with how accurately forecasters were able to predict the path Ian would take and how dangerous the storm would be: wind speed, rainfall amount, amount of storm surge, and so on.

Science makes this possible through computer models, weather satellites, storm-chasing airplanes filled with instruments, and other accomplishments of modern meteorology. But at the root of the capacity to predict what a hurricane will do, or what anything will do, is an understanding that reality is deterministic, governed by lawful causes and effects.

Ah, but most people believe humans have free will. (Not that they have any choice in this.)

One day, I'm confident, a belief in free will shall be viewed in much the same way as we regard a belief that the earth is flat. A product of ignorance that was disproven by science and now is held by just a few cranks.

In her book Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions, Sabine Hossenfelder tackles the question, "Has physics ruled out free will?" Short answer: yes. Here's passages from this chapter that provide a longer answer.

The major problem with discussions about free will is that philosophers have put forward a heap of definitions that have nothing to do with what nonphilosophers think free will means.

I am tempted to write "normal people" as opposed to "philosophers," but maybe that's a little uncharitable. And I don't want to be uncharitable. Certainly not.

For this reason, let me begin by stating the problem without using the term free will. The currently established laws of nature are deterministic with a random element from quantum mechanics. This means the future is fixed, except for occasional quantum events that we cannot influence.

Chaos theory changes nothing about this. Chaotic laws are still deterministic; they are just difficult to predict, because what happens depends very sensitively on the initial conditions (butterfly flaps and all that).

Our life is thus not, in Jorge Luis Borges's words, a "garden of forking paths" where each path corresponds to a possible future and it is up to us which path becomes reality. The laws of nature just don't work that way.

For the most part, there is really only one path, because quantum effects rarely manifest themselves macroscopically. What you do today follows from the state of the universe yesterday, which follows from the state of the universe last Wednesday, and so on, all the way back to the Big Bang.

...For your will to be free, it shouldn't be caused by anything else. But if it wasn't caused by anything -- if it's an "uncaused cause," as Friedrich Nietzsche put it -- then it wasn't caused by you, regardless of just what you mean by you.

As Nietzsche summed it up, it's "the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far." I'm with Nietzsche.

This is how I think about what's going on instead: our brains perform computations on input, following equations that act on an initial state. Whether these computations are algorithmic is an open question that we'll come to later, but there's no magic juice in our neocortex that puts us above the laws of nature.

All we're doing is evaluating what are the best decisions to make given the limited information we have.

A decision is the result of our evaluation; it does not require anything beyond the laws of nature. My phone makes decisions each time it calculates what notifications to put on the lock screen; clearly, making decisions does not necessitate free will.

...If free will doesn't make sense, why, then, do many people feel it describes how they go about their evaluations? Because we don't know the result of our thinking before we are done; otherwise, we wouldn't have to do the thinking.

As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, "The freedom of the will consists in the fact that future actions cannot be known now." His Tractatus is now a century old, so it's not like this is breaking news.

...The easiest way to deal with it [incompatibility of free will and physics] is through dualism, according to which the mind has a nonphysical component. Using dualism, you can treat free will as an ascientific concept, a property of your soul, if you wish.

This will be compatible with physics as long as the nonphysical component does not interact with the physical one, because then it'd be in conflict with evidence -- it'd become physical. 

Because the physical part of our brain is demonstrably the thing we use to make decisions, I don't see what one gains from believing in a nonphysical free will, but then this isn't a new problem with dualism, and at least it isn't wrong.

Here's what makes something scientific or ascientific

Recently I was talking with someone about Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based religious group centered on a guru that I was a member of for 35 years. 

I mentioned to this person that I'd always loved science, so one thing that attracted me to RSSB way back in 1970 was that it sometimes used Science of the Soul to describe itself. 

I liked the idea of a spiritual science. But back then I hadn't given a lot of thought to what makes something a science.

There's lots of different definitions. In her book, "Existential Physics," here's how Sabine Hossenfelder speaks about science and what she calls ascience or nonscience.

The distinction between scientific and nonscientific explanations is central to this book, so it deserves a closer look. Science is about finding useful descriptions of the world; by useful I mean they allow us to make predictions for new experiments, or they quantitatively explain already existing observations.

...The belief that an omniscient being called God made the chemical elements is not a good scientific theory. You might say it is in some sense a simple explanation, and maybe you find it compelling. However, the God hypothesis has no quantifiable explanatory power. You can't calculate anything from it. That doesn't make it wrong, but it does make it unscientific.

So while Science of the Soul sounds nice, my current conclusion is that it has nothing to do with science. After all, there's no evidence that soul even exists, much less that it is capable of revealing hitherto unknown knowledge about reality.

God is a belief. Soul is a belief. Returning to God via one's soul is a belief. These can be comforting beliefs, but if we're concerned about truth rather than mere comfort, it has to be admitted that those notions are thoroughly religious, not scientific. 

Which as Hossenfelder said, doesn't make them wrong. It is very difficult, maybe impossible, to prove conclusively that something doesn't exist. God and soul may exist. However, there is no demonstrable evidence that they do. 

Hence, God and soul are ascientific, which is pretty much the same as nonscientific. Atheism simply means not-theistic with the addition of a beginning "a." Same applies to ascientific.

Hossenfelder views theories about the multiverse (other universes that can't be observed) as ascientific even though many scientists speak and write about them a lot. She writes:

The scientific status of these multiverse ideas is thus the same as that of the many-worlds interpretation [of quantum mechanics]. Assuming the reality of something unobservable is unnecessary to describe what we observe. Hence, assuming that these other universes are real is ascientific. 

This isn't a particularly difficult argument, so I find it stunning that my physics colleagues can't seem to comprehend it.

...Well, as I have explained so often, this isn't about what I believe or not; it's about what we can know or not. I am saying that what's beyond what we can observe is purely a matter of belief. Science doesn't say anything about whether it exists or doesn't exist.

Hence, claiming it [the multiverse] exists is ascientific, and so is claiming it doesn't exist. If you want to talk about it, fine, but don't pretend it's science. At that point they're [her physics colleagues] usually either confused or offended or both.

...No one should be denigrated for what they believe in. If you want to believe in the existence of infinitely many universes with infinitely many copies of yourself, some of whom are immortal, that's fine with me. 

But please don't pretend it's science.

Now, I feel the same way about nonscientific religious beliefs, which I used to embrace. I realize how appealing those beliefs can be. They supported me for many years. I can't blame anyone for holding on to such beliefs. 

Life can be painful, difficult, scary, frustrating, sad. If an unscientific belief helps you get through life with more ease, great. Keep on believing if that works for you.

But as Hossenfelder says, please don't pretend that what you're doing is science, a reflection of what reality actually is like. Religious belief doesn't cause problems when the believer understands that what they have faith in is purely subjective with no clear connection to objective reality.

However, when religious belief is wrongly considered to be Truth From On High, that's when harmless belief turns into dangerous dogma.

Good video on "Does the past still exist?"

Today commenter Appreciative Reader clued me in to a video by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder about whether the past still exists. This is a fascinating topic that I wrote about recently since I'm reading Hossenfelder's book, Existential Physics.

Here's what Appreciative Reader had to say about the video, along with the video.

Just watched this Youtube video of Sabine Hossenfelder speaking about just this topic, about how and whether the past might exist per theoretical physics. (Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwzN5YwMzv0.) Short enough video, around 15 minutes. She speaks very well, and explains all of these complex concepts and ideas in an extremely clear and layman-friendly, jargon-free (and largely math-free) talk. Disclaimer, though: There's a commercial hook there, a two-minute or so plug at the end of the presentation for some course she's part of. But it isn't in the least obtrusive -- sitting as it does at the very end of the video -- and does not detract, in the least, from the rest of this excellent aimed-at-the-layman presentation. Apparently she’s got a few more videos out there, that can be explored with this one as the starting point. I’m looking forward to checking them out as well.

All it takes are particles to make a conscious being

Here's an excerpt from Sabine Hossenfelder's book, Existential Physics, that I liked a lot. In another post I'll share some subtleties about her emphasis on reductionism as being how the universe works.

Does it take anything more than particles to make a conscious being?

I have found that many people reflexively reject the possibility that human consciousness arises from interactions of the many particles in their brain. They seem wedded to the idea that somehow something must be different about consciousness.

And while the scientifically minded among them do not call it a soul, it is what they mean. They are looking for the mysterious, the unexplainable, the Extra that would make their existence special.

They find it inconceivable that their precious thoughts are "merely" consequences of a lot of particles doing whatever the laws of nature dictate. Certainly, they insist, consciousness must be more than this. 

In a 2019 survey, 75.8 percent of Americans subscribed to this idea of dualism -- that the human mind is more than a complicated biological machine. In Singapore, the percentage of dualists was even higher: 88.3 percent.

If you are among the dualist majority, we have to make a deal before we can move on. You put aside your belief that consciousness requires some Extra that physics doesn't account for and hear what I have to say. 

In return, I promise that if you, at the end of this book, still insist the human brain is exempt from the laws of nature, I'll let you get away with it. 

Having said that, as a particle physicist by training, I have to inform you that the whole is the sum of the parts, not more and not less. Countless experiments have confirmed for millennia that things are made of smaller things, and if you know what the small things do, then you can tell what the large things do.

There is not a single known exception to this rule. There is not even a consistent theory for such an exception.

Just as a country's history is a consequence of the behavior of its citizens and their interactions with the environment, so is the behavior of the citizens a consequence of the properties and interactions of the particles they are made of.

Both are hypotheses that have withstood any test they have been subjected to -- so far. As a scientist, I therefore accept them. I accept them not as ultimate truths, for they may one day be revised, but as best current knowledge.

A lot of people seem to think it is merely a philosophical stance that the behavior of a composite object (for example, you) is determined by the behavior of its constituents -- that is, subatomic particles. They call it reductionism or materialism or, sometimes, physicalism, as if giving it a name that ends in -ism will somehow make it disappear. 

But reductionism -- according to which the behavior of an object can be deduced from ("reduced to," as the philosophers would say) the properties, behavior, and interactions of the object's constituents -- is not a philosophy. It's one of the best established facts about nature.

Nevertheless, I am not a reductionist hard-liner. Our knowledge about the laws of nature is limited, much remains to be understood, and reductionism may fail in subtle ways I will discuss later. However, you have to learn the rules before you can break them.

And in science, our rules are based on facts. Fact is, we have never observed an object of many particles whose behavior falsified reductionism, though this could have happened countless times. 

We have never seen a molecule that didn't have the properties you'd expect, given what we know about the atoms it is made of. We have never encountered a drug that caused effects that its molecular composition would have ruled out. We have never produced a material whose behavior was in conflict with the physics of elementary particles.

If you say "holism," I hear "bullshit."

We certainly know of many things that we cannot currently predict, for our mathematical skills and computational tools are limited. The average human brain, for example, contains about a thousand trillion trillion atoms.

Even with today's most powerful supercomputers, no one can calculate just how all these atoms interact to create conscious thought. But we also have no reason to think it is not possible. For all we currently know, if we had a big enough computer, nothing would prevent us from simulating a brain atom by atom.

In contrast, assuming that composite systems -- brains, society, the universe as a whole -- display any kind of behavior that does not derive from the behavior of their constituents is unnecessary. No evidence calls for it.

It is as unnecessary as the hypothesis of God. Not wrong, but ascientific. 

A physicist answers the question, does the past still exist?

Here's how theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder answered one of Life's Biggest Questions in her book, Existential Physics -- which I wrote about a few days ago.  

This is the brief answer to "Does the past still exist?" (At the end of each chapter, Hossenfelder gives a one paragraph summary of her take on the Big Question tackled in the chapter.)

According to the currently established laws of nature, the future, the present, and the past all exist in the same way. That's because, regardless of what you mean by exist, there is nothing in these laws that distinguishes one moment of time from any other. The past, therefore, exists in just the same way as the present. While the situation is not entirely settled, it seems that the laws of nature preserve information entirely, so all the details that make up you and the story of your grandmother's life are immortal.

Her answer is in accord with Einstein's conception of the space-time continuum, as laid out in his special theory of relativity. 

A hundred years' worth of observation have confirmed that time has the properties Einstein conjectured at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Einstein, time is a dimension, and it joins with the three dimensions of space to one common entity: a four-dimensional space-time.

...You can advance this argument for any two events anywhere in the universe at any time and arrive at the same conclusion: the physics of Einstein's special relativity does not allow us to constrain existence to merely a moment that we call "now." Once you agree that anything exists now elsewhere, even though you see it only later, you are forced to accept that everything in the universe exists now.

This perplexing consequence of special relativity has been dubbed the block universe by physicists. In this block universe, the future, present, and past exist in the same way; it's just that we do not experience them the same way. And if all times exist similarly, then all our past selves -- and grandparents -- are alive the same way our present selves are.

They are all there, in our four-dimensional space-time, have always been there, and will always be there. To sum it up in the words of the British comedian John Lloyd, "Time is a bit like a landscape. Just because you're not in New York doesn't mean it's not there."

More than a century has passed since Einstein put forward his theories of special and general relativity. But here we are today, still struggling to understand what it really means. It sounds crazy, but the idea that the past and future exist in the same way as the present is compatible with all we currently know.

In the course of discussing how the measurement in quantum mechanics is an exception to time-reversibility (the evaporation of black holes is the other exception). Hossenfelder speaks about the role, or more accurately non-role, of consciousness in quantum measurement.

This was music to my scientifically-minded ears, since New Age types are notorious for exaggerating the role consciousness plays in creating reality through measurements of quantum phenomena.

"But what is a measurement?" you may ask. Yes, good question. This certainly bothered physicists a lot in the early days of quantum mechanics. By now this question has, luckily, largely been answered.

A measurement is any interaction that is sufficiently strong or frequent to destroy the quantum behavior of a system. Only what it takes to destroy quantum behavior can be (and, for many examples, has been) calculated.

Most important, these calculations show that a measurement in quantum mechanics does not require a conscious observer. In fact, it doesn't even require a measurement apparatus. Even tiny interactions with air molecules or light can destroy quantum effects so that we have to update the wave function.

...This is also why you shouldn't listen to anyone who claims that quantum leaps allow you to think your way out of illness or that you can improve your life by drawing energy from quantum fluctuations and so on. This isn't just off-the-mainstream science; it's incompatible with evidence. Under normal circumstances, quantum effects don't play a role beyond the size of molecules.

"Existential Physics" -- great title for a engrossing book

As soon as I saw the title of this book mentioned in a recent issue of New Scientist, I ran to my computer and ordered a copy of Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions from Amazon. 

As expected, I'm enjoying the book.

I've only read the Preface and initial chapter, "Does the Past Still Exist?", but that's enough to tell me that theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is a gifted writer with a talent for explaining complex ideas so ordinary people can understand them.

She describes her approach in the Preface. I like how she views the relationship between physics and spirituality.

After all, I'm just a physicist. I'm not competent to speak about consciousness and human behavior and such. Nevertheless, the young man's question drove home to me that physicists do know some things, if not about consciousness itself, then about the physical laws that everything in the universe -- including you and I and your grandmother -- must respect.

Not all ideas about life and death and the origin of human existence are compatible with the foundations of physics. That's knowledge we should not hide in obscure journals using incomprehensible prose.

It's not just that this knowledge is worth sharing; keeping it to ourselves has consequences. If physicists don't step forward and explain what physics says about the human condition, others will jump at the opportunity and abuse our cryptic terminology for the promotion of pseudoscience.

It's not a coincidence that quantum entanglement and vacuum energy are go-to explanations of alternative healers, spiritual media, and snake oil sellers. Unless you have a PhD in physics, it's hard to tell our gobbledygook from any other.

However, my aim here is not merely to expose pseudoscience for what it is. I also want to convey that some spiritual ideas are perfectly compatible with modern physics, and others are, indeed, supported by it. 

And why not? That physics has something to say about our connection to the universe is not so surprising. Science and religion have the same roots, and still today they tackle some of the same questions: Where do we come from? Where do we go to? How much can we know?

When it comes to these questions, physicists have learned a lot in the past century. Their progress makes clear that the limits of science are not fixed; they move as we learn more about the world. Correspondingly, some belief-based explanations that once aided sense-making and gave comfort we now know to be just wrong.

The idea, for example, that certain objects are alive because they are endowed with a special substance (Henri Bergson's "elan vital") was entirely compatible with scientific fact two hundred years ago. But it no longer is.

In the foundations of physics today, we deal with the laws of nature that operate on the most fundamental level. Here, too, the knowledge we gained in the past hundred years is now replacing old, belief-based explanations.

One of these old explanations is the idea that consciousness requires something more than the interaction of many particles, some sort of magic fairy dust, basically, that endows certain objects with special properties. Like the elan vital, this is an outdated and useless idea that explains nothing.

I'll be sharing Hossenfelder's conclusions about the big questions in future blog posts. To whet your appetite for them, here's the preview she shared in her Preface.

I will get to this [whether consciousness needs something besides particles] in chapter 4, and in chapter 6 I'll discuss the consequences this has for the existence of free will. Another idea ready for retirement is the belief that our universe is especially suited to the presence of life, the focus of chapter 7. 

However, demarcating the current limits of science doesn't only destroy illusions; it also helps us recognize which beliefs are still compatible with scientific fact. Such beliefs should maybe not be called unscientific but rather ascientific as Tim Palmer (whom we'll meet later) aptly remarked: science says nothing about them.

One such belief is the origin of our universe. Not only can we not currently explain it, but also it is questionable whether we will ever be able to explain it. It may be one of the ways that science is fundamentally limited. At least that's what I currently believe.

The idea that the universe itself is conscious, I have found to my surprise, is difficult to rule out entirely (chapter 8). And the jury is still out on whether or not human behavior is predictable (chapter 9).

Science says about dark energy: "So the mystery continues"

One of the most amazing scientific facts is how much of the universe is unknown to science. About 95%.

As discussed in the NASA article below (I copied it from a NASA web site), currently about 68% of all the stuff in the universe is considered to be dark energy, and nobody knows what it is. Another 27% is dark matter, and nobody knows what it is. That leaves 5% normal matter, and we do know what that is. 

Except the article says, Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the universe.

I love the honest humility of science. On the whole, scientists don't try to pretend that they know something when they're actually clueless about it.

They do this in part because science has some pretty damn good bullshit detectors, so any scientist who claims to know something without evidence to back that claim up likely will be challenged by other scientists. Also, scientists embrace mystery.

That's how they make progress -- by tackling mysteries, large or small, with the goal of making the mysterious less so. You'll see that the article says repeatedly about unproven dark energy possibilities, So the mystery continues.

Contrast this with religions and religious believers.

How often do you hear someone preach from a pulpit on the theme, "When it comes to God, the mystery continues"? How many people would follow a guru who says, "While I'm trying to understand what the cosmos is all about, the mystery continues"?

Illusory certainty gets high marks in religion, but a failing grade in science. Here's the NASA article.

-------------------------------

Dark Energy, Dark Matter

In the early 1990s, one thing was fairly certain about the expansion of the universe. It might have enough energy density to stop its expansion and recollapse, it might have so little energy density that it would never stop expanding, but gravity was certain to slow the expansion as time went on. Granted, the slowing had not been observed, but, theoretically, the universe had to slow. The universe is full of matter and the attractive force of gravity pulls all matter together.

Then came 1998 and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of very distant supernovae that showed that, a long time ago, the universe was actually expanding more slowly than it is today. So the expansion of the universe has not been slowing due to gravity, as everyone thought, it has been accelerating. No one expected this, no one knew how to explain it. But something was causing it.

Eventually theorists came up with three sorts of explanations. Maybe it was a result of a long-discarded version of Einstein's theory of gravity, one that contained what was called a "cosmological constant." Maybe there was some strange kind of energy-fluid that filled space. Maybe there is something wrong with Einstein's theory of gravity and a new theory could include some kind of field that creates this cosmic acceleration. Theorists still don't know what the correct explanation is, but they have given the solution a name. It is called dark energy.

What Is Dark Energy?

More is unknown than is known. We know how much dark energy there is because we know how it affects the universe's expansion. Other than that, it is a complete mystery. But it is an important mystery. It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the universe.

Universe Dark Energy-1 Expanding Universe

This diagram reveals changes in the rate of expansion since the universe's birth 15 billion years ago. The more shallow the curve, the faster the rate of expansion. The curve changes noticeably about 7.5 billion years ago, when objects in the universe began flying apart as a faster rate. Astronomers theorize that the faster expansion rate is due to a mysterious, dark force that is pulling galaxies apart.

Credit: NASA/STSci/Ann Feild

One explanation for dark energy is that it is a property of space. Albert Einstein was the first person to realize that empty space is not nothing. Space has amazing properties, many of which are just beginning to be understood. The first property that Einstein discovered is that it is possible for more space to come into existence. Then one version of Einstein's gravity theory, the version that contains a cosmological constant, makes a second prediction: "empty space" can possess its own energy.

Because this energy is a property of space itself, it would not be diluted as space expands. As more space comes into existence, more of this energy-of-space would appear. As a result, this form of energy would cause the universe to expand faster and faster. Unfortunately, no one understands why the cosmological constant should even be there, much less why it would have exactly the right value to cause the observed acceleration of the universe. 

Dark Matter Core Defies Explanation

This image shows the distribution of dark matter, galaxies, and hot gas in the core of the merging galaxy cluster Abell 520. The result could present a challenge to basic theories of dark matter.

Another explanation for how space acquires energy comes from the quantum theory of matter. In this theory, "empty space" is actually full of temporary ("virtual") particles that continually form and then disappear. But when physicists tried to calculate how much energy this would give empty space, the answer came out wrong - wrong by a lot. The number came out 10¹²⁰ times too big. That's a 1 with 120 zeros after it. It's hard to get an answer that bad. So the mystery continues.

Another explanation for dark energy is that it is a new kind of dynamical energy fluid or field, something that fills all of space but something whose effect on the expansion of the universe is the opposite of that of matter and normal energy. Some theorists have named this "quintessence," after the fifth element of the Greek philosophers. But, if quintessence is the answer, we still don't know what it is like, what it interacts with, or why it exists. So the mystery continues.

A last possibility is that Einstein's theory of gravity is not correct. That would not only affect the expansion of the universe, but it would also affect the way that normal matter in galaxies and clusters of galaxies behaved. This fact would provide a way to decide if the solution to the dark energy problem is a new gravity theory or not: we could observe how galaxies come together in clusters.

But if it does turn out that a new theory of gravity is needed, what kind of theory would it be? How could it correctly describe the motion of the bodies in the Solar System, as Einstein's theory is known to do, and still give us the different prediction for the universe that we need? There are candidate theories, but none are compelling. So the mystery continues.

The thing that is needed to decide between dark energy possibilities - a property of space, a new dynamic fluid, or a new theory of gravity - is more data, better data.

What Is Dark Matter?

By fitting a theoretical model of the composition of the universe to the combined set of cosmological observations, scientists have come up with the composition that we described above, ~68% dark energy, ~27% dark matter, ~5% normal matter. What is dark matter?

We are much more certain what dark matter is not than we are what it is. First, it is dark, meaning that it is not in the form of stars and planets that we see. Observations show that there is far too little visible matter in the universe to make up the 27% required by the observations.

Second, it is not in the form of dark clouds of normal matter, matter made up of particles called baryons. We know this because we would be able to detect baryonic clouds by their absorption of radiation passing through them.

Third, dark matter is not antimatter, because we do not see the unique gamma rays that are produced when antimatter annihilates with matter.

Finally, we can rule out large galaxy-sized black holes on the basis of how many gravitational lenses we see. High concentrations of matter bend light passing near them from objects further away, but we do not see enough lensing events to suggest that such objects to make up the required 25% dark matter contribution.

Abell 2744: Pandora's Cluster Revealed

One of the most complicated and dramatic collisions between galaxy clusters ever seen is captured in this new composite image of Abell 2744. The blue shows a map of the total mass concentration (mostly dark matter).

However, at this point, there are still a few dark matter possibilities that are viable. Baryonic matter could still make up the dark matter if it were all tied up in brown dwarfs or in small, dense chunks of heavy elements. These possibilities are known as massive compact halo objects, or "MACHOs". But the most common view is that dark matter is not baryonic at all, but that it is made up of other, more exotic particles like axions or WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles).

Dark Matter Goes Missing in Oddball Galaxy

Researchers were surprised when they uncovered galaxy NGC 1052-DF2 which is missing most, if not all, of its dark matter.

 

Chatter is our inner voice gone rogue

There's nothing wrong with the voice that speaks inside our head. It's a vital part of being human.

But as Ethan Gross describes in his captivating book, Chatter, the conversations we have with ourselves can become as annoying as being trapped on a long plane flight with a person sitting next to us who talks about stupid stuff and just won't shut up.

Chatter consists of the cyclical negative thoughts and emotions that turn our singular capacity for introspection into a curse rather than a blessing. It puts our performance, decision making, relationships, happiness, and health in jeopardy.

We think about that screwup at work or misunderstanding with a loved one and end up flooded with how bad we feel. Then we think about it again. And again. We introspect hoping to tap into our inner coach but find our inner critic instead.

The question, of course, is why. Why do people's attempts to "go inside" and think when they experience distress at times succeed and at other times fail? And just as important, once we find our introspective abilities running off course, what can we do to steer them back on track? 

I've spent my career examining those questions. I've learned that the answers hinge on changing the nature of one of the most important conversations of conscious life: the ones we have with ourselves.

