Posted on 10/20/2003 10:49:13 AM PDT by yonif
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http://www.aish.com/societyWork/sciencenature/Seeing_God_in_the_Physics_Lab.asp |
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Seeing God in the Physics Lab
That is to say:
The Lord is One. (Deut. 6:4)
There is nothing else. (Deut. 4:35, 39)
"I am wisdom.... The Lord acquired me [wisdom] as the beginning of His way, the first of His works of old." (Proverbs 8:12, 22).
The bit [of information] has given rise to the it [of the item]. (J. A. Wheeler)
E=mc2 (A. Einstein)
On that day the Lord shall be One and His name One. (Zechariah 14:9)
Imagine I could somehow acquire a cookbook of the physics and chemistry of what was going to be a universe -- all the laws of nature. And I was told that for some bizarre reason during the universe's formation, the self-annihilation of particle/anti-particle pairs that form while energy of the big bang creation condenses into matter would not be total. So therefore some particles of matter would survive that annihilation.
Then, based on those laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe, I could predict that through the alchemy of stellar temperatures and the immense pressures of supernova, the 92 stable elements that would form. I'd know that among those elements would be sodium and chlorine. I could predict that they would chemically react to form sodium chloride, common salt.
All that would be known from first principles -- the reductionist approach to analysis.
But could I predict that in some marvelous combination of the building blocks of matter -- the protons and neutrons and electrons that make up atoms, and then the atoms that combine to form molecules -- that I'd find a mind with its self-consciousness of joy, sentience, awareness of emotions.
Consider: In one mix of protons, neutrons and electrons I get a grain of sand. I take the same protons, neutrons and electrons, put them together in a different mix and get a brain that can record facts, produce emotions, and from which emerges a mind that integrates those facts and emotions -- and experiences that integration as joy.
It's the same protons, neutrons and electrons. They did not get a face-lift, yet one combination seems passive while the other is dynamically alive.
From where does this consciousness arise? Just which proton is feeling the joy or anguishing over the pain as I stub my toe on some unseen object?
From where does the complex order inherent in every form of life arise?
It is not evident in the particles that make up the atoms or in the molecules that those atoms combine to form.
SOURCE OF DNA INFORMATION
Most laypeople are unaware that life started immediately on the once molten earth. The earth formed from the debris of previous supernovae. As that stellar dust was drawn together by the force of gravity into the ball that was to become our planet earth, the friction was so great that the earth melted.
Over time the surface of our planet cooled. The temperature gradually fell to the level at which liquid water could form, and at that time the first forms of life appeared on earth, made from the rocks and water that were once stardust.
There were not billions of years between the formation of the cooled earth and the appearance of life. According to all geological data, life started immediately on earth. How? From where did all the amazing complexly arranged order that goes into even the simplest forms of life arise? The membrane of a cell is an astounding piece of architecture. And the systems that read our DNA genetic code (at 50 operations a second!) to translate that code into the proteins of life boggle the mind.
Yet DNA and those systems arose in the geological blink of an eye. How? What was the source of this information?
There is no clear scientific answer to these questions. Yet all scientists (or essentially all scientists) agree on the data I have just presented. Take five hours and go to a public library. Take a book on human physiology from the shelf. Don't try to study how the body works; that is a lifetime endeavor. Just spend five hours reading about the wonder in the functioning of a single nerve cell. You can weep in joy over the beauty and marvel of the life that is within each of us. And all this wonder occurred in a flash on earth.
We take as givens the forces of gravity, the laws of nature, the ideas that an electron has a negative charge and the protons a positive charge. But these fixed realities do not explain their origins or the order we find in the biological world.
We do not know how energy changes into matter. It took an Einstein to prove that it does, via his equation E=mc2. But the cause that changes matter into energy remains a mystery of nature. As does the cause of gravity. We say there must be gravity waves. We look for virtual photons, those never-seen particles of force and energy, for an explanation.
Eventually a clarification may be found, but even with our eventual understanding of the science behind life, the wonder of life's existence will remain, as will the wonder of existence itself. Why is there a universe, why is there anything rather than nothing?
