Gravity and Thermodynamics

My latest "book" (if such it is) can be accessed here. Below I list the chapter headings

Introduction                                                                     

1.      Wave function collapse and non-locality                                                           

2.      The Macroscopic vs. Microscopic Question                                   

3.      Diffusion field theory of gravity                                                        

4.      Developing an equation for the gravitational constant                            

5.      Interpretation of the equation for the gravitational constant                  

6.      The macroscopic boundary question; initial thoughts                              

7.      The F constant                                                                       

8.      Maintaining the gravitational field energy with quantum collapse                

9.      Equilibrium gravitational field flux.                                               

10   Towards a theory of consciousness

Some words taken from the Introductions:

This book continues to develop my concepts behind gravity and in particular it focusses on the meaning of the gravitational constant G. It also probes the boundary between the macroscopic and microscopic and the question of why we don’t see those ambiguous quantum states at the macroscopic level. I personally think the explanations given for the apparent macroscopic absence of quantum ambiguity supplied by multiverse theories and decoherence theory unlikely (More about that later). This opinion means that I have to tender a criterion for distinguishing between the macroscopic and microscopic; that is, some threshold in terms of material bulk has to be postulated above which quantum ambiguity is not supposed to be observed. To this end I make very tentative steps toward defining this threshold in this book. According to the ideas developed here those so-called “quantum collapses”, that is the discontinuous shifts in the quantum state vector when observations are made on those microscopic quantum systems, are necessary to prevent macroscopic objects linked to those observations correspondingly occupying ambiguous configurational states.

.....And my usual disclaimer:  

Before I go any further I’d better add my usual disclaimer.  This gravity project of mine reminds me of the sort of speculative exercise involved when theories about the colour of dinosaurs are offered. These colours leave little or no evidence in the rocks and so all that can be done in this circumstance, given a dinosaur’s likely life style, is to render the dinosaur in a colour scheme that is at best plausible, but not to be taken too seriously.  That’s how I see me own theory of gravity; I personally I’m not party to either sufficient data or understandings to either confirm or reject my speculations about gravity. At best the picture I’ve painted seems a plausible enough to me and that, I suppose, is the best I can expect. But right or wrong it has nevertheless been an interesting avenue to explore, if only to show that it is probably an avenue with a dead end.....

.....The way I’ve come to terms with the likelihood that my own theoretical renditions of reality are fanciful imaginings is to regard my creation as some other invented reality that, with a nod of respect to the glory of the true reality, makes a feeble attempt to emulate it, but when emulation fails I have to go it alone. I’ll therefore have to be satisfied in producing a reasonable looking & plausible presentation of some unlikely ideas. But you never know it might, perchance, be right for our world. As DNA pioneer Maurice Wilkins said encouragingly when it was clear that Watson and Crick’s first shot at a model of DNA failed badly against the data:

"One might say but why not? It's an exploration to make a model. You make a model and if you make a bit of a fool of yourself in the process why worry? ....you might get lucky!"

…in my case I need to get very lucky. Until then I look on this work as a work of science fiction.                                                                           

Subliminal deism and the de-facto IDists

Kalam thinking: God posited as a boundary condition in time

I've said it before and I say it again: In many ways I have a lot in common with the de facto Intelligent Design theorists: Viz: Without invoking sentience as a primary force it is, I believe, it is difficult to make intelligible sense of a highly organized universe where the observational experience of human consciousness is so central to the meaning of the reality of the cosmos. The irreducibility & hiddenness of the human first person perspective is the precedence for invoking thoughts of an a priori highly complex sentience underlying the cosmic order. Moreover, accounting for the universe just in terms of simple local interaction between fundamental particles necessarily eventually runs up against a logical hiatus of brute contingency. Therefore I seek aseity & ultimate origins in the complexity of deity and not the localised mindless simplicity of particulate interactions.

But in spite of all that when ever I look at the detail of the de facto IDist's apologetic efforts there is always something I have to take issue with and that issue, if its not to do with their now Trump slanting politics, is their subliminal dualism. This dualism comes out in their habitual use of a "natural forces vs "God" Intelligent Agency" dichotomy. But if it is God who has created and continues to create our world those so called "natural forces"  are far from "natural". In fact the cosmos is most unnaturally miraculous everywhere and everywhen.

This post is about my latest beef with de facto ID thinking.  

***

In a post entitled Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel Tries Banishing The Kalam Constant on the de facto Intelligent Design web site Uncommon Descent, Big Bang theorist Ethan Siegel is criticized for making an attempt to muddy the waters over the question of whether the Big Bang represents an absolute beginning. For as sure as eggs are eggs the de facto IDists are thoroughly committed to the idea that the Big Bang was an absolute beginning. They may well be right about that; in fact as Christian I think it likely they are right. But it is typical of dualist ID, whose "natural forces vs God" dichotomy all but puts created matter on a deistic footing, demands the patching-in of periodic and ad hoc Divine interventions in order to save Christianity. This subliminal deism also leads them to commit to the notion that Big-Bang was the first Big Patch-in.  As we shall see they are on precarious ground because the early nanoseconds of creation fade into epistemic obscurity the further we look back and the ground becomes debatable. Worst of all they commit themselves to the flaky Kalam argument.

***

UNCOMMON DESCENT: Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel Tries Banishing The Kalam Constant. To do that, he posits an “acausal, indeterminate, random Universe”:

 It remains possible that the Universe does, at all levels, obey the intuitive rule of cause-and-effect, although the possibility of a fundamentally acausal, indeterminate, random Universe remains in play (and, arguably, preferred) as well. It is possible that the Universe did have a beginning to its existence, although that has by no means been established beyond any sort of reasonable scientific doubt. And if both of those things are true, then the Universe’s existence would have a cause, and that cause may be (but isn’t necessarily) something we can identify with God. However, possible does not equate to proof. Unless we can firmly establish many things that have yet to be demonstrated, the Kalam cosmological argument will only convince those who already agree with its unproven conclusions.

