The Bad Design Argument

 In the study of the history of life on the Earth, there are two and only two reasonable explanations. Either a mind - AKA intelligent agent - played some role in directing evolution over the past 4 billion or so years, as claimed by Intelligent Design theory (ID), or else there was no intelligence involved and life evolved by random chance, natural selection, and other unguided, natural processes, as held by modern Darwinists. Any proposed alternative must be one or other of these, and of course, any mix of these two is still ID at some level. 

At some point in debates about Intelligent Design, you will likely hear comments about how badly the human body (eye, hand, reproduction, etc.) or some other animal is designed. A brief statement will usually follow to the effect that, "God would have made a better design if he was the designer, therefore there is no designer and evolution is true." This presumptive "logic" can come in different guises, usually with along with some supposed examples of "bad design". However, for a variety of reasons, which I will explore, this is a bad argument.

The "bad design" argument is usually brought up by atheists or materialists who do not believe in God. Yet here they pretend to know what God should have done, based on their own ignorance of the design and of any relevant theology. The hubris and irony here are thick! They assume a series of "bad designs" and suggest that those must have come about by an unguided, and hence imperfect, process; i.e. Darwinian evolution. Note however, that even if their examples of poor designs in life were true, even poor designs require a designer! An incompetent designer is still a designer and the "no designer" conclusion does not automatically follow from the "poor design" judgement. ID theory does not require that the designer be the God of the Bible, even if he is the obvious candidate.

Nevertheless, such summary judgements about "bad design" are usually also wrong in the sense that a detailed study often shows that the particular feature in question is in fact a good design for reasons not appreciated by the accuser. One example is the supposedly "reverse wired" human eyeball, where the optic nerves are in front of the retina, thereby blocking some of the light. The human appendix is another example offered as an unnecessary evolutionary left over serving no purpose. These and many other "bad design" claims have been refuted. See this article for some examples.

This raises another point; the person making the "{bad design" call is usually just passing along some meme that he has read or heard and has no real understanding of the biology or physiology in question, much less the alternative explanations. Thus it is often merely an argument from ignorance. A wiser approach would be to learn more about the feature or design in question before passing judgement on it.

In general and especially in engineering design practice, it is impossible to judge someone's design without knowing the design specifications and constraints behind it: the purpose, capabilities, cost, schedule, regulations, available materials, limitations, and so on imposed on the design process and resulting product. As an erstwhile systems design engineer, I can state unequivocally that there is no such thing as a "perfect design". All designs are an attempt to optimize some aspect of the designed item within the constraints of the project. All designs can be "improved" by additional effort and cost, but once a design is deemed "good enough" it is usually released to meet the schedule. 

All designs also involve trade-offs among various parameters and constraints. Without knowing all of those, it is unwise to judge the resulting product or process. Of course, we all complain about products that don't work properly, or that break because they were cheaply made. But those are human-designed products, none of which come close to the complexity and integrity of even the simplest living creature. Humility is therefore a better starting place in judging the fitness and merit of any human design, and even more so for designs found in nature. Indeed, more and more these days engineers are looking at design in nature for ideas on how to improve their own products.

Another point is that no designed thing operates in a vacuum, apart from the rest of the world. Everything is part of some larger system which it must interact with and perform within. Every living thing is part of a broader ecosystem where it plays different roles, and those interactions raise additional constraints that need to be taken into account from the design perspective. For instance, in principle, herbivores could be made faster or more powerful than the carnivores preying on them, but then the carnivores would die out, unbalancing the ecosystem. From the herbivore perspective, they might feel they are poorly designed, but a higher level viewpoint shows that ecological balance is more important.

Since the "bad design" argument is usually an attack on Theism, some additional things may be said about their ultimate target: God and (usually) Christianity. Note that God never claimed that creation was "perfect", he only judged it as "very good". Perfection apart from God is not possible. Moreover, once creation was completed, things started to go down hill quickly, initially due to the Fall and the entrance of sin into the world, which messes with everything (see Genesis 3). 

