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!

***

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

***

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.

Fundamentalist Anti-Science

Modern Genesis fundamentalism is a 20^th & 21^th century construction

 I want to showcase the following quote from a young earthist I shall call “Joe Smith”

 Answers in Genesis doesn't "hate science," many of them ARE scientists. They just hate to see science being used to make up stories about the past when no scientists were there, as an alternative to the plain, simple understanding of Genesis and many other passages in the Bible. Yes, you can be a Christian and believe in Christ while believing in billions of years and life evolving from microbes, but you can't honestly get the billions of years of gradual evolution from reading the Bible, and once you start re-interpreting things because of the claims of "experts" who can't actually PROVE those claims, where do you stop?

This is a fine example encapsulating several fundamentalist habits of mind. I want to unpack the fallacies crammed into this short statement which are in fact symptoms of an anti-science philosophy. The detailed breakdown of Joe Smith's statement can be found here: I don’t think there is anything in this breakdown I haven’t already said before but it brings together in one place several lines of criticism of fundamentalist anti-science.

ADDENDUM 21/05/2019

Here is a very interesting and useful post on Panda's thumb about someone called David MacMillan who was brought up as a young earthist and was very challenged by the star light problem. After much study he realised that no sensible fundamentalist solutions existed and therefore young earthism simply didn't stack up scientifically.  The full story can be read here:

https://medium.com/@davidstarlingm/path-across-the-stars-e8dbf93e4405

Two young earthists contribute to the discussion thread on Panda's Thumb (a Floyd Lee and a Robert Byers) but their contributions are incoherent and more or less simply assert that "God did it, just like that!" and therefore who are we to ask too many questions of an omnipotent God? Ironically their "anti-science" responses which appeal to brute omnipotent authority actually run counter to the many fraught attempts of other young earthists to rationalise the star light conundrum within a young earthist scientific framework  It only goes to show the disarray among young earthists over the question; for it seems that so far none of the attempts by young earthist "scientists" to fix the problem has become the stock answer reached for by the rank and file. 

One final question remains, however, about which I don't yet know the answer. Did MacMillan lose his faith? 

The Quest: Deep Water

Here is some long overdue autobiographical background to this web site and blog. 

***

As far back as I can remember I have been enthralled by the mystery and meaning of conscious existence:  It has always seemed to me a most peculiar, remarkable and unjustifiable state of affairs to suddenly find oneself with a level of consciousness complex enough to be able to probe its own existence. It is a mystery which demands attention; but how does one meaningfully present a “solution” to such a mystery when in the final analysis all one can do by way of "explanation" is describe, categorise and offer up inexplicable brute facts? Explanatory narratives which compress the apparent complexities of our world into succinct principles are themselves no more than contingent descriptions that beg the question of absolute origins.  

As a rather solitary child at infant school I used to walk around the playground by myself quite convinced that the other children were evidencing no conscious self-awareness. Those other children were so taken up with one another socially that none showed any evidence that they were, like myself, startled by their own existence and none appeared to be asking any questions. Solitary figures are rare; either that or they are so egocentric they don't notice one another. So, I came to believe that I alone was consciously aware. But how and why was I here with the power to ponder self and the organized and regular pattens that presented themselves to the senses? From a relatively early age these thoughts propelled me on the lifelong quest for meaning & purpose.  This quest started with a deep interest in the physical sciences, but it soon became apparent that these sciences only describe; that is, as it is often couched, they give us the "How", but not the "Why?", if indeed the "Why?" is an intelligible question in this context. Some might say "No" it is not intelligible, but I was banking on my deeper intuitions which answered "Yes" to the intelligibility of that question: After all, the complexities of my conscious cognition were a fundamental existential feature without which the meaning of reality is lost altogether; so, if conscious thought is fundamental to the Cosmos then the question "Why" becomes meaningful.  