 Ethan Siegel, “Does modern cosmology prove the existence of God?” at Big Think (November 3, 2021)

MY COMMENT: Given that Siegel is an atheist he's not being unreasonable here and he is giving some leeway to us theists: Yes, from the observational and theoretical data we have it is not yet possible to certainly decide whether the universe had an absolute start, although Siegel does concede above that a fundamental logical discontinuity at the beginning could conceivably be identified with God's action. But he's right, we don't yet have a water-tight proof one way or the other; rather we have, depending on one's worldview, arguments which may or may not compel. He does not posit an acausal, indeterminate, random Universe”. Rather he's being agnostic about the Kalam argument which in my opinion is an argument with cracks in it.  Although I would take issue with Siegel that the use of randomness really "explains" nothing in the deepest sense of the word "explain", I agree with him that randomness does erode the sharpness of the "cause & effect" concept, a concept that only really comes out clearly in classical mechanics. In fact not long after Newton annunciated his laws some enlightenment philosophers interpreted the unbroken chain of Newtonian cause & effect in a self sufficient deistical manner, a manner that has worked against Christianity. This leads very easily into de facto ID's "nature forces vs God" dichotomy with the upshot that IDists are very anxious to show that the otherwise deistical cosmos does from time to time experience divine interventions, thus making good for what they believe to be the cosmos' evolutionary inability to create life by those inferior "natural forces".

One can of course simply relabel randomness as a kind of cause in itself with its effects being seen in disordered patterns, but that is really just a change in semantics.  All in all I would suggest that given his convinced atheism Siegel naturally enough is going to favor the elimination of any awkward origins discontinuity or logical hiatus and would much prefer to establish a cosmic continuity from eternity unto eternity; that is, he sees the cosmos as a self supporting affair not needing the input of God as a sustaining and/or continuously creating agent. There's irony in his appeal to randomness: It's a process where there's a discontinuity every moment, but if you are going to claim that randomness is the forever-cosmic-status-quo then the constant discontinuity randomness becomes the new continuity!

But I'll give Siegel this: He's being fair to theists with his agnosticism about whether cosmic origins entail a logical discontinuity or not. 

UD quotes ID guru Brian Miller who is writing on Evolution, News and Science about Siegel's views:

MILLER: Siegel begins his piece by outlining the Kalam cosmological argument for God that Meyer detailed in The Return of the God Hypothesis:

 a) Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

 b) The Universe began to exist.

 c) Therefore, the Universe has a cause to its existence.

 Siegel then attempts to challenge the first premise by arguing that quantum phenomena appear to occur without causes:

“…there is no cause for the phenomenon of when this atom will decay. It is as though the Universe has some sort of random, acausal nature to it that renders certain phenomena fundamentally indeterminate and unknowable. In fact, there are many other quantum phenomena that display this same type of randomness, including entangled spins, the rest masses of unstable particles, the position of a particle that’s passed through a double slit, and so on.”

MY COMMENT:  Leaving aside decoherence and multiverse notions (ideas which attempt to reinstate localised determinism) it's true that quantum mechanics is certainly not so compellingly causal as Newtonian mechanics.  So, apart from the change in semantics I've already mentioned I would accept that Seigel is right in so far as the concept of "causation" in the context of irreducible randomness is a somewhat strained idea. However, where I do differ with Siegel is that my intuitions cannot accept the absurdity of irreducible randomness, an absurdity which tries to convince us "that's the way things are and that is all there is to it. Get used to it!". If Siegel finds he is able to accept that this meaningless logical hiatus is the end of enquiry then I have say I personally find it senseless and God help Siegel! For me the inquiry must go further rather than being left as the absurd logical hiatus of random contingency. As I always say, atheism teeters on the edge of the nihilist abyss.  

In the sense I advance in my previous post on Kalam, the search for a profound "cause" of  the highly contingent cosmic state of affairs, affairs which otherwise seem absurd & meaningless, must go beyond a resigned acceptance of the brute-fact descriptions of an ultimately incompressible kernel of algorithmic information. But the Kalam argument is naïve: It is based on notions of temporal antecedents & sequences of events: Whatever begins to exist has a cause..... And need that "cause" be God? Perhaps it's simply preceding "natural causes"?

I suspect that the Kalam argument finds intuitive support from those gross Newtonian intuitions about an unbroken temporal sequence of cause & effect. I don't share those intuitions myself, therefore Kalam doesn't work for me; it is far from axiomatic as far as I'm concerned. If there is any worthy intuition behind Kalam it is that the cosmos must make anthropic sense.

MILLER: This claim is highly misleading since it confuses determinism with causality. Quantum mechanics is not deterministic since it describes only the probabilities that certain events could occur such as the paths a photon could take in the double slit experiment. But the laws of quantum mechanics act in our universe as the causal agent for all such events.

Brian Miller, “Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel Again Desperately Attempts to Avoid a Cosmic Beginning” at Evolution News and Science Today (November 8, 2021)

Siegel may be confusing the Kalam Constant with the Shazzam! Constant. What’s really interesting is that he thinks he must answer Meyer’s arguments at all.

MY COMMENT: No, Mr. Miller quantum mechanics isn't a "natural causal agent" (as opposed to an "intelligent agent"?); Rather, it's a sovereign God's ordained constraint on the possible patterns of events that our cosmos can generate. The quantum equations are not best thought of as the cause of the individual random events of quantum collapse, but as a kind of "permissive envelope" of possibility within which the statistics  of randomness applies. 

