Interlude: Ex nihilo nihil fit

Wisdom is the highest goal of man; our knowledge as such is obscure, but it is illumined by searching.

Xenophanes in Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought

Some 2500 years ago, having moved beyond the anthropomorphic religion of Homeric Greece, the Greek Pre-Socratic thinkers began seeking to understand reality through reason and observation. They were doing science in the sense of trying to explain the fundamental facts of existence according to logical standards and the kinds of observational tools then available. They sought to explain two basic elements of reality, that anything exists and the process by which things change.

Heraclitus saw only change: “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.... It is in changing that things find repose.” For him, the universe was uncreated, it always existed, coming apart and back together again. He saw fire – the most visible form of energy – as the principle force of change, as could be seen in the cool becoming hot and the wet, dry.

Parmenides and the Eleatic School made central the logical claim that nothing can come from nothing. Parmenides, like Heraclitus, saw no reason to explain existence as “to be is possible and not-to-be is impossible.” The Eleatics saw the universe as unique, uncreated, unchanging and unbound. They argued that if the universe was bound in space or time, that would mean that it was not unique. If it was not unique, it could not be the universe. The Eleatics denied the existence of change. Zeno used various paradoxes of logic to argue, for example, that things cannot move as “if anything is moving, it must be moving either in the place in which it is or in a place in which it is not” and neither is possible.

Despite the Eleatics, the fact that things appear to change needed explanation. Empedocles accepted the monist view of reality: the universe is singular and unbounded. He pictured it as a circle containing the All. But while the underlying reality is unchanging, the four basic elements – fire, air, water and earth – produce change by combining and separating driven by the opposing forces of Love (philia) and Strife. Anaxagoras developed this approach further by positing a universe made up of an infinite number of particles of all possible qualities while “in everything there is a portion of everything else.” In the original cosmos, all these fundamental particles already existed but were mixed and therefore left the total without quality. Mind (nous) set them in motion and caused them to be separated into what now exists.

In their answers to the questions of why anything exists and how things change, the pre-Socratics said everything that we can logically say. The cosmology of Empedocles and Anaxagoras could be read as an early premonition of our modern version. Our understanding of reality includes seemingly unchanging fundamental particles and forces making up the changing observable. Love and Strife can be read as Gravity and Dark Energy, one pulling matter together and the other pushing it apart. More generally, the essential dynamic of everything that exists – natural and human – can be seen as either a coming together or a coming apart.

It was while reading Empedocles that I went back to reconsider the modern theory of the creation of the universe from the Big Bang. The Big Bang theory essentially explains nothing. Literally. It does not and cannot explain where whatever it was that went “bang” came from. Ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing can come from nothing. Further following the Eleatics, it is not possible to understand the universe as expanding since that would require space to expand into. Modern cosmology seeks to sidestep this by positing that space itself expands as the surface of a balloon expands as it’s pumped up. (Where does it expand into?) Or perhaps our universe is one of many in some higher dimensional multi-verse. (And in what space and from where does that come?) Obviously, these too explain nothing.

That the universe exists, that we exist, must mean that something always existed. That the universe seems to be expanding may be better understood as an unchanging totality without boundaries of time or space. Everything that exists – in the “past, present or future” actually exists at once, whole. Stephen Hawking once hinted at this by noting that the universe could be understood as one big wave function, a singluar All. That the universe appears to be expanding under the influence of dark energy and will eventually decompose into its constituent particles may simply be the state of this All. It is we – individual living beings – that move through reality that experience change and time.

This leaves the question of why there should be something rather than nothing in the first place unexplained except by the very fact that we exist. I don’t know where any of this leads except to wonder.

A Conclusion to a Still Unwritten Book: The End?

I previously have suggested that the universe seems to have been designed and that this therefore implies a designer. Following this supposition further leads to two fundamental questions: where did the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit. Subsidiary questions might include what materials and tools did the designer use and what can be said of the designer? We might also wonder if the designer watches or cares for us or has any of the other attributes humans have often associated with their gods such as being infinitely powerful, wise, kind, all knowing, loving, good etc?

