13. The End of Science
This is the thirteenth article in the series From Particles to Angels. If you are interested in this article you should read the previous articles in the series in order, beginning with the first (On Happiness).
In the preamble to The Scientific Creation Myth I stated that our program in these articles was "to accept everything that there is in science, everything that is demonstrably part of reality, but we also want to add to that the magical universe offered by religion, so that rather than choosing one or the other subset of reality as all of reality, one box or the other, we have a religion that is a superset containing science within it." Toward this end: "By clearly laying out the boundaries of science we will hopefully see that it is a small island of light, growing a little each day, in a large and limitless darkness of the unknown, like Newton's ocean of Truth, pregnant with possibility." We than gave a quick history of the universe as given by science, followed this with 3 articles on matter, and an extrapolation of the possible future of the universe based on the story so far, and then 3 articles on consciousness. So that I am hoping that by now I have succeeded in my stated goal to "make plain the place of science in the religious universe", and having "defined the limits of science, and indeed logic, we are then free to consider the various possibilities of what may currently lay beyond it".
"As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it."
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution."
We can consider the word "science" to mean "the stuff we know" as opposed to the stuff we may believe without necessary knowing, such as the stuff we assume, or the stuff we hope is true. Properly speaking, science is the product of the work of specialists called "scientists" working according to the "scientific method" of the time. But science has grown so big and all encompassing that the word "science" has come to be interchangeable with the word "knowledge". But people can know things and discover things without being scientists, obvious, self evident things, or using common sense analogues of the scientific method. People knew things long before there was anything called science. So when we talk about the word "science", we shouldn't just be thinking about scientists, but should have in mind this broader reference. The implications of this broader definition is that when we hear someone speaking against science, we should interpret them as speaking against things that are known to be true, not merely against the views of some tribe of specialists we call "scientists". Likewise, if a scientist starts making assertions about things that lay outside the scope of what is known, his words should be regarded as not science.
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Science, then, knows a great many things, and seems likely to come to know a great many more. Science knows so much now that some people have started making claims that no one should believe anything that does not have the secure stamp of scientific validation. Before there was such a thing as science, such a claim might have meant not believing anything. In the beginning, science knew a little bit, and that little grew slowly. Often times, what we thought was science, turned out not to be true. Science has been revised countless times, so that from alchemy we gained chemistry, and from astrology we gained astronomy. Science has been refining itself and developing for a long time so that know there appear to be things that we can be certain of with a high degree of certainty. But nothing is ever one-hundred percent certain. It could turn out that we are all living in the Matrix, or the universe of Descartes' mischievous spirit. But for practical purposes, we can assume for now that there are a great many things we know.
Since scientific knowledge is always expanding, it is always less yesterday than it will be tomorrow. What this means is that what is science tomorrow, was not science yesterday. If we assume that there is more stuff yet to know than is currently known, then what is not science is always bigger than what is science.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
But all of that stuff that we don't yet know is still a part of reality and always has been. We don't just live in the world of science, the stuff we know for sure, we live in a much larger universe much of which consists of stuff we don't know, may never know, or can only guess at. You will sometimes here people claim: "there must be a rational explanation" or "there must be a logical explanation", but these statements are themselves neither logical nor rational because they do not have a sound basis in logic or reason. The is no basis for supposing that everything should have a logical or rational explanation. There are a great many things that do, but we have also seen in the antinomies that logic and reason have well defined limits, and Gödel's Theorem shows us that we can never entirely remove the groundless assumptions the knowledge we do have is built on. The limits of possible knowledge, what is studied in the philosophical discipline called "epistemology", are vividly apparent and well demonstrated. So that the claim "there must be logical explanation", although true much of the time, is beyond that only a wishful statement of faith by those disturbed by the prospect that some things might not have a rational explanation. All the great multitude of things that we know fit neatly in a small box with well defined boundaries, floating in an endless space of possibility.
This raises the question of how we should live our lives. Should we do as some say and only believe in things we know to be true and ignore everything else? Or should we seek to be a part of that greater universe of possibility and wonder? If the latter, how do we go about this and not be a crazy person? How do we navigate in the universe of all of reality and not just the bit of reality we're certain of and know and understand? Rule one is probably to make a clear distinction between what you know and what you merely hope or surmise. When we start declaring the factualness of things we don't actually know, we are venturing on a path likely to turn our brain to porridge. We can create a sliding scale of degrees of certainty and act according to the degree of certainty. But sometimes we need to step out in an act of faith. Do they really love me? Will it last? Can I succeed at this new job? If I leap from the burning building will I survive? If I make a dash across no-man's land will I make it to the other side? Will this stock rise? Will this guy rip me off? What you and I know at any given time is probably much less than the totality of all human knowledge, so that acting without knowledge, even in our scientific world, is probably still the norm rather than the exception, and unavoidably so, because there just isn't enough time. Outside of the laboratory and the philosophical journal there is a great deal of uncertainty. But life does not wait on certainty.
But before there was any science (in the usual narrow technical sense), for thousands of years, human beings lived and loved, hunted and ate, raised families, enjoyed the sunshine and the natural world, laughed and fought. We are the products of evolution. Nature made us, and made us well, painstakingly over millions of years and with great refinement forged in the crucible of survival and competition. We were custom designed to live in this universe, by this universe. Reason, logic and science are newcomers. For all their great power they are not the be-all and end-all of truth and the power to act. We are all familiar with suggestions that we should "listen to our gut", the "gut instinct", "listen to our heart", perhaps even to "listen to your heart not your head", especially if its ringing alarm bells. In the section on "The Guide" in The Origin of Religion article we saw this in a religious context. If there is a world of the spirit, or a spiritual dimension to conscious matter, then we were forged by that spiritual dimension as well.
We saw in previous articles that particles of matter do not know what they do as they form complex shapes and creatures. Similarly, does a termite know what it is doing as it builds its great nest, or the bee its hive? When birds or whales set off on their great migrations, or salmon on their struggle upstream to spawn, are they aware of how these acts fit into the larger scheme of their species' survival? Evolution made them such that they do these things automatically without thinking, because such acts have survival value. If an act has survival value, it will persist and spread regardless of whether the creatures involved have any consciousness of why they are doing what they are doing. They are only following their gut. Proscriptions to follow our gut are made because a lot of the time our gut seems to be pretty smart, perhaps even smarter than our logical brain. Our gut is certainly not infallible, but if we listen to our gut and our brain, it is possible to integrate these two into a system of behaviour and decision making, developed and refined over time, that can leave you in good stead in the face of the many challenges of life, and even the loud and sometimes terrifying declarations of political dogma (most religious dogma being in the end political).
In the article On Happiness I said that religion was a hope. But of course, just because we want something to be true, doesn't make it true. We are all painfully aware of the fact. But what should we make of persistent intuitions in the face of what is said above. Certainly it is no surprise that the desire to live forever is common across all races and times. So neither does the ubiquity of the intuition make it true. Certainly we can see how the desire to live forever is an outgrowth of the desire to survive which obviously have evolutionary, survival value. But at the same time, we have seen that consciousness itself is not necessary to evolution at all, and has no role to play in it. The behaviours embodying what we call the "desire to go on living" certainly have survival value, but the conscious desire itself has none. So why do we have conscious desires at all?