IN THE BEGINNING
There is an answer in the Torah for all the wonder, for the source of the order that makes up our world. And that answer lies in the very first word of the Bible, Genesis 1:1:
Bereishit bara Elokim et ha'shamayim v'et ha'aretz.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
But there's a problem -- a puzzle in the very first sentence of the Bible! In its literal translation, Bereishit means "in the beginning of." But the Bible has not supplied an object for the preposition "of." Either the reader must fill in that blank by supplying an object for the preposition, or omit the "of" on the assumption that it isn't very important.
If we take the Bible to be the word of God, dropping words is a rather brazen act. Rashi (ca. 1090), the crucial interpreter of the Hebrew words of the Bible, saw the problem and insisted that we seek the deeper meaning. If the verse were "In the beginning," Rashi points out, the Hebrew would have been Be'reshona and not Bereishit.
The solution to this conundrum is found in a 2100-year-old Jerusalem translation of the Hebrew into its sister language, Aramaic. The kabbalist, Nachmanides (ca. 1250), leads into it as follows:
In the beginning from total and absolute nothing, the Creator brought forth a substance so thin it had no corporeality. But this substanceless substance could take on form. This was the only physical creation. Now this creation was a very small point, and from this all things that ever were or will be formed...
If you will merit and understand the secret of the first word, Bereishit, you will know why the Jerusalem translation [of Genesis 1:1] is 'With wisdom God created the heavens and the earth...' But our knowledge of it is less than a drop in the vast ocean.
The Jerusalem translation is not a discovery by itself. It is based on the information brought by Proverbs a thousand years earlier: "I am wisdom... The Lord acquired me [wisdom] as the beginning of His way, the first [reishit] of His works of old" (Proverbs 8:12, 22). Notice the same word, reishit, appears both in Proverbs and in Genesis 1:1.
Wisdom is the substrate, the basis of existence. The biblical claim is that all existence rests on something as intangible as the word of the Divine. As it says: "By the word of the Lord the heavens were made" (Psalms 33: 6).
Substitute the word "information" for "wisdom" and we are into the labs of physics at MIT, Princeton, Stanford, University of Vienna. This is physics, not philosophy, the quantum physics of the 21st century. And it has been the opening word of the Torah for over three millennia.
As the equation of words states:
Suddenly, the source of the complex order that guides every form of life, from bacterium to human, is clear. It is the wisdom of the Divine that forms the foundation of all existence. Our universe, and we ourselves, are built by the word of God. As the Talmud declares: "God looked into the Torah and created the world."
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Pattee's article truly put things in perspective for me. Later, when I read Kenneth Weiss' article on How the Eye got Its Brain all the pieces started falling into place (at least for me LOL!)
Weiss says that evolution theory is an "explanatory framework for biology" into which most any trait can be rationalized through some post hoc theory of random mutation/natural selection, i.e. a "just so" story.
He said that the "recent discovery of genetic mechanism widely shared in animal eye development" presented a great challenge to the accepted theory. Previously the eyes were thought to have developed separately on their own branches of the tree of life over time.
But this discovery pushed eyeness back to a common ancestor with the emphasis on the regulatory or control genetic functions (which are less mutable by the way.)
IMHO, that "goes to" the notion of autonomous biological self-organizing complexity championed by Rocha, Wolfram and others. And, as I mentioned in post 273 to betty boop, the significance may be profound:
I believe this work - by physicists and information theorists and geneticists - will ultimately show that biological life forms had to emerge within the blueprint adaptability of the core regulatory control genes. That would relegate random mutations (happenstance) to a remote secondary cause.
Taken altogether this would mean that evolution is not a directionless walk after all - a finding on theological/philosophical par with the discovery that the universe had a beginning.
I posted this link Calvin's throwing theory on another thread.
That is not so. The Michelson Morley experiment, crucial in showing that the speed of light is the same measured in all directions preceded special relativity by ten years. Lorentz and Fitzgerald had previously explored relativistic approaches to physics.
Einstein did not work in a vacuum; there were difficulties with the theoretical basis of physics at the time. There are no similar problems with evolution or with the physics of the mind.