Before taking a stab at these questions, it is worth noting that physicists and cosmologists are also trying to peer behind the curtain of creation. String theorists are still seeking – despite a lack of any experimental evidence offered by current high energy physics – to reconcile relativity and quantum physics and thereby explain the menagerie of observed elementary particles and forces. Recently, they have found a set of one quadrillion possible solutions to string equations within a ten-dimensional spacetime that have “the same set of matter particles as exists in our universe.” But there remains no experimental evidence or process for deciding which of these quadrillion, if any, may be applicable to the observed reality.

Also, for the past decade or so, cosmologists have been looking at alternatives to the inflationary scenario of the post-Big Bang universe. Inflation explains features of the cosmic background radiation. However, it does not explain from where the Big Bang itself arose beyond the suggestion that it came from some quantum fluctuation within a primordial singularity. An attractive alternative to having to explain any sort of a beginning is to assume that the Big Bang was simply our side of a “bounce” or “collision” between universes.

All these efforts to explain what might otherwise appear to be an amazing Goldilocks universe – in which all the elemental particles and forces seem to lead to the evolution of complexity and the seeming inevitability of life – must in the end still suppose something unexplained and just given: a multidimensional universe beyond ours, a singularity just sitting there at the beginning of time or a series of bouncing universes just following one another. (This latter leaves aside the issue of dark energy’s apparent speeding up of the expansion of our universe so that it never reverses into a big crunch. Instead, it seems that eventually – in some enormous 10 to the 100th years – matter will have broken down and even black holes will be warmer than space and radiate away with a final pop.)

It might also be worth pausing to wonder why the universe would have to be designed rather than simply “wished” into being as befitting an all-powerful “god.” Put another way, why would a creator need to design a universe using materials and processes that we would find understandable as laws of physics? Was the designer constrained in some way – perhaps by some preexisting Platonic Forms – to act through means such as singularities and Higgs fields?

Occam’s Razor suggests to me that we simply acknowledge that our universe seems to have a design discoverable by science and wonder about the designer. Following this line of inquiry, I return to considering where might have the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit?

It seems to me that there is no way to answer the where question. One must either posit that there never was an original moment of creation or accept that there was such a moment and recognize it as an uncaused first cause. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Either the designer was caused – by what, from where? – or was itself the First Cause. This seems to me the unanswerable question behind all others and thus the essential mystery at the bottom of all science, religion and philosophy.

The why question may be somewhat more amenable. Consider that the universe does appear to have been designed and put into action according to the physical laws thereby built into it. Could it be a grand simulation to test theories of good and evil, a complex and especially vivid dream or simply a work of art? Might it be a majestic theater on which a countless number of actors play our parts and then disappear off stage thus making the designer a cosmic Shakespeare? Or might it have been set in motion for the consciousness behind the design to dump itself into to avoid an endless eternity of loneliness and thereby undergo an almost endless series of experiences acted through everyone and everything? I myself drift toward the last suggestion and to the possibility of a universe in which consciousness is primordial and attaches to everything with mass (a kind of panpsychism). Life would offer the most interesting existence. So perhaps the designer looks out through the being of everything, in a sense making us all “children of god?”

One last question, does love come into it at all. Does the designer love its creation or any part of it, such as us? If the cosmic consciousness is in everything, then it may be essentially a matter of self-love, even when we “love” one another. I believe we exist as individuals and we love as such. Our capability – indeed need – to love suggests it is somehow built into the design.

A Conclusion to a Still Unwritten Book: An Interlude

What are we and what were we made for? For some, this question may be neither important nor interesting. That we exist is its own reality and sufficient explanation. The universe exists because it has always existed, no need to consider any creation story. One such person, a good friend, suggested after reading my previous post that I read Why Does the World Exist by Jim Holt. I had that on my bookshelf and reread it along with some Roger Penrose. These led me down some rabbit holes and thus this interlude, which I hope will eventually connect to the rest of my “conclusion.”

So, what about the Big Bang, doesn’t that seem to be a beginning requiring explanation? How can a grand explosion that became our universe be squared with an eternal universe that always existed? Well, our Big Bang might be just the most recent of a series without beginning or end, maybe one of a multi-verse of such. Perhaps “chaotic inflation” out of some “quantum fluctuation” created our universe from a tiny burp in the vacuum that “arose spontaneously from sheer nothingness.”