Moreover, due to entropy, all of the created world, including humans, began to break down and collect imperfections. As with any designed item, wear and tear, environmental effects, usage past its best-before date, abuse, and other realities cause even well-designed things to stop working, break down, or work poorly. Some seeming design problems in humans can be traced to errors finding their way into our genome. For example, humans cannot make Vitamin-C due to a genetic defect, and of course, many diseases can be traced to errors that have crept into our genome over time.

The next time you entertain (or are tempted to make) this "bad design", anti-ID argument, think first and ask yourself, "What have I designed so that I can judge a complex system like the human body?", or "Have I examined the design constraints and purposes for this particular item being judged?" That should slow down the negativity and allow the debate or discussion to proceed in a more useful and meaningful direction. By all means, keep up the discussion, but please base it on defensible evidence and reasonable arguments.

Two-Dimensional Time?

The space-time continuum we inhabit has three spatial dimensions and one time dimension - as far as we know.  For us, it is easy enough to visualize fewer spatial dimensions.  A one dimensional world is merely a straight line.  A two-dimensional world is a plane; e.g. x and y axes on a graph.  In 1884 Edwin Abbott published a fun book called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, exploring how life might be for two-dimensional creatures, and how mystified they are by a 3D visitor to their plane.  Some mathematicians claim to be able to visualize a four-dimensional space with tesseracts, hyperspheres, etc., but that is difficult for us, stuck as we are in 3D space.  Some cosmological theories of reality; e.g. String Theory, call for 6 or 10 or even more dimensions in all, but some of those are supposedly curled up so small that we cannot detect or experience them.

In all of these cases, however, there is but one temporal dimension.  Aside from relativistic time dilation effects, we all share the same passage of time, and the time where you are is the same - apart from time zones - as for me.  We all pass through time - which no one fully understands - at the rate of 60 minutes per hour, and your hour is the same length as mine, even if they feel different subjectively.

One temporal dimension is well understood, even if we do not quite know what time itself is (a deep philosophical conundrum).  An existence having no time - a zero time dimensional reality is easy to think about as a fixed space where nothing ever happens: no movement, change, or even thought, as in a still photograph - not a very interesting existence.  Looking for more complexity, we can ask, could there be more than one time dimension, even in principle?  I have spent some time trying to wrap my mind around what that might mean and how it would work, and finally chanced on a simple way to express and visualize an existence with two temporal dimensions - 2D time.

Consider a teen playing a video game.  The teen has his own passage of time, and the game has another, virtual timeline as events in the game occur.  These two times need not be the same, indeed, they often are not, yet they exist together.  In the game, hours may pass in a few minutes of the teen's time, or the game time may slow down, taking several player minutes to get through a few seconds of intense action in slow-motion.  What's more, the player may save his game and then shut it down, effectively freezing time inside the game, while his own clock continues to tick.  With the "save game" feature, he can even go back to an earlier game time if his avatar "dies" in the game.

Such a game is an example of a computer simulation.  An engineer develops a program in some software to simulate some physical process, in order to better understand what is going on, or to test and optimize his design.  The time dimension in the simulation does not begin until the engineer starts the simulation running at t = 0.  Note that in the simulated reality, there is no "before" this time.  Simulated time does not exist before the simulation begins - or alternatively, it is stuck at t = 0 until the engineer presses the "go" button.  Meanwhile, of course, the engineer's own timeline continues undisturbed; he works, goes home, eats, has coffee breaks, sleeps, etc.

This two dimensional time reality can be visualized in the following graph.  It has two independent time dimensions, te for the engineer's time in the real world, and ts for the timeline in the simulated world.  In this example, there are no spatial dimensions shown; size, shape, motion, etc. do not matter for this explanation.  Of course, a spatial dimension could be added, but that is harder to do on a 2D screen, and unnecessary for the description.  We can walk through events in this 2D temporal plane as follows:

1. At te = 0, the engineer has not yet started the simulation, so ts is stuck at zero, while his te proceeds at the usual rate.

2. the engineer presses "go" and the simulation begins.  If the rate of time passage is the same, the line would then rise at 45 degrees, but in this case, the simulation time runs faster than the real time te.

