Some scientific ventures and technological projects should stop pretending that there will be a big breakthrough that will change everything. After decades of unfulfilled promises and lack of significant progress, some research areas should be mothballed, or at least scaled back so that the money and effort can be applied elsewhere. Here are some currently expensive science and technology projects that, in my humble engineering opinion, will not pan out as long hoped, notwithstanding all the public hype surrounding them:
Practical Fusion Energy:
The joke for the past 50 years or more has been that fusion power generation is always just 20 years away. It would be great if fusion power became a reality, and some of the research in that area is fascinating, but I think it is safe to say we will not have a practical (much less financially viable) fusion generating plant in this century. Even if the science hurdles could be overcome - and they are still huge - the technology is so esoteric, marginal and complex that building a fusion reactor to operate most of the time for years is way beyond anything conceivable today.
Fusion research focuses in two areas: magnetic and inertial confinement. Magnetic confinement is the original hope, with strong magnetic fields in some three-dimensional configuration, holding a very-high temperature plasma with a high enough density, long enough for tritium and deuterium nuclei to fuse together into helium nuclei. This reaction releases some neutrons and lots of energy, which when thermalized, can drive a normal turbine/generator for electrical power.
The basic problem is trying to maintain the temperature and density high enough to produce more output energy than went into getting the reaction started. The plasma leaks out of the magnetic fields, the strong fields become unstable, and the peak conditions quickly fade. The newest fusion reactors have to use all sorts of special effects and added technology to achieve even momentary energy break-even. And then the system has to be shut down, and refurbished, or at least cleaned up and re-initialized for the next experimental run. Unwanted reaction products pollute the carefully assembled gas cloud. High energy particle irradiate and damage the interior walls of the chamber, and all the external high-power equipment is pushing the envelope of what is technically possible, so is difficult to keep in operation and expensive to maintain.
It seems the best promise is to make the reactor much larger, but that brings its own technical problems, not to mention costs. Slight improvements in materials and better understanding of the physics are unlikely to achieve the major advances needed for a commercially successful fusion station, much less the "energy so cheap, it won't be worth billing for" as originally dreamed.
Inertial confinement schemes suffer even worse problems. In this approach, a small target sphere with metal layers over the reacting Du and Tr atoms inside is carefully injected into the reaction chamber, and then blasted at a precise moment with focused, high-power laser beams on all sides. If everything is perfect, the metal shell is vaporized and blows off, pressing strongly against the reaction gases inside, compressing them enough for a few microseconds, allowing some of their nuclei to fuse together, releasing a lot of energy, which then blasts apart the gas, ending the reaction. Each target is small and expensive to make, and yields only small amounts of energy in a single burst. The hope is that the targets can be made cheaply, and injected and pulsed regularly, to provide continuing pulses of thermal energy, and hence, generate more power than is needed to operate the lasers. Experimental systems have apparently been able to achieve energy balance for single-shot tests.
The lasers involved are huge, very expensive, and difficult to keep focused and operational. Their lenses tend to heat up, distorting their shape and focus. The power supplies needed to drive the lasers are huge, and coordinating multiple laser pulses is tricky, even for a single pulse. The target pellets have multiple ablative layers which need to be precise in order to achieve uniform compression. Keeping the system, especially all the optics, clean with the exploding pellets and reaction products is a major hurdle for continuing operation. And then there is getting the released energy out of the reactor efficiently enough to make the power generation worthwhile, especially since much of the system needs to be cooled for proper functioning. As with magnetic confinement, it will be a steep uphill battle to solve all the engineering problems needed for continuous commercial operation.
Don't get me wrong, I think fusion research should continue. We will learn more about the physics and the techniques for controlling plasmas, the management of microscopic fusion explosions, and perhaps more important, the technologies developed to push beyond the current boundaries of materials, manufacturing, control mechanisms, and human understanding. But do not pursue this work hoping to build a practical fusion generating station in the foreseeable future.
As a reality check, compare how easy it was to get a stable nuclear fission "atomic pile" working in the 1940's with the troubles nuclear reactors have over the long term today: leaks, cracks, fuel handling and processing, redundant safety devices, human error, waste materials, decommissioning, etc. Given the experimental technological difficulties of sustained fusion, the construction and operating headaches of building and using such a reactor would be an order of magnitude more expensive and difficult. What power company is going to want to invest tens of billions in such a doubtful venture? Perhaps in a hundred years with new technology, materials and know-how, such a power plant may become feasible, but even then, will it be practical?
AI Consciousness:
There has been a lot of hype about artificial intelligence in the past decade or so: deep learning, Jeopardy-winning Watson, game playing champions, the dream of uploading our consciousness, the search for an artifical general intelligence, attempts to model animals' brains, and of course, the singularity, in which AI becomes smarter than humans, evolves itself and eventually takes over the world, the better or worse for mere humans. It is true there have been impressive advances: self-driving cars, natural-language capture, expert systems, big-data mining, and so on. But none of this comes anywhere near having a self-aware, conscious AI, notwithstanding all the sci-fi movies and various futuristic warnings or promises in the news and media lately.
Any AI system is basically, a complex algorithm, using inputs and information from its memory, to do calculations, make decisions, draw conclusions, and produce outputs, all based on its programming. Yes, some programs can adjust themselves to improve their game playing, or incorporate new data or goals set for it, but they do not "choose" their own goals on their own unless they have higher-level goals preprogrammed. They do not think for themselves, unless you want to include what AI does as "thinking". Unlike humans, they have no subjective sense of self, purpose, or meaning. A chess playing program does not "know" that it is playing chess. Sure, it may be able to answer questions about chess and tell you it is playing that game, but it is only doing so because of its programming, done by clever human minds.
No computer can "understand" the "meaning" of a poem or painting. It may be able to parse the text and tell you what the poem is about, but it cannot think about the poem and what it means to itself, you or me. Any computerized "emotions" are merely simulated in response to specified inputs. No AI can have "intentions" aside from optimizing some parameter specified by its programmers. Thus, all the apparent intelligence and seeming autonomy are narrow and programmed into it by humans, who do know what they are trying to achieve.
Don't get me wrong, AI has an amazing and huge future: medical diagnosis, human assistance, technology management, scientific research, etc. are all being helped by AI today, and that will only increase in the future. We will eventually get truly self-driving cars (although not as soon as some people project). We may get AI systems that can diagnose diseases better than human doctors. And so on. This work will continue and I hope it continues to benefit mankind in realistic ways.
It is quite possible that at some point in the near future, someone's clever AI system will be able to pass a fair Turing test, but that will not make it conscious, the equivalent of a human, much less of superior intelligence. Such a machine will have been programmed by humans to emulate a human well enough to fool other humans, but that won't make it human-like in any true sense. Humans are more general and flexible than any computer, and humans have self awareness, subjective intentionality, and the whole broad set of capabilities. They understand what they are doing!
So do not worry about AI's taking over the world or usurping humans. There is more danger from (human) hackers taking over the AI to crash a self-driving car, or damage a nuclear reactor's controls. Or some terrorist organisation getting hold of a smart weapon and sending it into the White House. It is true that some people will lose their jobs to AI systems, but that will happens slowly and people are usually flexible enough to find other employment niches. So AI will be disruptive, but not destructive, nor the end of the world as we know it. The singularity, uploading your consciousness, sentient androids, equal rights for AI's are all science fiction staples, but they will not happen in your lifetime, and perhaps never.
Quantum Computers:
There is a lot of research going on trying to develop a useful quantum computer. This is a device or system where the "bits" in a standard binary computer (all thjose 1's and 0's) are traded for "qubits". A qubit has the quantum property of being is an undefined state, or a "superposition" of being both a "1" and a "0" simultaneously. That sounds weird, as is pretty much everything about quantum physics, but it is perfectly true. So far, no problem.
In principle, with enough qubits all working together ("entangled" in the quantum jargon) such a computer could solve certain types of problems and simulate physical systems much faster than today's computers. Algorithms for quantum computers have been developed to take advantage of this capability, and have been shown to work on systems of a few qubits. Thus, the principle of quantum computing is sound.
The major hurdle to the development of powerful quantum computers is the number of qubits that can be entangled and maintained for the duration of the algorithm processing. It is relatively easy to get a large number of atoms entangled, but those are not qubits. To be useful, the qubits have to be maintained individually, programmed individually and properly, allowed to process the desired algorithm, and then read-out at the end of the run. The trick is to do that while keeping them all entangled long enough so they can all work on the algorithm simultaneously. In all such systems so far, "decoherence" sets in after a brief time, as the qubits begin to lose their entanglement. At that point - usually a few microseconds - errors creep into the processing so that the results quickly decay into nonsense.
In the initial years of development, various ways to generate and maintain qubits were researched. Then various ways to get several qubits working together were developed. It became possible to keep up to perhaps ten or a dozen qubits entangled and accessible long enough for testing simple quantum algorithms successfully. However, any useful quantum computer - "useful" meaning sufficiently faster than a normal computer to make the cost and effort worthwhile - would have to use hundreds of qubits, and preferably thousands, and that has proven to be a huge challenge.
Quantum computers boasting ten or so qubits are available for research purposes today. There are claims of systems having 40 or more qubits, but those are questioned by many people. Any system with 40 qubits that cannot get them all entangled together, carefully programmed, and kept in that state long enough to perform useful processing is not very helpful. I am not an expert on this, of course, but from what I have read, every added qubit makes the system much more difficult to set up, more susceptible to noise and errors, and reduces the duration of the entanglement. As a result, there has not been much advance in the past few years.
Based on this pessimistic outlook, I do not expect useful quantum computers to be ready for sale any time soon, and probably not for a long time, if ever. Here too, the research and technology are fascinating and should continue, but we shouldn't base our support for it on hyped up promises. I am not alone in my doubt, a recent IEEE Spectrum article described some additional concerns about the feasibility of quantum computing as the number of qubits increases.
Origin-of-Life Research:
This one is somewhat different in that the research does not aim to produce any new products or commercially useful processes, although if successful, some would doubtless flow from the results. Rather, the purpose here is to explore how life might have got started on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago or so, and as an added benefit, to see what conditions and processes could possibly cause life to arise on other worlds. This is called abiogenesis - life arising from non-life.
These are valid research projects, but there is another motive; that is to show that undirected natural processes could bring forth simple life forms, thereby undermining Intelligent Design theory and the need to posit supernatural creation help or intelligent guidance. As Richard Lewontin, an atheist scientist remarked, "materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door." Thus, some scientists are consumed with seeking only materialist causes, however hypothetical or unlikely.
And unlikely they are. Charles Darwin speculated about life beginning in a "warm little pond" somewhere on Earth, but the biomolecular science needed to define what that meant only came about a hundred years later with research into proteins, DNA, the genetic code and other aspects of living cells and organisms. There have been numerous hypotheses forwarded about how life might have got started: thermal cycling in warm ponds, non-equilibrium chemistry around sea-floor vents, surface catalysis on clays, organic molecules deposited by comets, lightning strikes in the atmosphere, even panspermia (seeding from outer space). It seems any superficially plausible speculation is good enough to get published, hyped up for the public, and even funded for further research.
The detailed chemistry aspects of all these ideas, however, involve immense hurdles, even with the probabilistic resources available over the surface of the Earth and hundreds of millions of years. Trying to find credible chemical pathways from simple organic molecules to complex biology capable of self-reproduction is extremely difficult, and so far has been impossible, even under carefully controlled laboratory experiments, with expert help in selecting pure chemicals, exacting conditions, purifying intermediate steps, preventing unwanted reactions, and then changing everything for the next step. To serioualy suggest this all happening in a random dilute mix of molecules, with no plan or guidance, beggars the imagination.
Some of the many difficulties are the fact that the building blocks of life are difficult to construct in mixed-chemistry situations, and tend to degrade or agglommerate in the wrong way once they are created. Getting a nice mix of nucleotides or amino acids together under any realistic early-Earth conditions is essentially impossible. Getting them to then polymerize properly is another massive hurdle. All of life uses left-handed molecules, but non-biological processes tend to produce both left and right handed molecules at random, which are then difficult to separate.
The simplest possible cell needs more than the building blocks. Any realistic cell needs proteins to operate, specific sugars to consume for energy, various lipids for the cell wall, other carbohydrates, and complex enzymes to make the biochemical processes possible. Any living system uses DNA and other codes to specify these complex items, as well as pre-existing molecular machines (proteins) to make them and do the actual work. How any of this could have come about naturally anywhere is all but incredible. How all of it could have come about in the same place at the same time, by unguided, natural processes is essentially impossible.
Ah, but you will say, there was an intermediate step using RNA molecules as both the early genetic code, and the functional aparatus to do the work. Thus was born the RNA world hypothesis, wherein RNA somehow came about and was active enough to not only operate as a simple life form, but also store information and replicate itself, allowing Darwinian evolution to get going. This overlooks the need for lipids and sugars, but sounds interesting. It is presumed that the DNA code storage and the protein synthesis mechanisms evolved later via the process of natural selection.
Aside from the problem of supplying the lipids and sugars, and the undefined Darwinian magic, not to mention the chirality (left-right chemistry) issue, RNA molecules do not spontaneously come about by non-biological means, much less come together in long polymer chains. Even under controlled lab conditions (intelligent design here!), the best active RNA molecule that scientists could design and create, so far as I am aware, is one that cuts itself in two pieces; not exactly a promising start. More recently, a laboratory created RNA strand that can catalyse its own "reproduction" from other carefully produced smaller strands, under precise lab conditions, has apparently been demonstrated. The gap between these experiments and the creation of an "RNA world" under naturally occurring conditions is immense.
How any RNA protocell would develop the transcription hardware needed for DNA before needing DNA, or how it would make DNA before being able to use it has never been elucidated. A lot of intracellular machinery is needed for the DNA-RNA-protein synthesis process to work, so it would all be needed at the same time since unguided processes, even Darwinian ones, cannot foresee a future need for specific complex chemistries.
Over and above all of this is the information problem. Even the simplest life form has megabits of functionally precise DNA code, which is needed to specify all of its hundreds of proteins and to control its cellular processes. In our uniform experience, huge amounts of meaningful information only arises from an intelligence, or a machine designed and built by an intelligence. There is no credible natural mechanism that can generate such volumes of genetic code, much less usefully insert it into a complex chemical system. In theory (but questioned in practice), the Darwinian mechanism can add a bit or two at a time, but that cannot account for the megabits of code needed before natural selection has something to work on - a self sustaining, self replicating protocell.