Imagine you are walking through the bush one day and you come across these bits of discarded electrical equipment scattered on the ground. There is one piece that you come across again and again. It is a socket with three holes, apparently designed for a three-pronged plug of some kind. You keep walking and you come across more and more of these three-holed sockets, so you naturally start keeping an eye out for the corresponding three-pronged plug. As you continue walking, your search for the mysterious missing three-pronged plug becomes something of a personal obsession.
Desires are filled by something. A desire for food is filled by food. A desire for sex is filled by sex. But every person has another opening on their heart, and judging by the shape of that opening, what is meant to fill it is eternal life and probably a deity. We can certainly explain away such a desire as a natural outgrowth of our ordinary mortal concerns, but need we treat them so dismissively? Are our deepest most cherished feelings mere bullshit, nonsense side-effects of biological evolution? Or might we give them some credit, and some of our time and consideration, at the very least some of our respect? Do we take note of a feeling that something is there? It is a nice idea that wherever conscious beings are in the evolution of their science, there is some subtle intuition of the destination, like a message from the future to the past, that such truth is not the sole prerogative of races of men in the far distant future.
I have called this article "The End of Science" for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it is the end of what we might call the "science" section of the series of articles. After this we will be looking at what exactly is the religious hypothesis. The other reason, in line with our project to view the scope of science within the context of the larger world, is to consider whether science itself may one day reach a stage of completion and be finished once and for all. In relation to physics specifically this has already been suggested a number of times. The search for the "Theory of Everything", the final complete theory of physics is in full swing.
For some time, the proton, neutron, electron model of the world looked quite thorough. It accounted for all the chemical elements which accounted for all the chemical compounds which accounted for all the material bodies in the universe. There were a few holes to be plugged for sure, and some phenomena left to explain, but these were details. All the big brush strokes seemed to be done.
"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."
"While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote."
"The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation."
One of the gaps in the proton, neutron, electron model was why didn't electrons just fall into the positively charged atomic nucleus. Another was a problem to do with something known as "Black Body Radiation". This was about trying to understand how electromagnetic radiation behaved inside an idealised hollow black box. Because in the classical model wavelengths could be any length, this meant there were an infinite number of possible wavelengths. Under black body conditions, this could lead to infinite energies; what was known as the "Ultraviolet Catastrophe". Resolving these two niggling problems is what led to quantum mechanics and a slew of new particles and laws.
Once the "Standard Model" of quantum physics had settled, some physicists started getting hopeful again that the work was almost done and speaking of the possibility of a "Theory of Everything" (TOE).
"[T]he goal of theoretical physics might be achieved in the not too distant future, say, by the end of the century. By this I mean that we might have a complete, consistent and unified theory of the physical interactions which would describe all possible observations.... [W]e have made a lot of progress in recent years and, as I shall describe, there are some grounds for cautious optimism that we may see a complete theory within the lifetime of some of those present here."
True, a few niggling problems remained, but these were details. Fundamental particles are treated as dimensionless point particles, and the forces associated with particles get stronger exponentially the closer you get to the particle. In the case of a point particle this means the forces are infinite at the location of the particle. In most situations the problem can be safely ignored, but not when you attempt to formulate a theory of quantum gravity. That is, when you attempt to unify quantum theory with general relativity. This niggling detail has inspired String and M Theory.
"In 1980 I said I thought there was a 50-50 chance of us finding a complete unified theory in the next 20 years. That is still my estimate, but the 20 years begins now. I will be back in another 20 years to tell you if we made it."
(Stephen Hawking (1998))
But not everyone thinks the work is almost done.
"Only the old fogies who thought that physics was almost finished are disappointed. The only thing that I would find discouraging would be that we run out of questions."
"The most astonishing thing about the universe is that we can understand it at all"
(Gilbert Fowler White (1942))
Then the question is how did this cosmic brain come to be? Did it evolve in a material universe? When considering the antinomies of time and causation we suggested that there might be something outside of time and that this might resolve the paradox of the beginning and end of time and causation. "Causation" is a concept that is necessarily incomplete. Because every effect must have a cause, there can logically be no end to the sequence. The only way to resolve the paradox is to nest the universe of causation within something larger that does not operate according to the rules of cause and effect. We might say, something that "just is". In the previous section we considered the material universe as a teaching tool, a way of presenting information to evolving consciousness in such a way that it could start with simple concepts before being led to more complex and subtle ones. We might view material evolution as the means of new consciousness to come to know itself and understand its own composition and function.
In Hindu and Buddhist philosophy the material world is an illusion to be overcome. Their word for illusion is "Maya". "Then it is all mere Maya, with which the Brahman (Supreme Soul) deceives himself" ("Māṇḍukya Kārikā" by Gaudapada). To be trapped in a world of illusion (Maya) is akin to being trapped in the belly of a beast as we encountered in the "Ouroboros" section of The Scientific Creation Myth. The engraving below appeared in a book called "The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology" by Camille Flammarion in 1888 and is by an unknown artist. It has become a popular image to represent a conceptual breakthrough (or paradigm shift), penetrating mere appearances to recognise the reality and workings behind. It has come to be known simply as "The Flammarion Engraving".
For the philosopher Descartes, the only reality of which we can be certain is the reality of our own self consciousness ("I think therefore I am"), because this is the only thing of which we (as a consciousness) have immediate experience. Everything else we experience is via the mediation of our senses. When we sleep and dream we are able to create apparently real worlds to inhabit, seemingly populated by other people we can meet and interact with. This raises the question of whether what we call the real world could just be another kind of dream, one that apparently works according to a more consistent set of rules. According to Descartes, the only other thing aside from ourselves we can be sure of the reality of is God, as the source and foundation of our consciousness. We can only trust in the reality of everything else on the assumption that God would not be so mean as to deceive us in that way. We have no way of knowing if anyone else is real, but it is not productive to dwell on this. Another kind of Idealist may suggest that there is no God as some separate being, but only the conscious state of which we are all a part. This is the model adopted by Buddhism that has no God as such. Instead, Buddha (the Nepalese prince Siddhartha) was merely the first being to realise the truth and penetrate the veil of illusion.
Idealism makes ambiguous the distinction between ourselves and the outside world. It becomes unclear where "I" end and the world begins. Even within the materialist worldview this can be uncertain. To illustrate, imagine that you are sitting idle with your eyes open. At such times it can seem as though "you" reside at a point in the middle of your head, behind your eyes, as if I consist of a dimensionless point in space. Sound coming in your ears can also support this view. This experience has tended to encourage the notion that the seat of the soul is the pituitary gland in the centre of the brain. Even the sensations of taste and smell might seem to be passed up and back along nerves to my brain where I live. However, when I'm using my body such as in running or swimming, or if I am standing in a cold wind, it seems as though "I" extend out to all the surface of my body. Although intellectually I know these sensations are also passed up to my brain through nerves, it does not seem that way. If any part of my body is pricked with a needle or cut with a blade I am quite certain it is part of me. And when my heart is pumping or my belly is tight, or my lungs are noticeably sucking in air or there is a rush of warmth through my body, I sense myself inside of my body.