3. the engineer decides the simulation was running too fast, perhaps missing some details. So he slows down ts to run slower than his own time.

4. the engineer doesn't like what he sees, so he shuts it down, resetting ts to zero.

5. after a break, during which he tweaks some initial conditions or parameters of the simulation, he starts over, this time with a different ts speed.

6. stopping the simulation, he spends some time looking at the results.

7. liking what he sees, he sets ts back to an intermediate value, so that he can watch it again, 

8. finally, the engineer lets the simulation carry on for a longer simulated duration.

With this example, it is easy to see how different realities could experience different time dimensions in the "same" world.  In such a situation, the simulation "experiences" one time dimension, as programmed by the engineer.  The engineer however, experiences, or at least understands, two time dimensions; his own and that inside his simulation.  Note that the engineer's time, te always increases at the same rate.  He cannot stop or go back in time, only move forward at the normal rate.  Note too that other engineers may be running other simulations, each with its own timeline, but presumably those simulations do not interact with each other on different timelines, and so, while there may hypothetically be other parallel time dimensions, they are just different versions of the 2D time discussed here and do not truly add more dimensions.

Another way of considering 2D time is while reading a printed fiction story.  Time begins in the story when you begin reading the book, and it passes as you turn the pages, until you put the book down, which freezes the story's timeline.  The story time may pass quickly or slowly as you read, depending on the context of events in the book.  Indeed, many books jump back and forward in story time as one reads, but you understand the book has a single unified timeline.  In principle, after reading the book through, you - like the author - can consider all of the story timeline at once, at least in memory.

Having understood this approach to two-dimensional time, we could postulate a third time dimension; perhaps God's own timeline above us, in which his eternal time dimension encompasses but transcends ours.  Whether time truly "passes" for God, we do not know, because we cannot envisage, much less experience God's time.  However, he may see all of our timeline at once as we do for the engineer described above, by looking at the above graph.  Over all, in addition to his own divine time dimension, td, God may experience or at least observe and control our created time line, te, along with that in the engineer's simulation, ts, if he is interested in that detail.  Hence, in some sense, for God there can be three-dimensional time!

In principle, the engineer could "play God" by programming a simulation that includes a built-in simpler simulation with its own separate timeline, tss, but that gets rather convoluted, so I won't go there.  Suffice it to say that the concept of a simulated reality makes thinking about two or even three dimensional time more understandable.  Now if your timeline and mine were different, yet we could somehow interact when they came together, that would be closer to actually experiencing two independent time dimensions at once.  That is harder to wrap our minds around, although some sci-fi tales and superhero movies try to do that; e.g. stopping or slowing time for the world while the superhero action continues.

For some further exploration of the weird possibilities that God's control of our timeline might allow, see my previous posting at: https://thopid.blogspot.com/2019/01/our-simulated-world.html  For example, as in the engineer's simulation, God could perhaps stop or even reset our timeline for his own purposes, and we would never know!

Renewable Energy Sanity

 

I like wind power and solar power, I really do. I taught a course on alternative energy once and I worked for years in photovoltaics. I am all for using these technologies where they make sense. Home use, remote sites, and small additions to utility grids are great. But they run into serious problems when trying to fill more than perhaps 20% of the demand load on a power grid.

Any AC power grid has to balance supply (electrical generation in watts) against demand (the total load on the grid in watts) continuously, second by second in order to maintain the voltage and frequency of the grid. A grid consisting of soures and loads has almost no energy storage capacity. If the load exceeds the supply even for a fraction of a second, the voltage will dip, reducing the power to all loads, thereby dropping the total load down to match the instantaneous supply. If the generators push out too much current for the total load at any moment, the voltage will increase and the load will rise to compensate.

A grid with variable sources and varying loads is kept stable by having some control mechanisms, and by adding some storage elements to ride through instantaneous variations less than a second or so. Overall grid loads are somewhat predictable: typically peaking during the afternoon and reaching their minimum in the middle of the night. Weekends and weekdays provide other changes, as do high and low ambient temperature extremes. But any grid needs quick control mechanisms to handle sudden load changes, line faults, or sudden generator shutdowns.