Every effort to produce life from scratch, even under lab conditions, with scientific guidance and control, have fallen far short of the goal. With each new finding in molecular biology, the complexity increases, and new hurdles to abiogenesis are revealed. Thus, I do not expect that humans will ever find a credible natural route to making life. I am not an expert here, but other, more knowledgeable chemists agree. Such research efforts should probably continue as new pathways and processes may be revealed, but the prospects are not promising, notwithstanding the hype in popular magazines. Perhaps research should expand to explore how much functional information is needed, and allow for the possibility that intelligence provided that information, along with the inital biochemical tools needed to interpret and use the information.
Sunday, 14 April 2019
Tuesday, 26 February 2019
A "Junk DNA" Functionality Analogy
I am not a molecular biologist, nor a geneticist, so may be oversimplifying or whistling in the wind here, but I have found the following analogy helpful in better understanding the shifting issue of "junk DNA" in human (or other) cells.
As a quick introduction, the human genome has some 3 billion DNA nucleotide pairs that, taken together include most of the information needed to build and operate a human being, complete from development of a fertilized egg, through to the maintenance of an adult, including the means for ongoing metabolism and eventual reproduction. Back in the 1980's, it was discovered that something like 98% of this DNA does not code for proteins or enzymes, the building blocks of life. Thus, your 20,000 or so genes (instruction for these blocks) make up only around 2% of your genome.
Those enamoured to the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution grabbed onto this factoid and declared that most of the remaining 98% of your genome is simply "junk DNA" left over from millions of years of evolutionary trial and error, just as might be expected from the undirected Darwinian process of random mutation plus natural selection. This assumption quickly became the received wisdom and researchers did not look for function or purpose in the supposed junk. The same people also made a lot of the fact that, within that 2% coding DNA, almost 99% is the same as for chimpanzees and bonobos, our nearest relatives on the presumed tree of life.
The then nascent Intelligent Design (ID) community responded to this "junk DNA" assumption with their own prediction, that essential functions would be found for most of the 98% "non-coding" DNA if careful testing were to be done. (And some people claim that ID makes no predictions.) Subsequently, the ENCODE project did a series of experiments and found that perhaps 80% of the genome (so far) shows some sort of "activity" in human cells, but did not delve into the nature of the activity and how important it might be for humans. Rather than admit that ID was right, Darwinists attacked the ENCODE results, or simply denied their prior "junk DNA" claims, stating that, of course Darwinism would optimize the genome by throwing out non-functional DNA. (Darwinism is like that; if prediction "X" doesn't pan out as expected, claim that the theory also predicts "not-X".)
In the meantime, assuming that 98% of the genome was indeed "junk" most evolutionary biologists did not bother to look for functionality there, delaying much of our understanding of human cell biochemistry by a decade or so. Now that we know the 98% is NOT all inactive, scientists have begun to explore its varied functions and have found all sorts of purposes for some of the "junk": regulatory, developmental, quality control, etc. And since then, most Darwinists have quietly stopped using the term "Junk DNA".
Notwithstanding all this, my purpose in this post is not to delineate these new-found DNA functions. Rather, I will offer up a simple analogy to explain why there has to be much more to the human genome than just codes for proteins and enzymes. As an aside, I used to ask people who passed on the meme that "we only use 10 % of our brains", whether they would like to have the other 90% removed to improve their thinking efficiency. Similarly, I wonder if those who claim that 98%, 50%, or even just 20% of their DNA is "junk" would like to have that removed from their cells - not that it would be possible to do so, of course, but just in principle. After all, if it truly is junk, then having a smaller genome would make for more efficient cell division (less DNA to copy and sort through), and possibly a longer life or more energy for other things.
Anyway, on to my analogy, which is to compare the building of a human being to the construction of a house or some larger building, or even an entire city. Of course, a human is far more complex than any building, and buildings do not self-replicate, so the analogy is limited, but I hope it will serve to elucidate potential "functionality" for the non-coding parts of our own DNA.
In this analogy, the house to be constructed has a stack of blueprints, or a hard drive full of all the design information needed to construct the house. This information is, of course, analogous to our DNA. The coding parts of the DNA (genes) would then be analogous to the instructions for making bricks, two-by-fours, shingles, glass, cabling, pipes, etc. (the "protein" materials needed for the house). Given that the information for the house has to start from available materials, we cannot assume that bricks, lumber and tools are readily available to the house (or the fertilized cell in the biological case). Some of them may be available initially (in the womb as it were), but later on, once the house (baby) has begun to grow, it will have to make its own materials out of simpler ones (e.g. metabolism of digested food in the human context).
In addition to materials (proteins), the house plans will need instructions for making the tools (or parts of tools) required to build the house (the enzymes, as it were). In the context of the house construction, these tools will have to be more complex than those usually employed as we cannot assume people are available to use them. Thus, some of the instructions will have to include how to make robots to use the tools to build the house. And of course, the "parent house" (maybe a model home?) will be available to supply the first robots, tools and materials, until the new house can take over its own construction.
If you have not entirely given up on me as having concocted a bizarre analogy, we can move on to the next part. A house cannot make itself just from instructions on brickmaking and sawing up lumber. Even with some capable robots, tools and materials, the house cannot be constructed without detailed plans or instructions. The hard disk or blueprints will have to contain step-by-step instructions for where to start, what to do next, and how to perform each step, which materials to use, where to find them (in a pile somewhere after they were made), how to prepare them, and precisely where to put them. None of those instructions create materials or tools, so would not be considered as coding information (genes) in the genome context, yet they are essential to the project.
Moreover the construction robots are probably not handy-man generalists. As there are usually many subcontractors needed to finish a house, so there will be many robots required, or perhaps it would be better to have one type of very simple robot, with lots of detailed instructions (an expanded version of the "how to" guides from Home Depot?). So already we have some detailed functional (necessary) "non-coding" instructions: instructions for how to use tools and what to do with materials.
For efficient construction, the building plans would also need a lot of control instructions, both positive (enable process X) and negative (disable or suspend process Y) to avoid piling up bricks before they are needed, or delivering lumber before the hole is dug, and to make sure that when the roof goes on, the shingles are available, the roofing tools are ready and the robots know how to use them. Oh by the way, there will doubtless be other "protein" codes for temporary items such as scaffolding, concrete forms, etc. at certain times during construction (or child development in the womb). These must also be specified, along with when they are needed, and what to do with them after they are no longer needed; e.g. discarded, or dismantle so bits can be reused.
The instructions would need to be very detailed to get the house built right. You cannot just tell the robot to "lay bricks", it would need to be told where to start, how to hold the brick and trowel, how to spread mortar, what to do at corners, how to handle half-bricks or broken ones, how to finish a row and start another, when to stop, and so on. Lots of instructions are needed to build a house (or a human). There would also be a need for "what if" instructions for unexpected things or random errors. Something would have to check the work as it progresses (supervisory or inspection robots?), make corrections (more specific tools?), and allow the work to proceed once each inspection passed. The cells in your body have analogous processes that also follow coded instructions.
All of this work would also require some sort of schedule or timeline, with complex start/stop instructions and checks/balances to ensure a timely and accurate result. There would also be a need for sensing and feedback mechanisms as noted above for quality control, repairs and rework. Once the house was completed, there is still a need for operating instructions - how to: open/close windows, adjust thermostats, regular checking and cleaning, and so on. In the human context, each cell has to monitor itself and its cell boundary for conditions around and within it, and make adjustments to protein and enzyme synthesis to keep itself and its surroundings healthy (this is called homeostasis in biology). Thus, cells, humans and self-constructing houses all need "non-coding" instructions in order to grow and exist properly.
If a house can be likened to a cell, then perhaps a human organ can be like an apartment building, with specialized rooms, and a human being can be analogous to a whole city, with many different buildings, along with infrastructure requirements. Indeed, a human cell has itself been likened to a city, given its internal complexity, so a human must be far more complex than even a big city. In that respect, some might consider it remarkable that a human being can be constructed using only 3 billion nucleotide bits of information! In any case, the building instructions would have to include plans for many types of buildings as well as the interfaces between them, in order to get everything in the right place and working together harmoniously.
Consider now, that many different buildings can be made using the same bricks, lumber, tools, etc. Thus, the fact that human and chimp genes are almost 99% the same only means that they are built of the same proteins and their metabolism uses the same enzymes. That is hardly surprising and does not imply that humans are almost the same as chimps, just as a library is not almost the same as a nursing home just because they both use the same framing, concrete and roofing materials. Obviously there are some minor differences even in the coding parts; for example, some houses may have different coloured bricks, or an oil furnace instead of gas. There are similarly some (around 0.1%) DNA differences among human genes due to eye/skin/hair colour, size/build, etc., just as in a given subdivision, there are variations among houses built by the same developer.
As a final note, building blueprints or construction plans also contain considerable information that is not, strictly speaking, needed to build the house. The name of the house model, the architectual firm, drawing inspection and approval dates, building license, surveyor notes, and engineer stamps are not needed to construct the house, but they are included in the information package anyway. Then there is the table of contents and page numbers so you can find what you need quickly, and cross references for related info and prerequisites or next steps. I expect that science will find similar pointers and directions in our DNA at some time, if they haven't already.
Wouldn't it be funny if somehow, some small piece of human "junk DNA" were eventually decoded as, "Then God said, Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness..." (Gen. 1:26). Or maybe it would say, "Species: Homo sapiens, model No. Adam/Eve; developed Holocene year 136,000, on planet Sol-3, by Archangel team Gabriel under divine directive Our-Image; QC by team Michael, passed inspection; released and ensouled by YHWH Himself into production thereafter; Soli Deo Gloria!"
In summary, just as construction projects need non-material instructions, so cells and humans require non-coding information in their DNA to develop, live well and reproduce properly. Such information should never have been considered as junk, and science should now do more research into the functions of "non-coding" DNA in our genomes. That about wraps up all I can find in this analogy. I hope you found it at least entertaining, if not educational. Forgive me if I have gotten any biology wrong or misused the terminology somehow. Comment if you can think of other intriguing aspects of this analogy.
As a quick introduction, the human genome has some 3 billion DNA nucleotide pairs that, taken together include most of the information needed to build and operate a human being, complete from development of a fertilized egg, through to the maintenance of an adult, including the means for ongoing metabolism and eventual reproduction. Back in the 1980's, it was discovered that something like 98% of this DNA does not code for proteins or enzymes, the building blocks of life. Thus, your 20,000 or so genes (instruction for these blocks) make up only around 2% of your genome.
Those enamoured to the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution grabbed onto this factoid and declared that most of the remaining 98% of your genome is simply "junk DNA" left over from millions of years of evolutionary trial and error, just as might be expected from the undirected Darwinian process of random mutation plus natural selection. This assumption quickly became the received wisdom and researchers did not look for function or purpose in the supposed junk. The same people also made a lot of the fact that, within that 2% coding DNA, almost 99% is the same as for chimpanzees and bonobos, our nearest relatives on the presumed tree of life.
The then nascent Intelligent Design (ID) community responded to this "junk DNA" assumption with their own prediction, that essential functions would be found for most of the 98% "non-coding" DNA if careful testing were to be done. (And some people claim that ID makes no predictions.) Subsequently, the ENCODE project did a series of experiments and found that perhaps 80% of the genome (so far) shows some sort of "activity" in human cells, but did not delve into the nature of the activity and how important it might be for humans. Rather than admit that ID was right, Darwinists attacked the ENCODE results, or simply denied their prior "junk DNA" claims, stating that, of course Darwinism would optimize the genome by throwing out non-functional DNA. (Darwinism is like that; if prediction "X" doesn't pan out as expected, claim that the theory also predicts "not-X".)
In the meantime, assuming that 98% of the genome was indeed "junk" most evolutionary biologists did not bother to look for functionality there, delaying much of our understanding of human cell biochemistry by a decade or so. Now that we know the 98% is NOT all inactive, scientists have begun to explore its varied functions and have found all sorts of purposes for some of the "junk": regulatory, developmental, quality control, etc. And since then, most Darwinists have quietly stopped using the term "Junk DNA".
Notwithstanding all this, my purpose in this post is not to delineate these new-found DNA functions. Rather, I will offer up a simple analogy to explain why there has to be much more to the human genome than just codes for proteins and enzymes. As an aside, I used to ask people who passed on the meme that "we only use 10 % of our brains", whether they would like to have the other 90% removed to improve their thinking efficiency. Similarly, I wonder if those who claim that 98%, 50%, or even just 20% of their DNA is "junk" would like to have that removed from their cells - not that it would be possible to do so, of course, but just in principle. After all, if it truly is junk, then having a smaller genome would make for more efficient cell division (less DNA to copy and sort through), and possibly a longer life or more energy for other things.
Anyway, on to my analogy, which is to compare the building of a human being to the construction of a house or some larger building, or even an entire city. Of course, a human is far more complex than any building, and buildings do not self-replicate, so the analogy is limited, but I hope it will serve to elucidate potential "functionality" for the non-coding parts of our own DNA.
In this analogy, the house to be constructed has a stack of blueprints, or a hard drive full of all the design information needed to construct the house. This information is, of course, analogous to our DNA. The coding parts of the DNA (genes) would then be analogous to the instructions for making bricks, two-by-fours, shingles, glass, cabling, pipes, etc. (the "protein" materials needed for the house). Given that the information for the house has to start from available materials, we cannot assume that bricks, lumber and tools are readily available to the house (or the fertilized cell in the biological case). Some of them may be available initially (in the womb as it were), but later on, once the house (baby) has begun to grow, it will have to make its own materials out of simpler ones (e.g. metabolism of digested food in the human context).
In addition to materials (proteins), the house plans will need instructions for making the tools (or parts of tools) required to build the house (the enzymes, as it were). In the context of the house construction, these tools will have to be more complex than those usually employed as we cannot assume people are available to use them. Thus, some of the instructions will have to include how to make robots to use the tools to build the house. And of course, the "parent house" (maybe a model home?) will be available to supply the first robots, tools and materials, until the new house can take over its own construction.
If you have not entirely given up on me as having concocted a bizarre analogy, we can move on to the next part. A house cannot make itself just from instructions on brickmaking and sawing up lumber. Even with some capable robots, tools and materials, the house cannot be constructed without detailed plans or instructions. The hard disk or blueprints will have to contain step-by-step instructions for where to start, what to do next, and how to perform each step, which materials to use, where to find them (in a pile somewhere after they were made), how to prepare them, and precisely where to put them. None of those instructions create materials or tools, so would not be considered as coding information (genes) in the genome context, yet they are essential to the project.