The need for the use of statistics in QM is simply an admission that humanly speaking, beyond  frequency statistics, the individual events of randomness are epistemically unknowable and we really don't know how particular "random" events fit in with God's active and permissive wills.  In referring to quantum mechanics as a causal agent Miller is really engaged in the trivial activity I've already talked about; namely, recycling the word "causal" to cover the role of quantum mechanics as a statistical constraint. Miller is at liberty to engage in this semantic jiggery-pokery, but Miller really should note that the Kalam argument is set very much in the context of time as a sequence of events with one event being the cause of the next event, an event which is regarded as an effect - this concept of cause comes straight out of intuitions that have been formed in the macroscopic world of Newtonian mechanics. Viewing physics as a constraint with divine purposes behind it rather than an old fashioned Newtonian cause & effect scenario is to my mind a much more appropriate nuance.

Miller's subliminal dualism encourages him to hang onto the Kalam argument at all costs. Yes. I agree it is likely that Big Bang does trace back to an absolute logical hiatus. But Miller is part of the ID subculture which has staked so much on the inefficacy of those so called "natural forces" to generate life and therefore has the need to invoke a patched-in intelligent agency. Underlying this, I propose, is a blend of subliminal deism which commits de facto IDists to seek evidence for the existence of intermittent acts of special creation in order to make the epistemic of their explanatory filter to work. 

Miller goes on to pick up the debate as to whether on not current theory points to an absolute beginning, in particular debates around the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem, a theorem I mention in my previous post on Kalam.  This theorem suggests that an absolute beginning is entailed by Big Bang Theory.  But Siegel mentions a paper by Aquirre and Gratton which raises questions over the BGV theorem. Miller counters as follows:

MILLER: And in his extended research notes under Note 6c, Meyer explains why the Aguirre and Gratton model is completely unrealistic. It requires an unimaginable level of fine-tuning in the infinite past for the universe to have contracted to such a special low-entropy, compact state at the transition from contraction to expansion. If the model were even plausible, the level of required fine-tuning would represent even greater evidence of design than it was intended to avoid by removing the beginning. By appealing to it, Siegel is proverbially jumping from the philosophical frying pan into the fire.

MY COMMENT:  Miller does have a worthy point here when he tells us that as one goes backwards in time entropy must decrease: This decrease can't go on forever.  If as the Boltzmann equation asserts entropy is a monotonically increasing function of the number of microstates consistent with a macrostate then there comes a point where the number of possible microstates is so small that the large-number assumptions of statistical mechanics will break down. I see this as yet another example of the potentially pathological epistemic of hopefully extrapolating physical laws (otherwise only tested in normal circumstances) into the unknown to the point of breakdown. 

And another example of extrapolation pathology: As I remarked on my previous post on Big Bang: The other baffling [extrapolation] issue is this: As we follow the shrinking exponential of inflation back in time there comes a point where the scales of gravity and quantum theory collide: What happens then?  Gravitational and quantum theory have yet to be united, hence extrapolation beyond the hot big bang period is an extrapolation into the dark unknown. Therefore, apart from speculation on all sides, I guess that is how the situation will remain for some time to come.

In my previous post on the Kalam argument I commented what I believe to be the general import behind the likes of the BGV theorem:

The general mathematical principle being invoked here can be found in algorithmics. The computations inherent in some functions cannot be meaningfully wound back in time indefinitely. There comes a point when the computations prior to a certain time in the past are undefined. So yes, it may well be that the physical computations that run our cosmos have a definite start time. However, it is one thing to hypothesize physical functions that can’t be run back in time indefinitely and quite another to make one’s theology depend on it.

***

Both Siegel and Miller show hints of desperation in desiring to see their respective creation agendas justified, although Siegel can be commended for showing a certain amount of epistemic humility in giving us theists some leeway. Miller however looks to be the more desperate or the two and that, I hazard, is because of de facto ID's philosophical dualism and subliminal deist thinking. For the IDist God must be seen to be overtly "intervening" in what they believe to be the creatively ineffectual "natural" order. Therefore a very contingent logical hiatus at the beginning of things will do nicely thankyou very much; it represents a God starting as he means to go on; namely, as an occasional intelligent "cause & effect" agent when "natural forces" are thought by IDists to be unable to do the job.  Well yes, I can accept that God may well occasionally miraculously dabble with one-off works, but that doesn't mean that the so-called natural order, which I stress once again is also God's work, isn't also capable of the miraculous. What I object to is that for IDists God becomes an ancillary cause to be invoked when "inferior natural forces" are thought not to be up to the job. What are the dualist IDists going say if evolution was proved beyond reasonable doubt? Do they then abandon "The God hypothesis"? 

For IDists "The  God Hypothesis" has become too dependent on an absolute beginning and those occasional one-off interventions; And here's the irony: Deism, which posits the existence of self sustaining "natural forces" is a short step from atheism; all one need do is argue that if the universe has a natural self-sustaining sequence of cause & effect then why is there any need for divine one-off interventions at all if it can be shown that "natural forces" can generate life?  In focusing so exclusively on a jumped up Newtonian time-based cause & effect paradigm IDists have failed to do justice to a cosmos that has a highly contingent logical hiatus everywhere and everywhen.

ADDENDUM  27/11/2021

Business as usual at de facto ID central

In the YouTube video below William Dembski implicitly assumes a natural forces vs intelligent agency dichotomy and perpetuates  the error that evolution, if it were true, doesn't entail the need for an intelligent agent and therefore people like Richard Dawkins can claim to be intellectually fulfilled atheists. As I've maintained before, in terms of the way they think  IDists are not far removed from the thinking of atheists.

William Dembski: Gauging the Success of Intelligent Design - YouTube

And by the way: Dembski concludes that de facto ID has not been successful at least in terms of its take-up.  As long as it continues to perpetuate old errors it doesn't deserve success.

Big Bang Notes II: Ethan Siegel

Picture from Did the Big Bang begin from a singularity?

After the notes I made in my last post on Big Bang Theory I was  fascinated by the following article on "The Big Think" by  Big Bang theorist Ethan Siegel.....