Einstein, Planck, Bohr, et. al. were working in the utter collapse of classical physics. Just about the time physicists were starting to crow that they had it all wrapped up but a few loose ends, physics almost seemed to stop working.
Almost as bad as the Michelson-Morley experiment was a theoretical problem called the "ultraviolet catastrophe." A good model that had worked for decades generated a nonsensical prediction when trying to predict the spectrum of a hot, radiating body.
Everyone checked the math over and over and over again. The model was clear and common-sense. The math was right. The prediction, a spectrum of infinite energy, was obviously wrong. It takes some quantum mechanical concepts to get the right answer.
However, I was not speaking as to whether Einstein was trying to solve a problem but rather that the geometry he needed to explain his theory was sitting there, “on the shelf” so to speak, ready to be used. And use it he did.
I am speaking of Reimannian Geometry. Here is an excerpt from a Biography of Bernhard Reimann:
In addition to his probationary essay, Riemann was also required to present a trial lecture to the faculty before he could be appointed to his "unpaid lecturership". It was the custom for the candidate to offer three titles, and the head of his department usually accepted the first. However, Riemann rashly listed as his third topic the foundations of geometry, a profound subject on which he was unprepared but which Gauss had been turning over in his mind for 60 years. Naturally, Gauss was curious to see how this particular candidate's "gloriously fertile originality" would cope with such a challenge, and to Riemann's dismay he designated this as the subject of the lecture. Riemann quickly tore himself away from his other interests at the time - "my investigations of the connection between electricity, magnetism, light and gravitation" - and wrote his lecture in the next two months. The result was one of the great classical masterpieces of mathematics, and probably the most important scientific lecture ever given. It is recorded that even Gauss was surprised and enthusiastic.
Riemann's lecture presented in nontechnical language a vast generalization of all known geometries, both Euclidean and non-Euclidean. This field is now called Riemannian Geometry; and apart from its great importance in pure mathematics, it turned out 60 years later to be exactly the framework for Einstein's general theory of relativity.
Fine,. Give me one experimental result pertaining to the mind of consciousness that can't be explained using contemporary physics and chemistry.
Penrose, et al, are motivated by a revulsion against the idea that we might not be free agents; that as we get closer to a deterministic understanding of the brain, it will be harder and harder to sustain the idea that humans can choose between alternatives, without our choice being determined by the laws of physics. That is, I agree, a serious philosophical concern, with ramifications in jurisprudence, political science, etc.. But it is not a scientific concern; on the contrary, Penrose, and the others, seem to be scared that science will be successful, not that the science may be inadequate.
For the moment, however, since we don't understand on any fundamental level how the brain works, there is no need to reconcile scientific determinism with the social and philosopical idea of free will. That's a problem for several generations from now.
Here is a link to Penrose's response to his critics: Beyond the doubting of a shadow. In the response, he explains that he sought to illustrate, using Gödel's theorem, that conscious thought is not fully computational:
4.2 Perhaps a little bit of personal history on this point would not be amiss. I first heard about the details of Gödel's theorem as part of a course on mathematical logic (from which I also learned about Turing machines) given by the Cambridge logician Steen. As far as I can recall, I was in my first year as a graduate student (studying algebraic geometry) at Cambridge University in 1952/53, and was merely sitting in on the course as a matter of general education (as I did with courses in quantum mechanics by Dirac and general relativity by Bondi). I had vaguely heard of Gödel's theorem prior to that time, and had been a little unsettled by my impressions of it. My viewpoint before that would probably have been rather close to what we now call "strong AI". However, I had been disturbed by the possibility that there might be true mathematical propositions that were in principle inaccessible to human reason. Upon learning the true form of Gödel's theorem (in the way that Steen presented it), I was enormously gratified to hear that it asserted no such thing; for it established, instead, that the powers of human reason could not be limited to any accepted preassigned system of formalized rules. What Gödel showed was how to transcend any such system of rules, so long as those rules could themselves be trusted.
4.3 In addition to that, there was a definite close relationship between the notion of a formal system and Turing's notion of effective computability. This was sufficient for me. Clearly, human thought and human understanding must be something beyond computation. Nevertheless, I remained a strong believer in scientific method and scientific realism. I must have found some reconciliation at the time which was close to my present views - in spirit if not in detail.
