More about Determinism

This is a continuation of the last blog entry dealing with the conflicts between the two types of determinism and our commonly held belief that we all have free will.

If we buy the idea that physics applies to everything—that is, that in principle everything is reducible to physics—then Type 1 determinism is inescapable. The universe is just a set of particles and energy fields which evolve according to set rules of behavior. It does not matter if the particles and fields are the ones we think we know of today, or whether the laws of physics that we think we know are even correct, or even approximately correct. The point is that the perspective of physics assumes that there are laws, and that all is mechanism deep down. The “conglomerates” that form, whether they are rocks, planets, molecules, or animals are not only subject to these laws, but all of the behavior of these forms is basically mechanical. The apparent ability of life forms to initiate movement is in this picture an illusion.

This picture is not changed even if we imagine that the idea of parallel universes is valid, for in the sense I am using the word universe it applies to everything that is, all of reality, whether we can see or detect it or not. Nor does anything change in this mechanistic picture if we suppose that the laws of physics or the associated “physical constants” change with time, provided we assume that there is some “meta law” that prescribes how these change.

To formalize this argument in a simple way, let’s denote the universe (in the sense described above) as U. Let’s imagine that a particular object (a clump of “stuff”) within it is X, and further that X is an animal that seemingly can spontaneously decide to initiate movement or action. On the mechanistic view, U’s future state is in entirely determined, as is every portion of it, including the component X. In fact, in a sense, there is no “future’ in this picture, because if we include time as a parameter, U is simply static. Let’s also imagine that there are no other life forms other than X---that is, U-X is non-life, so that from X’s viewpoint U-X is only undetermined because of his own influence on it. That is, X “imagines” that it is free to move and to create a future for itself that is not determined in advance. And since its “stuff” is part of U, it influence through mechanistic interactions U-X. But in the mechanistic view, X is not justified in believing this (of course, this belief is forced on X in the deterministic picture, which is just one of the many absurd aspects): X is just a portion of U, and evolves without any novelty emerging …all is essentially static, time is just a parameter. The future state is entirely fixed, and nothing creative or surprising can happen. The closed system never really changes…nor does any portion of it, such as our subject X.

In particular, as I said in the last blog entry, unless we assume that life forms are somehow different and at least partially outside the mere influence of mechanical forces, this picture is inescapable. Now if we imagine that the U is “tinkered with” on the outside (in some ‘space” or supernatural” realm) then non predictability enters, but it is not really due to the spontaneous motion of the animals(X’s), but rather it is being altered intermittently (or perhaps constantly) by an outside agent. This still does not seem to offer an escape from mechanism with the U….it just means that the U is an “open system”. It might still be closed, but at a “higher level” than U. Maybe we call refer to a meta U, U*, or something along that line.

Now, I argued in the previous blog entry that Type 2 determinism (the view that nature plus nurture plus randomness causes all animal behavior) is incompatible with the above Type 1 determinism. Type 2 tends to be the favored paradigm of the modern person, especially the social scientists of today (who also usually emphasize the “nurture” side of the mix, possibly for “politically correct” motives). If we try to imagine that both Type 1 determinism and Type 2 hold, then the behavior of X would seem to be “over-determined”. That is, the action of X must be “caused” (the premise of both types of determinism), and the action cannot be caused at once by both mechanisms. Either physics mechanisms (broadly understood) or nature plus nurture plus randomness must cause the animal’s action at any given time, not both.

Now, maybe the advocates of Type 2 really believe in Type 1, but think that this is not a useful picture, any more than it would be to try and understand the behavior of a computer purely in terms of the electron motions and currents in the wires and chips. That is, the Type 2 advocate might claim that they are taking a higher level of integration perspective, recognizing that, at some unfathomable level, Type 1 still rules. OK, but this would be beside the point philosophically---the point is that I do not see how one can avoid accepting Type 1 unless one postulates that life is something fundamentally different than the non-life stuff that obeys deterministic (mechanistic) laws. There is no way to get outside of this deterministic picture otherwise.

