Free Will: There Are No Easy Answers

 

by Stuart Kauffman

Free will!

Saint Augustine wrote about it linking our consciousness to a direct connection to the mind of God, and discussion about whether God left us, as evidenced by Adam and Eve and the apple, with free will. Then in the Abrahamic tradition, the question of free will is intimately tied up with the omnipotence of God and the conditions of forbearance in God's use of his Will in granting us humans our own free will.
The debate changed radically in the West with Rene' Descartes and Newton. Descartes famously proposed a dualism: Res Extensa and Res Cogitans. Res Extensa is a philosophical version of his "mechanistic" philosophy in which the bodies of humans, like all animals and plants and other things in the universe are "machines". But for humans, the mind is Res Cogitans, thinkiing "stuff".
For Descartes, as I have noted in previous blogs, this raised two major questions: 1) How could mind ACT on matter? 2) How could mind have a free will, which seems to be both an uncaused cause, yet a "choice" we make, perhaps via Res Cogitans.
  Matters assumed their more or less modern form with stunning Newton, the differential and integral calculus, initial and boundary conditions and thus deterministic differential equations, ordinary and partial. Given the initial conditions and boundary conditions, the future (and past) behavior of the system is entirely determined. One integrates the differential equations. I keep being amazed at the degree to which we are captives of Newton's conceptual framework.
Given that framework, the first question for Descartes seems unaswerable: 1) How can mind act on matter? If we assume, as virtually all scientists do, that the mind and brain are "identical", then the brain's dynamics is some kind of deterministic system of differential equations, thereby a Cartesian machine. (I note again that recourse to "stochastic" differential equations does not remove the underlying determinism, but only makes US ignorant of the details of the perhaps chaotic or noisy behavior, which remains deterministic in detail.) Given this determinism, the brain is fully sufficient to determine the next state of the brain. Then, critically, THERE IS NOTHING FOR MIND TO DO! Worse, there is no obvious way for mind stuff to ACT on the matter of the brain.
In past blogs, in the Czech version of my book Investigations, and in my Reinventing the Sacred, I have explored, and continue to explore, the hypothesis that the mind-brain system is a quantum cohering, decohering to classicity and recohering again to quantum behavior system in a Poised Realm interposed between fully quantum and classical for all practical purposes behaviors, FAPP. Then on this view, mind does NOT act causally on brain,but decoheres ACAUSALLY to classicity FAPP. I truly believe this is a cogent answer after 350 years to the problem Descartes set us: How can mind act on matter.
To act repeatedly on matter, I must suppose that the mind-brain system can decohere to classicity and recohere to quantum behavior repeatedly. Evidence for this reversibility in the Poised Realm is slowly mounting. We must pay it close heed, for the Poised Realm seems to be a new and profound aspect of reality, neither quantum, nor classical - something new whose physics remains largely to be explored. It is not even clear that "laws" will describe all the behaviors of the Poised Realm at this point in time.
But that brings us to the debate of the past half century about free will. If I am a determinist mind-brain system, I clearly have no free will. The Compatabilists argue that this is fine: we can train the young not to kill little old ladies and behave morally. While this view has proponents, I find it inadequate.
But we confront the horns of a dilemma when we include both classical deterministic physics and "classical" quantum mechanics of closed systems where the unitary evolution of the Schrodinger equation holds, and von Neumann's axiomatization of quantum mechanics is assumed.
If we are deterministic, no free will.
If we are "standard" quantum mechanical as above, then the Schrodinger wave propagates unitarily, meaning that the square of the amplitude of all of the propagating amplitudes, interpretable as probabilities, sum to 1.0. Then via von Neuman, in a measurement event, each amplitude has a probability of being "measured" and becoming suddenly classical, proportional to the square of its amplitude and via a magical von Neumann R process, all the probability weight is put on a SINGLE OUTCOME, which is now the measured and classical outcome. But on the Copenhagen interpretation, which I favor over the multiple worlds or Bohm interpretations, it is entirely acausal and ontological "chance" which of these amplitudes is measured and becomes "classical".
This random process per unit time is Poisson, so gives rise, when integrated, to an exponential fall off, the familiar half life of radioactive decay.
So now, in an attempt to find a free will, suppose that we imagine a standard quantum event, it might as well be a quantum random radioactive decay, bad for my brain but fine for my point. Then I walk down the street, presto the decay occurs, and I kill the old lady.
Am I responsible for this "act of free will"? No, it was quantum random. I have no responsibility.
So we are stuck: If classical, no responsible free will. If quantum no responsible free will.
These are the horns of the modern dilemma about a responsible free will.
Can the Poised Realm, where quantum becomes classical, help escape the horns of this dilemma? Yes, at least partially:
Help comes in the predicted and confirmed processes called the Quantum AntiZeno Effect. Here, as seen in supercooled sodium ions, an emergence of classical behavior happens FASTER than a Poisson process and its familiar exponential half life decay! The experimental results, first of their kind, are in, and fit theory, called a Floquet process. Then the behavior is not Poisson, as in "classical" quantum behavior for a closed quantum system. In an OPEN quantum system and it's environment, the Schrodinger equation does not propagate unitarily, for phase information is lost from the system to its environment. One result is that the behavior of the system is no longer standard quantum mechanics "random" or Markovian. The AntiZeno Effect is clearly non-Markovian.
