In parts 1 and 2 we established that the Universe is such that we are free to live our lives without God, and that the Universe is self-consistent. These two related properties combine to allow us to make our way in the world, and to frustrate us into doing so.
I use the word "frustrate" in a specific sense. The late psychologist Donald Winnicott developed the concept of the "good-enough" mother — the ordinary, devoted mother, who creates a secure enough environment for her child, yet is not "perfect" from her child's point of view, because she can not or will not satisfy the child's every wish. This "frustrates" the child enough to begin trying to do things for itself, and to establish its own identity apart from its mother. In this sense, "good enough" beats "perfect" hands down. A child with a good enough mother becomes a functioning adult. A child with a perfect mother remains dependent all its life.
Perhaps the entire question of theodicy stems from God being imperfect from our point of view. We want God to take care of our every want or need, to guard us from every harm. We might regard that as perfect, but we would be less than human. All we would be capable of is wanting and needing. Under such circumstances, who among us would be capable of doing or creating, and who would want to? Perhaps God is "good enough" to let us have a little space and time to become ourselves, which means that God better than perfect.
Yes, the Universe is a rough place. But within the constraints of freedom from God and self-consistency, could you come up with a better one? To quote Bob Dylan, "The answer, my friend, is blown' in the wind" — as God speaks it from the whirlwind in the Book of Job, chapters 38 and 39, of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.
Showing posts with label Creation and ID. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Creation and ID. Show all posts
19 September 2011
05 September 2011
Theodicy Part 2. Self-Consistency is a Bitch
At the end of Part 1, we took it as a self-evident axiom that the Universe is such that we are free to live our lives without reference (or deference) to any concept of God, gods, or divinity. In practice this means that if God exists, God refrains from jumping in to fix the Universe every time it functions in some way that causes us suffering. It means that we are on our own, except possibly for events so rare that the vast majority of us remain free to live without God nearly all our lives. Miracles may happen, but not so often that many of us can count on them.
This would be a mess if the Universe were random and unpredictable. An animal presented with aversive stimuli at random intervals, independently of its own behavior, soon cowers in its cage, suffering from what Seligman called "learned helplessness." Fortunately, the Universe is predictable in the following sense: it is self-consistent. Another name for self-consistency is the law of cause and effect.
Self-consistency has a positive side. It allows the Universe to function according to rules that we have been able to discover and to use to our benefit. We have developed agriculture, heating and air conditioning, cures to diseases, antiseptics and anesthetics for surgery, and so on. We have grown in autonomy and power as we have grown in scientific and technological knowledge. Consequently, we have grown in our average material well-being, worldwide. And these gains can be preserved and enlarged, because the world population is stabilizing.
On the negative side, self-consistency makes the Universe a rough place. It turns out that gravity is probably a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics and the existence of quantum fields like photons, leptons and baryons. In other words, if you want to have light to see by, a planet to stand on, and air to breathe, then self-consistency demands that the Universe be subject to the law of increasing entropy. Which means that things must run down. Which means that you (along with everything in the Universe, including the Universe itself) have to die someday.
To a religious person, it might seem as if we have been dumped into this Universe, where bad things happen, and where we do bad things to each other. God has dropped us from his embrace, kicked us out of Eden. This feels like a punishment, and theologians have rationalized that it happens because we deserve it. Or rather, our earliest ancestors did something to deserve it, which changed them in some way that we have inherited, which makes us deserve it also.
Any abandoned child will try to figure out what it did to cause its abandonment, so as to make amends and get its parent back. It is too threatening to think of the parent as bad, because the parent is the only one who can guarantee child's survival. So the child thinks that it must be bad, and that it must do something good to attract the parent to care for the child again. That, without commenting on its truth, is the level of explanation of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, and why the doctrine has such mythic, psychological power.
The truth of the doctrine of Original Sin is as a primitive, or rather primal, descriptive psychology. We act like the Doctrine says we act. We often treat ourselves, each other, and the world around us and its inhabitants badly, and we live most aspects of our lives as if God does not exist. Even those of us who are regularly attend church, synagogue, or mosque.
If we are being punished for it, the punishment was around long before we were. The overwhelming weight of the evidence is that evolution is the response of populations of living things to suffering and death. We humans are one instance of that ongoing response. For a religious person, that means that God used suffering and death to create humans. The Human Condition is not so much a punishment as an opportunity.
And, as I argued in the third paragraph of this section, we have taken advantage of that opportunity, at least in a material sense. We are beginning to do very well indeed. We have gone from a population of perhaps a few tens to 7 billion in just 200,000 years by learning to use the self-consistency of the Universe to change our world in our favor. This has been devastating to the world's mega-fauna, including the other human species (e.g. the Neanderthals - perhaps playing the original role of Abel, with our ancestors as Cain) with which we once shared this planet, but I'll just chalk that up to Original Sin for now.
On to Part 3.
This would be a mess if the Universe were random and unpredictable. An animal presented with aversive stimuli at random intervals, independently of its own behavior, soon cowers in its cage, suffering from what Seligman called "learned helplessness." Fortunately, the Universe is predictable in the following sense: it is self-consistent. Another name for self-consistency is the law of cause and effect.
Self-consistency has a positive side. It allows the Universe to function according to rules that we have been able to discover and to use to our benefit. We have developed agriculture, heating and air conditioning, cures to diseases, antiseptics and anesthetics for surgery, and so on. We have grown in autonomy and power as we have grown in scientific and technological knowledge. Consequently, we have grown in our average material well-being, worldwide. And these gains can be preserved and enlarged, because the world population is stabilizing.