Power generators have different control time frames. A nuclear power plant can be slowly adjusted on an hourly basis, but takes a day or so to properly shut down, and longer to start up. Thus nuclear plants usually provide a steady base load, perhaps up to 40% of the maximum load for the grid. Always on, and almost always the same power supplied into the grid.

Hydroelectric and coal/oil fired plants can be adjusted more quickly, but still take minutes to ramp up or down smoothly. Gas turbine generators are quicker, and are may be used to make minute-by-minute changes to the supply side, in response to other grid changes. Those supplies can therefore make up the variable parts, or peak loads, during the day, often being scheduled (dispatched) ahead of time for the expected changes.

Most grids now have some capacitors or batteries for sub-second control of small, fast changes. These are electronically switched in or out as needed. In some cases, certain loads can be placed under grid control to shut them down if the net supply cannot meet the instantaneous load demand. In this way, a large grid keeps the voltage and frequency within tight constraints as required by the government regulators.

Now add alternative energy into the mix. Solar power drops precipitously when clouds cover the sun, and of course falls to zero at night. Winds are notoriously variable, so wind power output is constantly changing in unpredictable ways. This is not a problem if the sources are a small part of the grid; the existing storage and control mechanisms can make up for the variability using other sources or shutting down loads as needed. However, as governments and people seek to use more "green energy", the percentage of the grid supplied by these alternatives goes up and starts causing major problems for the utility.

Some examples: California, in the summer of 2020 when rolling blackout had to be used because there wasn't enough power from the renewable supplies to meet the demand. Ontario has a similar problem: its contracts with wind and solar require it to pay top dollar for "green energy", whether it is needed or not. As a result, Ontario must often give away megawatts of power to other jurisdictions when the supply exceeds the demand, even as they pay for solar and wind energy, losing money overall in the exchange.

To maintain a stable grid in Ontario, the utiliy keeps gas turbine generators spinning with zero output, to kick in quickly when the wind or solar drops out suddenly. Clearly this is inefficient, and the resulting emissions detract from the supposed pollution-free wind and solar generation.

To grow the percentage of the grid beyond say, 20% wind/solar requires adding massive energy storage capacity. This isn't just a few batteries here and there. If the grid was 60% renewable, for example, it would need many hours of backup storage for those cloudy days, or weeks with little wind, to meet the peak load demand. Worse, when winter comes, there isn't much sunlight: in Ontario, for example, November averages two hours of direct sun per day, compared with perhaps 6 plus hours in June. Trying to balance supply and load over the seasons would require ridiculous amounts of energy storage.

This raises another issue. If you want a 100% renewable energy grid, you need to size the peak supply to more than 200% of the peak load. That is needed to average out the day-night cysles on the solar and the calm/windy weather for wind turbines. That becomes rather expensive, of course. Even if a watt of rated solar power is cheaper than a watt of rated nuclear power, the nuclear can run 80% of the time or more, year round, while the solar can barely operate 30% of the time at that level, at best, and much less in the winter.

For a 100% renewable energy grid in Ontario, the grid would have to provide Terawatt Hours (TWH) of backup energy storage to ride through the ups and downs of the solar and wind generators, while meeting the load demand and matching the load variations. Doing that with batteries would be insanely expensive, even if Ontario could find that much capacity to purchase. 

There are other energy storage technologies. Flywheels, compressed gas and hydrogen storage have all been touted, but they too are pricey or the round-trip efficiency is poor. The best current method is pumped water storage: pump large volumes of water up a high hill to a big reservoir when power is plentiful, then let it run downhill through a hydroelectric turbine when peak power is needed. This can be fairly efficient, and can store lots of energy if you invest in huge pumps, reservoirs and infrastructure. But even so, there are not that many suitable locations.

Fortunately, for places like Ontario, the situation is not quite so dire. Nuclear power plants provide the base supply around 50%. Hydro power provides about 40% of Ontario's supply, and hydro-power sites are often good candidates for pumped storage: you already have the volume, the turbines, and gravitational head, at least in some places. Mind you, you cannot back up or turn off a river very far or for long. 

