Borderland: The Last Frontier of Science

Our everyday world of classical physics makes sense. If we drop a pebble in a pond it causes waves and sinks to the bottom. At the quantum level the pebble itself would not only initiate the action, but would become a wave. What happens at the borderland between classical physics and quantum physics? Why can we not connect the two in our understanding? On the one hand, we have a ball going where we toss it. On the other, we have balls "tossing" everywhere at once at the quantum level. Is something missing in the way we think?

Some physicists don't like such questions and prefer established investigation patterns, world paradigms which allow acceptable communication between community members. The eminent physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose is asking questions that are on the fringe. He says something is being overlooked in physics. We need a new way of understanding how the mind works. He lays out his ideas in Shadows of The Mind.

Artificial intelligence, or computing, is a current model for thinking about consciousness. Penrose regards it as inappropriate. Using Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, he argues that computational models of intelligence are inadequate to understand mind. Physics itself, says Penrose, is noncomputable. Even the most mathematically inclined people spend far less time than computers do in crunching numbers. Indeed, most of their insight come in leaps of intuition. With Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Penrose argues that Alan Turing's Intelligence Machine* cannot do what people can. Computers will not know when to stop computing a noncomputable operation. The human mind will recognize when to stop. Penrose points out that a computer will continue its operations searching for an answer to Gödel's Theorem.

* ( Is this human/artificial intelligence test empirically irrelevant? That is, does it belong in the same category as Zeno's Paradox, which is empirically irrelevant? (See 20 November, Brain in A Vat, Peter Lynds, etc.) We know that despite what Zeno demonstrated, people in fact do reach end points. We also know that despite artificial intelligence theorists' arguments, machines do not demonstrate love, compassion, intuition, or longings for God, mystery, and deceased kin.)

Kurt Gödel aside, the big problem is wave function collapse, which occurs when a quantum event is measured. Penrose posits that the human mind itself is subject to wave function collapse and supposes that brain microtubules allow it. Microtubules are tiny enough to fit at the quantum level while neurons belong at the classical physics level. Within neurons, cytoskeletons form the structures that are the "glue" for cells. Inside them are microtubules, only 25 nanometers in diameter, which control synapse function.

In an interplay between the quantum cytoskeletal state and classical neurons, consciousness is manifested: anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff's findings support part of this description, but not Penrose's interpretation of it--that consciousness is manifested in the interplay.

When a human makes a quantum observation, wave function collapse occurs. Penrose assumes it results from human consciousness. Until the observation, the quanta are in a superposition of all possible states. (See Schrödinger's Cat, 2 January) Observation causes the quantum system to reduce (collapse) to a specific state.

Penrose argues that a corresponding collapse occurs in consciousness, and within certain microtubules. They self-collapse and each time they do, they correspond with a discrete consciousness event. Sequences of these events give rise to our sense of time,** and a stream of consciousness. Unlike computers, this collapse is non-algorithmic and is what separates us from machines. **(See Peter Lynds, Einstein, Time and "block" universe, 20 November--time as points rather than flow)

Perhaps most outrageous to the scientific community is that Penrose is led to believe in a Platonic scenario. With Plato, for every chair we sit on, its ideal counterpart exists metaphysically as a Platonic form.* For Penrose, conscious states exist in a world of their own, which our minds access. Unlike Plato, his world is physics rather than metaphysics. (Some of his opponents doubt this :-) *(See Julian Barbour and Plato, 13 January.)

With the correspondence between wave function collapse in mind and the objects of mental observation, he seeks to rescue the world of macrophysics (in some instances like the common sense world we experience) and make it compatible with quantum physics. Einstein's gravitational world up to now has been undermined by Superposition Theory (See Schrödinger's Cat, 2 January). Penrose wants to resolve quantum paradoxes to make them "fit" with Einstein's view. He argues that it makes no sense to use the term "reality" for only objects we can see.

Penrose has enough stature that he can risk his reputation on this book, which many consider as wild-speculation. He follows a long line of risk takers, including Copernicus and Darwin. He has stirred up debate, which is good. This could also be science's future. In his last sentence, he says, "These are deep issues, and we are very far from explanations. I would argue that no clear answers will come forward unless the interrelating features of all these worlds [mental, physical, Platonic/mathematical] are seen to come into play. No one of these issues will be resolved in isolation from the others. I have referred to three worlds and the mysteries that relate one to another. No doubt there are not really three worlds but one, the true nature of which we do not even glimpse at present."

