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

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?

Beyond quantum physics? Needed, a new Einstein

I've been thinking about consciousness and quantum reality for some years now.  Come to a few conclusions that have flowed into these ruminations:

First, seems to me that consciousness is primordial, i.e., to originate from the same source as the material universe that is the subject of modern physics.  Or to put it differently, to be unexplainable as a mere manifestation of some complex process of matter.  Consciousness is a property of the universe just as material existence appears to be.  Indeed, it may be that consciousness is prior to matter, that the ghost in the machine came before the machine.

Second, that the universe must be understood as something both eternal - the speed of light to itself is instantaneous - and immersed in time via our individual consciousness of it.  The universe is something that exists all at once in time and space.  It is we that travel through it at a speed - the flow of time - that leads us to measure light at 186,000 miles per second.  Individual consciousness seems to be attached to material processes that result from the Higgs field having given certain particles mass, that is, that slows them down from the instantaneous propagation of light and other mass-less particles.  Connected to these "slow particles," we experience time.

And now a third thought, too preliminary to call a conclusion.  That modern quantum physics while powerful and beautiful, is somehow fundamentally wrong.  Quantum physics is essentially a quantitative, numerical understanding of reality.  It offers probabilities and predictions flowing from a mathematical model of reality.  It has been amazingly accurate, predicting particles and properties then confirmed through experiment.  But more recently it seems that reality conforms too accurately to the standard model of physics.  The Higgs mass so far is exactly as predicted and now it seems the electron is perfectly spherical rather than dipole.  Both results appear to rule out the simplest models of super-symmetry (which already proposes more dimensions than the four we experience).   Super-symmetry is the effort to extend quantum physics into a theory of everything, accounting for all particles as well as gravity, dark mass and dark energy.

The latest news on the Higgs seems quite revealing.  Its mass (125 GeV) seems to be exactly where it should be for the universe as we know it to exist.  If it was much stronger, nothing much would form beyond hydrogen and helium because the particles that make them up would be so tightly bound that heavier elements - and us - couldn't form.  If it was much weaker, nothing could hang together and yet again, nothing much - including us - would form.  The Higgs - like Goldilock's porridge - is just right for us.  This is enough of a conundrum, why should it be just right for us?  But there also seems no reason - absent a super-symmetry explanation - for the exact value that the Higgs does have.  It seems to be a "given."

Quantum physicists still have hope.  There are more elaborate models for super-symmetry, less simple, less beautiful, more dimensions.  And some suggest that the Higgs has different values in the many multi-verses of which our universe may just be one.  So we happen to live in one with just the right value because in most of the others we could not exist.

Quantum physics is already a bit Rube-Goldberg.  The multi-verse proposal is more so.  Occam's Razor suggests there must be a simpler way.  It might be useful to again consider Einstein's dictum that "God does not play dice."  His theory of relativity did not flow from math but from a profound insight into how time and space relate.  Yes, math flows from it but relativity is an understanding of time and space as one thing and gravity as resulting from its curvature.  Quantum physics and relativity remain trains running on different tracks.  We may need a new Einstein to put everything on one.  Someone who can provide a deeper insight into why the universe is the way it is rather than look to mathematics to explain everything.

Quantum Being

Reading in La Roy Ladurie's excellent study of the people of Montaillou, came across his observation on the musings of these 14th century peasants on freedom of will, do we have it or not? Began thinking of this question in light of my musings on the speed of consciousness. I had suggested that the speed of light is actually a measure of time, the time it takes us to leap from one moment of existence to the next. Light itself has no speed since at its "speed" as we measure it, time does not exist. Light relative to itself is everywhere it will be at the same moment. The universe it illuminates is therefore that which exists across all time at once, the universe as an eternal whole. Our consciousness – embedded in matter and not traveling as light – experiences time and sees light crawl along at so much slower than infinite speed.

Could freedom of will exist if a timeless universe also exists? If everything that has happened, is happening and will happen “already” exists in the same instant of creation in the Big Bang, what could be new? Are we conscious beings just crawling along lines that already exist, just following what is already fated to happen?

Being is an interesting word. It can be both verb and noun. I can be something, I can be being sad or happy. I can have a state of being, we can talk of human and supreme beings or even alien beings. Being is simply the condition of existing, of having existence. But does a rock have being? It does exist but would we say that a rock is being anything. Even just being a rock? Being implies something more, it suggests a subjective agent, someone who is being. Only something that is being could also be conscious. Consciousness is the awareness of a being. The speed of time is the pace of a beings movement through moments.

Back to freedom of will. We certainly feel, at least some times, that we have it. Life can be so complicated with so many random seeming events and difficult choices to make that it is hard to believe that it has all already been written. Sure, sometimes it seems we have no choice but to have done what we have done but in reality at each moment, we can decide among almost anything. How to square this with a relativistic universe in which the true speed of light is instantaneous and in which everything has already happened?

What if being is quantum, both particle and wave? Each of us are particles. We move through a material universe with time. We are attached to particular assemblages of matter we call bodies. We observe and act within the time-bound material world and with our wonderfully complex brains our consciousness blossoms into self-awareness and thought. Being also exists as a wave. We would not necessarily be able to understand that, as such being – accompanied by an experience of everything at once – is not easy to grasp. But such being – being beyond time – would not become aware of the particles of being before (or after) they acted because before and after would not exist. In other words, there is no text for us to follow, no “fate” which limits or determines our actions, because what we do can be known only as we do it. If the eternal, timeless universe is one conscious thought of being, it is nothing but what we particular beings immersed in time have made of it. We collapse the wave function.