Or why assume, as I did in my previous, that “nothing is the more natural state because it would need no explanation.” Perhaps the universe exists because it has always existed and because nothing is itself not possible. The universe exists so why posit nothing as more natural? In any case, before the Big Bang, there was not nothing because there was no time, therefore no past. The singularity assumed to have exploded in the Big Bang was matter and energy infinitely compressed (just as it is in a black hole). Infinite compression of mass and energy means spacetime doesn’t exist so before the Big Bang there was nothing and no time. Therefore, the Big Bang requires no history.

Or perhaps the universe came into being through being observed by us. In other words, because we are here, it had to be.

None of these possibilities account for why they might have been the case. They do not explain why they should be true or what was their First Cause. But one could argue that any explanation of existence that leaves itself unexplained simply means that the ultimate wall has been reached and not that it is wrong. All explanations must end in such a explanatory wall. Just accept the one you choose.

Holt notes one rejoinder to this (Arthur Lovejoy, 1933) that if the universe existed as an accidental – it’s just-there – world – “uncertainty would infect the whole; anything...might exist and anything might happen, and no one thing would be in itself even more probable than another.” Indeed, the simplest alternative to Nothing is Everything, i.e., all possible worlds. In a multiverse of all possibilities, why not an entire universe – even ours – simple turning into chocolate cake?

Much more can be said about these conflicting positions. But as Holt notes, one way to escape the ultimate inability to provide a First Cause simply is to assume a self-explanatory something that would have to exist in order to explain everything else. That something would have to be eternal, infinite, powerful and – since the universe is ordered and includes intelligence – intelligent. In my last post, I suggested that such a thing is “what might be called God.” I should make clear that I would not suggest using that term as it carries a load of baggage that seems to me beside the point (more on that next time). I prefer to talk simply of a design and a designer.

For myself, I find the bare acceptance of a universe without explanation to be an ultimate abandonment of reason and intellect. We are capable of considering the infinite even if we cannot understand it. And I reject the notion that the effort to follow St. Thomas’ finger – science and reason – to consideration of a fundamental design and a designer is just an expression of a religious impulse. Man has long sought the answer to his Being. Religion did grow out of that but so has science and philosophy.

Infinitesimal but Inevitable

Went biking a bit later than usual today, had a chore to do first. Wasn’t sure what path to take and chose on the fly. As I went along, a bee flew into my chest. It was a chance encounter; the bee apparently was not coming at me with its stinger and no harm done to me, the bee I’m not sure. Struck me that the odds of this happening – the bee flying to that spot exactly as I entered it – were infinitesimally small. Yet when it happened, the event became inevitable. Everything that bee did that day and every decision I made led the two of us to it. 

The light leaving the sun all morning traveled the 93 million miles to earth in around nine minutes by our time. But as photons don’t experience time, all of them arrived at every spot they would ever be at the same moment, establishing a universal and simultaneous now. As the bee-human encounter happened, it had already/always happened. Folks used to call this fate: everything that happens was fated to happen. Yet the reality we experience has a future that we enter through a combination of factors including free will. We are conscious of the passage of time and can project our decisions and actions into a future that we can thereby affect, at least to some degree. Reality seems to be a kind of entangled state in which everything that will happen, or has happened, or is happening exists at the same moment while yet still unfolding in “real time.” Pretty cool.

Electrons & Salt

I have been working for the past two months within three degrees of the equator and re-watching The Ascent of Man (an excellent BBC series from the 1970s). Led thereby to consider:

1. the fact that a point on the surface of the earth at the equator spins faster than a point nearer the poles; thus

2. verified according to Einstein's theory of relativity – as speed increases, time must move slower to preserve the absolute limit of the speed of light – time must move a tiny bit slower for me than folks back home up north. 

This led me to wonder what the speed of an electron around an atomic nucleus might be, whether it would approach the speed of light and what that might mean about the nature of reality. The nature of reality is already very strange. Consider that what appears to us as solid matter – from the atom on up – is mostly just empty space. There is so much space inside ordinary matter that you could squeeze our sun down to the size of Manhattan Island (or something like that) and make it one big and very heavy neutron. Things seem solid to us because of electro-static forces that hold together and repel assemblages of atoms and molecules. This strangeness doesn't even include the weirdness of quantum physics. Anyway, what might be going on as an electron spins around inside an atom? 