On the negative side, self-consistency makes the Universe a rough place. It turns out that gravity is probably a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics and the existence of quantum fields like photons, leptons and baryons. In other words, if you want to have light to see by, a planet to stand on, and air to breathe, then self-consistency demands that the Universe be subject to the law of increasing entropy. Which means that things must run down. Which means that you (along with everything in the Universe, including the Universe itself) have to die someday.
To a religious person, it might seem as if we have been dumped into this Universe, where bad things happen, and where we do bad things to each other. God has dropped us from his embrace, kicked us out of Eden. This feels like a punishment, and theologians have rationalized that it happens because we deserve it. Or rather, our earliest ancestors did something to deserve it, which changed them in some way that we have inherited, which makes us deserve it also.
Any abandoned child will try to figure out what it did to cause its abandonment, so as to make amends and get its parent back. It is too threatening to think of the parent as bad, because the parent is the only one who can guarantee child's survival. So the child thinks that it must be bad, and that it must do something good to attract the parent to care for the child again. That, without commenting on its truth, is the level of explanation of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, and why the doctrine has such mythic, psychological power.
The truth of the doctrine of Original Sin is as a primitive, or rather primal, descriptive psychology. We act like the Doctrine says we act. We often treat ourselves, each other, and the world around us and its inhabitants badly, and we live most aspects of our lives as if God does not exist. Even those of us who are regularly attend church, synagogue, or mosque.
If we are being punished for it, the punishment was around long before we were. The overwhelming weight of the evidence is that evolution is the response of populations of living things to suffering and death. We humans are one instance of that ongoing response. For a religious person, that means that God used suffering and death to create humans. The Human Condition is not so much a punishment as an opportunity.
And, as I argued in the third paragraph of this section, we have taken advantage of that opportunity, at least in a material sense. We are beginning to do very well indeed. We have gone from a population of perhaps a few tens to 7 billion in just 200,000 years by learning to use the self-consistency of the Universe to change our world in our favor. This has been devastating to the world's mega-fauna, including the other human species (e.g. the Neanderthals - perhaps playing the original role of Abel, with our ancestors as Cain) with which we once shared this planet, but I'll just chalk that up to Original Sin for now.
On to Part 3.
23 September 2008
Neurobiology of Atheism
I ran into Bernie (not his real name) this weekend. Our talk turned quickly to politics, Sarah Palin, and the evils of religion. I mentioned that politics, not religion, is the opposite of science.
Bernie wasn't convinced. He brought up Creationism as an example of religion directly opposed to science, and of science being obviously right and religion being obviously wrong. I pointed out that the Creation story in Genesis is what a loving God would tell to a wandering semi-civilized people who began to ask 2800 years ago, "Where did we come from?" It is true at the level of explanation that a loving parent would give to a five-year-old child who asks where babies come from. It would be pointless and possibly cruel to burden a child with the mechanical details of human sexuality. It would have been equally pointless and cruel for God to say, "Well you have forty years of wandering to do..., let's start learning calculus, differential equations, and quantum mechanics." The Creationists mistake is to demand that we accept the five-year-old level of explanation as a mature explanation. In so doing, they generate an obvious falsehood and demand that we believe it along with the Gospel, which brings discredit to themselves and also to the Gospel.
Again, Bernie was skeptical. I get the sense that Bernie harbors a permanent anger toward religion, possibly to his having suffered some cruelty in its name. Or maybe simply because Bernie is a scientist, and is simply offended by biblical Literalism.
He began bringing up some of the recent research in neurobiology. "Indeed," I said, "there seems to be a neurobiological basis for religious experience." He gleefully agreed.
"But then you realize that elevates atheism to the level of color-blindness," I added.
Bernie wasn't convinced. He brought up Creationism as an example of religion directly opposed to science, and of science being obviously right and religion being obviously wrong. I pointed out that the Creation story in Genesis is what a loving God would tell to a wandering semi-civilized people who began to ask 2800 years ago, "Where did we come from?" It is true at the level of explanation that a loving parent would give to a five-year-old child who asks where babies come from. It would be pointless and possibly cruel to burden a child with the mechanical details of human sexuality. It would have been equally pointless and cruel for God to say, "Well you have forty years of wandering to do..., let's start learning calculus, differential equations, and quantum mechanics." The Creationists mistake is to demand that we accept the five-year-old level of explanation as a mature explanation. In so doing, they generate an obvious falsehood and demand that we believe it along with the Gospel, which brings discredit to themselves and also to the Gospel.
Again, Bernie was skeptical. I get the sense that Bernie harbors a permanent anger toward religion, possibly to his having suffered some cruelty in its name. Or maybe simply because Bernie is a scientist, and is simply offended by biblical Literalism.
He began bringing up some of the recent research in neurobiology. "Indeed," I said, "there seems to be a neurobiological basis for religious experience." He gleefully agreed.
"But then you realize that elevates atheism to the level of color-blindness," I added.
01 January 2008
Creationism is an Honest Lie
Let's say your preschooler asks you, "Where do babies come from? How did I get here?"
There are a number of ways you might answer, but if you know anything about young kids, you are not going to give your child all the details of human reproductive physiology and adult sexual behavior. Your child simply hasn't developed enough intellectually and emotionally to take in, much less process that kind of information. You're going to say something that meets your child's intellectual, emotional and spiritual needs right now. The details can wait until the child is more mature.
