Sunday, November 20, 2016

Michio Kaku argues for Intelligent Design**


Michio: "I recently had a thought that was this big!!"
You can say that again! See below:

Physicist and popular science commentator Michio Kaku's thoughts about  the cosmos probably come in too thick and fast for most us. As a string theorist he's no doubt on the top shelve as far as cleverness is concerned...... he's just too bright; doesn't it make you spit! But to be fair we've all got our faults and no doubt Michio was born with this annoying trait. He does have some redeeming points, however: He's very ambitious in his vision, wanting to embrace the whole of reality with his intellect and yet he gives every impression of being tentative, creative, tolerant, courageous and magnanimous; I like him; the honourable traditions of the Japanese Samurai knights must be part of his background. 

The reason for this blog post is this article which appeared on "Intellectual TakeOut". It quotes Kaku as recently saying: 

“I have concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence,” Kaku said, as quoted by the Geophilosophical Association of Anthropological and Cultural Studies. “To me it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance.”.

“The final solution resolution could be that God is a mathematician,” says Kaku. “The mind of God, we believe, is cosmic music. The music of strings resonating through 11-dimensional hyperspace.”  

I know 2% of next-to-nowt about string theory so I can't comment on the technicalities here. But I can say that it's a  privilege to have Michio as a fellow pilgrim! As I said at the end of this so-called "book" of mine:

The general lesson of this book is that maximally disordered distributions entail distributions of properties and states that are as evenly and uniformly spread as the constraints allow. That is, maximum disorder doesn’t favour or target any particular state/property consistent with the constraints. So, in a scenario of maximum disorder everything gets as equal treatment as possible and no skew is shown toward particular states/properties. In a random cosmos nothing appears to be singled out for a frequency above random expectation and this is likely to register in the human mind as evidence of indifference and impersonality;  a cosmos without anthropic meaning and purpose, one where intelligence, particularly personal intelligence, is not a final and  sovereign arbiter. A sovereign intelligence, it is felt, would show a much more anthropically recognizable bias; the antithesis of this sends chills down the back of theists, many of whom are accustomed to the concept of God as a highly personal intelligence and who is likely to show a preference for configurations of anthropic significance.

Conversely, those who have put their intellectual stakes in the idea that the cosmos points to no controlling intelligence, let alone personal intelligence, are likely to find it easier to accept that ultimately randomness is sovereign; although the question of “why is there something rather than nothing?” is still outstanding here. But, the fact remains; our slice of the cosmos is far from random. We would not expect an anthropic selection effect to persist for any length of time in a truly random cosmos. Moreover, our cosmos has singled out small space short time algorithms as a means of describing much of its operation. There is something peculiar about our cosmos, something very peculiar. 

Relevant Link:
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/time-travel.html

Footnote:
** Caution: I am, of course, not talking about the IDists of Uncommon Descent and other Christians who swing toward an embattled fundamentalism. Kaku is more likely to fit into the John Polkinghorne mold. 

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