Journeyman Philosopher

Economics of the future

2012-02-12T12:30:00.001+11:00

In March 2010 I wrote a post titled, The world badly needs a radical idea. Well, last Thursday I heard an interview with Guy Standing, Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath, UK, who does have at least one radical idea as well as a perspective that coincides with mine.

In particular, he challenges the pervasive definition we give to ‘work’. Essentially, that ‘work’ must contribute to the economy. In other words, in the West, we have a distorted view that work only counts if we earn money from it. He gives the example: if a man hires a housekeeper, whom he pays, she is part of the economy, but if he marries her she effectively disappears, economically. I’ve long argued that the most important job you will ever do, you will never be paid for, which is raising children.

To give another very personal example, I make no money from writing fiction, therefore any time I spend writing fiction is a self-indulgence. On the other hand, if I did make money from writing fiction, then any time I didn’t spend writing fiction would be considered a waste of time. By the way, I don’t consider writing as work, because, if I did, I probably wouldn’t do it or I wouldn’t be motivated to do it. Writing fiction is the hardest thing I’ve ever done and treating it as work would only make it harder.

Standing’s radical idea is that there should be a ‘minimum income’ as opposed to a minimum wage. Apparently, this has been introduced in some parts of Brasil and there is a programme to introduce it in India. In Brasil it was championed by a woman mayor who supported the programme if it was given to women. Standing claims that the most significant and measurable outcome is in the nutrition of babies and young children.

Now, many people will say that this is communism, but it’s not about overthrowing capitalism, it’s about redistribution of wealth, which has to be addressed if we are ever going to get through the 21^st Century without more devastating wars than we witnessed in the last century.

The core of the interview is about a new class, which he calls the ‘precariat’, who are the new disenfranchised in the modern world, partly a result of the concentration of wealth, created by those who still believe in the ‘trickledown fantasy’.

Is mathematics invented or discovered?

2012-02-04T16:10:00.010+11:00

I've used this title before in Sep. 2007, even though it was really a discussion of George Lakoff's and Rafael E. Nunez's book, Where mathematics come from. In fact, it was just my 6th post on this blog. This essay predates that post by 5 years (2002) and I found it by accident after someone returned a USB to me that I had lost. Though there is some repetition, this essay is written in the context of an overall epistemology, whilst the previous one is an argument against a specifically defined philosophical position. To avoid confusion, I will rename the Sep.07 post after the title of Lakoff's and Nunez's book.

I would argue that it is a mixture of both, in the same way that our scientific investigations are a combination of inventiveness and discovery. The difference is, that in science, the roles of creativity and discovery are more clearly delineated. We create theories, hypotheses and paradigms, and we perform experiments to observe results, and we also, sometimes, simply perform observations without a hypothesis and make discoveries, though this wouldn’t necessarily be considered scientific.

But there is a link between science and mathematics, because as our knowledge and investigations go deeper into uncovering nature’s secrets, we become more dependent on mathematics. In fact I would contend that the limit of our knowledge in science is determined by the limits of our mathematical abilities. It is only our ability to uncover complex and esoteric mathematical laws that has allowed us to uncover the most esoteric (some would say spooky) aspects of the natural universe. To the physicist there appears to be a link between mathematical laws and natural laws. Roger Penrose made the comment in a BBC programme, Lords of Time, to paraphrase him, that mathematics exists in nature. It is a sentiment that I would concur with. But to many philosophers, this link is an illusion of our own making.

Stanilas Debaene, in his book, The Number Sense, describes the cognitive aspect of our numeracy skills which can be found in pre-language infants as well as many animals. He argues a case, that numbers, the basic building blocks of all mathematics, are created in our minds, and that there is no such thing as natural numbers. The logical consequence of this argument is that if numbers are a product of the mind then so must be the whole edifice of mathematics. This is in agreement with both Russell and Wittgenstein, who are the most dominant figures in 20th Century philosophy. I have no problem with the notion that numbers exist only as a concept in the human mind, and that they even exist within the minds of some animals up to about 5 (if one reads Debaene’s book) though of course the animals aren’t aware that they have concepts – it’s just that they can count to a rudimentary level.

But mathematics, as we practice it, is not so much about numbers as the relationships that exist between numbers, which follow very precise rules and laws. In fact, the great beauty of algebra is that it strips mathematics of its numbers so that we can merely see the relationships. I have always maintained that mathematical rules are, by and large, not man made, and in fact are universal. From this perspective, Mathematics is a universal language, and it is the ideal tool for uncovering nature’s secrets because nature also obeys mathematical rules and laws. The modern philosopher argues that mathematics is merely logic, created by the human mind, albeit a very complex logic, from which we create models to approximate nature. This is a very persuasive argument, but do we bend mathematics to approximate nature, or is mathematics an inherent aspect of nature that allows an intelligence like ours to comprehend it?

I would argue that relationships like π and Pythagoras’s triangle, and the differential and integral calculus are discovered, not invented. We simply invent the symbols and the means to present them in a comprehensible form for our minds. If you have a problem and you cannot find the solution, does that mean the solution does not exist? Does the solution only exist when someone has unravelled it, like Fermat’s theorem? This is a bit like Schrodinger’s cat; it’s only dead or alive when someone has made an observation. So mathematical theorems and laws only exist when a cognitive mind somewhere reveals them. But do they also exist in nature like Bernoulli’s spiral found in the structure of a shell or a spider web, or Einstein’s equations describing the curvature of space? The modern philosopher would say Einstein’s equations are only an approximation, and he or she may be right, because nature has this habit of changing its laws depending on what scale we observe it at, which leads paradoxically to the apparent incompatibility of Einstein’s equations with quantum mechanics. This is not unlike the mathematical conundrum of a circle, ellipse, parabola and hyperbola describing different aspects of a curve.

So what we have is this connection between the human mind and the natural world bridged by mathematics. Is mathematics an invention of the mind, a phenomenon of the natural world, or a confluence of both? I would argue that it is the last. Mathematics allows us to render nature’s laws in a coherent and accurate structure – it has the same infinite flexibility while maintaining a rigid consistency. This reads like a contradiction until you take into account two things. One is that nature is comprised of worlds within worlds, each one self-consistent but producing different entities at different levels. The best example is the biological cells that comprise the human body compared to the molecules that makes up the cells, and then in comparison with an individual human, the innumerable social entities that a number of humans can create. Secondly, that this level of complexity appears to be never ending so that our discoveries have infinite potential. This is despite the fact that in every age of technological discovery and invention, we have always believed that we almost know everything that there is to know. The current age is no different in this respect.

The philosophical viewpoint that I prescribe to does not require a belief in the Platonic realm. From my point of view, I consider it to be more Pythagorean than Platonic, because my understanding is that Pythagoras saw mathematics in nature in much the same way that Penrose expresses it. I assume this view, even though we have little direct knowledge of Pythagoras’s teachings. Plato, on the other hand, prescribed an idealised world of forms. He believed that because we’ve had previous incarnations (an idea he picked up from Pythagoras, who was a religious teacher first, mathematician second), we come into this world with preconceived ideas, which are his ‘forms’. These ‘forms’ are an ideal perfect semblance from ‘heaven’, as opposed to the less perfect real objects in nature. This has led to the idea that anyone who prescribes to the notion that mathematical laws and relationships are discovered, must therefore believe in a Platonic realm where they already exist.

This aligns with the idea of God as mathematician. Herbet Westron Turnbull in his short tome, Great Mathematicians, rather poetically states it thus: ‘Mathematics transfigures the fortuitous concourse of atoms into the tracery of the finger of God.’ But mathematics does not have to be a religious connection for its laws to pre-exist. To me, they simply lie dormant awaiting an intelligence like ours to uncover them. The natural world already obeys them in ways that we are finding out, and no doubt, in ways that we are yet to comprehend.

Part of the whole philosophical mystery of our being and the whole extraordinary journey to our arrival on this planet at this time, is contained in this one idea. The universe, whether by accident or anthropic predestination, contains the ability to comprehend itself, and without mathematics that comprehension would be severely limited. Indeed, to return to my earliest point, which converges on Kant and Eco’s treatise in particular, Kant and the Platypus, our ability to comprehend the universe with any degree of certainty, is entirely dependent on our ability to uncover the secrets and details of mathematics. And consequently the limits of our knowledge of the natural world is largely dependent on the limits of our mathematical knowledge.

The anthropomorphism of computers

2012-01-21T11:35:00.011+11:00

There are 2 commonly held myths associated with AI (Artificial Intelligence) that are being propagated through popular science, whether intentionally or not: that computers will inevitably become sentient and that brains work similarly to computers.

The first of these I dealt with indirectly in a post last month, when I reviewed Colin McGinn’s book, The Mysterious Flame. McGinn points out that there is no correlation between intelligence and sentience, as sentience evolved early. There is a strongly held belief, amongst many scientists and philosophers, that AI will eventually overtake human intelligence and at some point become sentient. Even if the first statement is true (depending on how one defines intelligence) the second part has no evidential basis. If computers were going to become sentient on the basis that they ‘think’ then they would already be sentient. Computers don’t really think, by the way, it’s just a metaphor. The important point (as McGinn points out) is that there is no evidence in the biological world that sentience increases with intelligence, so there is no reason to believe that it will even occur with computers if it hasn’t already.

This is not to say that AI or Von Neumann machines could not be Darwinianly successful, but it still wouldn’t make them necessarily sentient. After all, plants are hugely Darwinianly successful but are not sentient.

In the last issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 87, November/December 2011), the theme was ‘Brains & Minds’ and it’s probably the best one I’ve read since I subscribed to it. Namit Arora (based in San Francisco and creator of Shunya) wrote a very good article, titled The Minds of Machines, where he tackles this issue by referencing Heidegger, though I won’t dwell on that aspect of it. Most relevant to this topic, he quotes Hubert L. Dreyfuss and Stuart E. Dreyfus from Making a Mind vs Modelling the Brain:

“If [a simulated neural network] is to learn from its own ‘experiences’ to make associations that are human-like rather than be taught to make associations which have been specified by its trainer, it must also share our sense of appropriateness or outputs, and this means it must share our needs, and emotions, and have a human-like body with the same physical movements, abilities and possible injuries.”

In other words, we would need to build a comprehensive model of a human being complete with its emotional, cognitive and sensory abilities. In various ways this is what we attempt to do. We anthropomorphise its capabilities and then we interpret them anthropomorphically. No where is this more apparent than with computer-generated art.

Last week’s issue of New Scientist (14 January 2012) discusses in detail the success that computers have had with ‘creating’ art; in particular, The Painting Fool, the brain child of computer scientist, Simon Colton.

If we deliberately build computers and software systems to mimic human activities and abilities, we should not be surprised that they sometimes pass the Turing test with flying colours. According to Catherine de Lange, who wrote the article in New Scientist, the artistic Turing test has well and truly been passed both in visual art and music.

One must remember that visual art started by us copying nature (refer my post on The dawn of the human mind, Oct. 2011) so we now have robots copying us and quite successfully. The Painting Fool does create its own art, apparently, but it takes its ‘inspiration’ (i.e. cues) from social networks, like Facebook for example.

The most significant point of all this is that computers can create art but they are emotionally blind to its consequences. No one mentioned this point in the New Scientist article.

Below is a letter I wrote to New Scientist. It’s rather succinct as they have a 250 word limit.

As computers become better at simulating human cognition there is an increasing tendency to believe that brains and computers work in the same way, but they don’t.

Art is one of the things that separates us from other species because we can project our imaginations externally, be it visually, musically or in stories. Imagination is the ability to think about something that’s not in the here and now – what philosophers call intentionality – it can be in the past or the future, or another place, or it can be completely fictional. Computers can’t do this. Computers have something akin to semantic memory but nothing similar to episodic memory, which requires imagination.

Art triggers a response from us because it has an emotional content that we respond to. With computer art we respond to an emotional content that the computer never feels. So any artistic merit is what we put into it, because we anthropomorphise the computer’s creation.

Artistic creation does occur largely in our subconscious, but there is one state where we all experience this directly and that is in dreams. Computers don’t dream so the analogy breaks down.

So computers produce art with no emotional input and we appraise it based on our own emotional response. Computers may be able to create art but they can’t appreciate it, which is why if feels so wrong.

Postscript: People forget that it requires imagination to appreciate art as well as to create it. Computers can do one without the other, which is anomalous, even absurd.

The Battle for ideals is the battle for the future

2012-01-11T10:26:00.009+11:00

The opposition to gay marriage, especially as espoused by the Catholic Church, and Pope Benedict in particular, is a symptom of a deeper problem: ignorance over enlightenment; prejudice over reason.

There are people who would love to freeze our societies, freeze politics and freeze cultural norms. This is why they are called conservatives. Ironically, it’s conservatives, or their policies, that are creating more change than anything else. A belief in infinite economic growth, the limited role of women in society and the denial of human-affected climate change will create more change in the 21st Century than anyone wants to see, and none for the better. An overpopulated planet depleted of resources, with an increase in the global wealth gap, rising sea levels, increased frequency of droughts and floods and the depletion of species are all being driven by conservative political policies.

The one symptom of human nature that holds all these positions together is denial, including the Pope’s message. They also, in various ways, defy what scientific endeavours are trying to tell us.

In Australia, the debate over climate change has become one of public opinion versus science. There seems to be a belief that we can vote for or against climate change as if it’s a political position rather than a natural phenomenon. The arguments against climate change in this country are that the scientists are all involved in a conspiracy, so they can hold onto their jobs, and all we have to do is tell them to produce the data we want to see and climate change will go away.

Yes, a touch sarcastic, but that’s the prevailing attitude. At a rally held on Parliament House lawns last year, someone with a megaphone stood up and told the CSIRO (Australia’s most esteemed scientific organization) to “Stop writing crap” on climate change, as if the person making the exhortation would actually be able to tell the difference.

If science could be overturned by popular opinion, Einstein’s theories of relativity would be consigned to the rubbish bin, quantum mechanics would be pure fantasy and evolution would never have happened. It would also mean that there would be no transistors or computers or mobile phones (without quantum mechanics) or GPS (without relativity) and virus mutations would be untrackable (without evolution).

Many of the things that modern society take for granted are dependent on science that most people don’t understand, even vaguely. Yet when scientists start making predictions that people don’t want to hear, they are suddenly ‘writing crap’. People think I’m being alarmist, yet in 2010 New Scientist listed 9 ecological criteria that affect the future of our planet, only one of which has been curtailed, the ozone hole (refer my post Mar. 2010).

Unfortunately, the only people who even know about this are nerds like me, and, as for politicians, they don’t want to know. Politicians in democratic societies can’t afford to tell anyone bad news because they get dumped at the next election. Consequently, as we’ve recently witnessed in Europe, politicians only deliver bad news after everyone has already been affected by it, and they can no longer pretend it isn’t happening. The same thing will happen with climate change. They’ve already put any action off till 2020: The Durban Agreement, reported in New Scientist (17 December 2011, pp.8-9); because they know no one will notice anything between now and then, even though the scientists are telling us we have to take action now.