Did the Big Bang begin from a singularity? Not anymore. - Big Think

Below I quote parts of the article and interleave my comments. 

SIEGEL: But extrapolating beyond the limits of your measurable evidence is a dangerous, albeit tempting, game to play. After all, if we can trace the hot Big Bang back some 13.8 billion years, all the way to when the universe was less than 1 second old, what’s the harm in going all the way back just one additional second: to the singularity predicted to exist when the universe was 0 seconds old?

The answer, surprisingly, is that there’s a tremendous amount of harm — if you’re like me in considering “making unfounded, incorrect assumptions about reality” to be harmful. The reason this is problematic is because beginning at a singularity — at arbitrarily high temperatures, arbitrarily high densities, and arbitrarily small volumes — will have consequences for our universe that aren’t necessarily supported by observations.

 For example, if the universe began from a singularity, then it must have sprung into existence with exactly the right balance of “stuff” in it — matter and energy combined — to precisely balance the expansion rate. If there were just a tiny bit more matter, the initially expanding universe would have already recollapsed by now. And if there were a tiny bit less, things would have expanded so quickly that the universe would be much larger than it is today.

And yet, instead, what we’re observing is that the universe’s initial expansion rate and the total amount of matter and energy within it balance as perfectly as we can measure.

 Why?

 If the Big Bang began from a singularity, we have no explanation; we simply have to assert “the universe was born this way,” or, as physicists ignorant of Lady Gaga call it, “initial conditions.”

 Similarly, a universe that reached arbitrarily high temperatures would be expected to possess leftover high-energy relics, like magnetic monopoles, but we don’t observe any. The universe would also be expected to be different temperatures in regions that are causally disconnected from one another — i.e., are in opposite directions in space at our observational limits — and yet the universe is observed to have equal temperatures everywhere to 99.99%+ precision.

 We’re always free to appeal to initial conditions as the explanation for anything, and say, “well, the universe was born this way, and that’s that.” But we’re always far more interested, as scientists, if we can come up with an explanation for the properties we observe.

MY COMMENT: Siegel is warning us against the extrapolating right back to a space-time singularity. That makes sense to me on this basis: I always have doubts when a theory predicts an infinity and I'm inclined to believe that this is a sign of an incomplete theory that is being pushed too far.  But in the above quote Siegel's reason for rejecting an initial singularity is to do with scientific prediction: For unless one is to engage in the ad hoc business of patching in arbitrary initial conditions, a cosmos that starts with an arbitrarily high temperature doesn't perform well on the prediction front. Siegel then goes on to tell us that a good origins theory would predict important cosmic features like the  flatness of space, the absence of magnetic monopoles, and the uniformity of temperature and density across the observable universe.  

As we shall see Siegel doesn't contradict Einstein's great theory of gravitation which predicts the possibility of a space-time singularity. Instead he conveniently side steps the question of whether space time space-time singularities are physical by telling us to stop yourself before you go all the way back to a singularity.

SIEGEL: Inflation accomplishes [(correct) predictions] by postulating a period, prior to the hot Big Bang, where the universe was dominated by a large cosmological constant (or something that behaves similarly): : the same solution found by de Sitter way back in 1917. This phase stretches the universe flat, gives it the same properties everywhere, gets rid of any pre-existing high-energy relics, and prevents us from generating new ones by capping the maximum temperature reached after inflation ends and the hot Big Bang ensues. Furthermore, by assuming there were quantum fluctuations generated and stretched across the universe during inflation, it makes new predictions for what types of imperfections the universe would begin with.

 MY COMMENT: So, inflation theory predicts a) a near enough flat universe, b) the absence of high energy relics (like magnetic monopoles), c) essentially a uniform distribution and d) makes predictions about the magnitude of fluctuations away from perfect uniformity.  Sounds good so far.  Now comes the interesting bit:

SIEGEL: But things get really interesting if we look back at our idea of “the beginning.” Whereas a universe with matter and/or radiation — what we get with the hot Big Bang — can always be extrapolated back to a singularity, an inflationary universe cannot. Due to its exponential nature, even if you run the clock back an infinite amount of time, space will of time, space will only approach infinitesimal sizes and infinite temperatures and densities; it will never reach it. This means, rather than inevitably leading to a singularity, inflation absolutely cannot get you to one by itself. The idea that “the universe began from a singularity, and that’s what the Big Bang was,” needed to be jettisoned the moment we recognized that an inflationary phase preceded the hot, dense, and matter-and-radiation-filled one we inhabit today.

This new picture gives us three important pieces of information about the beginning of the universe that run counter to the traditional story that most of us learned. First, the original notion of the hot Big Bang, where the universe emerged from an infinitely hot, dense, and small singularity — and has been expanding and cooling, full of matter and radiation ever since — is incorrect. The picture is still largely correct, but there’s a cutoff to how far back in time we can extrapolate it.

MY COMMENT: Yes, I get the point: Running a positive exponent exponential backwards means that it never reaches that mathematically mysterious singularity.  And yes we may well need to jettison the singularity postulate. I for one regard it as ontologically suspicious and unlikely to be physical. 

SIEGEL:  Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we can no longer speak with any sort of knowledge or confidence as to how — or even whether — the universe itself began. By the very nature of inflation, it wipes out any information that came before the final few moments: where it ended and gave rise to our hot Big Bang. Inflation could have gone on for an eternity, it could have been preceded by some other nonsingular phase, or it could have been preceded by a phase that did emerge from a singularity. Until the day comes where we discover how to extract more information from the universe than presently seems possible, we have no choice but to face our ignorance. The Big Bang still happened a very long time ago, but it wasn’t the beginning we once supposed it to be.