(Also see John Bell's Inequality Theorem and Alain Apect's experiments, 10 November, as well as John Wheeler and delayed choice, 11 January.)

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The Metaphysics of Grammar

I am these words you read. Or, if you want, these words are you. They radiate from this screen, involving you in their shapes, in their meanings, in the very mystery that they can communicate at all. We don't know one another and will never meet. Yet you read these words, each of them composed of letters, which shape representations. Representations of what?

Ah, there's the rub. Of what? What is it that is transpiring between us, you and me? Take this word: computer screen. There, that has clear representation. We register the screen surface, the edges, note the colors. That transpiration is clear. But what about other words? Where are their references? How is it possible that we make any sense at all together? What is it that we participate in to create this communication? It has been called consciousness, but that is another word.

We are wrapped in language. Our universe is linguistic. Poets, astronomers, philosophers, lovers, politicians, businessmen, even animal trainers, all use it. Most of it is based on airy conceptions, none of which does any more than help us think we know what we are talking about. Take grammar as an example.

Grammar has three basic tenses: we were, we are, and we will be. Our everday language is founded upon metaphysics, the metaphysics of time. With the future conditional, we would, speculation about choice and determinism arises.

We accept grammar as common sense rules of language and it works well to help communicate events as we experience them: what did happen, is happening, and will happen. Still, its tenses are flimsily based.

In "The Unreality of Time" (1908), Scottish philosopher J.E. McTaggart concluded that we label the tenses of our lives as time, and that is all it is, a mere name.

He said that confusion arises because we think the coffee was hot but is no longer hot. Instead, the coffee involves properties of hotness, then coldness which, as past and present, are properties of time which do not relate to one another because gone is gone, and here is here, so to speak.

Here are two different claims McTaggart poses about time:

A. Once in the past, a property can no longer be present. Only two possibilities are involved, present or not present.

B. But every event also has three properties; the coffee was hot, is cold, and will be gone (evaporated).

Claims A and B are logically incompatible. (No longer present? Three properties?) McTaggart must conclude that this inconsistency renders the tensed theory of time as false. Hence, he said time is a name for what we can't explain.Time is the strangest of our concepts, one that we rarely question. In terms of strangeness, consider the next paragraph.

Einstein's Special Relativity Theory folded space and time into spacetime, a four-dimensional block universe. In Relativity the observer determines the present. For our purposes, think of a light cone, which is the history of a flash of light. Relativity implies that time is unique to an observer's light cone. Philosopher Hilary Putnam pointed out an implication of relativity in which observers Joe, Linda, and Jennifer might involve these scenarios: Joe witnesses event X, which is not the future for Linda (therefore unreal), but is in the past for Jennifer (therefore real). How can events be both real and unreal?

Consider that in the night sky your eyes might register a star's light emitted billions of years ago. The light is real and present for you but the star cannot "see" the same light, which is in its past. Thus, too, dead stars may still live as we see their light for the first time.

Of time, St Augustine said, When you don't ask I know; when you ask, I know not. Modern theorists would say, When you ask I can give you lengthy explanations, but still I don't know. A Thirteenth Century Zen master and a brilliant mind, Dogen Zenzi said that man disposes himself into the world and takes this disposition as time. He meant that our "neural itch" creates time. (See Fait accompli, 8 November.) We are always impelled forward, always changing.

An understanding occurs when we realize that we are intelligent energy and that our changes are manifested as time. Some physicists would not touch this proposition. It does not readily yield itself to mathematical equations. It is one that each of us must explore for himself or herself.

Turn the light of consciousness inward and all thoughts, all sensation, all half-impressions disappear as it illuminates them. What remains is the light itself. This is not theoretical but is empirically verifiable.* Turn the light on whatever arises, and only it, a clear presence, remains until eventually clarity notices that all arises and falls away.

At this point, words again become a mystery because they remain on the remote edge of any further discussion. I had begun by saying I am, or you are, these words, and then, headed for laybyrinthine convolutions, tried to clarify meanings. But what are we when we turn away from them? What are we without meanings?