What has climate change to do with the Pope’s anti-gay rhetoric? They are both examples of polarised politics, a symptom of our age: the political tension created by trying to hang onto the past and resist the future. There are those who can see the future and know we need to adapt to it and there are those who live in the past and think the future can be avoided by freezing our culture.

According to the Pope: "This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself,"

There is politics within the Catholic Church and not everyone who is part of the Church shares the Pope’s views, but it’s only conservative members who are promoted through its hierarchy, as the news item behind the link demonstrates.

According to the item: ‘The Roman Catholic Church, which has some 1.3 billion members worldwide, teaches that while homosexual tendencies are not sinful, homosexual acts are, and that children should grow up in a traditional family with a mother and a father.’

And herein lies the legerdemain: the Catholic Church is not against gays per se but only against gay marriage. However, this argument doesn’t stick. As Australian philosopher, Raymond Gaita, pointed out in a Q&A panel last year, the aversion to gay marriage is the direct consequence of an unstated aversion to homosexual acts. They can’t say they are against homosexuality but they can say they are against gay marriage. And science has played a major role in bringing gays and lesbians out of the closet. We no longer consider homosexuality to be a psychiatric illness, as people did 50 years ago, and it’s no longer considered a criminal offence. Sexual orientation is something you are born with – it’s not a lifestyle choice - but anti-gay advocates will tell you otherwise because they can’t understand why everyone else isn’t just like them.

The Catholic Church is more than a religious institution, it’s a global political entity. It still argues for the lack of birth control and thinks oral contraception was one of the worst inventions of all time. Not just because it undermines one of its more perverse inculcations, but because it’s what gave impetus to modern feminism and gave women the sexual independence and freedom that had previously been the sole providence of men.

And this too has an effect on our future, because it’s only through the emancipation and education of women, worldwide, that we will ever achieve zero population growth. This is arguably the most important issue of our century, and the most significant for our planet’s future.

There is an ideological battle going on in the West between conservative and liberal political forces, yet nature will dictate the outcome because nature has no political affiliations and nature has no preference for the human race. Science studies nature and is our best predictor of future events. But politicians, and the public at large, have little interest in science – it’s only our economic fate that concerns us. Such short-sightedness may well be our species’ undoing.

The Quantum Universe by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

2011-12-30T12:06:00.007+11:00

I’ve recently read this tome, subtitled Everything that can happen does happen, which is a phrase they reiterate throughout the book. Cox is best known as a TV science presenter for BBC. His series on the universe can be highly recommended. His youthful and conversational delivery, combined with an erudite knowledge of physics, makes him ideal for television. The same style comes across in the book despite the inherent difficulty of the topic.

In the last chapter, an epilogue, he mentions writing in September 2011, so this book really is hot off the press. Whilst the book is meant to cater for people with a non-scientific background, I’m unsure if it succeeds at that level and I’m not in a position to judge it on that basis. I’m fairly well read in this area, and I mainly bought it to see if they could add anything new to my knowledge and to compare their approach to other physics writers I’ve read.

They reference Richard Feynman (along with many other contributors to quantum theory) quite a lot, and, in particular, they borrow the same method of exposition that Feynman used in his book, QED. In fact, I’d recommend that this book be read in conjunction with Feynman’s book even though they overlap. Feynman introduced the notion of a one handed clock to represent the phase, amplitude and frequency of the wave function that lies at the heart of quantum mechanics (refer my post on Schrodinger’s equation, May 2011).

Cox and Forshaw use this same analogous method very effectively throughout the book, but they never tell the reader specifically that the clock represents the wave function as I assume it does. In fact, in one part of the book they refer to clocks and wave functions independently in the same passage, which could lead the reader to believe they are different things. If they are different things then I’ve misconstrued their meaning.

Early in their description of clocks they mention that the number of turns is dependent on the particle’s mass, thus energy. This is a direct consequence of Planck’s equation that relates energy to frequency, yet they don’t explain this. Later in the book, when they introduce Planck’s equation, they write it in terms of wavelength, not frequency, as it is normally expressed. These are minor quibbles, some might say petty, yet I believe they would help to relate the use of Feynman’s clocks to what the reader might already know of the subject.

One of the significant facts I learnt from their book was how Feynman exploited the ‘least action principle’ in quantum mechanics. (For a brief exposition of the least action principle refer my post on The Laws of Nature, Mar. 2008). Feynman also describes its significance in gravity in Six-Not-So-Easy Pieces: the principle dictates the path of a body in a gravitational field. In effect, the ‘least action’ is the difference between the kinetic and potential energy of the body. Nature contrives that it will always be a minimum, hence the description, ‘principle of least action’.

Now, I already knew that Feynman had applied it to quantum mechanics, but Cox and Forshaw provide us with the story behind it. Dirac had written a paper in 1933 entitled ‘The Lagrangian in Quantum Mechanics’ (the Lagrangian is the mathematical formulation of least action). In 1941, Herbet Jehle, a European physicist visiting Princeton, told Feynman about Dirac’s paper. The next day, Feynman found the paper in the Princeton library, and with Jehle looking on, derived Schrodinger’s equation in one afternoon using the least action principle. Feynman later told Dirac about his discovery, and was surprised to learn that Dirac had not made the connection himself.

But the other interesting point is that the units for ‘action’ in physics are mx²/t which are the same units as Planck’s constant, h. In other words, the fundamental unit of quantum mechanics is an ‘action’ unit. Now, units are important concepts in physics because only entities with the same type of units can be added and subtracted in an equation. Physicists talk about dimensions, because units must have the same dimensions to be able to be combined or deducted. The dimensions for ‘action’, for instance, are 1 of mass, 2 of length and -1 of time. To give a more common example, the dimensions for velocity are 0 of mass, 1 of length and -1 of time. You can add and subtract areas, for example, (2 dimensions of length) but you can’t add a length to an area or deduct an area from a volume (3 dimensions of length). Obviously, multiplication and calculus allow one to transform dimensions.

One of the concepts that Cox and Forshaw emphasise throughout the book is the universality of quantum mechanics and how literally everything is interconnected. They point out that no 2 electrons can have exactly the same energy, not only in the same atom but in the same universe (the Pauli Exclusion Principle). Also individual photons can never be tracked. In fact, they point out a little-known fact that Planck’s law is incompatible with the notion of tracking individual photons; a discovery made by Ladislas Natanson as far back as 1911. No, I’d never heard of him either, or his remarkable insight.

Cox and Forshaw do a brilliant job of explaining Wolfgang Pauli’s famous principle that makes individual atoms, and therefore matter, stable. They also expound on Freeman Dyson’s and Andrew Leonard’s 1967 paper demonstrating that it’s the Pauli Exclusion Principle that stops you from falling through the floor. Dyson described ‘the proof as extraordinarily complicated, difficult and opaque’, which may help to explain why it took so long for someone to derive it.

They also do an excellent job of explaining how quantum mechanics allows transistors to work, which is arguably the most significant invention of the 20th Century. In fact, it’s probably the best exposition I’ve come across outside a text book.

But what comes across throughout their book, is that the quantum world obeys specific ‘rules’ and once you understand those rules, no matter how bizarre they may seem to our common sense view of the world, you can make accurate and consistent predictions. The catch is that probability plays a key role and deterministic interpretations are not compatible with the quantum universe. In fact, Cox and Forshaw point out that quantum mechanics exhibits true ‘randomness’ unlike the ‘chaotic’ randomness that is dependent on ultra-sensitive initial conditions. In a recent issue of New Scientist, I came across someone discussing free will or the lack of it (in a book review on the topic) and espousing the view that everything is deterministic from the Big Bang onwards. Personally, I find it very difficult to hold such a philosophical position when the bedrock of the entire physical universe insists on chance.

Cox and Forshaw don’t have much to say about the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics except in one brief passage where they reveal a preference for the 'many worlds' interpretation because it does away with the so-called ‘collapse’ or ‘decoherence’ of the wave function. In fact, they make no reference to ‘collapse’ or ‘decoherence’ at all. They prefer the idea that there is an uninterrupted history of the quantum wave function, even if it implies that its future lies in another universe or a multitude of universes. But they also give tacit acknowledgement to Feynman’s dictum: ‘…the position taken by the “shut up and calculate” school of physics, which deftly dismisses any attempt to talk about the reality of things.’

In the epilogue, Cox and Forshaw get into some serious physics where they explain how quantum mechanics gives us the famous Chandrasekhar limit, developed by Subrahmanyan Chandresekhar in 1930, which determines how big a star can be before it becomes a neutron star or a black hole. The answer is 1.4 solar masses (1.4 times the mass of our sun). Mind you, it has to go through a whole series of phases in between and that’s what Cox and Forshaw explain, using some fundamental algebra along with some generous assumptions to make the exposition digestible for laypeople. But the purpose of the exercise is to demonstrate that quantum phenomena can determine limits on a stellar scale that have been verified by observation. It also gives a good demonstration of the scientific method in practice, as they point out.

This is a good book for introducing people to the mysteries of quantum mechanics with no attempt to side-step the inherent weirdness and no attempt to provide simplistic answers. They do their best to follow the Feynman tradition of telling it exactly as it is and eschew the magic that mysteries tend to induce. Nature doesn’t provide loop holes for specious reasoning. Quantum mechanics is the latest in a long line of nature’s secret workings, mathematically cogent and reliable, but deeply counter-intuitive.

The philosophy of Professor Sir Michael Marmot

2011-12-21T12:02:00.002+11:00

This is another redoubtable interview by Margaret Throsby during her recent tour of Europe with the ACO (Australian Chamber Orchestra). Marmot holds a professorship at University College London and was President of the BMA (British Medical Association) until recently. As he admits in the interview, he was an unusual President in that he had an agenda.

The reason I’m writing a post about it is that he confirms a long-held belief of mine that the sense of having control of your life, or not, has an impact on your health, both psychological and physical. He quotes a German physician from the 19th Century, who apparently said: ‘physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor.’ This is because there is a ‘social gradient of health’ that exists in all Western societies (at least) and is not only unacknowledged but ignored. In other words, the poorer you are the poorer your health. According to Marmot, this gradient is statistically true right from the top to the bottom of our social hierarchy. And he puts it down to the sense of control one feels one has over one’s life. This outcome doesn’t surprise me, but apparently it surprises most other people, who think that the higher you are in the social train the more stress you are under and therefore the greater are your health risks. Marmot admits he thought this himself until he did the analysis and found the converse to be true.

Amongst other things, it makes a mockery of the health-reform debate in America, who seem determined to lag behind the rest of the Western world when it comes to social health issues.

In another interview by former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, that touches on subjects like the lost opportunities at the end of the Cold War and politicians' propensity to not tell people the truth, he points out how real incomes in America have not increased over the last 20 years, which contributed to the subprime crisis. In America, corporations have a stranglehold on domestic politics, and no one sees the deleterious effect this has on the welfare of ordinary people.

This is a not unrelated side-issue to the fact that people, wherever they live, are deeply affected by living and working conditions that erode their sense of worth. We actually get the best out of people when they feel they have control over what they’re doing and are not just automatons. This means that the lower one is down the pecking order the less control one feels one has over one’s life and the greater the risk to their health and wellbeing. According to Marmot, figures from all over the Western world confirm this.

At the end of the interview he provides an interesting ‘statistic’. He contends that, globally, 100 billion people live in poverty and that 100 billion dollars could change that situation. This, of course, is a lot of money, but, to put it into perspective, 9 trillion dollars was spent to bail out the banks. It makes one wonder, when, and if, we will finally appreciate that promulgating the global poverty gap is not the way to proceed in the 21st Century.

P.S. I'm unsure how long these interviews are available.

Consciousness Unexplained

2011-12-17T11:43:00.003+11:00

The Mysterious Flame by Colin McGinn, subtitled Conscious Minds in a Material World, was recommended to my by The Atheist Missionary (aka TAM) almost 2 years ago, and it’s taken me all this time to get around to reading it.

But it was well worth the effort, and I can only endorse the recommendation given by The New York Times, as quoted on the cover: “There is no better introduction to the problem of consciousness than this.” McGinn is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, with a handful of other books credited to him. Mysterious Flame was written in 1999, yet it’s not dated by other books I’ve read on this subject, and I would go so far as to say that anyone with an interest in the mind-body problem should read this book. Even if you don’t agree with him, I’m sure he has something to offer that you didn’t consider previously. At the end of the book, he also has something to say about the discipline of philosophy in general: its history and its unique position in human thought.

Most significantly, McGinn calls himself a ‘mysterian’, who is someone, like myself, as it turns out, who believes that consciousness is a mystery which we may never solve. Right from the start he addresses the two most common philosophical positions on this subject: materialism and dualism; demonstrating how they both fail. They are effectively polar opposite positions: materialism arguing that consciousness is neuronal activity full stop; and dualism arguing that consciousness is separate to the brain, albeit connected, and therefore can exist independently of the brain.

Materialism is the default position taken by scientists and dualism is the default position taken by most people even if they’re not aware of it. Most people think that ‘I’ is an entity that exists inside their head, dependent on their brain yet separate from it somehow. Many people, who have had out-of-body experiences, argue this confirms their belief. On the other hand, scientists have demonstrated how we can fool the ‘mind’ into thinking it is outside the body. I have argued elsewhere (Subjectivity, June 2009) that ‘I think’ is a tautology, because ‘I’ is your thoughts and nothing else.

McGinn acknowledges that consciousness is completely dependent on the brain but this alone doesn’t explain it. He points out that consciousness evolved relatively early in evolution and is not dependent on intelligence per se. Being more intelligent doesn’t make us more sentient than other species who also ‘feel’. He attacks the commonly held belief in the scientific community that consciousness just arises from this ‘meat’ we call a brain, and to create consciousness we merely have to duplicate this biological machine. I agree with him on this point. Not so recently (April 2011), I challenged an editorial and an article written in New Scientist inferring that sentience is an axiomatic consequence of artificial intelligence (AI): it’s just a matter of time before we will be forced to acknowledge it. However, the biological evidence suggests that making AI more intelligent won’t create sentience, yet that’s exactly what most AI exponents believe. As McGinn says: ‘…sentience in general does not involve symbolic manipulation’, which is what a computer algorithm does.

McGinn argues that the problem with consciousness is that it’s non-spatial and therefore could exist in another dimension. This is not as daft as it sounds, because, as he points out, an additional dimension could exist without us knowing it and he references Edwin A. Abbott’s famous book, Flatland, to make his point. I’ve similarly argued that quantum mechanics could be explained by imagining a hidden dimension, so I’m not dismissive of this hypothesis.

The most important point that McGinn makes, in my opinion, is a fundamental one of epistemology. We humans tend to think that there is nothing that exists that is beyond our ultimate comprehension, yet there is no legitimate cognitive reason to assume that. To quote: ‘We should have the humility, and plain good sense, to admit that some things may exist without being knowable by us.’