Now let's flash back some 2,800 years. You are God, and the Hebrew tribes are beginning to wonder how the world and humankind came into existence. One thing you are not going to say to them is, "First you need to learn Quantum Mechanics...." It would make absolutely no intellectual sense to them, and it would be too sterile emotionally and spiritually. You're going to tell them something that captures the essential truths of their relationship with you in a way that has meaning for them. Maybe that you made the Universe and everything in it. That you didn't make it all at once, but in stages. And lastly, you made people. And you made them special, so that you could even have this conversation. The details can wait until their cultures mature enough that they can discover Quantum Mechanics on their own.
In other words, the Creation story in Genesis is true. It's truth is similar to the truth a conscientious and loving parent might tell a five year old child about sex.
We could insist that a five-year-old's understanding of human reproduction be taught in high school sex education courses. But high schoolers, knowing more than that already, would see us as idiots, which would undermine our authority to teach them anything, period. Insisting that an iron-age understanding of biology be taught in 21st century high schools is of the same order of idiocy, and - for most kids - undermines our teaching authority in the same way.
So while Creation is true (in this Christian physicist's opinion), Creationism is false. Creationism insists that the iron-age understanding of cosmogeny and biology is factual, to the detriment of its true meaning for all of us. The Creationists and their spawn, Intelligent Design proponents, are not disingenuous, they're just wrong. They're telling an honest lie.
There are a number of ways you might answer, but if you know anything about young kids, you are not going to give your child all the details of human reproductive physiology and adult sexual behavior. Your child simply hasn't developed enough intellectually and emotionally to take in, much less process that kind of information. You're going to say something that meets your child's intellectual, emotional and spiritual needs right now. The details can wait until the child is more mature.
Now let's flash back some 2,800 years. You are God, and the Hebrew tribes are beginning to wonder how the world and humankind came into existence. One thing you are not going to say to them is, "First you need to learn Quantum Mechanics...." It would make absolutely no intellectual sense to them, and it would be too sterile emotionally and spiritually. You're going to tell them something that captures the essential truths of their relationship with you in a way that has meaning for them. Maybe that you made the Universe and everything in it. That you didn't make it all at once, but in stages. And lastly, you made people. And you made them special, so that you could even have this conversation. The details can wait until their cultures mature enough that they can discover Quantum Mechanics on their own.
In other words, the Creation story in Genesis is true. It's truth is similar to the truth a conscientious and loving parent might tell a five year old child about sex.
We could insist that a five-year-old's understanding of human reproduction be taught in high school sex education courses. But high schoolers, knowing more than that already, would see us as idiots, which would undermine our authority to teach them anything, period. Insisting that an iron-age understanding of biology be taught in 21st century high schools is of the same order of idiocy, and - for most kids - undermines our teaching authority in the same way.
So while Creation is true (in this Christian physicist's opinion), Creationism is false. Creationism insists that the iron-age understanding of cosmogeny and biology is factual, to the detriment of its true meaning for all of us. The Creationists and their spawn, Intelligent Design proponents, are not disingenuous, they're just wrong. They're telling an honest lie.
19 February 2006
Less So Intelligent Design
On the positve side, advocates of Intelligent Design try to use concepts from Information Theory that are divorced from physical reality. That is, information is physical - physical interactions must take place for information to be created, moved, or destroyed. And, contrary to the assertions of at least one ID supporter (William Dembski), all three things can happen to information. But that's the positive side. In this post, I want to look at the negative side: the arguments made by the IDers against Evolution.
First, they try to use the notion of irreducible complexity. This is the notion that if you take a part away from a machine, and it stops functioning at all, then that part could not have evolved from nothing through a series of small changes. They try to apply this to biological systems, heedless of its fallacy. For one thing, consider that a substitute, but inferior, part could make the machine work almost as well. There could be a whole sequence of such parts, stretching back into the past. Indeed there could be such sequences for every part of the machine, such that at some prior time, the machine looked and functioned rather differently. Such is the case with living things and their multiplicity of subsystems and parts, many of which are redundant, and many of which are flawed. (Indeed, the theory of systems with multiply redundant, flawed parts seems to account well for the phenomenon of aging.)
Second, they try to show that there simply hasn't been enough time since the beginning of the biosphere (about 4 billion years ago) for life as we know it to have arisen. They note the billions of parts of a DNA molecule, and point out that, given known mutation rates, random mutations could not account for the diversity of life that we now see. However, as I pointed out in my previous post on ID, mutations do not occur randomly. On this planet they are constrained by the stereochemistry of carbon compounds in solution in water. The process of change by mutation is neither random, nor even Markov. DNA , RNA, and their precursors, interacting with their environment are essentially computers with memory. Thus evolution proceeds far faster than the IDers (or most advocates for evolution) give it credit.
So, while evolution is an observed process, and people have testable theories concerning how it happens, ID is not yet one of those theories. It is instead an intellectual and political power-grab by people who would rather believe a comforting myth than stare into the abyss of uncertainty. In particular, by trying to force its way into school curricula, it is an attempt by my fellow believers to co-opt the temporal power of the state to shore up the weakness of their faith.
Well, we in Western Civilization have been down that road before. We have fought our way through the Protestant Reformation and the bloody wars of religion that followed. We should all know by now that when the power of Faith gets in bed with the power of the Government, their union breeds monsters. This is a simple fact of the Human Condition, and it applies to all religions, whether, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Secularist.