This means that the Poised Realm escapes the horns of the dilemma. If our mind-brain system is quantum-Poised Realm-classical reversibly, its behavior is neither deterministic nor quantum random. The behavior is something else.
So at a minimum the Poised Realm allows us a very first step to escape the modern horns of the dilemma about a responsible free will.
How much might the Poised Realm help? This is almost entirely unknown, for the behaviors of a system of quantum degrees of freedom coupled to one another, and to the classical system that "embodies" them, and receiving quantum and classical input "information" and "acting on its world via quantum, poised realm and classical behavior,t is almost entirely unknown. Among the issues are these: When a quantum degree of freedom decoheres to classicity FAPP, and remains there for a long time, that would seem to ALTER THE HAMILTONIAN OF THE CLASSICAL SYSTEM ITSELF. Rocks that are 4 billion years old are classical very much FAPP and would be parts of the Hamiltonian any physicist would write down.
But then, the alteration in the Hamiltonian of the classical system alters its own dynamics which must ALSO OFTEN ALTER THE BOUNDARY CONDITION HAMILTONIAN OF THE REMAINING QUANTUM SYSTEM.
More, if classical degrees of freedom can recohere to quantum as begins to seem likely, then when they do, that again MODIFIES THE CLASSICAL HAMILTONIAN, AND THEREBY BOTH THE QUANTUM HAMILTONIAN AND THE VERY SET OF QUANTUM DEGREES OF FREEDOM IN THE SYSTEM.
A first point, a crucial point, becomes this: The above embodied quantum-poised realm-classical system, with quantum and classical inputs and outputs is clearly processing information and "acting on its world". But the above system is absolutely NOT algorithmic. It is not a Turing machine, the idealization of a classical Cartesian machine whose every behavior is absolutely definite. Then given the above example, even in rude form, we need never again be convinced that the human mind MUST BE ALGORITHMIC.
The universe is richer and contains what I want to call Trans-Turing quantum-Poised Realm-classical information processing and acting systems that are anything but algorithmic.
Of course quantum computers are algorithmic, but they remain fully quantum coherent, while these embodied quantum-poised realm-classical systems do not remain coherent and the Schrodinger equation does NOT propagate unitarily in them, nor does emergence of classicity via at least decoherence constitute the R process of von Neumann. We confront something deeply new.
Now comes a deeper problem. Suppose that we construct such a system or better that our mind-brain system is such a Trans-Turing system. Can it have "responsible free will"?
Here is why the problem is hard. Consider an OUTSIDE third person description by me of the behavior of such a system, eg. a device or your mind-brain system operating in the quantum-poised realm-classical worlds where the Possibles of the quantum BECOME IN THE POISED REALM the Actuals of the classical world. I am not allowed to appeal to something outside of this system at its "free will". But then, ALL I have is my third person description of the behaviors of this Trans-Turing system. What constitutes "deciding"? I want to say that a transition from a quantum to a classical behavior of a degree of freedom, from the Possible of Res Potensia via the Poised Realm, to an Actual Classical event, constitutes DECIDING. But what third person grounds do I have to say that such a transition is "a decision"?
I do find this idea attractive. But I am still trapped. Let this transition from quantum to classical via the poised realm be the becoming of a decision. Fine, but is all this wonderful quantum-poised realm-classical new behavior a "responsible free will"?
Here are at least some of the issues: 1) Agency. In physics there are only happenings, no doings. Agents "do things". But given the third person description of the Trans Turing system, there are still only happenings. Where can we get agency and doings?
In Investigations I posited doings in molecular autonomous agents, fully classical systems that reproduced and did work cycles. I still like that, but I "posited" doings, eg as a Wittgensteinian "language game".
Can we do better?
I do NOT know. It seems we need first person experience and hence qualia - my awareness of the redness of red, or my deciding, to get agency without just positing it. How do we get there? I am coming to the slow conclusion that there is no pathway from third person descriptions to agency, hence experience and qualia.
I have blogged about consciousness being participation in "the Possible", Res Potentia. But that too does not give qualia.
Perhaps we could show that consciousness IS participation in "the Possible", for example by showing that 500 Duke undergraduate students concentrating on a two slit experiment could reduce interference patterns, but not if asleep. You see, constructive and destructive interference imply that the "real possibilities" of QM interact non-causally and change the classical outcome, as in the interference pattern. So perhaps we can show that consciousness does have an acausal consequence for quantum interference by reducing it in the two slit experiment. This would support Bohr's belief that mind is somehow "constitutive of the world".
In my blog "To Be Is To Be Perceived" , I made use of a feature of the Shor theorem for correcting decohering degrees of freedom in a quantum computation, that implies that any such correction merely shifts the decoherence from the decohering quantum system to the ENVIRONMENT. To my amazement, this implication of Shor's theorem could yield a conscious observer, the quantum-poised realm-classical observing system, consciously "aware" of the two slit experiment, exporting decoherence from within that observer to the environment, hence reduce two slit interference. Shor, plus the hypothesis that consciousness participates in Res Potentia, the Possible, may yield Bohr's consciousness "constitutive of the world".
But even that amazing result would not suffice to explain qualia.
We all have experiences. Perhaps we just have to accept this as a feature of the entire universe, as A.N. Whitehead does, or perhaps limited to Res Extensa and Res Potentia interacting via the Poised Realm in mind-brain Trans-Turing systems. I know no adequate answer, along with the rest of us.