This came up recently in an online discussion I had with Emanuel Rutten (Trying to define God, Nov. 11) who argued the opposite based on an ‘all possible worlds’ scenario. And if there were an infinite number of worlds, then Rutten’s argument would be valid. However, projecting what is possibly knowable in an infinite number of worlds to our specific world is epistemological nonsense.

As McGinn points out, most species on our planet can’t comprehend gravity or how the stars stay up in the sky or that the Earth goes around the sun – it’s beyond their cognitive abilities. Likewise there could be phenomena that are beyond our cognitive abilities, and consciousness may be one.

Roger Penrose addresses this epistemological point in Chapter 1 of Road to Reality, where he admits a ‘personal prejudice’ that everything in the natural world is within our cognitive grasp, whilst acknowledging that others don’t share his prejudice. In particular, Penrose contends that there is a Platonic mathematical realm, which is theoretically available to us without constraint (except the time to explore it), and that this Platonic realm can explain the entire physical universe. Interestingly, McGinn makes no reference to the significance of mathematics in determining the epistemological limit of our knowledge, yet I contend that this is a true limit.

Therefore, I would argue, based on this hypothetical mathematically cognitive limit, that if consciousness can’t be determined mathematically then it will remain a mystery.

Even though McGinn discusses amnesia in reference to the ‘self’, he doesn’t specifically address the fact that, without memory, there would be no ‘self’. Which is why none of us have a sense of self in our early infancy because we create no memories of it. It is memory that specifically gives us a sense of continuity of self and allows us to believe that the ‘I’ we perceive ourselves to be as an adult is the same ‘I’ we were as children.

I’ve skipped over quite a lot of McGinn’s book, obviously, but he does give arguably the best description of John Searle’s famous Chinese Room thought experiment I’ve read, without telling the reader that it is John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment.

At the end of the book, he devotes a short chapter to ‘The Unbearable Heaviness of Philosophy’ where he explains how ‘natural philosophy’ diverged from science yet they are more complementary than dichotomous. To quote McGinn again:

‘Science asks answerable questions… eliminating false theories, reducing the area of human ignorance, while philosophy seems mired in controversy, perpetually worrying at the same questions, not making the kind of progress characteristic of science.’

Many people perceive and present philosophy as the poor orphan of science in the modern age, yet I’m unsure if they will ever be completely separated or become independent. Science reveals that nature’s mysteries are endless and whilst those mysteries persist then philosophy will continue to play its role.

Right at the end of the book, McGinn makes a pertinent observation: that our DNA code contains the answer to our mystery, because consciousness is a consequence of the genetic instructions that make every sentient creature. So our genes have the information to create consciousness that consciousness itself is unable to comprehend.

Dr. Noel Fitzpatrick

2011-11-25T15:22:00.006+11:00

This is one of the most inspiring interviews I’ve heard, with an Irish vet, nonetheless. Fitzpatrick is best known for being the first vet to attach bionic legs (prostheses) to the hind quarters of a cat, called Oscar, who famously gained most of his mobility again, even to the extent of being able to scratch himself in the way that cats do. You can see how mobile he is here. He lost his legs and one of his nine lives, one would expect, when he tangled with a combine harvester in Jersey, I believe.

But Fitzpatrick has quite a lot to say on topics that go beyond veterinary science, including education, unconditional love and our relationship with animals in general.

In particular, his take on veterinary science that includes non-scientific methods, his belief that human and animal medical science would both benefit if they were done in concert, synergistically, and that the heart is just as important as the head. Fitzpatrick is one of those rare people who lives what he preaches and we could all benefit from his example.

Note: Interview is only available for a limited time.

Trying to define God

2011-11-14T10:03:00.019+11:00

This post arose from a lengthy discussion I had with Emanuel Rutten, who claims he has a ‘proof’, using modal logic, that God ‘necessarily exists’. The discussion started on Rust Belt Philosophy and then transferred to Rutten’s own blog. I’m naturally wary of anyone who claims they can prove God exists with nothing but logic, because it defies all epistemological sense. You can prove mathematical conjectures or solve puzzles using logic but everything else requires evidence.

For example, string theory is the latest contender for a so-called ‘theory of everything’ (really a theory of quantum gravity) which makes some extraordinary predictions, like the universe exists in 11 dimensions, of which all but 3 of space and 1 of time are ‘rolled up’ so as to be undetectable. Now, while no one challenges the mathematics behind the theory, no one claims it’s ‘necessarily true’ because there is no evidence to date to support it.

And, whilst I admit that Rutten is much cleverer than me, I think his proof is more sophistry than philosophy, and I’ve told him so on his own blog. Rutten’s argument should really be an argument about logic not religion. If his argument didn’t contain the word ‘God’, no one would give it a second thought and, certainly, no one would take it seriously. But because his argument in logic is an argument for the existence of God, it becomes a religious argument, especially since as a result of his own defence, it becomes clear that his ‘proof’ is critically dependent on how one defines God.

Rutten defines God as both ‘personal’ (meaning sentient) and ‘first cause’. Change this definition and his proof becomes one of negation instead of necessity. In particular, if one defines God as being non-sentient (but still first cause) then God goes from being necessarily existent to impossible to exist (according to Rutten’s own defence). The reason being that a sentient God ‘knows that God exists’ in ‘some possible world’ and a non-sentient God can’t possibly know. So the difference between God necessarily existing in all possible worlds (including ours) and impossibly non-existing is whether God knows that God exists (is sentient) or not. This is the corollary from the 2 conclusions of his own argument: one saying God must necessarily exist and one saying God can’t possibly exist, depending on how God is defined. Therefore God exists but only if God knows that God exists (is sentient). This is circular.

One of the reasons that no one has ever proved that God exists is because, by definition, God is immaterial and, according to most accounts, exists outside our universe. This means that God is not amenable to the scientific method. If God exists then he, she or it, only engages with the universe through the human brain, which is why God is totally subjective, just like colour. I’ve explained this before in an earlier post (God with no ego, May 2011). Colour is purely a psychological phenomenon that only exists in some creature’s mind, but it has an external cause, which is light reflected off objects. Now some may argue that the ‘experience’ of God may also have an external cause, but the difference is that colour can be tested (even for other species) whilst there is no test for God.

An essential part of Rutten’s argument is ‘first cause’, but so-called ‘personal first cause’ can only be found in mythology. As far as science goes, the only thing we can say about first cause is that it was a quantum phenomenon and quantum phenomena are amongst the greatest mysteries of the universe. I’ve written posts expounding on cosmological theories that contend the universe is ‘something from nothing’, including Alan Guth’s inflationary model, the Hartle-Hawking model and Roger Penrose’s cyclic universe. Paul Davies in his book, God and the New Physics, expounds on Alan Guth’s ‘free lunch scenario’, explaining that ‘….all you need are the laws [of nature] – the universe can take care of itself, including its own creation.’

And this seems to be the only pre-requisite for the universe to exist: that the laws of nature, that we understand through the universal language of mathematics, must be either imminent or necessarily entailed in the universe’s own birth. Without an intelligence like ours to comprehend them, nothing in the universe would even know they exist. This leads to the possible contemplation of the ‘anthropic principle’, but that’s a topic for a future post.

In Mar. 2009, I reviewed Mario Livio’s book, Is God a Mathematician? in which Livio suggests that the Pythagoreans would have said that God is the mathematics, and that probably makes more sense than the notion of personal first cause.

Mathematics fulfills 3 of the criteria we normally assign to God: infinity, truth and independent universality. Infinity only makes sense in mathematics and, in fact, is unavoidable at every level; mathematics is the only realm where infinity appears to be at home. Mathematical truths are arguably the only objective truths that are both universal and dependable. And mathematics gives the impression of a universal independence to human thought and possibly the universe itself.

Shame, shame, shame!!!

2011-10-25T15:35:00.005+11:00

I managed to write an entire novel without resorting to an exclamation mark, so it’s an indication of my indignation that I’ve used them with such extravagance in the above title.

On this week’s 4 Corners programme, which provides the best investigative journalism in the country, they uncovered the extraordinary damage our government does to refugees in the name of border protection.

Former Australian of the Year, Patrick McGorry, called our detention centres ‘mental-illness factories’ and the 4 Corners programme demonstrated that beyond contention. Meanwhile, other media outlets in Australia, continue to feed the Australian public’s paranoia that refugees get a free ride at our expense. The truth is that we treat refugees, who have committed no crime, worse than the worst criminals in the country.

And this is because politicians from both of our major parties believe it’s necessary to win the xenophobic vote. Fear is always a good vote winner, which is why capital punishment in the US has the history it does. And the media also know that fear sells air-space on television and radio and print-space in newspapers, so they are more than happy to jump on the bandwagon and help the politicians manipulate public opinion.

The height of the politicians’ hypocrisy (on both sides) is that they claim they are creating a ‘deterrent’ which will stop refugees from endangering their lives by crossing the Indian Ocean in ‘leaky boats’. They don’t acknowledge the fact that people only risk their lives in such circumstances because the risk of losing one’s life by staying where they are is even greater. Many of the refugees questioned have lost close relatives to political violence, so it is not safe for them to stay in their country of origin.

The most interesting aspect of all this is that it’s only refugees who arrive by boat who are put in detention. Those who arrive by aeroplane are treated entirely differently. Why is this so? You may well ask. It’s because those who arrive by plane attract no media attention whatsoever, whereas those who arrive by boat get all the media attention and therefore must be vilified by our politicians to show how ‘tough’ they are.

It’s unbelievable that our politicians can be so morally bankrupt, but the desire to win office, and stay in office, corrupts moral principles to the worst degree. As long as the public are unaware or unempathetic to our treatment of refugees, then politicians will do nothing to uphold their charter to treat them humanely. In fact, they will do the opposite because it will win them votes.

Addendum: It’s been demonstrated by neurological investigation that when people experience emotional pain it affects the exact same part of the brain, and to the same degree, as if they experience physical pain. This is why people self-harm when they are exposed to long term emotional stress, because the physical pain becomes a substitute for the emotional pain. This seems perverse, yet it’s been known to occur with animals as well (kept in captivity in stressful conditions).

When refugees self-harm, the idiot commentators, amongst others, tell us that they are seeking attention. Mental-health professionals know better: these people are at the extremity of their sanity and our government’s polices keep pushing them over the edge. This is arguably the most shameful behaviour one can witness in a 21st Century liberal democracy.

The dawn of the human mind

2011-10-22T10:34:00.004+11:00

It’s an extravagant statement to make, bordering on hyperbole, yet, after seeing Werner Herzog’s documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the Chauvet cave, discovered in 1994, one struggles to find words befitting the discovery. The first thing that strikes you as soon as you see the images (in 3D) is how modern they look. You can understand why the first reaction from academia was that they were a hoax, not 34,000 years old as has been verified by carbon dating.

The significance of this film is that it will probably be the only one ever made. The caves are closed to the public, only selected scientists and academics can gain access and only at certain times of the year. The caves were hermetically sealed off by a landslide and that’s the only reason we have this preservation of ancient rock art executed during the ice age when we co-inhabited Europe with Neanderthals. I say ‘we’ because they are the common ancestors to most of the peoples in the world today. The human genome project has revealed that we all came out of Africa, including all indigenous tribal people, and Asians as well as Europeans.

One of the archaeologists, a young man with a science background, who spent 4 continuous days in the cave, tells of the emotional impact they had on him beyond his expectations. In particular, they filled his dreams with the animals he saw. He said he dreamt of lions, both depicted and real-life forms. He remarked upon the emotional and subliminal connection that they could still make with humans living over 30,000 years after they had been created. When I was a child (pre-adolescent) I used to draw animals all the time – they were my favourite subject – concordant with a fascination with animal life in general. I was fortunate enough to live near the bush (as we call it in Oz) with a creek running alongside our house that plummeted into a deep gorge, not that far from where we lived.

This connection and this fascination with wild animals is something that we’ve lost. For these people, one feels it was spiritual, and that’s not just a projection. Herzog went to a lot of trouble to place this particular artwork into a much broader context. Talking with a number of academics, it became clear that 30-40,000 years ago in ice-gripped Europe, art, in all its manifestations that we know today, flourished. In particular, there are numerous figurines, especially of the female form, and bone flutes from the same age. So we know that both graphic and sculptural art flourished as well as music, and we can assume that so did storytelling, mythmaking and religion. Many people make a connection between art and religion, and I think one can safely say that they were born at the same time. They both deal with the subconscious and our dreamworld. An archaeologist at another site, produced a bone flute made from the radius bone of a vulture with 4 holes drilled in it. He played The Star Spangled Banner (though he was obviously not American) to demonstrate that these ice-age humans used the same musical scale that we use today.

The same archaeologist, whom we met earlier in the film discussing his dreams, tells of an incident he saw in northern Australia (probably in a documentary) of an Aboriginal Elder showing someone some rock art from thousands of years earlier and explaining how it used to be maintained but now it’s not. He then proceeded to ‘touch it up’ or restore it. When the white man asked him if he was an artist. He said, no, he wasn’t the artist, the ‘spirit’ was. And this is something that all artists can identify with, like we are a medium for something beyond us, out there. This is the exact same sense that people have with religion. They were born at the same time in humanity: the dawn of the human mind.

Where does time go? (in quantum mechanics)

2011-10-16T11:12:00.018+11:00

For those who are unacquainted with my blog, I’m not a physicist, or academic of any kind; I’m a self-confessed dilettante. I’ve written on this topic before (The enigma we call time, Jul. 2010) and it’s one of my more popular posts, based on an article I read in Scientific American (June 2010).

This time I’ve been inspired by last week’s New Scientist (8 October, 2011), which was a ‘Special issue’ on TIME; The Most Mysterious Dimension of All. They cover every aspect of time, by various authors, from the age of the universe to our circadian rhythms and everything in between and even beyond. But there were 2 essays in particular that caught my attention and led me to revisit this topic from 12 months ago.

Firstly, a discussion on Time’s Arrow by Amanda Gefter, who points out that, whilst the 2nd law of thermodynamics provides our only theoretical link with time’s arrow, because entropy must always increase, it’s not the solution: ‘If only it were so easy. Unfortunately, the second law does not really explain the arrow of time.’

The point is that entropy is statistical, as Schrodinger pointed out in What is Life? (refer my post, Nov. 2009) as is most of physics, but it’s not a deterministic law like, for example, Einstein’s general theory of relativity. So even though we can say that overall entropy doesn’t go backwards any more than time does, we can’t provide a mathematical relationship that derives time from entropy. In my post on time last year I said: ‘It is entropy that apparently drives the arrow of time…’ Gefter’s exposition suggests that I might be overstating the case.

Gefter goes on to say: ‘The only way to explain the arrow of time, then, is to assume that the universe just happened to start out in an extremely unlikely low entropy state.’ I’ve discussed this before when I reviewed Roger Penrose’s book, Cycles of Time (Jan. 2011), who spends a great deal of space expounding on the significance of the second law to the universe’s entire history, including its future. This is a bit off-topic to my intended subject, so I won’t dwell on it, but, as Gefter points out, the standard explanation for the universe’s initial low entropy is inflationary theory. But then she adds this caveat: ‘Inflation seems to solve the dilemma. On closer inspection, however, it only pushes the problem back.’ In other words, inflation itself must have had a low entropy and the standard explanation is that there were multiple inflations creating a multiverse.