MY COMMENT: Yes, I can accept Siegel's talk about our ignorance: in fact Siegel himself doesn't comment on two outstanding questions: Viz: What provides the energy for inflation? The nearest he gets to this question is a reference to a the cosmological constant which is another patch-in not greatly different to patching in initial conditions to fix the problems. The other baffling issue is this: As we follow the shrinking exponential of inflation back in time there comes a point where the scales of gravity and quantum theory collide: What happens then?   But quoting Siegel once more we've at least got this to hang onto:

The [Big Bang] picture is still largely correct, but there’s a cutoff to how far back in time we can extrapolate it.

So further extrapolation beyond the hot big bang period is an extrapolation into the dark unknown. Therefore, apart from speculation on all sides, I guess that is how the situation will remain for some time to come. As I said in my last post on Big Bang: People still hanker and yearn after the idea that there was something  before the big bang. But what was it? Was it God or just more  algorithmically compressible bytes and bits?  It might help when the incommensurability of gravitational theory and quantum theory is sorted. 

Big Bang Notes I

Microwave background: Looking back in time to the Big Bang

Recently somebody asked me for my assessment of Big Bang Theory. I'm no ball of knowledge on Big Bang, but I do have a few notions on the subject that I relate here. That the cosmos has its origins in a hot dense continuum seems a very likely scenario given the state of astronomical observation, but this very general idea can be the front for a huge amount of detail: it seems that those details are far less settled.  Anyway, below are my comments on Big Bang that I returned to the inquirer:

***

Inflation was an idea that was generated by the need to explain why opposite ends of the universe show the same temperature and density given that without inflation they wouldn't have been in thermal contact at the beginning. Inflation also explained the observation that the universe looks to be flat to a very good approximation. 

But Inflation theory is far from confirmed: The source of the energy needed to generate inflation is unknown, although there is some speculative talk about it being "dark energy". There is also the problem of unifying gravity and quantum mechanics which inflationary theory doesn't pretend to solve....as the inflation is wound back one reaches the so called "quantum gravity" limit where space-time curvature is so great that one must take into account the uncertainty principle - what happens here given that gravity hasn't yet been successfully quantized is anybody's guess.

What we are fairly sure about is that to all intents and purposes we can only wind the clock back 13 odd billion years to the very hot & dense big bang before we hit the "unknown physics barrier".

We can of course imagine the graticules of time measurement extending before that, but since time is actually measured using the physical ticks provided by material standards (such as vibrations) then given that as we go back in time gravity modifies these ticks by slowing them to near zero it follows that time just about stops at t=0 simply because there is no physical standard which remains ticking to measure it.

We are very far from understanding the big bang in terms of absolute origins. Hence the actual details on the other side of the big bang are up for the philosophical grabs. Atheists who don't like the idea that the big bang was an absolute beginning can speculate about previous universes or a multiverse of continuous inflationary bubbles or play philosophical word games with the meaning of nothing. Alternatively theists can speculate about it being an absolute beginning; that is the mathematical edge of a grand logical hiatus....this is the point at which our ability to carry out algorithmic compression via the annunciation of general physical equations stops. See the epilogue of my book on randomness where I discuss this:(see footnote)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeQXVKb2lHUmdtRzg/view?resourcekey=0-qGG_yo-LP-9gZ0lW9K__nw

My money is on this argument running and running because of epistemic distance: There seem to be insurmountable epistemic barriers in the two areas where we can attempt to make observations to test origins theories: Viz: 1) The microwave background yields limited data and only extends back so far. 2) Particle accelerators are unlikely to reach the colossal energies needed to recapitulate the very early universe. Of course there may always be observational & theoretical wild cards out there somewhere, but I'm not banging banking on it!

People still hanker and yearn after the idea that there was something

 before the big bang. But what was it? Was it God or just more  

algorithmically compressible bytes and bits?

Endnotes

Contingency and the Grand Logical Hiatus

Endnote 1: (Added 03/10/2021) It ought to be fairly self evident that an ultimate Logical Hiatus in our so-called  "explanations" is forever going to be an irreducible feature of our attempts to account for the cosmos. For those explanations find their expression in succinct mathematical laws as algorithmic ways of encoding descriptive information about the ordered dynamic that pervades our world. A hard core of contingency, then, can never be eliminated as the algorithmic nature of these laws means that as a matter of logical inevitability they must start from a set of given mathematically stated conditions. The laws of physics, then, amount to a form of algorithmic compression and as such lead back to an irreducible kernel of enigmatic simplicity. So, if we are looking for an ultimate "explanation" in some deeper sense than mere description, it's not going to be found in the simplicity of physics; more likely in complexity; perhaps the complexity of a Godhead. (See here where I first mooted this idea)

So leaving aside the silly word games with the meaning of "nothing", those who dislike the mystery of an irreducibly particular contingency find that their best shot is to postulate some version of multiverse theory, a theory which in its most extreme form posits the existence of just about every logically possible contingency. This tactic works by attempting to neutralize the mystery of a kernel of particular contingency by eliminating selective contingency (which is in fact what our cosmos, on the face of it, presents us with) by spreading the existential butter over a huge range of possibility. Needless to say, our instincts suggest that behind selective contingency is an intentionality. That there is such a concerted effort to eliminate selective contingency with multiverse notions is a sign that these instincts, even among disbelievers, are alive and well. 

Endnote 2: (added 19/10/2021) One of the bugbears with the common concept of "mechanism" is that it is conceived as entirely a matter of local interactions between the parts of the mechanism. Those parts, such as atoms or fundamental particles, have a few relatively simple rules governing their near-neighbor interactions and it is thought that these "mindless" rules are then the source from which all else incidentally and purely fortuitously emerges. It is assumed then that these rules are the fundamental & primary reality of the cosmos and all else is secondary and ephemeral.  No further questions are then asked about whether this system of rules, if it supports the development and maintenance of life, must therefore be algorithmically pre-biased.  Moreover, it is further assumed that these rules do not include global teleological constraints, constraints which (amounting to action at a distance) would really blow away any semblance of local interaction completeness & primacy.  The oft overriding and superficial response to this picture of local mechanical interactions is that it is entirely mindless in that clearly in and of themselves these interactions have no sentient apprehension of what they are doing and therefore any complex development built on them (such as life) is purely accidental and incidental. It is ironic that this superficial response is endemic among the de-facto Intelligent Design community of North America. But then there is this.