The key ingredient that is left out of this picture is “consciousness”, which is surely the most amazing and mystifying phenomena in the universe. Does anyone doubt that nebula and planetary system are subject to purely mechanical forces, and in fact would be totally determined by mechanical forces if there were no consciousness in the universe to inject novelty? Now, galaxies and nebula we know from Hubbell can be amazing and surprising to us viewing them, much in the way that fireworks displays astonish and wow us…but no one would claim these is any novelty in the sense of these being anything unpredictable in their behavior.

Somewhat oddly, it seems to be the people in the hard science of physics that tend to speculate that all is not physics. For example, the well known theoretical physicist A. Zee, in his masterful popular science book Fearful Symmetry says

“Ultimately, the discussion [regarding consciousness] comes down to the question of whether science can explain life; that is, whether there is a “life force”, for lack of a better term, outside the purview of rational thought. Is human consciousness merely the result of a bunch of neurons exchanging electromagnetic pulses? Is the thinking brain just a collection of quarks, gluons, and leptons” I don’t think so. Do I have a cogent reason? No, it is just that, as a physicist, I do not have enough hubris to believe that physics can be all encompassing……”.

I am pleased to see that I am in such good company in questioning whether all is mechanism. And today it must be hard for anyone in physics or cosmology to be smugly dogmatic in the opposite direction, in view of the recent discoveries of dark energy and dark matter. Though these do not fall outside the realm of mechanism, they do suggest we might be in for a lot of surprises about the nature of reality. And though I do not want to go into this here, some of the recent work in quantum mechanics suggests non local effects in the universe that seem to violate the classical thinking of cause and effect in a space time continuum.

But after all of this, I have to say that I find it very hard to escape from Type 2 determinism. What other factors could possibly be involved in a mental or physical decision and action? There seems to be no way to even frame the concept of “free will” that involves any factor outside of the nature-nurture-randomness axis. Anyone that is at all interested in this free will issue should read Martin Gardner’s chapter on this in his book “The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener”. In this brilliant essay, “Why I am not a Determinist or a Haphazardist” (the latter being the term he uses for a person believing that human action is caused by random influences), Gardner considers the relevant views of a great many philosophers and artists: Immanuel Kant, William James, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sarah Teasdale, Alfred North Whitehead, C. S. Lewis, Spinoza, Samuel Johnson, and H. L. Mencken, to list just a few. Gardner seems to conclude that the best we can do when considering the issue of free will and determinism is to fathom its incomprehensibility.

[to be continued]

Thinking on the Vastness of the Universe

The Universe is very, very big…I think we all know that. Probably most people don’t think about that very much, as it doesn’t really impact their everyday lives. But I’ll bet that a significant number of us love to think about it, and find it a source of awe and wonder.

And some that think about it seem to find it existentially disturbing. A good example is the attitude consistently expressed by the great cosmic horror writer, H. P. Lovecraft, whose stories often refer to "vast gulfs of time and space”, and tend to regard human beings as insignificant when compared to the vastness of time and space.

In his short story “The Call of Cuthulu”, Lovecraft begins with:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity……some day the piercing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we will either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

Lovecraft combined this feeling for the awesome sweep of space and time with a sort of gothic blackness along with a distinctly misanthropic tendency. In particular, one feels that to some extent he was using the hugeness of things to show how puny the affairs of humans are. This is, I think, a bit of a fallacy, because our importance (or lack thereof) should not really have anything to do with our relative size.

