A Conclusion to a Still Unwritten Book: Part One

Sometime ago, I wrote in this space an Introduction to a Still Unwritten Book. For several years before and since, I have been pondering consciousness, cosmology and quantum physics in what I like to think follows in the tradition of natural philosophy. While I am not a scientist, I believe that the ultimate questions are essentially unanswerable but – following Saint Thomas’ finger – the proper subject of a reasoning intellect. It seems to me that the most fundamental question remains one that has haunted all philosophical and religious traditions: why is there anything? Science alone cannot shed light on this. Current science points to a Big Bang some 13 billion years ago. Today’s quantum physics and cosmology can say much about the first few moments after that event and the subsequent evolution of the universe and life. But we cannot say much about where the Big Bang came from and even less about why it might have occurred. Nor can we explain – without positing an infinity of less comfortable parallel universes – why our universe seems so right for us.

So the ultimate questions – why should there be anything, why should there be us – remain unanswered. It would seem that nothing is the more natural state because it would need no explanation. That there was nothing and always would be nothing would require nothing to be done or said about it. That nothing somehow gave way to something, anything, would have required a departure from the most simple state of nothing to greater complexity. The universe, in which we find ourselves a part, exists, it is something. Furthermore, it seems to have been fine-tuned insofar as it expresses a particular set of physical laws that seem designed to make life and intelligence inevitable. We live in a Goldilocks’ reality, not too cold, not too hot, but just right for us. The apparent design that gave rise to our existence must inevitably imply a designer.

But granting all this, this still leaves two fundamental questions. Where did the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit. The possible answers to the first question appear to converge on two possibilities, that the designer always was – i.e., that something always existed and there never was nothing – or that there was an original act of creation (or self-creation) that led to the existence of the designer. Both of these “explanations” essentially define what we might call God. One of them must be true.

The second question, why did the designer enact the particular act of creation that led to us, could have a myriad of answers. It might have been from boredom – as an eternity of nothing but self might eventually wear thin – perhaps in the form of a cosmic-scale version of a computer SimUniverse. It could be the night’s sleep of a very rationally-minded dreamer. It could be an experiment of some kind, or a simulation set to explore possible design parameters. It could be an act of love. Whatever the possible reason, the act of creation implied a kind of consciousness (even of the sleeper) and some version of a conscious choice. The designer must have been a conscious entity, perhaps even consciousness in its rare form. Whether the designer always was or was somehow created, the form it had or took was consciousness. In either case, consciousness was primordial, coming before the creation of our universe, before matter, before the Big Bang. The primordial consciousness – what might be called God – was the designer.

A fascinating aside about following this chain of thought is the seemingly inescapable conclusion that the designer was or felt constrained to create a universe capable of being apprehended by scientific reason. The universe is not just some stage set on which we players play our parts but an intricate mechanism that obeys its own complex, intrinsic laws. This suggests that the designer was using – for whatever reason – a given toolbox that provided the means to form the particular set of physical parameters manifested in the Big Bang.

Still, why us? What are we and what were we made for? I lean toward the notion that the cosmic consciousness designed a reality that it could then enter, whether out of loneliness, curiosity, love or some combination of these. 

TBC... 

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

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.

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.

Why Time?

I've spent a good deal of time thinking about time.  It is a mystery.  We know it passes, the more quickly it seems as we get older.  Since Einstein, we know it is part of spacetime, baked into the fabric of the universe.  But that simply deepens the mysteries.  Why can we travel in all directions in space but only one in time?  And how can it be that there is no absolute time the same everywhere?  The "now" that  I see all around me is punctured during the day by photons from the sun that show me how that looked nine minutes ago and at night by stars showing me how they existed many thousands of years ago?  When we see those stars, we are looking into the past. Our experience of the "now" of those stars is likewise thousand of years in our future.

 

So time varies by distance in space.  The speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- connects these.  Contemplation of the speed of light leads to pondering how light can possibly have a speed.  Objects with mass, when not at rest, have speed.  (Actually, nothing is ever at rest except relatively.)  As an object with mass increases speed, time runs slower as it appears to observers not so moving.  Relative motion, in effect, eats relative time; the quicker something moves, the less time remains that seems to pass for the object moving relative to the observer at rest where "normal" time passes.  Mass-less particles, such as photons, do not experience time.  Mass-less particles are everywhere they will ever be at the same moment and are, in this sense, eternal.  Only objects with mass -- including us -- experience light as traveling in time.  A photon that left Proxima Centauri, traveled 4.25 years and just reached our eyes here on earth, took that photon no time at all. 

 

By capturing some of the particles spewing from the Big Bang and giving them mass, the Higgs Boson may in effect have also created time.  But as there is no universal and simultaneous "now," how can we think about time. As noted, under Einsteinian relativity, time is the fourth dimension and relative to location and motion in the other three.  Yet clearly there is also "now."  We live in it.  Is there not a single "now" that exists for all the photons that fill the universe in their one timeless, eternal moment?  Does that create a universal framework of now?  Perhaps each and every particle of matter exists in its own "now" tied to every other such moment within the crystalline universal now established by light?  Light seems to have a speed because it ties together the universe of separate, individual "nows."   Perhaps mass is simply the way everything is kept from happening at once?  Mass separates us from eternity, immersing us in spacetime where our consciousness has space and time to manifest.  Perhaps time exists to provide a way for the universe to experience itself.

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.