But now consider a parent watching their small child running and then falling over on concrete, scraping their knee. The parent may twinge with a tangible physical sensation. Similarly if their small child is standing tearfully in the midst of a ridiculing group of mean kids. We say that these feelings and sensations are only sympathetic, or empathetic. We tend to define ourselves as being bounded by the limits of our tactile sense, and not by the limits of our visual or aural senses, but this is merely a convention.
In Like a Seed from a Tree we speculated on the future destiny of the universe, and in particular of intelligent beings within it. Along the way we imagined beings who created and inhabited virtual worlds where they were totally free. Civilisation seems headed toward technology that permits creation by thought, so that we can create our own reality merely by imagining it. As described there, if this is the end state of the universe, might it also be the initial state, and we need only rediscover it?
It is the nature of ideals to be approached rather than reached, like infinity and eternity. In an ideal world, perhaps monarchy and socialism are the best forms of government. But in the real world, they are both terrible forms of government. We need the checks and balances of the democratic process and separation of powers because of the corruption of human beings. (“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” (paraphrase of Winston Churchill quoting an unknown predecessor)) Only in heaven with its idealised king can such a system work. From time to time societies are seduced by the ideals, only to be reminded of why they are a bad idea. Similarly, the materialist is speaking to the present and will probably always have more of practical value to contribute there. While the Idealist offers only the appealing and vague promises of an unattainable future. But as time goes on we might expect, little by little, the progress of material science to bring more and more of the Idealist vision to life. Idealism never seems to get past merely attempting to demonstrate the validity of idealism per se, whereas materialism has all of science as its offspring. Idealism serves only as a point on the horizon. In other words, as an ideal.
Transcendental Idealism perhaps offers more hope and interest to the natural philosopher. Kant suggests that the solution to the antinomies is to realise that space and time are appearances, not realities. They are secondary qualities like the other qualia. If there is no space and time in reality, then there are no antinomies of space and time in reality. Problem solved. There is still an objective world though. We are just not perceiving it as it is, and can only attempt to deduce it.
What does it mean to suggest that there is no such thing as space and time? It is easier to talk about in relation to space, so let's start there. Some of what follows may be very familiar, but for thoroughness, let's follow it through.
Imagine you are watching a 3d movie in a cinema. Perhaps 20 metres away is the screen; but the tip of the Star Destroyer seems to reach out of the screen and down into your lap. You might be tempted to reach out your hand to touch it. Your eyes take the 2-dimensional image on the screen all that distance away, and turn it into a vivid 3-dimensional illusion. Your eyes are able to do this because this is what they are doing all the time. The moviemakers are only exploiting the way your eyes naturally work.
Your eyes are like a camera. There is a lens at the front and a photographic plate at the back, called the "retina". The retina is a 2-dimensional surface. So each eye records a flat, 2-dimensional image. But each eye sees the world from a slightly different angle to the other. Your brain compares the discrepancies in the two 2-dimensional images and uses some very fast and sophisticated image processing software to create the illusion of a 3d image in your head. 3d movies work by interlacing two 2-dimensional versions of the movie, filmed from slightly different angles. Then, using some trick so that one eye sees only one version of the movie, while the other eye sees only the other version. Then your brain does what it usually does with the images it receives. The function of the 3d glasses is to control which eye sees which image. Coloured or polarising lenses in the glasses may filter out one of the versions of the movie for each eye. Other more sophisticated techniques have been invented for 3d glasses.
What this all means is that we don't see a 3d world. We see a 2d world and our brain automatically deduces a 3d world from visual clues. Moving our bodies around in the world and touching things helps us to get a clearer idea of the world in which we live. Our world is constructed in our head. We do not know a house just from the image of the façade as it appears from the street out front. We must walk around it and through its rooms until the whole has been pieced together from this procession of experiences. After that, when we move through the house we do not only see what our eyes give us at any particular moment, but we see the whole house is it exists in our mind, and us in it. When we are outside and a horse runs past, the changing pattern of brown is built into a four-legged animal.
Now consider a virtual world in a computer. We define objects in the 3d world against three perpendicular coordinate axes, usually labelled "x", "y" and "z", to represent the 3 dimensions of space: length, breadth and height. Where the 3 axes meet is defined as the zero point (0,0,0), the centre of the universe; and every object in the universe has a position in the universe defined by its measure along each of the 3 axes. The zero point of the virtual universe isn't anywhere, and the size of the units we measure along each of the axes isn't any actual magnitude. The zero point and the units of measure only have relative meaning within the virtual universe. All the objects in the virtual universe know where they are in relation to the zero point and each other, and each knows its size relative to the unit of measure. But neither of these have meaning in our universe "outside" the virtual world.
We create a connection between the 3d virtual space and our world by displaying the virtual world on a 2-dimensional screen. Then it looks to us that we are in the virtual world at the location of the virtual camera showing us that world. If we are looking at this virtual world and see in it a flag flapping in the wind, we might ask the question: "Which is moving, the flag or the wind?" The answer is: "Neither, only information is moving".
Now imagine that we are living in the computer as an artificial intelligence, experiencing the virtual world directly. We imagine that we are in a world of air and sky and trails through the woods, when in fact we are only signals moving in immovable silicon and copper. There does not need to be any correlation between appearance and reality. We could all be living in the Matrix. Not one created by a crazed computer, but one created by God or nature. Now imagine that there is only the computer: that the computer is the whole universe.
A computer is still a 3-dimensional object made of matter. But perhaps the reality behind appearances is not. Perhaps space and time have no meaning in that reality; as colour, sound and the other qualia have no meaning in the physical world. This is the hypothesis behind Transcendental Idealism. Space and time are illusions, only a means for us to have experiences. The reality behind may be pure information or pure qualia. So that instead of qualia being a reflection of material activity, the material world is rather a projection of qualia into a virtual space, in order that it may know itself.
With advances in technology we get more sophisticated models to use in our philosophising about reality. When we invented radio and television and could pull a world out of the air by changing channels, we could all conceive of "parallel dimensions of space and time" where God and spirits could exist. We no longer needed to place our Gods on inaccessible mountain tops, in the sky or deep underground. We can enter higher dimensions by "raising our frequency" (changing channels). Thinking machines give us a whole new paradigm of experience.
To imagine time as not real is more difficult, and we might wonder what exactly is meant by the assertion that "time is not real". If we conceive the word "timeless" to mean "no time" or "zero time", we seem to arrive at a frozen moment, like a temporal singularity into which the universe has collapsed. A static unconsciousness. This is not an appealing scenario.
However, in the popular imagination the word "timeless" might also refer to a kind of dreamy time. A time not rigidly linear, like being able to travel forward and back, fast and slow in time. To proceed to random moments across time, or to spread out across whole periods of time. Perhaps even allowing causation to follow new and strange courses. ("Slaughterhouse Five" and "Arrival" spoiler alert.) Movies like Slaughterhouse Five (from the book by Kurt Vonnegut) or Arrival (which made a language of the Ouroboros) illustrate this idea. In this kind of scenario, to be "outside of time" is to be free to walk around it in some kind of meta-time, perhaps a second dimension of time, and to enter it where we like. "Eternity" is to have the vista of all time before us, presented as if existing all at once. This is reminiscent of our earlier consideration of space-time (in the "Antinomies" section of The Scientific Creation Myth). As stated there, this does not really remove us from time, but rather expands the scope of time, making of our familiar linear time only a subset or sliver of the multi-dimensional whole. Or we might assert that to be "outside of time" is none of these, but some incomprehensible other.