The attitude that the magnificent size of the universe does render us insignificant is brilliantly spoofed in Monty Python’s film, “The Meaning of Life”, in the “live liver donor” scene: in this skit, some medical technicians collecting organs from donors try to convince a woman to let them rip out her liver while she is still alive. To persuade her, they materialize a guy (Eric Idol) in a vested suit who sings a catchy song to her about the dimensions of the cosmos. Interestingly, the lyrics to the song appear to be based on, for the most part, reasonable estimates of galactic and cosmic parameters. The skit can be viewed on the web, and the lyrics to the “Galaxy Song” can be found at many sites. My interpretation of this scene is that it shows that our personal pain and agony are real, essentially filling ones "subjective universe", and the size of the universe is irrelevant to making a decision involving subjecting oneself to live liver removal.

In the case of Lovecraft, I think there was a another attitude at work with him, in that he was truly fascinated by physics and cosmology (probably way ahead of his time in that regard) and his cosmic horror fantasies allowed a playful way for him to indulge the emotion and to stretch his imagination.

Another person who made some relevant remarks about the dread that can accompany thinking on the cosmos, and man’s place within it, was the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. For example, some of my favorite Pascal quotes (taken from his work “Pensées” of 1670) are:

“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”

“Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it.”

“[I feel] engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.”

Note that, in that last quote, Pascal throws in the interesting twist that it is the “eternal silence” of the spaces that he finds scary. I wonder if by that he meant that we earthbound animals seem to be totally alone? Or did he mean something else by it? In any case, I find it to be a nice poetical touch.

I think everyone can agree on the utter impossibility of really comprehending the galactic and cosmic sizes and characteristic times the way we would with most everyday objects and events. However, we can write down the numbers, and, in a way, understand the magnitude of what is involved. The use of analogous ratios can help put things in some perspective, and give some insights. Some of these will be considered below.

Based on information gleaned from various wikipedia sites (1,2), the following are some of the dimensions characterize galaxies and the cosmos:
(1) A typical galaxy diameter ranges from 1000 to 100,000 parsecs, or about 3000 to 300,000 light years. This is about 20 million billion miles at the small end of the range…wow, an inconceivable distance, really.
(2) A galaxy can contain anywhere from 1E7 to 1E12 stars…that is, ten million to a trillion.
(3) A typical spacing between galaxies is even bigger, perhaps about 1 Mega-parsecs, or 3 million light years. Thus, the distance between galaxies is about 10 to 1000 times the size of a galaxy.
(4) The number of galaxies in the universe has been estimated to be about 1E11, or a hundred billion (the Monty Python song actually overestimates the number of galaxies as being “millions of billions”---so maybe hold on for giving up that liver!).
(5) The average density of the universe is very small, about 30 orders of magnitude smaller that the density of water.
(6) The estimated radius of the “known universe” is 46 Billion Light Years.

A number of amusing examples can be considered to give some insight into these facts.

The average size of an atom (e.g., Helium) is about 100 pico-meters (or an angstrom, 1E-10 meters). The spacing between molecules in a gas at 1 atmosphere is about 3 nano-meters, or about 30 times the size of an atom. It is amusing to note that this is in the range of the ratio of a larger galaxy to a typical inter-galactic spacing.

How long would it take for a jet airplane to cover the distance equal to the diameter of a typical galaxy? If we take the small end of the range, 20 Million Billion miles, and consider the plane to fly at a steady 500 mph, this is over 4 billion years. Longer than the time that life has been on the earth. Indeed, it takes 3000 years for light to cross it, which of course is what 3000 light years means. And since a jet flies about a million times slower than light speed, it takes it a million times longer to traverse a given distance. If we consider a plausible spacecraft traveling a hundred times faster than a jet, it would take it a mere 40 million years to cross this ‘small” galaxy. We can see that any kind of conventional spacecraft will not be able to do the kinds of exploration depicted in the Alien movies. Now, if Star-trek like “warp speed” or worm-hole travel becomes possible, who knows what the limits might become (maybe there would be none).

So, a galaxy can contain a trillion stars. Consider the human body—according to most of the web sites (do a google search on “how many cells in a human body”) there are about 50 trillion, more than the number of stars in the largest galaxies.