OK, the mechanical picture of cosmic development with its purely bottom-up as opposed to top-down vision is at first sight a challenge to an anthropocentric view of the cosmos.  But if one starts to push a little harder the wall of that challenge starts to crumble. 

Science & Faith in Norfolk Lecture Notes 21 September

Norwich Cathedral west end where a skeleton of a diplodocus is currently on display.

The wife and I attended the lecture at Norwich Cathedral by Nick Spencer of Theos. The lecture came under the auspices of Science and Faith in Norfolk and was titled "Dinosaurs, Evolution and Religion".  Although I was familiar with much of the story Spencer related, below I log some notes on salient points. (I've also embedded some comments of my own in square brackets): 

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Science & Faith in Norfolk Lecture 21 September. Nick Spencer

The "Warfare Thesis" of science vs religion is invalid. For example Galileo was not arguing against Christianity but the failure of Aristotelian "science". [I believe he also was perceived to have shown disrespect for the authority of the religious leaders of the day - the problem was less with his science than his lack of deference to authority and lack of diplomacy when dealing with it] 

The idea of man evolving from other primates appeared to blur the distinction between man and the animal kingdom and this upset many. [Evolution was less the issue than was the perceived demeaning of human life and an apparent concomitant loss of its sacredness] But Darwin's Origins was a storm in a teacup compared to the reaction to "Essays and Reviews". 

Huxley was one of the first professional scientists: The word "scientist" was coined in 1834. His problem was with the authority of amateurs like Bishop Wilberforce who were making unfounded dogmatic  pronouncements on evolution. Wilberforce, on the other hand, was concerned with humanity: He was indignant about the belittling of humanity. (But evolution isn't the only perspective on humanity). There was a mismatch of underlying motive here.

As if to confirm the fears of the dehumanizing effect of Darwinism, in 1901 the pygmy Ota Benga was exhibited in the monkey house of Bronx Zoo and portrayed as a missing link. Black ministers were enraged that this exhibition made a beast of the pygmy. In reaction these black ministers stressed the soul of man, setting him apart from animals. [The fault line between the third person perspective vs the first person perspective was opening up between the practitioners of science and religion respectively]

But man isn't just an evolved primate. We need to understand humans in subjective and first person terms. There is "I and you" as well as an "it". We aren't just an "it". Spencer's point was that evolution dealt with the "it" only.

The expanse of time also raised questions. Why so much time between humans and dinosaurs? Spencer was asked this question by a child: His response was that important things take time. cf: Carl Sagan's quip about the time needed to make an apple pie.

Points made during Q&A time:

There are human values well mixed into science that are needed to make it work - truthfulness and integrity. 

There is a replication crisis in some sciences - many psychological studies can't be replicated. 

At what point did we become human? Where's the threshold? There is the "human revolution" of 30,000 years ago. 

Even Monkey's have a sense of fairness. Evolution isn't just about competition - it can also favour cooperation and altruism [But even taking into account the evolution of altruism, nature still comes over as utterly ruthless and impersonal, favoring only a survival ethic. This observed ruthlessness, especially when put together with the death of Darwin's daughter, slowly sucked the life out of Darwin's faith (and the faith of others too - it was yet another manifestation of the problem of suffering and evil)]

FURTHER COMMENTS

I'm glad to see that Spencer made the point about the internal first person perspective. As I've said before everything hangs on this perspective: Without it life becomes a meaningless simulacrum (See my "consciousness" label). 

What I will say however, is that the findings of systematic science have been and remain a challenge to an anthropocentric perspective on the cosmos even to the extent that some, fooled by the language games of the third person perspective, have attempted to deny the reality of the conscious first person perspective. Although distorted by polarized interests, the humanity vs mechanism fault line that was coming very much to the fore in 18th and 19th centuries is evidenced in Spencer's lecture material. (See also here). But here's a point I've made before: It's easier to design & make a car than it is to design & make a machine that designs and builds cars. It seems that in the cosmos we have something more like the latter. But it comes with overheads. 

This is a picture of the lecture video camera screen. I can be seen taking a picture of the screen. I'm on the far right at the edge of the small  audience. The diplodocus skeleton can be seen in the middle background. 

NB:  Science and Faith in Norfolk along with the Faraday Institute are the go to people for Christians interested in Science & Faith in the UK. In these days of cranky christian trends promoting crackpot conspiracy theories and anti-science notions about a flat earth and/or young earth, a source of technical & scientific competence such as we see in these institutions is sorely needed.

Links:

Network Norfolk : Dinosaurs, evolution and religion lecture (networknorwich.co.uk)

Talkative Tuesday - Dinosaurs, Evolution and Religion - YouTube

Evolution and Islands of functionality

I've said it before and I'll say it again: William Dembski, the North American "Intelligent Design"  guru, is a nice bloke and in many ways an admirable Christian; moreover, I think one of his primary publicized conclusion is entirely correct; that is, a universe such as ours, especially given the presence of life, demands a huge upfront information input. Unless we are going to invoke multiverse ideas this is a truism whether or not life is a product of the mechanisms of evolution as conventionally conceived (But see here for qualification). Dembski is also a reasonable Christian who disowns the fundamentalism abroad among many US Christians. But in spite of all this he has been rejected and even abused among some evolutionists of the academic establishment, especially by evangelical atheists. This is at least in part because some in the IDist community have assumed his work is a sure fire refutation of standard evolutionary mechanisms. But Dembski's main conclusion isn't such a refutation. In fact Dembski has given a back-handed acknowledgement of this fact. 