For instance, a model in economics might compare 20 different quantities. it was found that mathematically meaningful statements could be made using these n-dimensional models, even though we have no way to visually represent more than 3 or 4 dimensions (4 dimensions can be represented in an animated 3-dimensional graph).
The mathematics of n-dimensions has led some mathematical physicists to wonder if some difficult outstanding problems in physics might be soluble by supposing that there are more than 3 dimensions of space, with the extra dimensions hidden from us, but having physical consequences in our familiar 3 dimensions. We considered this possibility in the "Space" section of Unity vs Robot Zombies - Part 2 where we talked about "Flatland".
In a chart representing compared quantities anything can be a "dimension". For instance, imagine you are watching a weather report on tv. The weather person is pointing to a big picture of the country on which are drawn lines called "isobars" representing air pressure (high and low pressure systems). These diagrams are a clever way to represent 3 compared quantities: two quantities of space (latitude and longitude) and one quantity of air pressure. Now imagine the company providing the weather reports gets some fancy new software and starts showing 3-dimensional charts instead of the old 2-dimensional kind. In these new graphs we see latitude and longitude represented by the to horizontal axes, so that the country appears like a flat plane. The vertical axis is used to represent air pressure. In the sky is a wavy translucent sheet where a peak in the sheet represents a high-pressure zone, and a trough in the sheet represents a low pressure zone. In this graphic we have 2-dimensions of space and one of air pressure. A graph showing a Black Hole as a funnel does something similar. It shows 2 dimensions of space and uses the third dimension to represent the magnitude of gravitational force.
These graphs show quantities that are not space, as if they are space, so that we can see geometric relationships between the quantities. A pitfall of doing this is that some people may be seduced by the graphical representation into thinking that the quantities being represented are space-like.
For example, imagine I am the owner of a shoe shop selling women's shoes. I want to track my sales so I go into Excel and create a graph showing my sales of women's shoes by month. The horizontal axis of my chart measures time: January to December. The vertical axis measures the number of pairs of women's shoes sold that month. The sales are represented by vertical bars, or by a line from left to right. This chart however does not suggest that the universe possesses a "dimension of women's shoes sold per month", which might cause us to ponder the possibility of whether we might one day be able to travel forward and back "through the dimension of women's shoes sold per month"; or to speculate on the existence of "higher dimensions of women's shoes sold per month". This raises the question of what justification we have for treating the dimension of time in the manifold "space-time" as being a "space-like" dimension.
We are able to freely move through all 3 dimensions of space, because that is what makes space space. But in relation to time we are permanently stuck in the present. The past does not exist except as memory, and the future does not exist except as prediction. So there is no existent thing to travel to from the present.
Time dilation effects of relativity are just a comparison of how rapidly two processes occur. Consider objects X and Y that do processes x and y respectively. If X and Y are moving slowly relative to each other, x might occur 3 times each time y occurs once. But if X and Y are moving at relativistic velocities, then x may only occur twice in the time it takes y to happen once. Nothing is happening to some "dimension of time".
A related question might be to ask whether physical problems that can be solved by positing additional dimensions of space beyond the known three, can be similarly resolved by interpreting the extra dimensions as non-spatial, measures of new and as yet unidentified properties.
In The Scientific Creation Myth we saw the story of the creation of the universe as given by science. In the next article: In the Beginning: Water - Part 1 we will prepare to look at how religions approach explaining the creation of the universe.
Any comments welcome.
In the preamble to The Scientific Creation Myth I stated that our program in these articles was "to accept everything that there is in science, everything that is demonstrably part of reality, but we also want to add to that the magical universe offered by religion, so that rather than choosing one or the other subset of reality as all of reality, one box or the other, we have a religion that is a superset containing science within it." Toward this end: "By clearly laying out the boundaries of science we will hopefully see that it is a small island of light, growing a little each day, in a large and limitless darkness of the unknown, like Newton's ocean of Truth, pregnant with possibility." We than gave a quick history of the universe as given by science, followed this with 3 articles on matter, and an extrapolation of the possible future of the universe based on the story so far, and then 3 articles on consciousness. So that I am hoping that by now I have succeeded in my stated goal to "make plain the place of science in the religious universe", and having "defined the limits of science, and indeed logic, we are then free to consider the various possibilities of what may currently lay beyond it".
"As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it."
(Albert Einstein)
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution."
(Albert Einstein)
We can consider the word "science" to mean "the stuff we know" as opposed to the stuff we may believe without necessary knowing, such as the stuff we assume, or the stuff we hope is true. Properly speaking, science is the product of the work of specialists called "scientists" working according to the "scientific method" of the time. But science has grown so big and all encompassing that the word "science" has come to be interchangeable with the word "knowledge". But people can know things and discover things without being scientists, obvious, self evident things, or using common sense analogues of the scientific method. People knew things long before there was anything called science. So when we talk about the word "science", we shouldn't just be thinking about scientists, but should have in mind this broader reference. The implications of this broader definition is that when we hear someone speaking against science, we should interpret them as speaking against things that are known to be true, not merely against the views of some tribe of specialists we call "scientists". Likewise, if a scientist starts making assertions about things that lay outside the scope of what is known, his words should be regarded as not science.
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
(Arthur C Clarke)
Science, then, knows a great many things, and seems likely to come to know a great many more. Science knows so much now that some people have started making claims that no one should believe anything that does not have the secure stamp of scientific validation. Before there was such a thing as science, such a claim might have meant not believing anything. In the beginning, science knew a little bit, and that little grew slowly. Often times, what we thought was science, turned out not to be true. Science has been revised countless times, so that from alchemy we gained chemistry, and from astrology we gained astronomy. Science has been refining itself and developing for a long time so that know there appear to be things that we can be certain of with a high degree of certainty. But nothing is ever one-hundred percent certain. It could turn out that we are all living in the Matrix, or the universe of Descartes' mischievous spirit. But for practical purposes, we can assume for now that there are a great many things we know.
Since scientific knowledge is always expanding, it is always less yesterday than it will be tomorrow. What this means is that what is science tomorrow, was not science yesterday. If we assume that there is more stuff yet to know than is currently known, then what is not science is always bigger than what is science.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
(Arthur C Clarke)
But all of that stuff that we don't yet know is still a part of reality and always has been. We don't just live in the world of science, the stuff we know for sure, we live in a much larger universe much of which consists of stuff we don't know, may never know, or can only guess at. You will sometimes here people claim: "there must be a rational explanation" or "there must be a logical explanation", but these statements are themselves neither logical nor rational because they do not have a sound basis in logic or reason. The is no basis for supposing that everything should have a logical or rational explanation. There are a great many things that do, but we have also seen in the antinomies that logic and reason have well defined limits, and Gödel's Theorem shows us that we can never entirely remove the groundless assumptions the knowledge we do have is built on. The limits of possible knowledge, what is studied in the philosophical discipline called "epistemology", are vividly apparent and well demonstrated. So that the claim "there must be logical explanation", although true much of the time, is beyond that only a wishful statement of faith by those disturbed by the prospect that some things might not have a rational explanation. All the great multitude of things that we know fit neatly in a small box with well defined boundaries, floating in an endless space of possibility.
