Light Ages and Dark Ages

Read recently a dystopic sci-fi short story set near the end of this century in which a floating city of refugees is overturned by one of the then frequent super typhoons in the Philippine archipelago. The “hero” then must flee from super biotech Chinese police. Nothing about the story line offered reason to look forward to the world that will be brought about by climate change, environmental damage, rising sea-levels and technology-enabled authoritarianism. Indeed, the end of the century will most probably be one of desperation, displacement, disease, poverty and death for billions. Made me wonder what is the meaning and purpose of any of the lives we live now if it leads to this. The answer seems to me to be that there is no meaning but there may be purpose.

Most who live in the wealthy countries of North America, Western Europe and the Pacific Rim enjoy lives of security, well-being, comfort and accomplishment. In the past 200 years, advances in industry, agriculture, transportation, and technology have improved the lives of many others and reduced poverty globally. While not everyone shares in this progress, collectively, the human race has never had it better. But the good times and bad times come in waves – light ages followed by dark ages – and the next one may indeed be a super typhoon.

Throughout history, periods during which many lived relatively well are followed by times of collapse. During the golden age of Rome, its citizens enjoyed relative stability and comfort. When Rome fell, Europe entered the centuries of the dark ages. Other civilizations rose and fell in their own spaces and times. This was probably true in prehistory as well. Homo sapiens almost went extinct at least twice before: around 195,000 years ago and again some 70,000 years ago. Both times it took hundreds to thousands of years to recover. We now live in a global civilization that has entered the age we created from scratch, the Anthropocene. When our global light age ends, the dark age will therefore also be globalized.

What does this mean for those of us alive now? Well, we can enjoy what we have. Beyond that, nothing. Ages swing from good to bad and back again. It seems likely they will continue to do so. None of this has any meaning, it just is. At most, it has perhaps been the engine of human evolution as overcoming the past dark age allows us to rise a little bit further in the next light one. But we can not claim credit for our relative well-being. We were just born lucky. And we also cannot be blamed for the past centuries of burning fossil fuel and despoiling nature. We were merely alive when the bill came due. But we can still have purpose. At some point in the next century, humanity will reach a new equilibrium with the changed earth. So we can try to live more sustainably now and do everything we can to ready the world and the next generations for what is to come so that the next age is a light one.

Interlude: Unconscious Artificial Intelligence?

I’ve been considering the nature and role of consciousness for some years. Along the way, I’ve wondered about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and whether at some point it might become conscious. My conclusion has been that however complex and “intelligent” an AI would become, that would not produce consciousness. Consciousness requires life and – as at must include at least some degree of self-awareness – it could only be the property of an individual organism with some organized “self.” Machine intelligence might be constructed – coded – to simulate self (and thus pass the Turing Test) but this would nevertheless not be an awareness of self. (Even now, AIs and robots can be quite “clever.” A recent visitor to a Tokyo hotel asked the robot concierge how much it cost. It replied “I’m priceless.” Cute.) However elaborate the mind – in the case of the most advanced AI’s built with neural networks this might be quite sophisticated, even to the point that the human programmers might not be able to replicate its internal processes – consciousness is an additional property beyond mere complexity and processing power. In the first season of HBO’s Westworld, android “hosts” become conscious through the repeated experience of pain and loss. But of course, to feel such emotions, one must first experience them as such. Quantity (of coded processing operations) does not equal qualia. Qualitative experiences are only possible if one is already conscious.

But human beings not only possess a conscious mind but also an unconscious one. Most brain processes – even those that at some point enter consciousness – originate and work away unconsciously. We all have the experience of dreaming and also of doing things quite competently, without any awareness of having done them. (We may, for example, drive a familiar daily route and get to our destination without remembering details of the ride.) The brain processing of the unconscious mind may indeed be replicated by advanced machine intelligence. As AI becomes more complex, given the power of electronic circuits and the complexity of coded learning via neutral networks, the processing capacity of machine intelligence may well exceed human despite not becoming conscious. They would also, perhaps, exceed human ability to understand what they are “thinking” (or even “dreaming”). It was Stephen Hawking who most famously warned of the dangers of such AIs. He warned that we need to be attentive to their management.

So, though AIs may never become conscious or self-aware, they may nevertheless run autonomously along routes enabled by the algorithms coded into their machine DNA and come to “conclusions” we humans might find inconvenient or dangerous. (They might for example decide that human activity is injurious to the planet – which it seems it is – and seek to correct the disease.) Limits should be included in the most basic AI coding and algorithms. Isaac Asimov thought of this some time ago. His Three Laws of Robotics make a good start:

First Law – A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law – A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law – A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

To these he later added a zeroith law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

This last might be might turn out to be a doubled-edged sword.

Next week I will return to  Notes on "A History of Political Theory"

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.