First, they try to use the notion of irreducible complexity. This is the notion that if you take a part away from a machine, and it stops functioning at all, then that part could not have evolved from nothing through a series of small changes. They try to apply this to biological systems, heedless of its fallacy. For one thing, consider that a substitute, but inferior, part could make the machine work almost as well. There could be a whole sequence of such parts, stretching back into the past. Indeed there could be such sequences for every part of the machine, such that at some prior time, the machine looked and functioned rather differently. Such is the case with living things and their multiplicity of subsystems and parts, many of which are redundant, and many of which are flawed. (Indeed, the theory of systems with multiply redundant, flawed parts seems to account well for the phenomenon of aging.)
Second, they try to show that there simply hasn't been enough time since the beginning of the biosphere (about 4 billion years ago) for life as we know it to have arisen. They note the billions of parts of a DNA molecule, and point out that, given known mutation rates, random mutations could not account for the diversity of life that we now see. However, as I pointed out in my previous post on ID, mutations do not occur randomly. On this planet they are constrained by the stereochemistry of carbon compounds in solution in water. The process of change by mutation is neither random, nor even Markov. DNA , RNA, and their precursors, interacting with their environment are essentially computers with memory. Thus evolution proceeds far faster than the IDers (or most advocates for evolution) give it credit.
So, while evolution is an observed process, and people have testable theories concerning how it happens, ID is not yet one of those theories. It is instead an intellectual and political power-grab by people who would rather believe a comforting myth than stare into the abyss of uncertainty. In particular, by trying to force its way into school curricula, it is an attempt by my fellow believers to co-opt the temporal power of the state to shore up the weakness of their faith.
Well, we in Western Civilization have been down that road before. We have fought our way through the Protestant Reformation and the bloody wars of religion that followed. We should all know by now that when the power of Faith gets in bed with the power of the Government, their union breeds monsters. This is a simple fact of the Human Condition, and it applies to all religions, whether, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Secularist.
12 February 2006
Not So Intelligent Design
"Why do the heathen rage so furiously together, and why do the people imagine a vain thing?" Rather than read that line in context in the Bible, try listening to Handel's version of it in his oratorio, The Messiah." Now we are ready to talk about the controversy over Intelligent Design (ID) as an alternate theory to Evolution.
My grad school buddy Adrian Melott once wrote, Intelligent Design is Creationism in a Cheap Tuxedo, which I fear is true of most of its advocates. Now, don't get me wrong. I would love to see a real theory of Intelligent Design - a mathematical/logical framework that would enable me to methodically estimate the probability that a given object is natural or artificial, that is made by artifice, according to some design. A way to tell whether a stone is just a stone, or the earliest handmade tool. Today we use various arguments to convince ourselves one way or the other, but we have no formal theory.
One of ID's brightest advocates, William Dembski, seems to start toward such a theory, in his online article, Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information. In it, he sketches the concept of Complex Specified Information (CSI) - which involves Actualization, Exclusion, and Specification. Actualization means that a possibility has been realized. Exclusion means that possibility excludes many other possibilities. Specification means that the possibility matches a pattern that is given independently of and prior to the possibility itself.
Since exclusion is measured in terms of probability, i.e., the likelihood that the possibility could have occurred by chance, Dembski adopts the standard convention in information theory that the amount of information in an event is proportional to the negative of the logarithm (to the base 2) of the probability of the event's happening by chance. The base 2 is a nod to the idea that information can be reckoned in terms of binary digits or bits. But the log has significance in physics that Dembski ignores in his short article - the formula relating information in a system to the probability of the system being in the configuration in which it is found is related (by a sign change) to the Entropy of the system. More about this in a moment.
Dembski goes on to say:
Not so fast, Dr. Dembski. There is a related law in physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that Entropy must always increase, which it seems to do in the Universe as a whole. But there are localized regions in the Universe in which Entropy can decrease for a time due to a large input of Energy. One of these is the surface of the earth, on which the biosphere decreases its Entropy by means of the input of a huge amount of sunlight. Now the Entropy of a system is just an expression of the disorder in the system, which is the probability that the system would be in some actualized state by chance. In other words, Entropy is the negative of Information. And, since Entropy is physical, so is Information, and any theory of information must be constrained by what we already know about physics. (Actually, it goes much deeper than this: the scientifically inclined who have Adobe Reader can read Quantum Information is Physical by Di Vincenzo, et al.)
Since we know that Entropy can decrease locally for a time, we know that Information can increase locally for a time. That is to say, there is nothing in the article cited above that necessitates a Designer for CSI to originate and grow on earth, at least for a while, say as long as the sun keeps shining, and the globe remains habitable. To put it simplistically, if the earth is getting more intelligent, it is because the sun is getting dumber.
In fact, this may be true of the entire Universe, which seems to have begun in an extremely low-Entropy, high-symmetry (high Information) state. The generation of what appears to us to be CSI in the Universe is merely the creation of temporary, relatively low-entropy regions of the Universe, such as earth's biosphere, such as ourselves. Or more accurately, what appears to be Complex Specified Information in our DNA is actually not specified, at least not in advance by a Designer.
To see this, consider that once you have a self-replicating molecule (DNA, RNA, or some prior molecule or molecules), you have a computer. By replicating or failing to replicate under different circumstances, it processes information about what allows it to replicate and what doesn't. If variations can occur in the molecule, it can essentially learn to replicate better in its environment, and it can learn to adapt to changes in its environment. Since learning involves structural change in the molecule, it keeps a kind or record of its past configurations. Now, sometimes parts of the record might get lost, and extraneous stuff might get in, but generally speaking the molecule (or more precisely, the current generation of the molecule) constitutes a record of its path of changes through time.