The Contributors of '13.7: Cosmos And Culture' Blog

Welcome to 13.7, an opinion blog set at the intersection of science and culture.

The contributors to this blog are convinced that scientists must engage in the public debate of what science can and cannot do.
Science and its imperatives are deeply embedded in all aspects of human endeavor and human history. Science has shaped culture and, just as importantly, culture has shaped science.
This blog is a platform in which science and the domains of human culture, spirituality and imaginative capacity can speak to each other, addressing the extraordinary and pressing issues we face in this new century.
(P.S. In case you haven't guessed, clicked or Googled yet, the name refers to the estimated age of the universe — 13.7 billion years.)

The contributors are:
Adam Frank fell in love with astronomy when he was 5 years old and the affair has never cooled.
Late one night in the family library, the future Professor Frank found the keys to the Universe sketched out on the covers of his dad's pulp-science-fiction magazines. From astronauts bounding across the jagged frontiers of alien worlds to starships rising to discovery on pillars of fire, the boundless world of possibilities on those covers became the one he was determined to inhabit.
Later the love for astronomy transformed into a passion for the practice of science itself when his father's simple explanation of electric currents and sound waves turned the terror of a booming thunderstorm into a opportunity to marvel at the world's beauty.
Now a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, Adam Frank studies the processes which shape the formation and death of stars and has become a leading expert on the final stages of evolution for stars like the sun.
Frank is a theoretical/computational astrophysicist and currently heads a successful research group. He holds a joint appointment at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, a Department of Energy Fusion lab. As a post-doc he was awarded the prestigious Hubble Fellowship and in 1997 he was awarded an NSF Career award.
Frank described himself as an "evangelist of science." His commitment to showing others the beauty and power of science has led him to a second career as a popular writer and speaker on the subject. For the last 16 years Frank has published numerous popular articles on everything from planet formation to the quantum mechanics of honey bee dances (a piece that inspired a major art installation).
He has been a regular contributor to Discover Magazine and Astronomy Magazine (where he serves on the editorial advisory board) and has written for Scientific American, Sky & Telescope, Tricycle and many other publications. In 1999 Frank was awarded an American Astronomical Society prize for his science writing.
In January 2009 his first book, The Constant Fire, was published by the University of California Press. This year his work will appear in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009. The Constant Fire was chosen one of SEED magazine's "Best Picks of the Year."
Read Adam Frank's first post for 13.7:
Crossroads Real And Imagined: Why I'm Here.
Marcelo Gleiser is the Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He has authored over 80 refereed articles, is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a recipient of the Presidential Faculty Fellows Award from the White House and the National Science Foundation.
Marcelo is the author of the books The Dancing Universe, The Prophet and the Astronomer and the forthcoming A Tear at the Edge of Creation (Free Press, April 2010). He is a frequent presence in TV documentaries and writes often for magazines, blogs, and newspapers on various aspects of science and culture.
Read Marcelo Gleiser's first post for 13.7:
Science For A New Millennium
Ursula Goodenough is a professor of biology at Washington University, where she teaches cell biology and molecular evolution. Goodenough also heads a lab that studies 1) the molecular basis for sexual life-cycle transitions in a green soil alga and 2) the production of triglycerides as a potential source of algal biodiesel.