Einstein’s relativity theories tell us that time is observer-dependent, yet entropy and its role in the evolution of the universe suggests that there is an ‘entropic’ time that governs the universe’s entire history. Then there is quantum mechanics that has its own time anomalies in defiance of common sense and everyday experience (see below).

I’ve recently started reading Professor Lisa Randall’s book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door; How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World. This is an excellent book, from what I’ve read thus far, for anyone wanting an understanding of how scientists think and how science works, without equations and esoteric prose. In her introduction, she tells us that after giving guest lectures for college students, the most common question is not about physics, but how old she is. She’s young, blonde and attractive: the complete antithesis of the stereotypical physicist. In her first chapter she explains the importance of scale in physics and how different laws, and therefore different equations, are applied according to the scale of the world one is examining. I’ve written about this myself in a post (May 2009), which is also one of my more popular ones. Obviously, Randall is far better qualified to expound on this than me.

She mentions, in passing, a movie, What the Bleep do we know? to illustrate the error in scaling quantum mechanical phenomena up to human scale and expecting the same rules to apply. I remember when this movie came out and thinking what a disservice it did to science and how it misrepresented science to a scientifically illiterate audience. I remember having to explain to friends of mine, how, despite the credentials of the people interviewed, it wasn’t science at all. It was just as much fantasy as my own fiction, perhaps more so.

And this finally brings me to the second essay I read in New Scientist, titled, Countdown to the Theory of Everything, because it is ‘time’ that creates the conceptual and theoretical hurdle to a scientific marriage between Einstein’s theory of general relativity (gravity) and quantum mechanics. And this is what scientists specifically mean when they refer to a ‘theory of everything’. To quote Amanda Gefter again: ‘…to unite general relativity with quantum mechanics, we need to work with a single view of time. But which one is the right one?’ And then she goes on to quote various exponents on the topic, like Carlo Rovelli at the Centre for Theoretical Physics at Marseilles: “For me, the solution to the problem is that at the fundamental level of nature, there is no time at all.”

And this led me to contemplate how the dimension of time effectively disappears in many quantum phenomena, and at best, becomes an anomaly. In both quantum tunneling and entanglement, time becomes inconsequential. Also, superposition, which is just as difficult to conceptualise as any other quantum phenomenon, actually makes sense if time does not exist: something exists everywhere at once.

In May this year, I wrote an exposition on Schrodinger’s equation, aimed at physics students, which has since become my most popular post. Now Schrodinger’s equation, in its most common form, is a time-dependent wave function, which belies the ideas that I’ve just outlined above. But Schrodinger’s equation entails the paradox that lies at the heart of quantum mechanics and time is part of that paradox. As Gefter points out: ‘Unlike general relativity, where time is contained within the system, quantum mechanics requires a clock that sits outside the system…’ The time in Schrodinger’s equation is the observer’s time and his equation tells us that the particle or photon that the wave function describes, actually ‘permeates all space’, to quote Richard Elwes in MATHS 1001. And as the standard, or Copenhagen, interpretation of quantum mechanics tells us, the observer is a key participant because it’s their measurement or observation that brings the particle or photon into the real world. At best, Schrodinger’s continuous time-dependent wave function can only give us a probability of its position in the real world, albeit an accurate probability.

Schrodinger realised that his equation had to incorporate complex algebra otherwise it didn’t work. I find it curious that only quantum mechanics requires imaginary numbers (square route of -1, i ). What’s curious is that i is not a number per se: you can’t count or quantify anything with i ; it’s more like a dimension. To quote Elwes again: ‘…our human minds are incapable of visualizing the 4-dimensional graph that a complex function demands.’ This is because the imaginary plane is orthogonal to the real number plane. Schrodinger’s equation only relates to the real world when you square the modulus of his wave function and get rid of the imaginary numbers.

I’ve argued in a previous post (Jun. 2011) that quantum mechanics infers a Platonic world like a substratum to the ‘classical physical’ world that we are more familiar with. Is it possible that in this world time does not exist? Penrose, in Cycles of Time, points out that we need mass for time to exist. This is because photons have zero time, which is why nothing can travel faster than light. However a photon in the real world has energy, which means it has a frequency, which means there must be time. Schrodinger’s equation includes energy times a wave function so all aspects are entailed in the equation. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle also demonstrates that there is a clear relationship between energy and time, in exactly the same way there is between space and momentum. As Richard Feynman points out, translation in space is linked to the conservation of momentum and translation in time is linked to the conservation of energy. So time and energy are linked in the classical world and Heisenberg’s equation tells us that they are linked quantum mechanically as well, but only through a particle’s emergence into the physical world, even if it’s a virtual particle.

But if quantum phenomena are time-dimensionless then photons are the perfect candidate. The entire universe can go by in a photon’s lifetime. The same happens at the event horizon of a black hole. Does this mean that the event horizon of a black hole is the boundary between the classical physical world and the quantum world?

In Nov. 2009, I reviewed Fulvio Melia’s book, Cracking the Einstein Code, which is effectively an exposition and brief biography of Roy Kerr, a Kiwi who used Einstein’s field equations to describe the space-time of a rotating body, which is the norm for bodies in the universe. Kerr’s theoretical examination of a spinning black hole led him to postulate that it would have 2 event horizons, and when a body crosses the first event horizon, the parameters of space and time are reversed: space becomes time-like and time becomes space-like. This is because time freezes at the event horizon for an outside observer and the external time becomes infinite from the inside. Time becomes space-like in that it becomes static and infinite.

This post can be put down to the meanderings of an under-educated yet intellectually curious individual. If time does not exist in the quantum world then it actually makes sense of things like superposition, quantum tunneling and entanglement, not to mention time-reversal as expounded by Feynman in his book, QED, using his unique Feynman diagrams. John Wheeler also postulated a thought experiment in which a measurement taken after a photon passes through a slit in Young’s famous experiment can determine which one it passed through. I believe this has since been confirmed with a real experiment. It would also suggest that a marriage between the quantum world and Einstein’s general theory of relativity may be impossible.

Addendum 1: Earlier this year (May 2011) I reviewed John D. Barrow’s latest book, The Book of Universes, and I happened to revisit it and find this extremely relevant reference to the Hartle-Hawking universe devised by James Hartle and Stephen Hawking, using Feynman’s quantum integral method on a wave function for the whole universe.

What’s relevant to this post is that ‘[Hartle and Hawking] proposed an initial state in which time became another dimension of space.’

To quote Barrow’s interpretation:

‘Time is not fundamental in this theory. It is a quality that emerges when the universe gets large enough for the distinctive quantum effects to become negligible: time is something that arises concretely only in the limiting non-quantum environment. As we follow the Hartle-Hawking universe back to small sizes it becomes dominated by the Euclidean quantum paths. The concept of time disappears and the universe becomes increasingly like a four-dimensional space. There is no beginning to the universe because time disappears.’

What’s more: ‘…the transformation that changes time into another dimension of space corresponds to multiplying it by an imaginary number…’

This gives rise to what ‘Hartle and Hawking called the “no Boundary” state for the origin of the universe… Its beginning is smooth and unremarkable… In effect, the no-boundary condition is a proposal for the state of the universe if it appears from nothing in a quantum event. The story of this universe is that once upon a time there was no time.’

The only problem with this scenario, as Barrow points out, is that there is no big bang singularity, nevertheless it fits the idea that the quantum world doesn’t need time and the very early universe must have been a quantum universe at the very least.

Addendum 2: Also from Barrow (same book), I found this mathematical joke:

The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone through ninety degrees and try again. (Answer-phone message for imaginary phone numbers)

Utilitarianism and other moral philosophies

2011-10-09T19:00:00.012+11:00

Recently, I was involved in a discussion on utilitarianism on the Rust Belt Philosophy blog. The discussion got a bit esoteric, and, not being an academic, I got left behind. Nevertheless, there are some things that came out of it which I thought worth jotting down. Very early in the history of this blog, I wrote an ambitious and lengthy essay called Human Nature (Nov. 2007) where John Stuart Mill gets a mention but the context was too broad to elaborate on the subject of utilitarianism specifically.

Also in the latest Sep/Oct 2011 issue of Philosophy Now, where the theme is Kant & Co, there is a discussion on the famous rail trolley moral dilemma, which is often given as a classic utilitarian problem. I need to say up front that I don’t call myself a utilitarian but I can see merits in the principle. As someone suggests, in the same issue of Philosophy Now, whilst discussing Kant’s moral philosophy, one shouldn’t narrow one’s options when it comes to assessing moral issues. In fact, I’m not sure that any moral principle can be used on its own, but I’ll introduce other moral principles as I progress.

One of the main points that everyone seemed to agree on, both at Rust Belt Philosophy and in Philosophy Now, is that moral decisions need to be considered on a case by case basis and you can’t just feed a set of parameters into a computer and come up with an answer. In other words, there is not a set of rules that you can apply for specific situations like an algorithm. This is one of the fundamental conceptual differences that separates science from humanities, because, in science, one uses algorithms, in the form of equations, quite a lot. Even, in biological sciences, there are categories and generic mechanisms that make biology predictable in a way that psychology and morality isn’t and probably never will be. In fact, morality owes a lot to psychology, and even Mill understood that, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Utilitarian philosophy, as espoused by Mill in particular, is generally presented as the ‘greatest happiness’ principle, and on Rust Belt Philosophy, the term ‘maximising well-being’ was used, which was defined as ‘the opposite of suffering’. One of the points I made is that a lot depends on how one employs this principle, because, on face value, it appears that the ‘greatest happiness to the greatest number of people’ means that the majority should always gain at the expense of the minority, which is why we have political parties and why we vote for them. Using some common contentious moral issues, found on blogs, in news media and in political rhetoric, I challenged this prevailing view.

I will quote directly from the comment I left on Eli’s blog:

If you look at real world, moral issues that occupy blogs, politics and media, they are invariably portrayed as being about one person’s rights, or one group’s rights, versus another’s. For example: the rights of gays to marry over the rights of straights to maintain the sanctity of marriage; the rights of an unborn child over the rights of its mother; the rights of refugees over the rights of people to maintain control of their borders; and the rights of Palestinians over the rights of Israelis.

If one takes the ‘greatest happiness’ principle or the ‘maximising well-being’ principle, then you might argue that the majority wins and the minority loses. However, I disagree.

If you increase the well-being of gays by allowing them to marry, it has no effect on the well-being of heterosexuals – does not affect them at all.

By increasing the well-being of refugees, it has no immediate effect on the well-being of the current inhabitants, and history shows that it leads to the increased well-being of everyone in the long term (this is a specific, currently contentious issue in Oz).

The well-being of an unborn child is intimately entwined with the well-being of its mother, so you can’t consider the well-being of one without considering the well-being of the other. Anyone who attempts to do this is attempting to take over the mother’s role, which is impossible.

The well-being of Palestinians and the well-being of Israelis should be able to be resolved through compromise, or so one would think. However, there is a serious imbalance in this case, and addressing that imbalance would go a long way to increasing the well-being of both parties.

These arguments, not surprisingly, reflect my own personal views on these matters, and there are contrary arguments, obviously, otherwise these topics wouldn’t be contentious.

In a dialogue with another contributor on the blog, March Hare, I made the following point:

But there is another, more fundamental point here that I think has been lost. Most people see moral issues like a football match, whereby one person’s gain can only happen at another person’s lost. I think as long as we have that attitude then progress on many issues: moral, political and economical; will stagnate. In a relationship, one rarely gains pleasure at the expense of their partner’s misery. Usually, either both parties are happy or both are miserable. When you have conflict the same equation applies. We should be looking at ways that both parties’ well-being is increased. And, in many cases, one party can increase their well-being without affecting the other party; gay marriage being a case in point. Yes, it may affect some fundamentalists’ sensibilities but it doesn’t affect their own well-being.

March Hare took exception to my point that gay marriage has no effect on the lives of those who oppose it, and we had a protracted discussion over this. March Hare does not oppose gay marriage, by the way, he just believed that my argument was flawed. In particular, he argued that the opponents of gay marriage would be harmed by the law because it affects them psychologically.

To quote him: ‘…they think their way of life is being attacked, they think their country is leaving them, they fear for their future and their children's, they fear for the safety of their children and the moral well being of all. They may even fear god's vengeance on the country.’

And he’s right, because even though the law would have no effect on their own lives it would affect their phobias, as he so aptly describes them. However, if we passed a law, or maintained a law, that validated their phobias then that would create even more harm, though not to them, but to gays, in the way of persecution and vilification, which we’ve witnessed in the past. So capitulating to these phobias would actually create more harm and my utilitarian argument still stands, and, in fact, stands even stronger.

But this issue about ‘rights’ raises another principle, which is ‘universality’ and is taken up by Peter Rickman in Philosophy Now when he discusses Kant’s moral philosophy. Gay marriage is a case in point, where people are asking for a universality of an existing law, that currently applies to heterosexuals, to apply to same-sex couples. If one accepts same-sex relationships as both legal and psychologically valid (as they are in most Western societies), it’s very hard to deny them the same rights as opposite-sex couples, and I’ll return to this specific issue later.

But universality is tied to reciprocity which is tied to empathy: what’s good enough for you is good enough for everyone else. Reciprocity is most famously associated with Confucius, and 500 years later, Jesus, and is often called the golden rule. Confucius purportedly presented it in the negative: ‘Don’t do to others, what you wouldn’t want done to yourself’; which I think has more emotional weight. It emphasises the negation of harm rather than the giving of charity. It also emphasises the need for empathy – we are less likely to harm someone or persecute them or vilify them if we can see ourselves standing in their shoes. I’ve written elsewhere on the importance of art, and storytelling in particular, in promoting empathy. This is very much a humanist philosophy, and Don Cupitt argues that Jesus was in fact the first humanist philosopher (see my post on Jesus’ philosophy, Jan. 2010) though I would argue that both Confucius and Socrates predate Christ by 4 to 5 centuries as more likely contenders.

In an interview in New Scientist (13 April 2011), Simon Baron-Cohen argues that the word evil, should be replaced with the term ‘lack of empathy’ or something similar. I’ve written on this topic myself (refer Evil, Oct. 2007) because it requires the denial of empathy to perform atrocities, yet we hear about it all the time. We have to deny someone their basic humanity in order to treat them inhumanely yet we are surprisingly masterful at it. For this reason, I argue that empathy has to be a key component in any moral philosophy. In fact, I argue that morality cannot be separated from psychology, and I believe Mill understood this as well, albeit in a different context.

Mill, by his own admission, wanted to develop a social science which he called psychology. The term, social norm, had not been invented in Mill’s time, but he certainly understood the concept. In particular, Mill understood that conscience is largely a product of social norms and not some inner voice provided by God.