Because the molecule is subject to the laws of physics, its stereochemistry (its 3D structure and how it interacts with other molecules because of its 3D structure and their 3D structures) is constrained. That is to say, not all variations are possible, and in particular, once it has gone down one path of changes, many other paths become less accessible, because its structure now no longer permits those variations.
The forgoing two paragraphs imply that this process of changes cannot be strictly random, because the laws of physics and chemistry make it impossible for the variations in the molecule's structure to be completely random. Moreover, because the past changes in structure limit the possible (and the likely) future variations in the molecule's structure, the temporal process of successive variations is not even Markov. (In a Markov process, the current state of a system embodies all the information about a system - the future of the system is independent of its state at any other time in the past.)
Now this sequence of variations of molecular structure is the evolution of the molecule, which if the molecule is DNA, means that the evolution (variation of form through time) of life is neither random nor Markov. In other words, strict Darwinism is false - but what did you expect? Darwin knew nothing of DNA. On the other hand evolution is not a theory but a process which has been observed under controlled conditions, such as dog-breeding. What is theoretical about it is the details of how it happens.
So far, we see that Evolution is not equivalent to Darwin's idea of natural selection of the fittest random variations of living forms. Rather it is eqivalent to natural and/or artificial (in the case of breeding) selection of non-random and non-Markovian variations of living forms (and the biomolecular computers which generate and encode them). Essentially the biomolecular computers are mechanisms for turning inputs of energy into temporary and local decreases of entropy (increases of information). In other words, it is not necessarily the case that the information in our human DNA is specified by a Designer. Physics and chemistry may have brought about the first very simple biomolecular computers with some low but not infinitesimal probability, and then the biomolecular computers and their environment did the rest. There may be no CSI in humans as biological entities. It would not be the first time that humanity has had to dethrone itself.
But what about that low-entropy, high-information, priveleged state in which the Universe appears to have begun. Who specified that? Well, the state was a quantum vacuum state. Such states are characterized by so-called vacuum oscillations, in which virtual particle-antiparticle pairs spontaneously pop out of the vacuum and recombine to their original nothingness before the Time-Energy Uncertainty Principle is violated. In layman's terms this means that the original quantum vacuum state contained the virtual possibility of everything and its opposite. What changed this state was the spontaneous breaking of certain symmetries as the Universe expanded and cooled. The broken symmetries guaranteed that not all of the opposites would arise to cancel out all of everything. The universe began to differentiate into what we see today.
This rather dramatic over-simplification of current cosmological theory is I hope still reasonably faithful to the original. If so, it tends to support the Hindu/Buddhist idea of the "Ten Thousand Things" falling out of the original perfect unity of All in All. On the other hand, the emergence of the Universe itself, and the cosmic radiation from the Big Bang tends to add support to the Judeo-Christian, "Let there be Light." Or maybe not. The point is that I still see no logical/physical necessity for an Intelligent Designer. As a Christian, I happen to believe there is One, and that I experience His Presence, but here I stand to say that so far, I don't think Dembski has proved His/Her/Its existence.
Of course, the concept of Complex Specified Information is not all there is to Intelligent Design theory. But then, I'm not done with ID yet. It's just that this article is long enough for tonight.
My grad school buddy Adrian Melott once wrote, Intelligent Design is Creationism in a Cheap Tuxedo, which I fear is true of most of its advocates. Now, don't get me wrong. I would love to see a real theory of Intelligent Design - a mathematical/logical framework that would enable me to methodically estimate the probability that a given object is natural or artificial, that is made by artifice, according to some design. A way to tell whether a stone is just a stone, or the earliest handmade tool. Today we use various arguments to convince ourselves one way or the other, but we have no formal theory.
One of ID's brightest advocates, William Dembski, seems to start toward such a theory, in his online article, Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information. In it, he sketches the concept of Complex Specified Information (CSI) - which involves Actualization, Exclusion, and Specification. Actualization means that a possibility has been realized. Exclusion means that possibility excludes many other possibilities. Specification means that the possibility matches a pattern that is given independently of and prior to the possibility itself.
Since exclusion is measured in terms of probability, i.e., the likelihood that the possibility could have occurred by chance, Dembski adopts the standard convention in information theory that the amount of information in an event is proportional to the negative of the logarithm (to the base 2) of the probability of the event's happening by chance. The base 2 is a nod to the idea that information can be reckoned in terms of binary digits or bits. But the log has significance in physics that Dembski ignores in his short article - the formula relating information in a system to the probability of the system being in the configuration in which it is found is related (by a sign change) to the Entropy of the system. More about this in a moment.
Dembski goes on to say:
Natural causes are therefore incapable of generating CSI. This broad conclusion I call the Law of Conservation of Information, or LCI for short. LCI has profound implications for science. Among its corollaries are the following: (1) The CSI in a closed system of natural causes remains constant or decreases. (2) CSI cannot be generated spontaneously, originate endogenously, or organize itself (as these terms are used in origins-of-life research). (3) The CSI in a closed system of natural causes either has been in the system eternally or was at some point added exogenously (implying that the system though now closed was not always closed). (4) In particular, any closed system of natural causes that is also of finite duration received whatever CSI it contains before it became a closed system.