As I described in my last blog post there are big stakes here as a consequence of the US right-wing IDists and the atheists in the academic establishment polarizing around what they both believe to be a sharp dichotomy between "natural forces" and "intelligent agency". But the neutrality of Dembski's initial conclusions doesn't mean that Dembski is what the IDists contemptuously refer to as a "Darwinist"; rather he very much aligns with the IDist community and argues against standard evolutionary mechanisms as we shall see in this post. 

Given the establishment vs popularist right-wing polarisation in the US, it is not surprising if Dembski has been embraced by the right-wing and he has turned his talents toward supporting some of their contentions. For example in this blog post of his we find him entertaining (but falling short of outright affirmation of) the theory that Covid 19 was genetically engineered in China. His post will go down well among Trump right-wingers. In fact I'd be interested to know whether or not Dembski is a Trump supporter and believes in a stolen election. 

For myself I have no useful input on theory that Covid 19 was genetically engineered in a Chinese laboratory and then perhaps accidentally released. It is a plausible theory that may or may not be true as far as my knowledge is concerned. Unfortunately the authoritarian and secretive  nature of the Chinese regime doesn't help their case one little bit: It would be typical of a totalitarian government with little or no accountability to host a classic cock-up and cover up scenario like a laboratory escape. But if Covid 19 is a Chinese contrivance I think it unlikely it was deliberately released; that idea just smacks too much of the cold hearted Machiavellian fantasies spread about by the deluded conspiracy theorists; I find incompetence and cover up scenarios much more plausible and in line with humanity's often sleazy and idiotic behavior. In any case it cuts both ways; that lab-leak theories serve right-wing tribal interests erodes the credibility of these theories. But I'm less interested in this issue than Dembski's references to the evolution question.

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So, as I was saying, Dembski's main work doesn't contradict standard evolution:  But even so, as I've said, Dembski, of course, finds himself on the anti-evolution side of the culture war and naturally enough has tried to advance arguments which attempt to refute evolution. In his Covid 19 post he does a resume of a frequent argument used by IDists. In his post we find the picture I've published at the head of this post and Dembski tell us about it:

This first slide illustrates, by analogy, what the Darwinist thinks must be the case, namely, that islands of functionality exist dotted along the way in getting from the left most island to the farthest off island. With all these intermediate islands, it is easy (probable) to jump from one island to the next and thus get to the far-off island by starting with the closest one (the far-off island representing the end product of evolution that we’re trying to explain).

Yes I agree, each organic variation that walks the Earth must be functional and able to transmit incremental variations to the next generation that themselves must also be functional.  Evolution is a step by step gradual process that doesn't conceive huge organic variations appearing in one generation. e.g. Lobe finned fish didn't become amphibians in just one generation; that would require millions of years of step by step change, where each step is capable of survival and replication. 

But Demsbki goes on to give us this second picture to ponder.....: 

According to Dembski this picture illustrates the possible problem with standard evolutionary mechanisms that depend on the small jumps of incremental change. Of this matter he says this:

But how do we know that those intermediate islands exist? The second slide illustrates this possibility, and insofar as it describes what is happening with biological change, it renders Darwinian evolution far less plausible. It needs to be noted here that whether these transitional islands (i.e., intermediate functional biological forms) exist is a matter for fact. The dispute between design theorists and Darwinists is over the evidence for these intermediate islands/forms. For the Darwinists, these intermediates must exist because Darwinism requires a gradual form of evolution. For the design theorists it’s not that these intermediates can’t exist but that they might not exist and if they don’t, that argues for intelligent design.

Yes again I agree: For the Darwinists, these intermediates must exist because Darwinism requires a gradual form of evolution. The battle between IDists of Demsbski's variety and the establishment evolutionists revolves round the attempts on the one-hand of IDists to show that there is no evidence for this "island" hopping scenario and on the other hand evolutionists trying to show that there is evidence of the existence of closely set islands of functionality.  The IDists, of course, are quite sure that islands of functionality are not closely set enough to facilitate evolution and they then invoke their so-called "explanatory filter" and out pops intelligent agency (I believe to this explanatory filter to be flawed if pushed beyond everyday application into the realms of the origins of life - see here for more details). 

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But  there is one thing that Dembski's island metaphor hasn't made sufficiently explicit in my opinion. In the first picture above it could be that the sea is actually very thickly populated with islands of functionality and that the distance between these islands is a small configurational step. And yet this in itself, although a necessary condition for evolution, isn't a sufficient condition. This is because the islands may be so small that a random hop has very little chance of landing on any of these tiny islands of functionality. Actually, if one blows up the magnification of this "many small islands" picture it starts to look a little like Dembski's second picture with islands well separated. In fact it's vaguely reminiscent of what one sees of a galaxy in space - from a distance they look to be crowded with closely set stars - but blow up the magnification and one finds the stars to be very small and too far apart for space travel. Likewise, there may well be many islands of functionality and not very distant from one another in terms of steps but because they occupy such a small area in the "sea of non-functionality" random island hopping is too improbable to be practical.

One way of thinking about this situation is to understand that organisms, because they are composed of many particles, are actually multidimensional entities with huge numbers of dimensions. There may be many functional configurations within a few short steps but nevertheless too few, given the number of dimensions, to be accessible with small random hops; the overwhelming number of short hops will go in the wrong direction.

