Deep Internal Contradiction

Dream on:  No red pills for us in our cosmos I'm afraid! We just have to try and work it out for ourselves!

I was interested to see a quote from Paul Davies in a post on the ID web site Uncommon Descent. The post was entitled Physicist Paul Davies’ killer argument against the multiverse (Date August 14^th)

“If you take seriously the theory of all possible universes, including all possible variations,” Davies said, “at least some of them must have intelligent civilizations with enough computing power to simulate entire fake worlds. Simulated universes are much cheaper to make than the real thing, and so the number of fake universes would proliferate and vastly outnumber the real ones. And assuming we’re just typical observers, then we’re overwhelmingly likely to find ourselves in a fake universe, not a real one.”

So far it’s the normal argument.

Then Davies makes his move. He claims that because the theoretical existence of multiple universes is based on the laws of physics in our universe, if this universe is simulated, then its laws of physics are also simulated, which would mean that this universe’s physics is a fake. Therefore, Davies reasoned, “We cannot use the argument that the physics in our universe leads to multiple universes, because it also leads to a fake universe with fake physics.” That undermines the whole argument that fundamental physics generates multiple universes, because the reasoning collapses in circularity.

Davies concluded, “While multiple universes seem almost inevitable given our understanding of the Big Bang, using them to explain all existence is a dangerous, slippery slope, leading to apparently absurd conclusions.”

This line of argument has been noted before. The rest of this post is an extract I have taken from a blog post I wrote in February 2007. (See here). The context is the question of how the simulation argument impacts the possibility of time travel:

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PAUL DAVIES: “The better the simulation gets the harder it would to be able to tell whether or not you were in a simulation or in the real thing, whether you live in a fake universe or a real universe and indeed the distinction between what is real and what is fake would simply evaporate away…..Our investigation of the nature of time has lead inevitably to question the nature of reality and it would be a true irony if the culmination of this great scientific story was to undermine the very existence of the whole enterprise and indeed the existence of the rational universe.”

Let me broach some of the cluster of philosophical conundrums raised by this embarrassing debacle that physics now faces.

Why should our concept of a simulated reality be applicable to the deep future? Doesn’t it rather presume that the hypothetical super beings have any need for computers? The existence of computers is partly motivated by our own mental limitations – would a super intelligence have such limitations? Or perhaps these simulating computers ARE the super intelligences of the future. But then why would they want to think of us primitives from the past? Another problem: Doesn’t chaos and the absolute randomness of Quantum Mechanics render anything other than a general knowledge of the past impossible? In that case this means that any simulated beings would in fact be arbitrary creations, just one evolutionary scenario, a mere possible history, but not necessarily the actual history. And overlying the whole of this simulation argument is the ever-unsettling question of consciousness: Namely, does consciousness consist entirely in the formal relationships between the informational tokens in a machine?

But even if we assume that the right formal mental structures are sufficient condition for conscious sentience, the problems just get deeper. If physics is a science whose remit is to describe the underlying patterns that successfully embed our observations of the universe into an integrated mathematical structure, then physics is unable to deliver on anything about the “deeper” nature of the matrix on which those experiences and mathematical relations are realized. Thus, whatever the nature of this matrix, our experiences and the associated mathematical theories that integrate them ARE physics. If we surmise that our experiences and theories are a product of a simulation, physics cannot reach beyond itself and reveal anything about its simulating context. The ostensible aspects of the surmised simulation (that is, what the simulations delivers to our perceptions) IS our reality: As Paul Davies observed, “… indeed the distinction between what is real and what is fake would simply evaporate away”. Moreover, if physics is merely the experiences and underlying mathematical patterns delivered to us by a simulation how can we then reliably extrapolate using that “fake” physics to draw any conclusions about the hypothetical “real physics” of the computational matrix on which we and our ‘fake’ physics are being realized? In fact is it even meaningful to talk about this completely unknown simulating world? As far as we are concerned the nature of that world could be beyond comprehension and the whole caboodle of our ‘fake’ physical law, with its ‘fake’ evolutionary history and what have you, may simply not apply to the outer context that hosts our ‘fake’ world. That outer realm may as well be the realm of the gods. Did I just say “gods”? Could I have meant … ssshh … God?