Not so fast, Dr. Dembski. There is a related law in physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that Entropy must always increase, which it seems to do in the Universe as a whole. But there are localized regions in the Universe in which Entropy can decrease for a time due to a large input of Energy. One of these is the surface of the earth, on which the biosphere decreases its Entropy by means of the input of a huge amount of sunlight. Now the Entropy of a system is just an expression of the disorder in the system, which is the probability that the system would be in some actualized state by chance. In other words, Entropy is the negative of Information. And, since Entropy is physical, so is Information, and any theory of information must be constrained by what we already know about physics. (Actually, it goes much deeper than this: the scientifically inclined who have Adobe Reader can read Quantum Information is Physical by Di Vincenzo, et al.)
Since we know that Entropy can decrease locally for a time, we know that Information can increase locally for a time. That is to say, there is nothing in the article cited above that necessitates a Designer for CSI to originate and grow on earth, at least for a while, say as long as the sun keeps shining, and the globe remains habitable. To put it simplistically, if the earth is getting more intelligent, it is because the sun is getting dumber.
In fact, this may be true of the entire Universe, which seems to have begun in an extremely low-Entropy, high-symmetry (high Information) state. The generation of what appears to us to be CSI in the Universe is merely the creation of temporary, relatively low-entropy regions of the Universe, such as earth's biosphere, such as ourselves. Or more accurately, what appears to be Complex Specified Information in our DNA is actually not specified, at least not in advance by a Designer.
To see this, consider that once you have a self-replicating molecule (DNA, RNA, or some prior molecule or molecules), you have a computer. By replicating or failing to replicate under different circumstances, it processes information about what allows it to replicate and what doesn't. If variations can occur in the molecule, it can essentially learn to replicate better in its environment, and it can learn to adapt to changes in its environment. Since learning involves structural change in the molecule, it keeps a kind or record of its past configurations. Now, sometimes parts of the record might get lost, and extraneous stuff might get in, but generally speaking the molecule (or more precisely, the current generation of the molecule) constitutes a record of its path of changes through time.
Because the molecule is subject to the laws of physics, its stereochemistry (its 3D structure and how it interacts with other molecules because of its 3D structure and their 3D structures) is constrained. That is to say, not all variations are possible, and in particular, once it has gone down one path of changes, many other paths become less accessible, because its structure now no longer permits those variations.
The forgoing two paragraphs imply that this process of changes cannot be strictly random, because the laws of physics and chemistry make it impossible for the variations in the molecule's structure to be completely random. Moreover, because the past changes in structure limit the possible (and the likely) future variations in the molecule's structure, the temporal process of successive variations is not even Markov. (In a Markov process, the current state of a system embodies all the information about a system - the future of the system is independent of its state at any other time in the past.)
Now this sequence of variations of molecular structure is the evolution of the molecule, which if the molecule is DNA, means that the evolution (variation of form through time) of life is neither random nor Markov. In other words, strict Darwinism is false - but what did you expect? Darwin knew nothing of DNA. On the other hand evolution is not a theory but a process which has been observed under controlled conditions, such as dog-breeding. What is theoretical about it is the details of how it happens.
So far, we see that Evolution is not equivalent to Darwin's idea of natural selection of the fittest random variations of living forms. Rather it is eqivalent to natural and/or artificial (in the case of breeding) selection of non-random and non-Markovian variations of living forms (and the biomolecular computers which generate and encode them). Essentially the biomolecular computers are mechanisms for turning inputs of energy into temporary and local decreases of entropy (increases of information). In other words, it is not necessarily the case that the information in our human DNA is specified by a Designer. Physics and chemistry may have brought about the first very simple biomolecular computers with some low but not infinitesimal probability, and then the biomolecular computers and their environment did the rest. There may be no CSI in humans as biological entities. It would not be the first time that humanity has had to dethrone itself.
But what about that low-entropy, high-information, priveleged state in which the Universe appears to have begun. Who specified that? Well, the state was a quantum vacuum state. Such states are characterized by so-called vacuum oscillations, in which virtual particle-antiparticle pairs spontaneously pop out of the vacuum and recombine to their original nothingness before the Time-Energy Uncertainty Principle is violated. In layman's terms this means that the original quantum vacuum state contained the virtual possibility of everything and its opposite. What changed this state was the spontaneous breaking of certain symmetries as the Universe expanded and cooled. The broken symmetries guaranteed that not all of the opposites would arise to cancel out all of everything. The universe began to differentiate into what we see today.
This rather dramatic over-simplification of current cosmological theory is I hope still reasonably faithful to the original. If so, it tends to support the Hindu/Buddhist idea of the "Ten Thousand Things" falling out of the original perfect unity of All in All. On the other hand, the emergence of the Universe itself, and the cosmic radiation from the Big Bang tends to add support to the Judeo-Christian, "Let there be Light." Or maybe not. The point is that I still see no logical/physical necessity for an Intelligent Designer. As a Christian, I happen to believe there is One, and that I experience His Presence, but here I stand to say that so far, I don't think Dembski has proved His/Her/Its existence.
Of course, the concept of Complex Specified Information is not all there is to Intelligent Design theory. But then, I'm not done with ID yet. It's just that this article is long enough for tonight.
02 January 2004
Many Worlds Apart
contributed by Stephen D. Unwin
author of The Probability of God
author of The Probability of God
Be kind to people. Don't steal from them. Be honest. The world was created six thousand years ago.