I've only read the book's introduction and first two (of seven) chapters. But I'm already liking it a lot. Well written. Entertaining. Informative. Inspiring. Here's some additional passages from the part I've read so far that will give you a feel for some of the themes Gross talks about.

He makes the rather obvious point that always living in the now isn't possible nor desirable. 

A widespread cultural mantra of the twenty-first century is the exhortation to live in the present. I appreciate the wisdom of this maxim. Instead of succumbing to the pain of the past or anxiety about the future, it advises, we should concentrate on connecting with others and oneself right now.

And yet, as a scientist who studies the human mind, I can't help but note how this well-intentioned message runs counter to our biology. Humans weren't made to hold fast to the present all the time. That's just not what our brains evolved to do. 

We have a marvelous ability to engage in mental time travel. This is a feature, not a bug, of the human mind.

This pattern of hopscotching through time and space in their inner conversations highlights something we have all noticed about our own mind: It is an avid time traveler.

While memory lane can lead us down chatter lane, there's nothing inherently harmful about returning to the past or imagining the future. The ability to engage in mental time travel is an exceedingly valuable feature of the human mind.

It allow us to make sense of our experiences in ways that other animals can't, not to mention make plans and prepare for contingencies in the future. Just as we talk with friends about things we have done and things we will do or would like to do, we talk to ourselves about those same things. 

Many forms of self-talk are just fine. But when our inner voice goes rogue, chattering away in an unproductive fashion, that isn't fine. Our attention gets focused in the wrong direction.

Your labor-intense executive functions need every neuron they can get, but a negative inner voice hogs our neural capacity. Verbal rumination concentrates our attention narrowly on the source of our emotional distress, thus stealing neurons that could better serve us.

In effect, we jam our executive functions up by attending to a "dual task" -- the task of doing whatever it is we want to do and the task of listening to our pained inner voice. Neurologically, that's how chatter divides and blurs our attention.

Much of the book, the chapters I haven't read, deal with how we can manage the chatter of our inner voice. Today I read about one useful technique: distancing. Which isn't the same as distracting or avoidance.

In 1970, Aaron Beck, one of the founders of cognitive therapy and an influential figure in mental health, proposed that teaching patients how to objectively scrutinize their thoughts, a process he called "distancing," was a central tool that therapists should employ with their patients.

In the ensuing years, however, distancing had come to be equated with avoidance -- with not thinking about your problems. But in my mind, there is nothing inherently avoidant about distancing. In theory, you could use your mind to frame your problems from a zoomed-out perspective.

This approach differed from the meditative practice of mindfulness in that the goal wasn't to stand apart and watch one's thoughts drift by without engaging with them. The point was to engage,  but to do so from a distanced perspective, which isn't the same thing as an emotionally avoidant one.

...The immersers  -- the people who viewed the event from a first-person perspective -- got trapped in their emotions and the verbal flood they released. In their accounts describing their stream of thoughts, they tended to zero in on the hurt.

"Adrenaline infused. Pissed off. Betrayed," one person wrote. "Angry. Victimized. Hurt. Shamed. Stepped-on. Shitted on. Humiliated. Abandoned. Unappreciated. Pushed. Boundaries trampled upon." Their attempts to "go inside" and work through their internal conversations just led to more negative feelings.

The fly-on-the-wall group, meanwhile, offered contrasting narratives.

Where the immersers got tangled in the emotional weeds, the distancers went broad, which led them to feel better. "I was able to see the argument more clearly," wrote one person." I initially empathized better with myself but then I began to understand how my friend felt. It may have been irrational but I understand his motivation."

Their thinking was clearer and more complex, and, sure enough, they seemed to view events with the insight of a third-party observer. They were able to emerge from the experience with a constructive story.

The experiment provided evidence that stepping back to make sense of our experiences could be useful for changing the tone of our inner voice.

The brain creates the mind, which is us

Today Ron E. left a comment on a recent churchless post that I like a lot and share below.

I readily admit that my fondness for the comment, which extends to almost all of the comments Ron leaves on this blog, largely is based on the fact that he and I look at reality in much the same way.

In a word, naturalistically. Meaning, we as human beings are not separate from the natural world, but are an integral aspect of nature. Nature is us, to put it in three words.

But since we're Homo sapiens, not a rock, a bolt of lightning, or some other non-sentient aspect of nature, we're a part of nature with a mind. But mind isn't something ethereal. Consciousness isn't either. 

Mind and consciousness, which may be the same thing, arise from the physical goings-on of the human brain. No need to posit a soul or any other supernatural entity. The brain creates the mind, which is us. So it makes sense to say, the brain is us.

This is both really obvious, and really controversial -- for those who believe (without any demonstrable evidence) that humans possess some special ingredient that isn't physical, survives the death of the body, and/or has a connection with God or some other form of divinity.

Sure, awareness or consciousness does seem ethereal. But the Earth seems flat; the Sun seems to rise and set; matter seems solid; time seems separate from space. All of those seemings aren't true, so there's no reason to assume that the seeming transcendent nature of mind and consciousness is true either.

Many findings of science have come to be accepted by the vast majority of people. However, it's going to take quite a while for the near-certain fact that you and I and everyone else are made of meat, with the brain being a special form of meat, to become a truth that resonates intimately with most people.

It might be that this won't happen until advanced artificial intelligences are commonplace, being indistinguishable or even superior to human intelligence. Perhaps only then will humans truly understand that what we are is no different from what everything else in nature is: natural, not supernatural.

Here's the comment from Ron E. Courtesy of Amazon, I've ordered the book he's reading. I like that Barrett takes a contrarian approach to emotions and the mind. Maybe she's right. Maybe she's wrong. But her book seems to be well-written, thoughtful, and provocative, reason enough for me to buy it. 

I have recently been reading Lisa Fieldman Barrett’s, "How Emotions Are Made." Her research describes how the brain constructs everything we experience, including emotions. She states: “Its story features unfamiliar characters like simulation and concepts and degeneracy, and it takes place throughout the whole brain at once.”

I mention Barrett’s studies because similar to the studies described in Brian’s latest blog on the Self-Reference Effect which states that “SREs then, are a way to investigate how our sense of self emerges from the workings of the brain—something that multiple research groups have studied intensely”, it is another study that points to the brain as being the source of all that we experience.

For years, studies have revealed how much of what we experience results from the brain, including how the self emerges from the brain and builds our identities. By now, it should be pretty obvious that the brain creates the mind with its entire cognitive repertoire – and basically operates not through actualities but through predictions.

But apparently, the brain is not alone in creating the wonder that is us, simply because the brain's responses are dependent on the body and its senses and its environment – which importantly includes other people. The self then is a construct of all the on-going variables that our organism exists with and encounters every moment.

How revelatory it would be to realise the disconnectedness that we are and how we create our own worlds. How ‘heavenly’ it would be to be able to drop systems of belief that serve to separate and alienate us from each other and the world around us.

Having a minimal sense of self isn't a good thing

My problem with people who elevate the human "self" into something grandiose -- like an eternal soul -- is that they muddy the waters regarding what the self truly is.

An article in the August 2022 issue of Scientific American, "Creating Our Sense of Self," goes a long way toward clearing things up.
Download How Our Brain Preserves Our Sense of Self - Scientific American

The first paragraphs lay out the basics of the self. 

We are all time travelers. Every day we experience new things as we travel forward through time. As we do, the countless connections between the nerve cells in our brain recalibrate to accommodate these experiences. It's as if we reassemble ourselves daily, maintaining a mental construct of ourselves in physical time, and the glue that holds together our core identity is memory.

Our travels are not limited to physical time. We also experience mental time travel. We visit the past through our memories and then journey into the future by imagining what tomorrow or next year might bring. When we do so, we think of ourselves as we are now, remember who we once were and imagine how we will be.

Some religiously-minded people glibly talk about doing away with the self as if this was an unalloyed good thing. But as the excerpt above says, the self is our sense of a core identity. It requires memory and imagination to function as it should.

There's evidence that a particular region of the brain is responsible for this.

A study, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN), explores how one particular brain region helps to knit together memories of the present and future self. When people sustain an injury to that area, it leads to an impaired sense of identity. The region—called the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)—may produce a fundamental model of oneself and place it in mental time. When the region does so, this study suggests, it may be the source of our sense of self.

So how did the researchers determine the extent to which someone has a sense of self? This is necessary in science, but not in religion or mysticism, because science seeks what is real and true, not what is fantasized and false.

Psychologists have long noticed that a person's mind handles information about oneself differently from other details. Memories that reference the self are easier to recall than other forms of memory.

They benefit from what researchers have called a self-reference effect (SRE), in which information related to oneself is privileged and more salient in our thoughts. Self-related memories are distinct from both episodic memory, the category of recollections that pertains to specific events and experiences, and semantic memory, which connects to more general knowledge, such as the color of grass and the characteristics of the seasons.

SREs, then, are a way to investigate how our sense of self emerges from the workings of the brain—something that multiple research groups have studied intensely. For example, previous research employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a method that uses blood flow and oxygen consumption in specific brain areas as a measure of neural activity, to identify regions that were activated by self-reference. These studies identified the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) as a brain region related to self-thought.

This area, the mPFC, can be further divided into upper and lower regions (called dorsal and ventral, respectively), and it turns out that each one makes different contributions to self-related thought. The dorsal section plays a role in distinguishing self from other and appears to be task-related, whereas the ventral section, the vmPFC, contributes more to emotional processing.

The researchers studied three groups of people. One group consisted of seven people who had lesions in the vmPFC part of the brain mentioned above. Another group consisted of eight people with injuries to other parts of the brain. The third group consisted of 23 healthy people. 

All people in the study underwent a thorough neuropsychological evaluation, which confirmed that they were within normal ranges for a variety of cognitive assessments, including measures of verbal fluency and spatial short-term memory. The researchers then asked the participants to list adjectives to describe themselves and a well-known celebrity, both in the present and 10 years in the future. Later, the participants had to recall these same traits.

These were the findings.

The researchers discovered that people in their control group could recall more adjectives linked to themselves in the present and future than adjectives linked to the celebrity. In other words, scientists found that the self-reference effect extends to both the future and the present self. Although there was some variation in the group—people with brain injuries to areas other than the vmPFC were somewhat less able to recall details about their future self when compared with healthy participants—the self-reference effect still held true.

Results were distinctly different, however, for the participants with injuries to the vmPFC. People with lesions in this area had little or no ability to recall references to the self, regardless of the context of time. Their identification of adjectives for celebrities in the present or future was also significantly impaired when compared with the rest of the participants' responses.

In addition, people with vmPFC lesions had less confidence about an individual's ability to possess traits than other people in the study. All of this evidence points to a central role for the vmPFC in the formation and maintenance of identity.

The last part of the article had a couple of observations that fascinated me. One is that other studies had shown that when we think of our past self, that former version of ourselves seems like a stranger to us.

More broadly, the study helps us understand how self- related memories—recollections key to maintaining our core sense of identity—depend on the function of the vmPFC. But what about our past selves? Curiously, in previous studies that asked people to consider their past selves, there was no more activation of the mPFC than when considering someone else. Our past selves seem foreign to us, as if they were individuals apart from us.

One idea that scientists have put forward to understand this distinction is that perhaps we are not very kind in our judgments of our past selves. Instead we may be rather critical and harshly judgmental of our previous behavior, emotions and personal traits. In these situations, we may use our past primarily to construct a more positive self-image in the present. Put another way, because we may recognize flaws in our past self's behavior, we tend to distance ourselves from the person we once were.

I also resonated with the notion that memory is a form of imagination. It's well known that every time we retrieve a memory, there's a strong likelihood that this changes the memory. So over time our memories may become less and less accurate as regards what actually happened, since we embellish the memory -- often to make the past more acceptable or satisfying to our present self.

Bringing the present and future into the spotlight, then, is central to understanding the way our brain and thoughts build our current identities. In many ways, it makes sense that the mPFC is important in this process of recalling present details and imagining future ones that build on our recollections. The prefrontal cortex, including the mPFC and its subdivisions, forms a network in the brain that is involved in future planning.

That network also includes the hippocampus, a brain structure that is central to episodic memory formation and that can track moments as sequential events in time. In past work, researchers have found that manipulating the activity of the hippocampus alters creative and future imaginings, which suggests an important role for brain structures supporting memory in imagining the future.

In fact, although we often think of memory as the brain's accurate and dispassionate recording device, some scholars have characterized it as a form of imagination.

Prior experiences and assumptions determine how we view reality

As I've noted previously on this blog, one of the spiritual phrases that now irritates me, yet used to make sense to me, is "as it is." 

There's a mistaken notion that it's possible to see reality as it is, objectively. That notion gets elevated into various sorts of mumbo-jumbo where this or that meditation technique, or whatever, supposedly gives someone the ability to perceive what is actually there with no trace of illusion.

Today I finished reading another chapter in David McRaney's book, How Minds Change. "Socks and Crocs" was super-fascinating. I'll try to do the chapter justice in this summary of it.

He starts off by telling the familiar story of The Dress -- which some people see as white and gold (that's me) and others as black and blue.

There were various theories about why this occurred. A neuroscientist, Pascal Wallisch, is quoted in the chapter, having done extensive research on The Dress and similar images. He wrote a Slate piece, "Two Years Later, We Finally Know Why People Saw 'The Dress' Differently."

Even outside of vision scientists, most people just assume everyone sees the world in the same way. Which is why it’s awkward when disagreements arise—it suggests one party either is ignorant, is malicious, has an agenda, or is crazy. We believe what we see with our own eyes more than almost anything else, which may explain the feuds that occurred when “the dress” first struck and science lacked a clear explanation for what was happening.

Two years later we have a much better idea of what may have been a reason for the varied perceptions: People’s perceived color is also informed by their perception of lighting. And the image of the dress, taken on a cellphone, contained a lot of uncertainty in terms of lighting conditions. Was it taken inside or outside? This matters because it implies artificial or natural light. Was the dress illuminated from the front or the back? This matters because if it was back-lit, it would be in a shadow, otherwise not.

The brain cannot be accused of epistemic modesty. It is well-known that in situations like this—where it faces profound uncertainty—it confidently fills in the gaps in knowledge by making assumptions. Usually, its assumptions are based on what it has most frequently encountered in the past. For instance, if the sensory information is more uncertain, observers will estimate object speeds to be slower than they actually are, presumably because slow objects are much more common in the environment than fast ones. (Indeed, most objects in any given field of view don’t move at all.) Color and lighting are no exception.

As the illumination conditions are impossible to clearly assess in the dress image, people make assumptions about what they are. Different people do this in differing ways, which is what causes the different interpretations of color. At least, that’s what my research shows, thanks to 13,000 people, including many Slate readers, who took surveys on what they saw when they saw the dress and also compiled other information about how they generally perceived the photo and the world.

The dress actually is blue and black. But most people see it as white and gold, at least initially. Why? Well, the more time someone had spent exposed to natural light, the more likely they saw the dress as white and gold. The more time someone had been exposed to artificial light, the more likely they saw the dress as blue and black.

McRaney says:

Either way -- and this is the important point for us going forward -- the ambiguity never registered. Whatever colors people saw subjectively, the image never seemed ambiguous because consciously people experienced only the output of their processes, and the output differed depending on a person's prior experiences with light. The result was a lie told to them by their brains that felt obviously true.

...When we encounter novel information that seems ambiguous, we unknowingly disambiguate it based on what we've experienced in the past. But starting at the level of perception, different life experiences can lead to very different disambiguations, and thus very different subjective realities.

When that happens in the presence of substantial uncertainty, we may vehemently disagree over reality itself -- but since no one on either side is aware of the brain processes leading up to that disagreement, it makes the people who see things differently seem, in a word, wrong.

...In psychology, there's a term for this cognitive blind spot, for when your disambiguations feel undeniably true. It's called naive realism, and it's the belief that you perceive the world as it truly is, free from assumption, interpretation, bias, or the limitations of your senses.

The late psychologist Lee Ross, who helped popularize the term, told me that it leads many of us to believe we arrived at our beliefs, attitudes, and values after careful, rational analysis through unmediated thoughts and perceptions.

Unaware that different priors can lead to different disambiguations, you believe you've been mainlining pure reality for years, and it was your intense study of the bare facts that naturally led to all of your conclusions. According to Ross, this is why people on each side of any debate believe their side is the only one rooted in reality.

...The truth is that we are always reaching our conclusions through disambiguation, but all of that work is done in our different brains without us knowing it. We just experience, in consciousness, the result.

You think you are experiencing the world as it truly is, and when a lot of people are sure their version of reality is the really real version at the same time that a lot of other people are sure that no, in fact, their version is, you get arguments that break the internet (like The Dress), but also the Inquisition, the Hundred Years' War, QAnon, and anti-mask protests during global pandemics.

Here's a figure in the chapter that apparently came from Pascal Wallisch.

McRaney summarizes this approach, called SURFPAD.

When you combine Substantial Uncertainty with Ramified (which means branching) or Forked Priors or Assumptions, you will get Disagreement. 

In other words, when the truth is uncertain, our brains resolve the uncertainty without our knowledge by creating the most likely reality they can imagine based on our prior experiences. People whose brains remove that uncertainty in similar ways will find themselves in agreement, like those who saw the dress as black and blue.

Others whose brains resolve that uncertainty in a different way will also find themselves in agreement, like those who saw the dress as white and gold.

The essence of SURFPAD is that these two groups each feel certain, and among the like-minded it seems those who disagree, no matter their numbers, must be mistaken. In both groups, people then begin searching for reasons why so many people in other groups can't see the truth without entertaining the possibility that they aren't seeing the truth themselves.

Anecdotes no substitute for good arguments and evidence

Here's a cartoon from the Skeptical Science web site, which is skeptical about global warming skepticism. It makes a great point about the limitations of personal experience and isolated examples.

Whenever someone claims to have experienced the presence of God or some other supernatural phenomena, a valid response is "So what?" People claim that all sorts of crazy stuff are true. A lot more than a claim is needed before anyone else takes them seriously.

Best way to change someone's mind is to let them change it on their own

I've read another chapter in How Minds Change, by David McRaney.

This one is called "Deep Canvassing," as opposed to the shallow sort of canvassing that I've done occasionally where you knock on the door of a person you want to encourage to vote in a certain way, have a brief chat with them, and hand them a brochure about your favored candidate.

Deep Canvassing is the brainchild of a California group, the Leadership LAB (stands for Learn Act Build), which is the political action arm of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, the largest LGBTQ organization on earth.

The LAB wanted to change opinions about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other people with a queer identity. Through a lot of experience knocking on doors in southern California and having fairly lengthy conversations with people, they evolved an approach to changing minds that research has shown to be effective even with just a single conversation.

(See here and here for stories in the Atlantic and New York Times about that research.)

Below are excerpts from the Deep Canvassing chapter that provide a pretty good overview of what was found to work, and not to work, in changing minds. Basically, providing facts or arguing with someone rarely is productive. Encouraging the person to think about their own thinking -- that's the way to change a mind.

Naturally my own mind wondered about how that applies to this Church of the Churchless blog. After all, since 2004 I've been encouraging people to be spiritually independent rather than a follower of an organized religion, mystical path, or form of spirituality.

Since regular commenters on this blog run the gamut from avid religious believer to fervent atheist, over the years I've observed that by and large, trying to convince someone to alter their frame of mind regarding religion/God/spirituality may be interesting and entertaining, but almost always fruitless.

My own conversion from religious believer to skeptic was along the line of what the LAB folks found, albeit slower. The change in my outlook didn't come from any outside pressure. It evolved organically over quite a few years as, bit by bit, I came to see things differently as regards the guru-led organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

If someone had come to my door during the time I was a RSSB devotee and told me that I'd be better off leaving the group, I would have shut the door in their face. Instead, Laurel, the woman I married in 1990 after getting divorced from my first wife, would simply ask questions about RSSB, some of which I had difficulty answering.

I didn't have a dramatic change of heart about RSSB in the same way the LAB has found that attitudes to LGBTQ people can sometimes alter significantly after a single meaningful conversation. Probably this is because religious beliefs tend to be more complex and more central to a person's identity than how they feel about gays.

But my many talks with Laurel about our spiritual beliefs (at the time she followed a New Age channeler, which caused me to question her about him) seemed to help sow some seeds within my mind that eventually sprouted into me changing my mind about RSSB.

Here's the chapter excerpts. The "I," of course, is the author, David McRaney.

I couldn't shake the idea that I, too, was probably one conversation away from changing my mind about something, maybe a lot of things. But I also recalled how many conversations I'd had that only made my convictions stronger.

I thought about the truthers and all the conversations they had in New York. I wondered what made these interactions different. 

In the training after the videos, Laura handed things over to Steve, and I got my first clue. He opened by telling the crowd that facts don't work. A serene man with a gentle and patient spirit, Steve put away his persistent smile and raised his voice to address the audience on this point.

"There is no superior argument, no piece of information that we can offer, that is going to change their mind," he said, taking a long pause before continuing.

"The only way they are going to change their mind is by changing their own mind -- by talking themselves through their own thinking, by processing things they've never thought about before, things from their own life that are going to help them see things differently."

He stood by a paper easel on which Laura had drawn a cartoon layer cake. Steve pointed to the smallest portion at the top with a candle sticking out. It was labeled "rapport," the next smallest layer was "our story," and the huge base was "their story."

He said to keep that image in mind while standing in front of someone, to remember to spend as little time as possible talking about yourself, just enough to show that you are friendly, that you aren't selling anything.

Show you are genuinely interested in what they have to say. That, he said, keeps them from assuming a defensive position. You should share your story, he said, pointing to the portion of the cake that sat on top of the biggest layer, but it's their story that should take up most of the conversation.

You want them to think about their own thinking.

The team tossed out lots of metaphors like these. For instance, Steve later said to think of questions as keys on a giant ring. If you keep asking and listening, he told the crowd, one of those keys was bound to unlock the door to a personal experience related to the topic.

Once that real, lived memory was out in the open, you could (if done correctly) steer the conversation away from the world of conclusions with their facts googled for support, away from ideological abstractions and into the world of concrete details from that individual's personal experiences.

It was there, and only there, he said, that a single conversation could change someone's mind.

...Steve would tell me later that they had learned over many conversations that reasons, justifications, and explanations for maintaining one's existing opinion can be endless, spawning like heads of a hydra. If you cut away one, two more would appear to take its place.

Deep canvassers want to avoid that unwinnable fight. To do that they allow a person's justifications to remain unchallenged. They nod and listen.

The idea is to move forward, make the person feel heard and respected, avoid arguing over a person's conclusions, and instead work to discover the motivations behind them. To that end, the next step is to evoke a person's emotional response to the issue. 

...I nodded, still unsure why facts and logic were such a bad idea.

Steve explained that after thousands of recorded conversations they had found that battling over differing interpretations of the evidence kept the people they met from exploring why they felt so strongly one way or the other.

People could remain in the logic space doing battle with the canvasser's facts for hours and never leave, safe and unable to tap into why those facts evoked such powerful feelings. The LAB tried arguing the facts for years, and it had long proved a waste of time.

"Doing this work has taught me that people make their decisions about issues like this, in their life and when they're voting, at a really emotional, visceral level," said Steve.

"What I envision when I'm standing in front of a voter is that people have this intellectual, logical reasoning process. That's one part of how they process the world and make decisions. But they have this almost entirely separate emotional reasoning process which is based on feelings and things they've experienced."

Steve said they used to hand-hold people and try to walk them through why certain facts should be compelling, why they should obviously change their minds, but his hunch now is that it will never work. 

A canvasser's reasoning can't be copied and pasted into another person. The facts that matter to them probably won't matter to the other person at all.

In science, intuition arises from facts, not facts from intuition

I found a column by Chandra Prescod-Weinstein in the July 9, 2022 issue of New Scientist interesting for several reasons. 

This professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire has a take on the expanding universe that I hadn't come across before. As she says in the column, the simplest way to describe this is a familiar one: just as the distance between dots on a balloon that fills with air will increase as the balloon expands, so do galaxies within our universe.

But this image is misleading, because a balloon exists in a larger reality, like a room. So we can be led to think that the universe is expanding into a larger space, which can't be correct, since space-time is what's expanding. You'll see that Prescod-Weinstein finds the mathematics of relativity theory to be much superior to the balloon analogy. Unfortunately, most of us can't grasp that mathematics.

It's often said that intuition plays a big role in science, as in everyday life. However, intuition isn't divorced from facts, but is an outgrowth of facts. I experience this whenever I'm in the market for a new car. I'll research some automotive options for months, reading reviews, perusing car manufacturer web sites, watching You Tube videos, and such.

All that information will confuse me at first. I'll see the pros and cons of various cars, unable to decide which would be best for me. Then one day... I know. I don't consciously arrive at the knowing. My mind just settles on an intuitive choice: Car X is what I should buy, not Cars A, B, or C. But without all the facts I'd learned, my brain wouldn't have been able to come up with a wise intuitive decision. Prescod-Weinstein speaks of something similar.

I've ordered her book, The Disordered Cosmos. At first I was going to pass on it after looking at the Amazon listing, since the book includes more than science. In the end, though, I decided that I liked her non-traditional outlook on science, as described in the listing.

One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly nontraditional, and grounded in Black and queer feminist lineages. 

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is rife with racism, misogyny, and other forms of oppression. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society, beginning with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky. The Disordered Cosmos dreams into existence a world that allows everyone to experience and understand the wonders of the universe.