Moreover the construction robots are probably not handy-man generalists. As there are usually many subcontractors needed to finish a house, so there will be many robots required, or perhaps it would be better to have one type of very simple robot, with lots of detailed instructions (an expanded version of the "how to" guides from Home Depot?). So already we have some detailed functional (necessary) "non-coding" instructions: instructions for how to use tools and what to do with materials.
For efficient construction, the building plans would also need a lot of control instructions, both positive (enable process X) and negative (disable or suspend process Y) to avoid piling up bricks before they are needed, or delivering lumber before the hole is dug, and to make sure that when the roof goes on, the shingles are available, the roofing tools are ready and the robots know how to use them. Oh by the way, there will doubtless be other "protein" codes for temporary items such as scaffolding, concrete forms, etc. at certain times during construction (or child development in the womb). These must also be specified, along with when they are needed, and what to do with them after they are no longer needed; e.g. discarded, or dismantle so bits can be reused.
The instructions would need to be very detailed to get the house built right. You cannot just tell the robot to "lay bricks", it would need to be told where to start, how to hold the brick and trowel, how to spread mortar, what to do at corners, how to handle half-bricks or broken ones, how to finish a row and start another, when to stop, and so on. Lots of instructions are needed to build a house (or a human). There would also be a need for "what if" instructions for unexpected things or random errors. Something would have to check the work as it progresses (supervisory or inspection robots?), make corrections (more specific tools?), and allow the work to proceed once each inspection passed. The cells in your body have analogous processes that also follow coded instructions.
All of this work would also require some sort of schedule or timeline, with complex start/stop instructions and checks/balances to ensure a timely and accurate result. There would also be a need for sensing and feedback mechanisms as noted above for quality control, repairs and rework. Once the house was completed, there is still a need for operating instructions - how to: open/close windows, adjust thermostats, regular checking and cleaning, and so on. In the human context, each cell has to monitor itself and its cell boundary for conditions around and within it, and make adjustments to protein and enzyme synthesis to keep itself and its surroundings healthy (this is called homeostasis in biology). Thus, cells, humans and self-constructing houses all need "non-coding" instructions in order to grow and exist properly.
If a house can be likened to a cell, then perhaps a human organ can be like an apartment building, with specialized rooms, and a human being can be analogous to a whole city, with many different buildings, along with infrastructure requirements. Indeed, a human cell has itself been likened to a city, given its internal complexity, so a human must be far more complex than even a big city. In that respect, some might consider it remarkable that a human being can be constructed using only 3 billion nucleotide bits of information! In any case, the building instructions would have to include plans for many types of buildings as well as the interfaces between them, in order to get everything in the right place and working together harmoniously.
Consider now, that many different buildings can be made using the same bricks, lumber, tools, etc. Thus, the fact that human and chimp genes are almost 99% the same only means that they are built of the same proteins and their metabolism uses the same enzymes. That is hardly surprising and does not imply that humans are almost the same as chimps, just as a library is not almost the same as a nursing home just because they both use the same framing, concrete and roofing materials. Obviously there are some minor differences even in the coding parts; for example, some houses may have different coloured bricks, or an oil furnace instead of gas. There are similarly some (around 0.1%) DNA differences among human genes due to eye/skin/hair colour, size/build, etc., just as in a given subdivision, there are variations among houses built by the same developer.
As a final note, building blueprints or construction plans also contain considerable information that is not, strictly speaking, needed to build the house. The name of the house model, the architectual firm, drawing inspection and approval dates, building license, surveyor notes, and engineer stamps are not needed to construct the house, but they are included in the information package anyway. Then there is the table of contents and page numbers so you can find what you need quickly, and cross references for related info and prerequisites or next steps. I expect that science will find similar pointers and directions in our DNA at some time, if they haven't already.
Wouldn't it be funny if somehow, some small piece of human "junk DNA" were eventually decoded as, "Then God said, Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness..." (Gen. 1:26). Or maybe it would say, "Species: Homo sapiens, model No. Adam/Eve; developed Holocene year 136,000, on planet Sol-3, by Archangel team Gabriel under divine directive Our-Image; QC by team Michael, passed inspection; released and ensouled by YHWH Himself into production thereafter; Soli Deo Gloria!"
In summary, just as construction projects need non-material instructions, so cells and humans require non-coding information in their DNA to develop, live well and reproduce properly. Such information should never have been considered as junk, and science should now do more research into the functions of "non-coding" DNA in our genomes. That about wraps up all I can find in this analogy. I hope you found it at least entertaining, if not educational. Forgive me if I have gotten any biology wrong or misused the terminology somehow. Comment if you can think of other intriguing aspects of this analogy.
Thursday, 14 February 2019
What Are You?
When we are asked who we are, we usually reply with our name, and a couple of suitable references to what we do or how we fit into the group at hand. When asked further what we are, we normally respond with our occupation, familial relationships, position within the group, perhaps other important affiliations, or interests such as a key hobby. To most of us, these answers address our personal identities as human beings. However, in this post I would like to describe some alternative answers from a philosophical, scientific, and perhaps humorous perspective that apply to every one of us.
Consider your body: what is it? From one perspective it is a community of cells - some 25 trillions of them - each one a complex biochemical factory, working cooperatively to maintain your life and its various supportive processes. Each cell does its own thing, as it was programmed to do during your development in the womb, but each cell is also connected to and in communication with other cells to build up your organs, as well as their organized whole that together make up your physical self. This is vaguely like an ant colony, with different ants having different roles, all working together for the greater good in the colony's survival and flourishing.
Notwithstanding this physiological picture of health and well-being, most of the cells in your body are not human! Your "micro-biome" includes various bacteria, fungi, other microbes, and not a few larger living things, which together populate your gut, your mouth, your skin, and various other locations in and around your person. Taken together, these cells outnumber those with human DNA. Does that make you grossed-out, mostly alien, or just normal?
Looking deeper, we know that our bodies are mostly - some 70% or so - water. And the remainder is just a variety of organic molecules made up of mostly a handful of abundant chemical elements. In the last century chemists estimated that the value of the raw elements in a typical adult body was worth about $0.84 total. With inflation and resource price changes, that is probably a few dollars today, but still not very much. How does that affect your self worth?
But you say, surely we are more than raw chemical elements? Admittedly, all except the hydrogen atoms are indeed stardust from past supernovae explosions in the Milky Way galaxy. Together those elements form the molecules of life from simple sugars and fats, to more complex hormones and neurotransmitters, and on to complex and interactive enzymes and proteins. And you may want to add, "I have unique and highly complex DNA!" Yes, that is true, but from another perspective you are just a haphazard collection of selfish genes trying to propagate themselves. Moreover, some much simpler organisms have more DNA in each cell than you do.
Even deeper, the atoms making up your body consist of just three types of sub-atomic particles: protons, neutrons and electrons. How simple is that? But taken together, these particles take up only a miniscule volume of each atom. A typical carbon nucleus is just 0.005% of the diameter of a carbon atom, so more than 99.99999999999% of your body is nothing but "empty space"! Well not quite empty; those atoms are held together by electromagnetic fields and photonic forces that determine their chemical properties. The same goes for your molecules with their ionic, covalent and other bonds between atoms, governing all of the chemistry going on inside each cell. When you push your finger against something, the forces are all essentially interacting EM fields resisting the intrusion to maintain the structural integrity among molecules. Are you then mostly a complex and dynamically interactive EM field?
One could delve further into quarks and gluons, but at human temperatures, those are locked inside your neutrons and protons. To summarize therefore, what you are is: mostly non-human, largely common water, a bag of cheap elements, many highly-repetitive molecules, and a lot of empty space, held together by electromagnetic glue! But then, so am I - this is an equal opportunity humiliation! And when you die, the community of cells that make up your body will cease to function, your molecules will dissipate or break down, returning to simpler materials and their elements via entropy. Dust to dust, celestial ashes to ashes! Does that make you feel humble, insignificant, or just weird?
However, I don't want to leave you in that lamentable state. You are indeed more than all that! You are a unique and complex living being. And what you are from a physics and chemistry perspective, is much less important than who you are from a human, social, and spiritual perspective. You are one of the most complex things in the entire Universe, a unique and valuable individual person with consciousness, abilities, memories, rights, intentions, free-will, etc. That is where the real you exists, not in an assembly molecules, however complicated. Indeed, beyond all that, you are the very image of God himself, with an eternal soul! I hope that makes you feel better.
Consider your body: what is it? From one perspective it is a community of cells - some 25 trillions of them - each one a complex biochemical factory, working cooperatively to maintain your life and its various supportive processes. Each cell does its own thing, as it was programmed to do during your development in the womb, but each cell is also connected to and in communication with other cells to build up your organs, as well as their organized whole that together make up your physical self. This is vaguely like an ant colony, with different ants having different roles, all working together for the greater good in the colony's survival and flourishing.
Notwithstanding this physiological picture of health and well-being, most of the cells in your body are not human! Your "micro-biome" includes various bacteria, fungi, other microbes, and not a few larger living things, which together populate your gut, your mouth, your skin, and various other locations in and around your person. Taken together, these cells outnumber those with human DNA. Does that make you grossed-out, mostly alien, or just normal?
Looking deeper, we know that our bodies are mostly - some 70% or so - water. And the remainder is just a variety of organic molecules made up of mostly a handful of abundant chemical elements. In the last century chemists estimated that the value of the raw elements in a typical adult body was worth about $0.84 total. With inflation and resource price changes, that is probably a few dollars today, but still not very much. How does that affect your self worth?
But you say, surely we are more than raw chemical elements? Admittedly, all except the hydrogen atoms are indeed stardust from past supernovae explosions in the Milky Way galaxy. Together those elements form the molecules of life from simple sugars and fats, to more complex hormones and neurotransmitters, and on to complex and interactive enzymes and proteins. And you may want to add, "I have unique and highly complex DNA!" Yes, that is true, but from another perspective you are just a haphazard collection of selfish genes trying to propagate themselves. Moreover, some much simpler organisms have more DNA in each cell than you do.
Even deeper, the atoms making up your body consist of just three types of sub-atomic particles: protons, neutrons and electrons. How simple is that? But taken together, these particles take up only a miniscule volume of each atom. A typical carbon nucleus is just 0.005% of the diameter of a carbon atom, so more than 99.99999999999% of your body is nothing but "empty space"! Well not quite empty; those atoms are held together by electromagnetic fields and photonic forces that determine their chemical properties. The same goes for your molecules with their ionic, covalent and other bonds between atoms, governing all of the chemistry going on inside each cell. When you push your finger against something, the forces are all essentially interacting EM fields resisting the intrusion to maintain the structural integrity among molecules. Are you then mostly a complex and dynamically interactive EM field?
One could delve further into quarks and gluons, but at human temperatures, those are locked inside your neutrons and protons. To summarize therefore, what you are is: mostly non-human, largely common water, a bag of cheap elements, many highly-repetitive molecules, and a lot of empty space, held together by electromagnetic glue! But then, so am I - this is an equal opportunity humiliation! And when you die, the community of cells that make up your body will cease to function, your molecules will dissipate or break down, returning to simpler materials and their elements via entropy. Dust to dust, celestial ashes to ashes! Does that make you feel humble, insignificant, or just weird?
However, I don't want to leave you in that lamentable state. You are indeed more than all that! You are a unique and complex living being. And what you are from a physics and chemistry perspective, is much less important than who you are from a human, social, and spiritual perspective. You are one of the most complex things in the entire Universe, a unique and valuable individual person with consciousness, abilities, memories, rights, intentions, free-will, etc. That is where the real you exists, not in an assembly molecules, however complicated. Indeed, beyond all that, you are the very image of God himself, with an eternal soul! I hope that makes you feel better.
Monday, 4 February 2019
Intelligent Design Speculations
As noted in an earlier post, intelligent design (ID) is a theory that claims there is considerable scientific evidence that the Universe, life on planet Earth, and human consciousness are not accidents of naturalistic evolution, but are the results of intentional design by a super intelligence, although who or what that designer may be is not identified. For further details about ID theory, refer to this web site. I will not repeat any of this now; my purpose here is different.
ID theorists are often chastized for not identifying the designer or his methods. I will first point out that Darwinism, the principal naturalistic alternative to ID for life on planet Earth, has been around for 150+ years, with thousands of scientists working on various aspects of it, yet there are still huge uncertainties about how it works and whether it can accomplish everything attributed to it. In contrast, ID has been around for perhaps 30 years and has maybe a dozen scientists working on it openly (i.e. those willing to be known publicly, given the attacks made against anyone promoting ID). Thus, it is hardly surprising that ID theory is not yet fully developed! Even so, it has a lot going for it, usually focusing on the biological information aspect of life on Earth; i.e. where did all that information in DNA come from?
It is correct that ID theory does not offer any mechanism for how the intelligent designer (whoever it was) operated or proceeded to do its design work, nor how all that design got implemented in various life forms. There has been some speculation, of course (see below for mine), but ID purposely avoids saying who the designer was/is and how he/she/it/they did their work. The reason is that there is, as yet, little scientific evidence that would point to a particular designer or its methodology. Given the fossil record, the bio-molecular data, and other available evidence, it is impossible to go beyond detecting the attributes of design in the data.
ID is not the only science having that limitation. Forensics looks at data and can say that some event (e.g. a death) was not an accident, but rather was murder, without identifying the murderer, or precisely how the murder was carried out. Similarly, archaeology can say that certain artefacts (e.g. stone tools, or post hole patterns) are evidence of design and manufacture rather than natural causes, but they usually cannot say who made them without other evidence. It is always assumed that some group of early humans made them, but that is often just an assumption (albeit probably a good one), based on our expectations.
What follows is some idle speculation on my part about one possible mechanism for ID. First off, I assume, for lack of a different word, that “God” is the designer, tinkering or playing with his creation and aiming ultimately to create living beings capable of supporting souls well enough to appreciate and interact with him (that would be us humans). At the same time he is expanding the repertoire of possible life forms, for his own good reasons and pleasure. He perhaps uses his agents (e.g. angels with lab coats?) to do the detailed design work (i.e. defining new genes and other genome changes), and then implementing those designs by incorporating the changes into existing species to create new ones, possibly using methods we would view as “miraculous”. Thus, new or modified genes and other DNA are carefully inserted into existing genomes in somatic cells to provide new features or functions for the new species being created.