She was trained at Harvard and Columbia. She has served as president of the American Society of Cell Biology and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Goodenough's avocation is an exploration of the religious potential of our scientific understandings of nature, generating a book, The Sacred Depths of Nature (Oxford), and long-term participation in the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science.
Stuart Kauffman is an experimental and theoretical biologist.
Kauffman has written about three hundred articles and four books: The Origins of Order (1993), At Home in the Universe (1995) and Investigations (2000), published by Oxford University Press. Most recently he published Reinventing the Sacred (2008), Basic Books.
Kauffman is well known for arguing, in Origins of Order and At Home in the Universe, that self organization, as well as Darwin's natural selection, are twin sources of order in biology. Thus we must rethink the becoming of the biosphere.
Investigations and Reinventing the Sacred argue, radically, that the becoming of the universe, biopshere, economy, and culture cannot be sufficiently described by natural laws, but are creative and open, that we not only do not know what will happen, but do not even know what can happen. Thus, reason is an insufficient guide to living our lives forward and we must reunite our entire humanity, find a sharable sense of the sacred, and a global ethic to undergird the generative coevolution of our 30 or more civilizations.
Kauffman holds bachelor's degrees from Dartmouth and Oxford. He earned his M.D. at the University of California Medical School. He has held faculty positions at the University of Chicago, National Institutes of Health, University of Pennsylvania, the Santa Fe Institute, and, most recently, was the Founding Director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary.
He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, was awarded the Gold Medal of the Acadamia di Lincea of Rome and holds an honorary doctorate from the Universite catholique de Louvain in Belgium.
Kauffman now splits his time between an appointment with the Finland Distinguished Professor Programme (FiDiPro) at Tempere University and another appointment with The University of Vermont's Complex Systems Center.
His current experimental work involves inducing cancer cells to differentiate into normal, non-proliferating cells to achieve cancer differentiation therapy.
Kauffman has also founded three companies, Darwin Molecular, GenPathway, both biotechnology companies, and BiosGroup, founded with Ernst & Young, to apply complexity models to business.
Read Stuart Kauffman's first post for 13.7:
Entering A New Time For Our Co-Evolving Civilizations
Alva Noë is a philosopher working on perception and consciousness.
He is the author of Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From The Biology of Consciousness (Hill and Wang, 2009) and Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004). His new book Varieties of Presence will be published by Harvard University Press in 2011. He is now at work on a book about art and human experience.
Alva Noë is philosopher-in-residence at The Forsythe Company (a leading European contemporary dance company based in Frankfurt and Dresden). He is also a member of Motion Bank, an interdisciplinary dance research project in Frankfurt.
Alva Noë is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. He was educated at Columbia (BA), Oxford (BPhil), and Harvard  (PhD). He has held visiting positions at the Institut Jean-Nicod, a CNRS lab in Paris, France; the Oxford Center for Neuroscience at Oxford University in the UK; the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin) in Germany; as well as at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and the Department of Logic and the Philosophy of Science at UC Irvine. He was an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz.
Alva Noë co-created and appeared on stage in What We Know Best, a work performance art, at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt, Germany (premier: 27 August 2010).
Alva is the father of two young boys.

Is Time In A Hurry?

 

by Marcelo Gleiser

Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images

 

Time keeps on flipping into the future. 