Here's her New Scientist column.

THE origin story we tell about the universe goes roughly like this: there may have been a big bang (we aren’t sure), then space-time expanded extremely rapidly (we think) and has continued to expand ever since, even picking up the pace in relatively recent times (we are fairly certain). It is a nice story, and one I largely believe is true. But what does it mean when we say that space-time expanded?

In presentations to broad audiences, I explain by asking people to imagine an unfilled balloon with special dots on it. Imagine that as the balloon fills with air, the dots stay the same size, but, as one would expect, the distance between the dots expands. Pretend those dots are galaxies and, roughly speaking, this is what is happening to space-time.

The expansion of space-time means the space-time between galaxies grows, making the distance between galaxies larger as time goes on. There are exceptions to this. Galaxies that are gravitationally bound to each other won’t be pulled apart; for example, the Milky Way and Andromeda are on course to eventually collide and merge. The Milky Way also has many satellite galaxies in its orbit or otherwise gravitationally bound to it.

Other than ties through gravity, galaxies are generally “moving” away from each other because space-time continues to grow between them. The balloon analogy helps us understand this with some intuition, without needing to take several years of courses in order to fully understand general relativity as a technical subject. However, it also introduces problems that one can avoid if the subject is only looked at in mathematical terms.

As a scientist with deep knowledge of general relativity – the first advanced physics subject I trained in – I don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of time interpreting the equations to suit my intuition. Rather, part of my job is to develop new intuition based on the latest results from mathematical derivations, lab experiments and astronomical observations. The way I lead my life as a scientist involves a foundational commitment to looking at the world as it is and revising my understanding as I gather new information.

In the case of expanding space-time, I have to think carefully about what I mean by “space-time”. General relativity teaches me to think about space-time as a phenomenon that is described by the ruler we use to measure distances, an equation we call the metric. Therefore, expanding space-time means that the metric changes with time in such a way that spatial distances get larger as time goes on. This is something of an idealisation: we know this isn’t happening on the scales of everyday life here on Earth.

I am lucky because I can work through the equations and get a feeling for how this works mathematically, which makes it intuitive in a language that has more words than everyday English. This raises the question of translation from my technical, mathematical vocabulary into phrases that are comprehensible to broader audiences.

So we return to the balloon, which, yes, gives some good intuition, but can also get a reader thinking. Specifically, I know at least one person who is a regular reader of this column (thank you!) started to wonder where the space-time is expanding into. Certainly that is a limit of the balloon analogy. When we are blowing up a balloon, the balloon is expanding into the room we are in. Another way of putting it is that the balloon exists in a background, where the room is that background.

I introduce this way of thinking because it is one we scientists use when we describe general relativity, which we call a “background independent theory”. Relativity is described in this way because it doesn’t matter how we map out the coordinates in this theory, the physical reality it describes stays the same. There is a lot more to unpack here and not enough space (or time!), so let me just point out that this implies the space-time of general relativity doesn’t have a room. In other words, space-time is expanding, but into nothing in particular. The expansion is simply a growth in distances. It isn’t a material either, so it isn’t coming from somewhere. The distances just grow and grow.

Weird, right? If you don’t think so, that itself is odd. As I write in The Disordered Cosmos (now available in paperback), the universe is always more queer and fantastical than we think. The fundamental nature of space-time is an example of this fact. We exist in space-time and nothing in daily life necessarily makes us think it is a particularly strange phenomenon. Then again, we exist, and we are pretty odd, so maybe we should expect the nature of most things to be, on some level, unexpected.

Behold the early universe as revealed by the Webb Space Telescope

Science rocks! The Hubble Space Telescope was a scientific marvel. Now it has been surpassed by the James Webb Space Telescope, whose first images were released by NASA a few days ago. 

Check out the images on the NASA web site. My favorite is this one. Not because it is the most beautiful or most dramatic. I love it because it reveals how the universe appeared less than a billion years after the big bang set things in motion about 13.8 billion years ago.

This is part of how NASA described the image.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has delivered the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe so far. Webb’s First Deep Field is galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, and it is teeming with thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared.

Webb’s image is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, a tiny sliver of the vast universe. The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying more distant galaxies, including some seen when the universe was less than a billion years old.

This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours – achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks. And this is only the beginning. Researchers will continue to use Webb to take longer exposures, revealing more of our vast universe.

This image shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago, with many more galaxies in front of and behind the cluster. Much more about this cluster will be revealed as researchers begin digging into Webb’s data. This field was also imaged by Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which observes mid-infrared light.

Webb’s NIRCam has brought distant galaxies into sharp focus – they have tiny, faint structures that have never been seen before, including star clusters and diffuse features.

Light from these galaxies took billions of years to reach us. We are looking back in time to within a billion years after the big bang when viewing the youngest galaxies in this field. The light was stretched by the expansion of the universe to infrared wavelengths that Webb was designed to observe. Researchers will soon begin to learn more about the galaxies’ masses, ages, histories, and compositions.

Other features include the prominent arcs in this field. The powerful gravitational field of a galaxy cluster can bend the light rays from more distant galaxies behind it, just as a magnifying glass bends and warps images. Stars are also captured with prominent diffraction spikes, as they appear brighter at shorter wavelengths.

Since nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, looking out into space is looking back into time. We don't see the sun as it is now, but as it was about eight minutes ago. 

The Webb Space Telescope is a much vaster time machine, revealing the early universe as it was about thirteen billion years ago. Mind-boggling. And scientists say that much more is to come, since the Webb Space Telescope has a long life span ahead of it. 

Vox has a story that describes the image in somewhat more flowery language than that used by NASA. 

What makes this image so mind-blowing is how small it is, and how large it is, at the same time.

It’s small in the sense that this image represents only a teensy tiny portion of the night sky. Imagine you are holding out a grain of sand at arm’s length. The area of sky that grain covers — that’s the size of the area captured in the above image.

But it’s huge in the sense that nearly every object in this image is a galaxy (besides the bright spiky starbursts, which are stars in the foreground). Think about that: In every pinprick of sky, there are thousands and thousands of galaxies, at least.

And while it appears to us as a flat image, this image reveals the depths of the universe, and is a window through time. The very faintest, smallest blips of light in this photos are images of galaxies as they existed more than 13 billion years ago, near the very beginning of time(that light has been traveling through space ever since). And not only can Webb capture images of galaxies this old; the space telescope can make measurements about what elements those early galaxies are composed of.

An image like this is akin to a core sample of a sedimentary rock. It shows the evolution of the universe over time in its many layers.

And it represents a huge improvement over the capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope, which, until the launch of the Webb, was the largest observatory in space. Hubble’s mirror is an impressive 7.8 feet in diameter. Webb’s beautiful, gold-hued mirrors combine for a diameter of 21.3 feet. Overall, that amounts to more than six times the light-collecting area, and when it comes to telescopes, more light collecting equals more detail.

This image fills me with way more awe than any religious scripture could. Science tells us about reality. Religions tell us about fantasy. I like my awe to be fact-based, which is why I adore science so much.

Two big ideas about the cosmos and the self

As I frequently say here on the Church of the Churchless, and will undoubtedly be saying again and again, religions are notable for basically being stuck in the Dark Ages, with fresh theologies being very rare, while science and reason continually make strides in casting more light upon the unknown.

Recently I've been blogging about a couple of books that I've finished reading, and want to get off my active-reading bookshelf to make room for new titles.

So here's what probably are my final observations about Life is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe and Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self.

Well, now that I think about it, there could be more for me to say about the latter book. But that remains to be seen. Anyway, here's a Big Idea from each of the books that I found to be both fascinating and a decent chance of being correct. 

In Life is Simple, Johnjoe McFadden discusses how the universe came to be. This is the "Big Idea" approach of physicist Lee Smolin. I'm going to leave out quite a few details, focusing just on the natural selection aspect.

He proposes that our universe is the product of a cosmological evolutionary process, roughly analogous to natural selection, which he calls cosmological natural selection (CNS).

Currently, the most accepted scenario for the universe's origin starts with a random quantum fluctuation. Most likely this tiny universe was not interesting as the randomly selected values of its fundamental constants were incompatible with even the existence of matter.

As quickly as it popped into existence, the positive and negative energy of this matter-infeasible universe wold have recombined to vanish into nothingness. Yet further quantum fluctuations would have continued to generate universes out of the cosmological nothingness until, after maybe many trillions of searches through parameter space, a universe was born with values that promoted the formation of matter, stars, planets and, at least a few, black holes. 

The formation of black holes is, in Smolin's scenario, the cosmological equivalent of the origin of life: it made universes self-replicative. The early primordial universes would probably have generated few black holes and thereby produced only a handful of descendants. 

However, so long as that handful was greater than one, then the number of universes would increase.

...However, all universes would not be created equal. Some would be more fecund than others. Those that inherited parameter values that led to the greatest concentration of matter inside stars that collapsed into black holes would leave many descendants. Conversely, any universe that failed to produce stars or black holes would eventually blink out of existence to become extinct.

...Just as natural selection guided the evolution of life towards improbable creatures like dinosaurs, elephants or humans, so that same process, cosmological natural selection, fine-tuned the fundamental constants of physics towards the highly improbable values needed to make stars, planets, black holes, and us.

...Smolin's theory, with or without its Occamist tweak [which I haven't mentioned], has one final and startling implication. It suggests that the fundamental law of the universe is not quantum mechanics, or general relativity or even the laws of mathematics. 

It is the law of natural selection discovered by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett insisted, it is 'The single best idea that anyone has ever had.' It may also be the simplest idea that any universe has ever had.

Jay Garfield's "Big Idea" in Losing Ourselves is related to the seeming fact that our self actually isn't an internal subjective fact, but an interdependent construction involving us and the world. Here's how he ends his book. I'll keep this fairly brief, since likely I'll be writing another blog post about Losing Ourselves. 

We are not isolated individuals who happen to choose to live together; we are social animals who only become the individuals we do in social contexts that scaffold our flourishing. We can only make sense of our lives and see them as meaningful when we understand our personhood and when we give up the fantasy of independence encoded in the idea of a self.

When people hear about the idea of selflessness, they often find it disturbing. They think that this is the nihilistic idea that we don't really exist. But that only makes sense if you think that to exist is to be a self. Once we see that the self is illusory, we see that that can't be right.

The fact that a dollar is not a piece of paper does not mean that dollars don't exist, and the fact that we are not selves doesn't mean that we do not exist. 

Instead, for beings like us, to exist is to be a person -- a socially constituted being embedded in a rich and meaningful world -- just as for things like dollars, to exist is to be a unit of currency embedded in an economic system. 

To deny that we are persons would be to deny that we exist. So, the self illusion, although it seems to confer a greater reality on us than would mere conventional personhood, in fact undermines the very reality that makes us who we are.

To accept that you have no self is not to reject your identity; it is to reclaim your humanity. 

Science delivers accurate predictions. Religion doesn't.

Yay, me! I finally finished reading Johnjoe McFadden's book, "Life is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe." 

It took me longer than expected, because I didn't find McFadden's lengthy descriptions of the life and times of historical figures in science, starting with the ancient Greeks, to be all that interesting. I guess he felt he needed to do that in order to buttress his case for how science came to embrace the adage of William of Occam: "Entities should not be multiplied without necessity."

This doesn't mean that the world is simple, just that in attempting to understand the world, our models of reality should be as simple as possible -- which in some cases, could mean being quite complex, if reality is complex.

I liked the end of the book more than the rest of it. That's where McFadden discusses modern science such as relativity theory and quantum mechanics. I'll probably write another blog post or two on those subjects.

Here's excerpts from a section called The simple truth? 

I like McFadden's skepticism about ever knowing ultimate truth. "Ultimate reality" has always been a term that appealed to me. But his argument below about the apparent impossiblity of ever being able to know that we've contacted ultimate truth makes sense to me.

According to postmodernists, science merely takes its place alongside other belief systems such as religion, mysticism, witchcraft, folk beliefs, astrology, homeopathy or the paranormal. Each has, they claim, its own truths and none can claim any monopoly on the truth.

...William of Occam would surely have disagreed. He insisted that there was a stark difference between science and religion, as science is based on reason, religion is based on faith. Yet the postmodernists disagree.

Many of their arguments are heavily influenced by the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951).

...In 1921, Wittgenstein published his hugely influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in which he examined the relationship between language and reality and, at this stage of his career, appears to accept (philosophers still argue about the meaning of much of Wittgenstein's philosophical statements) that science can make statements about the world that are verifiably true.

Thirty years later, in his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein seems to abandon the quest to discover how language represents the world and instead argues that there are only different ways of using language or 'language games', whose meaning is derived solely from their use.

This argument seems to have much in common with William of Occam's nominalist insistence that words refer to ideas in our heads, rather than universals or essences that exist in the world.

...There is, however, another postmodernist insight that is both true and crucial to the role of Occam's razor, though it does not lead down the path taken by the postmodernists. Truth really is, as they argue, unknowable. 

This is something that is shocking even to scientists who are generally taught that science is an inexorable march towards the truth.

Imagine that science were one day to attain the blissful state of knowing everything, i.e. 'the truth'. How would we know? Knowledge of ultimate truth presupposes some means of peeking behind the curtain of evidence provided by our senses or scientific instruments to see the 'real' world rather than the one viewed through our senses or scientific instruments.

It supposes that there is some knowable, complete, and perfect world, a world of idealised Platonic forms, the very view of the world Occam disproved so many centuries ago. 

If like Occam we reject this view of the world we have to rely instead on our sensory inputs and a potentially infinite variety of models of the cosmos that could fit that data and explain our place in it. Yet that does not mean, as the postmodernists argue, that all models are equal.

When drawing up a horoscope, today's astrologers do not consult accounts of the moodiness of the god Mars or the lustful habits of Jupiter. They instead turn to planetary tables based on Kepler's simple model of the solar system.

Believers in the paranormal organise their meetings by phone and email, not telepathy; and, if the meetings are overseas, they fly by plane, not levitation.

Science may be a language game or model but, unlike the vast majority of models, from alchemy to feng shui, homeopathy and the indecipherable postmodernist tracts that dismiss science, its models actually work because they are simple and thereby deliver accurate predictions. 

Space may be created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity

If you're at a party, talking to someone, and the conversation is lagging, consider saying the title of this blog post: Space may be created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity. 

One of two things could happen, the first being most likely. Either the person will look at you like you're crazy and make an excuse to leave your company, or they'll reply, "That's so interesting. Tell me more."

Having read physicist Carlo Rovelli's book, "Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity," I could talk some more about quantum gravity, but only a little bit. It's an esoteric subject, not to mention it isn't scientifically proven, just conjectured for some good reasons.

One reason is that something seems to be more fundamental than the two pillars of modern physics, relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Rovelli writes:

A university student attending lectures on general relativity in the morning, and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon, might be forgiven for concluding that his professors are fools, or they haven't talked to each other for at least a century.

In the morning, the world is a curved spacetime where everything is continuous; in the afternoon, the world is a flat one where discrete quanta of energy leap and interact. 

The paradox resides in the fact that both theories work remarkably well. With every experiment and every test, nature continues to say "you are right" to general relativity, and continues to say "you are right" to quantum mechanics as well, despite the seemingly opposite assumptions on which the two theories are founded.

It is clear that something still eludes us. 

That something, in this way-cool chart Rovelli shares in a What Is The World Made Of? section, is covariant quantum fields -- the one ingredient he and other fans of quantum gravity believe constitutes reality.


In his book, Rovelli fills out this chart line by line, starting with Newton and ending with quantum gravity. Along the way, he discusses how science keeps refining that core question, what is the world made of?

The Big Idea of quantum gravity is that, as shown in the chart, unlike other quantum fields like electromagnetism that exist in spacetime, the covariant quantum field of quantum gravity is spacetime. Here Rovelli explains what "covariant" means.

Fields that live on themselves without the need of a spacetime to serve as a substratum, as a support, and which are capable by themselves of generating spacetime are called "covariant quantum fields."

The substance of which the world is made has been radically simplified in recent years. The world, particles, light, energy, space, and time -- all of this is nothing but the manifestation of a single type of entity: covariant quantum fields.

Don't worry about the mention of "nodes of the graph" in the passages below. Basically it just means a web of relations.

The crucial difference between photons, the quanta of the electromagnetic field, and the nodes of the graph, the "quanta of gravity," is that photons exist in space, whereas the quanta of gravity constitute space itself.

Photons are characterized by "where they are." Quanta of space have no place to be in, because they are themselves that place. 

...Physical space is the fabric resulting from the ceaseless swarming of this web of relations. The lines themselves are nowhere -- they are not in a place but rather create places through their interactions. Space is created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity.

Another cool thing about quantum gravity is that it does away with infinity. Or at least, certain types of infinity.

When we take quantum gravity into account, the infinite compression of the universe into a single infinitely small point, predicted by general relativity at the Big Bang, disappears. Quantum gravity is the discovery that no infinitely small point exists.

There is a lower limit to divisibility of space. The universe cannot be smaller than the Planck scale, because nothing exists that is smaller than the Planck scale.

What grounds religion and mysticism in reality? Nothing

During the 35 years I was a believer in an Eastern religion -- Sant Mat, of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas variety -- I spent a lot of time pondering how it was possible to know whether a description of God, spirit, soul, heaven, or something else supernatural really was true.

Meaning, that the description wasn't just a bunch of words strung together in a fashion meant to be convincing, but actually reflected the nature of an aspect of reality that transcended this physical universe.

My first book, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder," was an examination of how the new physics related to ancient mysticism. Of course, the mysticism I spoke about happened to be that preached by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), since mysticism comes in many varieties.

I made fun of the notion that a religion should be accepted as true just because a holy book or holy person says it is true.

Aside from this being an obvious circular argument, I said that it was akin to someone writing to the Nobel Prize committee saying that they deserved the physics prize because they'd laid bare all the secrets of the cosmos, the caveat being that the members of the committee would have to wait until after they die to see the evidence of this person's marvelous scientific accomplishment.

A letter like that would quickly find its way into the trash.

But it reflects the core of the world's religions. The claims of a holy book or holy person are accepted on faith, usually accompanied by a belief that a person with such faith will be presented with evidence after their death that the religious teachings they followed while alive are true.

So where does that leave a believer in religion or mysticism?

I argued for the existence of an objective but non-symbolic domain of spiritual reality. It could be experienced by a meditator who, not surprisingly, given what I believed at the time, followed the meditative approach of RSSB. However, that domain couldn't be described in any fashion.

My attitude now is, good try, Brian. But unconvincing.

Well, by "unconvincing" I mean that if there actually is an objective but non-symbolic domain of spiritual reality, nothing can be said about it other than Nothing can be said about it. So religious believers and mystics should, to put it bluntly, just shut the fuck up. 

Enjoy your supposed religious or mystical experience, but don't burden the rest of humanity with bullshit about how marvelous your revelation is, even though it can't really be put into words, so just believe that what is said is true -- which gets us back to the guy/gal who wants a physics Nobel Prize merely because they claim without evidence they've discovered every deep truth about the cosmos.

I'm not a philosopher of science. But I've read a heck of a lot of science books during my 73 years. There isn't a single scientific method, just a wide variety of approaches aimed at understanding what's true about our world and universe.

Some approaches are based on observation. Some are based on experimentation. Some are mostly mathematical. Some are entirely mathematical. All scientific approaches, though, must be capable of being described via words, images, numbers, something. 

This enables scientists to examine a potential fresh truth, subject that claim to rigorous criticism and examination, then decide whether it deserves to be accepted or rejected, with the proviso that, either way, additional research may call into question the first determination of truth/untruth.

Science is grounded.

It makes mistakes, for sure. But the general thrust of scientific inquiry is toward an ever-increasing store of knowledge. Science works so well because it is a public enterprise, many scientific minds collaborating at learning truths about the universe that can be proven provisionally, until an even better truth is revealed.

By contrast, religions and mysticism never progress. A key reason is that they are thoroughly subjective and individualistic. A religious or mystical claim can't be proven to be true, because the claim only exists within the confines of a human mind.

There's no grounding in an observation, experiment, mathematical equation, or other communication that allows for the claim to be tested against objective reality. Almost certainly this is because religion and mysticism have no connection with any objective reality other than this physical world which we all share.

So religious believers and mystics aren't devoted to truth. They are devoted to feeling good about themselves. This makes it frustrating for scientifically-minded people, who are seeking truth about objective reality, to have a discussion with religious or mystically-minded people.

This happens all the time in the comments section of my blog posts. Someone scientifically-minded challenges a claim made by a religious or mystically-minded person. In science, that challenge would be taken seriously, because both sides share the same goal: truth.

But in the comments section (I'm thinking of exchanges between Appreciative Reader and Spence Tepper, for example), the religious or mystically-minded person is seeking to defend their personal perspective or experience. 

They want to continue to feel good about their religious or mystical beliefs. So they engage in all sorts of "word salad" techniques in which all kinds of things are said, except for a saying that directly addresses the challenge directed at them by the scientifically-minded person.

And so it goes. Two ships passing in the night, because one ship is navigating toward truth, and the other ship is navigating toward defending their indefensible personal beliefs. 

Science lacks the blind conviction of the zealot

One of the reasons I absolutely love science and dislike religion is this: scientists the world over see reality in much the same way, while religious believers agree only on the need to believe without evidence, not on what they believe is true about their God fantasies.

So I wasn't surprised when, several days after writing "Science has a radical distrust of certainty. Me too," which was based on a book by physicist Carlo Rovelli, an Italian, I came across very similar sentiments about certainty in a book by a British physicist, Jim Al-Khalili, The Joy of Science.

Here's passages from the "Don't be afraid to change your mind" chapter.

If a theory survives, it is because it has been through this process of rigorous interrogation and we can be confident that the new scientific knowledge it gives us about the world can be trusted.

And it is here where we find one of the most important features of the scientific method: all of these careful steps are built on acknowledging and quantifying uncertainty, because a good scientist will always retain some degree of doubt and rational skepticism. 

This does not necessarily mean that the scientist is sceptical of others' views, but rather that we as scientists should acknowledge that we may ourselves be wrong.

...While doubt and uncertainty are important in science, so too is certainty; otherwise we would likewise never make progress, and of course we do. The scientific method has many imperfections, and it is true that the process of scientific discovery is often messy and unpredictable, and full of blemishes, blunders and biases.

But after the dust has settled on some aspect of our understanding of the world, we usually find that progress has been made not through doubt, but through well-founded conclusions based on carefully justified steps that gradually reduce our levels of uncertainty.

...And yet uncertainty forms part of every theory, every observation, every measurement. A mathematical model will have built-in assumptions and approximations with a well-defined level of accuracy.

...Measuring uncertainty and accepting it as an integral part of scientific investigation is ingrained into every science student.

The problem is that many people not trained in science see uncertainty as a weakness rather than a strength of the scientific method. They will say things like, "If scientists are not sure of their results and admit that there is a chance that they might be wrong, then why should we trust them at all?"

Quite the opposite, in fact: uncertainty in science does not mean we don't know, but that we do know. We know just how likely our results are to be right or wrong because we can quantify our degree of confidence in them.

To a scientist, 'uncertainty' means a 'lack of certainty'. It does not mean ignorance. Uncertainty leaves room for doubt, and this is liberating because it means we can critically and objectively assess what we believe.

Uncertainty in our theories and models means that we know they are not absolute truths. Uncertainty in our data means our knowledge of the world is not complete. The alternative is far worse, for it is the blind conviction of the zealot.

Science has a radical distrust of certainty. Me too.

If you're absolutely certain that you know what is true, this is a very good sign that you're wrong. Also, that you are religious rather than scientific.

This is one of the compelling insights theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli talks about in the concluding chapter of his book, "Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity."

In another post I'll describe why Rovelli views the as-yet-unproven theory of quantum gravity as the best approach to resolving the divide between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. For now, I liked what Rovelli had to say about the approach of science so much, I'm sharing portions of it below.

This really is brilliant. Nothing astoundingly new. Just stated in a fresh appealing fashion. Rovelli captures why I love science so much, and why I've come to dislike religiosity so much.

This acute awareness of our ignorance is the heart of scientific thinking. It is thanks to this awareness of the limits of our knowledge that we have learned so much. We are not certain of all that we suspect, just as Socrates was not sure of the spherical nature of Earth.

We are exploring at the borders of our knowledge.

Awareness of the limits of our knowledge is also awareness of the fact that what we know may turn out to be wrong, or inexact. Only by keeping in mind that our beliefs may turn out to be wrong is it possible to free ourselves from wrong ideas, and to learn.

To learn something, it is necessary to have the courage to accept that what we think we know, including our most rooted convictions, may be wrong, or at least naive: shadows on the walls of Plato's cave.

Science is born from this act of humility: not trusting blindly in our past knowledge and our intuition. Not believing in what everyone says. Not having absolute faith in the accumulated knowledge of our fathers and grandfathers.

We learn nothing if we think that we already know the essentials, if we assume that they were written in a book or known by the elders of the tribe. The centuries in which people had faith in what they believed were the centuries in which little new was learned.

Had they trusted the knowledge of their fathers, Einstein, Newton, and Copernicus would never have called things into question and would never have been able to move our knowledge forward. If no one had raised doubts, we would be still worshipping pharaohs and thinking that Earth is supported on the back of a giant turtle.

...A scientist is someone who lives immersed in the awareness of our deep ignorance, in direct contact with our own innumerable limits, with the limits of our understanding.