Choosing to modify existing species simplifies the work and provides continuity (AKA common descent), but also constrains the type of changes that can be made successfully. Why create something new from scratch when you have a viable species with 98% of what you want, and just need to tweak or add a few genes for some new feature or function? This is the same way that biologists today would work to resurrect lost species like the Woolly Mammoth, for example – implanting a modified egg into a female elephant – so it is not entirely crazy. Of course, human scientists have mammoth DNA to work with, making their job somewhat easier – nothing to design except the process, as difficult as that undoubtedly is. Perhaps in a few more decades, scientists will understand genomes and living systems well enough to invent new genes and their related information needed to implement new features, thereby creating new species of their own.
For what should be obvious reasons, you cannot have a fish giving birth to a reptile, or a dinosaur egg producing a fully fledged bird, so there would have to be some intermediary steps along the way between these different families. Modified somatic cells would have to be compatible with the existing species and be viable in order to develop and grow to maturity within the parents' environmental context, so the steps from one species to the next would have to be small enough to accommodate such practicalities. And at each step, you would have to generate a minimum population of the new species to support reproduction. All that work could, perhaps, be done elsewhere, in a “divine laboratory” somewhere, before releasing the new species into the wild, just as modern scientists would do. Once natural selection had worked to stabilize the new species (or cause its extinction if not truly viable), the next steps could be taken and another new species created.
Those familiar with Darwinian evolution theory will note that this picture looks like “punctuated equilibrium”, but with ID accounting for the punctuations to new species, and natural selection taking care of the periods of equilibrium between intelligent interventions. The difference, of course is that ID readily provides the evolutionary “saltations” (jumps) that Darwin ruled out in his theory, while materialistic evolutionary concepts cannot account for them. Sudden major jumps to a new species in a small population (as inferred from the fossil record, and supported by genomic data) go against any realistic Darwinian process, but fit right into the above ID scenario. This also “explains” where all the bio-information comes from for the origin of life, novel proteins, irreducible complexity, etc. – the hallmarks of ID theory – which naturalistic causes cannot account for. The designer decides what new species it wants, and its agents do the detailed design and lab work to bring them about.
Unlike blind Darwinism, ID can obviously have purpose and goals in mind for its work, easily accounting for the multitude of life forms on Earth, both past and present. All the weird and wonderful plants and animals can be seen as the designer tinkering within his creation, just for the joy of seeing what can be done with the marvellous biology he has developed. ID also neatly accounts for the apparent borrowing of genetic information between distant, unrelated branches of the "tree of life", which Darwinian theories have difficulty explaining, simply labelling it "convergent evolution". For example, the same genetic designs can be used to provide echo-location functions in both bats and in dolphins even though the two mammal branches separated in the fossil record long before echolocation existed. If the designer has a design available, he may incorporate it wherever he wishes, regardless of the pattern of descent to those species.
All this, of course, is not part of formal intelligent design theory, but is just an entertaining romp in theo-biological speculation. Perhaps once ID theory is allowed to exist alongside naturalistic theories about life's origins, researchers can begin to look closely at the saltations in the fossil record, and between the genomes of seemingly related species, to better understand at what points in time the new genomic information was added to create each new species, as well as the nature of the additional DNA needed to bridge the gap between each new species and its assumed precursor. That would go some way to identifying when, how, and how often ID was performed in the biosphere; whether one species at a time continually, or as upgrades to numerous life-forms at distinct and simultaneous points, as after a mass extinction event for example. That would provide a lot more scientific data to fill in ID theory and would allow further speculation about the designer and its methods.
ID theorists are often chastized for not identifying the designer or his methods. I will first point out that Darwinism, the principal naturalistic alternative to ID for life on planet Earth, has been around for 150+ years, with thousands of scientists working on various aspects of it, yet there are still huge uncertainties about how it works and whether it can accomplish everything attributed to it. In contrast, ID has been around for perhaps 30 years and has maybe a dozen scientists working on it openly (i.e. those willing to be known publicly, given the attacks made against anyone promoting ID). Thus, it is hardly surprising that ID theory is not yet fully developed! Even so, it has a lot going for it, usually focusing on the biological information aspect of life on Earth; i.e. where did all that information in DNA come from?
It is correct that ID theory does not offer any mechanism for how the intelligent designer (whoever it was) operated or proceeded to do its design work, nor how all that design got implemented in various life forms. There has been some speculation, of course (see below for mine), but ID purposely avoids saying who the designer was/is and how he/she/it/they did their work. The reason is that there is, as yet, little scientific evidence that would point to a particular designer or its methodology. Given the fossil record, the bio-molecular data, and other available evidence, it is impossible to go beyond detecting the attributes of design in the data.
ID is not the only science having that limitation. Forensics looks at data and can say that some event (e.g. a death) was not an accident, but rather was murder, without identifying the murderer, or precisely how the murder was carried out. Similarly, archaeology can say that certain artefacts (e.g. stone tools, or post hole patterns) are evidence of design and manufacture rather than natural causes, but they usually cannot say who made them without other evidence. It is always assumed that some group of early humans made them, but that is often just an assumption (albeit probably a good one), based on our expectations.
What follows is some idle speculation on my part about one possible mechanism for ID. First off, I assume, for lack of a different word, that “God” is the designer, tinkering or playing with his creation and aiming ultimately to create living beings capable of supporting souls well enough to appreciate and interact with him (that would be us humans). At the same time he is expanding the repertoire of possible life forms, for his own good reasons and pleasure. He perhaps uses his agents (e.g. angels with lab coats?) to do the detailed design work (i.e. defining new genes and other genome changes), and then implementing those designs by incorporating the changes into existing species to create new ones, possibly using methods we would view as “miraculous”. Thus, new or modified genes and other DNA are carefully inserted into existing genomes in somatic cells to provide new features or functions for the new species being created.
Choosing to modify existing species simplifies the work and provides continuity (AKA common descent), but also constrains the type of changes that can be made successfully. Why create something new from scratch when you have a viable species with 98% of what you want, and just need to tweak or add a few genes for some new feature or function? This is the same way that biologists today would work to resurrect lost species like the Woolly Mammoth, for example – implanting a modified egg into a female elephant – so it is not entirely crazy. Of course, human scientists have mammoth DNA to work with, making their job somewhat easier – nothing to design except the process, as difficult as that undoubtedly is. Perhaps in a few more decades, scientists will understand genomes and living systems well enough to invent new genes and their related information needed to implement new features, thereby creating new species of their own.
For what should be obvious reasons, you cannot have a fish giving birth to a reptile, or a dinosaur egg producing a fully fledged bird, so there would have to be some intermediary steps along the way between these different families. Modified somatic cells would have to be compatible with the existing species and be viable in order to develop and grow to maturity within the parents' environmental context, so the steps from one species to the next would have to be small enough to accommodate such practicalities. And at each step, you would have to generate a minimum population of the new species to support reproduction. All that work could, perhaps, be done elsewhere, in a “divine laboratory” somewhere, before releasing the new species into the wild, just as modern scientists would do. Once natural selection had worked to stabilize the new species (or cause its extinction if not truly viable), the next steps could be taken and another new species created.
Those familiar with Darwinian evolution theory will note that this picture looks like “punctuated equilibrium”, but with ID accounting for the punctuations to new species, and natural selection taking care of the periods of equilibrium between intelligent interventions. The difference, of course is that ID readily provides the evolutionary “saltations” (jumps) that Darwin ruled out in his theory, while materialistic evolutionary concepts cannot account for them. Sudden major jumps to a new species in a small population (as inferred from the fossil record, and supported by genomic data) go against any realistic Darwinian process, but fit right into the above ID scenario. This also “explains” where all the bio-information comes from for the origin of life, novel proteins, irreducible complexity, etc. – the hallmarks of ID theory – which naturalistic causes cannot account for. The designer decides what new species it wants, and its agents do the detailed design and lab work to bring them about.
Unlike blind Darwinism, ID can obviously have purpose and goals in mind for its work, easily accounting for the multitude of life forms on Earth, both past and present. All the weird and wonderful plants and animals can be seen as the designer tinkering within his creation, just for the joy of seeing what can be done with the marvellous biology he has developed. ID also neatly accounts for the apparent borrowing of genetic information between distant, unrelated branches of the "tree of life", which Darwinian theories have difficulty explaining, simply labelling it "convergent evolution". For example, the same genetic designs can be used to provide echo-location functions in both bats and in dolphins even though the two mammal branches separated in the fossil record long before echolocation existed. If the designer has a design available, he may incorporate it wherever he wishes, regardless of the pattern of descent to those species.
All this, of course, is not part of formal intelligent design theory, but is just an entertaining romp in theo-biological speculation. Perhaps once ID theory is allowed to exist alongside naturalistic theories about life's origins, researchers can begin to look closely at the saltations in the fossil record, and between the genomes of seemingly related species, to better understand at what points in time the new genomic information was added to create each new species, as well as the nature of the additional DNA needed to bridge the gap between each new species and its assumed precursor. That would go some way to identifying when, how, and how often ID was performed in the biosphere; whether one species at a time continually, or as upgrades to numerous life-forms at distinct and simultaneous points, as after a mass extinction event for example. That would provide a lot more scientific data to fill in ID theory and would allow further speculation about the designer and its methods.
Thursday, 10 January 2019
Our Simulated World
That the world we experience is really just a simulation is not a new idea by any means, but it seems to have garnered a lot of attention in recent years, so I cannot resist taking a crack at it too. This is not the "virtual reality" idea of our existence being false or fed to us by some outside agency. That would be the "brain in a vat" concept of reality, similar to the false-reality concept famously explored in The Matrix movie trilogy.
Rather, in this post I want to explore the idea that ALL of what we experience as reality, including our selves and our minds, is one huge simulation in a giant computer as suggested by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Elon Musk among others. For simplicity here, and without much loss of generality, I will name the entity doing the simulation as "God", and suppose that the platform for the simulation is simply his mind, so that no supercomputer or software are required. These designations do not limit the discussion since any other simulator would effectively be God from our perspective, and any simulation platform will do for discussion purposes.
However, thinking that we exist only in the mind of God puts a new, and quite literal spin on, "In him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28, but first written by Epimenides in the 7th century BC). Aside from that, it allows us to assume a benevolent simulation; God is not trying to fool us, his simulation is simply our reality. If reality is essentially the context in which we exist, then a simulated context would be just as real to us as a "real" world. But the religious terminology also clearly puts us in the realm of "speculative theology", if you will, and opens up all sorts of interesting interpretations and connections that are fun to explore. Having done a little computer simulation work myself, I can see numerous possibilities.
First of all, it makes creation of the Universe seem more manageable somehow, at least from our perspective. Genesis 1: "and God said, let there be...", seems more objective if God is setting up his simulation in his own mind. When you do a computer simulation, you specify the initial conditions, the range of the simulation in time and space (or other variables), define the rules for the simulation, and then press the start button, allowing the simulation to proceed, usually via a series of small steps in time. You then observe what happens, either to model a real system or scenario, to better understand what is happening, as in an electronic circuit, or to predict the future of whatever is being simulated, as in climate models for weather forecasting.
In our simulated world, the initial state could refer to the cosmological conditions at the start of the Big Bang when the universe came into existence. Those would be the energy and matter densities, and rules about the expansion of space-time. Depending how far back to the supposed singularity you want to begin, this could be a quark/gluon soup at gigakelvin temperature levels, or mere protons, electrons and neutrons in a uniform photon bath. In any case, God could specify these initial conditions anyway he wished, thereby easily accounting for the flatness of the present Universe and explaining the horizon problem in cosmology, without invoking some mysterious inflation theory.
The "rules" for the world simulation would, of course, be the laws of physics, which govern how the particles and energy exist and interact, starting with quantum mechanics, expanded to include the four known forces of nature (strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravity), along with their physical constants (c, e, G, h, k, etc.). Whether God's simulation uses the same "laws of physics" we have developed over the centuries to model our reality, or some other algorithmic formulations, I will leave to the reader to ponder.
For those conversant with modern cosmology, you will see that the start of this simulation neatly explains the fine tuning problem apparent in the Universe. God's purpose presumably included complex beings like us, so his initial conditions and rules would have to allow for our "existence" within the simulation. No untestable and unparsimonious "multiverse" is needed to "explain" away the obvious fine tuning in ours. Then again, perhaps God had done a number of previous simulations in order to zero in on the one that would yield what he wanted. That would depend on your view of God; whether he is all knowing and could get it right the first time without problems, or a Being who likes to explore and play with his ideas to expand his creations for his own good pleasure (or amusement).
As another "benefit", the simulation hypothesis neatly takes care of the temporal dimension in our reality. By convention, simulations begin at time t = 0 and proceed in a forward direction. There is no "prior time", the simulation simply begins to exist at t = 0. Thus, in this scenario any speculation about what happened "before the big bang" is meaningless. Moreover, the simulation timeline need not consist of equal step sizes. In computer simulations, the time step is sometimes adjusted to speed up or slow down the simulation for more precision during fast events, or less during boring times between slow events. The same could, in principle, be true of God's simulation. The first microsecond of the Big Bang would need fine time steps to capture events as currently theorized by cosmologists, while between supernova events, bigger time steps could be used to track the expansion of the universe or the aging of stars.
This concept of variable time steps only makes sense in the context of the simulator's time frame. From our perspective inside the simulation, a second is a second; whether God has divided it into femto or atto-second steps, we would not be aware of it. If I am simulating some physical phenomenon, each simulated time step will take a certain number of "clock cycles"; that is, a certain amount of my time in the real world, which will depend on the simulation software and the hardware platform (e.g. clock speed). Thus the simulated passage of time and the simulator's clock are quite different; God's own timeline (within eternity, somehow) need not be the same as ours, here inside the simulation. Just as the scientist watching his simulation is not stuck in its time line, so God is not constrained to ours, "With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day" (2 Peter 3:8, Psalm 90:4). That represents a range of more than 100 billion in relative rates for passage of time!