Well, 2009 is almost over. To me at least, and I bet to most of you, it went way too fast. On average, it was a year like any other, with some new things to celebrate and others to lament. (I'll abstain from listing them. Each person has her own list.) But it's hard to shake off the feeling that everything happened faster, that time seems to be in a hurry to get somewhere. Sometimes, people ask me if it's possible, from a physics perspective, for time to be passing faster. It can't.
According to the theory of relativity, time can slow down but not speed up. There are a few ways to do this. For example, you may move faster than other people. If you get to speeds close to the speed of light, time will slow down for you relative to the others. Hard to do, as the speed of light is a whopping 186,400 miles per second, in round numbers. Or, you may go live on the surface of the Sun. Time there would tick slower than here as well. But that's really not what people have in mind when they wonder about time. The question is about our psychological perception of time. And I am sure many of you would agree that sometimes it does feel like time is on a roller coaster.
Time is a measure of change. If nothing happens, time is unnecessary. So, at a personal level, we perceive the passage of time in the changes that happen around and within us. What's interesting is that—as anyone who has tried to meditate knows—even if you shut off all your senses, time keeps ticking away. As our thoughts unfold, our brains give us time. To "quiet the chatter" is the big challenge for going deeper into a meditative state, to be in the now.
The passage of time is about the ordering of events, things that happen one after another. Numbers, some say, are devices that were created to help us order time. Maybe, although counting chicks is also very useful if you are a hen. However, if we are to order events, we must remember them. Ergo, the perception of time is deeply related to memory. If our memories were to be erased, we would revert to the wonder of babyhood, where time extends forever. The more we have to learn, the more memories we make, the slower time passes. Routine, sameness, makes time speed up. Since routine is not usually equated with fun, this seems to go contrary to the "time flies when you're having fun" dictum. What's going on here?
  The answer may be in the level of mindful engagement, that is, in how tuned-in your brain is to what you are doing. Newness, as in fun newness, works as a flood of information and places the focus on the immediate. There is no ordering between events yet and not sense of the passage of time. I have felt this disengagement when lost in a calculation for hours or trying out a new trout stream with my fly rod. This is the opposite of routine, where new memories are not being made and the now is all there is. But maybe someone will prove me wrong.
In physics, things are simpler. Time is a fundamental quantity, something that cannot be defined in terms of anything else. There are some issues with this, that we will address some other time. (Sorry...) The second is the universal unit, and it's defined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations between two levels of the cesium-133 atom. Very different from the tick-tack of old mechanical clocks, which are not very reliable.
Einstein had a colloquial definition of the relativity of time: by the side of a pretty girl an hour feels like a second; if you burn your hand on the stove, a second feels like an hour. His special theory of relativity showed that the simultaneity of two events depends on how they are observed: what may be simultaneous for one observer will not be for another moving with respect to the first. Be that as it may, even in physics the ordering of time is essential: that's causality, causes preceding effects so that the present vanishes into the past and the future becomes the present.
At the cosmic level, there is a well-defined direction of time: the expansion of the universe, which has been going on for 13.7 billion years, pointing resolutely forward. Link it to our own passage through life, and we have a well-defined asymmetry of time, what's sometimes called time's arrow . There is not much we can do to escape this at the physical level. But at the psychological level, to slow down time we have to engage our minds, create more memories, absorb knowledge. Perhaps I will leave my guitar aside for a while and start playing the piano.

The Faster We Live, The Shorter We Seem To Be On Time

 

by Ursula Goodenough and Michael C. Kalton

Karim Sahib/AFP/Getty Images

The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, another magnificent sign of humanity's recent disconnect from a grounding in the slower processes of nature. 

Our understanding of the natural world has undergone astonishing transformations in recent times.
We now understand the cosmos to have undergone a 13.7-billion-year evolutionary process, our planet to have undergone a 4.5-billion-year evolutionary process and life on our planet to have undergone a ~3.5-billion-year evolutionary process. We now understand that we humans share a common ancestor with all the other creatures on the planet — that we are all genetically related — with more complex traits emergent from less complex traits. We understand that humans appeared on the planet a mere 150,000 years ago. And we understand that the planet — as a whole — is an ecosystem composed of countless sub-ecosystems. Each sub-ecosystem is emergent from the relationships between its parts, where the parts — the organisms and their environmental contexts — are continuously in flux, continuously engaged in the evolutionary process of variation and natural selection.
Given these understandings, we have come to discard the simplistic notion that biological evolution entails "survival of the fittest," since there is no such thing as "the fittest". Rather, evolution involves a myriad ways of fitting in.
Creative adaptive strategies emerge with each new element of change and complexity in the system. With every change in climate, or in available energy resources, or in the kinds and numbers of other creatures, novel opportunities may be created and expected opportunities may fail to materialize. To fit in to an ecosystem is to be adapted to it, to anticipate its parameters, to live out a life in that context.
The obvious exception to these maxims is the human. We humans not only anticipate the parameters of natural systems; we also manipulate them.
  We are "niche constructors" — the familiar prototype being the beaver who dams up streams and inhabits the resultant lake. We inhabit not only the planetary ecosystem but also the human-made language-based system we call culture, allowing us access to information accumulated from generation to generation. Therefore, whereas novel genetic ideas require millennia to become established, language-based ideas can be transmitted and evaluated in increasingly rapid timeframes.
As a result, human activity is no longer directly shaped by the global ecosystem, although it must ultimately harmonize with it, and our abilities to anticipate and manipulate have grown to the point where the evolutionary mandate of adaptive fit is far less evident than our spectacular ability to adapt the environment to fit our purposes. It is indeed this state of affairs that generates our sense that the name of the game is who is the fittest. The fittest humans are often understood be those who best manipulate their contexts to suit their purposes, and we have extrapolated this perception to declare that evolution is all about such dynamics of power.
This disconnect between our perception of how things work and how things actually work is generating countless planetary and existential crises. We have specialized and elaborated our rapid temporal framework and achieved unprecedented mastery over our immediate circumstances, in the process detaching our responses from groundings in the slower processes of nature. We have become the fastest-living creature on earth, producing more than the earth can absorb or sustain, changing entire ecosystems and environments faster than lifeforms can adjust, and straining our own capacity to deal with our ever more dense, eventful, experience-packed lives in which the dominant feeling is that we never have enough time.

