In the comments to another post, Blake Stacey gave me a pointer to a really obnoxious article, called "A New Theory of the Universe", by a Robert Lanza, published in the American Scholar. Lanza's article is a rotten piece of new-age gibberish, with all of the usual hallmarks: lots of woo, all sorts of babble about how important consciousness is, random nonsensical babblings about quantum physics, and of course, bad math.
Lanza's "theory" (if one wants to be generous enough to call it that) is that life is a fundamental, in fact the fundamental guiding force of the entire universe. His argument for that is purest, utter nonsense. Here's a typical sample:
Our science fails to recognize those special properties of life that make it fundamental to material reality. This view of the world--biocentrism--revolves around the way a subjective experience, which we call consciousness, relates to a physical process. It is a vast mystery and one that I have pursued my entire life. The conclusions I have drawn place biology above the other sciences in the attempt to solve one of nature's biggest puzzles, the theory of everything that other disciplines have been pursuing for the last century. Such a theory would unite all known phenomena under one umbrella, furnishing science with an all-encompassing explanation of nature or reality.
We need a revolution in our understanding of science and of the world. Living in an age dominated by science, we have come more and more to believe in an objective, empirical reality and in the goal of reaching a complete understanding of that reality. Part of the thrill that came with the announcement that the human genome had been mapped or with the idea that we are close to understanding the big bang rests in our desire for completeness.
But we're fooling ourselves.
Most of these comprehensive theories are no more than stories that fail to take into account one crucial factor: we are creating them. It is the biological creature that makes observations, names what it observes, and creates stories. Science has not succeeded in confronting the element of existence that is at once most familiar and most mysterious--conscious experience. As Emerson wrote in "Experience," an essay that confronted the facile positivism of his age: "We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects."
Mr. Lanza really doesn't like math very much. A very large part of his argument is really just an elaborate argument for why it is that biology (which he allegedly understands) and goofy metaphysics (which he can make up as he goes along) are really more important than math.
We have failed to protect science against speculative extensions of nature, continuing to assign physical and mathematical properties to hypothetical entities beyond what is observable in nature. The ether of the 19th century, the "spacetime" of Einstein, and the string theory of recent decades, which posits new dimensions showing up in different realms, and not only in strings but in bubbles shimmering down the byways of the universe--all these are examples of this speculation. Indeed, unseen dimensions (up to a hundred in some theories) are now envisioned everywhere, some curled up like soda straws at every point in space.
This comes down to a rather tacky argument from incredulity: "Gosh, doesn't all of this mathematical stuff just sound totally ridiculous? Isn't is just obvious that anything that dumb is total nonsense?". No, all of this complicated math stuff, this spacetime crap, the math of relativity: I don't understand it, and so it must be wrong.
And so he proposes to replace it by a dreadful kind of solipsism, mixed with some serious bad math:
Without perception, there is in effect no reality. Nothing has existence unless you, I, or some living creature perceives it, and how it is perceived further influences that reality. Even time itself is not exempted from biocentrism. Our sense of the forward motion of time is really the result of an infinite number of decisions that only seem to be a smooth continuous path. At each moment we are at the edge of a paradox known as The Arrow, first described 2,500 years ago by the philosopher Zeno of Elea. Starting logically with the premise that nothing can be in two places at once, he reasoned that an arrow is only in one place during any given instance of its flight. But if it is in only one place, it must be at rest. The arrow must then be at rest at every moment of its flight. Logically, motion is impossible. But is motion impossible? Or rather, is this analogy proof that the forward motion of time is not a feature of the external world but a projection of something within us? Time is not an absolute reality but an aspect of our consciousness.
This, kids, is what happens when you don't learn bother to learn calculus.
Zeno's arrow isn't a paradox. It's just part of another of those problems that the Greek mathematicians screwed up because they had all sorts of problems understanding infinities and infinitessimals. Zeno's arrow is the beginning of an attempt to understand how continuous processes can be broken into an infinite number of infinitely small instantaneous parts, and how those parts can be recombined back into a finite whole. A moving arrow has a position at a given moment of time - but it's only in that precise precision for an infinitely small instant. It's moving, but it's speed is varying, due to forces like gravity and drag - at any moment, it's moving at a particular speed - but the period of time during which it's moving at precisely that speed is infinitely small. But we can add those up, into real motion. Just because time is made up of an infinitely large stream of infinitely small moments doesn't mean that time doesn't exist; just because an arrow is moving doesn't mean that it's position is meaningless.
Alas, Lanza builds his argument on gibberish like this. He doesn't know math, so he replaces it with bad egocentric metaphysics:
Space and time are not stuff that can be brought back to the laboratory in a marmalade jar for analysis. In fact, space and time fall into the province of biology--of animal sense perception--not of physics. They are properties of the mind, of the language by which we human beings and animals represent things to ourselves. Physicists venture beyond the scope of their science--beyond the limits of material phenomena and law--when they try to assign physical, mathematical, or other qualities to space and time.
Shame for Lanza that we do, essentially, bring "space and time" into the lab in a marmalade jar for analysis. We can observe relativistic effects. We can observe the warp of space-time by gravity. The picture over to the right is an example of that: look into the sky with a telescope, and you'll see four different images of the same thing. Why? Because space-time is warped by the mass of a galaxy, and the warped spacetime essentially acts as a lens - exactly as predicted by the math of relativity.
And from there, it just gets worse. He goes into a very long-winded babble about, essentially, how time doesn't really exist. Time is just an illusion created by our senses. And so on - typical new-agey babble that explains nothing - but that puts us squarely back and the center of the universe, where we'd like to be:
In order to account for why space and time were relative to the observer, Einstein assigned tortuous mathematical properties to an invisible, intangible entity that cannot be seen or touched. This folly continues with the advent of quantum mechanics. Despite the central role of the observer in this theory--extending it from space and time to the very properties of matter itself--scientists still dismiss the observer as an inconvenience to their theories. It has been proven experimentally that when studying subatomic particles, the observer actually alters and determines what is perceived. The work of the observer is hopelessly entangled in that which he is attempting to observe. An electron turns out to be both a particle and a wave. But how and where such a particle will be located remains entirely dependent upon the very act of observation.
See what I mean? Every time math comes up, Lanza goes off into a rant about how, because he doesn't understand it, the math must not make sense. And then he compounds it by throwing in yet more ignorant babble about quantum physics and uncertainty. Hey, Bob! "Observation" in quantum theory isn't talking about you! The collapse of a quantum waveform due to observation does not require an intelligent observer. Consciousness has nothing to do with it. Math does. Just because you're incapable of comprehending the math doesn't mean that you get to arbitrary replace it with something you like better.
Bleh. I can't handle any more of this dreck. It's just more of the same, on, and on, and on - all of it ultimately reducible to: "I don't understand math, so anything that uses it must be nonsense; and since I think that I'm the center of the universe, anything that contradicts that must be wrong. So I'll just replace it all with my own solipsistic nonsense, which must be right, because I understand it."
Comments
Thanks for tearing into this! My opinion of The American Scholar fell quite a few notches when I found where this dreck had been published, which is too bad, really, since my earlier encounter with that publication was Brian Boyd's sensible article in the Autumn 2006 issue. What does it say when a literature professor — the biographer of Vladimir Nabokov, actually — says more sensible things about biology than the cell biologist? A sampling of Boyd:
Boyd wrote the big biography of Nabokov, and one of Nabokov's most famous students is Thomas Pynchon, in whose hands we can see what a real artist can do with Zeno's paradoxes:
(The Crying of Lot 49, p. 105.)
Thanks again.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | March 13, 2007 9:56 PM
Awesome!!! About time!!! I too wanted to write a magnum opus explaining all of cosmology, but I was never very good at any of the math which would be involved.
Except instead of biocentrism, I will explain everything in terms of color. I shall dub this "Chromocentrism." If someone has used that term before, I will pretend that I made it up.
Posted by: El Cid | March 13, 2007 10:23 PM
El Cid:
Chromocentrism stumps Google! I think this one is all yours — go to it!
Posted by: Blake Stacey | March 13, 2007 10:33 PM
You're too gentle, this time, Mark, but you hit the nail on the head anyway.
Younger readers may need to be told that there was a time, as recently as the mid-20th century, when one could get a PhD in Biology or Chemistry WITHOUT knowing Calculus. Isaac Asimov, for example, dropped out of his Calculus class when he could do integration by parts, but couln't understand why it worked. Good enough for Professor of Biochem in those days.
Robert Lanza and the editors of American Scholar have no such excuse. There is PLENTY of Good Math in modern Biology.
The one place where Robert Lanza heads towards an interesting topic, before veering off into solipsismspace (solispace?) is with Smolin's idea of cosmic evolution by black holes.
It is a very clever notion, and provides a mechanism for the otherwise pure handwaving of the Strong Anthropic principle. But My objection to it, which I said often and everywhere to universal "who cares?" is this. Smolin's evolving multiverse is unisexual. Bisexual reproduction of cosmoses (cosmoi?) searches superspace much more efficiently. Unfortunately, I don't have a plausible model of how two universes mate -- and the term "Big Bang" is already taken. So much for my attempt to give biological arguments for cosmology.
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | March 13, 2007 10:42 PM
It is not so clear that a conscious mind is not required for the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics. Since Wigner suggested it, this particular version of the Many Worlds Interpretation has been gaining ever greater acceptance; and based on my observation, it now appears to be the dominant paradigm among those physicists who have actually tried to grapple with quantum mechanics' tricky interpretational questions.
Posted by: Brett | March 13, 2007 11:00 PM
It seems as though Lanza has picked up where Berkeley left off. It's an interesting philosophical position but not really appropriate for science. In my mind, the biggest problem with this kind of subjective idealism arises when you want to communicate your theories to other people.
Let's take Lanza's program at face value and suppose that he successfully revolutionizes science so that we have a subjective theory of how some part of nature works. For it to be a useful theory it will have to make some predictions. If such a prediction are predicated on Lanza being the observer how can I be sure that the prediction is valid for me?
Things like electrons, the speed of light, etc. all have solid, observer-invariant properties which make them a perfect platform to base and communicate inferences. You could argue that science is the process of finding these sorts of invariants so we can make and relay inferences. I can't really see what the basis of inference would be in the type of science Lanza is proposing.
Posted by: Mark | March 14, 2007 12:50 AM
I think I understand the resolution of Zeno's paradox, I can do the calculus and the answers I have read all make sense.