This raises the question of how we should live our lives. Should we do as some say and only believe in things we know to be true and ignore everything else? Or should we seek to be a part of that greater universe of possibility and wonder? If the latter, how do we go about this and not be a crazy person? How do we navigate in the universe of all of reality and not just the bit of reality we're certain of and know and understand? Rule one is probably to make a clear distinction between what you know and what you merely hope or surmise. When we start declaring the factualness of things we don't actually know, we are venturing on a path likely to turn our brain to porridge. We can create a sliding scale of degrees of certainty and act according to the degree of certainty. But sometimes we need to step out in an act of faith. Do they really love me? Will it last? Can I succeed at this new job? If I leap from the burning building will I survive? If I make a dash across no-man's land will I make it to the other side? Will this stock rise? Will this guy rip me off? What you and I know at any given time is probably much less than the totality of all human knowledge, so that acting without knowledge, even in our scientific world, is probably still the norm rather than the exception, and unavoidably so, because there just isn't enough time. Outside of the laboratory and the philosophical journal there is a great deal of uncertainty. But life does not wait on certainty.
But before there was any science (in the usual narrow technical sense), for thousands of years, human beings lived and loved, hunted and ate, raised families, enjoyed the sunshine and the natural world, laughed and fought. We are the products of evolution. Nature made us, and made us well, painstakingly over millions of years and with great refinement forged in the crucible of survival and competition. We were custom designed to live in this universe, by this universe. Reason, logic and science are newcomers. For all their great power they are not the be-all and end-all of truth and the power to act. We are all familiar with suggestions that we should "listen to our gut", the "gut instinct", "listen to our heart", perhaps even to "listen to your heart not your head", especially if its ringing alarm bells. In the section on "The Guide" in The Origin of Religion article we saw this in a religious context. If there is a world of the spirit, or a spiritual dimension to conscious matter, then we were forged by that spiritual dimension as well.
We saw in previous articles that particles of matter do not know what they do as they form complex shapes and creatures. Similarly, does a termite know what it is doing as it builds its great nest, or the bee its hive? When birds or whales set off on their great migrations, or salmon on their struggle upstream to spawn, are they aware of how these acts fit into the larger scheme of their species' survival? Evolution made them such that they do these things automatically without thinking, because such acts have survival value. If an act has survival value, it will persist and spread regardless of whether the creatures involved have any consciousness of why they are doing what they are doing. They are only following their gut. Proscriptions to follow our gut are made because a lot of the time our gut seems to be pretty smart, perhaps even smarter than our logical brain. Our gut is certainly not infallible, but if we listen to our gut and our brain, it is possible to integrate these two into a system of behaviour and decision making, developed and refined over time, that can leave you in good stead in the face of the many challenges of life, and even the loud and sometimes terrifying declarations of political dogma (most religious dogma being in the end political).
In the article On Happiness I said that religion was a hope. But of course, just because we want something to be true, doesn't make it true. We are all painfully aware of the fact. But what should we make of persistent intuitions in the face of what is said above. Certainly it is no surprise that the desire to live forever is common across all races and times. So neither does the ubiquity of the intuition make it true. Certainly we can see how the desire to live forever is an outgrowth of the desire to survive which obviously have evolutionary, survival value. But at the same time, we have seen that consciousness itself is not necessary to evolution at all, and has no role to play in it. The behaviours embodying what we call the "desire to go on living" certainly have survival value, but the conscious desire itself has none. So why do we have conscious desires at all?
Imagine you are walking through the bush one day and you come across these bits of discarded electrical equipment scattered on the ground. There is one piece that you come across again and again. It is a socket with three holes, apparently designed for a three-pronged plug of some kind. You keep walking and you come across more and more of these three-holed sockets, so you naturally start keeping an eye out for the corresponding three-pronged plug. As you continue walking, your search for the mysterious missing three-pronged plug becomes something of a personal obsession.
Desires are filled by something. A desire for food is filled by food. A desire for sex is filled by sex. But every person has another opening on their heart, and judging by the shape of that opening, what is meant to fill it is eternal life and probably a deity. We can certainly explain away such a desire as a natural outgrowth of our ordinary mortal concerns, but need we treat them so dismissively? Are our deepest most cherished feelings mere bullshit, nonsense side-effects of biological evolution? Or might we give them some credit, and some of our time and consideration, at the very least some of our respect? Do we take note of a feeling that something is there? It is a nice idea that wherever conscious beings are in the evolution of their science, there is some subtle intuition of the destination, like a message from the future to the past, that such truth is not the sole prerogative of races of men in the far distant future.
I have called this article "The End of Science" for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it is the end of what we might call the "science" section of the series of articles. After this we will be looking at what exactly is the religious hypothesis. The other reason, in line with our project to view the scope of science within the context of the larger world, is to consider whether science itself may one day reach a stage of completion and be finished once and for all. In relation to physics specifically this has already been suggested a number of times. The search for the "Theory of Everything", the final complete theory of physics is in full swing.
For some time, the proton, neutron, electron model of the world looked quite thorough. It accounted for all the chemical elements which accounted for all the chemical compounds which accounted for all the material bodies in the universe. There were a few holes to be plugged for sure, and some phenomena left to explain, but these were details. All the big brush strokes seemed to be done.
"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."
(Lord Kelvin (1900))
"While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."
(Albert Michelson (1894))
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote."
(Albert Michelson ("Light Waves and Their Uses", 1902))
"The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation."
(Paul Dirac (1929))
One of the gaps in the proton, neutron, electron model was why didn't electrons just fall into the positively charged atomic nucleus. Another was a problem to do with something known as "Black Body Radiation". This was about trying to understand how electromagnetic radiation behaved inside an idealised hollow black box. Because in the classical model wavelengths could be any length, this meant there were an infinite number of possible wavelengths. Under black body conditions, this could lead to infinite energies; what was known as the "Ultraviolet Catastrophe". Resolving these two niggling problems is what led to quantum mechanics and a slew of new particles and laws.
Once the "Standard Model" of quantum physics had settled, some physicists started getting hopeful again that the work was almost done and speaking of the possibility of a "Theory of Everything" (TOE).
"[T]he goal of theoretical physics might be achieved in the not too distant future, say, by the end of the century. By this I mean that we might have a complete, consistent and unified theory of the physical interactions which would describe all possible observations.... [W]e have made a lot of progress in recent years and, as I shall describe, there are some grounds for cautious optimism that we may see a complete theory within the lifetime of some of those present here."
(Stephen Hawking (1980))
True, a few niggling problems remained, but these were details. Fundamental particles are treated as dimensionless point particles, and the forces associated with particles get stronger exponentially the closer you get to the particle. In the case of a point particle this means the forces are infinite at the location of the particle. In most situations the problem can be safely ignored, but not when you attempt to formulate a theory of quantum gravity. That is, when you attempt to unify quantum theory with general relativity. This niggling detail has inspired String and M Theory.