According to point (5) in the above list, the average density of the matter in the universe works out about to correspond to about one hydrogen atom per cubic meter. (Cosmologist Alan Guth has been quoted as saying that this is about 10 million times a better vacuum that can be attained in our laboratories). This low density seems to suggest that the universe is mostly nothing. If one can buy that, the answer to the old puzzle, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” would be, “Well, it is nothing”. Maybe that would be an amusing quip. But seriously, there are significant regions of the universe where “something” is clearly happening….not only galaxies and black holes and Quasars, but the amazing, seemingly so unlikely, phenomena of life (at least on one planet that we know of).

Now consider the range of the number of stars (1E7 to 1E12) in a galaxy. If we scale the population of Tokyo (12 million) to the larger number, then the smaller galaxy corresponds to about 100 people. Hmmm….we wouldn’t call that a city or even a town, really. Makes you wonder if cosmologists are right in classifying the small guys as galaxies?

But another kind of vastness arises when we consider how small things can be. If string theory is right….I have no idea if it is, nor, I suspect, does anyone else….then the smallness is equally baffling, and can be somewhat scary also. According to string theory, the characteristic dimension of strings is ~ 1E-35 meters, about 20 orders of magnitude smaller that the nucleus of an atom (a proton or neutron, of which several make up a nucleus, are about a femto meter, 1E-15 m, in extent), and this in turn is many orders of magnitude smaller than the typical size of atoms (1E-10 meters). And bigger yet, though still small by macroscopic standards, a typical human cell has a characteristic dimension of the order of ten microns.

A fascinating video, “Powers of Ten” can be watched on the Internet. It is based on a program and a book created by Philip and Phylis Morrison. This brilliant show takes you in steps of ten in both directions from the human scale dimension of one meter, down to the string theory dimension of the small side, and up to cosmic dimensions on the big side.

There is something about all of this that I find stranger, or perhaps I should say more unsettling, than the awesomeness of all these cosmic scale comparisons. Namely, that there must be countless trillions of planets out there that are solid like our planet, and contain rocks, mountains, and maybe even some water. Although some tiny fraction of these might support life, probably the vast majority of them do not, and in fact no conscious observer will ever see any aspect of them from close quarters, or walk around on them. And yet, if any of us were there, we could see them, touch them, etc (provided a suitable space suit environment were provide us, of course). It makes you think about the objective reality of the physical world. Is it really “there”, if no one ever sees it? I suppose I believe it is, but it gives me an odd felling. Much the same feeling is evoked in thinking about our planet in the millions of years it existed without any life yet present. Yet all of that time the wind blew, seas and storms raged, and so on. It suggests something along the lines of the old puzzle “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound”? Many regard such a question as silly, or rather one that just requires an analysis of what is meant by “make a sound”…..but to me the question is not so silly, and makes us dwell on what is meant by objective reality. In what sense are all of these portions of the universe that will never be observed objectively real?…does this kind of thing perhaps hint as to why consciousness exists?…that is, does it suggest the necessary, or at least important, role of conscious observers? But in any case, at the present time and into the near future, all of us humans, no matter how well traveled or worldly we are, will observe and interact with only the most minute portion of the universe.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about all of this, and I find it emotional to think about, is that we human beings have evolved from apes in just a finite number of generations (an almost "countable" of them, perhaps on the order of a million) …and we remain genetically very similar to chimpanzees, according to most evolutionary biologists. Isn’t it stunning to realize that we, related so closely to our ancestral apes, can now can grasp some truths about the physical universe, a universe that is so far “out there” from us and in a sense so far below us in size. I am sure that at the present time there is still much to learn. I know a lot of people, outside of science usually, that seem to almost enjoy gloating about how “we really don’t know much of anything”. Well, for my money the human race will continue to learn more about physical reality, and it will continue to amaze us, and the more stunning it will be the more that is learned.