With my tendency toward an introverted and egocentric reclusiveness, it took me some time to recognise that all those others, too, had a full complement of consciousness. Although I am no longer a self-centred solipsist I am, however, left with the feeling that the so called “material world” has no substantive existence independent of mind. My view has been and still is that my own conscious patterns and the patterns of consciousness of other beings are the touchstone of reality. In our normal mode of consciousness those patterns are for the most part controlled by a perfect registration between sensations and a systematic and ruthlessly rational mathematical logic, all of which facilitate the definition of mathematical materialism: “Materialism” is just a name for highly rational patterns with a faultless registration.*¹  It is this rationality which facilitates the definition of coherent material objects. This is cognitive positivism.

I have searched for answers in physics, programming, philosophy, psychology, history, the paranormal and above all in Christianity; the latter, to my mind, supplies the nearest to what could be called the meaning of life*². Huge continents of mystery remain, however, but as it turns out this is a very good thing; engaging mystery has become the staple of my mind; without it life would be incredibly dull; with it life becomes an exciting adventure! My web site articles and blog are, as it were, a kind of diary of an explorer who loves dabbling in mystery and logging his thoughts on the subject.  But it’s a good thing that the journey excites me more than the destinations because one can so easily find oneself going down blind alleys or round in circles! For me the exercise is a case of unburdening myself of a cognitive load; without this unburdening process I think I'd have to be committed!

I cannot make claim to being a “writer” per se anymore than an explorer who keeps a scrappy log of his explorations can be called a writer: After all, a true writer is trying to make a connection with an audience. True writing is a social exercise which seeks, above all, communion and community status. A log writer is just writing notes to himself; all part of a rather self-contained perhaps even egocentric enterprise.

It might seem strange that my "explorer's log", which appears on the very public world-wide-web, is only secondarily about currying favour with a readership. Readership and followership are about making social connection and seeking to be coupled into a community. Trouble is, I’m under-motivated when it comes to this kind of thing and I’m not any good at it anyway. No surprise then that my readership is minimal.

So why do I, nevertheless, write publicly? Actually, as it turns out, this is all about defence. If I didn’t have a public presence people would think I do nothing with my time and that I’m just another senior citizen put out to grass with time on his hands and on standby waiting for someone to find him something to do. But even more pertinent, especially if one is involved in Christianity, one finds the world to be full of self-promoting doctrinaire gurus whose gullible followers see them as God’s gift to end all disputes at an authoritarian stroke. When these conceited peacocks and dandies, with their wake of partisan followers, flit across one’s line of sight demanding obeisance it is wise to have one’s six guns loaded and at the ready. So, if you have something immediately to shoot back at these organ grinders and their monkeys, if they should appear, it is one way to keep them at bay. And when they have gone away crying crocodile tears that you’ve lost your salvation because you have paid no more attention to their works as they have to yours, you can then get on with the business of exploring without further interruption.

Exploration is an art form: One’s travels and one’s record of it have a personal aesthetic value.  I am reminded of theologian Don Cupitt’s Artist Theologian concept. None of my writings are primarily for reading by others, although it’s a nice bonus if people take an interest; but then I don’t think I personally can handle too much public attention. The hazard with social linkage is that it attracts further social linkage and as with internet web sites, social linkage is probably governed by a power law: If this (probably) non-linear feedback effect takes off it is possible to find oneself with a large audience and tempted to play to the gallery and therefore tempted by group think. One is then in danger of being compromised. 

Byron

A true explorer can’t live for the accolades that social coupling brings. But in my particular case I can’t expect people to take an interest anyway; for me the journey has been long, meandering, sometimes very tedious and not really very ground breaking; therefore my explorations have to be their own reward. But if I stopped exploring it wouldn’t be long before the men in white had to come and take me away! 

On the subject of exploring the good book says this:

25 And God is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring. Acts 17:25-28 (See also Hebrews 11:6, Ps 53:2)

Let's take it away then!!