Of course, electrons actually don't orbit the nucleus like little planets around a sun. Electrons exist in a kind of cloud of probabilities subject to certain allowed energy levels that can be thought of as shells. It is possible, mainly as a thought experiment, to estimate a kind of notional speed of an “orbiting” electron leading to a value of around five million MPH. That is fast but still only about 1% of the speed of light. So while time would certainly pass more slowly for an electron than for me, there would not be any profound relativistic effects. 

This then led me to consider the strangeness of salt. Salt is made from the ionic combination of a poisonous gas (chlorine) and a soft metal that burns in air (sodium). It is also vital to life. Perhaps because life evolved in the sea, sodium and chlorine ions are essential elements for the functioning of core biological systems. What rules of the universe led to the sixth most abundant element in the earth's crust (sodium) marrying so happily and fortuitously with the 21st (chlorine)? 

The sodium atom has a lone electron in its outer shell that it quite willingly donates to the chlorine making the sodium a negative ion and the chlorine a positive ion. That allows the two to remain together through that electro-static charge in a crystal lattice to make common salt. Electrons do not move at relativistic speeds because they are given mass through interaction with the Higgs Field. If they did move at the speed of light, as do massless photons, atoms would not exist and we would not be here.

Design Without A Designer?

My previous riff on the possibility of a designed universe considered what that might say about the designer. Would that be a First Cause that created the physical laws that seem to have governed the Big Bang and subsequent evolution of the universe, or perhaps a “programmer” using a preexisting set of tools to design a very elaborate simulation? Thomas Nagel offered instead the concept of a design without a designer, one arising through a somehow ordered process of mutation and natural selection. He opposed this to a teleologic explanation (such as divine intervention or creationism) or a merely material and chance elaboration of physical law. His alternative include “the constitutive possibility, in the character of the elements of which the world is composed, of their combination into living organisms with the properties of consciousness, action, and cognition which we know they have.” (pg 93) This “constitutive possibility” is in the same category as mathematical truths. They are just are, embedded in reality. The same can be said for moral truths – such as the imperative not to harm other sentient creatures – that are facts, he says, that we call values. These are accessible to consciousness. “We exist in a world of values and respond to them through normative judgements that guide our action…. The response to value seems only to make sense as a function of the unified subject of consciousness…. Practical reasoning and its influence on action involve the unified conscious subject who sees what he should do.” (pg 114-15 ) This gives consciousness a hook by which to express free will. We chose right or wrong. Nagel calls the whole process – the evolution of life, rise of consciousness and emergent perception of right and wrong – as one “of the universe gradually waking up.” (pg 117)

The emergent ability to perceive good and evil doesn’t mean an automatic tendency toward the good. “No teleologic principle tending towards the production of a single outcome seems suitable. Rather, it would have to be a tendency toward the proliferation of complex forms and the generation of multiple variations in the range of possible complex systems.” (pg 122) According to Nagel, teleology can be restated as “a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value [of what is good for each creature] that is inseparable from them.” (pg 123)

I like all this, it echoes Plato and his notion of the Forms as the basis of reality, perceivable through reason. But it begs the question of how and why there should be any “constitutive possibilities” pre-baked into the creation of the universe. Nagel, a self-declared atheist, wants to avoid the notion of any Devine Designer. But it seems to beg the question of how to posit a design without a designer. It violates Occam’s Razor. So I return to the question of what sort of designer would set this universe spinning. Perhaps Nagel here can point in the right direction. There does seem to be a moral order to the universe as well as a governing set of physical and mathematical laws (which we are still discovering). We can, in fact, know good from evil. (Mere good and bad may vary according to the individual, group or civilization.) We also have the free will to ignore this distinction and clearly human history is full of examples of those who did and do.

A while back, near the start of my ruminations, I suggested that perhaps the designer was a kind of cosmic Shakespeare, setting up the grandest possible stage on which a myriad of actors could perform. Or perhaps, out of loneliness, it formulated an elaborate simulation it could inhabit in the form of individual conscious agents, bound by time and space. I don’t know but it’s been fun, at least for me, ruminating on it. In the end, my own, I may, or may not, find out.