To keep me on track in pursuit of the moral life, I often sketch out the tenets of my religious beliefs. These elements seem coherent, although I admit to being a little leery about one of them. It is, of course, the one about being honest. I feel intuitively that God would want me to tell old friends they still look good after all these years. I really need to explore further the theology of honesty.
I didn't always believe all these things. Take the matter of the world's genesis, for example. In darker days, I thought of myself as a weak anthropicist. The adjective 'weak' doesn't apply to the degree of my commitment, but reflects someone's notion that the principle in which I believed - the weak anthropic principle - is a weaker variant of another form. Paradoxically, it was for me the weak version of the principle that was by far the more powerful and compelling. Attaching to it the epithet "weak", I suspect, is in the same spirit of banks and insurance companies issuing "nondisclosure statements"; that is, they are titled antithetically to content in order to allay any fuss. The strong anthropic principle has it that the universe must possess properties that ensure the emergence of observers. This idea always struck me as having unnecessarily strong teleological overtones. The weak, yet, in my opinion, more powerful version of the principle is that any observed universe must have those properties necessary to produce observers. The reason that this principle is so powerful is that it lacks any of those attributes that expose it to the possibility of being wrong. It has the incontrovertible and awesome power of tautology. Anyhow, strong or weak, the anthropic principle is often proffered as the reason that the universe is seemingly fine-tuned - that is, all the physical laws and constants of nature are calibrated just-so - to produce galaxies, stars, atomic matter, and, ultimately, life.
For the weak anthropic principle to make sense as an explanation of fine-tuning, we must accept the notion that there exist many universes, most of them untuned and lifeless, but in which the fine-tuning issue would never be raised. Yet - and here's the point - some tiny fraction of these universes; that is, those in which the laws and physical constants are just right, would be life-bearing. We could then conclude, with compelling obviousness, that we must live in one of the few that are just right for us. So, if someone marvels, somewhat parochially, that had the fundamental constants of nature been just a few percentage points different, it would have resulted in chaos and black holes instead of structure and life, then we can inform them with confidence that there are indeed plenty of universes just like that, but it isn’t our problem.
Now, some might ask if there is really any economy of belief in accepting this multitude of universes in preference to, say, the idea of a single cosmic designer who went out of his way to do all that fine-tuning? Perhaps it's just my frugal, north-of-England upbringing, but, as a general principle, I've always considered vast numbers of universes to be a rather extravagant solution to any problem. Now to be fair, one can go some way toward putting these universes on a reasonably sound physical footing. There is the so-called Everett 'many-worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics that has the universe splitting continually as quantum mechanical wave functions collapse - where each outcome to a quantum uncertainty represents a branch in the split. On the other hand, all these branching universes are governed by the same physical laws, and so this model is of limited help with the fine-tuning question. Then again, the Everett model doesn't have the monopoly on multi-universe concepts. There's always the idea that there are multiple parallel universes with different sets of physical laws - perhaps even some without much in the way of laws at all, where a physicist would be hard-pressed to get one lousy paper out of the whole thing. Or, if arguing for the notion of 'parallel universes' makes you feel a little nerdish and Trekkie-esque, what about the idea of an ongoing cycle of big-bangs and big-crunches giving rise to serial universes? This, of course, raises the issue of geese, as I will explain.
Say I inform you of the existence of an invisible and generally undetectable goose in the middle of my desk. What’s the risk of having you falsify my assertion? I think I'm pretty safe on the science front because science is quite ill-equipped to take on this sort of pronouncement. After all, science's starting point generally involves detection and measurement, and my goose is quite immune to that type of thing. Perhaps a philosopher - one of those who deals in metaphysics - could challenge my proposition. Yet again, he or she, by profession, might be considered less credible than the goose.
Indeed, science's preoccupation with observation renders it quite impotent when it comes to denying or confirming the existence of the undetectable. So, returning to the universes: if they are in principle unobservable - which they are generally considered to be (with the possible exception of the Everett model, which wasn't of much use, anyway) - then this many-universe outlook could not really be considered a scientific one. Yet, it seems in some intuitive way to have a meta-scientific flavor to it, doesn’t it? I must confess that I'm not entirely sure why I think this. Perhaps it's that science has come to gain some foothold on the physical universe, and on geese too, for that matter. So, to posit the existence of the undetectable goose or the unobservable universes has a sciencey feel to it. This would be in contrast to, say, positing the existence of God, who could by no means be considered some variant on a scientifically concrete idea. This is the best rationale I can muster for my meta-science claim.
I admit that any one of these beliefs - in undetectable universes, invisible geese, or God - would require somewhat of a leap of faith. I suppose we must each take our own path - and the option to which I have come to attach my own faith is God. If I were pressed for some justification (notwithstanding the whole issue of explanatory economics, which might simply be a case of cheapness on my part), I think I might play the logical positivism card to argue that at least the God in which I believe is, in a way I won’t expound here, detectable.
Now, it would crush me to think that my beliefs could be construed as an affront to the faith of others. I would not wish to offend those whose faith attaches to the notion of multiple universes, nor to offend the goose cultists for that matter. I will not be accused of attacking the religions of others. I am, after all, fully aware that my belief is simply one of faith, and that the physics of the natural world provides no argument for this preference.
Be kind to people. Don't steal from them. Be honest. The world was created six thousand years ago. As I think about it more, that last thing about the world being six thousand years old could be another problem. I suspect it's probably true — raising the tougher and more pertinent question of this: true in which universe?