4.4 My reason for presenting this bit of personal history is that I wanted to demonstrate that even the "weak" form of the Gödel argument was already strong enough to turn at least one strong-AI supporter away from computationalism. It was not a question of looking for support for a previously held "mystical" standpoint. (You could not have asked for a more rationalistic atheistic anti-mystic than myself at that time!) But the very force of Gödel's logic was sufficient to turn me from the computational standpoint with regard not only to human mentality, but also to the very workings of the physical universe.
4.5 The many arguments that computationalists and other people have presented for wriggling around Gödel's original argument have become known to me only comparatively recently: perhaps we act and perceive according to an unknowable algorithm; perhaps our mathematical understanding is intrinsically unsound; perhaps we could know the algorithms according to which we understand mathematics, but are incapable of knowing the actual roles that these algorithms play. All right, these are logical possibilities. But are they really plausible explanations?
4.6 For those who are wedded to computationalism, explanations of this nature may indeed seem plausible. But why should we be wedded to computationalism? I do not know why so many people seem to be. Yet, some apparently hold to such a view with almost religious fervour. (Indeed, they may often resort to unreasonable rudeness when they feel this position to be threatened!) Perhaps computationalism can indeed explain the facts of human mentality - but perhaps it cannot. It is a matter for dispassionate discussion, and certainly not for abuse!
4.7 I find it curious, also, that even those who argue dispassionately may take for granted that computationalism in some form - at least for the workings of the objective physical universe - has to be correct. Accordingly, any argument which seems to show otherwise must have a "flaw" in it. Even Chalmers, in his carefully reasoned commentary, seeks out "the deepest flaw in the Gödelian arguments". There seems to be the presumption that whatever form of the argument is presented, it just has to be flawed. Very few people seem to take seriously the slightest possibility that the argument might perhaps, at root, be correct! This I certainly find puzzling.
4.8 Nevertheless, I know of many who (like myself) do find the simple "bare" form of the Gödelian argument to be very persuasive. To such people, the long and sometimes tortuous arguments that I provided in Shadows may not add much to the case - in fact, some have told me that they think that they effectively weaken it! It might seem that if I need to go to lengths such as that, the case must surely be a flimsy one. (Even Feferman, from his own particular non-computational standpoint, argues that my diligent efforts may be "largely wasted".) Yet, I would claim that some progress has been made. I am struck by the fact that none of the present commentators has chosen to dispute my conclusion G (in Shadows, p.76) that "Human mathematicians are not using a knowably sound algorithm in order to ascertain mathematical truth". I doubt that any will admit to being persuaded by any of the replies to my queries Q1, ..., Q20, in Section 2.6 and Section 2.10, but it should be remarked that many of these queries represented precisely the kinds of misunderstandings and objections that people had raised against my earlier use of the bare Gödelian argument (and its conclusion G) in The Emperor's New Mind, particularly in the many commentaries on that book in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (and, in particular, one by McDermott 1990). Perhaps some progress has been made after all!
Why? Anyone who's read Penrose is surely aware of his motivation. In fact, he talks about it very forthrightly in the section you quoted (see 4.3). I don't consider the motivation ignoble; I'm simply asserting it's not driven by any anomaly in the scientific data.
You ask why I object to your attribution of motive to Penrose without cites. I object to attributing motive to anyone without evidence simply because motivation is quite personal and we cannot read each other’s mind (except where we are given the same Mind in the Spiritual sense.)
Thus, when anyone claims that a person’s motives are thus-and-so without evidence, to me it is an empty and thus, objectionable, assertion per se. The creationist Freepers continually attribute motive to evolutionists, and vice versa - that is objectionable to me for the same reason and I believe ought to be objectionable to you! (Weren't you the one who proposed that prohibition in the "Agreement"?)
I supplied the evidence for your assertion of Penrose’s motives using his own testimony. You summarized those motives as follows:
Speaking of logical arguments - thought experiments in this case, which underscore much of the advances in mathematics and physics, all of you might find this article particularly interesting:
On the Compatibility of the 'Knowledge Argument' with the Argument from Modality
Tillmann Vierkant, Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research
Let me ask you this: What is the difference between a perfect simulation and reality?