"In 1980 I said I thought there was a 50-50 chance of us finding a complete unified theory in the next 20 years. That is still my estimate, but the 20 years begins now. I will be back in another 20 years to tell you if we made it."
(Stephen Hawking (1998))
But not everyone thinks the work is almost done.
"Only the old fogies who thought that physics was almost finished are disappointed. The only thing that I would find discouraging would be that we run out of questions."
(Leonard Susskind (2008))
In Like a Seed from a Tree we considered the universe as like a big machine for the manufacture of intelligent life. But intelligent life doesn't only require an appropriate body and brain, it requires an environment that is comprehensible.
"The most astonishing thing about the universe is that we can understand it at all"
(Albert Einstein)
When we send our children to school they don't start in university/college. We send them first to kindergarten, then to primary and middle/high school, and then they are ready for university. Evolving intelligent beings require a staged approach to the acquisition of knowledge. They need simple building blocks that lead in stages to more complex and subtle concepts. The universe must therefore be such that it provides these staged building blocks. If we all needed to understand Schrödinger's equation to find food to eat, we all would have starved and humanity would be extinct before it began. So first we are presented with sights and sounds, colours, tastes and smells, and we use these to learn about our environment. We do not need any deep intellectual insights. But we learn about solid and liquid, hard and soft, living and dead, hot and cold, and a great multitude of other phenomena that are easy to absorb until we are ready for the next stage in our intellectual development.
Physics didn't begin with quantum physics. It couldn't have. We needed the stepping stone of Newtonian physics and classical electromagnetism. We need stepping stones that are each fairly good theories in their own right, that work to a high degree of accuracy under most normal circumstances. But so that intellectual development doesn't stall there, we also need a hole, a crack in the surface of the theory that will lead us eventually to the next level of understanding.
Mathematics is full of elegant helpers that make the universe analysable. Pythagoras' Theorem, the ratio between the length of the long side of a right-angled triangle and the combined lengths of the other two sides, is not just a mathematical curiosity or useful trick. Modelling and therefore navigating in space would be dramatically more complicated without it. If you look at a lot of the formulas of physics, they are just a couple of quantities multiplied together. They do not have elaborate relationship. They are just multiplied together. Physics is complicated, but it could have been so very much more complicated in another kind of universe. A lot of the simplicity comes from the simple geometric properties of fields and waves, and the simplicity of these comes from the fact that they are composed of bosons, which can occupy the same place at the same time, that is, pass right through each other without interfering with each other. This means their combined effects are described by the simple mathematical properties of addition and subtraction.
Some people look at the universe around them and see an ocean of mystery, while others think it has been more or less explained already. Some are happy fleshing out the details of fields in which they are already expert, while others are looking eagerly at the next undiscovered country of knowledge. In our consideration of matter, consciousness and the history of the universe, I hoped to instil the impression that what we know is a thin veneer, and the tiniest step in any direction confronts us with unfathomable mystery. What is matter? When we look closely we find dimensionless particles. What is force? We find massless, dimensionless particles flying right through each other to deliver "information" to the other particles. Where do we find solidity? What is consciousness if it is not merely an arrangement of matter?
If there is a gulf to be filled between matter and consciousness, then that is likely to keep us busy for some time to come. The concept "infinity" gave us the antinomies. That concept alone should keep us stumped for the foreseeable future. I hope that I have made it clear that the religionist does not need to be threatened by science, and that I have gone some way toward achieving the goal I set in the preamble to The Scientific Creation Myth to show that "we do not inhabit a glib and purely banal universe". The following quote may be apocryphal, but a nice quote nevertheless.
"As I look back over the truly crucial events in my life I realize that they were not planned long in advance. Albert Einstein said, ‘There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.'"
(Gilbert Fowler White (1942))
Idealism
By "Idealism" I do not mean being idealistic in one's behaviour. I mean the philosophical doctrines or schools of Idealism. So far we have been contrasting "religion" and "materialism" as opposites. When we were looking at the philosophy of mind we considered "physicalism" and "dualism" as opposites. In philosophy more generally, Materialism and Idealism are opposites. There are many kinds of Idealism, but put simply, we might contrast Materialism and Idealism in the following way.- Materialism says that everything is matter.
- Idealism says that everything is mind.
We encountered Idealism in the Buddhist quote in Unity vs Robot Zombies - Part 2: "neither the flag nor the wind moves. It is the mind that moves". Platonism was a kind of idealism because he thought ideas were things, and that things were made of ideas. For instance, a warm, blue ball was literally composed of the ideas Warmth, Blueness and Spherical. A well known Idealist was the philosopher George Berkeley (1685 – 1753), Kant is also considered a kind of Idealist because he thought that space and time were produced by the mind. Idealism is like the Matrix movies. It suggests that the physical world is some kind of a virtual world produced by some kind of cosmic mind. This cosmic mind might be God, or it might just be some consciousness that we are all a part of (or a collective unconscious that we are conscious parts of). Something we might "call God". Idealism might be religious. And religions might have Idealist philosophies, or the two may be distinct. A religion might simply say that God created a physical world. Idealism takes the everyday world, something we mostly understand except for a few gaps, and replaces it with something we know nothing about. While it is an interesting idea and may for all we know be true, it is difficult to find a use for it except in fantasy and obscure metaphysical problems.
One of the questions around Idealism is that if everything we experience is merely being imagined in a cosmic mind, what is the reality of this cosmic mind? That is, if everything is only imaginary, there must be something real behind it that is having these imaginings. For instance, is the imagining being done by a giant physical brain? Presumably, the thing doing the imagining has to have some sort of objective reality we might call "concrete" whether it is made of matter or of something else. Presumably it can't merely imagine itself into existence, but has to at least begin with something real. So that we cannot entirely free Idealism of something matter-like.
Then the question is how did this cosmic brain come to be? Did it evolve in a material universe? When considering the antinomies of time and causation we suggested that there might be something outside of time and that this might resolve the paradox of the beginning and end of time and causation. "Causation" is a concept that is necessarily incomplete. Because every effect must have a cause, there can logically be no end to the sequence. The only way to resolve the paradox is to nest the universe of causation within something larger that does not operate according to the rules of cause and effect. We might say, something that "just is". In the previous section we considered the material universe as a teaching tool, a way of presenting information to evolving consciousness in such a way that it could start with simple concepts before being led to more complex and subtle ones. We might view material evolution as the means of new consciousness to come to know itself and understand its own composition and function.
In Hindu and Buddhist philosophy the material world is an illusion to be overcome. Their word for illusion is "Maya". "Then it is all mere Maya, with which the Brahman (Supreme Soul) deceives himself" ("Māṇḍukya Kārikā" by Gaudapada). To be trapped in a world of illusion (Maya) is akin to being trapped in the belly of a beast as we encountered in the "Ouroboros" section of The Scientific Creation Myth. The engraving below appeared in a book called "The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology" by Camille Flammarion in 1888 and is by an unknown artist. It has become a popular image to represent a conceptual breakthrough (or paradigm shift), penetrating mere appearances to recognise the reality and workings behind. It has come to be known simply as "The Flammarion Engraving".
 |
| "The Flammarion Engraving" by an unknown artist, 1888 |
(This image is taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flammarion_engraving
where it is available as "in the public domain".)