APPENDIX

The video below (Deep Water 2006) is an interesting case study in the psychology of ambition, exploration, and adventuring; it warns of the psychological hazards. In many ways it is a sad story, but salutary. Comparing and contrasting Donald Crowhurst with Bernard Moitessier is an illuminating exercise. Both were very gifted but their motivations were different. In the latter-day writings of Donald Crowhurst we see a man who was desperately trying to restore his ego in the face of his very public catastrophic failure. He was attempting to make sense of the contradictions in his life via his writings, if rather incoherently and the only way out it seems was into delusion. Crowhurst was betrayed by his vested interest in social connection & accolade and that set him up for a fall. Moitessier, on the other hand, was a philosophical loner who loved his work above the social accolades, accolades about which he was ambivalent. He was, however, neglectful of his family as a result. Both men, in the final  analysis, found themselves struggling with their egos in different ways. This is why Phil 2:1-11 is so relevant to the human predicament and, I believe, to the very meaning of life.

I believe I have some empathy with the struggles of both Crowhurst and Moitessier. I can empathise with Moitessier's diffidence toward crowds and attention (Not a fault of Crowhurst's!) but I also empathise with Crowhurst's ambitious, hair-brained and pretentious plan! After all, I thought I was in with a chance with a theory of gravity! But I at least completed the course, after a fashion, and did not put all else at risk!

Footnotes:

*1 But what about those distant galaxies and times when there were no human observers? That’s an issue for another time!

*2 I’m thinking in particular of Philippians 2:1-11 which indicates that getting community right and getting the right balance between human relationship and status is very close to the meaning of life. Ironic really as my aptitude in this area is rather limited and it hasn’t been my main goal in life; God has made it all about us, but we in turn must make it all about Him. We make it all about God by making it all about others.  

But having acknowledged that Christianity is where the meaning of life, the universe and everything is found, I must qualify this by admitting that the intellectual degeneracy found in many Christian sub-cultures is self-undermining: Who needs atheists to undermine the faith when there are plenty of Christian fundamentalists doing just fine without them! (See here, here, here, here, and here ). I have to confess that having discovered  Christianity and concluding that it contained the meaning of life, only to be confronted by countless plastic fundamentalist clowns, real doubts began to set in: Another reason why defense, particularly of my faith, became all important!

Science and the Multiverse

Just one imaginative vision of how the multiverse might 'look'

The de-facto Intelligent Design (ID) community are, in the main, a much nicer bunch of people to get on with (and more intelligent - see William Dembski for example) than the fundamentalist young earthists (for examples of the latter see here, here, here and here). Unfortunately the mutual hate-in that exists between the left of centre evolutionary academic establishment and the academic out-on-a-limb IDists has fueled polarisation which has probably pushed the IDists toward the political right-wing and even into the open arms of that lying demagogue Donald Trump, a man who is quite capable of whipping up suspicion, paranoia, hatred and fear in order to bolster his presidency.^*1

ID doesn't necessarily contradict evolution as top flight IDist William Dembski admits. Conversely, sophisticated atheists like Joe Felsenstein and PZ Myers have effectively  made it clear that evolution  requires a presumed background of transcendent organisation from which to work. (See here, here and here). I therefore see common ground between IDists like Dembski and atheists like Felsenstein and Myers, although of course they would disagree sharply about the ultimate origins of the necessary a priori information needed to drive evolution. Moreover, in these days when fear of the unknown along with tribal, racial, cultural and religious fault lines are exaggerated and exploited by the likes of Donald Trump, Alex Jones and Ken Ham, we are very unlikely to see people unifying around common ground.

The upshot of all this is that I probably automatically find myself on the opposing side to the IDists even though I would agree that the universe only makes sense if we posit complex sentient intelligence as a given (More about that in a later post). As I have explained elsewhere my concept of intelligent creation differs markedly from the IDist's explanatory filter based conclusions. But in spite of this, I am now pleased to announce that I actually agree with something posted by Barry Arrington, the supremo of the Intelligent Design web site Uncommon Descent (This certainly has not always been the case with Barry! See here). In this particular instance Arrington is posting on the subject of the scientific status (or otherwise!) of the multiverse as an explanatory device; his post is entitled The Multiverse is Anti-Scientific.