However we do appear to have a problem, in modern physics we don't appear to have infinitessimals in the material world. We appear to have limits as to how finely we can split up time and space (i.e. planck time). So does the paradox reappear?
I suppose it could be that our material reality is just a distorted shadow of the true mathematical reality.
Posted by: Chris' Wills | March 14, 2007 1:17 AM
That's Platonism, the idea that the perfect constructs of mathematics actually exist in some "higher reality". I don't think it much matters, really--calculus seems to be a pretty effective model for the real world even if infinitessimal units of time and space aren't possible.
Posted by: Susan B. | March 14, 2007 1:29 AM
I think you're being harsh, the worst criticism you can level against the arguments in the article is that they're rather trite and badly expressed. It doesn't seem that he's rubbishing maths he doesn't understand, more saying it's dangerous to ascribe physicality to variables in mathematical models.
As for his point on quantum physics, perhaps you could explain something that has stumped the physics postgrads I've asked. In regard to quantum physics, what is an observation?
Posted by: Steve | March 14, 2007 3:50 AM
I think if anything, quantization of space and time makes the "paradox" disappear completely. One of Zeno's assumptions was the infinite divisibility of space and time, if I'm not mistaken; this is a key assumption in the construction.
This sounds like the kind of nonsense people spout off at parties to sound all philosophical and stuff. It's a bit embarrassing to see it being put forward seriously. But the bit that really bugs me is that Lanka wants to replace modern science, with all its successes, with an idea which has absolutely no predictive power.
Posted by: Davis | March 14, 2007 3:53 AM
Lanza reads like an undergrad who just heard about Kant for the first time in his Philosophy 101 class.
As for Emerson: on principle I refuse to give credence to anyone who believes 'consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.' The root of most of the world's moral and political problems can be traced back to inconsistent world views.
Posted by: Shaneal Manek | March 14, 2007 4:17 AM
That's Platonism, the idea that the perfect constructs of mathematics actually exist in some "higher reality". I don't think it much matters, really--calculus seems to be a pretty effective model for the real world even if infinitessimal units of time and space aren't possible.>>
Hi, I know that it is Platonism; even down to cribbing the shadow analogy :o)
As someone, far cleverer than me said and I paraphrase, the effectiveness of mathematics is suprising.
I 100% totally agree that calculus is effective at modelling the material world. I find it even more suprising when it is effective even though the underlying assumptions of the mathematical model used don't appear to match our understanding/theories (physics theories) of the material world.
It doesn't cause me to lose sleep, I just find it interesting.
Posted by: Chris' Wills | March 14, 2007 4:39 AM
A bit of a tangent: I like your explanation of Zeno's arrow. However, I have to take exception to the claim that Zeno's arrow doesn't constitute a paradox.
To me, a paradox is when an apparently reasonable result, perhaps in some formal system, is counter to our intuition. Contrast this with a contradiction, which is when a formal system gets in trouble all by itself. A contradiction forces us to discard the system; a paradox may only force us to adjust our intuition.
By way of example, consider the usual "Russell set" B of all sets which are not elements of themselves. This seems like a perfectly reasonable set, until one asks whether B is an element of B (it is iff it isn't). By itself, this is a paradox -- some principle by which we built B must be faulty, no matter how obvious the construction may seem -- and is rightly labeled such. It becomes a contradiction only in certain systems, such as Frege's, which explicitly allow the construction of B; and we are forced to discard such systems as a result.
In the case of Zeno's arrow, a paradox arises in people whose intuition is that time is, for example, a sequence of moments. One proper response is to discard this intuition and think of time as a continuum. One might also discard the argument itself, say by asserting that it breaks down on a sufficiently small time scale, but one isn't forced to do this, as one would be with a contradiction.
Certainly this jerk's explanation is nonsense. But far from explaining why Zeno's arrow isn't a paradox, you've explained why, for many people, it is.
Posted by: Chad Groft | March 14, 2007 5:01 AM
If you don't like math you needn't replace it with sollipsism. Instead you could find that a workable theory of everything is not essentially about mathematical description like in the physics of the forces. But rather you can ask what details could be described of any force to explain how matter can be and remain naturally organised out of its subatomic parts and conclude that a cause acting in addition to any force so as to keep matter organised would not act with any measurable strength...
Google> foranewageofreason
Posted by: Andrew Daw | March 14, 2007 5:54 AM
Glad to see that my impression of the story was correct. There is no science there.
And don't we all hate the misuse of the word 'theory'?
Posted by: Kristjan Wager | March 14, 2007 6:16 AM
Posted by: Davis
I think if anything, quantization of space and time makes the "paradox" disappear completely. One of Zeno's assumptions was the infinite divisibility of space and time, if I'm not mistaken; this is a key assumption in the construction.>>
Ok, I may be wrong but I thought that the paradox arose because Zeno took time & space to be quantized (i.e. one unit of time followed by another) and the arrow had to move between these. Yes, he took it to the limit but it always looked like a step wise arguement to me.
The calculus resolves the problem by replacing steps with a smooth continuum.
If you know of any, could you refer me to any mathematics (please no woo maths :o)) that resolves this for quantized space/time. If not I'll continue searching.