Most utilities in North America are not so fortunate as Ontario, depending as they do on fossil fuel (coal, oil, gas) for most of their electricity generation. Using nuclear and hydro as your principal sources, and adding solar and wind, with significant storage of some sort, is probably the most practical way to go to get up over 60% non-fossil-fuel supply mix in most locations. Even so, pushing wind and solar beyond perhaps 20% of the total will require massive additional storage of some kind. 

Perhaps at some future time a more steady renewable energy source will be developed, or maybe the cost of large-scale energy storage will drop significantly. Something like that would be essential to get to a fully renewable, reliable utility grid without nuclear and hydro power. Until then, we can make marginal improvements, supply mix adjustments, and storage additions as feasible and financially practical. But until then most utilities will depend on various forms of fossil fuel power generation to keep our electric grids running reliably.

Mental Reality Theory

In philosophy, there is a long-standing debate -very long standing, over thousands of years! - about the fundamental nature of reality. On one side, realists claim that the world we think we see and experience around us is indeed real, made of matter and energy, and that the things we see around us exist apart from our awareness of them. Idealists on the other hand believe that the only reality we know for sure is what is in our minds. Everything else is simply sensations we experience with our minds. There may be no external reality, or it may be quite different from what we think we experience. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_realism

While idealism seems very odd to most at first glance, it is actually a well-founded position, giving rise to the "brain in a vat" idea, or more recently, The Matrix movie series, where what we experience inside our heads does not correspond with what is really happening. Indeed, everything we think we experience is merely nerve impulses coming into our brains. Who knows whether those impulses relate to anything real? Maybe some mad scientist is sending us prepared nerve signals as part of his experiment. Moreover, even the concept of nerves and a brain are based on a supposed external physical reality (EPR) that we have no direct access to. We could, in principle, be a simulation in a computer, or worse, a scripted fictional character just passing through the plot as someone else turns the pages. As weird as it may seem, there is no way to be absolutely certain that one of these situations is not true.

In one current manifestation, idealism is sometimes called Mental Reality Theory (MRT), the claim that all of reality is mere mental activity in some non-physical reality. There is no EPR, no external world. The entire world consists only of mental activity, perhaps shared with other minds at times, but nonetheless, devoid of any actual physical matter or energy. Everything we claim to experience is just sensation of mental activity in our minds.

The proponents of MRT claim that they can prove their case, and they point to a variety of evidence in support. As well as the above fact that all experience is based on sensations perceived only by the mind, they have related arguments. For instance Descartes' "cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) is the only thing anyone can know for absolutely certain. Any other "fact" is based on assumptions, tenets, or presuppositions that cannot be proven.

Recently, MRT advocates also point to quantum physics to "prove" that matter does not truly exist - it is all just interacting wave functions. And they apply the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics to say that mental activity - the observer effect - determines even physical reality.  By discounting matter and energy and expanding the role of thought, they claim support for their views.

But no so fast! While the alternative of believing in an external physical reality cannot be "proven" mathematically, I believe there is considerable evidence available to each of us to cast MRT into doubt and perhaps balance the debate again. I will present several such arguments: consistency, interactions with others, shared reality, children, and surprises, as well as countering the quantum arguments.

First of all, my experience of the apparent external physical reality (EPR) is very consistent over time, far more consistent than I could maintain in my own mind. The room I'm in seems to me very solid, detailed and unchanging except for the normal coherent changes with my movements and attention, and the passage of time. When I wake up each morning, the world seems just as I remember it from the previous day, even if I cannot describe all the details. To create and constantly maintain such consistency only in my mind would be far more than I feel capable of doing. What a waste of mental energy if it is not real!

Of course there are counter arguments. How do I know what I remember is what actually existed the last time I looked? Maybe my memories are being adjusted on the fly. And if my mind is incapable, then some sort of Universal Mind existing in the same mental reality would be more than capable of maintaining the illusion of consistency, which I only tap into from my smaller mind.

