Jottings on Reality, the Paranormal and Chaoskampf. Part I

Below are my latest thoughts on the nature of reality. They are jottings of ideas that have been hanging around for some time, although I have on occasion expressed these views in some of my blog entries and also in the prologue of my book "Gravity and Quantum Non-Linearity" (See here, here and here for example).  Much of it is a repeat of what I've written elsewhere, but to go over it again is one way of trying to take the ideas forward and hopefully clarify them.

My website/blog is a kind "Donald Crowhurst" log of my thinking on the meaning of life. It is a "pilgrim's" journal of philosophically inclined thoughts written down as life slips past; life is short and therefore one needs to capture one's thoughts in text, otherwise they are forgotten and disappear into oblivion. As Donald Crowhurst neared his end on his lonely journey he did his best to solve the riddle of the meaning of it all; it was his personal Riddle of the Sphinx and like H.G. Wells' Time Traveller he found himself in dire straits. His desperation, his loneliness, a very badly bruised ego and the pressure to make some sense of an apparently nonsensical situation unhinged Crowhurst and he became incoherent. Nevertheless,  I'm happy to honour this flawed hero; he was only doing what countless humans have tried to do; probe the meaning of life and in Crowhurst's case use it as a means to dignify his predicament at the same time. Like Crowhurst I seek adventure in my own (small) way and I also know the pressing need to make sense of life as it flies by but fortunately not under quite so desperate and solitary circumstances!

If am I given the time perhaps one day I will organise my rather raw and haphazard journal notes into a systematic book form. But just at the moment there are still too many avenues to explore and when I abandon this latest exploration I'll be moving on. I see my endeavours as a kind of wrestling with reality in order to squeeze out its secrets. But perhaps as a Christian I should really characterise it as a wrestling with God himself (cf. Genesis 32:22-32); for through created reality God makes himself known. Unfortunately in comparison with contemporary Christian culture's blends of scriptural fundamentalism, fideism, ecstatic experiences, divine encounters, undamings of the emotions, hi-passion scenes, spiritual existential crises, spiritual pizzazz and holy star-dust my relatively dry endeavours are unlikely to register on the spiritual radar. But then that may be a good thing; I become self-conscious and distracted if I think I'm being noticed!

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It is very tempting to take it for granted that the essence of reality is embodied in that heavy inertial stuff we perceive around us and call "matter"; sometimes it comes in lumpen homogeneous forms but at other times it appears in exquisitely organised forms such as we see in living organisms. But in both cases the underlying paradigm which dictates an interpretation of what we perceive is often the same: Viz: that is, it is taken to be self-evident that the third person perspective on matter  is the absolute and objective grounds for anchoring "truth". In the material paradigm matter has an unambiguous existence; it can't have a partial existence; it's either there or it's not there. This is materialist dualism which in its strong form dichotomises mind and matter but is apt to regard mind and its concomitant of conscious cognition as at best a ghostly epi-phenomenon and at worst a complete illusion.

I have always had difficulty with the thesis that a posited "material reality" is somehow the ultimate unambiguous anchor point for reality and the standard by which reality is defined: For a start, quantum theory suggests that matter  can exist in ambiguous states (more about that another time). Moreover, knowledge of so-called material reality can only ever come via our experience and our cognisance of it. As is so often pointed out in philosophical circles we really only see the world through our perceptions and therefore don't have any direct contact with some unambiguous well anchored "material-thing-in-itself"; as far as we are concerned the latter can only ever be evidenced by our experiences and then constructed by our cognition based on those evidences, almost as a kind of explanatory myth. Hence, I've always been inclined toward idealism as a philosophy; that is, the touchstone of reality is  not "matter", whatever that is supposed mean, but the shades of grey we call mental life. On this view reality derives from conscious cognition, but because conscious cognition comes in degrees of rationality and completeness this means that deciding what is real is itself not a binary on/off decision, but as with mind it comes in degrees of reality.

To me the notion of a fixed "material" world absent of the existence of sensing conscious thinking, "myth" constructing agents, is simply not an intelligible idea. The concept of a "concrete material reality unambiguously out there" is, I suggest, a kind of illusion worked on us because of the integrity and rationality of our experience and perceptions. In the normal rational mode of consciousness incoming data is so well organised, coordinated and potentially complete, not just for a single cognating agent but also across a whole society of agents, that it facilitates the mental construction of coherent objects. The mutually harmonious responses of these agents is evidence of a shared rational reality of high observational integrity (in most cases). Registration of the senses of sight, sound and touch and also the observational registration between agents means that conscious cognition, especially a society of communicating cognating agents, can construct the consistent "myth" of a single coherent world of great harmony and meaning. Reality is its rationality, coherence and observational integrity. Without this integrating integrity reality is compromised. For me, then, the existence of a benevolent God who underwrites this rational integrity is all important.