Unless those many posited universes of the multiverse interact with our own in someway, thereby providing the potential to make testable predictions, I believe Arrington is right to question the scientific status of an otherwise untestable theory. In fact it's arguable that the universes of the multiverse shouldn't interact with our universe by definition and therefore by definition can never be observed!  I suppose, however, it could be argued that if the multiverse is a prediction of an otherwise successfully tested cosmogony then this would be evidence in favour of the multiverse. But then it could be claimed that the theory is being used for an unwarranted and untestable extrapolation into the unknown and should be made more mathematically succinct by recasting the theory so that it did not require the extravagant elaboration of infinite amounts of conjectured reality. In the absence of any interaction with our universe the multiverse is not predictive but only serves as a narrative retrospectively applied in a way which for some people, repeat for some people, constitutes a sense making cosmic myth which is sympathetic to their a priori world view (See this post for more on the epistemic point being made here).

So, without being a genuinely testable science, as Arrinton's colleague Denise O'leary has also pointed out, we are then left judging the content of a multiverse theory purely on the basis of what feels right. But, of course, what feels right will be very subjective and/or worldview sensitive - see here where I did a post on this matter. In the positing of these subliminal universes beyond all detection the subjective deciding factor is, I believe, to do with a sensed need for symmetry: Viz: This symmetry is imposed by generalising the cosmological principle so that each case taken from a very wide range of platonic possibilities is posited as having been reified into a universe. That is, no universe taken from a well defined range of possible universes is specially favoured with reification since a hyper-symmetric uniformity reigns over all conceived possibilities in so far as each of these possibilities is posited as reified. To some people of an atheist persuasion this makes complete and utter sense. But it doesn't make sense to me and neither does it to Arrington; for some people symmetry has no god-like status in the intellectual canon. For others, meaning and purpose trump symmetry when it comes to making sense of the universe, although trying to apply these complex anthropic ideas to cosmology don't readily yield simple mathematical rules.

The sentiment of symmetry would be equally satisfied, if not in actual fact better satisfied, if nothing existed at all! For in such a case all platonic possibilities would be treated equitably in so far as  none of them would have any reality thus avoiding the awkward question of why a very particular cosmos has been singled out for preferential existential treatment. But given the existence of our universe the hi-symmetry fans are faced with the question of why at least something actually exists and, it seems, quite unnecessarily so! That something - namely, our cosmos -  appears to be of a very contingent kind and on the face of it quite unjustifiably favoured for existential status. Now, for some people this special existential status is disquieting and smacks too much of unjustifiable (intelligent) selection. Hence to restore the idea of symmetry and universal mediocrity across the board there is for them only one thing for it; that is, to go to the opposite extreme and posit that every conceivable thing exists; or at least postulate that the probability of existence of every conceivable thing is uniformly smeared across platonic space. Taking this sentiment of symmetry and uniformity to its extreme conclusion we soon find ourselves knocking at the door of Max Tegmark's extravagant mathematical universe: This (unscientific) "theory" posits that every mathematical construction has some kind of existential reification*. It's very tempting to suspect that the underlying motive for proposing such an idea is that it undermines any awkward questions about the apparent contingent asymmetry of our universe, an observation which might lead to the mooting of divine selection and/or intelligent contrivance. After all, in our culture the divine is seen as a personal sentience and therefore (as is the wont of personality) generally having an inscrutable bias toward certain preferences which in turn leads to very particular choices and, accordingly, a very contingent creation. As I have remarked before, intelligent beings have a tendency for bias, interest and focus toward order. (See here and see the epilogue here)

It is very unlikely that even a multiverse is an absolutely random affair: If we were part of a huge multiverse of absolute randomness we would expect our own cosmos to be observably and very rapidly dissolving into disorder a lot faster than is required by the second law of thermodynamics. This dissolution would, of course, eventually kill us off as observers, but there would be a large number of possible scenarios where we would be hanging around long enough to see it happening; these scenarios are much larger in number than the number of possible cases where we have an apparently ordered and stable existence, such as we see in our universe.  Since we don't see this rapid decay happening it follows that it is very likely that even the multiverse, if it exists,  isn't absolutely random and therefore itself has a relatively narrow "symmetry breaking" contingency!