But if we are certain of nothing, how can we possibly rely on what science tells us? The answer is simple. Science is not reliable because it provides certainty. It is reliable because it provides us with the best answers we have at present. Science is the most we know so far about the problems confronting us.

It is precisely its openness, its constant putting of current knowledge in question, that guarantees that the answers it offers are the best so far available: if you find better answers, these new answers become science. 

When Einstein found better answers than Newton, he didn't question the capacity of science to give the best possible answers -- on the contrary, he confirmed it.

...The nature of scientific thinking is critical, rebellious, and dissatisfied with a priori conceptions, reverence, and sacred or untouchable truth. The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical distrust in certainty. 

This means not giving credence to those who say they are in possession of the truth.

For this reason, science and religion frequently find themselves on a collision course. Not because science pretends to know ultimate answers, but precisely for the opposite reason: because the scientific spirit distrusts whoever claims to be the one having ultimate answers or privileged access to Truth.

This distrust is found to be disturbing in some religious quarters. It is not science that is disturbed by religion: there are certain religions that are disturbed by scientific thinking.

...To live with uncertainty may be difficult. There are those who prefer any certainty, even if unfounded, to the uncertainty that comes from recognizing our own limits. There are some who prefer to believe in a story just because it was believed by the tribe's ancestors, rather than bravely accept uncertainty.

Ignorance can be scary. Our of fear, we can tell ourselves calming stories: up there beyond the stars there is an enchanted garden, with a gentle father who will welcome us into his arms. It doesn't matter if this is true -- it is reassuring.

There is always, in this world, someone who pretends to tell us the ultimate answers. The world is full of people who say that they have The Truth. Because they have got it from the fathers; they have read it in a Great Book; they have received it directly from a god; they have found it in the depths of themselves.

There is always someone who has the presumption to be the depository of Truth, neglecting to notice that the world is full of other depositories of Truth, each one with his own real Truth, different from that of the others.

There is always some prophet dressed in white, uttering the words: "Follow me, I am the true way." 

...For my part, I prefer to look our ignorance in the face, accept it, and seek to look just a bit further: to try to understand that which we are able to understand.

Not just because accepting this ignorance is the way to avoid being entangled in superstitions and prejudices but because to accept our ignorance in the first place seems to me to be the truest, the most beautiful, and above all, the most honest way.

"Reality is Not What It Seems," a book by Carlo Rovelli

My new favorite book, until a fresh one arrives from Amazon, is Carlo Rovelli's Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity.

Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who, not surprisingly given the title of his book, is focused on resolving the mismatch between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The key to doing this is to find a theory of gravity that is more fundamental than Einstein's general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of space-time and isn't compatible with quantum mechanics.

That's a fascinating subject, made more fascinating by Rovelli's impressive writing ability, albeit in an English translation.

I've only just begun the book but am already liking it a lot. Rovelli starts off with a chapter about the atomic theory of ancient Greek thinkers such as Democritus. They broke away from the superstitions and religions of their time by extolling the ability of reason and observation to lay bare the secrets of the universe, which is still the basic scientific approach.

I found Rovelli's description of how Democritus concluded that reality had to be composed of discrete parts enlightening, having never heard it put this way before.

Democritus observed that matter could not be a continuous whole, because there is something contradictory in the proposition that it should be so. We know of Democritus's reasoning because Aristotle reports it.

Imagine, says Democritus, that matter is infinitely divisible, that is to say, that it may be broken down an infinite number of times. Imagine then that you break up a piece of matter ad infinitum. What would be left?

Could small particles of extended dimension remain? No, because if this were the case, the piece of matter would not yet be broken up to infinity. Therefore, only points without extension would remain. 

But now let us try to put together the piece of matter starting from these points: by putting together two points without extension, you cannot obtain a thing with extension, nor can you with three, or even with four. No matter how many points you put together, in fact, you never have extension, because points have no extension.

Therefore we cannot think that matter is made of points without extension, because no matter how many of these we manage to put together, we never obtain something with an extended dimension.

The only possibility, Democritus concludes, is that any piece of matter is made up of a finite number of discrete pieces that are indivisible, each one having a finite size: the atoms. 

Pretty damn brilliant. Just through clear thinking, around 450 BCE Democritus was able to come up with an atomic theory of what matter consists of that has stood the test of time. Sadly, all of Democritus' writings were destroyed by Christian emperors who didn't like that his ideas conflicted with Christian dogma.

So we're left with indirect mentions of Democritus' teachings. A Latin poet, Lucretius, says Rovelli, "adheres to the philosophy of Epicurus, a pupil of a pupil of Democritus." Here's how Rovelli describes how Lucretius viewed reality, comparing it to medieval notions that were much farther removed from modern science,

The medieval cosmos so marvelously sung by Dante was interpreted on the basis of a hierarchical organization of the universe that reflected the hierarchical organization of European society: a spherical cosmic structure with Earth at its center; the irreducible separation between Earth and heavens; finalistic and metaphorical explanations of natural phenomena; fear of God, fear of death; little attention to nature; the idea that forms preceding things determine the structure of the world; the idea that the source of knowledge could only be the past, in revelation and tradition.

There is none of this in the world of Democritus as sung by Lucretius. There is no fear of the gods; no ends or purposes in the world; no cosmic hierarchy; no distinction between Earth and heavens. There is a deep love of nature, a serene immersion within it; a recognition that we are profoundly part of it; that men, women, animals, plants, and clouds are organic threads of a marvelous whole, without hierarchies. There is a feeling of deep universalism, in the wake of the splendid words of Democritus: "To a wise man, the whole earth is one, because the true country of a virtuous soul is the entire universe."

There is, too, the ambition of being able to think about the world in simple terms. Of being able to investigate and understand the secrets of nature. To know more than our parents. And there are extraordinary conceptual tools on which Galileo, Kepler, and Newton will build: the idea of free and rectilinear motion in space; the idea of elementary bodies and their interactions, out of which the world is constructed; the idea of space as a container of the world.

And there is the simple idea of the finite divisibility of things. The granular quality of the world The idea that stops the infinite between our fingers. This idea is at the root of the atomic hypothesis, but it will also return with augmented force with quantum mechanics, and today is revealing itself to be powerful again -- as the keystone of quantum gravity.

Life is Simple, a fascinating book about Occam's razor

I've been making my way through Johnjoe McFadden's book Life is Simple:How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe. It traces the history of science through the lens of Occam's razor.

William of Occam, who was born in the late 13th century, is famous for favoring the simplest solutions in theology, science, and other areas of life.

The book says, "Three centuries after his death, the French theologian Libert Froidmont coined the term "Occam's razor" to refer to William's preference for shaving away excess complexity."

But contrary to how many people look upon Occam's razor, this doesn't mean that reality is simple. McFadden says:

Kepler's next step was, albeit reluctantly, to add more complexity. This is of course perfectly compatible with Occam's razor, which, contrary to many of its detractors, does not insist that the world is simple, only that in reasoning about it we should not multiply entities beyond necessity.

If the existing entities cannot do the job then the razor gives you free rein to add as many entities as needed, so long as they are not 'beyond necessity'.

...'Entities' refers to the parts of an hypothesis, explanation or model of any particular system.

Models come in for a lot of attention in the book.

The most familiar example is the numerous epicycles in the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, which assumed Earth sits at the center of it. In order to match observations of the sun and planets, smaller circles had to keep being added on to the large circles that was wrongly assumed to be how the planets moved. 

(Now we know it is an ellipse, and the sun is the center of the universe.)

What's interesting is that very different models can each be a reasonable-sounding explanation for some aspect of reality. Thus a good model is one that can be used to steadily improve our knowledge of reality, something that religious models, theologies, are utterly incapable of doing.

Our scientific model remains, not in the world, as Aristotle insisted, or in some mystical realm, as Plato proposed, but, according to Occam, in our head. The ultimate reality of what is really out there in the world will always be beyond our reach, as unknowable as Occam's omnipotent God.

...Models instantiate knowledge. They model the structure, dynamics and function of machines [among other things], usually in the language of geometry and mathematics. They can be as simple as the drawing of a steam engine, such as Newcomen's in 1712 that refers to Boyle's 'weight of air' to account for the motion of the piston.

The feature that makes them so useful is that improvements can be fed back into the model as a positive feedback loop that leads to exponential increases in performance. Yet models are useless without Occam's razor.

Imagine trying to build a steam engine if your model of how it works was based on More's 'knowing spirit'. How would you improve it? Perhaps you might pray to its spirit?

When this approach failed, your only recourse would have been the geologically slow process of trial and error that has been responsible for most innovations on our planet, including life itself, since the dawn of time. 

This all changed when scientists and engineers shifted to using models that instantiated their knowledge and their scientific laws and, as Boyle had urged, were 'the Simplest it must be: at least from all that is superfluous, free'.

With razored models in hand, scientists and engineers could predict modifications that would improve performance. If their prediction was realised, then the engineer knew their model was good; if not, the engineer would modify their model until their predictions held true and they obtained the desired improvement.

Their improved model would then be a starting point for further advances. With this positive feedback loop in place, technological development went from the linear rate of improvement delivered by trial and error to the exponential advances that characterise the modern age.

Well, religious and mystical beliefs don't even improve at a linear rate. They never improve at all, at least not in regard to explaining the nature of reality. 

One big reason for this is that dogmatism and blind faith prevail in religions.

So a religion isn't even capable of proving itself wrong -- with logically must be the case for nearly every religion given that religions contradict each other (or indeed every religion) -- because theological models don't include a capacity to test how well they match up against reality, with feedback providing a way to improve the theology.

Such as by discarding it as totally false. 

Instead, the same old dogmas are preached year after year, decade after decade, century after century. This is why science constantly progresses and religions remain the same insofar as their capacity to explain reality.

"Nature versus nurture" is just wrong

This morning I noticed a book in my office languishing under a pile of papers. I'd read most of it quite a while ago, except for a few pages at the end. 

Having finally finished "Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality" by neuroscientist David J. Linden, I wanted to mark the occasion by sharing some excerpts on subjects that I found particularly interesting.

First up is the familiar "nature versus nurture" phrase that I remember from my schooling. The idea is that who we are is a function of just two things, heredity and upbringing. Linden makes clear that this way too simplistic. In fact, wrong.

The oppositional construction of "nature versus nurture" is just wrong. But the part of this horrid expression that really chaps my ass is "nurture." The word means how your parents raised you -- how they cared for and protected you (or failed to do so), when you were a child. 

But of course, that's only one small part of the non-hereditary determination of traits. As we will explore in this chapter, a more correct term would be "experience," which I mean in the broadest sense.

Not just social experience and not just the experience of events that you have stored as memories, but rather every single factor that impinges upon you, from the moment that the sperm fertilizes the egg to your last breath.

These experiences start even before the embryo implants in the womb and encompass everything from the foods your mother ate while she was carrying you in utero to the waves of stress hormones you secreted on the first day of your first real job.

And there's another important factor that is neither heredity nor experience. That's the random nature of development, particularly the self-assembly of the brain and its five hundred trillion connections. 

As I mentioned earlier, developmental randomness is a large part of what we measure in twin studies in the category of non-shared environment. This self-assembly is guided by the genome, but it is not precisely specified at the finest levels of anatomy and function.

The genome is not a detailed cell-by-cell blueprint for the development of the body and brain, but rather a vague recipe jotted down on the back of an envelope. 

The genome doesn't say, "Hey you, glutamate-using neuron #12,345,763! Grow your axon in the dorsal direction for 123 microns and then make a sharp left turn to cross to the other side of the brain." Rather, the instruction is more like, "Hey, you bunch of glutamate-using neurons over there! Grow your axons in the dorsal direction for a bit and then about 50 percent of you make a sharp left to cross the midline to reach the other side of the brain. The rest of you, turn your axons to the right."

The key point is that the genetic instructions for development are not precise. In one growing identical twin, 40 percent of the axons in this area will make the left turn; in an another, 60 percent will. The example here is from the brain, but the principle applies to all the organs.

That's the main reason why identical twins, who share the same DNA sequence and nearly the same uterine environment, are not born with wholly identical bodies, brains, or temperaments. 

This means that your individuality is not a matter of "nature versus nurture" but rather "heredity interacting with experience, filtered through the inherent randomness of development." It's not nearly as fun to say but, unlike the former expression, it's true.

Then there's the question of how our memories are altered to some extent every time we recall them. Meaning, memories aren't like photographic images. They're more like Photoshop, which allows images to be edited, changed, altered. I've always thought this was a defect of human memory, but Linden says otherwise.

Another answer to the question of what memory is for is that the particular features of autobiographical memory are actually features rather than bugs. For memory to be useful, it must be updated and integrated with subsequent experience, even if it alters the memory of the original event.

In that way, it's helpful for recollection to render the memory of an event malleable, so that it may be integrated with the present.

In most situations, a generic memory compiled from many trips to the beach is more useful in guiding future decisions and behavior that fifty stand-alone, detailed, and accurate beach trip memories. The repetition-driven loss of detail allows for the efficient use of the brain's limited memory resources.

In other words, it's not surprising that our memories for events are often inaccurate, because the particular way in which memories are compromised is often useful. What's surprising is that we mostly fail to recognize this in our daily lives.

We humans all have an inborn tendency to create a plausible story out of memory fragments. Because of this ongoing narrative construction, we are often confident about the veracity of blurred memories and allow them to form the basis of our core beliefs about ourselves.

Free will fascinates me, for reasons outside of my control. Here's part of what Linden says about free will.

We like to imagine that we are fundamentally creatures of free will. We reliably call certain facts, events, and concepts to mind. We make conscious decisions and act volitionally. Our individuality is inextricably bound up with a deep sense of agency and autonomy.

To a large degree, this is a trick our brain plays on us. Most of our behavior is subconscious and automatic. In the words of neuroscientist Adrian Haith: "Almost everything you do is a habit."

A habit is not just a behavioral routine that is formed and then performed at a subconscious level, it must become divorced from an ultimate goal. Your goal might be to stop off at the Thai restaurant for takeout after work, but instead you habitually drive straight home.

...As Haith writes, "Atop this massive conglomeration of habits sits a thin sliver of cognitive deliberation that steers only the highest-level decisions that we need to make." Without habits, our brain would be instantly overwhelmed with a multitude of tiny decisions better left to rapid, automatic processes.

The extent to which traits are inherited/genetic is a topic of great interest, since this gets at the extent to which we can control those traits (assuming we have free will).

Overall, adults in the United States are pretty good at estimating the heritable components of traits. In one recent online survey, most people guessed more or less correctly that, for example, political beliefs have a very small heritable component, height is strongly heritable, and musical talent falls in the middle.

There are a few traits for which people's estimates tend to be inaccurate. For example, most people think that variation in sexual orientation is about 60 percent heritable, whereas it's really only about 30 percent (about 40 percent in men and 20 percent in women).

On the other side, most people think that variation in BMI [Body Mass Index] is about 40 percent heritable, when it's really about 65 percent. It's interesting to imagine the ways in which cultural ideas inform these mismatches.

In the case of BMI, I imagine that many people want to believe that food consumption is more a matter of personal willpower than it really is. This is a frequent, if mysterious, theme.

In most cases -- from the accuracy of memory to the heritability of personality traits -- people imagine that they (and others) have a greater degree of autonomy and personal agency than they really do.

What hitting a fastball tells us about the brain

I'm not sure what to make of this seemingly correct fact, but I find it so interesting, I feel that it must have some deep significance to those of us who aren't professional baseball players.

In the course of rereading a chapter in Robert Burton's book, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not, I came across his analysis of baseball pitchers and hitters in the "When Does a Thought Begin?" chapter.

Here's the crux of the issue:

Professional baseball pitchers throw with velocities in the range of 80 to 100 miles per hour. Elapsed time from the moment of release to the ball crossing home plate ranges from approximately 380 to 460 milliseconds.

Minimum reaction time -- from the instant the image of the ball's release reaches the retina to the initiation of the swing -- is approximately 200 milliseconds. The swing takes another 160 to 190 milliseconds.

The combination of reaction and swing time approximately equals the time it takes for a fastball to travel from the pitcher's mound to home plate.

So how is a batter ever able to hit the baseball?

It can't be by following the path of the ball with their eyes, deciding it is a hittable pitch, and then swinging their bat at the ball. Physics and human biology don't allow for that. Burton explains what actually happens.

Once the ball is in flight, it is too late for detailed deliberation. The batter sees the release and the beginning of its path, and then goes on automatic pilot. Sounds suspiciously like an inner machine at the helm, some robotic neuronal clumps that are responsible for a hitter like Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds.

Yet we all know that a hitter's skill, beyond mere athleticism, is dependent upon prior practice and extensive study of the game. Great hitters keep extensive notes on the tendencies of opposing pitchers, including what type of pitch and where it will be thrown in various conditions.

A 3-0 pitch with the bases loaded is more likely to be down the middle than a 0-2 pitch with the bases empty. The combination of circumstances is infinite, yet each hitter develops a probabilistic profile of the speed, trajectory, and location of the next pitch. It is in this realm that great players have a greater accuracy than novice players.

The act of hitting the ball involves two fundamentally different strategies inextricably linked together -- conscious analysis prior to the event, and reliance upon nearly instantaneous subconscious calculations at the onset of the event.

The cortex sets out general guidelines for when to swing and where, then hands the controls over to quicker subcortical mechanisms. 

A simplified schema provided by a computer scientist-engineer after extensive study of the physics of a pitch:

"We divide the pitch into thirds. During the first third the batter gathers sensory data; during the middle third he does computations (predicting where and when the ball will collide with his bat); during the last third he is swinging. During the swing he could close his eyes and it would not make any difference. He can't alter the swing. The most he can do is check the swing." (Italics mine.)

Lastly, Burton explains why an onlooker thinks the batter should have been able to do better with a pitch, and how conversation is a lot like pitching a fastball and trying to hit a fastball.

To further complicate the problem of the timing of perception, consider how different the approaching baseball looks to the batter and to you, an observer sitting behind home plate. The pitcher fires three successive ninety-five-miles-per-hour blazers.

The batter whiffs the first and fouls off the next two. He prepares himself for another smoker. Instead, the pitcher lobs a deceptive sixty-five-miles-per-hour change-up. The batter swings far too early and strikes out. You watch in amusement and ask yourself how the batter can make five million a year and so misjudge a ball that, to your uninvolved eye, a Little Leaguer could hit.

The difference is that while the batter's decision to swing begins prior to his full conscious appreciation that the pitcher has thrown a slow pitch, you have the luxury to see the ball's entire path toward the plate. By not being forced to immediately decide whether or not to swing, you see a batter being badly fooled by a pitch that doesn't fool you.

The basic neurobiological principle is that the need for an immediate response time reduces the accuracy of perception of incoming information. Though most of aren't involved in high-speed sports, we all experience these limitations in the most crucial of daily activities -- normal conversation.

In fact, conversation is as much a high-speed competition as a top-flight table tennis match. 

First, consider the act of listening. We are bombarded with the rapid presentation of individual phonemes strung together to make words, phrases, and sentences. Processing takes time. A word may not be initially decipherable; only with further speech is it clarified.

...Now visualize conversation as a means for the exchange of complex ideas with each participant's response dependent on whether or not he believes the idea is correct. Instead of throwing a fastball, each discussant is throwing an idea at the other. 

If the listener judges the idea as correct, he will not swing (he will accept the idea as is). If he thinks the approaching idea is incorrect, he will swing (formulate an immediate rebuttal and/or interrupt the speaker to interject his correction).

Here's the windup, and here's the thought. The listener's decision as to the thought's correctness will be based upon a quick glimpse of the idea leaving the other's lips, snap judgements of body language, sighs, gestures, facial expressions, and all the various verbal and nonverbal contributions to interpretation of the spoken word. 

If the listener is forced to make a quick response, the decision as to the thought's correctness will be subject to the same physiological restraints as a batter's assessment of an incoming pitch.

...How different conversation sounds when we don't feel obliged to respond. As uninvolved spectators luxuriating in our more leisurely processing time, we easily see the shallowness, evasiveness, and lack of real exchange of ideas in most dialogue.

...Sadly, the problem is at least in part a matter of the physiology of conversation. As we move from silent observer to active discussant, we become mired in the very processing problem we're trying to overcome.

How neural networks operate in the hidden layer of our brain

ln my previous post, I referred to the hidden depths of the brain without including much of a description of what goes on in those depths.

Neuroscience is still working on that problem. But even though Robert Burton, a neurologist and neuroscientist, wrote the book I spoke about in the blog post (On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not) in 2008, the basic points he makes are still valid.

(Neuroscience doesn't evolve that fast.)

Here's passages from his chapter on Neural Networks that will give you a good feel for how the hidden layer of the brain operates. Fascinating stuff. 

As you can read below, the brain operates very differently from how most people believe it does -- as a reliable instrument for knowing reality as it is, a phrase that often pops up in spiritual books that aren't grounded in neuroscience.

Yes, in large part we humans agree on the basics of how the world is. If that wasn't the case, traffic signals would be useless. Most of us see red as red, green as green, and know that red means stop and green means go.

But as Burton says in these excerpts, there's a tremendous amount of personal subjectivity in what our brain presents to us as reflective of reality. And this isn't a bad thing, not that we can do anything about it. Life would be boring if we all experienced the world in the same way.

In the human brain, a typical neuron receives incoming information from approximately ten thousand other neurons. Each bit of information either stimulates (positive input) or inhibits (negative input) cell firing. 

The neuron acts like a small calculator.

If the sum of the inputs reaches a critical threshold level, an electrical charge travels down the nerve fiber (axon) to the region where neurotransmitters are stored. The transmitters are released into the synaptic cleft -- a tiny gap between adjacent neurons. If a neurotransmitter finds  a receptive site (receptor) on the adjacent neuron, the process will be repeated on this adjacent neuron.

...Despite a veritable symphony of interacting mechanisms, the neuron ultimately has only two options -- it either fires or it doesn't. At this most basic level, the brain might appear like a massive compilation of on-off switches. But the connections between neurons are not fixed entities.

Rather they are in constant flux -- being strengthened or diminished by ongoing stimuli.

Connections are enhanced with use, weakened with neglect, and are themselves affected by other connections to the same neurons. Once we leave the individual synapse between two neurons, the complexity skyrockets -- from individual neurons to a hundred billion brain cells each with thousands of connections.

Although unraveling how individual neurons collectively create thought remains the Holy Grail of neuroscience, the artificial intelligence (AI) community has given us some intriguing clues as to how this might occur.

Using the biological neuron and its connections as the model, AI scientists have been able to build artificial neural networks (ANN) that can play chess and poker, read faces, recognize speech, and recommend books on Amazon.com.

While standard computer programs work line by line, yes or no, all eventualities programmed in advance, the ANN takes an entirely different approach. The ANN is based upon mathematical programs that are initially devoid of any specific values. The programmers only provide the equations; incoming information determines how connections are formed and how strong each connection will be in relationship with all the other connections (or weightings).

There is no predictable solution to a problem -- rather as one connection changes, so do all the others. These shifting interrelationships are the basis for "learning." The AI community has labeled this virtual space where the weightings take place as the hidden layer. 

...In the human brain, the hidden layer doesn't exist as a discrete interface of specific anatomic structure; rather it resides within the connections between all neurons involved in any neural network.

...The hidden layer, a term normally considered AI jargon, offers a powerful metaphor for the brain's processing of information. It is in the hidden layer that all elements of biology (from genetic predispositions to neurotransmitter variations and fluctuations) and all past experience, whether remembered or long forgotten, affect the processing of incoming information.

It is the interface between incoming sensory data and a final perception, the anatomic crossroad where nature and nurture intersect. It is why your red is not my red, your idea of beauty isn't mine, why eyewitnesses offer differing accounts of an accident, or why we don't put all our money on the same roulette number.

...Now let's up the ante and watch a human neural network in action. A bright light is briefly flashed into your eyes. The retina turns the flash of light into electrical data that travel along the optic nerves and into the brain (input).

But instead of a direct route to consciousness with a precise and unaltered duplication of the flash, the data first goes to a subconscious holding station where it is scrutinized, evaluated, and discussed by a screening committee representing all of your biological tendencies and past experiences. This committee meets behind closed doors, operating outside of consciousness in the hidden layer.

Consider each committee member as being one set of neural connections. 

One might represent a childhood memory of having seen a similar flash of light when a toaster shorted out and started an electrical fire; the second is a general alarm system that has recently become highly sensitive and vigilant to the possibility of terrorism; the third is composite memory of rock concerts; the fourth is a genetically based predisposition for a heightened startle reflex for bright lights.

Each member has his own opinion and each gets one vote.

After hearing all the arguments, each committee member casts his vote and they are tallied (weighted). At the most elemental level, a decision is made -- either to entirely suppress the flash or send it on to consciousness (output). The degree of awareness generated is yet another function of this decision -- ranging from a barely noticed flash at the periphery of vision to a bright flash, front and center.

The childhood memory votes yes: Send the flash into awareness. The terrorist alarm network, fearing that the flash could indicate an explosion, votes yes. The rock concert memory is blasé, has seen the same flashes a zillion times at rock concerts, and feels the flash should be ignored. It votes no. The genetic predisposition reflexively votes yes.

The third member is outvoted, and the flash is sent on high priority into consciousness. You look around, heart pounding, on high alert for everything from a gunshot to a terrorist bomb exploding. But you are at a wedding, and everyone is taking pictures of the bride. You sigh and tell yourself not to be so anxious.