This idea has further possibilities that are intriguing, or perhaps disturbing, depending on your viewpoint. As in a computer simulation, God could stop his simulation at any time, effectively suspending time (and our reality), for as long as he wishes, perhaps to examine our thoughts (prayers?) in detail, as data in some memory buffer in his own mind. When playing a computer game, which is essentially one type of simulation, we often save our game to return later, after supper, or a good night's sleep. In principle, God could do the same with us. What's more, if our game avatar dies in the game, we will likely return to a previously saved game to restart it at that point, hoping to do something different this time to avoid being "killed", based on what we learned the last time. Indeed we may have to do this many times to proceed through the game. The characters in the game are "unaware" that they have played this scene "before" in your timeline, that they have killed you or perhaps "died" themselves. The game is simply reset to an earlier point in "time" and restarted as if the events leading to your avatar's "death" never occurred.
Does God do the same? Is it possible somehow that in God's timeline he has "replayed" numerous events numerous times, back tracking to a previous "save game" point in order to change the outcome of the current one? His preferred result may include your salvation, or my not being killed in a traffic accident. Of course, with multiple characters in his simulation (many billions over the millennia), it may not be possible, even in principle, to have the "best" possible outcome for all of them. Thus, if God wants to invest us with meaningful "free will" (whatever that means in a simulation context), even he will not be able to prevent bad things happening to some people. Perhaps he chooses some favourites for his own inscrutable reasons to pour out his blessings on? That begins to sound like predestination as in Calvinism! I did say some would find this disturbing. I hope these speculations do not get me into trouble!
In any computer simulation, the owner or operator can interrupt the timeline (suspend the simulation) and then go into the memory registers and adjust any of the parameters he wishes to change, in order to tweak the simulation along whatever lines he wants. Similarly, God could presumably be free to do the same in his Universe simulation. Early on, perhaps tweaking the laws of physics to allow stars and planets to exist, then adding rules when needed for chemistry, life, and eventually, us. This evokes the Intelligent Design theory, where the designer (AKA, God) is "allowed" to be active in his creation, to pursue his own ends.
In the context of a simulated reality, intelligent design (ID) theory also solves the origin of life problem, via the injection of complex biochemical information to get cellular life started on Earth. Evolution too can easily occur with the occasional injection of new genetic information into existing simulated life forms at suitable time points. In that way, God can be seen as "tinkering" or "playing" in his creation (the simulation) for his good pleasure, as it progresses toward his goal. That goal might well have been to, "make man in our image" (Genesis 1:26), which is to say, create a spiritual being, within his (simulated) material Universe, capable of interacting with him.
From our vantage point, inside the simulation, any noticeable but sudden change due to God's intervention, or parameter tweaking would appear inexplicable, which is to say, miraculous. Miracles therefore, may simply be God's occasional adjustments to our ongoing simulation. He would have gotten all the long-term settings correct long ago (on cosmological and geological time scales), and now limits himself to directing or "fine tuning" historical and social directions at cultural and human time scales. Any such interventions would then primarily be associated with his purposes for our souls or spirits, as are most recorded miracles throughout history.
Our human spirits might exist in God's simulation as bundles of algorithmic interaction protocols, potential abilities and preferences, heuristic behavioural guides (and other buzz-word gobbledegook), associated with each new human person. There is considerable evidence that our minds are not entirely materialistic, nor simply algorithmic in our (simulated?) material context, so perhaps our spiritual aspects exist as an added layer of simulation, connected into God's own mind somehow, and external to the material Universe simulation, but able to interact with it. This, of course, raises questions about "free will", which I will leave the reader to decide for himself. It also accommodates a variety of religious understandings, such as cosmic consciousness, and god-within-us views.
To stretch the religious interpretations further, when we die, here in the simulation, God might simply "up load" the spiritual aspects of those he likes, into a better "simulation"; perhaps one called "heaven", thereby providing for life after death. Alternatively, such human spiritual bundles could be revamped or reset and then re-injected into the ongoing Universe simulation as new people (reincarnation anyone?). Other spirits that God does not want to continue developing or using immediately might get stored for future use, discarded, or even relegated to "hell" in an entirely different simulation - one not as much fun. On the other hand, perhaps those destined to hell are not fully conscious spirits, but only metaphysical "zombies" that appear to the rest of us as human, but have no actual souls? In that case, in a sort of universalism, no true simulated spirit would actually end up in hell. There's lots of room here for idle speculation and religious syncretism!
Continuing to explore the possibilities of this simulated Universe yields some additional, but perhaps troubling suggestions. One obvious interpretation is that this scenario is just a simple form of pantheism: everything is God and God is in everything. Philosophically, this is a form of monism (everything is one essence), which may not be palatable for some. Another disturbing possibility is that the simulation actually began just yesterday in our timeline, with all of our reality and memories merely the initial conditions chosen for us. If those were set up carefully, there would be no way for us to know that our past was just a complex illusion. Then again, perhaps I am the only "real" mind in the simulation and all of my reality, including you and the rest of the world are just data inputs to my processor. One may wish to speculate about God's motive for doing that.
One final religious speculation is regarding the person of Jesus. There are now several science fiction motifs about humans entering into virtual realities, or their own simulations, so thinking of God immersing himself into his Universe simulation as a true human person, while still retaining his Godliness (Emmanuel - God with us), is not too difficult to envisage. God would then be simultaneously external to the simulation (the "Father" in his eternal timeline), while operating as a human inside our timeline - "the only begotten Son". With some further consideration, we might then think of the Holy Spirit as God's way of speaking to our spirits and dealing with our prayers. By means of this approach, our theological speculations have invoked the Trinity: three divine persons in one Godhead.
Although such speculations are interesting and entertaining, I do not actually believe them. While existing as a detailed simulation in God's mind may be indistinguishable from a truly material Universe with real flesh and blood people, it somehow reduces God to merely a clever and powerful simulator; perhaps even a trickster playing a complex computer game for his own amusement. I prefer the Christian belief in a loving God who created a stable material reality with creatures to inhabit it, in order to interact with his spiritual image bearers for all of eternity.
Rather, in this post I want to explore the idea that ALL of what we experience as reality, including our selves and our minds, is one huge simulation in a giant computer as suggested by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Elon Musk among others. For simplicity here, and without much loss of generality, I will name the entity doing the simulation as "God", and suppose that the platform for the simulation is simply his mind, so that no supercomputer or software are required. These designations do not limit the discussion since any other simulator would effectively be God from our perspective, and any simulation platform will do for discussion purposes.
However, thinking that we exist only in the mind of God puts a new, and quite literal spin on, "In him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28, but first written by Epimenides in the 7th century BC). Aside from that, it allows us to assume a benevolent simulation; God is not trying to fool us, his simulation is simply our reality. If reality is essentially the context in which we exist, then a simulated context would be just as real to us as a "real" world. But the religious terminology also clearly puts us in the realm of "speculative theology", if you will, and opens up all sorts of interesting interpretations and connections that are fun to explore. Having done a little computer simulation work myself, I can see numerous possibilities.
First of all, it makes creation of the Universe seem more manageable somehow, at least from our perspective. Genesis 1: "and God said, let there be...", seems more objective if God is setting up his simulation in his own mind. When you do a computer simulation, you specify the initial conditions, the range of the simulation in time and space (or other variables), define the rules for the simulation, and then press the start button, allowing the simulation to proceed, usually via a series of small steps in time. You then observe what happens, either to model a real system or scenario, to better understand what is happening, as in an electronic circuit, or to predict the future of whatever is being simulated, as in climate models for weather forecasting.
In our simulated world, the initial state could refer to the cosmological conditions at the start of the Big Bang when the universe came into existence. Those would be the energy and matter densities, and rules about the expansion of space-time. Depending how far back to the supposed singularity you want to begin, this could be a quark/gluon soup at gigakelvin temperature levels, or mere protons, electrons and neutrons in a uniform photon bath. In any case, God could specify these initial conditions anyway he wished, thereby easily accounting for the flatness of the present Universe and explaining the horizon problem in cosmology, without invoking some mysterious inflation theory.
The "rules" for the world simulation would, of course, be the laws of physics, which govern how the particles and energy exist and interact, starting with quantum mechanics, expanded to include the four known forces of nature (strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravity), along with their physical constants (c, e, G, h, k, etc.). Whether God's simulation uses the same "laws of physics" we have developed over the centuries to model our reality, or some other algorithmic formulations, I will leave to the reader to ponder.
For those conversant with modern cosmology, you will see that the start of this simulation neatly explains the fine tuning problem apparent in the Universe. God's purpose presumably included complex beings like us, so his initial conditions and rules would have to allow for our "existence" within the simulation. No untestable and unparsimonious "multiverse" is needed to "explain" away the obvious fine tuning in ours. Then again, perhaps God had done a number of previous simulations in order to zero in on the one that would yield what he wanted. That would depend on your view of God; whether he is all knowing and could get it right the first time without problems, or a Being who likes to explore and play with his ideas to expand his creations for his own good pleasure (or amusement).
As another "benefit", the simulation hypothesis neatly takes care of the temporal dimension in our reality. By convention, simulations begin at time t = 0 and proceed in a forward direction. There is no "prior time", the simulation simply begins to exist at t = 0. Thus, in this scenario any speculation about what happened "before the big bang" is meaningless. Moreover, the simulation timeline need not consist of equal step sizes. In computer simulations, the time step is sometimes adjusted to speed up or slow down the simulation for more precision during fast events, or less during boring times between slow events. The same could, in principle, be true of God's simulation. The first microsecond of the Big Bang would need fine time steps to capture events as currently theorized by cosmologists, while between supernova events, bigger time steps could be used to track the expansion of the universe or the aging of stars.
This concept of variable time steps only makes sense in the context of the simulator's time frame. From our perspective inside the simulation, a second is a second; whether God has divided it into femto or atto-second steps, we would not be aware of it. If I am simulating some physical phenomenon, each simulated time step will take a certain number of "clock cycles"; that is, a certain amount of my time in the real world, which will depend on the simulation software and the hardware platform (e.g. clock speed). Thus the simulated passage of time and the simulator's clock are quite different; God's own timeline (within eternity, somehow) need not be the same as ours, here inside the simulation. Just as the scientist watching his simulation is not stuck in its time line, so God is not constrained to ours, "With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day" (2 Peter 3:8, Psalm 90:4). That represents a range of more than 100 billion in relative rates for passage of time!
This idea has further possibilities that are intriguing, or perhaps disturbing, depending on your viewpoint. As in a computer simulation, God could stop his simulation at any time, effectively suspending time (and our reality), for as long as he wishes, perhaps to examine our thoughts (prayers?) in detail, as data in some memory buffer in his own mind. When playing a computer game, which is essentially one type of simulation, we often save our game to return later, after supper, or a good night's sleep. In principle, God could do the same with us. What's more, if our game avatar dies in the game, we will likely return to a previously saved game to restart it at that point, hoping to do something different this time to avoid being "killed", based on what we learned the last time. Indeed we may have to do this many times to proceed through the game. The characters in the game are "unaware" that they have played this scene "before" in your timeline, that they have killed you or perhaps "died" themselves. The game is simply reset to an earlier point in "time" and restarted as if the events leading to your avatar's "death" never occurred.
Does God do the same? Is it possible somehow that in God's timeline he has "replayed" numerous events numerous times, back tracking to a previous "save game" point in order to change the outcome of the current one? His preferred result may include your salvation, or my not being killed in a traffic accident. Of course, with multiple characters in his simulation (many billions over the millennia), it may not be possible, even in principle, to have the "best" possible outcome for all of them. Thus, if God wants to invest us with meaningful "free will" (whatever that means in a simulation context), even he will not be able to prevent bad things happening to some people. Perhaps he chooses some favourites for his own inscrutable reasons to pour out his blessings on? That begins to sound like predestination as in Calvinism! I did say some would find this disturbing. I hope these speculations do not get me into trouble!
In any computer simulation, the owner or operator can interrupt the timeline (suspend the simulation) and then go into the memory registers and adjust any of the parameters he wishes to change, in order to tweak the simulation along whatever lines he wants. Similarly, God could presumably be free to do the same in his Universe simulation. Early on, perhaps tweaking the laws of physics to allow stars and planets to exist, then adding rules when needed for chemistry, life, and eventually, us. This evokes the Intelligent Design theory, where the designer (AKA, God) is "allowed" to be active in his creation, to pursue his own ends.
In the context of a simulated reality, intelligent design (ID) theory also solves the origin of life problem, via the injection of complex biochemical information to get cellular life started on Earth. Evolution too can easily occur with the occasional injection of new genetic information into existing simulated life forms at suitable time points. In that way, God can be seen as "tinkering" or "playing" in his creation (the simulation) for his good pleasure, as it progresses toward his goal. That goal might well have been to, "make man in our image" (Genesis 1:26), which is to say, create a spiritual being, within his (simulated) material Universe, capable of interacting with him.
From our vantage point, inside the simulation, any noticeable but sudden change due to God's intervention, or parameter tweaking would appear inexplicable, which is to say, miraculous. Miracles therefore, may simply be God's occasional adjustments to our ongoing simulation. He would have gotten all the long-term settings correct long ago (on cosmological and geological time scales), and now limits himself to directing or "fine tuning" historical and social directions at cultural and human time scales. Any such interventions would then primarily be associated with his purposes for our souls or spirits, as are most recorded miracles throughout history.
Our human spirits might exist in God's simulation as bundles of algorithmic interaction protocols, potential abilities and preferences, heuristic behavioural guides (and other buzz-word gobbledegook), associated with each new human person. There is considerable evidence that our minds are not entirely materialistic, nor simply algorithmic in our (simulated?) material context, so perhaps our spiritual aspects exist as an added layer of simulation, connected into God's own mind somehow, and external to the material Universe simulation, but able to interact with it. This, of course, raises questions about "free will", which I will leave the reader to decide for himself. It also accommodates a variety of religious understandings, such as cosmic consciousness, and god-within-us views.
To stretch the religious interpretations further, when we die, here in the simulation, God might simply "up load" the spiritual aspects of those he likes, into a better "simulation"; perhaps one called "heaven", thereby providing for life after death. Alternatively, such human spiritual bundles could be revamped or reset and then re-injected into the ongoing Universe simulation as new people (reincarnation anyone?). Other spirits that God does not want to continue developing or using immediately might get stored for future use, discarded, or even relegated to "hell" in an entirely different simulation - one not as much fun. On the other hand, perhaps those destined to hell are not fully conscious spirits, but only metaphysical "zombies" that appear to the rest of us as human, but have no actual souls? In that case, in a sort of universalism, no true simulated spirit would actually end up in hell. There's lots of room here for idle speculation and religious syncretism!