Decoherence, or What is Special About a Tree

Quantum physics makes some people – especially those that seem to understand it – uncomfortable. It suggests that at the base of reality, things can be both here and not here, both particle and wave, both one and zero. The double slit experiments, in which electrons are sent in groups or individually through screens with slits open or closed, show wave or particle features depending upon the experimental set-up. Anything, small or large, can be thought of as existing as a wave function with the probability that when measured the wave will collapse into a definite object in a specific place as determined by the probabilistic mathematics. (Large objects have the highest probability of being where we see them, when we see them, rather than anywhere else the wave may be spread out to, including perhaps in another galaxy.) The picture of reality that quantum physics paints is strange yet the mathematics of it – quantum mechanics– successfully predicts core elements confirmed by experimentation. Niels Bohr, who was at the forefront of inventing the mathematics, said that it requires a “radical revision of our attitude toward the problem of physical reality.” For Bohr, and others of the Copenhagen school, the relationship of quantum physics to classical physics – the micro world to the macro – is not straightforward. Quantum mechanics accurately predicts outcomes at the level of the very small where quantum affects lead to strangeness. Yet we seldom see quantum effects at the macro level that is well-described by classical physics, despite its failure at the micro level.

One of the stranger possibilities raised by quantum physics is the role of the conscious observer. This interpretation posits that a wave function is collapsed when measured and the measurement observed. (The role of the measuring instrument and whether it is part of quantum or classical reality is one of the many issues still debated.) Various efforts have been made to sweep aside the difficulty of reconciling quantum and classical physics and avoid the messiness of assuming a tree is not there unless someone sees it. (This problem is separate from attempts to reconcile quantum physics with relativity or to unify the fundamental forces and particles of nature.) One such – the many worlds theory – suggests that every time a measurement is made, reality splits into separate universes. A more parsimonious approach looks to the concept of quantum decoherence. Essentially, wave functions spread out into each other and merge into the world of classical physics. Strictly speaking, this still leaves the question of the role of measurement and the observer open. But some believe we need not accept any quantum strangeness because decoherence itself leads to macro objects emerging from the micro reality. The quantum waves crash onto the shores of observability by themselves. A tree is there whether we see it or not.

The questions here are profound. One hundred million years ago, the earth was populated by dinosaurs. Some very large creatures roamed the earth and we have found their bones in our time. Surely they existed and moved through space and time as discrete objects. They stepped over stones and across rivers that also had a specific and real existence. Even before that, in deep time, before multi-cellular life, primitive bacteria and archaea lived and reproduced and we’ve found their traces as well. They existed without being measured or observed by any higher, conscious living being. So does this mean that quantum strangeness is fake physics?

The possibilities seem to be three:

– quantum mechanics works well at the micro level but is unnecessary to explain the reality of the world we see because it emerges on it’s own whether we are there or not to see it.

– nothing emerges from the universal wave function (the equation encompassing the totality of existence across time and space) as discrete objects until observed.

– some things exist as collapsed wave functions on their own while other “things” exist only as the former interact with them.

The first possibility simply begs the question of how two fundamentally different pictures of reality can both be true. Rather, let me suggest that the second possibility may be a subset of the third. Life is the dividing line. Rocks, planets, stars and even galaxies exist as wave functions perhaps decohering as they spread out into each other but still not there until acted upon – observed, eaten, stepped on – by something acting as an individual agent, something alive and trying to stay alive and perhaps reproduce. Life seems inevitable given the fundamental constants of physics and chemistry. (Why the universe is made this way is a separate question.) But a rock is just a rock and is never trying to become anything else. It may be acted upon but doesn’t by itself act. A tree is always there because it is trying to be. It acts upon its surroundings with purpose thus collapsing its own wave function and those with which it interacts. It transforms earth and sunlight into living tissue, its own living tissue. This may imply or even require a certain kind of consciousness. Certainly, it does suggest awareness of environment sufficient to utilize it. How is a tree’s awareness different from our own? That is another matter. But a tree is there even if alone its forest.