There is a clear difference, and a very concise and elegant one at that, such that I expect you will accept it and its obvious consequences if I assert it, but it would also likely modify your view of this matter. I am just curious as to how thoroughly you've thought through your above conclusion.
It has everything to do with one's worldview and thus whether one can accept that any simulation could rise to the same level. Here is an excerpt from my article:
For another, mathematicians and physicists accept axioms of the level evolutionary biologists do not, such as taking life as an axiom. According to Sir Karl Popper, competing theories that are equally falsifiable ought to result in one or the other being true; when the competing theories are both true as in wave/particle duality, the undecidability itself must be accepted as an axiom. For instance, in wave-particle duality one experiment proves the electron is a wave, another proves it is a particle.
Evolutionary biologists speak of function and complexity over time. Mathematicians speak of functional complexity, randomness and probabilities over time.
Evolutionary biologists speak of chemistry and genetics. Mathematicians speak of symbolization, self-organizing complexity and syntactic autonomy.
Or to put it more succinctly, the evolutionary biologist describes but the mathematician/physicist explains.
Einstein's speech 'My Credo' to the German League of Human Rights, Berlin, autumn 1932, Einstein: A Life in Science, Michael White and John Gribbin, page 262
This is no small philosophical question. Many of us agree that "reality" must exist before it is discovered, observed or measured. However, that definition becomes qualified with whatever a person already believes because, for example:
To an autonomist "reality" is all that is, the way it is
To an objectivist "reality" is that which exists
To tpaine, “reality” is all about us, and it is best defined by the bad things that happen when it is ignored.
To a mystic "reality" may include thought as substantive force and hence, a part of "reality"
To Plato "reality" includes constructs such as redness, chairness, numbers, geometry and pi
To Aristotle these constructs are not part of "reality" but merely language
To some physicists, "reality" is the illusion of quantum mechanics
To Christians "reality" is God's will and unknowable in its fullness.
Reality and Physics:
Reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. - Einstein
In physics, "realism" refers to the idea that a particle has properties that exist even before they are measured. Measurement however presents a problem to our sense of "reality" in quantum mechanics.
Assume you have a real brain B(r) and a simulated brain B(s). Both are a black box, one metaphorical and one literal, and for the sake of argument we will assume that nobody really understands how either of them work internally hence the "black box", and it doesn't make a difference one way or the other here.
B(s) perfectly mimics B(r), such that if B(r) responds a certain way to some datum or stimulus we can always expect B(s) to respond the same way. The only difference between the two that we can really measure is that one is a human brain, and the other is the latest IBM mainframe with software designed to mimic the human brain B(r). B(s) behaves exactly B(r), but since it is a computer program, we know it is just "faking" being B(r) a la Searle's Chinese Room.
Now consider an algorithmic information theory analysis of our two systems, B(r) and B(s):
1.) The time complexity may vary greatly between the two systems. We don't know how these systems work internally and they could be using wildly different computational architectures. One cannot expect the same answer to the same question in the same amount of time, all we can know is that the time will be finite.2.) The Kolmogorov complexity of these systems is identical, by definition.
2a.) There exists an expression of B(r) that can be implemented on the machinery of B(s) and vice versa.
2b.) No functionality can exist in B(s) that does not exist in B(r) and vice versa.
3.) The information of all orders contained in each system is identical, also by definition. That is, the abstract pattern that uniquely defines the systems are identical. (With respect to 2a., we would say that B(s) is the expression of B(r) on the machinery of B(s).)
From this, and outside of the fact that B(s) and B(r) nominally exist in different physical locations, the only actual differences between B(r) and B(s) that are allowed mathematically is the fundamental nature of the universal computing machine inside the black box, and consequently the time complexity of a given behavior. These are the differences allowed for mathematically, but they may not be the differences you were looking for.
But any attempt to use it as proof of a specific God (i.e. the God of the Bible) fails.