Continuing to explore the possibilities of this simulated Universe yields some additional, but perhaps troubling suggestions. One obvious interpretation is that this scenario is just a simple form of pantheism: everything is God and God is in everything. Philosophically, this is a form of monism (everything is one essence), which may not be palatable for some. Another disturbing possibility is that the simulation actually began just yesterday in our timeline, with all of our reality and memories merely the initial conditions chosen for us. If those were set up carefully, there would be no way for us to know that our past was just a complex illusion. Then again, perhaps I am the only "real" mind in the simulation and all of my reality, including you and the rest of the world are just data inputs to my processor. One may wish to speculate about God's motive for doing that.
One final religious speculation is regarding the person of Jesus. There are now several science fiction motifs about humans entering into virtual realities, or their own simulations, so thinking of God immersing himself into his Universe simulation as a true human person, while still retaining his Godliness (Emmanuel - God with us), is not too difficult to envisage. God would then be simultaneously external to the simulation (the "Father" in his eternal timeline), while operating as a human inside our timeline - "the only begotten Son". With some further consideration, we might then think of the Holy Spirit as God's way of speaking to our spirits and dealing with our prayers. By means of this approach, our theological speculations have invoked the Trinity: three divine persons in one Godhead.
Although such speculations are interesting and entertaining, I do not actually believe them. While existing as a detailed simulation in God's mind may be indistinguishable from a truly material Universe with real flesh and blood people, it somehow reduces God to merely a clever and powerful simulator; perhaps even a trickster playing a complex computer game for his own amusement. I prefer the Christian belief in a loving God who created a stable material reality with creatures to inhabit it, in order to interact with his spiritual image bearers for all of eternity.
Monday, 31 December 2018
Hell and Damnation
This seems like a suitable topic for the end of a year!
Atheists, most agnostics, various other stripes of non-Christians, and even some Christians balk at, or deny outright the Biblical concept of hell and damnation. This ancient idea rubs against our 21st century sentiments of equality, fairness, proportionality, morality, and so on. Visions of lakes of fire (Revelation 20:14), and demons torturing unbelievers forever, with no chance of improving conditions, strike many people as absurd at best, and wrong, immoral, or even evil at worst. How could a good God condemn any finite, mortal, human soul to eternal damnation under such conditions?
These concerns are not unreasonable, although they run the dangerous risk (to the people raising them) of placing God, or at least his word in the Bible, in the dock (as C.S. Lewis wrote) with man as his prosecutor, judge and jury. One has to be careful judging the judge, especially when he is all knowing and all powerful! If there is but one God, a better strategy for dealing with him would be to listen, seek to understand, and then obey. Following Jesus in this life can actually be quite pleasant! And frankly, disliking what you read in the Bible, or have heard about him, is not a good argument against God's existence. Nevertheless, I can understand these concerns and will address them, at least in part.
First of all, many of the images of Hell and damnation that we may have in mind are not entirely biblical, but were generated by people's imaginations in the middle ages to essentially frighten people into believing, or at least obeying what was taught. See for example some of the medieval artistic depictions of hell. The Bible is much less explicit about hell, and much of what is written there can be better interpreted allegorically or metaphorically, if one is willing to give up the literal reading, as needed in so many other places in scripture. For instance, the entire book of Revelation is an apocalyptic vision and surely not intended to be taken literally. Certainly many people, especially during the middle ages, believed in such eternal punishments in the fires of hell. But many more, including most, non-literal Bible readers today, do not take such graphic imagery as a true description of hell, even if they accept hell as a literal destination for human souls.
Jesus does talk about hell and fire (Matthew 5:22) and uses the images of eternal fire in some of his parables (Mark 9:47, Luke 16:23). He also applies the Hebrew concept of Sheol, or the Greek Hades as the resting place of dead spirits. But he is more focused on people's salvation and the Kingdom of God than on the details of damnation. Jesus' parable of the sheep and goats, in which the damned are cast into the "eternal fire", gets close to the medieval images of hell (Matthew 25:41), but this too is a parable, intended to get people's attention and warn them against sin and disbelief. Notwithstanding certain doctrines and the limited information in the Bible, human death and what happens after remain a huge mystery to us, and so both heaven and hell are impossible to describe with very many clear details, although some people try.
In The Great Divorce, the Christian writer C.S. Lewis provides a more humane, yet still allegorical vision of hell and damnation. Basically, he says that if you have denied God all your life and wanted no part of Christian faith, then he will grant you your wish and place your soul apart from him when you die. In this understanding, hell essentially becomes a place separate from God, where unbelievers go to be far away from that which they wanted to be apart from. Damnation is in this sense, one's own choice, reinforced throughout a life of disbelief. The actual conditions there remain largely unspecified. The "burning fire" is sometimes envisioned as one's own shame and lost opportunity at not "being with God for eternity" (one definition of heaven). The "physical conditions" (if one can speak of such in a spiritual realm) may be quite pleasant, as far as we know, and the damned soul will, moreover, be in the presence of other like-minded souls and spirits who chose the same fate. That is not so bad now perhaps?
One way of looking at who is saved and who is condemned is to consider that, due to original sin, none of us is guiltless, and we all deserve eternal punishment, apart from God. We are all spiritually dead (the definition of being separated from God). Everyone has a natural tendency to do bad things, even if we think of ourselves a "good people". Any honest person will recognize this in himself, even as we downplay or try to hide our sins, they are real and many. The Bible goes beyond this to say none of us of our own accord seeks God or wants him to be part of our lives (Romans 3:10-12). Only the action of the Holy Spirit in our hearts can make us want to seek God, believe His truths, and accept the salvation of Jesus. Accordingly, divine justice and the perfection of heaven demand that ALL of us belong in hell, that is, away from God and his perfect, holy goodness. In his mercy, however, God chooses some to respond to his offer, accept Jesus' sacrifice, be cleansed and saved from our sins, and be allowed into his presence, both in this life and the next. That perspective puts another and very different spin on the subject. (John 3:16-18)
But some will complain, why does God only call some to salvation via his spirit? At bottom, this is a mystery beyond human understanding, best left to God in his wisdom. Fortunately, each person need only consider his or her own status, not judging who else will be saved or condemned. The mystery of who will be saved is tied up with the mystery of free will, which is a different, deep and mysterious subject. Suffice it to say that God respects our free will at some level and allows us to resist his Spirit and his offer, something many people actually do. Thus, to some extent, you are still choosing to go to hell if you turn your back on the Gospel message, God's invitation, and the Spirit's nudges in your heart.
This raises the follow-up question; what of those who did not understand the call, did not feel those nudges, or simply were not exposed to the Gospel message, either by missing it around them, or living at a time or place where they could not be exposed to it? There have been various views on this subject over the centuries. Some say, too bad, God only saves those he has predetermined to choose, before time began. That may be difficult to swallow, but we should not think we can understand the plans and purposes of an all powerful, all knowing, eternal, infinite being! Others claim there is a third possible outcome between heaven and hell, a place where those who did not have the choice in life end up for further processing, or perhaps another chance at deciding. Some call that Limbo, an old theological concept, although scripture provides little support for it. Perhaps God wants Bible readers to accept his offer, and so does not provide a clear "wait and see", or agnostic pathway for a second chance.
Although Jesus is "the way, the truth and the life" (John 14:8), the Bible does not say outright that if you do not explicitly accept Jesus Gospel offer then you are forever condemned to hell. Rather, the Gospel offer is the normal way into God's presence; accept and believe, and you will be saved by Jesus' sacrifice in your place. Another theoretical way is to be sinless yourself, like Jesus, but practically speaking, that is impossible. Anyone who claims to be sinless, especially before God, is lying to himself and makes God out to be a liar since he states clearly that no one is without sin (1 John 1:10).
In principle, there might be a third way into God's kingdom. One who has not rejected the Gospel offer because he has not been exposed to it, and so had no chance to accept, may be recruited by Jesus himself. The Bible is clear that Jesus controls entrance into heaven, but it does not constrain him to accept only those who explicitly accept his offer. Thus, sincere followers of other faiths who try to do what they know is right, even though they may not have heard his offer, may (conceivably) find Jesus merciful and willing to cleanse them from their sins without their explicit acceptance in life. After they die, they may find Jesus inviting them to be with him despite their ignorance. This is just speculation, but fits with some of Lewis' writings.
Finally, is hell eternal, or is it possible, at least in principle to get out of hell, once condemned to be there? Most Christians believe that hell is forever, but some theologians hold that it may indeed be possible, albeit difficult, to seek God after death. While many souls may be happy to remain apart from God, preferring the company in Hell, others may realize, too late that they did not listen to the offer, missed the boat, or merely would like another chance at being with God, even if they know little about him. I note that in most scripture passages about hell, it is the fire that is eternal (e.g. Matthew 3:12, Mark 9:43, Jude 7), not necessarily the soul's punishment. In this view, Jesus could seek lost souls after death as well as before. He has, after all been to hell once already. If he finds sincere souls looking for an alternative, he might, some hope, allow them into his presence or provide them with a pathway out of hell. There are some cryptic Bible passages that suggest this possibility, but I wouldn't bet my soul on it by ignoring God's salvation offer today!
I hope the above discussion shifts your view of hell and damnation at least a bit. God is not cruel and nasty, arbitrary, or capricious, but wants everyone to accept his offer (1 Timothy 2:4). He is also merciful and slow to anger, so may, perhaps be flexible for his Son's sake, allowing some unbelievers into his kingdom - those he deems redeemable, as it were. However, the step of faith to salvation in this life is not too high, nor a huge leap. The Bible implies that someone with the smallest amount of faith may be granted God's grace (Isaiah 42:3, Luke 23:43). Some theologians even hope that as eternity progresses, there will be fewer and fewer human occupants of hell, leaving only the devil and his demons to reside there forever. Although that seems an extreme view, eternity is a long time, and who can limit what God will do? Nevertheless, the best option today is clearly to accept God's offer and Jesus' salvation, adjusting your life accordingly, with his Spirit's guidance and help, and to begin looking forward to being with God for eternity.
If you haven't already done that, what are you waiting for?
Atheists, most agnostics, various other stripes of non-Christians, and even some Christians balk at, or deny outright the Biblical concept of hell and damnation. This ancient idea rubs against our 21st century sentiments of equality, fairness, proportionality, morality, and so on. Visions of lakes of fire (Revelation 20:14), and demons torturing unbelievers forever, with no chance of improving conditions, strike many people as absurd at best, and wrong, immoral, or even evil at worst. How could a good God condemn any finite, mortal, human soul to eternal damnation under such conditions?
These concerns are not unreasonable, although they run the dangerous risk (to the people raising them) of placing God, or at least his word in the Bible, in the dock (as C.S. Lewis wrote) with man as his prosecutor, judge and jury. One has to be careful judging the judge, especially when he is all knowing and all powerful! If there is but one God, a better strategy for dealing with him would be to listen, seek to understand, and then obey. Following Jesus in this life can actually be quite pleasant! And frankly, disliking what you read in the Bible, or have heard about him, is not a good argument against God's existence. Nevertheless, I can understand these concerns and will address them, at least in part.
First of all, many of the images of Hell and damnation that we may have in mind are not entirely biblical, but were generated by people's imaginations in the middle ages to essentially frighten people into believing, or at least obeying what was taught. See for example some of the medieval artistic depictions of hell. The Bible is much less explicit about hell, and much of what is written there can be better interpreted allegorically or metaphorically, if one is willing to give up the literal reading, as needed in so many other places in scripture. For instance, the entire book of Revelation is an apocalyptic vision and surely not intended to be taken literally. Certainly many people, especially during the middle ages, believed in such eternal punishments in the fires of hell. But many more, including most, non-literal Bible readers today, do not take such graphic imagery as a true description of hell, even if they accept hell as a literal destination for human souls.
Jesus does talk about hell and fire (Matthew 5:22) and uses the images of eternal fire in some of his parables (Mark 9:47, Luke 16:23). He also applies the Hebrew concept of Sheol, or the Greek Hades as the resting place of dead spirits. But he is more focused on people's salvation and the Kingdom of God than on the details of damnation. Jesus' parable of the sheep and goats, in which the damned are cast into the "eternal fire", gets close to the medieval images of hell (Matthew 25:41), but this too is a parable, intended to get people's attention and warn them against sin and disbelief. Notwithstanding certain doctrines and the limited information in the Bible, human death and what happens after remain a huge mystery to us, and so both heaven and hell are impossible to describe with very many clear details, although some people try.
In The Great Divorce, the Christian writer C.S. Lewis provides a more humane, yet still allegorical vision of hell and damnation. Basically, he says that if you have denied God all your life and wanted no part of Christian faith, then he will grant you your wish and place your soul apart from him when you die. In this understanding, hell essentially becomes a place separate from God, where unbelievers go to be far away from that which they wanted to be apart from. Damnation is in this sense, one's own choice, reinforced throughout a life of disbelief. The actual conditions there remain largely unspecified. The "burning fire" is sometimes envisioned as one's own shame and lost opportunity at not "being with God for eternity" (one definition of heaven). The "physical conditions" (if one can speak of such in a spiritual realm) may be quite pleasant, as far as we know, and the damned soul will, moreover, be in the presence of other like-minded souls and spirits who chose the same fate. That is not so bad now perhaps?
One way of looking at who is saved and who is condemned is to consider that, due to original sin, none of us is guiltless, and we all deserve eternal punishment, apart from God. We are all spiritually dead (the definition of being separated from God). Everyone has a natural tendency to do bad things, even if we think of ourselves a "good people". Any honest person will recognize this in himself, even as we downplay or try to hide our sins, they are real and many. The Bible goes beyond this to say none of us of our own accord seeks God or wants him to be part of our lives (Romans 3:10-12). Only the action of the Holy Spirit in our hearts can make us want to seek God, believe His truths, and accept the salvation of Jesus. Accordingly, divine justice and the perfection of heaven demand that ALL of us belong in hell, that is, away from God and his perfect, holy goodness. In his mercy, however, God chooses some to respond to his offer, accept Jesus' sacrifice, be cleansed and saved from our sins, and be allowed into his presence, both in this life and the next. That perspective puts another and very different spin on the subject. (John 3:16-18)
But some will complain, why does God only call some to salvation via his spirit? At bottom, this is a mystery beyond human understanding, best left to God in his wisdom. Fortunately, each person need only consider his or her own status, not judging who else will be saved or condemned. The mystery of who will be saved is tied up with the mystery of free will, which is a different, deep and mysterious subject. Suffice it to say that God respects our free will at some level and allows us to resist his Spirit and his offer, something many people actually do. Thus, to some extent, you are still choosing to go to hell if you turn your back on the Gospel message, God's invitation, and the Spirit's nudges in your heart.