Thanks
Posted by: Chris' Wills | March 14, 2007 6:27 AM
It's subtle, but the arrow version of the paradox requires infinitely divisible time. You look at a given moment, and claim the arrow is at rest in a particular location. If time is quantized, there's no such thing as a "moment" -- only a minimum span of time. Since you're looking at a time interval, rather than an instant, there's no basis for claiming the arrow is at rest, as the paradox requires.
Posted by: Davis | March 14, 2007 8:21 AM
Posted by Davis:
It's subtle, but the arrow version of the paradox requires infinitely divisible time. You look at a given moment, and claim the arrow is at rest in a particular location. If time is quantized, there's no such thing as a "moment" -- only a minimum span of time. Since you're looking at a time interval, rather than an instant, there's no basis for claiming the arrow is at rest, as the paradox requires.>>
Thank you for answering so clearly.
What you say makes sense, I'll now try and understand it.
Off to re-read Zeno.
Posted by: Chris' Wills | March 14, 2007 8:59 AM
It's a contraction!
Posted by: the english language | March 14, 2007 9:29 AM
Steve:
No, the worst thing you can say about Lanza's "arguments" is that almost every time he makes a specific claim about modern physics, he's wrong. I'm not saying he draws vague or sophistic conclusions from a correct understanding of physics. I'm saying that he makes a whole list of claims about relativity and quantum mechanics, almost all of which contain painfully evident errors. See my original comment to MarkCC for some details.
When the errors in basic facts are so big you could drive an SUV through them, any philosophical conclusions can only be interesting by accident. Unfortunately, such an accident has not transpired here.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | March 14, 2007 10:06 AM
It seems to me that Lanza is just an average, run of the mill postmodernist. The quote above reminds me of Sokal's famous prank paper, which states close to the beginning that "reality is a social construct" :)
Posted by: MiguelB | March 14, 2007 10:47 AM
"This, kids, is what happens when you don't learn bother to learn calculus."
No, it's what happens when you learn bother instead of calculus.
From the OED:
"bother, n.
1. (?) Blarney, humbug, palaver. Obs.
1803 BRISTED Pedest. Tour I. 267 Among an ignorant..peasantry the bother must consist of coarse and broad flattery laid on with a trowel."
Speaking from personal experience: I'm an English major who developed an interest in mathematics in graduate school. I learned the bother first, but got the calculus eventually. With 20/20 hindsight, I shouldn't have bothered with bother.
Posted by: Billy | March 14, 2007 10:58 AM
Oh good grief. Lanza is simply advocating John Wheeler's interpretation of the anthropic principle, which has apparently been given a recent experimental boost:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/315/5814/966
Paul Davies, a very respected physicist and cosmologist, also holds this view, so get a freaking grip, people, Lanza's pet theory doesn't have to be perfectly correct, in order for his claim that the universe is biocentric, to be, and unless you can shoot down Wheeler's strong cosmological interpretation, then his model is, by default, the most conservative mainstream approach to explaining the structuring of the observed universe:
http://www.penguin.com.au/lookinside/spotlight.cfm?SBN=0713998830&Page=Extract
Highly recommended:
http://evolutionarydesign.blogspot.com/
I'm betting that Blake Stacy and the rest of the clueless critics who DON'T have any brilliant ideas of their own, don't know didly squat about the anthropic physics... and I'll be happy to call any of you out on it to prove it.
Just click-on my name and away we go...
Posted by: island | March 14, 2007 11:12 AM
Can you do a basics post about what time and space are? I really don't understand. I feel dumb for asking actually.
Is there any definition other than just making them axioms?
Posted by: Ben | March 14, 2007 12:02 PM
Shaneal says:
Lanza reads like an undergrad who just heard about Kant for the first time in his Philosophy 101 class.
As for Emerson: on principle I refuse to give credence to anyone who believes 'consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.' The root of most of the world's moral and political problems can be traced back to inconsistent world views.
I agree with the first part; the (very) distant echoes of Kant are what struck me too. Kant's point, though, is not that there are no objects (whatever that means), but that "object" and "objective" don't mean (as the saying goes) what people think they mean. Not the same thing. So my reaction is a bit different from Mark's: it's not that Lanza's are the bizarre ramblings of a non-mathematician; they're the bizarre ramblings of a non-philosopher. 8-)
But I must stick up for Emerson (although I confess I didn't like that quotation from "Experience"): I think the quote Shaneal cites actually reads "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," which makes much more sense. We all know people like that, don't we?
Oh, and I agree with Chad: "paradox" means "apparent contradiction," and Zeno's paradoxes qualify. That doesn't mean there's no motion (just as the skeptical paradox means we don't know anything).
And another vote for a basics post about time and space!
Posted by: Dave M | March 14, 2007 12:12 PM
Chris Wills:
Your source is Nobel laureate Wigner, one of the "Hungarian Mafia" or "Martians" who worked at Los Alamos in World War II. No need to paraphrase:
"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," in Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, No. I (February 1960). ...
www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
Check in Wikipedia for "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Biology" by the way.
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | March 14, 2007 1:00 PM
At the risk of sounding trite, but an article that raises Chalmer's philosophical zombie's should immediately be put to death.
It could be that Lanza is a narrow expert. "Dr. Lanza is a noted pioneer in the field of stem cell science, with more than 25 years experience in the application of stem cells in regenerative medicine." ( From ACT site). Which could explains his problems with current facts or what theories are.