Michael C. Kalton is a world-renowned expert on Korean Neo-Confucianism who teaches at the University of Washington Tacoma. He holds a joint Ph.D. in comparative religion and East Asian languages and civilizations from Harvard University.

Intelligent Design, No. Darwinian 'Exaptations' and More. Yes.

 

by Stuart Kauffman

Danny Lawson/PA wire/AP

 

Evolution is not the enemy of morality, but its first source. 

Intelligent Design has been discussed in recent blogs and comments. It is either not science, or, if grudgingly taken as science, is disproved. More importantly, I think, those of us who fear evolution need not do so.
Around the globe, 3 billion of us believe in the Abrahamic God, a billion of us do not believe in God, and some 3 billion of us are members of Eastern Wisdom Traditions. The United States is known to be the most religious among first world nations, perhaps because of the religious backgrounds of our colonies.
A large faction of Americans do not believe in evolution. For those of us who are overwhelmingly convinced of the natural origin of life some 3.7 billion years ago and the gradual evolution of the stunning biosphere, it is deeply important to try to understand the resistance to evolution, and with it, a belief by some in the recently proposed "Intelligent Design" arguments.
Some scholars of biblical history, (I don't remember who unfortunately), say, interestingly, that before Newton, Christianity often interpreted the Bible as largely allegorical. With Newton and Celestial Mechanics, there seemed nothing for a theistic God to do, and the Deistic God of the 18th Century, who wound up the universe and let it go to follow Newton's laws, became a new view of God. Others, believers in a theistic God that acts continuously in the universe, came to view the Bible as the literal word of God. If so, then there is the familiar struggle between science and religion where the two disagree. Evolution is a major case.
I suspect the fear of evolution is also based in the view of many that God is the author of our moral laws. Then if the Bible is God's literal word, and yet evolution is true, the Bible, the very word of God, is false, and our morality falls to the ground. Hence some of us hold to Intelligent Design, the idea that organisms are, as ID proponent Michael Behe wrote, "Irreducibly complex", and, as ID proponent William Demsky says, vastly improbable, so are signs of Intelligent Design.
But evolution, in fact, is no enemy of morality. I tell of a story written in an Edmonton Alberta newspaper eighteen months ago. A six month baby was outside in a rocker with the family dog. A rattle snake coiled to strike the infant. The dog stepped between the snake and dog and took six strikes. Why? We cannot prove dogs are conscious, although I am convinced, having our dog Winsor, that dogs are conscious. I think this dog knew perfectly well what it was doing, and was trying to save the baby. Happily, the dog survived.
Franz de Waal, in "Good Natured", writes of a experiment with higher primates: Two were in facing cages, unable to see one another. A third "observer" was in a cage able to see the other two. The experimenter fed one of the two well, and nearly starved the second, and fed the observer well. One day, the experimenter gave the observing primate lots of extra food. What happened? The observer gave the extra food to the starved primate. These, as de Waal says, are signs of the evolution of "prosocial behavior", presumably due to group selection.
No evolution is not the enemy of morality, but its first source.
What then of Intelligent Design?
  Intelligent Design argues that complex traits such as the famous flagellar motor in some bacteria enabling them to swim, are too complex to have evolved. The probabilities of achieving the motor are too remote to have remotely occurred, ID proponents say.
Now, if we take ID to be science, one would think that the next hugely pressing scientific questions would be: who or what is the Designer? And, how does the Designer manage to achieve the designs in organisms? It is no accident that ID proponents do not ask these questions. On the one hand, no one has any idea of a natural mechanism whereby this design and implementation might have occurred. On the other hand, the quiet premise of these ID proponents of what was earlier, as the Dover trial showed, Creation Science, is that the Designer is our theistic God. But to mention God as the Designer would put ID at odds with our separation of Church and State.
How do biologists explain "irreducible complexity" such as the flagellar motor? Largely by our now well discussed Darwinian "exaptations". Other bacteria have been found, and presented in the Dover trial, that have parts of the flagellar motor. In these other bacteria, the parts of the flagellar motor play entirely different functional roles, unrelated to swimming via the flagellar motor. The transition, we believe, to the flagellar motor arose, like the swim bladder from the lungs of lung fish, via Darwinian exapatations. The flagellar motor was never selected for directly and ab initio. It arose by a succession of exaptations, like the three bones of our middle ears from three adjacent bones of an early fish. Furthermore, as I've described before, we can have no probability measure for the evolution of the biosphere into its Adjacent Possible, since we do not know all the possibilities, hence we do not know the sample space of the process, so cannot construct a probability measure. Therefore, the calculations of improbability that the ID proponents make are vacuous.
If ID were taken to be a science, it would make one prediction: Darwinian exaptations do not occur, hence cannot offer an explanation for "irreducible complexity". But exaptations arise in evolution all the time. The one testable prediction of ID that I can think of is false.
So: to all of us, those who believe in God and those who do not: We do not need ID. And to those of us who believe in our theistic God, perhaps the views of those before Newton have merit, the Bible may be partially allegorical, and we need not fear evolution.
Finally, science itself may be transforming. Adam, Frank and I all doubt the reductionist scientific belief that all that happens in the universe is entailed by the fundamental laws of physics. I will be discussing "The Open Universe" in forthcoming posts, trying to show that the becoming of the universe is partially beyond sufficient natural law. If so, we can take the natural creativity in the universe as God, and nature, with all of life, as sacred, to be treasured. And for those of us who believe in a supernatural theistic God, there is room for that God to act in such an open universe, compared to that of Newton. Perhaps a newer science and a sharable sense of the sacred can arise together as a co-evolving ecology of civilizations around the globe forms.