...To get an idea of the magnitude of this process, imagine billions of committee members, each with at least ten thousand hands reaching out to shake hands, prod, poke, seduce, or fend off the other members. Miraculously, this orgy of utter chaos is transformed into a relatively seamless and focused stream of consciousness.

...The schema of the hidden layer provides a conceptual model of a massive web of neuronal connections microscopically interwoven throughout the brain. Such neural networks are the brain's real power brokers, the influence peddlers and decision makers hard at work behind the closed doors of darkened white matter. How consciousness occurs remains an utter mystery, but conceptually, it must arise out of these hidden layers.

The concept of neural networks also helps explain why established habits, beliefs, and judgments are so difficult to change. 

Imagine the gradual formation of a riverbed. The initial flow of water might be completely random -- there are no preferred routes in the beginning. But once a creek has been formed, water is more likely to follow the newly created path of least resistance. As the water continues, the creek deepens and a river develops.

...The brain is only human; it, too, relies on established ways.

As interneuronal connections increase, they become more difficult to overcome. A hitch in your golf swing, biting your nails, persisting with a faulty idea, not dumping your dot.com stocks in late 1999 -- habits, whether mental or physical, are exasperating examples of the power of these microscopic linkages.

Our sense of knowing flows from hidden depths of the brain

The human brain remains largely mysterious, even though modern neuroscience has learned a lot about it. It's unclear to what extent computer artificial intelligence will come to mimic our brains.

But at the moment this much seems clear. Just as "deep learning" takes place in artificial intelligence in a manner that even AI programmers can't figure out, our own sense of knowing arises from hidden depths of the brain that we can't figure out.

Meaning, when you've been trying to figure out what to do about some problem -- like whether you should take a new job that's been offered to you, even though you aren't unhappy in your old job -- and suddenly you have a feeling, This is what I need to do, there's no way you can tell how your mind, the brain in action, came up with that conclusion.

This is a key theme in Robert Burton's fascinating book, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not. 

Burton, a neurologist and neuroscientist, says that a sense of knowing is closely tied to our feeling of having a life purpose. I wrote about this in a 2009 blog post based on his book, "Science and religion share a sense of purpose." 

Scientifically-minded people have a sense of purpose and meaning just as much as religiously-minded people do.

Burton talks about how Richard Dawkins, a noted atheist scientist, is ferociously dedicated to debunking mythologies and irrationality -- such as a denial of how evolution has guided the course of life on Earth.

Dawkins lives for this, just as the Pope lives to serve the cause of Catholicism, or a woman lives to raise her children, or a man lives to become the best at some sport.

So a felt sense of meaning and purpose is the root out of which grow stalks of action and commitment. Scientists do science because it is meaningful to them. Religious people do religion for the same reason.

Different strokes for different folks. Whatever turns you on.

We should force ourselves to distinguish between separate physiological categories of faith -- the basic visceral drive for meaning that has real purpose versus the unsubstantiated cognitive acceptance of an idea. Compassion, empathy, and humility can only arise out of recognizing that our common desires are differently expressed.

Nicely said, Dr. Burton. Both science and religion need to recognize that their common ground is a sense of meaning and purpose.

Fairly frequently a commenter on this blog will argue, "science is a form of religion." That's wrong. He or she says that because scientists are deeply devoted to the pursuit of truth about the physical universe.

But devotion grows from a sense of meaning. It doesn't need religion. People can be devoted to all sorts of non-religious things, such as improving one's golf game.

So religious believers should differentiate between the cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of their faith. Meaning, the feeling they have toward divinity, the meaning they derive from religiosity, is shared by scientists (and everyone else on Earth aside from the deeply clinically depressed).

However, the cognitive side of their faith is something different. These are the concepts that accompany the feelings. "Jesus is the Son of God." Well, you think so. But where is the proof?

I'm not justified in questioning the meaning someone gets from his or her religion. I am justified, though, in questioning their purported facts about the cosmos.

Facts can be challenged. Meaning can't.

If you wrongly believe that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election, even though there is no evidence that the election wasn't fairly decided, I have some hope of convincing you otherwise by correcting your facts. 

However, I've got very little chance of getting you to give up your conservative political views, or your fervent allegiance to Trump. Your political persuasion, like your religion, is a source of profound meaning to you that isn't given up lightly.

In large part because you aren't capable of altering what gives your life meaning. Neither am I. Nor is anybody else. Yes, what we find meaningful can change over time. But not through our conscious efforts. 

Burton writes in a final chapter about an exercise earlier in the book in which he shared a paragraph about a mysterious object that had various qualities. Spoiler alert: the object was a kite. He says:

Once imbedded within the conclusion that this paragraph refers to a kite, the feeling of correctness cannot be consciously dislodged or diminished. We can consciously input new contrary information; only the hidden layer of the neural networks can reweight the values.

The message at the heart of this book is that the feelings of knowing, correctness, conviction, and certainty aren't deliberate conclusions and conscious choices. They are mental sensations that happen to us. 

I've written a few other blog posts about Burton's book:

Knowing that you know: impossible
The three wisest words in the world: "I don't know"

 

Science is the best lens we have to view the world

Here's a typically thoughtful comment from Appreciative Reader on a recent post. I made it into a blog post of its own for a couple of reasons.

Most importantly, the comment explains in a clear, persuasive fashion why science is just a great way of learning about the world and our place in it.

Secondly, Appreciative Reader's comment went into the spam filter of Typepad, my blogging service, and it took me several days to notice that this had happened, because I've been so obsessed with keeping track of what's going on with Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

So it's Putin's fault that the comment wasn't immediately available. At least, that's my spin on the situation. It could be also be argued, quite reasonably, that I simply forgot to check the spam filter. But I prefer the Putin hypothesis, since it puts me in a better light.

Enjoy...

"Science has its place .. no doubt about that but it has nothing to attribute as far as living life is concerned, it cannot offer an vision on life.

Trying to do that turns science into a religion."

-------------------------------------

Sorry, um, but I'm afraid I disagree, squarely.

(With just that much, that I've quoted above, and the thrust of your last two comments addressed to me; I continue to agree, broadly that is, with your larger point that you keep making here, about the primacy of one's own experiences vis-a-vis someone elses's --- the whole restaurant thing, that we've discussed at length. But this last, I find this POV less than persuasive.)

You seem to see science as some kind of a tool that simply answers specific questions of a technical nature, and assists in developing technology that keeps us comfortable and happy.

I'm sorry, but that's seeing science as some kind of magic; you know, like how the king in the fairy tale orders the mage to rustle up some magick to help repel those invaders from overseas, or quickly rustle up a cure for the dying prince and heir, even as the royal household keeps sacrificing to the gods for rain and a good harvest.

You may have read my rather lengthy exchange with Spence, where Spence started out in disagreement with me but finally ended up seeing things my way. Without revisiting the detailed argument, and in short, what the rational-scientific worldview does is to open up for us a way of viewing the world, a sane clean world that isn't "demon-haunted" (to quote Carl Sagan).

It's a world where every time you see a storm you don't dance around wearing beads in an effort to propitiate Odin and Thor and Indra, until such time as every part of the mechanism of storms has been sussed out by those science boffins.

It's a world where you look at the things that you don't know as something you don't know, and something that, if you're so inclined, you try to find out more about, but don't immediately rush to fantastic supernatural explanations just because you still don't know all about it.

(Needless to say you remain open to accepting even the supernatural and the miraculous, should such be evidenced, but that isn't the default --- unlike in manjit's worldview, for instance, at least as he discusses it here in this thread.)

The kind of strictly skeptical spiritual approach that, for instance, Dungeness advocates, and sometimes Spence as well, is not what religions are normally like. Your garden variety religion that your garden variety theist follows basically offers people a lens through which to view the world.

(And in as much as that lense is entirely faulty, it presents a distorted upside-down view of the world, that occasionally by happenstance rings true, kind of like a stopped watch giving you the right time twice a day.)

Well, science, or more correctly a scientific worldview, also offers you a lens to view the world, a sane rational view of the world. To that very limited extent, yes, you may indeed liken science with religion, and that is a comparison I'm happy to embrace, in that very limited sense.

So is the lens that science provides to us perfect? No, obviously not. Clearly it is a work-in-process, clearly it is constantly being updated and improved. But it is the best we've got. It's the only one we've got that's reliable. It's head and shoulders above the craziness of religion in terms of both accuracy and precision, and utility as well.

But I suggest that it is also better than a personal idiosyncratic worldview, most times at least, in as much such a worldview is susceptible to a hundred and one biases.

Science, collectively done, isn't exactly entirely free of bias; but those biases are glitches, bugs, that are sought to be corrected. Correcting those biases is the whole point of science, even if it doesn't always succeed 100%. While personal biases generally stay on unaddressed, distorting one' view of the world.

Sure, if one takes the effort to rid oneself of one's personal biases when arriving at one's personal point of view, then I agree that it might be possible, at least in theory, to arrive at a personal worldview that is 'better' than an impersonal scientific one --- in the sense that such a worldview might embrace the best of both worlds.

But very few actually conceive of such, and far less actually execute it. So that my default remains the impersonal scientific worldview, while not discounting the carefully curated personal worldview provided the latter is very carefully curated and nurtured and weeded.

A scientific theory never becomes a fact

New Scientist has a feature near the end of the magazine where reader questions shared in one issue are answered by other readers who send in submissions that are selected to appear in a later issue.

Below is a question and six answers related to when a theory becomes a fact. The answers make a lot of sense.

Even though I've been aware that when something is called a theory, this doesn't mean that it isn't a well-proven means of describing reality. But this is how many people view a theory -- as something speculative, as when we say "I've got a theory about why my car won't start."

All the answers are great, which isn't surprising, since they're chosen by staff of New Scientist, who obviously know a lot about science. I particularly like #3, which encapsulates some key features of science in just a few sentences.

Theories are interpretive structures that link facts. The more facts, the better. If facts are discovered that don't fit the theory, scientists embark on a search for a better theory. So science makes progress by being flexible, not viewing any truth as set in stone, since it can always be dislodged by fresh facts that call into question the validity of a theory.

Religions can't compete in this Game of Truth, because they typically are founded on faith, not facts. Even religions which claim to be a science of sorts aren't really open to having their Theory of God, or whatever, subjected to modification, improvement, or even rejection.

When does a theory become a fact and who decides?

Answer 1: A theory never becomes a fact. It is an explanation of one or more facts.
--------------------
Answer 2: A well-supported evidence-based theory becomes acceptable until disproved. It never evolves to a fact, and that's a fact.
--------------------
Answer 3: Many scientists, including the late Stephen Hawking, are happy to say that a theory never becomes a fact. It is always an interpretive structure that links facts, which are themselves reproducible experimental observations.

The "truth" of a theory is determined by its usefulness in linking the largest number of facts and predicting new ones that haven't been observed yet. Discovery of facts that don't fit the theory will lead to the search for a new theory.
--------------------
Answer 4: This question misunderstands what a theory is in the same way that creationists dismiss evolution as "just a theory." 

A theory isn't speculation about what might be true. It is a set of propositions that seek to explain a particular phenomenon or set of facts. A theory can be tested and shown to be accurate or modified as the evidence requires. Even when a theory is accepted as fact, it remains a theory.
--------------------
Answer 5: While a scientific theory such as Issac Newton's theory of gravitation makes an infinite number of predictions, it can only be verified by a finite number of observations, so it can never be seen as irrefutably correct. In philosophy, this is the problem of induction.

The fact that science rests on rather shaky epistemological foundations opens it to attack from anti-science movements, for example when creationists claim that Darwinian evolution is "only a theory." All science is, to some extent, "only theory," but its great strength is that theories that don't fit real world observations are eventually discarded. This has happened with Newton's theory of gravitation, now seen to be a special case of general relativity.

So in reality, in science we do not have facts or proof, all we have is the best available, most widely accepted theory at the time.
--------------------
Answer 6: Evolutionary pressures have favoured some organisms that are aware of their surroundings and able to react to them. Humans have become rather good at this.

We also have curiosity, which leads us to look hard at our surroundings and try to make sense of what we find. So, we gather information, and try to invent theories that could explain what we see. The better theories don't just explain all the data so far observed, they enable predictions. If confirmed by data, this strengthens our reliance on the theory.

Take satnav systems, for example. These rely on the predictions of relativity and quantum theories. Every time a satnav system is used, the theories it was based on are tested again. But, until we know "everything," theories, even the successful ones, will still be theories.

Say yes to drugs. The war on drugs is crazy.

Over on my HinesSight blog, tonight I wrote "MDMA research shows war on drugs is absurd." Check it out. I shared part of a story Sam Harris tells in his Waking Up book about taking MDMA (Ecstasy) with a friend in 1987, which produced a marvelous feeling of love in them.

Does spacetime emerge from a more fundamental reality?

The title of this blog post is a question posed on the cover of the February 2022 issue of Scientific American. It refers to a story in the issue, "The Origins of Space and Time." 

I enjoyed the story, even though it was difficult to understand. 

Here's an image that encapsulates the two main approaches to figuring out what space and time (or as relativity theory puts it, spacetime) emerge from -- assuming they emerge from anything.

So if you were expecting some explanation that could be fit, or crammed, into a religious or mystical worldview, expect again.

Science of this sort is complicated, mathematical, provisional. Currently there's no way to test whether space and time emerge from something more fundamental. But just raising that possibility is fascinating, since most of us view space and time as fundamental realities themselves.

One reason physicists are pursuing this issue is that while quantum mechanics and relativity theory are both fantastically accurate depictions of reality, quantum mechanics focuses on the very small and relativity theory on the very large.

Plus, quantum mechanics does an excellent job of explaining three forces of nature -- weak, strong, electromagnetism -- while relativity theory does an excellent job of explaining the fourth, gravity. 

It's too simplistic to say that three are more than one, so that's why physicists are interested in finding a quantum theory of gravity, but probably there's some truth to that. Relativity theory isn't capable of explaining the other three forces, so the goal is to find a quantum way to explain how gravity works.

It is indeed strange that so far quantum mechanics and relativity theory aren't compatible with each other, even though each is amazingly successful at explaining the realm in which they operate. 

Hence, the appeal of finding a theory of how spacetime emerges from something more fundamental, which would demote relativity theory into a non-fundamental theory and, hopefully, bring about a understanding that explains gravity without using relativity theory.

Here's how the story starts out:

Natalie Paquette spends her time thinking about how to grow an extra dimension. Start with little circles, scattered across every point in space and time -- a curlicue dimension, looped back on itself. 

Then shrink those circles down, smaller and smaller, tightening the loop, until a curious transformation occurs: the dimension stops seeming tiny and instead becomes enormous, like when you realize something that looks small and nearby is actually huge and distant.

"We're shrinking a spatial direction," Paquette says. "But when we try to shrink it past a certain point, a new, large, spatial direction emerges instead."

Paquette, a theoretical physicist at the University of Washington, is not alone in thinking about this strange kind of dimensional transmutation. A growing number of physicists, working in different areas of the discipline with different approaches, are increasingly converging on a profound idea: space -- and perhaps even time -- is not fundamental.

Instead space and time may be emergent: they could arise from the structure and behavior of more basic components of nature. At the deepest level of reality, questions like "Where?" and "When?" simply may not have answers at all. "We have a lot of hints from physics that spacetime as we understand it isn't the fundamental thing," Paquette says.

These radical notions come from the latest twists in the century-long hunt for a theory of quantum gravity. Physicist's best theory of gravity is general relativity, Albert Einstein's famous conception of how matter warps space and time.

The best theory of everything else is quantum physics, which is astonishingly accurate when it comes to the properties of matter, energy and subatomic particles. Both theories have easily passed all the tests physicists have been able to devise for the past century. Put them together, one might think, and you would have a "theory of everything."

But the two theories don't play nicely. Ask general relativity what happens in the context of quantum physics, and you'll get contradictory answers, with untamed infinities breaking loose across your calculations. Nature knows how to apply gravity in quantum contexts -- it happened in the first moments of the big bang, and it still happens in the hearts of black holes -- but we humans are still struggling to understand how the trick is done.

Part of the problem lies in the ways the theories deal with space and time. While quantum physics treats space and time as immutable, general relativity warps them for breakfast. Somehow a theory of quantum gravity would need to reconcile these ideas about space and time.

One way to do that would be to eliminate the problem at the source, spacetime itself, by making space and time emerge from something more fundamental.

We humans are animals. But most of us deny this fact.

I'm enjoying Melanie Challenger's book, "How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human." Here's some excerpts about our dental that we're animal.

The point here is that life is neither straightforwardly good nor progressive. This might be unbearable if it weren't for the possibility that humans are special. Something important saves us from the threatening parts of earthly life.

We're told this comes from the heart of human nature, some essential part of us. We can't see it and we can't measure it, but it marks us out as the most important life form on Earth.

For those with deep belief in a creator, we have a soul that is unique to the human body. For secular humanist thinkers, we have soul-like mental powers that are unique to the human brain. Each is a reason for why humans aren't truly animals. At least, not in any crucial way.

...This idea -- or something like it -- has been a source of profound solace for countless human lives. Whether it's the soul or some other property, these are ways to take humans out of a bewilderingly anarchic nature.

They are methods to save humans from the difficulties that nature's amorality presents to us. The idea may take on different hues in different times and places. But there's always something transcendent about humans that rescues us.

In this way, the major theories about the significance of human lives have the distinct whiff of psychological necessity rather than rational clarity.

...Hundreds of years of denying that we're an animal has left us with inconsistencies and confusion. 

...It is a testament to the depth of our denial that we are animals that we still can't admit this. All that we do, we do as animals. But we justify it as humans. The way we've structured the world is little more than the intuition of an animal whose greater interests lie with its own kind.

But we almost never confess to this. We tell ourselves instead that we have a soul. Or, if we don't want to call it a soul, we say there is a person inside us that is more important than the body from which it's made.

In this way, the bodies of other animals mean nothing. They are bits of machinery, spare parts. We may use them as we wish.

...It's worthwhile to note that no matter how deep into the physical substances of organisms we go, we never find an edge. There's no absolute dividing line between us and other animals, nothing that can offer us an unassailable moral category.

Science now shows us not only that the lives of other organisms are far more complex and sentient than we've sought to admit, but also that our traits -- to lesser and greater degrees -- are things that nature can reinvent.

A blow to God, perhaps. A far greater threat to a rational animal convinced it's the centre of things.

While the slightest insight into our experience shows how necessary it is to care about human lives, this doesn't separate us from the rest of our planet's life. Human life remains an animal life. Our awareness and our exchanges of ideas make us a powerful and sensitive animal, but none of this brings our animal life to an end.

That this idea has had such extraordinary influence across our societies is only now becoming clear. It is surfacing because it matters now more than it ever has that ten thousand years of modernity have delivered an animal that doesn't think it's an animal.

Respect for facts is a great virtue

I'm a lover of facts. That's why I'm a hater of religion.

Ah, but don't religions seek the truth? Not really. They claim to, but only in the sense that QAnon followers believe they're truth-seekers. 

In each case, religion and QAnon, truth is viewed much more as a belief, as something they hope is the case, rather than as an aspect of objective reality.

So facts are different from truth. There's lots of ways people define those two terms, as I learned by doing some Googling. 

This article describes the difference quite clearly.

A Fact and a Truth walk into a bar and ask for a drink.

The bartender says to the Fact, “What can I get you?” clearly ignoring the Truth.

The Truth complains to the Manager that the bartender didn’t offer Truth a drink. The Manager responds, “the Bartender didn’t see you because he doesn’t believe in you”.

I have been pondering the difference for quite some time. How can multiple people look at the same situation but have vastly differing opinions on what is fact? What I have learned so far is that the difference between a fact and a truth is that a fact cannot be disputed – it is real, quantified, qualified, and measured as fact – it’s real.

A truth is not the same – it is based on belief and/or an interpretation of a fact, “You believe that something is true”.

It may NOT be true, but you believe it to be true. It could be because of where you were brought up, how your parents raised you, or the external influences during critical time periods during your life. Your belief system is borne out of those influences. Is this the reason why positions vary so wildly as it relates to the pandemic or even global warming?

Facts should be the foundation of truth. But often they're not.

This is what allows a Christian to say, "I speak the truth when I say Jesus is the Son of God," or a devotee of a guru to say, "The plain truth is that my guru is God in human form."

Those aren't facts. They're beliefs. 

I stopped being religious when I realized that facts were more important to me than beliefs. For thirty-five years I diligently sought facts to support my beliefs. Not finding those facts, I chose to give up my belief.

The most recent issue of TIME magazine features a cover story of TIME's Person of the Year, Elon Musk. Following that story is a profile of the Heroes of the Year -- four people who were instrumental in the development of COVID-19 vaccines.

Here's an excerpt that mentions facts. I've boldfaced the part about fealty to facts.

Progress flows from the gradual accretion of knowledge. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, it started with the initially painstaking process of decoding the genomes of all living things; then folded in the development of sequencing machines that reduced that genetic reading time to hours; and finally weaved in the insights -- "Put it in a fat bubble!" -- that seemed to come in brilliant flashes but were actually the result of wisdom developed over decades working on how to manipulate a finicky genetic material called mRNA.

What drives it all might, in less divisive times, seem too obvious to mention: fealty to facts. It's the basis of the scientific method and the structure of our world. Without trust in objective reality, the lights don't turn on, the computer doesn't boot up, the streets stay empty.

...The miracle workers behind the COVID-19 vaccines are the TIME Heroes of the Year not only because they gave the world a defense against a pathogen, but also because the manner of that astonishing achievement guards more than our health: they channeled their ambitions to the common good, talked to one another, and trusted in facts.

What alternative do we have, really? Assuming we care about objective reality, and not just what subjectively feels good. 

Facts are what bind us together. They are the common denominator of human experience. Opinions are important also, of course. But opinions, like beliefs, are personal and subjective. In contrast, facts are a treasure that everybody can partake of.

There are many virtues. Respect for facts is one of them. These days, more than ever, we need people who do their best to honor facts. 

This doesn't mean never being wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Science progresses because recognizing when you're wrong is a big part of the scientific method. This allows false facts to be discarded and genuine facts to be embraced. 

So it's a virtue to have a shaky belief punctured by solid facts. That can be uncomfortable, because our beliefs are comforting. But if they're not factual, it's better to give them up.

Reason rules with God's will, karma, and laws of nature

Having written about reason and rationality recently, here's some thoughts that came to mind (weird phrase, since where else would thoughts appear?) as I was musing about how people believe in God's will and karma as other-worldly explanations for why things happen as they do.

It struck me that God's will and karma are appealing notions for many because they provide reasons for happenings that often aren't pleasant. Or are surprising.

For example, I know someone who got stage 4 lung cancer even though she never smoked. Thankfully, she's doing quite well, even after several years have passed since the diagnosis. She isn't at all religious. But if she was, probably the idea that her cancer is in accord with God's will would comfort her.

"Will" implies a reason behind it.

Otherwise we'd speak of "God's caprice" or "God's random choice." When someone wills that something happen, even if that someone is a supernatural being, seemingly there's a purpose that will is intended to achieve -- even if that purpose is unknown to us.

Likewise, karma definitely entails reason. Typically karma is viewed as encompassing more than one lifetime, though the word also can be limited to causes and effects occurring within a single life. Good karma is the result of positive actions; bad karma is the result of negative actions. 

You know, the whole as you sow, so shall you reap thing. 

Thus karma is nothing but reasons. Those reasons for why something is happening to us may be lost in deep time, if we believe in rebirth/reincarnation, but they exist nonetheless. At least, that's the way karma is conceptualized. 

( I wrote a book about karma, "Life is Fair," so I'm familiar with the term.)

Obviously there's another way to look upon the reason something is happening: as being in accord with the laws of nature. The benefit of this perspective is that it is scientific, not religious; factual, not fantasized; coherent, not confusing.

As with God's will and karma, often it is very difficult, if not impossible, to discern the precise reasons that produce a happening. In part this is because chaos theory, though deterministic, says that initial conditions can play a big role in an event.

Often this is called the "butterfly effect." A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can theoretically create an atmospheric instability that, over time, is magnified into a hurricane striking the United States.

Even so, the beauty of embracing laws of nature as the reason things happen as they do is that no outside concepts are required. No need to believe in the unseen will of an unseen God. No need to believe in the unseen force of karma extending across multiple unseen lifetimes.

We know about the laws of nature through science and everyday life. They are the manifestation of nature's reason. Sometimes they even can be described in mathematical terms. 

So if you're looking for a way to understand why life here on Earth is as it is, there's no need to look beyond three simple words: laws of nature.

Supernatural beliefs lack both causes and mechanisms

When I press on certain keys on my MacBook Pro keyboard, magic happens!

Which you can see. Because I can touch type, words form on my laptop's screen. After I publish this post, the words appear on my Church of the Churchless blog.

Of course, all this isn't really magic. There's a chain of causes that leads to the words appearing in a blog post. Underlying those causes are hidden mechanisms -- software, hardware, internet functions, and such -- that most of us don't understand very well.

But what we're certain of is the overall way someone typing out thoughts at home can share those ideas on the internet, or worldwide web, even if we don't grasp the finer details of this.

When it comes to the realm of the supernatural, though, and religiosity in general, both causes and mechanisms are lacking. Well, let's make that believable causes and mechanisms with a foundation in demonstrable evidence.

This is a big reason why, after 35 years, I couldn't continue believing in the India-based religion that I once embraced wholeheartedly. 