A Ruminations Credo

These are fancies of my own, by which I do not pretend to discover things but to lay open myself.... if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retention; so that I can promise no certainty, more than to make known to what point the knowledge I now have has risen.... I speak my opinion freely of all things, even of those that, perhaps, exceed my capacity, and that I do not conceive to be, in any wise, under my jurisdiction.  And, accordingly, the judgment I deliver, is to show the measure of my own sight.

 Michel de Montaigne

Dinosaurs and Intelligence

Dinosaurs arose some 240 million years ago. They became the dominant terrestrial vertebrates after the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event 201 million years ago. Their ascendancy lasted another 135 million years until the Cretaceous mass extinction 66 million years ago opened the world to the eventual rise of mammals and us. The first mammal-like forms appeared some 225 million years ago. But for the next 160 million years, mammals had to find their niches in the shadow of the dinosaurs, characteristically living a nocturnal lifestyle, emerging from burrows to feed only at night. This may have favored the evolution of better eye-sight, smell, touch and hearing to be able to navigate, find food and survive in the dark. But they still had to hide from the dinosaurs.

The question of why dinosaurs never developed cognitive intelligence, despite the many millions of years they were the top vertebrate clade, forms a rich WWW vein. (Search for the question and check it out.) Some dinosaurs did get quite intelligent in the form of birds. Some avian dinosaurs are even tool users. But there is no evidence that dinosaurs ever achieved anything like the human intelligence which has allowed us to alter our environment in ways both planned and unplanned. We human beings (the last surviving species of the homo genus) have been around for only some 200 thousand years. If one starts counting with the Australopithecus, then our progenitors go back around 3.6 million years. In either case, the fact that dinosaurs didn’t develop intelligence and complex technology even over a hundred million years while we did in just a few raises at least two questions: Is the rise of intelligence inevitable and does it have survival value over the long run?

The second question may be easier to answer. Dinosaurs and all other life on earth have done pretty well without human-style intelligence. Indeed, intelligence has not played a major role over the four billion years of life on earth. Some dinosaurs may have been clever hunters, as are wolves for example, and Jurassic Park has shown us a possible example. But they apparently found the use of claw, teeth, armor and size sufficient to last until a huge asteroid took them out with most other life. This leads to an answer to the first question, was the rise of intelligence inevitable. We can never know what might have happened with the clever dinosaurs if they were given the next 65 million years instead of mammals. Large brains need extra oxygen and are costly in energy. Maybe there would never have been any evolutionary advantage to making the investment. Human intelligence may be a cosmic accident, the result of a particular rock hitting at a particular moment allowing the burrowing underclass – mammals – to take their furtive ways into the sunlight.

So to return to the question of the long-term survival value of our big brains, the dinosaurs did really well without them and it is not clear that they will save us from ourselves.

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.

If There Was A Cosmological Design, What about the Designer?

I have been speculating about the origins of the universe and consciousness for some time now. Following St. Thomas’ finger, modern science points to an act of creation tightly constrained to produce the universe of matter and energy that we see around us (and in which conscious beings arose). If the fundamental constants of physics were not exactly what they are, if the Higgs boson did not manifest itself in a way to create the menagerie of particles that physics has discovered, the Big Bang would have produced some other kind of universe or perhaps none at all. We discover the laws of nature because they – the laws – appear to be there. They were there from the very first moment something “exploded” into spacetime. We exist in a universe that seems to have been designed according to these laws, or better, was created through using a particular set of fundamental constants and rules.

Of course, if there was a design, it suggests there was a designer. (I’m now reading Mind & Cosmos by Thomas Nagel. He suggests something like a design without a designer but more on that another time.) My question this time is why anything capable of designing a law governed creation on the order of the cosmos would have to use or obey law? The traditional notion of a Transcendental God is a being all-powerful and without constraints. As noted here before, I tend not to believe in such a god. And in fact, it seems that whatever set in motion the particular universe we find ourselves in was constrained to act through rules of the game we now discover as fundamental physics. Could an omnipotent god be constrained? Could not such a god simply call a universe that would look like ours into being by commanding or dreaming it? What kind of “god” would work with a rule book and where would that rule book have come from? Either that rule book precedes its use or for some unknowable reason the god created it in order to use it? What kind of god would do the later? And if the rules predate the god then we have not yet reached the First Cause.

I have no answers to these questions so let me have some fun. Let’s imagine a toolkit of cosmic software that allows the creation of universes. It contains menus of all sorts of starting conditions, rules and variables. A “player” – amateur or professional – plugs in, picks through the many choices available and runs the program. The “machine” cranks and out spews the result. Some might crash immediately, others just sit there shining or in the dark, others maybe moving forward in whatever way the rules encourage. A “successful” run might eventually contain things like stars, planets and people. If this program came on the market here, it would quickly outsell any of Sid Meier’s creations.