( * For empirical verification comments see the Richard Dawkins article, 31 December, and the Francisco Varela article, 6 January. For articles on time, see John Wheeler, 11 January, and Peter Lynds, 20 November. Also see the article on Perception, 8 December.)

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John Archibald Wheeler, Delayed Choice, & Time

If you aren't confused by quantum physics, you really haven't understood it. (Neils Bohr)

To explain very puzzling quantum phenomena Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg provided our world with the 1927 Copenhagen Interpretation of the double slit experiment (see Schrödinger's Cat, 2 January). The Interpretation still stands. It regards as meaningless questions like, Where was the particle before I measured its position? Measurement itself causes wave function collapse. Measurement, then, randomly picks one of the many possibilities allowed, and the wave function instantaneously changes to reflect that pick.

How is it possible that observer/measurement somehow alters that which is observed/measured? Only in movie cartoons do bullets split in order to go through two holes at once to reach the target. The world at the quantum level is cartoonish.

In considering the relationship of observer to the experiment, Wheeler concluded that choice by an observer would determine experiment outcome. And this, regardless of when the choice is made, before or after the "bullet" (particle) is fired. On our "common sense" level this is akin to saying that experimenter choice will determine what a bullet will do after it leaves a gun muzzle.

This is partly how it works:

Fire a photon toward a screen with double slits.

The photon passes through one slit, the other, or both. Presumably whatever the photon does, it does so while passing through the slits.

Past the slits, it heads toward a back wall.

At the back wall, the experimenter has two separate photon detection methods. One is leaving in place a screen while the photon is in transit to the back wall. The other is removing the screen.

After the photon is shooting to the back wall, the experimenter makes a choice to remove the screen or not. This is the delayed choice.

The experiment is much more detailed but the paradox is this. The delayed choice determines whether the particle passed one slit, or the other, or both. The delayed choice of how to measure the particle determined how the particle behaved at an earlier time. The choice seems to have changed the past.

Consider this: Assume a galaxy many light years away with light emitted billions of years ago. In brief, the delayed choice experiment implies that as we observe the light we alter its path. The paradox is that our observation changes the path of light that billions of years ago had already reached the point of our observation. How can the light have been emitted before observation, if the observer can alter what happened before it was observed?

At the quantum level, the experiment has yielded results largely as Wheeler expected them.

We can touch things in space, but that which we call time is inaccessible to us for an explanation. We think of it as real because it helps make sense of a bewildering universe according to the self, objectified by mind.

Home______Two Sages & a Taoist

Excerpts from a couple of What Is Enlightenment magazine interviews*, one with sage Ramesh Balsekar, the other with sage Swami Dayananda.

Ramesh Balsekar interview:
Q: [To Balsekar regarding his assertion that he and all of us are fated, not determined, and have no choices in what we do.**] On the other hand, though, if one believed that one does have control over [his action] as opposed to believing that one doesn't, one might not have done it in the first place!

RB: [He responds with various explanations of fatalism, but comes eventually to this clear statement:] It is not God's will that human beings think in those terms. It is not God's will that the human being be perfect. The difference between the sage and the ordinary person is that the sage accepts what is as God's will, but—and this is important—that does not prevent him from doing what he thinks should be done. And, what he thinks he should do is based on the programming. [Emphasis mine]

Q: But why would the sage "do whatever he thinks he should do" if, as you've already explained, he knows that it is not he who is thinking in the first place?

RB: You mean, how does the action happen? The answer is that the energy inside this body/mind organism produces the action according to the programming.

Swami Dayananda interview:
Q: One of the subjects I'm very interested in is the relationship between the nondual realization that you've been describing and action in the world of time and space. For example, in the empirical world, in empirical reality, even the realized soul who has no doubt about his true nature finds that he still must take a stand against, in opposition to the forces of delusion and negativity operating there.

SD: We need not impose a rule like should and must--he may take a stand.

Q: May take a stand?

SD: Yes. Because once he's free, who is to set rules for him? You see, if he is free enough to do, then he is just as free not to do--that is what I say. [End of interview excerpt]

Lao Tzu:
He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.***
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*The full interviews
**See the 8 January article on the difference between fatalism and determinism.
*** 1) Invoked only for the determinism/fatalism issue. 2) Because he said, "The world is everything that is the case," this by Ludwig Wittgenstein, would not fit: "Of that which we cannot speak, we must be silent."