Everyone believes they know what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’, intrinsically, and we often say, ‘You know it’s right,’ as if it’s undeniable, carved in stone. But, when people contemplate if something is right or wrong, they invariably and subconsciously reference their social norms. Social norms have been driving moral behaviour through all societies and all ages. Mill understood that social norms could be changed and that they didn’t have to be governed by the Church. And this brings me back to the discussion on gay marriage because it’s an example of a social norm in progress. Attitudes toward homosexuality have changed enormously in the last half century in Western societies, despite opposition from sectors of the Church (to this day), to the extent that it’s no longer considered criminal nor a mental health issue in mainstream society. It’s really only a small step to legalising gay marriage, but one that politicians are reluctant to take. Retired Australian High Court judge, Michael Kirby, in a recent interview, said that it’s really a generational issue because he believes that young people already don’t have an issue with it.

So morality, as it’s practiced, is intrinsically related to social norms. What was considered radical in the past becomes the status quo in the present. Abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage seem so last millennium, yet they were contended more vociferously than gay marriage is today. One would like to think that we are making progress at a societal level, but only future generations will let us know.

The trickledown fantasy

2011-10-05T14:42:00.002+11:00

This is a BBC documentary featuring 3 kids (2 in one family) living in modern-day Great Britain.

The really good part about this doco is that it’s almost totally from the mouths of the children. They understand their world just as well as the adults do, and you really do wonder about their future. Possibly the most extraordinary scene in the film is 11 year-old Sam getting his first ever barbershop haircut for a birthday present, from money saved up by his aunt, because it’s outside the family’s necessities list. And this is 21st century England.

The interview at the end of the programme with Danny Dorling (this is a transcript) puts it all into perspective. It’s all about the poverty gap and its pernicious effect on society at large. We really can’t afford to go down this path.

Feudalism in the modern world

2011-09-28T15:31:00.000+10:00

This is an interview with monologist, Mike Daisey, who is currently in Australia. The topic of his current tour is ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’. In a nutshell, Daisey is pointing out the hidden ‘dark side’ of all the gadgetry that we love and use in the Western world, of which I am a participant. This missive is being typed on one of the latest Apple computers, so how ironic is that?

There is no moral compass in the corporate world unless someone shines a spotlight on it. Davies has visited the so-called factories in China where Apple products are made, and witnessed the appalling OH&S conditions that the employees endure. He gives the example of how workers’ fingers are crippled from having to perform the same repetitive action for 16 hrs a day, month in, month out, when the simple measure of rotating the work would eradicate this avoidable injury.

In an unrelated documentary, filmed sometime in the last year by an Australian journalist, I saw how people were suffering from an appalling, debilitating and crippling illness caused by inhaling the glue used to paste the Apple icon on smart phones. I can’t look at the Apple icon on a phone now without thinking about it. And, no, I don’t own one, but they’re unbelievably popular in this country.

Last week I went and saw an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) of the Viennese Secession that erupted at the turn of the 20th Century. According to a talk given at the exhibition, this came about when Franz Joseph carried out political reform in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. It’s significance to Daisey’s talk is that the feudalistic paradigm was overturned, or, at least, reformed under Joseph, creating the political climate for artisans and artists to flourish.

It made me realise that up until the industrial revolution, everyone (in Europe at least) assumed that the feudal model, that had been followed for centuries, would continue for ever. In today’s world, we assume that the current economic paradigm driven by consumerism and infinite growth will also continue for ever. I expect it won’t continue past this century.

I’ve said before that we still live in a feudalistic society, only now it’s global rather than national. Daisey’s talk confirms that point of view. At the end of the interview he lays the problem at the door of the corporate mindset that dominates politics and economics worldwide.

The perspective from outer space

2011-09-16T12:48:00.001+10:00

This is an interview with astronaut, John Grunsfeld, and it juxtaposes humanity’s greatest achievements against our greatest destruction. Grunsfeld points out that, in just over half a century, we went from experimentation with canvas and wire flying contraptions to manned space flight: Wright brothers in 1903 to Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon in 1969. Who would have predicted that the two achievements could happen in the same century?

Grunsfeld, according to his own testimony, has witnessed, over many space flights, the deforestation in the Amazon, a symptom of our worst excesses in the 20th Century. He points out the irony of our technological prowess compared to our unparalleled and unstoppable destruction of the planet’s largest ecosystem.

Part of the problem is the disconnect between science and politics, worldwide, which I’ve commented on many times on this blog. Politicians see science and technology as a tool to drive the economy and to push our finite resources to their absolute limit. When scientists try and disseminate messages that are politically unpalatable, they are either ignored, or their warnings are watered-down. We can’t have the public drawing their own conclusions, without the filter of political spin. Politicians can only provide positive messages – any negative message is political suicide – such is the dilemma of living in a democracy.

The best-known current example is climate-change. But a quarter of a century ago it was the ozone hole, and, whilst it took decades to achieve political action in the face of corporate opposition, it’s one of the few scientifically driven political success stories. It will also take decades for action to be realised on climate change, but by 2030 I expect public opinion may overtake political inertia.

And public opinion is what drives these debates. Unfortunately there is a huge public distrust of science that politicians and special-interest groups love to exploit. Almost everything one touches in a Western society is dependent on science yet people can somehow make a disconnect between the past and the future when it comes to trusting science.

The other half of this equation, that Grunsfeld leaves unmentioned, is the economic paradigm that’s driving population growth and the decimation of the planet’s resources. I spoke about this in my last post so I don’t have much to add. We have the technology to save the planet from ourselves but we don’t have the political will or the vision to do it. Without a change to our economic paradigm of infinite growth, neither the political will nor the vision will eventuate.

Biology, economy, humanity

2011-09-09T12:00:00.005+10:00

This is a culmination of issues from 4 different sources, including one from last week. The first (from last week) was an interview with Rob Brooks, an evolutionary biologist at the UNSW (University of New South Wales) in Sydney, Australia. He also wrote an article in the last issue of COSMOS about the relationship between rock and roll, and art in general, and human evolution. How rock gods like the Rolling Stones (Mick, Keith and Brian, in particular) had a number of offspring via different partners, hence ensuring the successful propagation of their genes.

What was more interesting, and even counter-intuitive, was his revelation that wealthy people statistically have more sons and poor people statistically have more daughters, and that there was a biological explanation for this. He explained that a study in Germany during the industrial revolution revealed that within the landed gentry the sons prospered and daughters didn’t, but amongst the poorer classes the reverse was true: daughters prospered and sons didn’t. He said the reason was cultural as well as biological because sons can’t marry up in the manmade class structure but daughters are more likely to. But the curious point is that, according to Brooks, this is still true today. What’s more, the female selects the sperm with the requisite X or Y chromosome according to her social status, though, of course, not consciously. In other words, nature does it for her.

When asked to give another example in the natural world, he referred to a study of red deer on an island off Scotland (don’t ask me the name of the island; this was a radio interview). Because stags have to compete with others for the does, in a poor season, it makes more sense if a pregnant doe has a female fawn because it would have a better chance of getting pregnant itself. However, in a good season she’s more likely to give birth to a stag because he will have the requisite strength to compete with others. What Brooks is saying is that this biological selection that occurs for animals in the wild also occurs for humans in modern Western civilisation. In the wild it’s climatic conditions that determine the outcome, whereas, for humans, it’s economic conditions. But in both cases the outcome is the same: for the well-off, male offspring are more likely and for the less-well-off, female offspring are more likely.

The other issue that Brooks referred to was what he called the ‘tragedy of the commons’ which he acknowledged was originally coined by Garrett Hardin and has far-reaching consequences in the modern world. The tragedy of the commons is based around the idea that different people, or, more likely, groups of people, share a common resource but no individual or particular group takes responsibility. In fact, it becomes competitive whereby one group will either deny others access or take more than their share yet blame others when this leads to scarcity. We see this in everything from the global depletion of fisheries to the climate change debate to arguments over asylum seekers and refugees.

In Australia, the climate change debate has become irrational with people targeting scientists with death threats and demonstrations demanding that scientists give the ‘other side’ a fair voice. One may well ask who the ‘other side’ is? Popular opinion seems to be the answer. In fact, the argument seems to be that this debate can be resolved by taking a vote the same way political governance is resolved. In other words, ignorance carries the same weight as scientific opinion. It’s a modern equivalent to burning witches to avert a natural calamity. As someone pointed out, getting rid of the scientists isn’t going to get rid of the science, yet that’s what these people seem to think.

The relevance between this debate and Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’ is that no one wants to take the lead in committing to lowering carbon dioxide emissions and countries all over the world point to the ‘other’ as being the chief culprit. So no one will take responsibility because it’s always someone else’s problem. In Australia, the populace at large seem to be in denial, and believe that if we stop the science investigating the problem we will stop the problem.

Yesterday I heard an interview with Wade Davis, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence (yes, that’s his official title). Davis is a man with a fascinating past, having lived with indigenous cultures all over the world, but particularly in the Amazon. His message, or one of his messages, is that we discount so many indigenous cultures as backward, irrelevant and imminently extinct.

In the Western world we live in a cocoon shielded by technology to the extent that we don’t even know where our food comes from, how our meat is killed or how many heavy metals there may be in the seafood we eat. Ignorance is bliss. We are so dependent on technology that most of us cannot even imagine living without electricity, even for one day.

Then a friend sent me an article from the New York Times about a study being done on our dependence on electronic communications, which is exactly what I’m doing now. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone camping in the bush but I have good memories of it. I grew up in a place where I could go walking in the bush and literally leave my normal life behind. We know that being in nature, quite literally, affects our well-being. What this study shows is that given time, people stop looking at their blackberries and even stop wearing a watch. For the mind, time slows down and we become more meditative.

We live in an artificial environment from the time we are born. We go to school, in part, to develop a routine that continues through our entire adult lives: get up, go to work, come home, watch TV, go to bed, get up… We live on a treadmill that drives the economy and if we get off we become unemployed, a burden to society, lose the meaning of our lives and become destitute.

There is a connection between this small-scale daily process that we all lead and the large scale problems facing the planet. Education is necessary because it leads to smaller families, lower birth rates and greater opportunities. This is just as relevant in third world countries as it is in the first world. But economic growth, in both developing and developed countries, insists that cities keep growing which means that populations must keep growing which means that the ‘tragedy of the commons’ becomes more critical globally, affecting water, food and energy resources world wide, which means more wars.

This is the dilemma of the human race: we have the technology to do almost anything yet we have a clash between economy and ecology, with species and cultural decimation occurring at an unprecedented rate. Davis pointed out that the disappearance of languages is synonymous with the disappearance of cultures. Yet, arguably, cultural diversity is just as important as genetic diversity.

Can we afford to lose the knowledge that allowed us to live for centuries without technology? I’m not arguing that we give up technology or turn back the clock, quite the contrary. I’m arguing that we look at the future and find a vision that doesn’t end in a train wreck. We need to rid ourselves of our dependency on fossil fuels, develop an economy that rewards recycling and longevity over waste and limitless consumerism, and change our perception from king of the evolutionary tree to a recently formed and relatively short-lived branch. Having said all that, I don’t expect it to happen without a lot of pain. Human society has a history of boom and bust. Considering the extent of the boom since mid-last century, one does not want to contemplate the bust.

Ayrton Senna, the movie, the life, the man

2011-09-07T15:53:00.011+10:00

Notice that I didn’t say the legend because that would be so unfair, not only to Senna, but to the people who made this movie.

I saw this movie at a mid-morning session in mid-week at what is called a ‘babes in arms’ session, where mothers can bring their babies. So I was the only bloke in the cinema who didn’t have a baby, and I was surrounded by mothers with strollers and the odd father as well. Not surprisingly, the cinema was far from capacity to the extent that I expect they made no money for that viewing.

I need to make a confession: I’m a closet petrol-head, which, for most people, means that I’m one of those blokes who never grew up when it came to cars, motorcycles and anything else that goes fast. I didn’t review Eric Bana’s great autobiographic movie, Love The Beast, but this one is different. And you may well ask: how can you write a philosophical post about a racing car driver? Well, watch me.

For a start, Senna was a deeply complex person: very sensitive, which means that he was also passionate and temperamental. In this respect, I could identify with him on a personality level, albeit superficially. Senna was a person who could never hide what he was feeling. His temperament was more akin to an artist’s than a sportsperson’s. He strived for an authenticity that was very existential, despite his deeply and candidly held religious beliefs. In his early successes, he claimed it was because of his belief in God, but in truth, it was his belief in himself.

I’ve said many times that I don’t judge people for their belief in God (or not) and I don’t try to rationalise it either. But, in Senna’s case, his belief was part of what he was. God was as much a part of Senna’s makeup as his passion for racing cars (where ‘racing’ is a verb in this context). I’ve also said before (on this blog) that a belief in God can lead someone to extraordinary hubris or extraordinary humility. From what I read about Senna in the mainstream press during his Formula 1 career, I thought he was egotistical as most driven people are. But the film painted a different picture: more than one person spoke of his humility, including the F1 doctor, who became his friend, and, coincidentally, tried to talk him into retiring on the eve of his last fateful race. I think Senna’s humility was purely a result of his belief in God – it put the entire world into perspective for him – that there were things greater than him, greater than F1 championships, greater than life itself.

One cannot discuss this movie without discussing Senna’s genius and I don’t use that word lightly. If genius is defined by the ability to do what no one else can do then Senna qualifies in spades. On more than one occasion he produced performances that were considered ‘impossible’ under the circumstances. Watching his early races, he could make the car skate through corners, reminiscent of past masters like Nuvolari and Fangio. He demolished the opposition as if they were driving cars with half the power. In the wet he was unbeatable and in the dry he drove the car like he was driving in the wet. He was one of those rare drivers who could actually drive a car beyond its limit – to his limit and not the car’s.

The film is dominated by his career-long rivalry with Alain Prost, which became very personal and bitter. In 2 successive Japanese GPs, they put each other out of the race when the GP championship was hanging in the balance (on the first occasion they were driving for the same team). It goes without saying that Senna was loved in Japan, though not as much as he was loved in Brasil. Senna was loyal to his roots, both national and familial – it was part of who he was. He made it clear that he wanted to set up a fund to give under-privileged children an education. After his death, his sister Viviane fulfilled that dream and Prost is one of the trustees. Prost was also a pall-bearer at his funeral.

Senna also had a testy and, dare-I-say-it, openly confrontational relationship with F1’s boss at the time, Jean-Marie Balestre (FIA President). There is one scene in the ‘drivers’ room’, prior to a race, where they have a stand-up and heated argument. Balestre manages to save face but Senna gets his way because the other drivers support him. Many might argue that the film is unfair to Prost and I suspect that another version would give a different perspective on their ‘war’.

This is a sport where death is much closer than other ‘gladiator’ contests we see in the modern world but it would be wrong to assume that racing car drivers, and Formula 1 drivers in particular, have a callous disregard for life. Senna talks honestly and candidly about this aspect of his sport in one interview, after Prost claimed that Senna’s belief in God made him ‘dangerous’ on the circuit.