It is indeed an interesting idea since, as Smolin himself points out, in principle it would avoid the usual anthropic problems of finding a relevant statistics (perhaps solved now) by local selection, precisely as biological evolution does. But I had the impression it doesn't work because black holes doesn't permit the behavior he needs. (And unfortunately, since his old universes doesn't die, his statistics should give the same prediction as the weak anthropic principle.)
Actually, already the part with decoherence, usable in some other interpretations, is claimed to describe the observer and remove the speculations about consciousness from the measurement problem. (See for example the Wikipedia article on the measurement problem for references.) And interestingly, decoherence time scales is IIRC also what Tegmark used to debunk Penrose's speculations about quantum processing in the brain.
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson | March 14, 2007 2:22 PM
Torbjörn Larsson:
Tegmark, M. "The importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes". Phys. Rev. E 61 (2000): 4194–4206. Abstract:
Thanks for the link to the cosmological constant paper.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | March 14, 2007 3:03 PM
Me neither. Wigner makes an interesting case, but my own conclusion is that science is also interestingly effective on its own, and that math in this and other aspects is more like science than other human endeavors. That is, math is as science constructed after our experiences. (Which btw also solves the problem with theorems for me - a theorem is a justified belief exactly as other knowledge.)
It is not a stupid subject at all, since there is a lot known but more that is not known. But perhaps it is a basics post for a physics blog.
Meanwhile, to hopefully answer your questions somewhat, we can separate the aspects of time and space from the aspect of spacetime.
The former are axioms in some fundamental theories such as quantum mechanics.
The later is an emergent property in the universe we live in. It is also not a basic axiom in the theories, but follows from demanding an observed symmetry, Lorentz covariance. (Roughly, the symmetry is that an interpretation of a physical observation does not depend on where you are.) One of the promises of string theory is the ability to show how fundamental time and space becomes the spacetime we see.
Another subject is why time is different from space (the arrow of time), and connected to that the observed asymmetry that the entropy of our universe started out low. At least the later promises to perhaps be a result, not an axiom.
Yet another subject mentioned here is if time and space, or spacetime, is fundamentally discrete or continous.
Perhaps your question is also about if space and time needs to be axioms, or if they have an explanation? If we find a selfconsistent fundamental theory, it should be enough of an explanation IMHO. At least, we won't get a better one. :-)
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson | March 14, 2007 3:03 PM
Blake:
Thanks for the reference.
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson | March 14, 2007 3:08 PM
For follow-ups to Tegmark's work, see A. Litt et al., "Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?" Cognitive Science 30, 3 (2006): 593–603. I mentioned this back in January; for those joining our program already in progress, here's the abstract:
There's lots of good stuff in this paper, including references into the literature. My favorite bit might be the quotation they give from P. S. Churchland, who said, "The want of directly relevant data is frustrating enough, but the explanatory vacuum is catastrophic. Pixie dust in the synapses is about as explanatorily powerful as quantum coherence in the microtubules."
About the evolving-Universes thing:
I wouldn't want to give it an enthusiastic endorsement, but it is a well-known idea, and anybody who's trying to argue for "biocentrism" — or even for the much more modest proposal that physicists should pay attention to biology — should mention it.
Now, I need to go off and think about the whole "universes not dying" thing. Some 'verses clearly do croak — they implode upon themselves because they're too full of matter (dark or otherwise). In the Cosmic Variance thread to which you linked, Aaron Bergman says,
To which Smolin replies,
This doesn't sit quite right with me. All in all, the best reason to like Smolin's proposal may be the SF it can generate.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | March 14, 2007 3:25 PM
Actually, he said a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, which is more sensible.
Posted by: eric | March 14, 2007 4:01 PM
>>Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post
Your source is Nobel laureate Wigner, one of the "Hungarian Mafia" or "Martians" who worked at Los Alamos in World War II. No need to paraphrase:
"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," in Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, No. I (February 1960). ...
www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
Check in Wikipedia for "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Biology" by the way.>>
Thanks for the references, I'll look them up though may have to give away some books to make room on my floor if I buy them :o)
>>Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson
Yet another subject mentioned here is if time and space, or spacetime, is fundamentally discrete or continous.
Perhaps your question is also about if space and time needs to be axioms, or if they have an explanation? If we find a selfconsistent fundamental theory, it should be enough of an explanation IMHO. At least, we won't get a better one. :-)>>
No, the comment was just about how it would relate to Zeno's paradox. I would hope that a fundamental theory would tell us what structure spacetime has to have.
Posted by: Chris' Wills | March 14, 2007 4:14 PM
>>Posted by: the english language
It's a contraction!>>
Yes it is :o)
Posted by: Chris' Wills | March 14, 2007 4:17 PM
As for Emerson: on principle I refuse to give credence to anyone who believes 'consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.' The root of most of the world's moral and political problems can be traced back to inconsistent world views.
I don't know what Emerson was trying to say there or whether it was reasonable. I do like what Mark Twain said, though:
Posted by: Coin | March 14, 2007 4:27 PM
Reference all known objective reality and there's still the remaining UNknown. Into this unknown metaphysicians will continue to project their metaphors, and enlightened minds will continue to point our the difference between such metaphors and scientific theory. Solipsism plays on the apparent infinite regress in the relationship between the objective and the subjective, on the reality-mirroring function of consciousness. Robert Lanza is pointing out this infinite regress by using biology as his metaphor of choice.