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Home______Daniel Dennett & Choice Machines

In his book Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett says we have more freedom if determinism is true. A determined world has less randomness, less unpredictability. It allows us to make informed judgements on reliably future events. If you are about to cross an open field in a deterministic lightning storm you can plan when lightning will next strike by measuring intervals and making your run to safety. If it strikes wholly randomly, you are at its mercy.

He says people confuse determinism with fatalism. They think JFK's assassination could not have been prevented, or that they can never avoid getting a disease.

Determinism holds every event as a result of earlier events. Cause begets effect; no event is purely accidental. "Choice" derives from antecedents.

Fatalism is determinism with you left out. It is the idea that something will happen no matter what you do. Determinism holds that an event depends on what you do, on what you know, or what you are caused to know. In short, determinism doesn't mean inevitability. (Even if the you is omitted, as in Advaita or Buddhism, fatalism is not necessarily implied. See My comments, appended to the 28 December Balsekar/Goswami/Libet article.)

Dennett distinguishes between situation-action machines and choice-machines. He calls humans choice-machines. Situation-action machines' rules say, "If in situation X, do A," "If in situation B, do Z." If the action is on the list, it is done. The rule says so. Choice machines see options, "If I did this, what would happen? Or, if I did that? If I did this other thing?" They don't have lists of rules to follow.

Where do we get our values to make these choices? They evolve over time. Of them, he says in an interview, "our responsibility for our values is not absolute and it’s not zero." You can’t choose your parents, your culture, nor even your kindergarten teacher. As you mature you can gradually assume responsibility for your own actions. We try to raise our children as moral agents, which means eventually letting go of them by saying, "I’ve done the best I can. . . . I’ve created this hopefully moral agent. . . ."

But some take responsibility; others don't. How do they differ? Dennett doesn't refer to irresponsibility, but to nonresponsibility. If you are simply unable to notice what you’re doing and its implications, you’re less responsible than somebody who can.

We learn morality much as we learn language. "We hear stories, or we watch how people get rewarded or punished, and what we see and hear shapes our characters over time." We are not born moral.

Memes. Ideas culturally evolve analogous to biological genes in evolution. Some ideas survive better than others, mutating, recombining into new ideas. Such units of cultural evolution have been called memes. Copyright and patent laws deal with some memes. Like genes, memes may be worth copying.

Genes "speak" the language of DNA and RNA. Memes are culturally more varied. Just as biology evolves, so does culture, and through memes. They don't transmit DNA information but cultural information. In fact, natural selection can favor memes over genes in that culturally well-equipped social groups can survive others. (See Richard Dawkins, Memes, genes, and God, 31 December below.)

The self is only a metaphor for our bodies and brains as they exist in time. Without social interactions, the self wouldn't exist. This contravenes Descartes' idea that the self does all the person's work. For Dennett, the self is functionality. It is not one thing, but little things, neurons wired together, so to say. This explains why when philosopher David Hume looked for the self he couldn't find it. It is not localized and is rather like the internet, existing as a whole but not traceable to a single node. Unlike Eastern thought, however, the self doesn't disappear. "It bottoms out with the neurons." (In practice, Eastern religions allow that ego never completely vanishes.)

To those who charge he has disenchanted the world, rendering it meaningless, he replies that he has disenchanted it but it retains meaning, which doesn't depend on magic. (See more on Daniel Dennett in the 15 December article below.)

It's reductionist Professor Arthur Deikman, University of California, San Francisco, would say. It reduces us to less than we are. Are we choice machines? Deikman has responded to points of view similar to Dennett's. "When mathematics and chemistry define your world, it has no meaning; the world dries up,. But, for you, as you walk the streets, engage others, live your ife, your world is charged with meaning, filled with purposes, conflicted or aligned at every level." In a context about the "realistic" perspectives of science, he asks do they "really fit what you feel, what you experience, moment by moment--or are they something you have been told, something you now think?" Personal Freedom, found in Spiritual/Mysticism here: More

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Home______Winnie The Pooh on Free Will

"If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by free will. I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.” (Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse–Five)

"There's a very large question here." (Winnie The Pooh)

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