I became a devotee of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) because I liked the supposedly scientific nature of this mystical approach to meditation and God-realization. However, over time the RSSB teachings made less and less sense to me.

I was asked to believe that I had a soul that could be separated from my body. But there was no evidence of this soul. I was asked to believe that the RSSB guru could know what his disciples were doing from afar, but there was no reasonable cause or mechanism that allowed this to occur.

Many other examples could be given of how the RSSB teachings basically involved a lot of mumbo-jumbo, ideas that made sense only if you didn't think about them very much. This "science" actually turned out to be as much of a faith-based religion as Christianity.

Now, it's true that science often doesn't completely understand the mechanisms underlying causes. For example, gravity causes apples to fall from a tree. Einstein figured out that the mechanism is curved space-time.

But quantum theory doesn't have its own explanation for gravity that fits with Einstein's. So many physicists suspect there's a deeper mechanism that explains gravity which is compatible with both relativity theory and quantum theory.

Still, modern science is hugely better at describing how the world works than religion and supernaturalism is. In large part this is because science seeks causes and mechanisms that can be tested empirically, not just talked about in vague ways.

RSSB taught that consciousness is immaterial. That allows the conscious soul to survive the death of the material body. Left unexplained was how immaterial consciousness was so obviously affected by changes to the material brain such as being hit on the head with a baseball bat or undergoing anesthesia.

If the soul goes offline when you have surgery, how does it survive death? If the soul is who we really are, why doesn't it manifest when consciousness is temporarily absent from the brain?

In his book, "Rationality," Steven Pinker speaks about causes and mechanisms.

Even once we have established that some cause makes a difference to an outcome, neither scientists nor laypeople are content to leave it at that. We connect the cause to its effect with a mechanism: the clockwork behind the scenes that pushes things around.

People have intuitions that the world is not a video game with patterns of pixels giving way to new patterns. Underneath each happening is a hidden force, power, or oomph.

Many of our primitive intuitions of causal powers turn out, in the light of science, to be mistaken, such as the "impetus" that the medievals thought was impressed upon moving objects, and the psi, qi, engrams, energy fields, homeopathic miasms, crystal powers, and other bunkum of alternative medicine.

But some intuitive mechanisms, like gravity, survive in scientifically respectable forms. And many new hidden mechanisms have been posited to explain correlations in the world, including genes, pathogens, tectonic plates, and elementary particles.

These causal mechanisms are what allow us to predict what would happen in counterfactual scenarios, lifting them from the realm of make-believe: we set up the pretend world and then simulate the mechanisms, which take it from there.

The chance that you know something others don't is very small

After over fifty years of pursuing spirituality in one form or another, I've come to one firm conclusion. I'm nothing special.

And neither are you. Nor is anybody else.

Now, I'm not saying that everybody is the same. Obviously every person is different. We all have different thoughts, emotions, talents, likes and dislikes, appearance, and so on.

What I mean is that we're all material beings living in this material world, to sort of quote Madonna. 

So whatever we know about the world, almost certainly other people possess the same knowledge. Most of us like to think that in some way we're special when it comes to what we know. 

But the truth is that we're not. 

Some would say that our beliefs can be unique, shared by no one else. But a belief is different from knowledge. Knowledge is a true statement about reality, while a belief isn't.

Sure, we often say things like "I believe the Earth goes around the Sun." Actually that is something we know. It's a fact. 

Whereas "I believe in God" is a genuine belief. It isn't grounded in reality. There's no demonstrable evidence for that statement. 

Beliefs are limited only by our imagination. Knowledge is limited by what is true. 

Of course, a belief can be transformed into knowledge through evidence. And evidence can transform knowledge into belief if what once was thought to be true turns out to be untrue.

For example, almost everybody used to know that the Earth was flat. Now we know it is round, so that confident initial knowledge actually was a shaky belief.

Yet there's still a Flat Earth Society. Untrue beliefs take a long time to completely die, if they ever do.

A few days ago I wrote "A Bayesian argument against miracles." The takeaway quote by Steven Pinker in that post was Which is more likely -- that the laws of the universe as we understand them are false, or that some guy got something wrong?

This relates to the notion that no one possesses special knowledge. Over thousands of years, humanity has built up a store of shared knowledge.

It is ever-changing, which is the nature of knowledge. The more we know, the more there is left to know. Sometimes this is described as the Island of Knowledge having a vaster shoreline as the island expands in size.

Science is by far our best means of arriving at a shared understanding of what is real and true. Sure, scientific knowledge is constantly changing, just as our individual knowledge does. 

But science has ways of correcting errors that individuals don't. It may take a while for an untrue theory to be overturned. However, there's no doubt that science steadily progresses toward a more accurate picture of reality.

This accomplishment means, in Carl Sagan's words, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

During the seventeen years this blog has existed, I've debunked a great many religious supernatural claims. This doesn't stop people from continuing to believe in them.

Almost every day someone leaves a comment on one of my posts that amounts to an extraordinary claim about the nature of reality. If true, it would overturn much of modern science, since the claims people make go against the well-proven laws of nature.

But those extraordinary claims always lack extraordinary evidence. Or even ordinary evidence. 

The big question is, why do people continue to believe things that lack demonstrable evidence? There are plenty of reasons. Here's a few of them.

-- They want to believe in the supernatural so badly, they ignore the lack of evidence for it.
-- They enjoy the attention other people give them when they make supernatural claims.
-- They like to feel they possess knowledge no one else has.
-- They are out to make money from followers who revere them.
-- They have deluded themselves into mistaking belief for knowledge.

Having been a religious believer for thirty-five years, I understand the appeal of considering that God, spirit, heaven, angels, and such are as real as rocks, goldfish, iPhones, and clouds.

But eventually I grew out of my unfounded religiosity, because solid truth was more important to me that flimsy belief. This is why I put so much emphasis on being honest about what we actually know, versus what we would prefer to be true.

Wishes are one thing. Reality is another. 

Science is repeatable. Religions aren't.

There are lots of reasons to choose science over religion. Chief among them, of course, is that science comes up with solid knowledge about reality, while religion doesn't. 

But I find science's repeatability to be an especially appealing feature of science. 

Meaning, if somehow all scientific knowledge were to disappear from the face of the Earth, while leaving humanity intact, there's little or no doubt that this knowledge eventually would be rediscovered. 

In other words, science is repeatable. It's methods aren't dependent on one-of-a-kind happenstance, like Einstein being born at a particular time and place with certain aptitudes. 

If Einstein hadn't come up with his theories of special and general relativity when he did, someone else would have trod the same scientific ground not long after.

Ditto with Darwin's theory of evolution. Others were on the verge of publishing their own take on evolution just when Darwin was about to, which, I recall reading, spurred Darwin to finish writing "On the Origin of Species" as soon as possible.

We can also easily imagine an alien civilization in a galaxy far, far away having much the same understanding of scientific reality as we humans do. Sure, their language, concepts, mathematics, and such probably would markedly differ from ours.

But almost certainly they'd have a similar understanding of atomic particles and the forces of nature as we do. After all, their basic physical reality would be the same as our basic physical reality.

By contrast, things would be very different if somehow all religious knowledge were to disappear from the face of the Earth. Or if we came into contact with an alien civilization and learned about what beliefs, if any, they might have in the realm of religion 

What are the chances that Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism would reappear if no trace of these religions remained? Essentially, zero. 

Same with every other religion, since each religion is heavily dependent on historical circumstances that can't be repeated. Jesus' supposed birth and death. The Koran being dictated to Muhammed by an angel. Hindu beliefs arising from ancient Indian sources.

Because Buddhism is the most psychological, and least supernatural, of the world's major religions, it's teachings would have the best chance of being rediscovered if all trace of Buddhism vanished. Even so, Buddhism obviously is a product of the insights arrived at by a specific person. 

Take away the Buddha, and you would still have Buddhism, yet in a markedly changed form. But take away Einstein, and the theory of relativity would be totally unaffected, since the theory rests on the nature of reality, not on any particular person.

Of course, most religious people find the non-repeatability of their faith to be a desirable feature. It gives them a pleasing feeling of being special. Jesus died for our sins so that we might live for eternity with our Father in heaven. Cool!

Unreal. But cool. 

Me, I prefer reality. Which is why I love science so much.

Particular people are responsible for scientific discoveries -- they don't fall out of the sky like snowflakes -- yet this knowledge has little or nothing to do with them, and everything to do with the nature of our world.

Quantum theory doesn't say consciousness creates reality

I'm no quantum physicist. That option closed down for me early on, when I was kicked out of my high school physics class because I was paying more attention to my girlfriend sitting behind me than to whatever the teacher was saying. 

But I've made up for that by reading lots of books about quantum theory, many of them in the course of researching my first book about the connection between ancient mysticism and the new physics, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder" -- which I got back in print via a rewrite that took out the preachy parts. 

I no longer believe in most of the mysticism in that book, but the scientific stuff is still valid, by and large. I keep up with current developments in quantum theory through my subscriptions to Scientific American and New Scientist.

The August 28 issue of New Scientist is a special issue about Quantum Frontiers. The stories on this subject were all interesting and clearly written for non-physicists like me. 

What's crystal clear is that most people who claim quantum theory proves something mystical or spiritual about the cosmos don't know what they're talking about.

Quantum theory is mysterious, for sure.

So far science hasn't figured out how it relates to relativity theory, which explains how gravity works. The other forces of nature are amenable to explanation by quantum theory, but not gravity. This means that there's a good chance a deeper explanation of nature needs to be found that unifies relativity theory and quantum theory.

Frequently New Age types claim that quantum theory has shown that consciousness creates reality. This isn't at all proven. Yes, the quantum measurement problem is real. Somehow various probabilities of a particle having certain properties, like being in a specific location, are converted to a single actuality when a measurement occurs.

This is called the collapse of the wave function.

The mathematics of quantum theory are marvelously accurate. That's why modern technologies like computers and cell phones have become so ubiquitous. However, physicists don't agree about the philosophical side of quantum theory. Meaning, the explanation of what's going on behind the mathematics. 

Here's a graphic from the New Scientist special issue that does a great job of summarizing the various ways scientists have tried to explain what quantum theory means.

I like the objective collapse theory, in part because it doesn't involve a conscious observer collapsing the wave function. As the entry for this in the table above says, that explains how the universe was able to be real before consciousness came on the cosmic scene. 

Here's a story in the special issue on this subject: "Do we distil reality from the quantum fog, or does it exist without us?"
Download Do we distil reality from the quantum fog or does it exist without us? | New Scientist

QUANTUM stuff, whether single atoms, electrons or photons of light, is notorious for seeming to be here, there and everywhere – and indeed everything – all at once. It exists as clouds of possibilities, manifested in a beast you can’t get around when contemplating quantum mysteries: the wave function.

On one level, the wave function is just a mathematical expression that lets you calculate the probability a particle will manifest in a particular location, say. The mystery is the way the maths says that, once you look at it, the wave function “collapses” to leave something definite we can all agree on. This creates the picture of the world that our classically trained eyes see. But how does the mathematics relate to the reality before the measurement – and what exactly, if anything, does the act of measurement change?

Erwin Schrödinger expressed the unease we might feel about apparently “making” reality when he mused about a cat inside a box that might or might not have been killed by a random quantum process inside it. Before you look, he asked, is the cat dead and alive at the same time?

The orthodox take on quantum theory, known as the Copenhagen interpretation, says yes: the maths adds up, so just shut up and calculate. “From a practical point of view, it works perfectly,” says Angelo Bassi, a theoretical physicist at the University of Trieste in Italy. “But from a fundamental point of view, why should the wave function collapse?”

Some physicists argue that it all makes complete sense if you think of the wave function as a way to predict what might happen. It changes with time, just like a weather forecast. “The universe is not made of wave functions, just as it is not made of weather forecasts,” says Christopher Fuchs at the University of Massachusetts, a leading advocate for an interpretation of quantum theory known as quantum Bayesianism, or QBism.

For QBists like Fuchs, quantum theory is a tool for us to better navigate the world, not a description of the world as it exists independent of our presence. So of course the wave function collapses – and how could it be anything other than us doing the collapsing?

Or you can go to the opposite extreme and say that the wave function doesn’t collapse at all. In the many worlds interpretation, every possible outcome of a measurement encoded in the wave function happens in different universes. No one collapses anything at the point of measurement – the world just splits, carrying us with it into one particular branch.

If you prefer an answer that gives us a hope of understanding physical reality, and doesn’t invoke a multiverse that we can never hope to observe, there is yet another option: that wave functions collapse spontaneously, without the influence of observers. This “objective collapse” was first proposed in the 1970s, but has enjoyed a revival in recent years largely because it promises to submit to empirical testing. “The other interpretations simply aim at reinterpreting the wave function,” says Bassi, who is a proponent.

In this picture, the chances of an atom’s wave function collapsing on its own is so small that you might have to wait billions of years to see it. Group enough of them together, however, and it rises dramatically. The cumulative effect would be a kind of faint background “noise” of collapsing wave functions that a sensitive enough detector might pick up.

“Testing the large-scale limit of quantum mechanics”, or TEQ, is a project that aims to do just that, and perhaps write the observer out of quantum theory for good. Designed specifically to look for collapse noise, the project involves levitating a bead of glass a few nanometres wide using electric fields, watching its motion closely. The latest version was delayed, but Hendrik Ulbricht at the University of Southampton, UK, who is leading the experiment, expects results within a year. “We are all very excited,” he says.

Looking for noise isn’t something physicists typically do. “Usually, we suppress the noise as much as possible, because the physics is in the signal,” says Ulbricht. But there is an interesting precedent. When astronomers Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias first detected an all-pervasive background radio signal in 1964, they thought it might be coming from New York City, from other galaxies or even from nearby pigeons. Finally, they realised they had discovered the cosmic microwave background, relic radiation left over from the big bang. “There could be a similar story with these collapse models,” says Ulbricht. 

Metacognition is key to knowing yourself

I'm about halfway through reading Stephen Fleming's Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness. Basic concepts of the book are mind reading, in the sense of inferring what is in someone else's mind, and metacognition, literally thinking about our thinking, or more broadly, being aware of ourself. 

Since Fleming, a British neuroscientist, cites many research studies in his book, reading it can take some effort. However, Fleming is a good writer, and frequently uses examples from everyday life, so on the whole I'm liking it a lot. 

The title, Know Thyself, points toward a fact I've marveled at for a long time. We humans can turn our attention upon ourself in a way that other animals can't. Fleming's idea, which makes sense, is that this metacognition and mind reading (another term for the more usual "theory of mind") are closely related.

Meaning, many of the same brain processes are at work when we think "I feel bad that I got so angry" (metacognition) and "I believe that she thinks I'm mad at her" (mind reading). One is directed inward at our own mind; the other is directed outward at other minds.

And the same sorts of problems can arise in both metacognition and mind reading. We can be wrong about our own mind, and we can be wrong about other people's minds. Fleming writes:

First of all, it is important to distinguish between the capacity for metacognition and the accuracy of the self-awareness that results.

The capacity for metacognition becomes available to us after waking each morning. We can turn our thoughts inward and begin to think about ourselves. The accuracy of metacognition, on the other hand, refers to whether our reflective judgments tend to track our actual skills and abilities.

...In fact, metacognition is likely to be even more susceptible to illusions and distortions than perception. Our senses usually remain in touch with reality because we receive constant feedback from the environment.

If I misperceive my coffee cup as twice as large as it is, then I will likely knock it over when I reach over to pick it up, and such errors will serve to rapidly recalibrate my model of the world.  Because my body remains tightly coupled to the environment, there is only so much slack my senses can tolerate.

The machinery for self-awareness has a tougher job: it must perform mental alchemy, conjuring up a sense of whether we are right or wrong from a fairly loose and diffuse feedback loop. The consequences of illusions about ourselves are usually less obvious.

If we are lacking in self-awareness, we might get quizzical looks at committee meetings, but we won't tend to knock over coffee cups or fall down flights of stairs. Self-awareness is therefore less moored to reality and more prone to illusions. 

Those illusions basically involve us feeling that we know something that we actually don't know, or failing to feel that we know something which we actually do know.

There are lots of gradations, of course. The ideal is to feel uncertain about knowing things that our knowledge really is uncertain about, to feel confident about knowing things we really do know about, and to feel not at all confident in things that we don't know about.

That last "feel" is what makes us call a plumber when we know we don't know how to fix a leaky faucet. Lacking it makes us attempt a repair when we're not competent to do the job, something I have some familiarity with. 

(One sadly vivid memory is giving up on a faucet repair, calling a plumber, and have him simply reverse one of the parts I had backward. When I joked that this 30 second repair now was going to cost me $80, or whatever, he said "You're forgetting what it took me to learn how to do that 30 second repair," which was absolutely true.)

At an extreme, this sort of thing is called frontal lobe paradox.

The paradox is that people with frontal lobe damage may have significant difficulties with everyday tasks such as cooking or organizing their finances, but because their metacognition is impaired, they are unable to recognize that they need a helping hand. 

Without metacognition, we may lose the capacity to understand what we have lost. The connection between our self-impression and the reality of our behavior -- the reality seen by our family and friends -- becomes weakened.

A less extreme example is how most people believe they are an above-average driver, a statistical impossibility.

If "God" is all there is, science is the way to know God

The August 16, 2021 issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating article about the new James Webb Space Telescope that will be launched soon. It will be much more powerful than the Hubble space telescope. 

I liked the end of "The Youthful Universe." You can read it below.

Science truly is our best way of learning about "God" -- if by that word is meant everything that exists. That's how I've come to view God.

Sometimes during my day I'll say, "Thank you God." I'm not thanking a divine being. I don't believe in supernatural entities.

Rather, I use "God" as shorthand for the marvelous reality that is evident everywhere from the mysterious quantum realm of the very small to the unfathomable vastness of the universe that will be explored by the James Webb Space Telescope. 

So for me thanking God is simply an appreciation of the causes and effects inherent in the laws of nature that produced the thing I feel thankful for.

Once you get a taste of science, the offerings of religion seem horribly bland. Science, as the story excerpt below says, is about knowing. Religions are about believing, a much less appealing alternative.

The seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler studied the physical world for the messages he felt that God had written into the Book of Nature. Galileo, in fact, had supporters inside and outside the Church.

Sometimes people in power have been reluctant to acknowledge the truths that science uncovers. Each time we look farther, our universe gets larger. Or, depending on your perspective, we get smaller.

Astonomers take the position -- an incidentally ethical one -- of being radically in favor of knowing. 

Bob Williams, the former head of the Space Telescope Science Institute, grew up in a Baptist family in Southern California, one of five children.

He'd wanted to be an astronomer since the seventh grade, when he received a pamphlet on astronomy in science class; he then saved his paper-route money to  buy a telescope.

He earned a scholarship to U.C. Berkeley and studied astronomy there. 

"My father didn't want me to go to college," he said. "He told me that if I went to get an education I would lose my faith. And he was right about that. We were raised to take every word in the Bible as literally true. But then I was learning about continental drift. About evolution."

Williams said that he is often asked about faith.

Many traditions use the term "God" to mean, basically, everything that is. In that view, the universe itself is the Book, and astronomers are reading it as it is.

What could be better than contemplating the inner and outer worlds?

Today I finished physicist Anthony Aguirre's book, "Cosmological Koans: A Journey to the Heart of Physical Reality." Rather than describing how the book ends, you can read the ending yourself. I liked what Aguirre says here.

To me, one clarion message comes through: when you are tempted to think or say "the Universe is fundamentally like this," then go and sit and think some more.

So why do we like to divide things into opposing camps? Probably no small part of it is a rather strong drive, bestowed upon us by our evolution as surviving beings, to identify some certain things with ourselves, our group, our tribe.

The "selfing" process walls us off as individuals in an often hostile world and seeks to protect not just our bodies, but by extension, whatever we identify with. Our own beliefs tend to be converted into truth much more easily than is warranted. 

Even in the most abstract of questions, it's easy to see, in oneself or in others, a strength of belief that the world is a certain way -- material or ideal, free or fated, inherently good or evil -- all out of proportion to the actual evidence and even when confronted with many people believing quite different things for reasons they find just as persuasive. 

This is a tendency worth keeping a keen eye on.

But it isn't just tribalism. Convincing, opposing views persist because the questions are hard. The easy ones get settled and largely forgotten about. In a well-run government, only the hard questions come to the desk of the emperor (or president). So too with the structure we've built out of our hard-won understanding of the world, both individually and collectively.

Of course, sorting things into what has been settled and what is still unknown or open for debate is not always easy, or agreed upon. 

But overall, there is some sense of a cutting edge: the world really is not flat, but we can debate about the speed at which it is warming; lightning is caused by segregation of electric charges, not gods' whims; gravity is not a propensity to go down but rather a propensity for stuff to curve space-time in a particular way. 

Knowing exactly where this cutting edge lies can be something of an art. Sometimes it is obvious and surrounded by debate. Sometimes, as we've seen, it can be much more subtle, discoverable only through a careful skepticism of simple or familiar answers. But there it lies, still licking its chops.

Even knowledge of moral truths, which are perhaps harder to place on the subjective-objective axis of being, has progressed.

Slavery is wrong; discrimination is wrong; women are equal in worth to men; might does not make right. Even if they contain some invention as well, we must choose to see these as hard-earned discoveries that we cannot unknow.

We may then focus on how to to bring our reality in closer accord with these ideals, as well as tackle the still much more open questions: What makes a just society? How do we balance liberty and security? When does technology bring, or undermine, well-being? What does the future hold, with its quantum computers, artificial intelligences, genetic engineering, and interplanetary travel -- and how can we make that a future we really want?

The progress we've made so far comes from a long history of remarkable human effort and drive. Humans are agents of action. Minute to minute, hour to hour, week to week, we decide, decide, decide, and act, act, act. 

Our cognitive architecture is that of an astonishing prediction-and-decision engine, much of which runs with little notice. We dash across rocks, make coffee, and shuffle papers more or less on autopilot. But when the predictions or the decisions get hard, then suddenly they are at the center of our awareness. This can become very stressful, frightening even.

But it is also when we feel most alive, most interested, most awake. Who wants to read a novel or see a drama in which no character has to make a difficult decision, caught in a dilemma between conflicting desires and with only guesses as to what will come?

Yet humans don't just act and decide and feel. We have also learned to contemplate.

To think and ponder free-style on ideas and truths that may have elegance and beauty but near-zero utility. I'm often amazed that we can do this at all, let alone so well as to conjure an understanding of the metric structure of space-time, or the evolution of the quantum state, or the meaning and generation of entropy.

And we've learned to contemplate in other less intellectual ways. To very simply and purely be. To look ever more closely at our own minds and how they run. To see the minute gradations of our relations with others and with the world.

Like adventures in the physical world, this contemplation of the inner world and the world writ large can be exhilarating and even terrifying. As one's mental picture of the Universe and its operation shifts, reality can swing from being a comforting den to a windswept mountaintop to a dark forest and back again.

But you're made of that very, very special stuff, infinitesimal in the universe, that is able to appreciate this, and to take the adventure. The journey can be exhausting, true, painful, humbling, but I often feel: "What could be better?"

Who am I?
What is this?
Where, from here?

Here's an elusive cosmological koan to beguile you

When I saw a book called Cosmological Koans mentioned in another book I was reading, there was little doubt in my mind that it would be delivered to me by Amazon before too long. And so it came to pass.

Anthony Aguirre is a Professor of Physics at University of California - Santa Cruz. That is so perfect! I can't imagine a more appropriate place for a koan loving, Buddhism inspired, creative writing physicist than UC Santa Cruz. 

(I went to college at San Jose State in the 1960s; Santa Cruz beaches were a favorite spot for LSD trips, along with the mountains separating San Jose from the Pacific coast and Santa Cruz.)

For quite a while I could only read one cosmological koan chapter a day, because each koan stretched my mind so much. Aguirre mixes together science and philosophy in a wholly unique way. It's hard for me to describe this book, other than to say it is like no other.

But when I got to Part 5, "Who Am I? Don't Know!," I found myself in more familiar territory. So I've been reading several cosmological koans a day, eager to get to the final Part 6, "Form is Emptiness; Emptiness is Form."

Below is a passage from the Time and Free Will cosmological koan. You'll see that Aguirre skillfully keeps the reader off balance, as a physicist Zen master would. Just when you think his train of thought is heading in a certain direction, surprise!, it jumps onto another track. 

The two tracks are connected, yet also separate. This makes for provocative reading. Also, frustrating reading, since I have to attend closely to the subtleties of what Aguirre is saying, rather than letting his words wash over me in a free and easy fashion.

I like how Aguirre presents a fresh way of what being in the present is. Basically, there's no such thing. Although in a sense there is. "Now," he says, is the point where uncertainty in the history is the least. 

Brilliant. Along with perfectly obvious. Koan on...

Though the state-based and the history-based descriptions can be mathematically translated into each other, they give quite different feelings, and they relate to different aspects of how we experience the world. 

The state-based view accords with how we experience the present. The world is some way, which we infer from observations. The world's future is tightly connected to its present configuration in ways that are somewhat but not entirely predictable, and the future's unpredictability leads to feelings of both freedom and frustration.

But the past feels more history based: we look back at how things evolved through time, at full trajectories, at seemingly inescapable chains of cause and effect. We may have uncertainty about the past, but feel that the past itself is certain while our knowledge of it is partial.