Just a thought.

Maybe Reality Is Not An Infinitely Peelable Onion?

Science is the search for rational understanding of nature and the universe achieved through replicable observation.  2012 has seen a fundamental advance in the effort to achieve an ultimate understanding of physical reality and the cosmos with the discovery of the Higgs boson.  In July, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN found direct evidence of the Higgs.  Since then, further LHC data appears to place the Higgs more firmly in the Standard Theory that unifies three of the four fundamental forces (electromagnetic, weak, strong and gravity).  Perhaps equally significant, however, is what LHC seems not to be finding - evidence supporting Supersymmetry, the only candidate theory physics has to unify all four forces and explain the dark matter that seems key to holding galaxies together.

Supersymmetry posits an unseen partner particle for every particle now known to science.  Supersymmetry is a basis for string theory, which directly seeks to account for quantum gravity.  With evidence for supersymmetry and string theory, we would have a unified theory of forces and particles, uniting the big and the small and explaining "everything."

Trouble is that those particles that LHC could be finding if the simplest versions of supersymmetry were predictive don't seem to be there.  This does not rule out more complex versions of the approach but modern physics has generally been guided by the notion that the simple is most beautiful and the beautiful is more likely to be true.

But its not the details of the current state of physics that I want to talk about here but the very quest for an ultimate understanding, one that explains everything we can see and know by some set of fundamental scientific laws and equations.  The notion that everything has an ultimate explanation, according to a laws-based structure that puts everything in its place, cannot logically be true.  Any explanation of what is by another set of what-ises begs the question of what explains those.  Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem puts this nicely:  “Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle – something you have to assume but cannot prove.”

The menagerie of particles now known by science includes all sorts of particles with mass (fermions) and those without (bosons).  The smallest fermions include quarks and leptons.  Supersymmetry and string theory seek to explain all these particles by placing them within a frame with many other particles and dimensions that we cannot observe and for which we so far have no evidence.  Meanwhile, an extension of string theory - superstring theory - seeks to explain the Big Bang and space-time by positing other things we cannot observe:  colliding branes.

Let's suppose that we find evidence of some form of the supersymmetry and superstring theories, i.e., that they are "true."  What will explain them?  What will account for whatever laws and equations that seem to predict everything else we can observe?  Where do the laws that govern lawful action come from?  As Gödel proved, nothing can explain itself.

Perhaps, Plato was right.  The cosmos is made up of Forms.  What if the basic building blocks of existence - the bosons and fermions we observe, the structure of space-time, the Higgs field that creates mass, the gravity that pulls mass so tightly that it releases the energy of life in the middle of our sun - all these, just are? 

The explanation of everything is either infinitely recursive - each peel of the onion of explanation simply uncovers the next layer to be explained - or the ground of everything is/was simply there.  Either way, it makes science no less important and useful but not necessarily the answer to all questions and especially to those most human of all questions - why are we here, where do we come from and for what ends?

The Higgs and Creation

The "discovery" of the Higgs boson in July was hailed by many - finally, the "God" particle - and understood, assimilated into our understanding of the universe and creation by who?  To the community of physicists, it seemed to "explain" the universe, why it is here, why it is something rather than just eternally careening photons of energy.

In an excellent piece in ScienceNews, Tom Siegfried offers one of the most lucid explanations of what the Higgs is all about.  It's not so much the particle as the Higgs field itself.  In the first trillionth second or so after the Big Bang, everything was the same non-thing, speeding around at the speed of light.  Then the expanding universe cooled enough for the Higgs field to manifest itself.  When it did, it caught some of those careening non-things in its net.  The Higgs field slowed these down, subjected them to resistance, made them move as if they were plowing through a field of thick molasses.  They experienced inertia - thereby gaining mass - and became things, the elemental particles of which matter is made.  The others that were not affected by the Higgs field continued on their way as photons traveling at the speed of light.  The Higgs field, in other words, called forth from light the material universe.  Pretty cool, eh?

And there's more to it.  When the Higgs manifested itself with the (relative) cooling of the universe, there sprang up not just one kind of particle but a whole menagerie of them.  Each kind affected by the Higgs field to a different degree, therefore having differing masses.  Without this differentiation, there would be no real physics or chemistry.  Therefore no suns, planets or life.  In other words, from the moment of the Big Bang whatever was in the expanding blob of energy that was the universe was already imprinted with that which would be manifested as all the kinds of particles and forces of which we know (and probably some we don't know as yet).  The moment the Higgs field grabbed them, they became what they were to be.

This is quite a lot to consider.  But still there is more.  None of this so far explains gravity, dark matter or dark energy.  What about particles with mass also leads to gravity being able to warp time and space?  Where are the particles with mass - though apparently very little individually, as if barely caught by Higgs - that make up dark matter?  And what is that energy that seems to operate on large scales counter to gravity?  What is that dark energy all about anyway?

One can say that we are like dogs in relation to the works of man when we try to grasp what it all means.  Dogs just don't have the capacity to understand man or how we create the world they live in.  And we can't really understand why something exists rather than nothing.  Chalk it up to ramdoness, just fluctuations in the vacuum.

But this bears further thought.  What can we say about creation?  1. It happened. 2. It apparently happened according to laws written into the act - or moment, if you're shy - that would determine what manifested and when. 3. It produced a universe that allowed the development of life and manifestation of consciousness.

My Dad was a truck driver and never graduated grammar school.  He'd look up at the night sky and ask me how I could believe it's just accidental.

A lawful act of creation would imply what? Or as God said to Job:

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding....
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone?