Category Archives: Science

A Guide to Reality, Part 15 (the End, or Maybe Not Quite)

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The final chapter of Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions is “Living With Scientism”. Rosenberg defined “scientism” in his first chapter as a worldview that isn’t merely consistent with atheism, but is:

the worldview that all us atheists (and even some agnostics) share…[It’s] the conviction that the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything; that science’s description of the world is correct in its fundamentals; and that, when “complete”, what science tells us will not be surprisingly different from what it tells us today…Science provides all the significant truths about reality, and knowing such truths is what real understanding is all about [6-7].

Anyone who accepts scientism as Rosenberg explains it may well be an atheist, since there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God or gods. But the idea that all atheists accept Rosenberg’s version of scientism is clearly false. Rosenberg’s scientism is an extreme example of what might be called “nothing-but-ism”. The universe is nothing but subatomic particles. Everything can ultimately be explained in terms of those particles and their interactions. In Rosenberg’s words, physics fixes all the facts.

Yet one can deny the existence of God or gods but believe without contradiction that there are ethical truths and that some higher-level phenomena cannot be reduced to physics. Rosenberg himself calls attention to so-called “secular humanists” who may be atheists but who also “treat the core morality we share as true, right, correct and really morally binding on us” [277]. Rosenberg, of course, thinks that morality, as well as meaning and purpose, are all illusions.

He has an answer, however, for anyone who wonders why someone with his beliefs would bother getting out of bed in the morning:

Luckily for us, Mother Nature has seen to it that most of us, including the secular humanists, will get up most mornings and go on living even without anything to make our lives meaningful. The proof is obvious. There is nothing that makes our lives meaningful, and yet here we are, out of our pajamas [280].

Natural selection (aka Mother Nature) has made human beings generally capable of surviving and reproducing. Some of us do better at the components of being alive and some do worse, as should be expected. Anyone who worries too much about the meaning of life can look to religion, philosophy or science for answers, although there aren’t any answers to be found, since life has no meaning. Fortunately, we who need special assistance getting out of bed can seek medicine from psychiatrists or conversation with therapists, either of which may rewire our brains and relieve our suffering. As science progresses, it will become easier for psychological problems to be addressed. But we should remember that:

Your neural circuits, and so your behavior, may get modified as a result of the therapy, but it is an illusion that the change results from thinking about what the therapist said and consciously buying into his or her diagnosis. In therapy, as in everything else in life, the illusory content of introspective thoughts is just along for the ride [286].

With respect to morality, Rosenberg endorses what he calls “nice nihilism”, the view that moral distinctions have no basis in reality (that’s the nihilist part), but most people behave morally anyway as the result of natural selection (that’s the nice part). He points out that moral disagreements usually concern facts, not values. For example, some argue that capital punishment is morally acceptable because it’s a significant deterrent. But that’s a question that can be answered by looking at statistics. Some moral disagreements result from conflicting ethical ideals. In those cases, there are no “right” answers. 

Rosenberg argues that scientism is most consistent with tolerance toward other people’s ethical views and willingness to question our own. We shouldn’t assume that people who disagree with us are evil; they’re simply misinformed. And since scientific conclusions are almost always subject to revision, we should admit that our own scientifically-informed ethical views may be mistaken.

As Rosenberg points out, most scientists (not all of whom accept Rosenberg’s brand of scientism, of course) are on the political left. As evidence, he could have cited a 2009 poll showing that 81% of American scientists are Democrats or lean that way, while only 12% are Republicans or lean right. (These numbers shouldn’t be a surprise, since scientists tend to know about science, and therefore about reality, which has a well-known liberal bias).

Furthermore, Rosenberg thinks that anyone who accepts scientism should oppose retributive punishment and favor political egalitarianism. In his view, there is no free will, so nobody is really responsible for the painful things they do or the pleasant things they accomplish. He concludes that prisons should resemble hospitals: sick people (criminals) should be treated and seriously infectious people (those can’t be rehabilitated) should be quarantined. Meanwhile, society’s goods should be distributed rather evenly. None of this should be done for ethical reasons, since ethics is an illusion, but for practical or prudential reasons. For example, people with lots of money can interfere with the operation of free markets, which tend to benefit society as a whole (of which we are a part), so it makes sense to redistribute some of their wealth.

Rosenberg concludes with the suggestion that we consider emulating the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. He was ahead of his time in believing that everything in the universe, including our minds, is made of atoms. He also thought that pleasure and pain are the best guides to what’s good and bad or right and wrong. He didn’t favor riotous living, however. As Rosenberg explains:

A tranquil self-sufficient life along with your friends was the key to securing the good and avoiding evil…The tranquility he commended requires that we not take ourselves or much of anything else too seriously…. Epicureanism encourages a good time [313].

Epicurus also argued that death is nothing to fear. There is no such thing as immortality, so death is the end of our existence. Since we no longer exist when we are dead, we have no reason to fear death (although the process of dying may be very uncomfortable, as Epicurus realized)..

When I started writing about Rosenberg’s book almost two years ago, I thought it would be an interesting experience, but didn’t anticipate taking so long to get through it. (You never know if you’ll enjoy reading a book a second time, even if you really enjoyed it the first time.) This was going to be my last entry on this topic, but a few final thoughts may be appropriate. Not tonight, however, unless they’re yours.

A Guide to Reality, Part 14

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It’s been more than three months since I wrote about Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. I left off part of the way through chapter 8, “The Brain Does Everything Without Thinking About Anything At All”. Having read the book once before, it’s been difficult going through it again, but I’m now going to finish chapter 8.

The principal thesis of Rosenberg’s book is that since the universe is nothing more than subatomic particles, much of what we take for granted about the world is illusory. In the case of the human brain, this means that the brain does its work without anything happening in the brain being “about” anything at all.

Rosenberg asks us to consider a computer:

Neither the … electrical charges in the computer’s motherboard nor the distribution of magnetic charges in the hard drive can be about anything, right? They are just like red octagons. They get interpreted by us [as stop signs or whatever] [187].

Electrical engineers and computer programmers assign meanings to a computer’s low-level states (“on” or “off”, or 32767, or the letter “w”), but those states have no meaning in themselves. It’s only because people are able to assign meanings to the states of a computer and then interpret those them that those states can be about anything, just the way a red octagonal sign with “STOP” on it only has meaning for those of us who know how to read a traffic sign.

But doesn’t that mean that the physical states of a computer can be about something? Doesn’t our interpretation of those states imply that those states are meaningful?

Rosenberg doesn’t think so. Earlier, he discussed how brain cells function as input/output devices. Now he compares the brain itself to a computer:

The brain is at least in part a computer. It’s composed of an unimaginably large number of electronic input/output circuits…The circuits transmit electrical outputs in different ways, depending on their electrical inputs and on how their parts… But that it is at least a computer is obvious from its anatomy and physiology right down to the individual neurons and their electrochemical on/off connections [188-189].

But if what’s inside a computer isn’t about anything, and your brain works like a computer, what’s inside your brain isn’t about anything either. It’s merely an enormous bunch of interconnected cells that have no intrinsic meaning. That’s Rosenberg’s conclusion.

To clarify his point, he then offers an analogy. The image in a still photograph doesn’t move. But string many photographs together, project them on a screen and you’ve got a motion picture. The motion we perceive in a movie, however, is an illusion. Creatures whose physiology worked faster than ours would simply see a succession of still pictures, not actors or objects in continuous motion. In similar fashion:

The illusion of aboutness projected by the neurons in our brain does not match any aboutness in the world. There isn’t any….There is no aboutness in reality [191].

So, despite what introspection tells us (or “screams” at us, using his term), our thoughts aren’t about anything either:

Consciousness is just another physical process. So, it has as much trouble producing aboutness as any other physical process. Introspection certainly produces the illusion of aboutness. But it’s got to be an illusion, since nothing physical can be about anything [193]. 

But doesn’t that mean The Atheist’s Guide to Reality isn’t about anything? Why bother reading it then?

Rosenberg’s answer is that his book isn’t “conveying statements”. It’s “rearranging neural circuits, removing inaccurate disinformation and replacing it with accurate information” [193]. But, we might ask, isn’t information “about” something? And isn’t the distinction between accurate and inaccurate information dependent on the idea that information can be about something in a more or less satisfactory manner?

At this point, I can’t remember why Rosenberg is so interested in convincing us that there is no real “aboutness” or what philosophers call “intentionality” in the world.

It’s certainly puzzling how our minds are able to assign meaning to and find meaning in the world. Being appreciative of science, I can accept that there is nothing in the universe but quarks, leptons and bosons when you get right down to it (or their component parts if there are any), but there are also arrangements of those things. Some of those arrangements are meaningful to us and some aren’t. The fact that scientists might and probably will explain our experience of aboutness in biological terms, and then in terms of chemistry, and then in terms of physics, doesn’t change the fact that Rosenberg’s book and the words I’m typing are about something.

When I started writing this post, I didn’t know if I’d work through any more chapters in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (although if the universe is as deterministic as Rosenberg thinks – and I tend to think – that was decided some time ago). But now what I think I’m going to do is skip the next three chapters. They’re concerned with purpose (an illusion), the self (also an illusion), history (it’s blind) and the other social sciences, especially economics (they’re all myopic). Chapter 12, the final chapter, is called “Living With Scientism: Ethics, Politics, the Humanities, and Prozac as Needed”. That seems like a good place to stop.

How We Wasted Time Before the Internet – Mathematics Edition

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Or more precisely, how I wasted too much time long before the Internet. Here’s the picture:

SquareWhen I was a little kid, somebody, probably my father, drew a picture like that and challenged me to draw the same thing without lifting my pencil from the paper. That seemed like a pretty easy thing to do. It wasn’t.

Many years passed before my first and last attempt. Not that I spent days and nights continuously working on this, but there were a lot of classes and then some meetings to sit through. And I guess I was competitive, stubborn and/or obsessive.

But one thing that kept me going off and on through the years was the belief that I had successfully met the challenge once, couldn’t remember how I did it and should be able to do it again (too bad I didn’t keep notes).

Of course, I eventually concluded that this was a false memory. The thing cannot be done!

What brought all this back to me was an article at Three Quarks Daily called “A Square Peg for Every Round Hole”. It’s about mathematical puzzles, the most famous being Fermat’s Last Theorem (“I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain”). In particular, it’s about 

another enticing mathematical morsel which is still unsolved: the Square Peg Problem (SPP). The history is a bit murky, but it is generally credited to Otto Toeplitz in 1911. The SPP is the conjecture that if you draw a curve on a sheet of paper without picking up your pencil and which begins and ends at the same place, then you can find four points on the curve which form the corners of a square. 

For example, I drew this wavy curve in black and was then able to overlay a square with its four corners intersecting the curve. 

Square 2

(Ok, I cheated and put in the square first and then drew the curve. The other way may be mathematically possible in every case (or not) but it’s not that easy and my little obsession lies elsewhere.)

Maybe mathematicians proved long ago that it’s impossible to draw a picture like the one at the top of this post. Maybe there’s even a name for this particular “mathematical morsel”: the Square With Lines Around It and a Cross in the Middle Problem (SWLAIAACITMP).  

On the other hand, if you know a way to draw the damn thing without lifting your pencil or pen from the paper or your index finger from the mouse – or know why it can’t be done – please let me know.

Update: That didn’t take long. A person going by the name of “X” gave the answer in the comments at Three Quarks Daily after I described the SWLAIAACITMP problem:

This is a cool problem called “Euler Paths”. You can prove it’s impossible for this graph because there are too many vertices with an odd number of edges coming out of them. So there will always come a time when you go into a vertex and can’t get out. This page has the rules: Euler’s Graph Theorems.

Thank you, X, whoever you are.

Sarah Silverman Receives Divine Guidance

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I like Sarah Silverman a lot. She’s funny and does good work. Plus she has eaten popcorn with Jesus (who apparently looks like a West Coast hippie, just like in the movies).

That God Playing Dice With the Universe Thing Again

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Quanta has an article with the intriguing title: “Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time?”. Far be it from me to interpret quantum mechanics at all, so I’ll merely quote:

…That nature is inherently probabilistic — that particles have no hard properties, only likelihoods, until they are observed — is directly implied by the standard equations of quantum mechanics. But now a set of surprising experiments with fluids has revived old skepticism about that worldview. The bizarre results are fueling interest in an almost forgotten version of quantum mechanics, one that never gave up the idea of a single, concrete reality.

The experiments involve an oil droplet that bounces along the surface of a liquid. The droplet gently sloshes the liquid with every bounce. At the same time, ripples from past bounces affect its course. The droplet’s interaction with its own ripples, which form what’s known as a pilot wave, causes it to exhibit behaviors previously thought to be peculiar to elementary particles — including behaviors seen as evidence that these particles are spread through space like waves, without any specific location, until they are measured.

Particles at the quantum scale seem to do things that human-scale objects do not do. They can tunnel through barriers, spontaneously arise or annihilate, and occupy discrete energy levels. This new body of research reveals that oil droplets, when guided by pilot waves, also exhibit these quantum-like features.

Assuming that continued experimentation confirms that the probabilistic behavior of these droplets and fluids mirrors the behavior of quantum-level particles, the question would be: Is this similarity a mere coincidence or does it indicate that there is an underlying deterministic basis for apparently spooky, indeterministic quantum events? 

To some researchers, the experiments suggest that quantum objects are as definite as droplets, and that they too are guided by pilot waves — in this case, fluid-like undulations in space and time. These arguments have injected new life into a deterministic (as opposed to probabilistic) theory of the microscopic world first proposed, and rejected, at the birth of quantum mechanics.

“This is a classical system that exhibits behavior that people previously thought was exclusive to the quantum realm, and we can say why,” said John Bush, a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has led several recent bouncing-droplet experiments. “The more things we understand and can provide a physical rationale for, the more difficult it will be to defend the ‘quantum mechanics is magic’ perspective.”

The great French physicist Louis De Broglie first proposed a deterministic pilot-wave theory in the 1920s. David Bohm famously proposed a later version. According to the article, John Stewart Bell, the author of Bell’s Theorem, which supposedly shows that quantum mechanics cannot be deterministically explained by “hidden variables”, was also a proponent:

In 1986, [Bell] wrote that pilot-wave theory “seems to me so natural and simple, to resolve the wave-particle dilemma in such a clear and ordinary way, that it is a great mystery to me that it was so generally ignored.” 

Of course, many physicists are skeptical, as they should be. Overturning the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics (the indeterministic “Copenhagen” interpretation) would be a very big deal. But doing so would make our universe much less mysterious (no more God playing dice). And it would allow physicists to give up the increasingly popular idea that there are many, many universes (the “multiverse” interpretation of QM). We might then go back to thinking of the universe as a unique, cozy place where everything happens for a reason.