Next, there is the question of other minds. Unless I am a solipsist (believing mine is the only mind in existence), then MRT has to account for other people - or rather, other minds. They assume the other minds exist in the same mental reality universe. That is OK, albeit rather vague, but look at how these minds interact. If MRT is true, one would think telepathy would be the obvious way for minds to interact. However, that does not seem to be the case in our experience. Rather, we seem to need to convert thoughts into nerve impulses that control muscles and body parts to create speech, which then goes as sound waves to the other person's ears, to be converted to nerve impulses into his brain before becoming a communication. Interaction at a distance involves additional transducers and physical signal media, like telephones, computers, wireless and electrical circuits, etc. Why depend on such cumbersome, convoluted methods for mind-to-mind interaction if it isn't real? And what does "distance" even mean in a mental reality?  If all of this apparent physical reality is an illusion, how did it come about and why does it seem so real to each one of us?  Perhaps some demon mind is running the experiment, having better control of mental "space" than we have managed, and using it to fool us all?

When these two arguments are combined, they provide a third one: shared experiences. When two people sit down together, they can communicate sufficiently well to be sure that the EPR they experience is identical. The table between us is this colour, that material, an agreed size and shape, and so on, to an almost arbitrary level of detail. They can see, touch, hear and experience the same things and events, without unexplainable differences, aside from the obvious ones of precise location, which way they are each looking, and so on.  In an MRT world, how would that work? How could two minds "move" to meet together, see the world shift as they move, and then experience the same "reality" around them from slightly different, but compatible perspectives, all without prior collusion?  That is never explained, other than by some reference to the Universal Mind controlling everything; perhaps the same mad scientist or demon?

In philosophy, it is often useful to reflect on how children grow and develop in order to address deep questions. MRT has no problem with minds being immature or minds learning and maturing - that is what minds do.  But how does that apply to what children actually do while learning?  Almost all of their learning is based on interaction with the EPR, through touch, sight, movement, sound, etc. Despite parents' and teachers' best efforts, children do not learn much by direct, verbal communication. Nor do they soak up wisdom by osmosis from some Universal Mind.  And then there is the question of how such children come to exist? What is the mental reproduction process that seems to require physical interaction between two and only two different minds? While I haven't read a lot from them, MRT proponents would seem to provide little help there.

An interesting consideration is the concept of "surprise". All through life, unexpected things happen to us all. We stub our toe, we lose our keys, we find a long lost book, we have a surprise party, or an unexpected visit from a friend (or the police!), and so on.  If MRT is true, where are these surprises coming from?  I cannot be creating them myself or they would not be surprising.  One could argue that my subconscious is creating them, but what does that even mean in MRT theory?  Does my mind have purely mental "parts" that work together? The other answer would, again be the Universal Mind creating these situations for me.

The last point, regarding quantum physics, is somewhat different.  MRT people seem not to notice the irony of depending on the results of physics experiments done in the EPR as evidence that the EPR does not exist.  If MRT is all there is, then particles, waves and energy, not to mention all of physical reality, including physics itself, are illusory.  How can an illusion be used to prove its own non-existence?  I expect MRT has some explanation for this seeming contradiction, but at first blush, it looks like an odd approach.

As I see it, to be credible, MRT must fall back on some sort of Universal Mind, which to us would be indistinguishable from "God". This suggests that MRT is metaphysical at its core, and perhaps religious as well. That is OK as long as MRT people do not then try to debunk actual religions and other people's metaphysics.  Indeed, there are related theories that the EPR we experience, including ourselves, is a simulation at some god-like level. That may be conceivable, but it is not quite the same as MRT. In any case, personally I am going to stick with realism, trusting the existence of an EPR, as my view of reality.  And I suggest that MRT advocates operate 99% of the time as if they too accept EPR as the basis for their ongoing existence and experiences.

I did say the debate has been around for awhile. These few paragraphs will not settle it, of course, but it was fun exploring some aspects of the two competing views, and I now wonder, are there only two, or is there a third possibility?