This raises the follow-up question; what of those who did not understand the call, did not feel those nudges, or simply were not exposed to the Gospel message, either by missing it around them, or living at a time or place where they could not be exposed to it? There have been various views on this subject over the centuries. Some say, too bad, God only saves those he has predetermined to choose, before time began. That may be difficult to swallow, but we should not think we can understand the plans and purposes of an all powerful, all knowing, eternal, infinite being! Others claim there is a third possible outcome between heaven and hell, a place where those who did not have the choice in life end up for further processing, or perhaps another chance at deciding. Some call that Limbo, an old theological concept, although scripture provides little support for it. Perhaps God wants Bible readers to accept his offer, and so does not provide a clear "wait and see", or agnostic pathway for a second chance.
Although Jesus is "the way, the truth and the life" (John 14:8), the Bible does not say outright that if you do not explicitly accept Jesus Gospel offer then you are forever condemned to hell. Rather, the Gospel offer is the normal way into God's presence; accept and believe, and you will be saved by Jesus' sacrifice in your place. Another theoretical way is to be sinless yourself, like Jesus, but practically speaking, that is impossible. Anyone who claims to be sinless, especially before God, is lying to himself and makes God out to be a liar since he states clearly that no one is without sin (1 John 1:10).
In principle, there might be a third way into God's kingdom. One who has not rejected the Gospel offer because he has not been exposed to it, and so had no chance to accept, may be recruited by Jesus himself. The Bible is clear that Jesus controls entrance into heaven, but it does not constrain him to accept only those who explicitly accept his offer. Thus, sincere followers of other faiths who try to do what they know is right, even though they may not have heard his offer, may (conceivably) find Jesus merciful and willing to cleanse them from their sins without their explicit acceptance in life. After they die, they may find Jesus inviting them to be with him despite their ignorance. This is just speculation, but fits with some of Lewis' writings.
Finally, is hell eternal, or is it possible, at least in principle to get out of hell, once condemned to be there? Most Christians believe that hell is forever, but some theologians hold that it may indeed be possible, albeit difficult, to seek God after death. While many souls may be happy to remain apart from God, preferring the company in Hell, others may realize, too late that they did not listen to the offer, missed the boat, or merely would like another chance at being with God, even if they know little about him. I note that in most scripture passages about hell, it is the fire that is eternal (e.g. Matthew 3:12, Mark 9:43, Jude 7), not necessarily the soul's punishment. In this view, Jesus could seek lost souls after death as well as before. He has, after all been to hell once already. If he finds sincere souls looking for an alternative, he might, some hope, allow them into his presence or provide them with a pathway out of hell. There are some cryptic Bible passages that suggest this possibility, but I wouldn't bet my soul on it by ignoring God's salvation offer today!
I hope the above discussion shifts your view of hell and damnation at least a bit. God is not cruel and nasty, arbitrary, or capricious, but wants everyone to accept his offer (1 Timothy 2:4). He is also merciful and slow to anger, so may, perhaps be flexible for his Son's sake, allowing some unbelievers into his kingdom - those he deems redeemable, as it were. However, the step of faith to salvation in this life is not too high, nor a huge leap. The Bible implies that someone with the smallest amount of faith may be granted God's grace (Isaiah 42:3, Luke 23:43). Some theologians even hope that as eternity progresses, there will be fewer and fewer human occupants of hell, leaving only the devil and his demons to reside there forever. Although that seems an extreme view, eternity is a long time, and who can limit what God will do? Nevertheless, the best option today is clearly to accept God's offer and Jesus' salvation, adjusting your life accordingly, with his Spirit's guidance and help, and to begin looking forward to being with God for eternity.
If you haven't already done that, what are you waiting for?
Tuesday, 11 December 2018
Philosophy 101 - I and (maybe) You Exist
From a personal perspective, studying philosophy has various benefits: it forces logical and precise thinking, clarifies one's beliefs and motivations, helps one understand reality and knowledge better, and it can also be fun, or at least entertaining. Technically, philosophy is the study of several aspects of life as a thinking person: the ultimate nature of reality (metaphysics), existence and being (ontology), truth and how we know it (epistemology), how to interact with other people and things (ethics), how to think and argue clearly (logic). My philosophical ramblings on this site will begin with the first two of these: my own existence and from there delve into what is real. I hope you enjoy the ride.
As my starting point, I choose Rene Descartes' famous "cogito ergo sum", "I think therefore I am". It is hard to disagree with that; if some thinking is occurring some existing thing must be doing it and if I am aware of it, then it is surely me doing the thinking, so therefore I exist. But what is this "I" and what does it mean to "exist"? The "I" is clearly the "entity" doing the "thinking", or forming "ideas" in its "mind". And "exist" means having some sort of true reality or being.
Here we come across one problem common to all philosophy; the terminology used and the meaning of words. All those terms in quotations in the previous paragraph have been discussed, defined and argued about, some for millennia. Without getting lost in semantics or semiotics I will merely assume at this point that the reader (if this post and you too actually exist) has more or less the same understanding of those words as I do. This cannot always be assumed, however, and much of what passes for philosophy is often hair splitting, or confusion about the precise meanings of terms. That is not the fun part!
In any case, "I exist" is my starting "truth" for exploring reality and developing my personal philosophy. Beyond this it is hard to go without first making one or more assumption. Unless I want to stop here, I will need to propose some additional truths or tenets about reality. Those may not be absolutely provable from my minimal starting point, but they can be checked and tested in my mind to see how reasonable they are and where they will take me. This is a common feature of philosophy - making tentative assumptions or positing basic tenets. In Descartes case, he assumed that God exists and that God would not fool him with a fake reality, but I will try a different route.
Is there anything real apart from me? Is the "I" the only thing that exists? In principle, I could be a unitary thinking entity, a universe in and of itself, that is just mentally playing with myself, pretending, without knowing it, that there is a world of some sort beyond my thoughts. Yes, of course, it seems that there is such a world: I can see, hear, touch, feel, hurt, etc. But in truth, all those sensations or experiences are just sensory signals coming into my mind via nervous pathways. This is the basis of the "brain in a vat" concept of unreality. Similar to the Matrix movies, where a fictional "reality" is fed into a brain from some simulation machine, or virtual reality device. Even the concept of nerves and a brain might, in principle, be only figments of my data feed or subconscious imagination.
In addition to an apparent world around me, there also seems to be, in my mind, the passage of "time". Even alone in my mind, I sense that this thought comes after that one, and that there seems to be a progression of mental activity, even if there are no sensations coming from "outside". I also seem to have "memories" of events in previous times, as well as anticipations about future events. That is, I feel like I can recall as well as plan, so some temporal dimension must be needed in my existence, even if the memories are fake and the plans are meaningless. The concept and nature of "time" has perplexed and confounded philosophers for millennia, and physicists for at least a century. I am not about to solve the conundrum here, so will merely accept that the dimension of time is somehow part of my reality.
In my mental dialogue with myself, the world I think I see, hear and touch, and the "people" (real or otherwise) I seem to interact with are much more complicated than I am capable of imagining, and they bring concepts and ideas to mind that I am not capable of generating. I am not a perfect genius to be able to create all that I experience in my mind. I am not aware of continually and consciously creating reality around me, and to think that all of the external world I seem to experience is the product of some unconscious part of my mind seems highly unlikely. What purpose would that have? (Then again, is purpose necessary?) Yes, my mind can generate imaginary fantasies and I can have dreams, but they are either fuzzy, illogical (even to my own mind), limited, or difficult to construct in any detail, whereas the "reality" I seem to experience pours into my awareness willy-nilly and seemingly, at a huge data rate, without my own mental effort, even when I am not paying attention.
Therefore, it seems unlikely or highly improbable that I and only I exist, and only as a mind, with no physical reality around me. One possibility that Descartes proposed was that there is another being of some sort (he called it a malicious demon) that is feeding me all these sensations in order to fool me into thinking that there is some reality beyond me. Why it would want to do that if it were only the two of us I could not say. However, to do so, this other entity would have to be separate from me since I have no experience of it. Moreover, there would have to exist some mechanism for it to feed me this stream of conscious experiences that seem to be separate from my own thoughts, being and mental activity. Thus, although I cannot prove it with certainty, there must surely be at least two entities and some connection between them in whatever "reality" is. Even if the second entity is my own subconscious mind, there must be some sort of separation between it and my conscious mind, so again, there are at least two separate parts one way or other.
If two beings or parts, why not more? Why not admit the existence of other minds, or at least some other entities, if only ones that generate the data for the second being to stream into my mind? Much of the data I experience seems to point toward a bigger reality, or "world" out there, so perhaps what appears to be a reality outside my mind actually does exist! Is that a leap too far? On what basis can I make this leap? For it not to be true, I would have to posit the following: my thinking generates what seem to me to be actions, including speech composed of words and sentences that seem to (imperfectly) capture and represent some of those thoughts. Said "actions" appear to elicit corresponding changes in the data stream: I "see" my "body" move, I "hear" my words, I "feel" changes within my "body". Moreover, these supposed "actions" sometimes appear to lead to responses from the supposed reality around me: my view of the "world" shifts, my "hand" touches something in my field of view, and sometimes, other "entities" seem to respond to me using similar words and sentences, which I "hear" and then decode to (usually) make some sense in my mind. Could all that be that second entity's activity, cleverly and carefully arranged to fool me? For what possible purpose? Solely its own entertainment?
Clearly any such entity capable of doing all that must be superior to my limited, slow self. The data stream coming into my mind seems far more detailed, quick and sophisticated than anything going out from my thoughts. If the other entity and its connection to me were the only things in existence, then I am clearly the lesser of the two and have no control over the other or the link between us. Perhaps the other entity is just insane after realizing he is alone with an idiot? But consistent and steady data streams are not what one thinks of as insanity. That does not seem a very promising way to build up a sense of existence or a philosophy of reality.
So, am I ready to take the leap and suppose that there is indeed some sort of physical reality apart from my mind, in which I exist? Again, that cannot be proven, but does not seem unreasonable, and the few conceivable alternatives are not very attractive. Perhaps it is I who am insane and just imaging everything? But then, what does "insane" mean? And how did I come into being, since I seem to be able to recall thoughts and sensations from only a finite past? I suppose that whatever I am could be somehow programmed to "forget" events further back than a certain time. On the other "hand" (so to speak), my "memories" could just have been implanted a few seconds ago and the thoughts I am having are just a test for some Artificial Intelligence developer, seeing where his simulation software will take him... Again, unprovable but not particularly happy to think about. In any case, some other entity would have to have programmed me or produced my detailed memories to feed into me, thereby "proving" that something other than me exists.
I should take a moment to talk about "proof" and how I can prove any conclusions I try to make. Strictly speaking, very few postulates or conclusions can be proven as absolutely true. There are mathematical theorems and geometry proofs, which once understood are seen as necessarily true, and there are deductive proofs such as syllogisms, which can be seen as certainly true, given their premises. But it is rare that other aspects of life -- cause and effect, the meaning of texts, scientific theories, and yes, reality itself -- can be proven to be true at that same level of undoubtable certainty. Even longstanding scientific "truths" can be and are questioned, or are subject to testing.
David Hume famously showed that inductive thinking cannot be proven by logic, but even he admitted that usually, inductive thinking is all we have to move forward. Thus, for instance, we get "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" as used in courtrooms. That is the best you can hope for in a murder trial, where someone can always put together a fanciful explanation that "it wasn't me", all evidence to the contrary. In such a case, and in most cases of reasoning, one has to look at the evidence on hand and draw the best conclusion one can, bearing in mind that there may be other evidence that one has not seen or that may arise in future, or that there may be a better explanation or hypothesis in the offing. In many cases, even "beyond reasonable doubt" is impossible, and we have to settle for "most likely", or "on the balance of probabilities" however understood and interpreted.
This question of "knowing" is what epistemology is all about: how do we know what we think we know? This involves examining "evidence", facts or inputs that bear on the question at hand. In this initial study, it means accepting and interpreting the sensations and data stream coming into my mind, trying to make sense of it all, and I hope, learning to trust my senses and deciding whether what they seem to be telling me is true and reasonable.
As another aside, babies are natural philosophers; that is, true scientists. Being born into a world means being confronted with all sorts of novel sensations, and slowly learning to make sense of them. Babies see shapes, colours, patterns and changes, and need to interpret them as things, separate objects and movements. They also see things waving around in front of them and eventually realize these are their mother or their own hands and find they have some means of influencing what happens. Their minds are constantly building, adding to, and revising their mental "model" of reality as new data is collected and their thinking abilities improve. In that sense, each mind is constantly using its mental model of reality to interpret what is happening around it. For instance, when driving a car, I have a mental map of where I am and where I'm going, and a constantly updating model of what is around me: that car in the other lane behind me gaining on me, that sign coming up that I cannot yet read, my position in my lane, how fast I am going, and so on.
Going back to my reverie, how sure can I be that I am not alone, but that some reality exists beyond my thinking mind? The answer is that I cannot be certain. I cannot prove absolutely that anything else really exists. Given the nature of the question, what possible evidence could I accept that could not just be part of my dream or subconscious imagination, or the data stream from that "other" entity? Nevertheless, as outlined above, I have some reasons to think that there must be something other than my own overactive mind. At least such an assumption is not unreasonable, given the data stream I experience, and it is surely preferred to the alternative. Therefore, I will go with it. A world outside my mind does exist! My model of said world may be inaccurate and is surely incomplete, but I cannot accept that it is entirely wrong or just fictional.
Note that I cannot yet refer to "you", "we" or another person since I do not yet know whether you or others truly exist. Therefore the next step is to decide whether or not there are other minds in the reality I experience. Here too, I could be in some sort of simulation or virtual reality, where a clever AI generates the appearance and feedback from what appear to be creatures similar to myself "out there". Perhaps all the "people" I see and interact with are just robots or holodeck projections programmed to interact with me? Or perhaps mindless zombie-like beings, pre-programmed to interact in certain limited ways with me. The belief that I am the only mind in the world and that all the other apparent people are either figments of my imagination or constructions of some other entity intended to fool me is known as solipsism, although how I ever came up with that word if I am the only mind that exists, I don't know. That reminds me of the joke about the solipsist professor; his best students feared that if he died, they would cease to exist.