For the philosopher Descartes, the only reality of which we can be certain is the reality of our own self consciousness ("I think therefore I am"), because this is the only thing of which we (as a consciousness) have immediate experience. Everything else we experience is via the mediation of our senses. When we sleep and dream we are able to create apparently real worlds to inhabit, seemingly populated by other people we can meet and interact with. This raises the question of whether what we call the real world could just be another kind of dream, one that apparently works according to a more consistent set of rules. According to Descartes, the only other thing aside from ourselves we can be sure of the reality of is God, as the source and foundation of our consciousness. We can only trust in the reality of everything else on the assumption that God would not be so mean as to deceive us in that way. We have no way of knowing if anyone else is real, but it is not productive to dwell on this. Another kind of Idealist may suggest that there is no God as some separate being, but only the conscious state of which we are all a part. This is the model adopted by Buddhism that has no God as such. Instead, Buddha (the Nepalese prince Siddhartha) was merely the first being to realise the truth and penetrate the veil of illusion.
Idealism makes ambiguous the distinction between ourselves and the outside world. It becomes unclear where "I" end and the world begins. Even within the materialist worldview this can be uncertain. To illustrate, imagine that you are sitting idle with your eyes open. At such times it can seem as though "you" reside at a point in the middle of your head, behind your eyes, as if I consist of a dimensionless point in space. Sound coming in your ears can also support this view. This experience has tended to encourage the notion that the seat of the soul is the pituitary gland in the centre of the brain. Even the sensations of taste and smell might seem to be passed up and back along nerves to my brain where I live. However, when I'm using my body such as in running or swimming, or if I am standing in a cold wind, it seems as though "I" extend out to all the surface of my body. Although intellectually I know these sensations are also passed up to my brain through nerves, it does not seem that way. If any part of my body is pricked with a needle or cut with a blade I am quite certain it is part of me. And when my heart is pumping or my belly is tight, or my lungs are noticeably sucking in air or there is a rush of warmth through my body, I sense myself inside of my body.
But now consider a parent watching their small child running and then falling over on concrete, scraping their knee. The parent may twinge with a tangible physical sensation. Similarly if their small child is standing tearfully in the midst of a ridiculing group of mean kids. We say that these feelings and sensations are only sympathetic, or empathetic. We tend to define ourselves as being bounded by the limits of our tactile sense, and not by the limits of our visual or aural senses, but this is merely a convention.
In Like a Seed from a Tree we speculated on the future destiny of the universe, and in particular of intelligent beings within it. Along the way we imagined beings who created and inhabited virtual worlds where they were totally free. Civilisation seems headed toward technology that permits creation by thought, so that we can create our own reality merely by imagining it. As described there, if this is the end state of the universe, might it also be the initial state, and we need only rediscover it?
It is the nature of ideals to be approached rather than reached, like infinity and eternity. In an ideal world, perhaps monarchy and socialism are the best forms of government. But in the real world, they are both terrible forms of government. We need the checks and balances of the democratic process and separation of powers because of the corruption of human beings. (“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” (paraphrase of Winston Churchill quoting an unknown predecessor)) Only in heaven with its idealised king can such a system work. From time to time societies are seduced by the ideals, only to be reminded of why they are a bad idea. Similarly, the materialist is speaking to the present and will probably always have more of practical value to contribute there. While the Idealist offers only the appealing and vague promises of an unattainable future. But as time goes on we might expect, little by little, the progress of material science to bring more and more of the Idealist vision to life. Idealism never seems to get past merely attempting to demonstrate the validity of idealism per se, whereas materialism has all of science as its offspring. Idealism serves only as a point on the horizon. In other words, as an ideal.
Transcendental Idealism
"Transcendental Idealism" is the name given by the philosopher Immanuel Kant to his own brand of Idealism. He distinguished it from the "Subjective Idealism" of philosophers like George Berkeley. Presumably implying that Kant's Idealism is somehow more objective. Berkeley's Idealism seems to imply something along the lines of: "We are all living in the mind of God who is imagining the universe and us." Being God, when He imagines something it is real. This raises questions around the fruitfulness of science. If I imagine a bouncing ball, it is pointless for me to investigate the physics involved, because there is no physics involved. That is just the way I imagine it moving. Subjective Idealism does not give us a meaningful connection between reality and appearances except as metaphor. Or as clues, perhaps intentionally placed within the program, again, like the Matrix. Our experiences may well be meaningful. They may in a sense be important messages to us from God. But the apparent physics of the world is beside the point and trivial. Just window dressing, or a cognitive stepping stone.Transcendental Idealism perhaps offers more hope and interest to the natural philosopher. Kant suggests that the solution to the antinomies is to realise that space and time are appearances, not realities. They are secondary qualities like the other qualia. If there is no space and time in reality, then there are no antinomies of space and time in reality. Problem solved. There is still an objective world though. We are just not perceiving it as it is, and can only attempt to deduce it.
What does it mean to suggest that there is no such thing as space and time? It is easier to talk about in relation to space, so let's start there. Some of what follows may be very familiar, but for thoroughness, let's follow it through.
Imagine you are watching a 3d movie in a cinema. Perhaps 20 metres away is the screen; but the tip of the Star Destroyer seems to reach out of the screen and down into your lap. You might be tempted to reach out your hand to touch it. Your eyes take the 2-dimensional image on the screen all that distance away, and turn it into a vivid 3-dimensional illusion. Your eyes are able to do this because this is what they are doing all the time. The moviemakers are only exploiting the way your eyes naturally work.
Your eyes are like a camera. There is a lens at the front and a photographic plate at the back, called the "retina". The retina is a 2-dimensional surface. So each eye records a flat, 2-dimensional image. But each eye sees the world from a slightly different angle to the other. Your brain compares the discrepancies in the two 2-dimensional images and uses some very fast and sophisticated image processing software to create the illusion of a 3d image in your head. 3d movies work by interlacing two 2-dimensional versions of the movie, filmed from slightly different angles. Then, using some trick so that one eye sees only one version of the movie, while the other eye sees only the other version. Then your brain does what it usually does with the images it receives. The function of the 3d glasses is to control which eye sees which image. Coloured or polarising lenses in the glasses may filter out one of the versions of the movie for each eye. Other more sophisticated techniques have been invented for 3d glasses.
What this all means is that we don't see a 3d world. We see a 2d world and our brain automatically deduces a 3d world from visual clues. Moving our bodies around in the world and touching things helps us to get a clearer idea of the world in which we live. Our world is constructed in our head. We do not know a house just from the image of the façade as it appears from the street out front. We must walk around it and through its rooms until the whole has been pieced together from this procession of experiences. After that, when we move through the house we do not only see what our eyes give us at any particular moment, but we see the whole house is it exists in our mind, and us in it. When we are outside and a horse runs past, the changing pattern of brown is built into a four-legged animal.