The foregoing is what I call mathematical materialism. The physical model of fundamental particles with its fields of signals is a way of describing this world of harmonious registration between observers. For me the replete rationality of physics looks like an organising principle and medium for a world of communicating observers. In one sense we do have direct contact with the "thing-in-itself" because that thing-in-itself is not made of particles, but of organised "cognita"; the stuff of mind; a coherent world of organised experience and a thinking rational mind to apprehend it. "Particles" are a computational device for describing this world of communicating minds. 

In Turing's test for the existence of true human-level "machine intelligence" a qualifying machine must hold its illusion of human intelligence under close natural language interrogation. However, this test effectively implicitly posits the existence of an interrogating intelligence of sufficient level of capability to pass a qualifying judgement. It is clear that given we are dealing here with the complex multidimensional phenomenon of intelligence the Turing test, like psychological tests in general, is not  going to  return simple "yes or no" answers but rather it is likely to confer a pass mark or score. It is notable, however, that the Turing test concept of mind has unleashed controversy over whether the third person perspective of a very convincing simulated facade is sufficient condition for identifying the presence of mind or whether intelligence has a deeper thing-in-itself in the form of the first person perspective of conscious cognition. Dualism assumes a dichotomy between "material-things-in-themselves" and "sentient-things-in-themselves" where to today there is a tendency to believe ultimate reality resides in "material-things-in-themselves" rather than "sentient-things-in-themselves". In contrast my choice is sentience as the ultimate thing-in-itself and moreover the thing-in-itself which underwrites the reality of matter.

Using the Turing test as a kind of template I propose that the qualification for material reality is that it must hold up under the close scrutiny of an investigating rational sentient agent and provide a sufficient suite of evidence faultless enough in registration, harmony, and coherence between observers for it to qualify as real. As in the Turing test, the test for material reality has an implicit assumption of the preexistence of a sentient cognating interrogator without which the test becomes meaningless. This concept of reality posits an up and running complex sentience as an a priori feature; for an agent capable of carrying out a reality test, that agent must itself be sufficiently rational, complex  and organised. In fact as it turns out human sentience is governed by the very same rational world of particulate order that is found in the world around us. Minds know what it feels like to be a mind and therefore because minds explain themselves in terms of a material paradigm minds are, in a sense, matter knowing what it feels like to be matter.

Therefore in probing that world of matter we are, in effect, probing the nature of our very selves: As I have said before, like a computer language compiler that is written in the self-same language it compiles, human beings can describe themselves in terms of their own physical concepts. But unlike the Turing test which unleashes controversies over whether mind is merely a facade or has a sentient-thing-in-itself behind the facade, there is for me no controversy of whether the material facade hides a particulate-thing-itself behind it; it simply doesn't: Rational reality is merely a highly organised facade: unless it be the mind of God himself who creates. organises and sustains this facade and underwrites its reality and rationality.

There are some things that do fail the "Turing" test for full reality. For example, our dreams, although sometimes feeling very real, do not return such a reality; the scenes and actors in dreams are not amenable to any closer scrutiny than the dream offers. In fact dreams have more the character of the scenes and actors in works of fiction such as films or computer simulations: those scenes and actors are bit parts with little or no background that can be investigated by oneself let alone share with other persons. Unlike much of the "material reality" we are familiar with, dreams do not allow their subject matter to get into the cross hairs of different perspectives and angles. In contrast in mathematical materialism the entities are not bit-parts; they have a background story and/or personalities worked out in full.

In the next part(s) I will be thinking about the paranormal phenomena when rationality partly breaks down and conscious cognition enters the "Oz" state. I will also be thinking about the reality of those distant galaxies and distant times and more on the role of God as underwriter of reality. 

Christian Fundamentalists Embrace Flat Earth.

I'm ashamed to say that recently resurgent
beliefs in  flat earthism, like young earthism, 
has strong christian fundamentalist leanings

An interesting web-article on the Flat Earth movement can be read here. It was written by Lee McIntyre a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University. To further his research into the contemporary burgeoning of anti-science sub-cultures he attended a flat earth conference and his web-article tells of his experiences. 

I have touched on flat earth theory before but as with young earthism (unless like McIntyre you are a researcher in the field) I regard it as time wasted spending too much effort refuting the work of people who have a knack of tying themselves up in intellectual knots when there are other things I should be pursuing.  There is no way of stopping this lunacy because, as the saying goes, one can make a refutation idiot proof but these kinds of movement have a way of finding even better idiots from a bottomless pit of idiocy. 