We might also think of the future in terms of histories, playing our stories in our minds of how things could go. But we generally believe -- or at least act -- as if we are uncertain of the future because the future itself is uncertain, not just our knowledge of it.

The state-based and history-based perspectives also give very different senses of the uncertainties inherent in the "now." 

This uncertainty in the present state gives rise to a sense of "splitting" of the future into many different possibilities: from one uncertain present, many possible futures. Yet from the history-based view, no history starts now; each extends indefinitely forward and back in time. 

The uncertainty in the present is just a particular type of uncertainty in the history. "Now" is, in a sense, the point at which our uncertainty in the history is the least, and it is in the space-time locale at which the different possible histories say very similar things about our observable surroundings.

Our present knowledge thus allows us to select a subset of all possible histories that accord with our present view and knowledge of the world. We call this subset selection "learning about the world"; selecting a smaller and smaller subset means that the present state is more and more precisely specified, which in turn means that we attain greater and greater knowledge. 

Insofar as the two views can be mathematically related, there is no sense in which one is more "right" than the other. However, insofar as they are views of how the world works, we might be led more, or less, astray. 

In particular, we are quite used to thinking of "places" in space, so it is natural to think of "places" in time. And the mathematics of fundamental physics allows us to do this. Yet we also recognize that there are some "things" that have a wholeness that is rather at odds with divvying them up into parts that are here and there.

We recognize that we can't talk about the left-hand side of a thought, or the northern half of a computation, the east end of blueness, or the bottom of a smell.

We also understand that processes unfold in time, and by its very nature a process, which involves time, cannot be happening at an instant any more than an arrow can fly during a moment of zero duration.

Yet we are often tempted to think about things like "your mind now" or "the person up until some point in time." We slice time into past, present, and future as if we might really slice it this way without doing terrible violence; but we can't, any more than we can take a slice out of a person to study the operation of their heart.

If there is no "left side" of a thought, is there really a "beginning" of a thought, or an "end"?

If we don't slice up our minds, if we consider them as just part of a chain of events and outcomes, then look what happens: they become unfettered, extending over great distances in space and time and including books, relations, records, laws, statements, and arguments, as well as neurons.

Much more than they are extended in space, our minds are extended in time, as undivided processes playing out over many timescales. Our mental life is built largely of memory, and we function as intelligences and agents in the world largely through predicting, envisioning, and acting toward the future.

Any amount of introspection will reveal that we tend to spend most of our time in either what was or what might be.

Perhaps we should take this very seriously -- this idea that our very existence is contingent on being extended nonlocally in time. Many of the rather unsettling implications we've explored in Part 5 have hinged on an assumption that there is a state of a mind, a self, a consciousness, as it is right now. 

Could there be something fundamentally wrong with this notion that could extricate us from some of those disturbing directions of thought?

This view is slippery, elusive, and beguiling. 

I'm enjoying my Mendi neurofeedback device

Recently I got the Mendi brain exercise (neurofeedback) device that I'd ordered early last year via a Kickstarter campaign. Repeated delays kept pushing back the estimated time us backers would get our Mendi.

Finally it came, from Sweden. Here I am modeling my Mendi. I took the photo in front of several katana swords and a fan in my office, because the Mendi has a certain Japanese/samurai look to it.

The Mendi web site describes what the device does.

An iPhone app connects with the Mendi via bluetooth. You train your brain by playing a game. You focus on a ball, with the goal to have the ball rise vertically. This video shows an early version of the app. The current version is a bit slicker, but works in the same way.

I've only been using the Mendi for a short time and need to do more exploring with it. This is my initial impression of what works best to get the ball moving upward.

My first try with the Mendi produced a pretty good score. I think this was because I simply focused on the ball and didn't try to make the ball go up.

The next few Mendi sessions didn't go so well, probably because I was trying to get a better score. From what I can tell so far -- and my experience likely is different from other Mendi users -- trying isn't the best way to train the brain.

Not trying is. 

Meaning, I do best when I simply look at the ball with a sense of open curiosity. This is hard to put into words. My best scores come when I'm alert and aware of the ball, yet am looking at it with no motivation to control it, just to observe it.

Which, of course, is what mindfulness is all about: nonjudgemental awareness of what is happening in the present moment. 

I started meditating in 1970 when I was 21. Now I'm 72 and have only missed a day or two of meditation in the past 51 years. So I have a lot of experience with various forms of meditation: mantra, open awareness, mindfulness, counting breaths.

But I've never used a neurofeedback device like Mendi. I'm seeing the benefits of it. When I enter a certain relaxed state of mind, the ball moves upward. If I'm tense or trying too hard, the ball jumps around or goes down.

I'm already able to visualize the ball going up and thereby approach the same state of mind I'm in when using the Mendi device. Can't say my life has markedly changed, just that I see the potential of this form of brain training. 

Here's a screenshot of my most recent session. 

This is what the three scores mean.

The app keeps track of all of your sessions. I was definitely in a zone during the 3-minute session at 8:24 pm yesterday. Focusing on the ball seemed quite effortless. I was sitting on the floor for that session, rather than in a chair.

A few times the app has told me that something was wrong, like I was moving too much (I wasn't) or light was shining directly on my head (yes, I was facing a bright window). It's advised to use the Mendi in a dim room.

This might explain whey I did better when I used my Mendi in the evening when it was almost dark here in Oregon. I also could have been in a more relaxed frame of mind.

Testimonials on the Mendi web site are impressive. But that's to be expected of testimonials on a web site. I'll keep experimenting with the device and report on how that goes in a subsequent blog post. Some early reviews are here, here, and here.

Thanks to Appreciative Reader for defending the scientific worldview

There are three thousand word comments that deserve trashing. Then there are comments of the same length that deserve fervent applause from those of us who respect reality, truth, evidence, reason, and the scientific worldview.

That's why I'm sharing another lengthy comment from "Appreciative Reader" below. 

As you'll see if you read the following comment published on my Why neither unicorns nor God are to be believed in post, Appreciative Reader absolutely demolishes the religious perspective of another commenter, Spence Tepper.

If this were a boxing fight, it'd be called after the second or third round because too much damage is being done to the weaker opponent. 

Or, as Appreciative Reader points out below, the referee would warn Tepper to stop constantly retreating and refusing to engage in a fair fight. I share the frustration of Appreciative Reader, because I frequently encounter the same tactic by religious believers.

You point out the absurdity of a belief. You ask for evidence in support of it. You question why anyone should take that belief seriously when there's no reason to do this. You say that if this religious tenet is to be accepted, then why not accept every other unproven notion offered up by the thousands of world religions.

And the response is... ducking and weaving. Running away. Failing to engage. Spouting nonsense words that mean nothing but are filled with the fire and fury of a threatened religious believer.

So I'm grateful for what Appreciative Reader has done in his repeated attempts to get Tepper, and others, to respond in a reasonable fashion to the nonsensical world view of those who cling to beliefs that have no foundation in reality, yet comfort the believer and so are very difficult for the religious person to give up.

Hey, I've been there and done that. I spent many years, decades actually, clinging to a religious worldview. It met needs that I had at the time, so my mind wouldn't allow me to see the many contradictions, absurdities, and plain weird ideas promulgated by the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

It's a lonely task, doing what Appreciative Reader has done in his comment exchanges with Spence Tepper. Religiosity is the dominant worldview of most people in the world. Science, reason, open debate -- these are under challenge. 

Recently I read that about 50% of people in the United States either believe that President Biden wasn't elected in a free and fair election, and/or believe that Covid vaccines aren't effective. Both beliefs are false. The evidence is overwhelming that Biden won fairly and that Covid vaccines are effective.

Thus the Appreciative Reader - Spence Tepper debate isn't just about religious belief. It also is about the danger of large numbers of people believing stuff that clearly isn't true, going so far as to stage an insurrection at our nation's capitol in an effort to keep Trump as president, and Republicans urging people to not get a Covid vaccine, thereby causing needless illness and death.

Reality is too important to discard. Thank you, Appreciative Reader, for standing up for truth and the scientific worldview. I've been inspired by your comments and I know that others have been also, even if you mostly get responses from religious believers.

Here's the comment from Appreciative Reader.

Spence, I’m sorry to say our discussion has devolved to bizarre levels now. I really hadn’t expected you of all people to descend to desperately clutching at straws in this manner.

You keep ignoring the points I raise, and insist on straddling your soapbox instead. You keep conflating the actual conduct of scientific experiments with a scientific worldview. You keep ignoring the implications of the burden of proof. You betray (or at least, you project) zero understanding of the entire discussion around the functional equivalence of “accepting” and “not-rejecting”.

In discussing the dragon/unicorn thought experiment, you keep repeating you will try to find out more about the beast, despite having been told at the outset that it is impervious to all means of detection available to today’s science and technology; and you keep veering off into non sequiturs, like saying you’ll try to test whether the person making the (dragon/unicorn/religious/mystical) claim is of sound mind.

I don’t see this discussion really going anywhere, what it is doing is lurchingly retracing its own already trod steps, but still, I’ll try to address here, in one single post, the issues you raise in your last three or four posts that you addressed to me. The result is likely to be a lengthy post, I’m afraid, and so as not to make it even longer I’ll simply title out the main themes that you’ve written on (and that I’ll respond to), rather than actually quoting your words.

DISPROVING SPECIFIC GOD IDEAS : YOUR CHALLENGE

This is the part that I find truly bizarre. The part where you keep insisting, in the face of all rationality and reason, that no god ideas have ever been disproved by science, despite clear instances of such having been promptly presented.

Recall two of the most conspicuous contortions you had to resort to in the course of your last few comments.

First, when in response to your challenge I presented you with two specific examples of God ideas having been disproven, you turned around to demand of me how I know those are real Gods. Can you really, even now, not see the absurdity of even asking that question?

Some theist has presented very specific God ideas, and I have shown how a scientific worldview clearly refutes those ideas; whereupon what do you do? You demand of ME how I can be sure those are valid God ideas!! (And, when the entirely bizarre nature of the thought process that can think up this objection is pointed out to you, what do you do? You simply ignore it, and move on to talk of other things.)

And second, you then do the typical goalpost-shifting thing that theists seem to specialize in.

I’m going to address your “challenge” one more time now. Despite the fact that I’ve done it twice already, and despite having little real hope of piercing through any better this time. (And all we have on wager is your clear admission that your challenge has been met.)

ONE: The thurder-and-lightning producing Gods, Thor, and Odin, and Zeus, and Indra, and Varun, and whoever and whatever else that specializes in this superpower. Modern science has shown us the exact mechanism of these phenomena, and that mechanism has no need at all for any God entities.

(That is, to spell it out, we have no need to resort to hypothesize Gods in order to understand those phenomena as well as we do, ergo following Occam's Razor we have no need to posit any Gods, and we can safely not accept, or reject, the God hypothesis as superfluous and unnecessary in respect of those specific phenomena, and therefore those specific Gods.)

Further, we do have a means of directly falsifying the god claim as well. Believers in these Gods claimed that propitiating them by praying to them and sacrificing to them can help turn these elements in one’s favor, and angering them attracts their wrath.

No one does that these days, and yet we are not visited by some terrible wrath of these Gods, as represented by these elements wreaking some terrible disaster on us. To not see this as debunking is, I’m sorry to say, to harbor, despite an education in science, a decidedly irrational and anti-scientific worldview.

TWO: The God of the Bible, that people did believe in literally in vast numbers in times past, and in not negligible numbers even today. Showing that the creation myth presented in the Bible is erroneous, by showing that the mechanism of how the universe arose has no need of invoking a God, is enough to debunk this claim. Directly showing that the age of the universe is far older than claimed by the alleged Word of God, as recorded in the Bible, is direct falsification as well.

THREE: The sun-god in Norse legends that is driven in a chariot by two horses (or, in other versions, by one horse, whatever). As well as the sun-god of the Aztecs, that, unless propitiated with human sacrifice, will not appear to us again and will abandon us to eternal darkness and death. The "how" of the sun apparently going around the earth has been explained clearly enough by science, and none of that has need to invoke either Gods or chariots or horses.

And the claim has been directly falsified as well, because no one sacrifices human hearts to the sun-god any more, and yet the sun rises in the east every single day..

Spence, you aren’t by any chance spoofing me, are you? Pulling my leg, playing a trick on me, by putting me in the distinctly ridiculous position of solemnly holding forth on these elementary things in all earnest like this? If that is the case, then I applaud you, because you did take me in completely so far, and even now I have no more than a very tentative suspicion that your arguments might be no more than a practical joke. So that if the idea was to play a practical joke on me, you’ve been entirely successful.

To claim in all seriousness that your challenge hasn’t been met, despite these clear examples having been presented (and plenty more can easily be thought of), is to either be completely oblivious of the implications of a scientific worldview, or, if that is not the case, then it is to be literally delusional. Unless of course this is all a joke.

In claiming that your challenge hasn't been met satisfactorily, the arguments you employ are the equivalent of asserting that science cannot debunk the claim that the moon is made of cheese. Sure, you won’t find actual peer-reviewed papers, describing elaborate experiments conducted, that clearly tell you that the moon isn’t made of cheese.

But to latch on to that as some kind of justification for a worldview that claims that science does not directly refute clearly and DEMONSTRABLY absurd claims like that the moon is made of cheese (or that the sun is drawn around the earth by horses, and will abandon us unless we sacrifice to it; or that lightning and storms are caused by gods who will wreak destruction on us unless they are propitiated; or that the world was created six thousand years ago by a psychotic but immensely powerful god that will annihilate us and/or consign us to hell if we don’t abide by his commandments and his prophets’ and son’s instructions) is to have simply seen and maybe even to have participated in science, but to have come away with no more than a cargo-cult impression of what science actually is and what a scientific worldview actually entails.

WHAT YOU SEE AS THE FUNDAMENTAL FLAWS IN ATHEISM (OR AT LEAST, IN THIS PARTICULAR VERSION OF ATHEISM)

Let me quote you first on this, before likewise enumerating my response :

“Here is the fundamental flaw. I'll state it in three ways.
1. What science hasn't tested science cannot comment upon.
2. Evidence that has not been gathered is not non-existent.
3. The unknown is not non - existent. It is the basis of scientific inquiry.”

(1.) “Science” does not comment on anything. People do.

The scientific method is a tool that people use to suss out what is reasonable to believe, and what not. Thereafter, it is people who arrive at positions on different claims and issues.

We’ve been through this already, the difference between the scientific method and a scientific worldview. You’ve ignored that last discussion, and gone on with your inner monologue without referencing our past discussion on this.

To imagine that a scientific worldview entails referencing the scientific method only in such instances where there has been some formal scientific study, and in everything else either believing any random thing that one likes, or else not taking any position at all, is to arrive at some cargo-cult version of “science”.

The core of the scientific method is that one will not accept any hypothesis that one cannot back up with evidence. Any position --- and that includes the God question as well (or at least, some versions of it, that is to say, some specific abstract God-ideas) --- that cannot admit of direct evidence, it is simply not “scientific” to believe at all.

It is not that no evidence equals we have carte blanche to believe whatever we want, or that we must necessarily suspend any conclusion at all (which suspension of all conclusion is in practice sometimes/often simply not even feasible, in any case). It is that no evidence equals we have no reason to hold that position as true, no reason to accept it.

(2) “Evidence” refers to some support for some proposition or some hypothesis. Therefore, if evidence has not been “gathered”, it is literally not evidence at all.

Sure, whether we self-important humans catalog something or cogitate on something does not in any way impact the underlying reality. That is understood, obviously. Not once have I suggested otherwise.

The point is, in as much as evidence has not been “gathered”, it may perhaps exist, but in as much as we do not yet know of it, it is entirely and wholly fallacious to base any conclusion on such evidence. In as much as some conclusion that you seek to support via such not-yet-gathered evidence is fallacious, such conclusion we are constrained to not accept, that is to say, we reject such conclusion.

This is entirely straightforward. And your views on this are entirely mistaken.

(3) Similar to above. Agreed, the unknown is not non-existent, and, rather than saying “it is the basis of scientific enquiry”, I think it may be more precise to phrase it thus, “It can be the basis of scientific enquiry if we should choose to make it so.”

Anyway, minor nitpicking aside, I have not once suggested otherwise. But the question isn’t what does exist; the question is what do we believe, what belief or claim do we accept. If something is unknown then we can’t go around believing random things about it.

(Which, mind you, is what you are doing. You’re claiming there are no grounds to do science on God. And you take that as carte blanche to go ahead and believe in God --- which you have every right to --- but where you err is in claiming that such an attitude comports with a scientific worldview. The fact is it doesn’t.)

Nor is it that what is technically unknown, as far as formal science, we will necessarily suspend all judgment on. That science hasn’t explicitly considered and tested whether the moon is made of cheese, or whether the sun is drawn by horses around the earth, or whether the sun will not rise unless propitiated with sacrifice, does not mean that we will necessarily suspend all judgment on such.

(And I don’t mean idiosyncratic personal judgment, I mean a conclusion that comports with a scientific worldview.)

We know the approximate composition of the moon, so we can certainly conclude that it isn’t made of cheese. And what is more such conclusion will be fully in agreement with a scientific worldview, even though there are no papers published specifically on the subject, “Is the moon made of cheese?” Ditto questions about whether the sun is a God that is drawn by horses around the sun, or whether the universe was created by a psychotic and decidedly unpleasant God six thousand years ago.

Those aren’t flaws in atheism, as you claim they are. They are flaws in your reasoning and your own POV.

YOUR POST ON THE FUNCTIONAL EQUIVALENCE OF “NOT ACCEPTING” VIS-À-VIS REJECTING A CLAIM

What you argue here is no more than yet more contortions, Spence.

That the hypothesis is not accepted (and, for that matter, not rejected either) by the people carrying on the experiment and for the duration of the experiment and analysis, that hardly needs pointing out. In any case, it *has* already been pointed out, more than once, in a separate context, which would be the context of distinguishing between the POV appropriate to the scientist researching some specific hypothesis, vis-à-vis the POV appropriate for everyone else. That is an out and out non sequitur as far as this particular discussion.

Should the experiment not bear the results the hypothesis predicts, then in the setting aside of the hypothesis there is no universal distinction between “not accepting” and “rejecting”, as you suggest. To speak of this in the context that you do is to not understand what was said at all, not even a little bit (hint, repeated for the third or fourth time already: refer back to Osho Robbins’s analogy of “Not guilty” vis-à-vis “Innocent”); or else it is to resort to deliberate disingenuity.

Here’s a concrete example that will make the distinction clear, using the overtly formal scientific setting that you seem to imagine imparts some especial sanctity that everyday examples don’t.

(It doesn’t, actually, and everyday examples are equally as effective, provided you grok the actual underlying implications of the scientific method. Nevertheless, I’ll try to accommodate your apparent fetish for examples from formal science.)

Contrast the Ether theory with the String Theory. The former is an example of a hypothesis rejected, while the latter is an example of a hypothesis not (yet) accepted. The experimental results in the case of the former clearly refuted the prediction that the ether theory had thrown up. It clearly showed that, rather than there showing up a difference in the speed of light, instead the speed of light remained the same.

That is direct refutation, leading to rejection. As far as the latter, there has been no direct refutation, at all, so far. But nor has there been any evidence that bears it out, no evidence that justifies bypassing Occam’s Razor. In as much as no evidence has been found, the theory is not accepted.

(Disclaimer: This example focuses only on the difference between “not accepting” and “rejecting”, and not on the actual promise that string theory holds out, or the fact that people are still working on string theory while no one works on ether theory. Don’t focus on that part of it, I clearly recognize that in that specific respect this analogy/example is imperfect. That string theory is not, as a result of yielding no evidence, tossed right out the window as the ether theory has been, is because it is early days still, and because it otherwise explains our observations so very completely. No doubt if in another fifty or seventy years string theory still does not bear out any evidence [that isn’t explained equally well by other, simpler hypotheses], so as to justify its far more complex structure, then it might be relegated to the museum or the trashcan as well, conceivably.)

Come on, man. Do I really need to spell this out like this all over again in words of one syllable? Have my many posts on this, already presented in this thread, as well as the many discussions elsewhere (including one whole thread we’d both participated in that was on this very subject) not made the distinction between the two amply clear, that you should compose the post you did just preceding, that betrays zero understanding of the difference between the two (and indeed between soft atheism and hard atheism)?

You know what it looks like to me? You’re not actually reading my posts. You’re basically focused on your soapboxing, while going through the motions of responding to my posts, all with the aim of somehow passing off your theistic worldview as somehow not anti-scientific.

Otherwise you wouldn’t so blatantly misread and/or misrepresent this part so completely so late into this discussion; and you wouldn’t keep on repeatedly and totally missing the point of the unicorn/dragon thought experiment (and keep raising tangential non sequiturs around it rather than actually addressing the meat of the argument presented via that construct); and you wouldn’t keep raising these wild objections to these very obvious and simplistic God-ideas having been clearly debunked by science (even as some more subtle God-ideas admittedly remain beyond the reach of such easy and direct debunking).

Apologies, Spence, if some of what I’ve said here seems rude. I really truly hope this thread will not sour the general regard we have for each other.

But … how do you even begin to hold a coherent conversation with someone who insists, in the teeth of all reasonable argument, that such blatant irrationalities like the Olympian Gods and the Aztec Sun God and Biblical God and the Norse Gods as literally depicted --- as well as, presumably, the moon made of cheese --- are not ruled out by a scientific worldview?

With someone who, at the end of a detailed discussion (indeed, more than one detailed discussion) around “rejecting” and “not accepting” (and soft atheism and hard atheism) comes out with an elaborate post that betrays either zero understanding of what was being said all along, either that or else it deliberately seeks to misdirect?

I’m going to walk away now from this discussion, but without the hope that I’d held yesterday of arriving in future at closer agreement and better understanding, because how on earth do you even address this bizarre state of affairs, where on one hand there is familiarity with (some of) the techniques of science, but on the other hand there is complete cluelessness as to its implications?

And I’m going to walk away more resolutely this time than I was able to yesterday, because although it started out promisingly enough, what this discussion has now devolved into is an apparently endless exchange of comments that is neither illuminating nor, at this point, particularly pleasurable. Again, my apologies.

Why neither unicorns nor God are to be believed in

Once again, I'm sharing a marvelous comment from "Appreciative Reader" on a recent post of mine.

I especially liked the Shadowfax part near the end. Shadowfax is an invisible unicorn impervious to detection by all means, yet lives in Appreciative Reader's spare garage.

Or at least, this is what Appreciative Reader claims. 

Should other people assign Shadowfax a 50-50 probability of actually existing? Of course not. They should consider that perhaps one day there will be evidence of Shadowfax, since anything is possible.

But until that day arrives, there's no reason to believe in this invisible unicorn. Just as there's no reason to believe in God, since there's exactly as much demonstrable evidence of God's existence as there is of Shadowfax's existence.

The difference between them, of course, is that billions of people believe in God, while only Appreciative Reader believes in Shadowfax -- and only to make a point about the scientific approach to understanding reality.

Here's the comment.

"Can we agree that personal choices, personal logic may be our best effort to be scientific, but do not actually constitute actual objective science?"

.......Sure, Spence. But with the qualification that that personal choice isn't a free-for-all, but follows the broad guidelines of what I'd referred to as a scientific worldview.

That is, to describe that worldview as an agglomeration of essentially personal choices is to add precision to what I'd earlier on termed "scientific worldview", but is not to actually change what that actually amounts to.

In other words, to state that this is a personal worldview, is not to let open the floodgates to accepting whatever some individual person happens to find likely or reasonable, not unless they can rationally defend it with reference to the scientific method and per the terms we've already discussed.

With those qualifications, sure, absolutely, agreed to that much.

But I was hoping for broader agreement than just that much. Let me have one more go at trying to arrive at it.

Following on what I'd just said, in my comment above, Spence, let me quote, and comment on, what you'd said in your previous post:

"... to claim science hasn't proved God exists and therefore God doesn't exist is a false statement."

To recognize that science hasn't proved God exists, and therefore, for all practical purposes, to hold that God doesn't exist, is the rational worldview that is in keeping with a scientific outlook.

Happy now, with that rephrasing? And taken in conjunction with my last two comments addressed to you, do you, finally, agree with my larger point?

For perspective, let me introduce you to Shadowfax.

There is, beyond my front garden, a spare garage that now is a store (a dump, more like) for sundry gardening equipment and supplies.

I claim that that garage houses a unicorn. A real unicorn. His name is Shadowfax.

Except he is invisible, and impervious to detection by all means, all technology, that are thus far known to man. Might some means be invented to detect Shadowfax in future? One day, maybe, why not? But not so far.

So what are you to make of this unicorn? Your science has no means to return a clear resounding “No” when asked if this unicorn exists. And of course, a “Yes” answer is out of the question too.

So then will you spend your days honestly believing that perhaps in Appreciative Reader’s garden there lives a unicorn, maybe yes, maybe no, with more or less equal probability of either?

That’s patently ridiculous, that approach.

If in the years to come science does come up with some means to show you that that unicorn is in fact real, then you will certainly start believing in it. But until then, it makes sense to simply reject the claim of the existence of that unicorn.

That, in brief, is what soft atheism is all about. That is the sane approach to arriving at a scientific worldview.