Fundamentalist young earthists often claim that they see the same data as the science establishment but simply have a different worldview and therefore interpret that data according to the fundamentalist worldview with equal plausibility: Not true! Young earthism leads to silly and irrational thinking and also undermines God's creative integrity (See here, for example). However, the  principle "same data, different interpretation" does apply when it comes to the choice between belief in the high symmetry of the multiverse or belief in the specially selected contingency of the observable cosmos. This is because by its very nature the multiverse doesn't readily throw up testable predictions and therefore it is just one way of stitching together a dot-joining myth which for some people makes sense of reality.

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APPENDIX I

If you are a hard core fan of symmetry as a "theory of everything" then there are at least two ways of applying this philosophical prejudice to one's view of the cosmos. The simple way is to do a "Max Tegmark" and simply posit the systematic existence of everything; that is, each mathematically possible world is somehow reified once and once only^*2.

Another way of preserving symmetry is to posit that each and every platonic possibility has an equal probability of existence. But this leaves us with some questions that are not easily answered: What is the value of the probability of the existence of a universe and what theory assigns these probabilities? What is the number of probabilistic trials which have brought the reified universes into existence? What is the size of the set of platonic possibilities from which the trials are taken?  These questions themselves suggest the existence of a particular stochastic model which addresses them and this raises the meta question of why this particular model is favoured for reification.

If universes are being selected at random from a platonic but denumerable set of size T then the probability of the selection of a particular universe will be 1/T; in fact the probability of a cosmos being selected n times will be (1/T)ⁿ. So this probabilistic scenario implies that there is a small chance of a cosmos being selected more than once. Clearly as T goes to infinity the probability of a particular universe making any appearance at all will be infinitesimal. But if the number of trials N goes to infinity as T goes to infinity then the probability of the appearance of a particular universe could be finite, although of indefinite value.

But whether it is intelligible to posit the reality of other universes which neither have observers nor can be observed is, as far as I'm concerned, moot. I have always had positivistic leanings myself and find such an idea  difficult to swallow  But more about that another time.

APPENDIX II

On Symmetry

Footnotes:
*1 See for example this post on Dembski's blog where he identifies with ultra-right winger Tommy Robinson whose book has been banned from various book sellers. He also links to articles on the banning of Milo Yiannopolous from entering Australia and (presumably sympathetically) to Brietbart material on transgender issues and Jacob Wohl. Dembski has been roughly treated by "left wingers" for his ID work so it is no surprise why he finds it easier to identify with these people. So even without me doing anything or even disagreeing with Dembski's core thesis I find myself on the opposite side.

*2 I'm passing over here the considerable conceptual problems Tegmark's proposal raises, not least how to actually define, without self referencing inconsistency, the class of mathematical structures available to his hypothesis.

Signalled Diffusion Book II: Exponentiating Diffusion

Book II of my "Signalled Diffusion" project can be downloaded here. Book I can be downloaded from a link in this post. Below I reproduce the introduction to  book II. 

Introduction

This is Book II in my current series about diffusion. It investigates the possible meanings of equations of the form

…where  the "house" symbol represents the multidimensional equivalent of the "Del" operator.

In interpreting the meaning of equations of this kind my concern is to investigate the possible sub-microscopic mechanisms which will return equations like the above, at least as an approximation. But this logic cannot be reversed: This equation doesn’t logically entail the submicroscopic approximations from which it is derived. That is, we have to hypothesise these mechanisms and then derive the equation; the mechanisms themselves don’t necessarily follow from the equation. Therefore this equation  only constitutes evidence that these submicroscopic mechanisms are in operation and not proof.

As I said in book I my sights are on the case where  the equation becomes a quantum equation: that is when the diffusion constant D, and also V,  incorporate the imaginary number “i”.

The Creative Forgery of Young Earthism

The creation of the Hitler diaries would have entailed a creation process and therefore a history, but it wasn't the history the dairies purported to tell: They were forgeries. According to the logic of  young earthism the creation is effectively a forgery

Somebody recently asked me the following question: 

I have a friend who, for some reason, is friendly to the idea that God might have created our universe already aged by a few million years, so to speak - so that the universe looks 14 billion years old, but if at the start of creation God kind of zapped it into existence at several billion years old already then it just looks older but is actually much younger.