The root of the problem here is, I believe, a deep potential contradiction in contemporary thinking that has at last surfaced. If the impersonal elementa of physics (spaces, particles, strings, laws and what have you) are conceived to be the ultimate/primary reality, then this philosophy, (a philosophy I refer to as elemental materialism) conceals a contradiction. For it imposes primary and ultimate reality on physical elementa and these stripped down entities carry no logical guarantee as to the correctness and completeness of human perceptions. Consequently there is no reason, on this view, why physical scenarios should not exist where human perceptions as to the real state of affairs are wholly misleading, thus calling into question our access to real physics. Hence, a contradictory self-referential loop develops as follows: The philosophy of elemental materialism interprets physics to mean that material elementa are primary, but this in turn has lead us to the conclusion that our conception of physics could well be misleading. But if that is true how can we be so sure that our conception of physics, which has lead us to this very conclusion, is itself correct?

There is one way of breaking this unstable conceptual feedback cycle. In my youthful idealistic days I was very attracted to positivism. It seemed to me a pure and unadulterated form of thinking because it doesn’t allow one to go beyond one’s observations and any associated integrating mathematical structures; it was a pristine philosophy uncontaminated by the exotic and arbitrary elaborations of metaphysics. For example, a simulated reality conveying a wholly misleading picture of reality cannot be constructed because in positivism reality is the sum of our observations and the mental interpretive structures in which we embed them - there is nothing beyond these other than speculative metaphysics. However, strict positivism is counterintuitive in the encounter with other minds, history, and even one’s own historical experiences. In any case those “interpretative structures”, as do the principles of positivism, look themselves rather metaphysical. Hence, I reluctantly abandoned positivism in its raw form. Moreover the positivism of Hume subtly subverts itself as a consequence of the centrality of the sentient observer in its scheme; if there is one observer, (namely one’s self) then clearly there may be other unobserved observers and perhaps even that ultimate observer, God Himself. Whatever the deficiencies of positivism I was nevertheless left with a feeling that somehow sentient agents of observation and their ability to interpret those observations have a primary cosmic role; for without them I just couldn’t make sense of the elementa of physics as these are abstractions and as such can only be hosted in the minds of the sentient beings that use them to make sense of experience. This in turn lead me into a kind of idealism where the elementa of science are seen as meaningless if isolated from a-priori thinking cognitive agents in whose minds they are constructed. In consequence, a complex mind of some all embracing kind is the a-priori feature that must be assumed to give elementa a full-blown cosmic existence. Reality demands the primacy of an up and running complex sentience in order to make sense of and underwrite the existence of its most simple parts; particles, spaces, fields etc – these are the small fish that swim in the rarefied ocean of mind. This philosophy, for me, ultimately leads into a self-affirming theism rather than a self-contradictory elemental materialism.

The popular mind is beginning to perceive that physics has lost its way: University physics departments are closing in step with the public’s perception of physics as the playground for brainy offbeat eccentrics. My own feeling is that physics has little chance of finding its way whilst it is cut adrift from theism, and science in general has become a victim of nihilism. The negative attitude toward science, which underlies this nihilism, is not really new. As H. G. Wells once wrote:

"Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room - in moments of devotion, a temple - and that this light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands lit and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated - darkness still."

Wells tragically lost his faith and with it his hope and expectation: He no longer believed the Universe to be a Temple on the grandest of scales, but rather a place like Hell, a Morlockian underworld with walls of impenetrable blackness. In that blackness Lovecraftian monsters may lurk. Nightmares and waking life became inextricably mixed. And in this cognitive debacle science could not be trusted to reveal secrets or to be on our side. The seeds of postmodern pessimism go a long way back.

But we now have the final irony. The concluding words of the Horizon narrator were:

"Now we’re told we may not even be real. Instead we may merely be part of a computer program, our free will as Newton suggested is probably an illusion. And just to rub it in, we are being controlled by a super intelligent superior being, who is after all the master of time."

The notions that we are being simulated in the mind of some super intelligence, that a naïve concept of free will is illusory, that we can know nothing of this simulating sentience unless that super intelligence should deign to break in and reveal itself are all somehow very familiar old themes:

“….indeed He is not far from each of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being…” (Acts 17:27-28)

“My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth., Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be” (Ps 139:15&16)

“…no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.” (Mat 11:27)

Have those harmless but brainy eccentric scientists brought us back to God? If they have, then in a weird religious sort of way they have sacrificed the absolute status of physics in the process.

Relevant Link:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/goldilocks-enigma.html