I said fun, but this is really a thought experiment for it raises the question of why any designer would create a universe and let it run without further ado. For it seems that the putative designer plays no further part in influencing outcomes. There is good and evil in our world and one must assume that it exists anywhere conscious beings exist. Lots of bad things have happened here on earth – to civilizations, societies, individuals – despite whatever prayers or entities were sent the gods’ way. One might argue that God showed its care for us by allowing us free will, by allowing us reason, by giving us the ability to tell right from wrong. There is scant evidence that that has worked out very well when one looks at the present state of the world, or as my historian friend would say, at any period of history. What possibly could be the intention of the possible designer who set our world in motion? Play, experiment or maybe child-rearing?

What if there was no designer but simply a design and the universe is an example of the eternal return?

Gravity Waves, Relativity, Quantum Physics and Consciousness

Previously, I suggested that the confirmation of gravity waves grounds general relativity theory (GR) more firmly than the Standard Model of quantum physics (SM). The latter remains incomplete in a way the former is not. Relativity accounts for gravity (as a bending of spacetime); the Standard Model is still looking to do the same, perhaps via supersymmetry or string theory. For this reason, it seemed perhaps useful to look at quantum physics in light of relativity, instead of trying to extend the SM to account for gravity. GR is complete as it is and now provides the basis of classical cosmology which traces the origin of the universe to the Big Bang. But practitioners of the SM are busy seeking to use quantum physics to get beyond the Big Bang. One important and interesting effort is contained in the unbounded-universe approach pioneered by Stephen Hawking and James Hartle (see also this SETI talk brought to attention through @GeorgeShiber). This posits the origin of the universe not with a Big Bang but with the conversion of a dimension of space into a dimension of time.

With GR, the universe originates with a Big Bang that by itself has no explanation. Where does the original singularity that explodes come from? According to what physical laws does it exist? The Hawking-Hartle approach seeks to explain this by suggesting that four dimensions of space without time – and therefore without origin – give rise to the universe through a process akin to quantum tunneling that converts one space dimension into time and thus produces spacetime. But even the Hawking-Hartle approach does not offer an explanation of where and how the four dimensions of space come from. Neither theory provides any way to get a grip on the question of first causes. Both approaches reveal in their own way a reality that apparently was given, suggesting there may be no more layers of the onion to peel back. Perhaps, mathematically based science has brought us to the edge of what we can know in this way. There may simply be nothing beyond what we presently understand; we now know the givens of the universe we exist within. Or it may be that both are useful in understanding a reality that we cannot ultimately know through a single lens. The key may lie in pondering more deeply consciousness and the role of the observer.

GR and the SM appear fundamentally incompatible. Yet the observer seems central to both approaches. For the SM, it is the act of observing – measuring – which collapses the wave function of probabilities of a quantum wave (or entangled state) into a specific value. For GR, there is no privileged place to measure the state of anything else, all is in motion and each observer will see time and space differently depending upon his position relative to everything else. The relationship between light and mass creates the framework for observation by providing a measure of time and the three dimensions of space. Light “travels” at the cosmic speed limit but takes no time to get anywhere since at its speed, time stops. A surfer riding a photon is everywhere that photon will ever be at the same moment. It is stuff with mass that experiences, bends and moves through spacetime.

Observation requires consciousness; without being heard, trees that fall in the forest make no sound. Tied in some way to mass, consciousness manifests probabilities as it moves through spacetime. Looking from the perspective of what both GR and the SM tell us, the universe is one big wave function outside of time where at one level everything happens at once while to the observers immersed in the Higgs field, time exists. Why should this be true?

The practitioners of quantum physics remain focused on considering various ways to reconcile the SM with GR. Whether these efforts will ever lead to anything that can be observed and measured is an open question. But even in the event of some unification – or a new theory that subsumes both – the problem would remain of where does that come from? This leads to the ultimate question of the origin of the universe. If it's not the Big Bang but some other beginning or even some steady state, it would then beg the question of why that?

Both GR and the SM describe the universe we find ourselves in from different points of the observer's view. In one we experience relative time. In the other, we determine what is by looking at it. As conscious observers and living creatures, we are, in effect, at the center of everything. This would suggest that if we are to gain further, deeper understanding of reality we must understand more about consciousness and its relation to reality. Those who try to explain consciousness as a product of organic matter and processes get it exactly wrong. In some way, consciousness creates reality. Consciousness is not derivative but somehow primordial. There is a ghost in the machine.

This leaves us with two apparent options. One would be to accept that we can go no further. Science may yet produce new ways to manipulate the world – via technology – but we will be unable to penetrate further the veils of the cosmos we inhabit. The other would be to start with a more profound understanding of consciousness and perhaps by creating a science based upon qualia rather than quantity. This would require a new way of thinking more akin, perhaps, to philosophy than mathematics. And it might start with the question of why there should be anything rather than nothing.