Once again, we (oh sorry, I) cannot "prove" that you or anyone else actually exists as a mind apart from mine. Nevertheless, I can try to reason about this. When I am seemingly interacting with other apparent persons, I note that they appear to think, reason and act in ways similar but not identical to myself. Although each one is different, they appear to look similar to the way I look (shape, arms, heads, size, etc.), at least with consistent differences (beard, height, dress, voice, gender, etc.). Moreover, when they "speak", I can understand what they appear to be saying, and that seems to connect with my own "speech" and actions. That is, conversations seem to be meaningful most of the time. Moreover, those others' behaviours seems to be similar enough to my own that I can claim to understand them and what they are doing, at least much of the time. The interactions and relationships I seem to have feel like they are real. Also, there seems to be a lot more of "them" than would be necessary to simulate a fake reality for me, and my imagination would get rather tired dreaming up new and slightly different versions of "them" wherever I go. Moreover, I often hear or read ideas novel or even surprising to me - something that would be tricky if they were all in my own mind.
If these supposed other people seem to operate and exist in the same way that I do, perhaps the simplest explanation is that they actually do exist in the same way that I do. If I was looking at myself externally, and all I could see was the data stream associated with my external (non-mental) self, I postulate that it would appear more or less like what I perceive of these others, aside from differentiating details; that is, I suppose that I am pretty similar to those others; i.e. there is nothing special about my physical self, other than that is where "I" appear to reside.
Again, the alternative is that these others are somehow simulacrums, robots, or simulations designed to behave in ways similar to myself. In that case, what would be the difference whether or not they were "real" persons? It would be like a Turing test: if I cannot tell whether the "others" I perceive are persons like me or simulations of the same, then there is no meaningful difference. Then, rather than assume that I am the only "real" person and everyone else is fake or unreal somehow, I would rather go with the hypothesis that these others are indeed real people, like me in various ways, and most importantly, having minds of their own. I can see evidence of this in their behaviour, especially when compared with my own, over time as the interactions and evidence collects.
So where are we now? To recap, I exist, I am not alone, there is some sort of reality outside my mind, there are other minds similar to my own in this reality. Well then, hello reader, you real person, welcome to my thoughts! Stay tuned, more on reality next time...
As my starting point, I choose Rene Descartes' famous "cogito ergo sum", "I think therefore I am". It is hard to disagree with that; if some thinking is occurring some existing thing must be doing it and if I am aware of it, then it is surely me doing the thinking, so therefore I exist. But what is this "I" and what does it mean to "exist"? The "I" is clearly the "entity" doing the "thinking", or forming "ideas" in its "mind". And "exist" means having some sort of true reality or being.
Here we come across one problem common to all philosophy; the terminology used and the meaning of words. All those terms in quotations in the previous paragraph have been discussed, defined and argued about, some for millennia. Without getting lost in semantics or semiotics I will merely assume at this point that the reader (if this post and you too actually exist) has more or less the same understanding of those words as I do. This cannot always be assumed, however, and much of what passes for philosophy is often hair splitting, or confusion about the precise meanings of terms. That is not the fun part!
In any case, "I exist" is my starting "truth" for exploring reality and developing my personal philosophy. Beyond this it is hard to go without first making one or more assumption. Unless I want to stop here, I will need to propose some additional truths or tenets about reality. Those may not be absolutely provable from my minimal starting point, but they can be checked and tested in my mind to see how reasonable they are and where they will take me. This is a common feature of philosophy - making tentative assumptions or positing basic tenets. In Descartes case, he assumed that God exists and that God would not fool him with a fake reality, but I will try a different route.
Is there anything real apart from me? Is the "I" the only thing that exists? In principle, I could be a unitary thinking entity, a universe in and of itself, that is just mentally playing with myself, pretending, without knowing it, that there is a world of some sort beyond my thoughts. Yes, of course, it seems that there is such a world: I can see, hear, touch, feel, hurt, etc. But in truth, all those sensations or experiences are just sensory signals coming into my mind via nervous pathways. This is the basis of the "brain in a vat" concept of unreality. Similar to the Matrix movies, where a fictional "reality" is fed into a brain from some simulation machine, or virtual reality device. Even the concept of nerves and a brain might, in principle, be only figments of my data feed or subconscious imagination.
In addition to an apparent world around me, there also seems to be, in my mind, the passage of "time". Even alone in my mind, I sense that this thought comes after that one, and that there seems to be a progression of mental activity, even if there are no sensations coming from "outside". I also seem to have "memories" of events in previous times, as well as anticipations about future events. That is, I feel like I can recall as well as plan, so some temporal dimension must be needed in my existence, even if the memories are fake and the plans are meaningless. The concept and nature of "time" has perplexed and confounded philosophers for millennia, and physicists for at least a century. I am not about to solve the conundrum here, so will merely accept that the dimension of time is somehow part of my reality.
In my mental dialogue with myself, the world I think I see, hear and touch, and the "people" (real or otherwise) I seem to interact with are much more complicated than I am capable of imagining, and they bring concepts and ideas to mind that I am not capable of generating. I am not a perfect genius to be able to create all that I experience in my mind. I am not aware of continually and consciously creating reality around me, and to think that all of the external world I seem to experience is the product of some unconscious part of my mind seems highly unlikely. What purpose would that have? (Then again, is purpose necessary?) Yes, my mind can generate imaginary fantasies and I can have dreams, but they are either fuzzy, illogical (even to my own mind), limited, or difficult to construct in any detail, whereas the "reality" I seem to experience pours into my awareness willy-nilly and seemingly, at a huge data rate, without my own mental effort, even when I am not paying attention.
Therefore, it seems unlikely or highly improbable that I and only I exist, and only as a mind, with no physical reality around me. One possibility that Descartes proposed was that there is another being of some sort (he called it a malicious demon) that is feeding me all these sensations in order to fool me into thinking that there is some reality beyond me. Why it would want to do that if it were only the two of us I could not say. However, to do so, this other entity would have to be separate from me since I have no experience of it. Moreover, there would have to exist some mechanism for it to feed me this stream of conscious experiences that seem to be separate from my own thoughts, being and mental activity. Thus, although I cannot prove it with certainty, there must surely be at least two entities and some connection between them in whatever "reality" is. Even if the second entity is my own subconscious mind, there must be some sort of separation between it and my conscious mind, so again, there are at least two separate parts one way or other.
If two beings or parts, why not more? Why not admit the existence of other minds, or at least some other entities, if only ones that generate the data for the second being to stream into my mind? Much of the data I experience seems to point toward a bigger reality, or "world" out there, so perhaps what appears to be a reality outside my mind actually does exist! Is that a leap too far? On what basis can I make this leap? For it not to be true, I would have to posit the following: my thinking generates what seem to me to be actions, including speech composed of words and sentences that seem to (imperfectly) capture and represent some of those thoughts. Said "actions" appear to elicit corresponding changes in the data stream: I "see" my "body" move, I "hear" my words, I "feel" changes within my "body". Moreover, these supposed "actions" sometimes appear to lead to responses from the supposed reality around me: my view of the "world" shifts, my "hand" touches something in my field of view, and sometimes, other "entities" seem to respond to me using similar words and sentences, which I "hear" and then decode to (usually) make some sense in my mind. Could all that be that second entity's activity, cleverly and carefully arranged to fool me? For what possible purpose? Solely its own entertainment?
Clearly any such entity capable of doing all that must be superior to my limited, slow self. The data stream coming into my mind seems far more detailed, quick and sophisticated than anything going out from my thoughts. If the other entity and its connection to me were the only things in existence, then I am clearly the lesser of the two and have no control over the other or the link between us. Perhaps the other entity is just insane after realizing he is alone with an idiot? But consistent and steady data streams are not what one thinks of as insanity. That does not seem a very promising way to build up a sense of existence or a philosophy of reality.
So, am I ready to take the leap and suppose that there is indeed some sort of physical reality apart from my mind, in which I exist? Again, that cannot be proven, but does not seem unreasonable, and the few conceivable alternatives are not very attractive. Perhaps it is I who am insane and just imaging everything? But then, what does "insane" mean? And how did I come into being, since I seem to be able to recall thoughts and sensations from only a finite past? I suppose that whatever I am could be somehow programmed to "forget" events further back than a certain time. On the other "hand" (so to speak), my "memories" could just have been implanted a few seconds ago and the thoughts I am having are just a test for some Artificial Intelligence developer, seeing where his simulation software will take him... Again, unprovable but not particularly happy to think about. In any case, some other entity would have to have programmed me or produced my detailed memories to feed into me, thereby "proving" that something other than me exists.
I should take a moment to talk about "proof" and how I can prove any conclusions I try to make. Strictly speaking, very few postulates or conclusions can be proven as absolutely true. There are mathematical theorems and geometry proofs, which once understood are seen as necessarily true, and there are deductive proofs such as syllogisms, which can be seen as certainly true, given their premises. But it is rare that other aspects of life -- cause and effect, the meaning of texts, scientific theories, and yes, reality itself -- can be proven to be true at that same level of undoubtable certainty. Even longstanding scientific "truths" can be and are questioned, or are subject to testing.
David Hume famously showed that inductive thinking cannot be proven by logic, but even he admitted that usually, inductive thinking is all we have to move forward. Thus, for instance, we get "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" as used in courtrooms. That is the best you can hope for in a murder trial, where someone can always put together a fanciful explanation that "it wasn't me", all evidence to the contrary. In such a case, and in most cases of reasoning, one has to look at the evidence on hand and draw the best conclusion one can, bearing in mind that there may be other evidence that one has not seen or that may arise in future, or that there may be a better explanation or hypothesis in the offing. In many cases, even "beyond reasonable doubt" is impossible, and we have to settle for "most likely", or "on the balance of probabilities" however understood and interpreted.
This question of "knowing" is what epistemology is all about: how do we know what we think we know? This involves examining "evidence", facts or inputs that bear on the question at hand. In this initial study, it means accepting and interpreting the sensations and data stream coming into my mind, trying to make sense of it all, and I hope, learning to trust my senses and deciding whether what they seem to be telling me is true and reasonable.
As another aside, babies are natural philosophers; that is, true scientists. Being born into a world means being confronted with all sorts of novel sensations, and slowly learning to make sense of them. Babies see shapes, colours, patterns and changes, and need to interpret them as things, separate objects and movements. They also see things waving around in front of them and eventually realize these are their mother or their own hands and find they have some means of influencing what happens. Their minds are constantly building, adding to, and revising their mental "model" of reality as new data is collected and their thinking abilities improve. In that sense, each mind is constantly using its mental model of reality to interpret what is happening around it. For instance, when driving a car, I have a mental map of where I am and where I'm going, and a constantly updating model of what is around me: that car in the other lane behind me gaining on me, that sign coming up that I cannot yet read, my position in my lane, how fast I am going, and so on.
Going back to my reverie, how sure can I be that I am not alone, but that some reality exists beyond my thinking mind? The answer is that I cannot be certain. I cannot prove absolutely that anything else really exists. Given the nature of the question, what possible evidence could I accept that could not just be part of my dream or subconscious imagination, or the data stream from that "other" entity? Nevertheless, as outlined above, I have some reasons to think that there must be something other than my own overactive mind. At least such an assumption is not unreasonable, given the data stream I experience, and it is surely preferred to the alternative. Therefore, I will go with it. A world outside my mind does exist! My model of said world may be inaccurate and is surely incomplete, but I cannot accept that it is entirely wrong or just fictional.
Note that I cannot yet refer to "you", "we" or another person since I do not yet know whether you or others truly exist. Therefore the next step is to decide whether or not there are other minds in the reality I experience. Here too, I could be in some sort of simulation or virtual reality, where a clever AI generates the appearance and feedback from what appear to be creatures similar to myself "out there". Perhaps all the "people" I see and interact with are just robots or holodeck projections programmed to interact with me? Or perhaps mindless zombie-like beings, pre-programmed to interact in certain limited ways with me. The belief that I am the only mind in the world and that all the other apparent people are either figments of my imagination or constructions of some other entity intended to fool me is known as solipsism, although how I ever came up with that word if I am the only mind that exists, I don't know. That reminds me of the joke about the solipsist professor; his best students feared that if he died, they would cease to exist.
Once again, we (oh sorry, I) cannot "prove" that you or anyone else actually exists as a mind apart from mine. Nevertheless, I can try to reason about this. When I am seemingly interacting with other apparent persons, I note that they appear to think, reason and act in ways similar but not identical to myself. Although each one is different, they appear to look similar to the way I look (shape, arms, heads, size, etc.), at least with consistent differences (beard, height, dress, voice, gender, etc.). Moreover, when they "speak", I can understand what they appear to be saying, and that seems to connect with my own "speech" and actions. That is, conversations seem to be meaningful most of the time. Moreover, those others' behaviours seems to be similar enough to my own that I can claim to understand them and what they are doing, at least much of the time. The interactions and relationships I seem to have feel like they are real. Also, there seems to be a lot more of "them" than would be necessary to simulate a fake reality for me, and my imagination would get rather tired dreaming up new and slightly different versions of "them" wherever I go. Moreover, I often hear or read ideas novel or even surprising to me - something that would be tricky if they were all in my own mind.
If these supposed other people seem to operate and exist in the same way that I do, perhaps the simplest explanation is that they actually do exist in the same way that I do. If I was looking at myself externally, and all I could see was the data stream associated with my external (non-mental) self, I postulate that it would appear more or less like what I perceive of these others, aside from differentiating details; that is, I suppose that I am pretty similar to those others; i.e. there is nothing special about my physical self, other than that is where "I" appear to reside.
Again, the alternative is that these others are somehow simulacrums, robots, or simulations designed to behave in ways similar to myself. In that case, what would be the difference whether or not they were "real" persons? It would be like a Turing test: if I cannot tell whether the "others" I perceive are persons like me or simulations of the same, then there is no meaningful difference. Then, rather than assume that I am the only "real" person and everyone else is fake or unreal somehow, I would rather go with the hypothesis that these others are indeed real people, like me in various ways, and most importantly, having minds of their own. I can see evidence of this in their behaviour, especially when compared with my own, over time as the interactions and evidence collects.
So where are we now? To recap, I exist, I am not alone, there is some sort of reality outside my mind, there are other minds similar to my own in this reality. Well then, hello reader, you real person, welcome to my thoughts! Stay tuned, more on reality next time...
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