Not Your Father's Objective Reality: 100 Years of Quantum Weirdness

 

by Adam Frank

It's more than a century since physicists stumbled upon the disconcerting fact that Nature acts very differently on the scale of "fundamental" particles then it does on the scales of billiard balls and people.

'What do you do when your best theory of reality offers no guidance about what reality looks like?'

Beginning in the late 19th century, new experiments took us down to regimes measured in the billionths of a meter and physicists were suddenly able to probe a staggering array of new phenomena: the nature of atoms: the interaction between matter and light: the physics of solids at ultra-low temperatures.
The experiments unveiled bewildering new behaviors that proved exceedingly difficult to understand. Attempts to make sense of the experiments using the physics of the day, what we now call "classical physics," failed entirely.
In desperation, and a phenomenal display of human creativity, scientists created an entirely new branch of physics we now call quantum mechanics. The difference between classical and quantum physics is the difference between "common sense" and something else entirely. Our common sense classical physics derives from stuff that is "about our size" (for a physicists this can mean anything from millimeters to mountain-sized objects). As kids we play with rubber balls, ride our bikes and scream our heads off on roller coasters. All of these experiences condition us to expect certain kinds of behavior from the world of "things". But as Niels Bohr once said "Atoms are not things."
I will eschew describing the various examples of quantum weirdness here. Wave-particle duality, the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, the Problem of Measurement, Entanglement - the list is long and I cannot do any justice to it in a single blog post. What I do want to note here, however, is an important point for our discussions of Cosmos and Culture.
What do you do when your best theory of reality offers no guidance about what reality looks like?
  100 years or so ago we were forced to abandon the classical physics, "billiard ball" picture of reality. What replaced it was not, however, a new set of pictures. The language of quantum mechanics that emerged was rooted in an abstract mathematical formalism, which didn't allow one to imagine an electron the way you imaged an ordinary object like, for example, a chair or a rock. While the mathematics borrowed broad ideas like the conservation of energy from classical physics, it did not provide a way to "picture" what was happening the way classical physics did. You could not imagine, or draw a sketch on paper, the "things" quantum physics described. This is the origin of many of the paradoxes in Quantum Mechanics - like Schrodinger's Cat - that point us to a world radically unlike our everyday experience.
Early on I asked a professor how I was supposed to think about quantum objects like, say, an electron. I have never forgotten his answer, "In quantum mechanics an electron is simply that to which we ascribe the properties of an electron". Wow. That was really helpful. This kind of thing is not what I was thinking when I imagined being a physicist.
Make no mistake; Quantum physics is a triumph of human creativity and the power science. The magnitude of this triumph is evident in the culture transforming technologies quantum physics engendered from the laser to the microchip. Nonetheless, the reality it reveals is very, very weird and that leads me to my second point.
Reality, a'la quantum physics, has been very, very weird for more than 100 years.
For all the enthusiastic efforts of generations of smart scientists, the weirdness of quantum physics has not gone away. New, ever more powerful experiments have only deepened the conclusion that whatever sense reality makes at a fundamental level, it is not common.
So how does culture absorb this fact?
The first wave of reaction appears to have been the New Age movement of the 1960s and 1970s. New Age enthusiasms embraced quantum physics as proof that consciousness was more important than matter and that the world was imbued with spiritual realities of great and grand potential. It seemed very exciting. Unfortunately it was wrong, missing the essential point that quantum mechanics doesn't really "say" anything. It raises questions. It does not answer them. The New Age movement with movies like the infuriating "What the Bleep Do We Know" just inserted its own pictures into a theory that does not allow them.
Hopefully this first wave has passed and we are ready for a deeper discussion about how culture absorbs the quantum. Its weirdness is persistent and an idea like that is too powerful to simply rest at the edges of human activity.