We see 3 deaths in this film, and everyone is clearly and deeply affected by them, none more so than Senna. There was a death during practice at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix in Imola, Italy (Austrian, Roland Ratzenberger) and Senna was deeply affected by it. It was after this incident that F1’s Chief Doctor, Sid Watkins, suggested that Senna retire and they go fishing together. In fact, after this incident it was unsure if Senna would even take his place on the grid. There was also an earlier incident in practice when newcomer and fellow Brasilian, Rubens Barrichello, had a nasty accident, and Senna climbed a fence to be by his compatriot’s side. And then there was an incident at the start of the race itself when JJ Lehto’s car stalled on the grid and was rammed by an un-sighted Pedro Lamy. There were more injuries in the crowd, however, (8 fans and a Police Officer) than on the track, caused by this incident.

In 1993, the previous season, the Williams racing team had changed F1 racing by adding electronics to many components of the car, including the suspension. This made them unbeatable, though Senna won the last 2 races in Japan and Australia. I didn’t know this, until I saw the film, but Senna won his last race and his last podium finish in Australia.

After Williams’ technological domination, F1 changed the rules for 1994 but not before Senna had changed teams from Mclaren to Williams. What was obvious straightaway, is that without its electronic ‘magic’, the Williams’ car was rubbish. This was evidenced by the fact that the best driver in the world struggled to keep it on the track. It was obvious from body language more than words that Senna was frustrated and stressed by his inability to get the car ‘balanced’ on the track.

On the morning he died, his sister claims that Senna asked God a question, which I fail to recall (go see the movie). The answer, according to her, was that he opened his Bible and read the passage that ‘God would give his greatest gift, and that was God himself’. Obviously people can read into that what they want.

At the end of the day, Senna died in a freak accident. He came off the track on a corner, that someone claimed no one should come off. People claim that his car ‘broke’ – in particular, it’s speculated that his steering failed. Watching the incident it appears that way: the car just spears off the track as you would expect if the steering suddenly failed at high speed (refer Addendum below). Even then, Senna should have survived except that a suspension arm flew up and hit his helmet. He had no broken bones and no bruises to his body. His friend, Sid Watkins, was with him when he died. He could tell from his injuries that he wouldn’t live and he claims that he’s not a religious man but when Senna sighed and gave up his life he felt like his spirit had left him. I have to admit I’ve had that experience myself, though only once.

I should inform you that much of the film, if not all, is poor quality video, but neither this nor the occasional screaming baby could distract me from being fully and emotionally engaged by this biopic. And I concede that it glossed over some of Senna’s questionable behaviour both on and off the track: for example, when he punched rookie driver, Irishman, Eddie Irvine, for ‘unlapping’ him in the 1993 Japan Grand Prix. Having said that, when he won against Prost in the 1990 Japan Grand Prix after colliding with him, it was obvious that he took little pleasure from the win.

But perhaps the most telling piece of video is not in the main body of the film but in the credits at the end. The filmmakers show bits of video of Senna enjoying himself with his family and clowning with his friends. In the midst of this ‘fun’ they show a clip where Senna has to drive around a car, recently crashed. It’s what happens after that that really shows what Senna’s priorities were, because he stops his car on the side of the track and runs back whilst other cars are still dodging the accident to check on the driver.

After his death, Senna’s friend, Professor Sid Watkins, became head of F1 safety and whether by fate or good management or both, Senna was the last F1 fatality as I write this.

Addendum: Here is an explanation of Senna's crash, the veracity of which I cannot confirm, but it gives the impression that it's based on 'black box' data.

Tenth Anniversary of Tampa

2011-08-27T12:41:00.002+10:00

It’s been 10 years yesterday since the infamous Tampa incident unfolded under the Howard government of the day, and, by tapping into Australia’s inherent paranoia and xenophobia, given fresh air by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, helped Howard to win an election.

This is part of Australia’s shame yet most seem to be caught up in the hysteria still, as ‘boat people’ once again become the pawns in our major political parties’ determination to prove who has the most backbone in halting asylum seekers coming to this country. Really, it’s a battle to see who can be the most amoral, least charitable and most pernicious in treating victims of foreign conflicts.

Julian Burnside QC, an outspoken advocate for the rights of refugees, wrote an excellent editorial in yesterday’s AGE in the hope of convincing Australians that they are misinformed and manipulated without compunction by our political leaders on both sides of the House.

Anyway, I won’t waste words when Burnside’s argument is far more informative and eloquent than anything I could write on the subject.

Back in April 2009, I wrote a short post called Tampa Revisited concerning horrific stories of atrocities committed against refugees forced to return to Afghanistan. Here is a story with a positive outcome because the refugees were given sanctuary in our neighbouring country, New Zealand.

Great Equations

2011-08-06T11:45:00.008+10:00

This is a book by Robert P. Crease, subtitled The hunt for cosmic beauty in numbers, and it takes the reader from Pythagoras’s Theorem to quantum mechanics. In so doing, it pretty well covers the whole of Western physics – it's as much history as it is exposition – which makes it an ideal introduction for anyone with only a passing knowledge of physics and mathematics.

Crease takes us from Euclid to Newton, Euler, Boltzmann, Maxwell, Planck, Einstein, Schrodinger and Heisenberg. Even though he jumps from Euclid to Newton (chapters 1 to 2) he includes others who played a significant role: in particular, Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Descartes. It’s this historical context that gives the book a semblance of narrative, albeit an episodic one, and provides an appeal that may go beyond scientific nerds like myself. There is, in fact, very little mathematics in the book, yet he explains the physics behind the equations with eloquence and erudition. That’s quite an accolade, considering he covers the most seminal scientific discoveries and equations in all of Western history.

Only 2 of the ‘great equations’ are pure mathematics, the other 8 (4 of which are 20th Century) are all physics equations. The 2 exceptions are the well-known, and erroneously titled, Pythagoras’s Theorem (a² + b² = c²), and the lesser known, but no less iconic, Euler’s identity (e^iπ + 1 = 0). Euler’s identity is technically not really an equation because it contains no variables, and it’s derived from Euler’s equation: e^ix = cosx + isinx. But no book of ‘great equations’ could leave it out.

Pythagoras’s equation, as it relates to right angle triangles, was well known centuries before Pythagoras, and was discovered independently in various cultures, including India, China and Egypt. But even though the proof may well have been developed by Pythagoras or his school, it is Euclid’s proof that is best known. In fact, Euclid’s famous Elements, as Crease points out, is the first known work to provide mathematical proofs from stated axioms and became the standard by which mathematics has been mined ever since.

One of the historical and philosophical points that Crease makes is that, during the period from the Ancient Greeks to Newton, there were 2 recognised sources of knowledge and it was only during the renaissance that a conflict first arose, epitomised by Galileo’s famous clash with the Catholic Church.

What is not so well known is that Euclid’s Elements was the second most published book after the Bible following its initial typesetting in Venice in 1482. I find it most interesting that a mathematical volume should contest the Bible as a source of ‘truth’, during a period when Christianity was, politically, the most powerful force in Europe. Half a millennia on, this conflict still exists for some people, yet, for most of us, there is simply no contest, epistemologically.

Mathematics is a source of truth that no religious writings can match, because religious scriptures (of any persuasion) are completely open to diverse interpretations, dependent on the reader, whereas mathematical truths are both universal and epistemologically independent of the individual who discovers them.

Crease covers 2 of Newton’s equations: the second law of motion (F = ma) and the universal equation of gravitation (F_g = m₁m₂G/r²). Newton transformed the way we perceive abstract qualities like force, energy and gravity, which are, nevertheless, all tangible to our everyday experience. It was Newton’s discovery and consequential deployment of calculus (he called it fluxions) that opened up this world of physics from which we’ve never looked back. Despite the consequential discoveries of people like Maxwell, Planck, Einstein, Schrodinger and Heisenberg (all covered in this book) Newton’s equations are no less significant today than they were in his time, and no less relevant as humankind’s exploration of the solar system has demonstrated.

Euler’s identity is arguably of less significance to our everyday understanding of the universe (than Newton’s mathematical discoveries) yet no one who comes across it for the first time and appreciates its deep profundity can help but be gobsmacked by it. In one succinct formula it pulls together so many strands of mathematics: logarithms, trigonometry, calculus, power series and complex algebra. It’s all the more impressive when one realises it’s made up of 2 infinite series, that when combined gives the most unlikely relationship in mathematics between rational, irrational and imaginary numbers. The equation, as opposed to the better known identity (that is effectively a special case) is central to Schrodinger’s equation, developed a couple of centuries later.

Euler’s identity seems to encapsulate mathematical truth, which is why it has gained iconic status. As Richard Feynman wrote just months before his 15th birthday, when he first discovered it: ‘[it is] The most remarkable formula in math.’ Like the great Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who also discovered it whilst still in high school, Feynman was disappointed to learn that Euler had made the connection a couple of centuries earlier. It’s not for nothing that it’s earned the title, God’s equation.

No book on great equations could leave out Einstein’s famous equation (E = mc²) that is a direct consequence of his special theory of relativity, and Crease provides a good exposition of how the theory developed and its logical consequence from a conceptual conflict between Maxwell’s equations and Newton’s mechanics. Crease also captures the other players like Fitzgerald, Lorentz and Poincare, which makes us realise that Einstein’s theories would have eventually evolved even without Einstein. But it was Einstein’s ambitious thought experiments that set him apart from his contemporaries and led him to the iconoclastic theories that history deservedly gives him credit for.

I’ve skipped over Maxwell’s equations and the second law of thermodynamics, yet in both cases, Crease points out that these discoveries transformed life as we know it. One was essential to the industrial revolution and the other to the communications industry that followed. He makes the salient point that few people appreciate the significance of great scientific discoveries and their impact on so-called civilisation the way they appreciate political changes and acts of war. He quotes Feynman, who once claimed that Maxwell’s equations would come to have a greater historical significance than the American Civil War, both being products of the 19th Century.

On my 50th birthday I was given a copy of Peter Watson’s A Terrible Beauty; A History of the People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind. This ambitious book covers the entire 20th Century and was published to coincide with the dawn of the new Millennium. But, instead of covering the politics and wars that enveloped that century, Watson concentrated on the science and art, which he wrote about with equal erudition. It’s an extraordinary book and a great birthday present. I read it over a year, whilst travelling and working in North America, simultaneously writing my only published novel.

I mention Watson’s book because it encapsulates a point that Crease makes more than once: how the importance of scientific erudition often gets lost when scholars examine the history of the Western world. He makes this point specifically in regard to the 2 aforementioned 19th Century discoveries: Maxwell’s equations and the second law of thermodynamics.

Crease quotes Max Born in his introduction to Einstein’s equation of his General Theory of Relativity, who compared it to a work of art. I have to admit that was how I considered it when I first read about it in Einstein’s own words. I confess that I didn’t follow the physics and the mathematics at the time, yet I appreciated its significance and its beauty. Conceptually, Einstein realised that a falling body feels no force, which appears to contradict Newton’s formulation. He reformulated it so the motion of a falling body is a consequence of the geometry of space-time that is curved as a result of the existence of mass. This is an extraordinary intellectual achievement, especially when one realises that his equation maintains Newton’s inverse square law, thereby only disagreeing with Newton on relativistic grounds. Even the word genius sometimes seems inadequate when you apply it to Einstein; such was his vision, bravado and intellectual tenacity.

I wrote an exposition on Schrodinger’s equation back in May, and I’m proud to say it’s become my most popular post, though it’s strictly an introduction. One thing Crease does better than me is to explain the dichotomy between quantum mechanics and classical physics. In particular, he contends that the so-called collapse of the wave function is conceptually misleading. He argues that the wave function is a convenient mathematical device, like a plot device in a narrative (my analogy, not his) that no longer serves any purpose once a measurement is made. The wave function gives a probability that is confirmed statistically over many measurements, but determines nothing specific for a specific event.

The last great equation in his book is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle expressed mathematically. By juxtaposing it with Schrodinger’s equation in the previous, second-to-last chapter, Crease demonstrates how the 2 antagonists used different mathematics to reach the same result. In other words, Schrodinger’s wave mechanics and Heisenberg’s matrices are mathematically equivalent (proven by Schrodinger), yet the different approaches led to arguments about what they meant conceptually and philosophically. Interestingly, Born played a key role in both interpretations: he realised that Schrodinger’s wave mechanics led to probabilities; and he realised that Heisenberg’s non-commutative algebra could be reformulated using matrices, and this led to the precursor of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle with the conclusion pq does not equal qp, where p represents momentum and q represents position of a particle.

Crease’s account exemplifies the importance of ideas being challenged in their formative stages by people of comparable knowledge, and how the interaction between philosophy and science is a necessary factor in the advancement of scientific theories.

Like Schrodinger’s equations, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle makes predictions that can be confirmed experimentally, yet the predictions can never be specific. Both equations, in different ways, highlight the inherent fuzziness that differentiates quantum mechanics from classical physics, whether it be Newtonian or relativistic. In fact, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general theory of relativity have never been satisfactorily resolved, with the best contender being String Theory requiring 11 dimensions and predicting 10⁵⁰⁰ universes.

In his conclusion, Crease emphasises how the discovery process for theoreticians often involves a re-evaluation of what they set out to achieve. No where is this more apparent than in the early 20th century when physics underwent 2 revolutions, the epistemological and ontological consequences of which are still unresolved today.

The case of Jock Palfreeman

2011-06-27T19:12:00.004+10:00

This is a story about clashes: a clash of cultures, a clash of justice systems, a clash of families; and its genesis was a clash on the streets that has resulted in tragedy for both sides. I’m sure no one knows about this outside of Bulgaria and Australia, and I suspect some will see it as a clash of two countries.

Not surprisingly, I’ve only seen one side of the story, through Australian journalists and an Australian family, though the prosecutor for the Bulgarian side was interviewed and we see footage of the victim’s father voicing his opinion on Bulgarian national television. The victim’s family refused to be interviewed by Australian journalists (from the ABC).

Basically, 24 year old Jock Palfreeman, an Australian who has spent some time in Bulgaria – enough to be familiar with its darker side – became involved in a melee when he went to the aid of a Roma (gypsy) being bashed and became the target of the attack himself. According to his account, he was knocked to the ground when hit on the head from behind, and, when he regained his feet, drew a knife to defend himself. This apparently resulted in the death of 20 year old Andrei Monov, who suffered a single knife wound under his armpit, though Palfreeman claims he has no memory of inflicting the wound, even though he admits he was wielding a knife.

There are statements from witnesses who support Palfreeman’s account of events, quite accurately, yet these statements were not admitted to the court, and Police written statements also conflicted with their in-court evidence. When the defence team requested that the original Police statements be admitted to court, they were overruled by the victim’s family, who were part of the prosecution team. Apparently, this is the norm in Bulgaria. Jock Palfreeman’s father, Dr. Simon Palfreeman, who is a pathologist, had to mount the defence case, though he hired an Australian legal team to help him.

Simon Palfreeman, who is a scientist by discipline, had never had to deal with a legal exercise of this nature before, let alone in a foreign Eastern bloc country. In hindsight, his faith that justice and fair representation would prevail could be seen as naïve. Certainly, his son has a better appreciation of the situation than his father.