Otherwise you’ll spend your days half-sure and half-unsure about the existence of Olympus and the gaggle of gods and half-gods of ancient Greece, and of Shangri-La and Tibetan mystics with what are effectively superpowers, and of the literal rendering of all the tall tales in the Bible, and of the Hindu pantheon, and the (Vajrayana) Buddhist deities, and the Yeti and the bigfoot, and the Loch Ness monster, the world as simulation, the world as projection of a brain in a vat, in fact any and every fanciful concoction of man’s fertile brain that hasn’t explicitly and directly been ruled out by science so far (and indeed even such things as science has actually rejected, because after all such rejection is tentative and may yet, in future, be reversed, given adequate evidence).

Shh, quiet now. Yes, Shadowfax? Oh, ok, I'll ask him.

Spence, Shadowfax instructs me to ask you if his refulgent being has impressed you with the splendor and the simplicity that is the scientific worldview.

(Which is the short form for "the personal worldview that is appropriate for the individual, arrived at basis regard for the scientific method as *the* most efficacious means devised thus far for arriving at the truth".)

What should I tell him?

Science embraces the unknown, but wants evidence of it

I'm a huge fan of the comments "Appreciative Reader" leaves on my blog posts. Which means, I agree with almost everything this person says.

I only wish that I could express myself as clearly and reasonably as Appreciative Reader does. He writes so expertly, I enjoy sharing his top performing comments in a blog post.

That's what I've done here. 

I don't mean to disparage the views expressed by other commenters. No doubt some other people would find their arguments more impressive than Appreciative Reader's -- because they resonate more with the mystical/religious worldview of some of the other commenters.

I just find Appreciative Reader's description below of how science looks upon the unknown to be right-on. Scientists absolutely love the unknown.

That's what powers science: a passion to find new knowledge by expanding the borders of the known.

But here's the thing. As Appreciative Reader argues, it isn't possible to specify what lies in unknown territory. If that could be done, some of the unknown would have become known. 

We can speculate and hypothesize about what lies in the darkness beyond the light of knowledge.

However, until that light illuminates a previously unknown entity, which enables people to assess the evidence for that thing and possibly admit it into the realm of the known, it makes no sense to speak of what's unknown as if it were demonstrably real.

Sure, God could exist. Sure, consciousness could exist apart from the brain. Sure, life after death could be true. These and many other "could's" are speculations that can't be accepted as fact until there's good reason to do so.

That doesn't stop individuals from claiming to have an experience of something unknown. It just prevents science-minded people from accepting those claims as being anything other than a personal experience. People claim all sorts of things that are highly unlikely, like alien abductions.

Saying so doesn't make it so. Evidence makes it so. Here's Appreciative Reader's comment.

Hello, Spence.

In your last two comments you quoted these words of mine, ""Until such time, as we do know such exists substantially, we'll treat is as not existing. Be it consciousness, or be it fairies."

And you started out your comments with these words, developing this theme further in the rest of your two comments addressed to me :

Quoting you this time: "That system of belief would put an end to all science. Science is based on exactly the opposite. That the unknown exist, and that to understand reality we must investigate and learn. Many things do exist that are unknown. Your statement is tantamount to claiming the unknown doesn't exist."
-------
This is exactly the kind of apparent ignorance about the nature and the implications of the scientific method that I'd spoken of on the other thread, that one sometimes comes across from people one would certainly expect to know better.

Not only that, this entirely misrepresents my own words, part of which you'd yourself quoted, to attempt to argue against a blatantly strawman version of my comments. The whys and the wherefores of this I'd rather not get into, but the 'what' of it is incontrovertible.
-------
The latter portion of what I've just now said, first, as that is so much easier to establish.

Here's what I'd said in my own comment, that you've quoted from (and I quote these extracts verbatim):

"This isn't in any way to shut oneself off from the possibility of what might be. Nor is it to shut oneself into unreasonable closed-minded certainty that nothing beyond what is known might ever be known. All the possibilities of Mystery, with a capital M, are acknowledged, and indeed honored. But not accepted, until one has reason to."

"Nor does it stop one from performing one's own researches. Into science, or into technology. Into fairies, on into mystic realities. Into whatever appears promising to one, into whatever appeals to one."

"I don't see we can do any more than accept things as they are. Which does not stop us from striving to find out more, in such ways as we are able and willing."

It is astonishing that you should apparently parse the above so as to conclude, as you do here, that "That system of belief would put an end to all science. ... Science is based on exactly the opposite. That the unknown exist, and that to understand reality we must investigate and learn. ... Many things do exist that are unknown. Your statement is tantamount to claiming the unknown doesn't exist." (etc)

You've read exactly the opposite of what I'd very clearly said in my post. I wonder why that is?
-------
Moving beyond these I-said-you-said inconsequentialities, let us turn to the more consequential part of your comment, that betrays a confusion about the implications of the scientific method, that is surprising coming from you.

Cue, at this time, Carl Sagan: “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” Because what you're advocating here is clearly the equivalent of having one's brains fall right out.

There are many things we don't know. The domain of what we don't know is far more vast, infinitely more vast, than what we do know. Further, what little we do know is tentative, and always subject to correction in future. But what are the implications of this?

It is reasonable to accept and treat as known what we do know thus far, no far how little and no far how tentative. The rest it is reasonable to reject.

And to reject something is neither to claim that it shall forever remain rejected, nor to turn away from exploration of it; to reject some hypothesis is no more than to not accept such at this time, and such rejection is always tentative and always subject to correction in future.

Like I'd said in the other thread, it is surprising that this obvious thing should need to be spelt out in this manner to those whom one would have expected would know better.

Let's take an actual example to make this clear.

There's this real-life hypothesis that our universe is a simulation. We don't know enough to incontrovertibly reject the hypothesis. Indeed there are actual physicists who are researching this very issue. But as far as actually accepting this claim, what is the reasonable stance?

The reasonable thing to do is to not accept this hypothesis, for now, to clearly reject this hypothesis, for now. Such rejection is not to say that one will not research this subject, nor to claim that one has shut oneself off from ever accepting this hypothesis; it is only to state that one does not have justification, at this time, to rationally accept this hypothesis.

For all practical everyday purposes, one rejects this hypothesis. (To emphasize again, that does not preclude people who are interested in the subject from exploring and researching it further.)

Thus with consciousness and mystical realities and the God question, which is clearly what this discussion is all about at bottom. Until the day we have reasonable rational grounds to accept such, we will not accept such. That is a perfectly sound position.

That does not stop us from speculating. Nor does that stop us from actually exploring and researching the issue. That also does not stop us from realizing the essentially tentative nature of our rejection --- which tentativeness is an intrinsic part of the scientific worldview --- and it does not stop us from promptly changing our mind in future should circumstances so warrant.

To see in this clearly stated position the antithesis of science, as you do, is to completely misunderstand one's clearly written words, as well as to profoundly misunderstand the nature of a scientific worldview.

Why should anyone else believe what you believe?

Well, the responses I got to my previous post, "Objective reality is validated by the reality-based community," were underwhelming. 

Not really surprising, since I said:

The question I'd pose to those who hold a mystical, religious, or intuitive view of reality is this: what alternative to Rauch's approach below do you suggest for determining the nature of objective reality?

Meaning, it is easy to criticize reason, rationality, facts, science, open discussion, criticism of propositions about reality, and such. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a better approach than the Constitution of Knowledge.

Read what follows.

Then, if you disagree with some of what Rausch says below, leave a comment on this post describing the nature of your disagreement. Others can then submit their own ideas. This is how knowledge is gained: by a reality-based community willing to engage in the social pursuit of truth.

No one could suggest a better approach for gaining knowledge than a reality-based community willing to engage in the social pursuit of truth.

So in this post I'm going to take a different approach, with the goal of convincing those who hold a mystical, religious, or intuitive perspective that there isn't any other valid means of gaining knowledge of objective reality.

Note that I said "objective reality." Obviously we all gain knowledge of subjective reality just by being ourselves. Every experience each of us has is subjective, since it isn't evident to other people.

There's no way anyone can put a thought, emotion, perception, or any other content of consciousness on a table and say, See, this is my experience.

Thus a basic assumption here is that there are almost eight billion subjective human realities, one for each person on Earth. Yet there is only one objective shared reality. Rausch writes:

The main idea of the Constitution of Knowledge, as we have seen, is that reality is what we know, not what you or I know. No purely personal belief can be knowledge, no matter how much merit you or I might think it possesses.

...A corollary is that members of the reality-based community accept that, despite their diversity, they are all exploring aspects of one reality. The Constitution of Knowledge does not require them to see the world the same way or to agree on facts.

In fact, it only works where people see the world differently and disagree on facts, so that they can test their ideas and surmount their biases.

Its unique capacity, however, is to force individual differences toward social convergence. It does so by requiring persuasion, which in turn requires that we try to account for our differences by comparing them.

Science has made astounding progress in the past several hundred years by doing just that. By and large, scientists the world over agree on the knowledge gained from the scientific aspect of the reality-based community.

By contrast, religious believers and mystics have made essentially zero progress in arriving at a common spiritual knowledge. The same questions are being debated today as were being debated hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Why? One obvious reason is that there's no persuasive evidence that a supernatural realm exists. Thus there's no way to test propositions about what that realm consists of, since almost certainly it exists only in the subjective minds of individuals.

Consider the religious belief system that I used to accept, that of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a form of Sant Mat, an India-based religiosity that claims Perfect Living Masters can guide their disciples back to God by connecting them to the shabd, or Sound Current, the power that activates the cosmos.

That'd be amazing if it was true. But how would it be possible to determine the truth of RSSB or Sant Mat?

It can't be by accepting someone's claim that they're experienced divine light and sound. Hallucinations of that sort are commonplace. Psychedelic drugs can produce those phenomena. People can be mistaken. People can lie. People can fool themselves.

No matter how strongly someone believes in a religious, mystical, or supernatural tenet -- whether this belief is held by a small number or billions -- the question remains, Why should anyone else believe what you believe?

Christians believe Jesus is the Son of God. Muslims believe there is no God but God and Muhammed is His prophet. Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, plus adherents of thousands of other religions all have their own unique beliefs.

Atheists and agnostics are skeptical about all of those beliefs. For good reason, because there is no reality-based community in the realm of the supernatural. Again, almost certainly this is because that reality doesn't exist.

Yet suppose you're someone who has had such a profound experience of a supernatural reality that you feel the need to speak your truth to others? (A number of those someone's leave comments on this blog.)

Again, why should I or anyone else believe you? 

It can't be because you've done the experiment of meditation, or whatever you want to call it, and the rest of us haven't. I haven't done any quantum mechanics experiments nor genetics experiments, but I accept the scientific knowledge in these areas.

I do so because there is a reality-based community -- researchers, journals, conferences, peer review, universities, government agencies, science writers, etc. -- that's skilled at assessing the validity of scientific propositions.

If a single scientist claims this or that is true, no one should believe them. Yet if their claim survives careful scrutiny by the reality-based community, there's good reason to believe them. At least until the claim is debunked.

With religious and mystical claims about the supernatural, so far none have become validated knowledge. 

Not miracles. Not ESP. Not life after death. Not astral projection. After thousands of years of attempts by humans to find proof of the supernatural, there's so little to show for this search, we might as well round it off to zero. 

The reason is that what Rausch says in his book is correct. 

By extension, the empirical rule also dictates what does not account as checking: claims to authority by dint of a personally or tribally privileged perspective. In principle, persons and groups are interchangeable. 

If I claim access to divine revelation, or if I claim the support of miracles which only believers can witness, or if I claim that my class or race or historically dominant status or historically oppressed status allows me to know and say things which others cannot, then I am breaking the empirical rule by exempting my views from contestability by others

...You have to check your own claims and subject them to contestation from others; you have to tolerate the competing claims of others; you have to accept that your own certainty counts for nothing; you have to forswear claiming that your god, your experience, your intuition, or your group is epistemically privileged; you have to defend the exclusive legitimacy of liberal science even (in fact, especially) when you think it is wrong or unfair.

Each of us isn't a thing, but a web of connections

Before moving on to subjects other than quantum theory, which I've written about here and here recently, I want to talk in my own words regarding what I like about Carlo Rovelli's book, "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution." 

The previous posts consisted mostly of excerpts from the book. So here's my attempt to describe what appealed to me the most about Helgoland. (That's an island in the North Sea where Heisenberg came up with his key concepts about the quantum world.)

Rovelli is an exceptionally clear writer. He also has a poetic sense that isn't unique among physicists, but is uncommonly well developed in Rovelli. This book deals with notions that never made much sense to me, yet I largely accepted given that the ideas are embraced by so many experts in quantum theory.

For example, the idea that an observation by human consciousness brings a certain quantum reality into being. As Rovelli notes, galaxies billions of light years away obey the laws of quantum physics, as does everything else in the universe.

Consciousness doesn't exist everywhere, unless we assume that everything in existence possesses at least a minute form of proto-consciousness. 

Ah, but if that is true, then there's no need to bring in human consciousness as the means by which the probabilistic nature of quantum equations, involving various possibilities, "collapse" down to a single outcome when an observation of an electron, photon, or whatever occurs.

The Many Worlds approach to quantum theory deals with the observation problem by positing that all possible outcomes of an observation occur, with reality splitting into an infinity of worlds at every instant, of which we inhabit only one of them.

The relational approach to quantum theory makes much more sense. Both the quantum world and the world familiar to us aren't made up of things, but of connections, of relationships. 

Not family relationships, of course. Something much more general.

As I stare at my computer screen, there's a dance going on between the photons striking my eye, the pixels of the screen, vision processing centers in my brain, and more besides. Our dog would see something different. As would a snake. Or a bat.

I like how Rovelli says that there is no such thing as an outside perspective on the world or universe. It's all 100% inside, in two senses. 

First, there's no way we can get outside of the universe, of everything that exists (some call this the cosmos). We humans, along with everything else, are part of the universe. We aren't experiencing the universe. One aspect of the universe is experiencing another aspect.

Or we can say, "The universe is experiencing itself." 

Most books about quantum physics don't include a mention of Nagarjuna, the Buddhist thinker. But Rovelli's book does.

It isn't that Nagarjuna had a mystical insight into the nature of quantum reality. Rather, Rovelli says that ancient texts should be read not from the perspective of what the author initially intended to say, but how the work speaks to us today.

Rovelli writes that the central thesis of Nagarjuna is there is nothing that exists in itself independently from something else. Thus Buddhism fits in nicely with the relational approach to quantum physics.

Buddhism evolved in part as a reaction to Hinduism, which assumes the existence of soul, Atman, that is an aspect of God, Brahman. Buddhism denies that anything is eternal or unchanging, including ourselves, or our self. 

So from the most minute subatomic particle to the grandest expanse of galaxies, with us humans occupying a middle ground, size-wise, relations are what reality is all about, not things. 

We're alive because of our relationships with air, water, food, sunlight, other people, bacteria, cells, neurons, and everything else that makes it possible for us to be born, live, and yes, die.

The good news is, from the relational view of Rovelli's take on quantum physics and Buddhism, we never exist as a separate and distinct entity, so when we die, it is the relations that cease to exist. In a very real sense, each of us has never existed as the "I" we generally take ourselves to be.

The bad news is, there's nothing that can live on after the relations which sustain life are broken. But this is just reality speaking, and I don't see reality as dealing in good news and bad news. It simply is what it is.

Over and over in his book, Rovelli says that we need to embrace the idea that reality may be very different from how we currently consider it to be. This is how science is so successful: scientists do their best to understand reality as it actually is, even if that understanding is uncomfortable or surprising. 

On his third page, in a section called Looking Into the Abyss, Rovelli writes:

But this is what science is all about: exploring new ways of conceptualizing the world. At times, radically new. It is the capacity to constantly call our concepts into question. The visionary force of a rebellious, critical spirit, capable of modifying its own conceptual basis, capable of redesigning our world from scratch.

I love those words.

Mind and consciousness through the eye of quantum physics

Here's additional excerpts from physicist Carlo Rovelli's wonderful new book, "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution." (See here for my first post about the book.)

The passages below are from final chapters where Rovelli focuses on the nature of mind and consciousness in light of quantum physics. 

Rovelli's take on this subject is very much in line with a post I wrote in 2018, "Awareness is a process, not a thing." 

Consciousness isn't a thing. It is a process. Thinking of it as a thing makes us wonder what kind of a thing it is, whereas we should be asking, what sorts of processes and interactions give rise to consciousness?

Hope you enjoy these words from Rovelli as much as I do.

If the fine grain of the world is made of material particles that have just mass and motion, it seems difficult to reconstruct our perceiving and thinking complexity from this amorphous grain.

But if the fine grain of the world is better described in terms of relations, if nothing has intrinsic properties except in relation to other things, perhaps in this physics we can better find elements able to combine in a comprehensible way, to be the basis of those complex phenomena that we call our perceptions and our consciousness.

If the physical world is woven from the subtle interplay of images in mirrors reflected in other mirrors, without the metaphysical foundation of a material substance, perhaps it becomes easier to recognize ourselves as part of that whole.

...But there is no need to attribute photo-consciousness to elementary systems in order to get around a frozen "simple matter." It is enough to have observed how the world is better described by relative variables and their correlations.

This allows us to be released from the prison of a blunt opposition between the objectivity of matter and mental life. The rigid distinction between a mental world and a physical one fades. It is possible to think of both mental and physical phenomena as natural phenomena: both products of interactions between parts of the physical world.

...If the world consists of relations, then no description is from outside it. The descriptions of the world are, in the ultimate analysis, all from inside. They are all in the first person. 

Our perspective on the world, our point of view, being situated inside the world (our "situated self," as Jenann Ismael beautifully puts it), is not special: it rests on the same logic on which quantum physics, hence all of physics, is based.

If we imagine the totality of things, we are imagining being outside the universe, looking at it from out there. But there is no "outside" to the totality of things. The external point of view is a point of view that does not exist. Every description of the world is from inside it.

The externally observed world does not exist; what exists are only internal perspectives on the world which are partial and reflect one another. This world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives. 

...I think that when we wonder about the relationship between the "I" and "matter," we are using two concepts that are both confused and misleading, and this is the origin of the confusion surrounding the questions about the nature of consciousness. 

Who is the "I" that has the sensation of feeling, if not the integrated set of our mental processes? We have an intuition of unity when we think about ourselves, but this is justified by the integration of our body and by the ways our mental processes work, of which the part we call conscious does one thing at a time.

The first term of the problem, the "I," is the residue of a metaphysical error: the result of the common mistake of mistaking a process for an entity.

...To ask what consciousness is, after having unraveled the neural processes, is like asking what a storm is after having understood its physics: it is a question that makes no sense. To add in a "possessor" of sensations is like adding Jove to the phenomenon of the thunderstorm.

It is like saying, after having understood the physics of the storm, that there still remains, as Chalmers would put it, the "hard problem" of connecting it with the anger of Jove.

It is true that we have the "intuition"of an independent entity that is the "I." But we also had the "intuition" that behind a storm there was Jove. And that the Earth was flat. It is not through uncritical "intuitions" that we construct an effective comprehension of reality.

Introspection is the worst instrument of inquiry if we are interested in the nature of mind: it is tantamount to looking for our own prejudices and wallowing in them.

Even worse is the the second term of the question, "matter." It is, as well, the residue of an incorrect metaphysics based on too naive a conception of matter as a universal substance defined only by mass and motion. This is erroneous metaphysics because it is contradicted by quantum physics. 

If we think in terms of processes, events, in terms of relative properties, of a world of relations, the hiatus between physical phenomena and mental phenomena is much less dramatic. It becomes possible to see both as natural phenomena generated by complex structures of interactions. 

...The best description of reality that we have found is in terms of events that weave a web of interactions. "Entities" are nothing other than ephemeral nodes in this web. Their properties are not determined until the moment of these interactions; they exist only in relation to something else. Everything is what it is only with respect to something else.

Every vision is partial. There is no way of seeing reality that is not dependent on a perspective -- no point of view that is absolute and universal. 

...Every time that something solid is put into doubt or dismantled, something else opens up and allows us to see further than we could before. Watching what appears to be as solid as rock melt into air makes lighter, it seems to me, the transitory and bittersweet flowing of our lives.

The interconnectedness of things, the reflection of one in another, shines with a clear light that the coldness of eighteenth-century mechanisms could not capture.

Even if it leaves us astonished. Even if it leaves us with a profound sense of mystery.

Relational view of quantum theory reeks of truth

If you're into quantum physics, prepare to have your mind blown. Well, whether or not you're into quantum physics, prepare to have your mind blown.

At least a little bit. Because below I've shared an excerpt from physicist Carlo Rovelli's amazing new book, "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution." 

The excerpt doesn't do justice to the entire book, but it will give you a feel for Rovelli's relational take on quantum physics -- which makes so much sense, it's hard to understand how anyone could disagree with it (though I'm sure many do).

I'll have more to say about the book in additional blog posts. I wanted to share this lengthy excerpt to provide a foundation for those other posts, one of which will be about how Rovelli finds echoes of the Buddhist thinker Nagarjuna in quantum physics. 

I've read many books about quantum physics. Rovelli presents a way of looking at quantum phenomena that's so compellingly clear, those other books seem confusing by comparison. Every sentence of what follows has a lot of meaning, so read it slowly.

In a physics laboratory, where we study a small object such as an atom or a photon of Zeilinger's lasers, it is clear who the observer is: it is the scientist who prepares, observes, and measures the quantum object, who deploys their instruments of measurement, detecting the light emitted from the atom or the place where the photons arrive.

But the vast world is not made up of scientists in laboratories, or instruments of measurement. What is an observation, when there is no scientist observing? What does quantum theory tell us, where there is no one measuring? What does quantum theory tell us about what happens in another galaxy?

The key to the answer, I believe, and the keystone of the ideas in this book, is the simple observation that scientists, and their measuring instruments as well, are all part of nature. What quantum theory describes, then, is the way in which one part of nature manifests itself to any other single part of nature.

At the heart of the "relational" interpretation of quantum theory is the idea that the theory does not describe the way in which quantum objects manifest themselves to us (or to special entities that do something special denoted "observing"). It describes how every physical object manifests itself to any other physical object. How any physical entity acts on any other physical entity. 

We think of the world in terms of objects, things, entities (in physics, we call them "physical systems"): a photon, a cat, a stone, a tree, a boy, a village, a rainbow, a planet, a cluster of galaxies... These do not exist in splendid isolation. On the contrary, they do nothing but continuously act upon each other. To understand nature, we must focus on these interactions rather than on isolated objects.

A cat listens to the ticking of a clock; a boy throws a stone; the stone moves the air through which it flies, hits another stone and moves that, presses into the ground where it lands; a tree absorbs energy from the sun's rays, produces the oxygen that the villagers breathe while watching the stars, and the stars run through the galaxies, pulled by the gravity of other stars... The world that we observe is continually interacting. It is a dense web of interactions. 

Individual objects are the way in which they interact. If there was an object that had no interactions, no effect upon anything, emitted no light, attracted nothing and repelled nothing, was not touched and had no smell... it would be as good as nonexistent. To speak of objects that never interact is to speak of something -- even if it existed -- that could not concern us. It is not even clear what it would mean for us to say that such objects "exist."

The world that we know, that relates to us, that interests us, what we call "reality," is the vast web of interacting entities, of which we are a part, that manifest themselves by interacting with each other. It is with this web that we are dealing. 

...The discovery of quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the properties of any entity are nothing other than the way in which that entity influences others. It exists only through its interactions. Quantum theory is the theory of how things influence each other. And this is the best description of nature that we have.

It is a simple idea, but it has radical consequences that open the conceptual space required to understand quanta.

...The properties of an object are the way in which it acts upon other objects; reality is this web of interactions. Instead of seeing the physical world as a collection of objects with definite properties, quantum theory invites us to see the physical world as a net of relations. Objects are its nodes.

The first radical consequence is that to attribute properties to something when it does not interact is superfluous and may be misleading. It is talking about something that has no meaning, for there are no properties outside of interactions. 

This is the significance of Heisenberg's original intuition: to ask what the orbit of an election is when it is not interacting with anything is an empty question. The electron does not follow an orbit because its physical properties are only those that determine how it affects something else, for instance, the light that it emits when it is interacting. If the electron is not interacting, there are no properties.

This is a radical leap. It is equivalent to saying that everything consists solely of the way in which it affects something else. When the electron does not interact with anything, it has no physical properties. It has no position; it has no velocity. 

The second consequence is even more radical

Suppose that you are the cat in Schrodinger's thought experiment. You are shut in a box and a quantum mechanism has a one in two probability of releasing the sleeping drug. You perceive whether the drug has been released or not released. In the first case, you sleep; in the second, you remain awake. For you the drug was delivered or it was not delivered. There are no doubts. As far as you are concerned, you are asleep or you are awake. You are certainly not both at once. 

I, on the other hand, am outside the box and do not interact either with the bottle of sleeping draught or with you. Later on, I can observe interference phenomena between you-awake and you-asleep: phenomena that would not have been produced if I had seen you asleep, or if I had seen you awake. In this sense, for me you are neither asleep nor awake. This is what it means to say that you are "in a superposition of sleeping and waking."

For you, the soporific is released or not, and you are asleep or awake. For me, you are neither awake nor asleep. For me, "there is a quantum superposition." For you, there is the reality of being awake, or of not being so. The relational perspective allows both things to be true: each relates to interactions with respect to distinct observers -- you and me.

Is it possible that a fact might be real with respect to you and not real with respect to me? 

Quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the answer is yes. Facts that are real with respect to an object are not necessarily so with respect to another. A property may be real with respect to a stone, and not real with respect to another stone.