Science And The Question Of Origins I: Creation And The Big Bang

 

by Marcelo Gleiser

Adolf Schaller/NASA

After the primeval fireball: An artist's concept of the early universe. 

This will be the first of a series of postings on how modern science deals with the ancient question of origins. For as long as we have records, different cultures have dealt with the question of the origin of all things. Where did everything come from? Across history, creation myths have tried to deal with this issue from a supernatural perspective. In most (but not all!) cases, a God, or Goddess or an ensemble of gods create the world and its inhabitants. For us in the West, the most familiar creation narrative(s) is that of Genesis 1 and 2. Here, an all-powerful God creates all that is ex nihilo: creation out of nothing. God, an absolute power that transcends the limits of space and time, decided for mysterious reasons to create the world. In most creation narratives, the absolute power separates light and shadow, cold and hot, man and woman, that is, it polarizes reality: only a transcendent power existing beyond the separations that we perceive in everyday reality can possibly create that reality.
Science has slowly but surely encroached on what was once religion's exclusive territory. It is now perfectly legitimate to research questions related to what I call the "three origins": cosmos, life, and mind. In fact, to many scientists, these are the most fascinating questions. How far can science go in explaining the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the existence of consciousness? Today, I wanted to say a few words about the origin of space and time, aka, the big bang.
During the twentieth century, our knowledge of the universe underwent an extreme revolution. In 1924, American astronomer Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way, our home galaxy, is one among billions of others, separated by millions of light-years. In 1929, Hubble revealed to the world that the universe is expanding: these galaxies are moving away from each other, at speeds that increase with their separation. Soon, this expansion was interpreted as the expansion of space itself: contrary to popular belief, galaxies are not like shrapnel from an explosion, but are carried away by the stretching of space itself. As Einstein's general theory of relativity showed, space (and time) is plastic, amenable to stretching like a rubber band. Playing the movie backwards, as we go back into the distant past, galaxies are moving towards one another up to the point where they are on top of each other: matter reaches enormous densities and pressures and the temperature soars. Close to the beginning of time, the universe was incredibly hot and dense. It is this initial state, highly unstable, that unleashed the expansion of space that we call the big bang.
In truth, things are not so simple. There may have been a phase even before this one, which we call inflation, where the universe stretched with speeds above that of light. But for now, let's stick with the view of the cosmos circa 1970. (I will get to the next 40 years soon enough.) The question then is, ok, but how did this compressed ball of matter come to be?
  Here things get messy. Classically, the theories we use to describe the primeval fireball break down. Energies go to infinity, the "size" of the universe goes to zero. Clearly, something is wrong. And what's wrong is that you can't use classical theories to describe the origin of the universe. You need to incorporate quantum effects. The problem is that we don't have a theory that marries classical gravity with quantum mechanics. The leading contenders, superstrings and loop quantum gravity, are still far from providing answers. Even so, we do know that, in the beginning, space-time was quantum mechanical. As such, energies can fluctuate according to the uncertainty principle and, amazingly, the universe itself can be a quantum fluctuation with zero energy: the scientific version of creatio ex nihilo. Out of quantum nothingness comes space. Let's suppose that we have a theory that does this in acceptable, empirically-validated ways. Is this the solution to the origin of the universe? I'd say it is a solution, a scientific version of creation. It turns out that science needs a framework, a scaffolding to operate: principles, laws, concepts such as energy, space, time, matter. It's always possible to contemplate reality beyond all of this, beyond the reaches of scientific conceptualization. In other words, since science can't explain itself, it can't completely answer the question of the origin of all things. Unless, of course, science becomes something new, capable of coming up with the "theory of theories," that explains even why there is such a thing as science and a universe that follows certain rules and not others. But that seems to be very far away.