I actually much prefer what I call the "spongeam" picture to Dembski's first figure above. I have featured the spongeam structure on this blog several times before. It looks something like this:

In this metaphor we are in 3D rather than 2D, although of course we should be talking about a configuration space of immense dimensionality and where the spongeam structure is considerably more tenuous looking than it looks in the picture above.  However, the spongeam metaphor, in my opinion, conveys, the complexity of the situation better than the island picture. In the spongeam picture I identify the necessary condition for standard evolutionary mechanisms to be that the class of functional, self perpetuating organisms form a connected set in configuration space, resulting in a thin, tenuous, but complex network of fibrils spanning a space of immense dimensionality.  In this picture the random walk steps of evolution are modeled as a form of diffusion guided by the thin connections (or channels) of the spongeam. If the spongeam exists then the mechanism of evolution is a process of diffusion through this network of channels. Also, as I've remarked before, one can express this metaphor for evolution mathematically. Viz: 

I explain this equation more fully in this blog post.  Suffice to say here that Y represents some kind of population density at a point in configuration space. The first term on the righthand side is a diffusion term resulting of the random hops across the space. The second term on the righthand side represents a breeding or decaying population term, where V is a value which varies across configuration space. It is this value which describes the spongeam structure, a structure which must be sufficiently connected to provide the necessary conditions for standard evolutionary mechanisms. It embeds the upfront "Dembski information" required for those mechanisms to work.

Like Dembski, I have doubts that this necessary condition is actually fulfilled given our current understanding of the physical regime in spite of the stringent constraint that the known laws of physics put on the possible behaviours in configuration space. My feeling is, and I admit it's only a intuition, that the high organisation of life means that the number of possible organic structures are likely to be overwhelmed by the number of possible disordered configurations. That is, notwithstanding the known laws of physics which considerably reduce the "volume" of configuration space, there simply aren't enough viable organic configurations to populate configuration space with an extensive connected structure like the spongeam, a structure which is a necessary condition for molecules to man evolution. So, it may be that IDists like Dembski are actually right. But having said that I don't think the case against evolution is actually proved and standard evolutionary mechanism may yet be the engine driving natural history. I'm not strongly aligned on this question.

It is ironic that in one sense IDists of Dembski's ilk would likely agree with the academic establishment on one very important aspect of evolution; namely, that the fossil record testifies to a natural history of changing life forms over millions of years; So, in the natural history sense they both accept that evolution has occurred although would disagree on the underlying driving mechanisms: A further irony here is that the mechanisms of evolution, when stated in their most general form, even by an evangelical atheist biochemist like Larry Moran, admits intelligent design as a possible driving mechanism - see here. I wonder if Moran is aware of this? 

So, at heart the contention between IDists and establishment evolutionists is about the nature of the internal engine driving evolutionary change. But I have doubts that this contention can ever be settled conclusively given that fossil, genetic & breeding data can only ever be a way of sampling the highly complex processes of natural history. I'll have to leave the two sides arguing the evidence for that one, although I'm inclined to float my vote against the spongeam as a reality and yet at the same time stand with the evolutionists in the culture war against an extreme right-wingery which of late has manifested itself as a threat to Western democracy.

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If the class of functional structures are closely spaced but occupy too small a "volume" in configuration space to be reachable by evolutionary diffusion, there may yet be a way round this situation, one that I've probed for many years (although without unambiguous success). If some kind of tentative expanding parallelism is in operation which probes a few steps across configuration space these islands of functionality could then be reached. But accompanying this there would have to be some underlying drive to preferentially select these islands and that aspect, which implies a built-in teleology in the physical regime, would have to exist. Quantum mechanics gives us expanding parallelism straight away; it also gives us the selection too, in the form of collapse of the wavefunction (I'm by-passing multiverse & decoherence interpretations of quantum mechanics here). But apparently (and I stress apparently) quantum selection isn't preferentially biased but random. - as far as we know. Notwithstanding that however, my radical suggestion is that there is an underlying teleology in the cosmos, a teleology embodied in a biased seek, inspect, reject and select algorithm behind the generation of life. In effect  this would both considerably speed up the diffusion and introduce a life favoring value of V in the above equation. 

Well, I suppose it's likely I'm on a hiding to nowhere here, but in the poisonous atmosphere of a  polarised culture-war, to even tentatively investigate such ideas is an affront to the hardened nihilistic atheists and a heresy to the hardened dualists among right-wing IDists & fundamentalists. Just as well I'm in a relatively unconnected domain on this part of the web; I'm not keen on meeting them. (I've already had three unpleasant chance web-meetings with fundamentalists and/or conspiracy theorists - see Richard Sweet,  Steve Pastry and Ken Ham)

For evangelical atheists whose world is ultimately meaningless these ideas would smack too much of intelligent contrivance & purpose to be acceptable. Take an atheist like Steven Weinberg for whom the universe is absurd: As his famous saying goes "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless".  And yet I can empathize to some extent with Weinberg: From a human perspective science and industry have left us with enigmas & challenges to deal with. But even so perhaps Weinberg could have asked himself more questions about the origins of a comprehensible cosmic order rather than jumping to the conclusion that it's all absurd.

It is ironic that for Christian IDists and fundamentalists the thought of a cosmos provisioned to generate life via a teleological version of evolution is, if anything, an even greater affront than it is to nihilistic atheists; the latter will brush you off as a fool, whereas right-wing religionists are inclined to see you as a subversive, may be even a malign & wicked influence. For one thing they have difficulty with the notion that God's creation is able to create of information. But creating information is what teleological algorithms achieve. There is nothing intrinsically anti-Christian in seeing human beings as a thoroughly "natural" (sic) phenomenon; for as far as we know they are a dynamical pattern that works within the operational envelope of a physical regime that the sovereign Creator has set up and manages on a moment by moment basis. In that sense human beings are at once both natural and supernatural. Moreover, as a "natural" phenomenon human beings (like natural history itself) are clearly able to create information on a daily basis. But the dualistic religionists who have committed themselves to the notion that intelligence is tantamount to some form of mysterious intellectual alchemy that cannot be described in algorithmic and material terms have backed themselves into a corner: Their vested interest in a particular line of thought brings down a taboo on any suggestion that in God's "natural" (sic) world information is being created all the time. Why is this such a difficult idea given that God is sovereign and it is God's created world? The temptations of gnosticism are never far away.