In the end, Jock Palfreeman was charged with ‘Murder with hooliganism’ and the sentence handed down was 20 years. They’ve since gone through an appeal process, which is Part 2 of the programme, and the conviction was upheld. The defence team are now talking about going to the European Court of Human Rights where Bulgaria has 200 cases pending, apparently.

What I find remarkable, in Part 2, is that Jock Palfreeman has not only become acceptant of his fate, but has taken on a role of supporting fellow inmates in one the worse prisons in Europe, according to Dr Krassimir Kanev, Bulgarian Helsinki Commitee, Human Rights Group.

Part 1 and Part 2 are 30mins each, or you can read the transcripts.

Addendum: It's worth watching/listening to the 5 min interview with Prof. David Barclay, an internationally recognised forensics expert at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland (behind the Part 2 link).

MAD RUSH by Philip Glass

2011-06-18T15:04:00.004+10:00

Yes, something entirely different for me. If you look up my profile you'll see that my musical tastes are quite diverse: AC/DC to J.S.Bach is a broad church.

I recently acquired this CD and I can't get enough of it. I wanted to share it and I guess that's what blogs are for.

Here is a sample of the opening track called Opening overlaid with some commentary by the pianist, Sally Whitwell.

Other tracks include Metamorphosis I-V (runs about 30 mins), which Glass wrote for Kafka's famous play, and Dead Things, which is from the sound track of Hours (a film about Virginia Woolf starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep).

The title track sits in the middle and is about 15 mins long. It's like a dialogue between contemplation and exuberance - an unusual juxtaposition that works - it swells and ebbs, and it always makes me listen. I never get sick of it.

The last track is called Wichita Vortex Sutra, and, according to the CD notes, arose from a chance meeting between Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg in a Manhattan bookshop, where Ginsberg asked Glass if he'd perform a '...duo of sorts at a benefit concert for the Vietnam Veteran Theatre.' Apparently, 'The work is just as often performed with narration as without.' It has an anthem feel about it and it reminds me of Oscar Peterson's Hymn to Freedom off Night Train, but whether that's a deliberate allusion by Glass or just me, I don't know.

The instrument - the only instrument on the recording - deserves special mention, because it's an Australian-made Stuart and Sons 102 keyboard piano. Their pianos have already featured on award-winning classical CDs.

To add a bit of philosophy to this post, I will quote Sally Whitwell's impression of Wichita Vortex Sutra:

There's a solidarity in the realisation that we can fight and be heard. There is an optimism too, or even more than that, an ecstatic epiphany that brings about a surprisingly serene conclusion and a return to the ordinary, to the drive down the highway. I could talk for hours about the metaphor of the highway, but instead I think I should leave you to your own conclusions.

Addendum: Listen to Wichita Vortex Sutra

Of Gods and Men

2011-06-07T07:41:00.000+10:00

This is a French film by Xavier Beauvois with numerous awards to its name, including the Grand Prix at Cannes, 2010. The French title is Des homes et des dieux. ‘A powerful film’ is a well-worn cliché but in this case the accolade is totally apposite.

In Australia, we are very lucky because art house cinema still flourishes (we have art house multiplexes as well as the mainstream variety) and they largely cater for foreign language cinema and so-called independents. When I was in America 10 years ago, I noticed that art house cinema was on the verge of extinction and David Lynch even commented on its dire state at a press conference. I expect that a movie like this would only be seen in American cinema, at a film festival, despite the awards it has already received. More’s the pity because Beauvois’ film deserves a wider audience, especially when he tackles stereotypical perceptions on religion.

The film is based on real events, set in early 90s Algeria following the assassination of President Mohamed Boudiaf in 1992. The militant entity, Groupe Islamique Armee, took advantage of the vacuum to wage a Taliban-like war against ordinary Muslims. The film’s narrative, however, centres on a group of Cistercian Trappist monks, known as the Monks of Tibherine, living and working in a monastery in the Atlas Mountains, 90k south of Algiers. They live an almost Franciscan lifestyle and they are an organic part of the community, which is entirely Muslim, from what we see.

It’s obvious, from the rise of Islamique Armee, that the monks are at grave risk – an early scene shows Croatians at a nearby construction site being massacred. It’s the only scene of violence in the movie, the remainder happens off-screen, but it sets the scene, juxtaposing a violent jihad against the monastic life of the monks and the ordinary village life of their neighbours. At first they are offered armed protection, but the leader, Brother Christian, refuses on the grounds that the monastery can never harbour weapons, even for protection. They are requested in very strong terms to leave by the government, but this they also refuse to comply with, believing that to leave would be a betrayal to their community. As one woman says: ‘We are the birds and you are the branch; if you leave we fall’.

This is a deeply psychological film, whereby each member of the monastery undergoes their own journey as to how they deal with the prospect of an imminent and violent death, and how it challenges their faith and their principles. This is a film where each and everyone of us can step into their shoes and ask ourselves the same questions – it’s a bloody good film.

But there is a wider message here that is very pertinent to the current climate on religion, and Islamic religion in particular. This movie is a very relevant and powerful antidote to the simplistic black-and-white view of religion espoused by people like Dawkins and Harris, who really get up my nose. From what I’ve seen of Hitchens, he exhibits a more flexible and informed point of view, despite having the most acerbic tongue. Harris and Dawkins talk exactly like politicians, who know their constituency and their agenda; Hitchens, less so.

This movie is about courage, both physical and moral, and the beliefs that people draw on when they are really tested. This is a movie that depicts religion at its worst and at its best. It completely annihilates the black-and-white view of religion that we are currently being asked to consider.

Quantum Platonism

2011-06-01T09:07:00.003+10:00

This post is a logical extension of the previous one – a sequel if you like – and, for that reason, it should be read in conjunction with it.

One of the things I learnt, from researching for that post, was that Schrodinger was attempting something else to what he achieved. He didn’t like the consequences of his own equation. I believe he was expecting to obtain results that would reconcile quantum phenomena with classical physics and that didn’t happen. His famous Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment confirms his disbelief in Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s interpretation of the wave function collapse: only when someone makes an observation or a measurement does reality occur. Prior to this interaction, the quantum state exists as a superposition of states simultaneously. His thought experiment was to take a quantum phenomenon and amplify it to a contradictory macro-state: a cat that was dead and alive at the same time. His express purpose was to illustrate how absurd this was.

Likewise, he apparently wasn’t happy with Born’s probabilities, yet it was Born’s insightful contribution that actually gave Schrodinger what he wanted: a connection between his quantum wave function and classical physics. To quote Arthur I. Miller in Graham Farmelo’s book, It Must be Beautiful; Great Equations in Modern Science:

[Born’s] dramatic assumption transformed Schrodinger’s equation into a radically new form, never before contemplated. Whereas Newton’s equation of motion yields the special position of a system at any time, Schrodinger’s produces a wave function from which a probability can easily be calculated… Born’s aim was nothing less striking than to associate Schrodinger’s wave function with the presence of matter. (My emphasis)

I think this is the key point: Born was able to provide a mathematical connection between quantum physics and classical physics via probabilities. The fact that these probabilities agreed with experimental data is what cast Schrodinger’s equation in stone and gave it the iconic status it still has in the 21st Century. As Wikipedia points out: Schrödinger's equation can be mathematically transformed into Richard Feynman's path integral formulation, which is the basis of his QED (quantum electrodynamics) analytic method, and the current ‘last word’ on quantum mechanics.

I re-read Feynman’s ‘lectures’ on QED after writing my post and one can see the connection clearly. But it’s Born’s influence that one sees, rather than Schrodinger’s, which is not to diminish Schrodinger’s genius. His attempt to create a ‘visualisable’ wave function, as opposed to Heisenberg’s matrices, is what set the course in quantum mechanics for the rest of the century.

But whilst Schrodinger and Einstein argued over the philosophical consequences of quantum mechanics with Bohr and Heisenberg, Feynman (a generation later) was dismissive of philosophical considerations altogether. In a footnote in QED, Feynman argues that the probability amplitudes are all that matters, and that the student should ‘avoid being confused by things such as the “reduction of a wave packet” and similar magic.’

If Feynman professes a philosophy it is by this credo:

‘I’m going to describe to you how nature is – and if you don’t like it, that’s going to get in the way of your understanding it… So I hope you can accept Nature as She is – absurd.’

However, the discontinuity between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics that arises from a ‘measurement’ or an ‘observation’ is hard to avoid. As I said in my previous post, it is entailed in Schrodinger’s equation itself, because the wave function is continuous yet all quantum phenomena are discrete. Roger Penrose, and others (like Elwes, quoted in previous post) point out that Schrodinger’s wave function is continuous until the quantum phenomenon in question is physically resolved (observed), whence the wave function effectively disappears.

What this tells me is that everything seems to be connected. It’s like nothing can come into existence until it interacts with something else. But it also implies that the quantum world and the classical world – what we call reality – are distinct yet interconnected. It reminds me of Plato’s cave, where our reality is akin to the ‘shadows’ projected from a quantum world that only mathematics can describe with any precision or purpose.

Our reality is a veneer and the quantum world hints at a substratum that obeys different rules yet dictates our world. It’s only through mathematics that we are able to perceive that world let alone comprehend it – particle smashers play their role, but they only provide windows of opportunity rather than a panoramic view.

This is a subtly different concept to the ‘hidden variables’ philosophy proposed by David Bohm (and some say Einstein) because I’m suggesting that the quantum world and the classical physical world obey different rules.

In a not-so-recent issue of New Scientist (30 April 2011, pp.28-31) Anil Ananthaswamy explains how different parties (Mario Berta from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Robert Prevedel of the University of Waterloo Canada and Chuan-Feng Li of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefie) have all reduced the limits of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle through quantum entanglement.

Their efforts were apparently in response to theoretical suggestions by 2 Dutch physicists, Hans Maassen and Jos Uffink, that information gained through quantum entanglement (knowing information about one entangled particle or photon axiomatically provides information about its partner) would affect the limits of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. For example: if 2 particles go in opposite directions after a collision, they theoretically have the same momentum, yet Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that the information would be necessarily fuzzy, juxtapose knowing its position. However, measuring the momentum of one particle automatically gives knowledge of the other that subverts the uncertainty principle for the second particle.

Entanglement is an example of quantum interaction that classical physics can’t explain or even duplicate. That there appears to be a correspondence between this and the uncertainty principle supports the view that the quantum world obeys its own rules.

In my introduction, I suggested that this post needs to be read in conjunction with the previous one. This post focuses on the philosophy of quantum mechanics whereas the previous one focused on the science. Whereas the philosophy of quantum mechanics is contentious, the science is not contentious at all. That’s why it’s important to appreciate the distinction.

Trying to understand Schrodinger’s equation

2011-05-24T10:55:00.055+10:00

This is one of my autodidactic posts – I’m not a physicist so this is a layperson’s attempt to explain one of the seminal equations in physics so that others may perhaps understand it as well as me. I know that there are people with more knowledge than me on this topic, so I’m sure they’ll let me know if and when I get it wrong.

Physics is effectively understanding the natural world through mathematics – it’s been a highly productive and successful marriage between an abstract realm and the physical world.

Physics is almost defined by the equations that have been generated over the generations since the times of Galileo, Kepler and Newton. Examples include Maxwell’s equations, Einstein’s field equations, Einstein’s famous E=mc² equation and Boltzmann’s entropy equation. This is not an exhaustive list but it covers everything from electromagnetic radiation to gravity to nuclear physics to thermodynamics.

It is difficult to understand physics without a grasp of the mathematics, and this is true in all of the above examples. But perhaps the most difficult of all are the mathematics associated with quantum mechanics. This post is not an attempt to provide a definitive understanding but to give a very basic exposition on one of the foundational equations in the field. In so doing, I will attempt to explain its context as well as its components.

There are 3 fundamental equations associated with quantum mechanics: Planck’s equation, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Schrodinger’s equation. Of course, there are many other equations involved, including Dirac’s equation (built on Schrodinger’s equation) and the QED equations developed by Feynman, Schwinger, Tomonaga and Dyson, but I’ll stop at Schrodinger’s because it pretty well encapsulates quantum phenomena both conceptually and physically.

The 3 equations are:

E = hf

The first equation is simply that the energy, E, of a photon is Planck’s constant (h = 6.6 x 10^-34) times its frequency, f.

This is the equation that gives the photoelectric effect, as described by Einstein, and gave rise to the concept of the photon: a particle of light. The energy that a photon gives to an electron (to allow it to escape from a metal surface) is dependent on its frequency and not its intensity. The higher the frequency the more energy it has and it must reach a threshold frequency before it affects the electron. Making the photons more intense (more of them) won’t have any effect if the frequency is not high enough. Because one photon effectively boots out one electron, Einstein realised that the photon behaves like a particle and not a wave.

The second equation involves h (called h bar) and is h divided by 2π. h is more commonly used in lieu of h and it features prominently in Schrodinger’s equation.

(For future reference there is a relationship between f and w whereby
w = f x 2π, which is the wave number equals frequency times 2π. This means that E = hf = hw/2π and becomes E = h w.)

The second equation entails Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which states mathematically that there are limits to what we can know about a particle’s position or its momentum. The more precisely we know its position the less precisely we know its momentum, and this equation via Planck’s constant defines the limits of that information. We know that in practice this principle does apply exactly as it’s formulated. It can also be written in terms of E and t (Energy and time). This allows a virtual particle to be produced of a specific energy, providing the time duration allows it within the limits determined by Planck’s constant (it’s effectively the same equation only one uses E and t in lieu of p and x). This has been demonstrated innumerable times in particle accelerators.

To return to Schrodinger’s equation, there are many ways to express it but I chose the following because it’s relatively easy to follow.

The first thing to understand about equations in general is that all the terms have to be of the same stuff. You can’t add velocity to distance or velocity to acceleration; you can only add (or deduct) velocities with velocity. In the above equation all the terms are Energy times a Wave function (called psi).

The terms on the right hand side are called a Hamiltonian and it gives the total energy, which is kinetic energy plus potential energy (ignoring, for the time being, the wave function).

If you have a mass that’s falling in gravity, at any point in time its energy is the potential energy plus its kinetic energy. As it falls the kinetic energy increases and the potential energy decreases, but the total energy remains the same. This is exactly what the Schrodinger equation entails. The Hamiltonian on the right gives the total energy and the term on the left hand side gives the energy of the particle (say, an electron) at any point in time via its wave function.

Another way of formulating the same equation with some definition of terms is as follows:

The Laplacian operator just allows you to apply the equation in 3 dimensions. If one considers the equation as only applying in one dimension (x) then this can be ignored for the sake of explication.

Before I explain any other terms, I think it helps to provide a bit of contextual history. Heisenberg had already come up with a mathematical methodology to determine quantum properties of a particle (in this case, an electron) using matrices. Whilst it gave the right results, the execution was longwinded (Wolfgang Pauli produced 40 pages to deduce the ‘simple’ energy levels of the hydrogen atom using Heisenberg’s matrices) and Schrodinger was 'repelled' by it. An erudite account of their professional and philosophical rivalry can be found in Arthur I. Miller’s account, Erotica, Aesthetics and Schrodinger’s Wave Equation, in Graham Farmelo’s excellent book, It Must be Beautiful; Great Equations of Modern Science.