The existential unknown remains: it isn't scientifically predictive to point it out, but everything we know could indeed be wrong, a dream, a simulation or shadow of some kind of a more substantial level of energy. It's not science, but it is an open philosophical or metaphysical question.
Posted by: Norm Breyfogle | March 14, 2007 4:29 PM
I think that one of the worst mistakes ever made in trying to explain the heisenberg uncertainty principle was to describe it terms of trying to measure the position of billiard balls by hitting them with other billiard balls. This turns the principle into purely a "measurement problem" rather than a fundamental principle that velocity and position, or energy and duration, are in a sense "coupled" and cannot be both be exact properties of the "particle". As a lowly electrical engineer, one of the things that was most impressive to me during my education was the "appearance" of the uncertainty principle in signal analysis. That is, a signal cannot be precisely confined in both the "time-domain" and the "frequency-domain" simulataneously. That is a perfectly time limited signal must have an infinite frequency content, and conversely a perfectly limited frequency content implies infinite duration. It is not a question of measuring its frequency content will make it change its time span, but simply the fact of how the time representation transforms into a frequency representation. Seems to me that this is a perfect analog of the "wave-particle" duality of quantum physics and thus the uncertainty principle really has nothing to do with observation at all but is "built in" to the equations we use to describe quantum phenomena.
Posted by: SteveM | March 14, 2007 4:44 PM
SteveM:
Nicely put. I remember Griffiths' introductory QM book uses the example of a wiggling rope. If you make the rope shake at a definite frequency, then you can see it has a certain well-defined wavelength, but the idea of the "position of the wave" isn't meaningful. What's the "position" of a perfect sine wave? You can make an oscillation which travels along the rope with a fairly well-defined position — a wave packet — but you have to superpose many different frequencies.
Squeeze one quantity, and the Fourier transform spreads out.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | March 14, 2007 5:08 PM
Hey, we hit the "most emailed" top five list. Good job, us! :-)
Posted by: Blake Stacey | March 14, 2007 5:20 PM
Blake, care to address my second paragraph?
Posted by: Steve | March 15, 2007 3:54 AM
Me neither. He doesn't really answer the argument about boltzmann's brains and statistics by his seemingly handwaving. Unfortunately, any attempt for me to pin down his claims also amounts to handwaving. ;-)
Sometimes physical analogs have more fundamental underpinnings than one realize at first. When I studied partial differential equations, IIRC already the math sometimes could use an 'energy principle' to perfectly naturally constrain solutions, before even looking at the possible physics of an application.
Steve:
I assume you want to discuss this:
I hope to not sound facetious when I say that I think this is what "the measurement problem" is about. In practice, in the math and by observation, one of the possible states are picked out (also called projected, I think) by an observation. How that works and what it means exactly for the whole system seems to be the discussion. (See for example von Neumann's measurement scheme or decoherence theory for some variants with partial descriptions, falsified or not.)Hopefully someone more knowledgeable pitch in here.
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson | March 15, 2007 8:29 AM
Torbjörn Larsson:
Yes. An observation is a process by which a system in a superposition of multiple eigenstates is "collapsed" (or appears to collapse) into a single eigenstate, with the probability of landing in a given state given by the weighting of the states in the original superposition (the "weights" in this case being complex numbers).
That was a bit of a mouthful. If you'd like a mouthful with equations too, see these technical notes by Greg Egan.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | March 15, 2007 9:24 AM
See also Tegmark and Wheeler's "100 Years of the Quantum" in Scientific American (2001). Abstract:
Posted by: Blake Stacey | March 15, 2007 9:28 AM
"This, kids, is what happens when you don't bother to learn calculus."
+1 QOTW
Posted by: Rob Z. | March 15, 2007 10:49 AM
Aside from any outright scientific errors and/or semantic misrepresentations from Lanza, isn't he pointing out something that's not perfectly rationally resolveable, *even in principle*, when he brings up what we can rightly call solipsism? Isn't this recognition of the inevitable interconnectedness between objective fact and subjective perception ("solipsism") a fundamentally different feature in post-Einsteinian, quantum science when compared to Newtonian science?
Posted by: Norm Breyfogle | March 15, 2007 12:15 PM
Or maybe I should have written that the difference is between the *implied world views* of post-Einsteinian quantum science and Newtonian science. The there's obviously no fundamental difference in the scientifc method in either case.
Posted by: Norm Breyfogle | March 15, 2007 12:19 PM
I thought I'd bring up a small relevant experience. A fellow that I know is quite clever, quite realistic, very honest, understands the value of math but doesn't know much math himself. I was trying to explain what I considered to be a simple thing to him when he replied "There are two kinds of people. There are those that can do math and those that can't." to explain to me the folly of trying to explain even this to him.
This was well put and increased my respect for the man. One needs to have at least a sense of what one doesn't understand.
Posted by: Brian J | March 15, 2007 1:46 PM
Brian J:
It would be funnier if he'd said, "There are three kinds of people. . . ."