We can take people at their word. Penrose said "Clearly, human thought and human understanding must be something beyond computation. Nevertheless, I remained a strong believer in scientific method and scientific realism. I must have found some reconciliation at the time which was close to my present views - in spirit if not in detail.'
In other words; human thought is non-deterministic; scientific realism is in effect determinism; he doesn't know how he reconciled them at the time but he must have had some way to do so.
He then goes on to explain how he's progressed from that point to questioning computationalism. And in fact, if you read sections 13 through 15 of his answer to his critics, he makes it quite clear that it is qualities like consciousness and understanding that he feels will not be computable.
Why? Penrose doesn't say why this should be clear. It only seems to be something Penrose desires. Penrose's statement is something that needs demonstration. A computer program with a few hundred conditional branches has more paths through it than the total number of particles in the universe (and may be just as hard to debug.)
I realize I gave you more than you asked for, but your question (”What is the difference between a perfect simulation and reality?”) requires a definition of terms – specifically, ”What is Reality?”
But getting back to the example of B(s) and B(r) in a finite box – I would like to offer this excerpt from the article I linked at post 309. That article addresses the same issues using a Mary and a Zombie-Mary from a black/white room being faced with color choices, life/death consequences for the planet, etc.
If Mary has the ability to recognize blue even before she leaves her room, this could mean three things:
1) The zombie, faced with a blue banana, could observe her own behavior and then conclude: I react in this specific way because my system has been exposed to waves which create a blue functional state. But this option has undesirable consequences. It means that Mary would use exactly the same deductive mechanisms, because otherwise she would not be equivalent to Zombie-Mary any more, which in turn means that her belief about what is like to see blue does not stem from the phenomenal experience, but from her clever deductions. This could now either be true, in which case physicalism would be true as well, or it could be false and Mary actually learned something from her phenomenal experience (and just managed to deceive herself about her surprise when she learned this new and unexpected phenomenal fact). Nevertheless, this alternative renders the original premise, that Mary knows everything physical there is to know about color perception, incorrect, because she would now mistakenly believe that she had learned something as a result of her deductions, when she really learned something for very different reasons. This means: She believes in a physical fact P that does not exist. Therefore, she does not know the physical fact that -P is the case. This possibility is therefore not a possibility after all.
2) Another option might be that Zombie-Mary acquires the ability because of her knowledge, but believes that she has it because of the phenomenal impression (she would believe that she just had a surprising phenomenal experience). This would save the original Mary experiment, because Mary could now rightly believe that she learned a new phenomenal fact, but it has one major fault for Zombie-Mary. She would then have acquired a false belief about her perceptions: This is because she lives in a world that is per definition only physical and believes in a non-physical reason for her belief, but this renders the premise that Zombie-Mary knows everything there is to know about perception wrong. If she holds a false belief, then she obviously does not know the true state of affairs about why she holds a certain belief connected to her perceptions.
3) It seems to me that there is only one possibility to avoid such a dilemma. One would have to argue that there is something wrong with the idea of a Zombie-Mary itself. This could be because it does not make sense to talk of knowledge in the zombie world or it could be because a Zombie-Mary or a Mary are not possible for contingent reasons, or because somebody who has complete physical knowledge would know whether she is a zombie or not. All these options have undesirable side effects, but they are not the topic of this essay.
The purpose of this essay is only to show that the Mary argument does not provide support for the zombie ontology. This goal seems achieved. Not only do the two experiments not provide any support for each other, but they actually seem to be fully incompatible.
I agree that Penrose's statements today are as you say, but where I disagree with you is in his motivation, i.e. that he didn't get there because of a "revulsion" but because of the logic behind Gödel's argument - according to his own words excerpted at post 307.
Perhaps he has since developed a revulsion, but at that time that was not the case: "You could not have asked for a more rationalistic atheistic anti-mystic than myself at that time!"
The incompleteness theorem says nothing about human consciousness; it simply says all formal systems are incomplete. It is very difficult to see how this could motivate someone to try to prove consciousness is incomputable.
I think you're mistaking the formal argument for the motivation. I think you're also reading 'revulsion' as pejorative; it isn't intended to be.
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