 Obviously this is a distortion of the true picture - but I wonder if you have any thoughts on this and/or previous blogs on it, because I seem to recall you writing about matters like that before, where creationists claim similar things re the changing speed of light, a universe that God has made look older than it is.

My reply is given below: It includes some clarifying changes and actually concatenates two emails.

***

This is less of an issue than it was in the late 60s and early 70s when young earthism had its revival. For example in the early 70s my wife was told by a young earthist that God placed the fossils in the rocks "as is". The 1961 book "The Genesis Flood" which I read in the mid 70s tells us that God might have created light from the stars in transit.

But young earthists have been trying move away from this "appearance of age" creation (Sometimes euphemistically called "mature creation"); they will admit:
a) It is subversive of science and can block all attempts to do science.
b) Far worse, it questions God's creative integrity.
This "mature creation" can be likened to the person who wrote the fake Hitler Diaries - it's all a lie.

Hence, for modern young earthists much effort is put into flood geology and star light theories in order to try to give scientific account as to why things are the way they are. These theories have come to grief but at least a protagonist can engage them polemically whereas the guy who just claims that it was all created "as is" is difficult to argue with. But even if God created a fake diary it would still have a history in so far as it would require God to assemble it in his mind - hence you can't get away from history as an assembly path.  See here

But one finds that in the final analysis even those young earthists who try do science have to eventually fall back on creation "as is" and are open to being accused of the "Hitler Diary" syndrome. (See my links below)

Science is a data dot joining exercise: We see a pattern of "data dots" and attempt to complete the pattern with a theoretical narrative which joins the data samples into a coherent whole.  We attempt predictions of further dots and those predictions, if correct, point to the correctness of our dot joining theories. But all this is based on the assumption that the data dots are not misleading us; no problem for a non-fundamentalist Christian who believes in God's creative integrity. But it is a problem to a fundie who is effectively positing huge arbitrary holes in the anticipated background structure joining the data dots*. This is basically what the "appearance of age/mature creation" wallahs are trying to tells us; namely that the world is a forgery! I don't buy it!

Some of my writings on the subject can be seen in the links below.

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/12/beyond-our-ken-on-mature-creation-part.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/01/beyond-our-ken-on-mature-creation-part.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/02/beyond-our-ken-on-mature-creation-part.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/04/beyond-our-ken-on-mature-creation.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/03/mangling-science-part-1-kens-can-of.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/04/mangling-science-part2-opening-up-kens.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/10/mangling-science-continuing-our-diet-of.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2014/02/mangling-science-part-4-worms-all-way.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2014/12/mangling-science-part-5-two-kinds-of.html

Footnote

* Notice that this back of the envelope sketch of science doesn't recognise the distinction "historical science vs observational science" - the latter is a misleading fundamentalist trope. Science is about timeless patterns and in the exercise of all science both history and observation are always implicit. This is no surprise because every object we observe and study can only be done at the receiving end of  signals transmitted by the object. These signals inevitably have a history of travel.  However, there is such a thing as epistemic distance and this distance varies; some objects are closer to our scrutiny than others, some objects have a greater density of data dots than others and some objects have a greater complexity of behaviour than others: These are all factors that impact epistemic distance, making an object more or less amenable to our epistemology.

The fundamentalist attempt to solve the star light problem by positing a coordinate system which entails the instantaneous arrival of star light at our earthly doorstep (See links above for more on this "solution") immediately creates an issue with the historical science vs observational science dichotomy: This follows because it raises a conundrum as to whether astronomy is to be classified as "historical" or "observational" science!

A Case Study in Technological Capitalism: Part1: Xenotron vs Paleontological Man.