Norm Breyfogle:
Given that solipsism was alive and kicking in the philosophical literature in the many years between Newton and Einstein, I'm not so sure that the "implied worldviews" (at least so far as they leak out into the general populace) are any more or less friendly to the idea. Today, people invoke quantum physics when they want to speak about "the interconnectedness of all things" or say that "reality depends upon the observer". A few decades ago, the tone of the "cocktail talk" was that Einstein's relativity meant everything depended upon your point of view (although now Lanza is saying that quantum physics undermines relativity while arriving at the same conclusion).
I'll be frank and admit that I don't know all the attitudes which philosophers took in response to Newton's mechanics. Somebody call a historian of science. However, I can say that by misrepresenting the science, by making inaccurate statements of fact and putting every assertion in a vague form, one can justify any philosophy using any school of science. Want to make Newton a New Age icon? Everything is influenced by gravity fields, man. The Sun pulls on the Earth, and we pull right back on the Sun. We touch without touching, but we can't touch without being touched ourselves. It's like there are fields of energy reaching all through space. Dude.
(And that's just vague, not really inaccurate!)
Posted by: Blake Stacey | March 15, 2007 2:14 PM
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand Binary and those who don't.
There are 2 kinds of people in the world: the ones who think that there are 2 kinds of people in the world, and the ones who don't.
Or, in Lanza's case: "There is one kind of person in the world: me, me, me, me!"
See also:
Quantum physics: It's all about me, me, me, isn't it?
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2007-03-11-quantum-quandary_N.htm
[image: Maybe it's all in your mind: The Hubble Telescope's sharpest view of the Orion Nebula.]
Exclusive: Response to Robert Lanza's essay
American Scholar: A New Theory of the Universe
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
"... I can't help thinking that there's an enormous exercise of vanity in Lanza's argument -- the universe only exists, he says, because we're here to observe it and be part of it," Lindley says in objection. "I would go the opposite extreme. I think the universe was a real physical thing long before we came on the scene, and we humans are just crumbs of organic matter clinging to the surface of one tiny rock. Cosmically, we are no more significant than mold on a shower curtain."
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | March 15, 2007 2:22 PM
Somehow, scientific objectivity and the most vague and inclusive solipsism are BOTH correct because all that we can know about our mold-like state (a la the Lindley quote in JVP's post above) is - speaking in the most inclusive sense - inseparable from the contents of our minds, and yet, scientific objectification WORKS. Ultimately, existence *as a whole* is both subjective AND objective.
It's at least logically conceivable (though difficult if not impossible to verify) that all of objective reality as we know it is some sort of self-consistent fake, since we can't, even in principle, escape our own ultimate subjectivity (we can prove or disprove individual instances of it, but not the ultimate principle thereof).
Science deals with objectivity, and yet our imaginations can see the limitations of any present level of objective knowledge, can create metaphors/analogies to fill the void of the unknown, and can even reference the ultimate level of interconnectedness which the search for truth in the extreme objectivity of science itself implies: the striving for a GUT or TOE.
The problem is that as soon as anyone attempts to say more than "the relationship between consciousness and the objects of consciousness is an endless hall of mirrors" they fall into potential error which is - at least in principle - experimentally falsifiable in objective reality.
Whether or not Lanza has made such a falsifiable error re quantum science is the question being debated here, and given the various alternative approaches to interpreting certain "paradoxes" in quantum dynamics, surely the jury is still out?
Posted by: Norm Breyfogle | March 15, 2007 5:53 PM
Correction to my last post: Lanza has indeed crossed the line into verifiablility/falsification when he equated ultimate or cosmic subjectivity with a specific manifestation of mind, i.e., biological brains. The only sense in which solopsism will legitimately endure forever is as an indeterminate generality.
Posted by: Norm Breyfogle | March 15, 2007 6:04 PM
So solipsism is a fundamental and irreducible aspsect of reality for conscious entities. And since it is irreducible, it carries no predictive power beyond the basic assertion that subjectivity will always be an aspect of consciousness to *some* degree, and any attempt at formulating a TOE or GUT will be incomplete without addressing it (which is to say that, strictly speaking, a *perfectly* predictive GUT or TOE is a logical impossibility.
Posted by: Norm Breyfogle | March 15, 2007 7:20 PM
I'm responding to someone way up there who talked about how well math fits science.
I've been thinking about this lately. Math is not a singular entity. There are many kinds of maths, based on different axioms, giving different results. The only thing tying all of them together is constancy. They start with regular rules and apply regular processes to arrive at regular results. Math is generally too complex to be done mechanically, but the algorithm is still a useful concept in every branch of math.
That, I think, explains perfectly why math is so good at modeling the physical world. As long as the physical world is constant and regular (or random with constant and regular biases), we can describe it using rules. Thus, we can build a math for it. The idea of custom-building maths is relatively common these days, even if it's not thought of in quite that way.
Thus, it's no mystery that math matches physics. The universe is patterned, and math is the science of pattern. No matter how the universe turns out, as long as it doesn't have true randomness (or it does, but we can abstract it away), there will be some math that describes it.
Posted by: Xanthir, FCD | March 15, 2007 11:41 PM
Xanthir: "The universe is patterned" -- and that's the mystery! Why is the universe patterned? By what processes? Why is "pattern" applicable to both physical reality and reproducible mental images and formal mathematical notation?
"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." -- Einstein
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | March 16, 2007 12:35 AM
Xanthir: As JvP wrote plus.