Now consider a virtual world in a computer. We define objects in the 3d world against three perpendicular coordinate axes, usually labelled "x", "y" and "z", to represent the 3 dimensions of space: length, breadth and height. Where the 3 axes meet is defined as the zero point (0,0,0), the centre of the universe; and every object in the universe has a position in the universe defined by its measure along each of the 3 axes. The zero point of the virtual universe isn't anywhere, and the size of the units we measure along each of the axes isn't any actual magnitude. The zero point and the units of measure only have relative meaning within the virtual universe. All the objects in the virtual universe know where they are in relation to the zero point and each other, and each knows its size relative to the unit of measure. But neither of these have meaning in our universe "outside" the virtual world.
We create a connection between the 3d virtual space and our world by displaying the virtual world on a 2-dimensional screen. Then it looks to us that we are in the virtual world at the location of the virtual camera showing us that world. If we are looking at this virtual world and see in it a flag flapping in the wind, we might ask the question: "Which is moving, the flag or the wind?" The answer is: "Neither, only information is moving".
Now imagine that we are living in the computer as an artificial intelligence, experiencing the virtual world directly. We imagine that we are in a world of air and sky and trails through the woods, when in fact we are only signals moving in immovable silicon and copper. There does not need to be any correlation between appearance and reality. We could all be living in the Matrix. Not one created by a crazed computer, but one created by God or nature. Now imagine that there is only the computer: that the computer is the whole universe.
A computer is still a 3-dimensional object made of matter. But perhaps the reality behind appearances is not. Perhaps space and time have no meaning in that reality; as colour, sound and the other qualia have no meaning in the physical world. This is the hypothesis behind Transcendental Idealism. Space and time are illusions, only a means for us to have experiences. The reality behind may be pure information or pure qualia. So that instead of qualia being a reflection of material activity, the material world is rather a projection of qualia into a virtual space, in order that it may know itself.
With advances in technology we get more sophisticated models to use in our philosophising about reality. When we invented radio and television and could pull a world out of the air by changing channels, we could all conceive of "parallel dimensions of space and time" where God and spirits could exist. We no longer needed to place our Gods on inaccessible mountain tops, in the sky or deep underground. We can enter higher dimensions by "raising our frequency" (changing channels). Thinking machines give us a whole new paradigm of experience.
To imagine time as not real is more difficult, and we might wonder what exactly is meant by the assertion that "time is not real". If we conceive the word "timeless" to mean "no time" or "zero time", we seem to arrive at a frozen moment, like a temporal singularity into which the universe has collapsed. A static unconsciousness. This is not an appealing scenario.
However, in the popular imagination the word "timeless" might also refer to a kind of dreamy time. A time not rigidly linear, like being able to travel forward and back, fast and slow in time. To proceed to random moments across time, or to spread out across whole periods of time. Perhaps even allowing causation to follow new and strange courses. ("Slaughterhouse Five" and "Arrival" spoiler alert.) Movies like Slaughterhouse Five (from the book by Kurt Vonnegut) or Arrival (which made a language of the Ouroboros) illustrate this idea. In this kind of scenario, to be "outside of time" is to be free to walk around it in some kind of meta-time, perhaps a second dimension of time, and to enter it where we like. "Eternity" is to have the vista of all time before us, presented as if existing all at once. This is reminiscent of our earlier consideration of space-time (in the "Antinomies" section of The Scientific Creation Myth). As stated there, this does not really remove us from time, but rather expands the scope of time, making of our familiar linear time only a subset or sliver of the multi-dimensional whole. Or we might assert that to be "outside of time" is none of these, but some incomprehensible other.
Dimensions
In the 17th Century the philosopher and mathematician René Descartes discovered that mathematical equations in general could be graphed on 2-dimensional charts using coordinates we now call "Cartesian coordinates" in his honour. Since then, the practice has become a commonplace in mathematics, physics and the other sciences, business, engineering and anywhere that quantities are measured and there is a desire to view relationships between measured quantities in a convenient graphic form. the practice was extended to 3-dimensional charts, for instance, displayed on a computer, and beyond to n-dimensions, that is, any arbitrary number of dimensions.For instance, a model in economics might compare 20 different quantities. it was found that mathematically meaningful statements could be made using these n-dimensional models, even though we have no way to visually represent more than 3 or 4 dimensions (4 dimensions can be represented in an animated 3-dimensional graph).
The mathematics of n-dimensions has led some mathematical physicists to wonder if some difficult outstanding problems in physics might be soluble by supposing that there are more than 3 dimensions of space, with the extra dimensions hidden from us, but having physical consequences in our familiar 3 dimensions. We considered this possibility in the "Space" section of Unity vs Robot Zombies - Part 2 where we talked about "Flatland".
In a chart representing compared quantities anything can be a "dimension". For instance, imagine you are watching a weather report on tv. The weather person is pointing to a big picture of the country on which are drawn lines called "isobars" representing air pressure (high and low pressure systems). These diagrams are a clever way to represent 3 compared quantities: two quantities of space (latitude and longitude) and one quantity of air pressure. Now imagine the company providing the weather reports gets some fancy new software and starts showing 3-dimensional charts instead of the old 2-dimensional kind. In these new graphs we see latitude and longitude represented by the to horizontal axes, so that the country appears like a flat plane. The vertical axis is used to represent air pressure. In the sky is a wavy translucent sheet where a peak in the sheet represents a high-pressure zone, and a trough in the sheet represents a low pressure zone. In this graphic we have 2-dimensions of space and one of air pressure. A graph showing a Black Hole as a funnel does something similar. It shows 2 dimensions of space and uses the third dimension to represent the magnitude of gravitational force.
These graphs show quantities that are not space, as if they are space, so that we can see geometric relationships between the quantities. A pitfall of doing this is that some people may be seduced by the graphical representation into thinking that the quantities being represented are space-like.
For example, imagine I am the owner of a shoe shop selling women's shoes. I want to track my sales so I go into Excel and create a graph showing my sales of women's shoes by month. The horizontal axis of my chart measures time: January to December. The vertical axis measures the number of pairs of women's shoes sold that month. The sales are represented by vertical bars, or by a line from left to right. This chart however does not suggest that the universe possesses a "dimension of women's shoes sold per month", which might cause us to ponder the possibility of whether we might one day be able to travel forward and back "through the dimension of women's shoes sold per month"; or to speculate on the existence of "higher dimensions of women's shoes sold per month". This raises the question of what justification we have for treating the dimension of time in the manifold "space-time" as being a "space-like" dimension.
We are able to freely move through all 3 dimensions of space, because that is what makes space space. But in relation to time we are permanently stuck in the present. The past does not exist except as memory, and the future does not exist except as prediction. So there is no existent thing to travel to from the present.
Time dilation effects of relativity are just a comparison of how rapidly two processes occur. Consider objects X and Y that do processes x and y respectively. If X and Y are moving slowly relative to each other, x might occur 3 times each time y occurs once. But if X and Y are moving at relativistic velocities, then x may only occur twice in the time it takes y to happen once. Nothing is happening to some "dimension of time".
A related question might be to ask whether physical problems that can be solved by positing additional dimensions of space beyond the known three, can be similarly resolved by interpreting the extra dimensions as non-spatial, measures of new and as yet unidentified properties.
In The Scientific Creation Myth we saw the story of the creation of the universe as given by science. In the next article: In the Beginning: Water - Part 1 we will prepare to look at how religions approach explaining the creation of the universe.
Any comments welcome.
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