To keep me on track in pursuit of the moral life, I often sketch out the tenets of my religious beliefs. These elements seem coherent, although I admit to being a little leery about one of them. It is, of course, the one about being honest. I feel intuitively that God would want me to tell old friends they still look good after all these years. I really need to explore further the theology of honesty.
I didn't always believe all these things. Take the matter of the world's genesis, for example. In darker days, I thought of myself as a weak anthropicist. The adjective 'weak' doesn't apply to the degree of my commitment, but reflects someone's notion that the principle in which I believed - the weak anthropic principle - is a weaker variant of another form. Paradoxically, it was for me the weak version of the principle that was by far the more powerful and compelling. Attaching to it the epithet "weak", I suspect, is in the same spirit of banks and insurance companies issuing "nondisclosure statements"; that is, they are titled antithetically to content in order to allay any fuss. The strong anthropic principle has it that the universe must possess properties that ensure the emergence of observers. This idea always struck me as having unnecessarily strong teleological overtones. The weak, yet, in my opinion, more powerful version of the principle is that any observed universe must have those properties necessary to produce observers. The reason that this principle is so powerful is that it lacks any of those attributes that expose it to the possibility of being wrong. It has the incontrovertible and awesome power of tautology. Anyhow, strong or weak, the anthropic principle is often proffered as the reason that the universe is seemingly fine-tuned - that is, all the physical laws and constants of nature are calibrated just-so - to produce galaxies, stars, atomic matter, and, ultimately, life.
For the weak anthropic principle to make sense as an explanation of fine-tuning, we must accept the notion that there exist many universes, most of them untuned and lifeless, but in which the fine-tuning issue would never be raised. Yet - and here's the point - some tiny fraction of these universes; that is, those in which the laws and physical constants are just right, would be life-bearing. We could then conclude, with compelling obviousness, that we must live in one of the few that are just right for us. So, if someone marvels, somewhat parochially, that had the fundamental constants of nature been just a few percentage points different, it would have resulted in chaos and black holes instead of structure and life, then we can inform them with confidence that there are indeed plenty of universes just like that, but it isn’t our problem.
Now, some might ask if there is really any economy of belief in accepting this multitude of universes in preference to, say, the idea of a single cosmic designer who went out of his way to do all that fine-tuning? Perhaps it's just my frugal, north-of-England upbringing, but, as a general principle, I've always considered vast numbers of universes to be a rather extravagant solution to any problem. Now to be fair, one can go some way toward putting these universes on a reasonably sound physical footing. There is the so-called Everett 'many-worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics that has the universe splitting continually as quantum mechanical wave functions collapse - where each outcome to a quantum uncertainty represents a branch in the split. On the other hand, all these branching universes are governed by the same physical laws, and so this model is of limited help with the fine-tuning question. Then again, the Everett model doesn't have the monopoly on multi-universe concepts. There's always the idea that there are multiple parallel universes with different sets of physical laws - perhaps even some without much in the way of laws at all, where a physicist would be hard-pressed to get one lousy paper out of the whole thing. Or, if arguing for the notion of 'parallel universes' makes you feel a little nerdish and Trekkie-esque, what about the idea of an ongoing cycle of big-bangs and big-crunches giving rise to serial universes? This, of course, raises the issue of geese, as I will explain.
Say I inform you of the existence of an invisible and generally undetectable goose in the middle of my desk. What’s the risk of having you falsify my assertion? I think I'm pretty safe on the science front because science is quite ill-equipped to take on this sort of pronouncement. After all, science's starting point generally involves detection and measurement, and my goose is quite immune to that type of thing. Perhaps a philosopher - one of those who deals in metaphysics - could challenge my proposition. Yet again, he or she, by profession, might be considered less credible than the goose.
Indeed, science's preoccupation with observation renders it quite impotent when it comes to denying or confirming the existence of the undetectable. So, returning to the universes: if they are in principle unobservable - which they are generally considered to be (with the possible exception of the Everett model, which wasn't of much use, anyway) - then this many-universe outlook could not really be considered a scientific one. Yet, it seems in some intuitive way to have a meta-scientific flavor to it, doesn’t it? I must confess that I'm not entirely sure why I think this. Perhaps it's that science has come to gain some foothold on the physical universe, and on geese too, for that matter. So, to posit the existence of the undetectable goose or the unobservable universes has a sciencey feel to it. This would be in contrast to, say, positing the existence of God, who could by no means be considered some variant on a scientifically concrete idea. This is the best rationale I can muster for my meta-science claim.
I admit that any one of these beliefs - in undetectable universes, invisible geese, or God - would require somewhat of a leap of faith. I suppose we must each take our own path - and the option to which I have come to attach my own faith is God. If I were pressed for some justification (notwithstanding the whole issue of explanatory economics, which might simply be a case of cheapness on my part), I think I might play the logical positivism card to argue that at least the God in which I believe is, in a way I won’t expound here, detectable.
Now, it would crush me to think that my beliefs could be construed as an affront to the faith of others. I would not wish to offend those whose faith attaches to the notion of multiple universes, nor to offend the goose cultists for that matter. I will not be accused of attacking the religions of others. I am, after all, fully aware that my belief is simply one of faith, and that the physics of the natural world provides no argument for this preference.
Be kind to people. Don't steal from them. Be honest. The world was created six thousand years ago. As I think about it more, that last thing about the world being six thousand years old could be another problem. I suspect it's probably true — raising the tougher and more pertinent question of this: true in which universe?
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