When I peruse the history of mathematics I find things such as i^2 = -1 being discovered and used in mathematics long before any application in the physical world.
It wasn't a model built to reflect the world, rather it came out of the mathematics and just happens to be useful in modeling the world.
The concept of zero as an actual number and the negative numbers are other examples.
I agree that in modern times the needs of physics have pushed the development of mathematics in some areas, but as often the mathematics has already been discovered that the physicist needs for their model.
I find it suprising and wonderful :o)
Posted by: Chris' Wills | March 16, 2007 7:10 AM
Always. Besides being fun, it usually clarifies the scope of definitions and other sundry stuff. And that link seems useful, thanks.
Nitpick: Technically, it is an eyeful. Except for those who are wording while reading.
I hope Wheeler is as good on quantum as on gravitation. It went to the top of my to-read list.
Btw, that is what autists may think too. I just read an interview with a nowadays highfunctional autist who described that she after years of training could understand intellectually (she claims to have no emotions, btw) that other persons are different from things.
Personal experience is subjective, and I would not have it any other way.
But as I understand it you have to go solipsism full throttle; I'm not sure what you mean by "inclusive" solipsism. Any acceptance of an objective reality destroys the concept of "the self is the only thing that can be known and verified" or "the self is the only reality".
Btw, what we today think as subjective may turn out to be objective. For example, who knew that altruism actually is an acceptable evolutionary strategy?
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson | March 16, 2007 8:40 AM
Fascinating, Captain. ;-|
(All right, how would you do the eyebrow thing with an emoticon?)
Posted by: Blake Stacey | March 16, 2007 1:25 PM
JVP:"Why is the universe patterned?" is a question beyond the aegis of science, logic, or reason. Since no pattern at all equals nothingness or nonexistence, then pattern equals existence. Reason, logic, science, etc., can only answer *specific* questions about why the pattern wiggles this way here, that way there, but the question of why the universe is patterned at all in the first place is purely metphysical, inviting solipsistic answers and tautologies such as the Anthropic Principle or the Metaphysics of Quality or Zen Buddhism or the grosser pop beliefs of literalistic religion.
Torbjörn: By the most "inclusive" solipsism I mean to point to the above most general of questions ("Why existence?") and the only possible answers: metaphorical, solipsistic, or religious ones.
Posted by: Norm Breyfogle | March 16, 2007 4:04 PM
For conscious creatures the only answer to the question "What is the final and absolutely predictable relationship between subjective consciousness and the objects of consciousness?" is also a solipsistic, metaphorical, or religious one. We can always progress further in our knowledge of the predictive details of that relationship, but - like probing ever closer to the moment of the Big Bang without ever being able to perceive it's very beginning - we can't exhaust the details of that relationship; it's an infinite hall of mirrors.
Hence the silopsistic assertion that consciousness is fundamental to the universe. How could it be any other way for us conscious creatures? We can't consciously escape consciousness and remain conscious at the same time!
Posted by: Norm Breyfogle | March 16, 2007 4:19 PM
Dang; I've got to remember to use the preview button to increase the odds of my catching my spelling errors before posting. =)
Posted by: norm Breyfogle | March 16, 2007 5:36 PM
JVP:
I've read some of your poetry in your link in your posts, but I couldn't find an email address where I could write to you directly, so I'm asking you here: would you be willing to critique a short story of mine (just a few pages long)?
If so, let me know via my email address:
nbreyfogle@chartermi.net
Posted by: Norm Breyfogle | March 16, 2007 5:41 PM
There's that classic joke about the drunk who looks for his lost keys under the street light, because the light's better there. Sometimes I think mathematics is the street light; it's the place where we look, because we can't see anywhere else.
Of course, I also think that constant improvements in math amount to extending the area that light illuminates.
Posted by: Davis | March 16, 2007 7:37 PM
JVP:
Well, there are two kinds of universes in the totality of theoretical existence: universes with patterns and universes that are completely and utterly random. ^_^
If the universe was completely random, there would be no way for life to exist (I'm accepting this as a given). Given that we are alive, then we live in a universe with patterns. Thus, it is inevitable that in a universe with life, math is applicable to the world.
That's my argument, and I'm sticking to it. ^_^ Questions about why the universe is not completely random are FORBIDDEN. (Not really, of course. I like discussions about the reasons for our particular cosmology, like that absolutely fascinating line I heard a while ago about the fact that knots only exist in 3 dimensions possibly being why we have 3 spatial dimensions rather than any other number and I get a lot of enjoyment out of grammatically correct run-on sentences.)
Chris Wills:
I think it's a beautiful thing as well when we discover interesting mathematical identities that happen to be useful in the real world. Of course, plenty of possible identities are much less useful, so there's probably some selection bias in there making us more likely to think that math is automatically perfect for describing the world.
I personally find the applicability of partition theory to fluid dynamics fascinating (partition theory being the study of the number of ways to divide a number into unique natural number sums). I don't know what good it is, I just heard once that it actually does something useful.
Posted by: Xanthir, FCD | March 16, 2007 8:01 PM
Intriguing. ^_^ But I had to cheat:
(ó ô)
quizzical or "Indeed" (designed to mimic Star Trek's Mr. Spock)
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon )
Don't say that Wikipedia isn't useful... (^_~)
OK. But it seems to me this solipsism is the same as the usual one.