 

1984: Xenotron's video composer work stations for newspaper page and ad make-up

Between  February 1984 and September 1991 I worked as a software engineer for a UK company called Xenotron. This company was manufacturing and marketing proprietary desk top and plinth computers for the interactive make up of Ads and Newspaper pages. This was done WYSIWYG style by moving around and tweaking blocks of texts on screen. At the time this was an innovative hardware/software combination and a revolution for litho-printers (perhaps comparable to the invention of the printing press?). Xenotron products took the market by storm, so when I joined the company in 1984 it was riding the crest of the "we-did-it-first" wave. But the creative destruction of market dynamics which had brought Xenotron into existence ensured that the Xenotron itself was up for eventual destruction and the last remnants of the company were wound up in 1991. I am in the process of creating documents which tell the Xenotron story via newspaper clippings, memos, brochure photos and notes. The first part of this three part story can be read here. 

The story I tell reveals just what creative destruction feels like for the lives of its human players, players who may find themselves on the back foot and perhaps not that well adapted to the circumstances creative destruction throws at them. After all (wo)man is a creature whose mode of society, for many thousands of years, was that of the hunter-gatherer. Small hunter-gatherer communities lived in harmony with nature in so far as they could take from nature what she offered with little or no environmentally detrimental effects. But that environment could be cruel and ruthless and this helped ensure that the members of these communities valued each other because each member had their recognised role in providing much needed community support. I suspect that inter-tribal conflicts were fairly minimal in such an underpopulated world where in any case conflicts were pointlessly wasteful when there was so much that needed doing just to survive. But all in all the human animal was undoubtedly well adapted for the hunter-gatherer life style, a style which lasted for thousands of years. I guess that for the people of these primitive communities expectations were seldom crushed because they hadn't been conditioned to expect much from life other than food, shelter, reproduction and above all appreciative human company. There was no time or space for listlessness, depression, disaffection and dissent from one's community; they knew how to enjoy and be grateful for basic pleasures and probably felt fulfilled when they had won these pleasures.

But I don't want to paint too rosy a picture of hunter-gatherer society: They were dirt poor by our standards even though, perhaps, surprisingly happy and contented. They had short rough lives as they faced the ravages of the environment and illness. What made it all tolerable is that they knew (and expected) nothing better. In comparison many of us in the West live like entitled aristocrats having (and expecting) riches and privileges that our ancient forebears couldn't even imagine. But a deep sense of expectation fulfilled, social belonging, tribal identification and social recognition & status, all of which are so important to human feelings of well-being, often allude us. Citizenship has always been a dubious concept since the first cities.

I'm not anti-capitalist or anti-market, but as for the realities of hunter-gatherer life I try to avoid a romanticised vision and instead endeavour to be cognizance of the our society's downsides: Free market industrial scale communities are not entirely successful at satisfying all the needs of the human heart and delivering contentment. Instead, as Marx observed, capitalism has a tendency to breed alienation and dissent in spite of its riches. This is not surprising given that agricultural man is less than 10,000 years old, urban man 4000 years old and industrial and hi-tech man (developments we can thank the free market for) has only been around for a mere 200 to 300 years.  In comparison hunter-gathering was a way of life for perhaps a 100 thousand years or more. Which life style is our psychology best adapted to?

It is not surprising that a creature which battles with selfishness, epistemic challenges and social alienation in a world where expectations are sky-high and where zero sum games abound, some times finds contentment and fulfillment to be illusive. But to be fair modern humanity's relationship with rich market driven societies is ambivalent. On the one hand such societies provide opportunities to express ambition, creativity, and individuality. These rich societies can also satisfy human acquisitiveness and a need to achieve. Also, let's not forget the relatively secure environmental bubble in which we live in Western societies. On the other hand all this comes at the cost of economic instabilities, fractured community spirit, social alienation, purposelessness and boredom. Like the trench warfare of WWI times of stifling empty monotony are punctuated by times of unsettled terror. 

Some of the human ambivalence toward market driven technological society can be seen in the very human details of the Xenotron story where we see the needs of tribal affiliation and creativity initially provided for and yet ultimately tugged at by a wider market dynamic. As I always say,  technological capitalism has made us rich beyond the imagination of our forebears and has given us huge vistas of knowledge but the devil is found in the details.