As I have pointed out before flat earth theory necessarily includes huge dollops of conspiracy theorism in order to work as a "theoretical framework"; by necessity conspiracy theorism is part and parcel with the flat earthist mindset. Conspiracy theorism is itself a narrative which attempts to make sense of life, but less in an intellectual way than in the sense of satisfying certain emotional, ego and group needs, catalysed in part by a failure to identify with society's establishment. Generalised conspiracy theorism is itself a theoretical non-starter  (See here, here, here), but no doubt the connectivity of the internet has helped promote the contemporary sub-culture of conspiracy theorism. Moreover, I have a growing conviction that these anti-science sub-cultures are bound up with the rise of anti-establishment popularism and the ascendancy of people like Donald Trump, a man who has (probably) cynically courted the professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (who also makes claims to being a Christian) in his attempts to secure the large American anti-establishment popularist vote; and this includes many Christian fundamentalists.  

What I would like to highlight here is a quote from McIntyre's article providing evidence that Christian fundamentalism is implicated as one of the factors driving the rise of flat earthism. Viz (My emphases): 

For the first day, I kept my mouth shut and just listened. I wore the conference badge and took notes. The second day, I came out hard as a philosopher of science. After numerous conversations, I came away with the conclusion that Flat Earth is a curious mixture of fundamentalist Christianity and conspiracy theory, where outsiders are distrusted and belief in Flat Earth is (for some) tantamount to religious faith. This is not to say that most Christians believe in Flat Earth, but almost all of the Flat Earthers I met (with a few notable exceptions) were Christians. While they claimed not to rely on faith as proof of their beliefs—and were anxious to present their own "scientific evidence"—most did seek empirical findings that would make all of their beliefs (both spiritual and worldly) consistent with one another. And once they started looking, the evidence was all around them.

Further evidence of the rise of flat earthism among fundamentalists can be found from the testimony of the young earthist fundamentalist organisation Answers in Genesis who are aghast at the idea of the flat earth movement identifying itself with a Biblical literalist fundamentalism.  For example in a blog post dated 2nd June this year Ken Ham said: 

In the past, one question I rarely ever received was, “What about the flat earth?” But now I hear it all the time! And that holds true for our other AiG speakers, particularly our astronomer, Dr. Danny Faulkner.

Clearly then something is afoot among Christian fundamentalists and it is alarming AiG. Here is the original link to Ham's post although the post has recently been taken offline for some unknown reason. If you go to the AiG web site and type in "flat earth" in the search field it returns quite a few articles arguing against flat earth ideas; one of the few times I can get behind AiG! Some of the articles, I think, are less about the flat earth movement per se than worrying the subject of whether or not the Bible writers had a flat earth world view; after all if some of them did then this would raise questions over AiG's literalist paradigm of scripture. 

Also of interest is a flat earth discussion on the Answers in Genesis Facebook page*.  This discussion succeeds in bringing out the flat earth fundamentalists in opposition to the original young earthists who oppose flat earth. The thing to note is how acrimonious the discussion gets when there are fundamentalists on both sides of the debate. This is really no surprise: After all both sides believe their opinions to have the divine authority of a very angry God of eternal damnation so what do you expect? There is, however, poetic justice in the fact that young earthists are being hoist by their own petard as a crass Biblical literalist paradigm is being turned on them by Christian flat earthists. They are very effectively consuming one another's time by arguing among themselves!**.

In many ways flat earthism is a natural outcome of young earthist culture (and in fact fundamentalism in general); the latter believe that there is kind of world-wide conspiracy of scientists, all of whom are spreading ideas of "millions of years and evolution". That a myriad independent scientists across the world manage to largely march in lock step on this question is put down to the fundamentalist notion that because they are all in rebellion to God they are all fixated on the concept of an old earth and shoe horn the data into this preconception. But this requires such a feat of organised behaviour among many independent scientists that the fundamentalist has to invoke the concept of world-wide Satanic influences being at work behind the scenes prompting scientists to work from a false starting point. They are, of course, also many Christians in the academic establishment who accept mainstream science. But according to Ken Ham, AiG's supremo, Christians who contradict his views are wilfully and knowingly compromising their faith; presumably as all part of the world-wide Satanically inspired conspiracy! It is this kind of distrust of outsiders (an observation also made by McIntyre at the flat earth conference - see above) that is an important precursor of conspiracy theorism. 


FOOTNOTES
* In case this  discussion should go offline I think I have managed to capture most of it and copied it here

** It is worth comparing the AiG discussion with the following argument I published between two Christian fundamentalists one of whom is a geocentrist.

https://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2010/11/fundamentalist-argument-clinic-part-1.html
https://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundamentalist-argument-clinic-part-2.html
https://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2011/02/fundamentalist-argument-clinic-part-3.html
https://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2011/03/fundamentalist-argument-clinic-part-4.html

In 2011 when I published that discussion I would never have guessed that Christian fundamentalism was set to get a lot worse and start turning to flat earthism! - it goes to show how quickly it has come to the fore; within less than a decade in fact. By comparison it would be worth researching how long it took for young earthism to gain acceptance among 1960s fundamentalists without the aid of the internet.

ADDENDUM  24/06/2019

There's an interesting post here by PZ Myers where he once again indulges his passion for lampooning fundamentalist lunacy. In this case his target is a very recent (June 22) article on the AiG web site by Ken Ham's tame astronomer Danny Faulkner. The article is a critique of flat earthism and as Myers remarks it is very ironic in that much of the article could be about AiG itself if one simply replaces "flat earth" by "young earth". The article can be found here:

https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/earth/reflections-flat-earth-movement/

Before I read the article I thought my many years of observing fundamentalism had pretty much hardened me to its irony and that therefore my own irony meter would survive the reading intact. However, when I read the following my meter did become dangerously overloaded! Viz:

This extreme suspicion of anyone with any amount of advanced education is common in certain brands of Christian fundamentalism. This type of fundamentalism is committed to a very wooden, hyper-literal approach to the Bible. The fear is that if one admits that any part of the Bible is not literal, then one is free to interpret any and all the Bible in a nonliteral sense. But this fear is unwarranted, for some parts of the Bible clearly are not literal.

Additionally, many flat-earth pastors are very domineering and dictatorial. This rubs many people the wrong way, particularly when other, much smaller, differences arise. 

Flat-earthers insist that their understanding of the Bible is the only true meaning of Scripture, dismissing all others as the mere teachings of men at best, and at worst, the work of the devil. This is the major defining characteristic of a cult.

Pastors who are very domineering and dictatorial?  Insistence that  their understanding of the Bible is the only true meaning of Scripture, dismissing all others as the mere teachings of men at best, and at worst, the work of the devil ? Suspicion of outsiders, particularly of academia? That non-literal interpretations are the thin end of the satanic wedge? 

I wonder where have I seen this kind of thing before? Perhaps here,  here,  here, here, here,  here and here?

Signalled Diffusion Book III: Drift-Diffusion

Book III of my "Signalled Diffusion" project can be downloaded here. Books I and II can be downloaded from here and here respectively. Below I reproduce the summing  up section that appears at the end of Book III

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Summing up and Interpretations

Our final equation, equation 108.0 was:

110.0

…where

111.0

What does this equation mean? Going through the terms on the right hand side we have:

1. The first term is the diffusion term for randomly walking agents.
2. The second term, the drift term, results of the random walk having a systematic bias in the same direction as the diffusion.

3. Because a positive sign in front of the third term only makes sense if the walk agents are multiplying then we interpret the quantity Y  not as probability but as a count of stepping agents at a point in time and space. If the sign in front of the third term is negative then it is possible for Y to be a decaying probability.

The coefficients on the right hand side of 110.0 depend on k. This is a consequence of the constraint which sets the drift current equal to the diffusion current. The drift has the effect of moving the Y envelope to the left or right depending on the direction of the slope; in fact in 110.0 the drift is always in the opposite direction to the slope. Therefore changes in the slope cause differential drifting resulting in the distortion and dispersion of a localised envelope in Y. The consequence is that a spatially limited envelope in Y will be pulled apart by differential drifting. Hence the idea of a moving frame defined by the systematic drift of a spatially localised envelope in Y is not found in equation 110.0. 

The highly disruptive dispersion in real number drift-diffusion is ameliorated when we move over to complex number diffusion.  In complex number diffusion the analogue of k is the wave number of a corkscrew wave and the vector wave number can be uni-directional and still allow a localised envelope in Y . Moreover the wave envelope can have a packet profile that moves with an identifiable velocity. Even so, as we know, a measure of dispersion also occurs in wave theory.

It is hoped that a study of real number drift-diffusion will assist in the understanding of complex number drift-diffusion. As we saw in chapter 6 equation 110.0 implies a kind of relativity of time and space in that standards of measurement change with drift value. However, in the case of real number diffusion this is not likely to lead to any kind of elegant frame invariance as it does with complex number diffusion, but it nevertheless shows how the complementary nature of drift and diffusion entail a relativity of time and space measurements; in the case of complex number diffusion this relativity has the effect of masking the existence of an absolute frame. The other feature that we begin to see in real number drift-diffusion (and also true of complex number diffusion) is how it disguises the asymmetries in the construction of space and time by compressing the node structure as slopes increase.