Schrodinger was inspired by Louis de Broglie’s insight that electrons could be described as a wave in the same way that photons could be described as particles. De Broglie understood the complementarity inherent between waves and particles applied to particles as well as light. Einstein famously commented that de Broglie ‘has lifted a corner of the great veil’.

But Schrodinger wanted to express the wave as a continuous function, which is counter to the understanding of quantum phenomena at the time, and this became one of the bones of contention between himself and Heisenberg.

Specifically, by taking this approach, Schrodinger wanted to relate the wave function back to classical physics. But, in so doing, he only served to highlight the very real discontinuity between classical physics and quantum mechanics that Heisenberg had already demonstrated. From Miller’s account (referenced above) Schrodinger despaired over this apparent failure, yet his equation became the centre piece of quantum theory.

Getting back to Schrodinger’s equation, the 2 terms I will focus on are the left hand term and the kinetic energy term on the right hand side. V (the potential energy) is a term that is not deconstructed.

The kinetic energy term is the easiest to grasp because we can partly derive it from Newtonian mechanics, in spite of the h term.

In Newtonian classical physics we know that (kinetic energy) E = ½ mv²

We also know that (momentum) p = mv

It is easy to see that p² = (mv)² therefore E = p²/2m

In quantum wave mechanics p_x = -i h d/dx

(Remember (–i)² = -1 = i² because -1 x -1 = 1)

So p_x² = - h² d²/dx² therefore E = - h²/2m d²/dx²

Which is the kinetic energy term on the right hand side of Schrodinger’s equation (without the Laplacian operator).

I apologise for glossing over the differential calculus, but it would require another lesson for another time.

The term on the left hand side is the key to Schrodinger’s equation because it gives the wave function in time, which was what Schrodinger was trying to derive.

But to understand it one must employ Euler’s famous equation, which exploits complex algebra. In classical physics, wave equations do not use complex algebra (using the imaginary number, i ). I will return to a discourse on imaginary numbers and their specific role in quantum mechanics at the end.

e^ix = cosx + isinx

This equation allows one to convert from Cartesian co-ordinates to polar co-ordinates and back, only the y axis one finds in Cartesian co-ordinates is replaced by the i axis and the corresponding diagram is called an Argand diagram.

In Schrodinger’s equation the wave function is expressed thus

Ψ(x, t) = Ae^i(kx−ωt) where A is the wave amplitude.

If one differentiates this equation, wrt (with respect to) the term t, we get the left hand term in his equation.

Differentiating an exponential function (to base e) gives the exponential function and differentiating i(kx-wt) wrt t gives -iw. So the complete differentiated equation becomes

∂Ψ/∂t = −iωΨ

Multiplying both sides by ih gives ih ∂Ψ/∂t = h ωΨ

But from much earlier I foreshadowed that h ω = E

So ih ∂Ψ/∂t = h ωΨ = EΨ

This gives the left hand term for the famous time dependent Schrodinger wave equation.

The simplest expression is given thus:

Where H is simply the Hamiltonian.

Going back to the classical wave equation, which Schrodinger was attempting to emulate in quantum mechanics, a time dependent equation would give the position of the particle at a particular point in time, knowing what its energy would be from the Hamiltonian. However, in quantum mechanics this is not possible, and Heisenberg pointed out (according to Miller cited above) that Schrodinger’s equation did not give a position of electrons in orbits or anywhere else. However, Max Born demonstrated, by taking the modulus of the wave function (effectively the amplitude) and squaring it, you could get the probability of the position and this prediction matched experimental results.

This outcome was completely consistent with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle which stated that determining the particle’s precise position given its momentum, which can be derived from its energy, is not possible. Schrodinger also demonstrated that his equation was mathematically equivalent to Heisenberg’s matrices.

So Schrodinger’s equation effectively didn’t tell us anything new but it became the equation of choice because it was conceptually and mathematically simpler to implement than Heisenberg’s, plus it became the basis of Dirac’s equation that was the next step in the evolvement of quantum mechanical physics.

Back in the 1920s when this was happening, there were effectively 2 camps concerning quantum mechanics: one was led by Bohr and Heisenberg and the other was led by Einstein, Schrodinger and de Broglie. Bohr developed his Copenhagen interpretation and that is effectively the standard view of quantum mechanics today. Louisa Gilder wrote an excellent book on that history, called The Age of Entanglement, which I reviewed in January 2010, so I won’t revisit it here.

However, Schrodinger’s wave equation is a continuous function and therein lies a paradox, because all quantum phenomena are discrete.

In my last post (on cosmology) I referenced MATHS 1001 by Richard Elwes and he sums it up best:

The basic principle is that the wave function Ψ permeates all of space and evolves according to Schrodinger’s equation. The function Ψ encodes the probability of finding the particle within any given region (as well as probabilities for its momentum, energy and so on). This theory can predict the outcomes of experimental observation with impressive accuracy.

As Elwes then points out, once an observation is made then the particle is located and all the other probabilities become instantly zero. This is the paradox at the heart of quantum mechanics and it is entailed in Schrodinger’s equation.

His wave function is both continuous and ‘permeates all space’ but once a ‘measurement’ or ‘observation’ is made the wave function ‘collapses’ or ‘decoheres’ into classical physics. Prior to this ‘decoherence’ or ‘collapse’ Schrodinger’s wave function gives us only probabilities, albeit accurate ones.

Schrodinger himself, from correspondence he had with Einstein, created the famous Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment to try and illustrate the philosophical consequences of this so-called ‘collapse’ of the wave function.

Equations for quantum mechanics can only be expressed in complex algebra (involving the imaginary number, i ) which is a distinct mathematical departure from classical physics. Again, referring to Elwes book, this number i opened up a whole new world of mathematics and many mathematical methods were facilitated by it, including Fourier analysis, which allows any periodic phenomenon to be modelled by an infinite series of trigonometric functions. This leads to the Fourier transform which has application to quantum mechanics. Effectively, the Fourier transform, via an integral, allows one to derive a function for t by integrating for dx and finding x by integrating for dt. To quote Elwes again: ‘revealing a deep symmetry… which was not observable before.’

But i itself is an enigma, because you can’t count an i number of items the way you can with Real numbers. i gives roots to polynomials that don’t appear on the Real plane. On an Argand diagram, the i axes (+ and -) are orthogonal to the Real number plane. To quote Elwes: ‘…our human minds are incapable of visualizing the 4-dimensional graph that a complex function demands.’ This seems quite apt though in the world of quantum phenomena where the wave function of Schrodinger’s equation ‘permeates all space’ and cannot be determined in the classical physical world prior to a ‘measurement’. However, Born showed that by taking the modulus of the wave function and squaring it, we rid ourselves of the imaginary number component and find a probability for its existence in the physical world.

In light of this, I will give Elwes the final word on Schrodinger’s equation:

The Schrodinger equation is not limited to the wave functions of single particles, but governs those of larger systems too, including potentially the wave function of the entire universe.

P.S. Source material that I found useful.

Addendum 1: The next post furthers the discussion on this topic (without equations).

Addendum 2: John D. Barrow in his book, The Book of Universes (see previous post) referred to Schrodinger's equation as '...the most important equation in all of mathematical physics.'

Cosmology, infinity, existence – how they are all linked

2011-05-15T18:23:00.011+10:00

Over the last month I’ve acquired 3 books that are not entirely unrelated. Not surprisingly, they all deal with topics I’ve discussed before.

In order of acquisition they are: Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg; The Book of Universes by John D. Barrow; and MATHS 1001 by Richard Elwes. Of all these, Heisenberg’s book is probably the least accessible, even though it’s written more for a lay-audience than an academic one.

Elwes’ book is subtitled Absolutely everything you need to know about mathematics in 1001 bite-sized explanations. Under the subtitle is a mini-bite-sized blurb presented as an un-credited quote: ‘More helpful than an encyclopaedia, much easier than a textbook’.

Both of these claims seem unrealistic, yet the blurb is probably closer to the end result than the subtitle. I had this book whilst I spent a recent 4 day sojourn in hospital and it ensured that I never got bored.

But Barrow’s book is the most compelling, not least because he’s not just an observer but a participant in the story. Barrow covers the entire Western history of ‘cosmology’ from Stonehenge to String Theories. This is a book that really does attempt to tell you everything you wanted to know about theories of the universe(s). And Barrow’s book is certainly worth writing a post about, because he revealed things to me that I hadn’t known or considered before.

On the back fly cover, Barrow’s credentials are impressive: ‘Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Director of the Millennium Mathematics Project at Cambridge University, Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and current Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London.’ As an understatement, the citation continues: ‘His principal area of scientific research is cosmology…’. It’s rare to find someone, so highly respected in an esoteric field, who can write so eloquently and incisively for a lay audience. Paul Davies comes to mind, as does Roger Penrose, both of whom get mentioned in the pages.

Not surprisingly, even though Barrow’s narrative goes from Aristotle to Ptolemy to Copernicus then Galileo, Kepler and Newton, it resides mostly in the 20th Century, specifically post Einstein’s theories of relativity. Einstein’s field equations have really dictated all theoretical explorations into cosmology from their inception to the present day, and Barrow continually reminds us of this, despite all the empirical data that has driven our best understanding of the universe to date, like Hubble’s constant and the microwave background radiation.

One of the revelations I found in this text, is that Alan Guth’s inflationary hypothesis virtually guarantees that there is a multiverse. Inflation is like a bubble and beyond the bubble, which must always lie beyond the horizon of our expanding universe, are all the anomalies and inconsistencies that we expect to find from a Big Bang universe. The hypothesis contains within it the possibility that there are numerous other inflationary bubbles, many of which could have occurred prior to ours. Barrow also points out that, if there are an infinite number of universes, than any event with probability greater than 0 could occur an infinite number of times. Only mathematicians and cosmologists truly understand just how big infinity is and what its consequences are. Elwes’ book (MATHS 1001) also brings this point home, albeit in a different way. Barrow’s point is that if there are an infinite number of universes then there are an infinite number of you(s) doing exactly what you are doing now as well as an infinite number living infinitely different lives. The fact that they will never encounter each other means that they can exist without mutual awareness except as philosophical speculations like I’m doing now.

For most people the thought of an infinite number of themselves living infinitely variable lives is enough to turn them off the infinite multiverse hypothesis. It should also make one reconsider the idea of an infinite afterlife.

The other philosophical concept that Barrow discusses at length is the anthropic principle and how it is virtually unavoidable in the face of our existence. Another of his relevations (to me) was that we don’t live in one of the most ‘probable’ universes. He demonstrates that if we were to produce a bell curve of probable universes that our particular universe exists in the ‘tail’ and not at the peak as one might expect.

As he says: “Universes that don’t produce the possibility of ‘observers’ – and they do not need to be like ourselves – don’t really count when it comes to comparing the theory with the evidence.”

He then goes on to say: “This is most sobering. We are not used to the existence of cosmologists being a significant factor in the evaluation of cosmological theories.”

There is a link between this idea and quantum mechanics, which I’ll return to later. It was explored specifically by John Wheeler and discussed at length by Paul Davies in his book, The Goldilocks Enigma. People are often dismissive about the idea of why there is something rather than nothing. Recently, Stephen Law, in a debate with Peter Atkins, said that this was the wrong question without elaborating on why it was or what the right question might be. The point is that without conscious entities there may as well be nothing, because only conscious entities, like us, give meaning to the universe at all. To dismiss the question is to say that the universe not only has no meaning but should have no meaning. It’s not surprising (to me) that the people who insist our existence has no meaning also insist that we have no free will. I challenge both premises (or conclusions, depending how they’re framed).

Slightly off track, but only slightly; Barrow immediately follows this relevation with another of equal importance. Life in a universe requires both lots of time and lots of space, so we should not be so surprised that we live in such a vast expanse of space bookended by equally vast amounts of time. It is because life requires enormous complexity that it also requires enormous time to create it.

Again, to quote Barrow: “This is why we should not be surprised to find that our universe is so old. It takes lots of time to produce the chemical building blocks needed for any type of complexity. And because the universe is expanding, if it is old, it must be big – billions of light years in extent.”

Stephen Hawking recently created a minor furor when he claimed the entire universe could have arisen from nothing. People who should know better, or should simply read more, were derisive of the statement, believing he was giving fundamentalists ready-made ammunition by kicking an own goal. Back in the 1980s, Paul Davies in his book, God and the New Physics (covers much the same material as Dawkins’ The God Delusion, only in more depth) quotes Alan Guth that “the Universe is the ultimate free lunch”. Barrow also points out that gravity in the way of potential energy (therefore negative energy) can exactly balance all the positive energy of mass and radiation (through E=mc²) so that the energy balance for the entire universe can be zero.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle allows that matter (therefore energy) can and is produced all the time (via ‘quantum fluctuations’) albeit for very short periods of time. The shorter the time, the higher the energy, via the relationship of Planck’s constant, h. So a quantum mechanism for producing something from nothing does exist. That it can happen on a cosmological scale is not so improbable if all the principle forces of nature: gravitation, electromagnetic, electroweak and strong nuclear; can all meet as equal magnitude in the crucible we call the Big Bang. In his discussion on ‘grand unification’ Barrow leaves gravity out of it. I’ve glossed over this for the sake of brevity, but Barrow discusses it in detail. He also gives a rational explanation for the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter that allows anything to exist at all.

Another revelation I found in Barrow’s book was his discussion of string theories, now collectively called M theory, and the significance of Calib-Yau spaces or manifolds, of which there are over 10⁵⁰⁰ possibilities (remember 1 billion is only 10⁹). Significantly, all these predict that gravity can be expressed by Einstein’s field equations. So Einstein still dominates the landscape, though what he would make of this development is anyone’s guess.

This means that our quest for a ‘Theory of Everything’ has led to a multitude of universes of which ours is one in 10⁵⁰⁰. But Barrow goes further when he explains “There are an infinite number of possible universes. The number is too large to be explored systematically by any computer.”

But Barrow’s best revelation is left to the next to last page when he claims that he and Douglas Shaw have recently postulated that the cosmological constant (which ‘adds an additional equation to those first found by Einstein’) is given by the relationship (t_p/t_u)² where t_p is Planck’s fundamental time, 10^-43 sec, and t_u is the current age of the universe, 4.3x10¹⁷ sec. t_p is the smallest quantity of time predicted by quantum mechanics, so is effectively the basic unit of time for the whole universe. By postulating the cosmological constant as a squared ratio dependent on the age of the universe it gives a rational reason, as opposed to a mystical one, why it is the value we observe today of 0.5x10^-121. What’s more, their postulate makes a prediction that the curvature of the universe is -0.0056. Current observations give between -0.0133 and +0.0084, but more accurate maps of the microwave background radiation should ‘be able to confirm or refute this very precise prediction’.

There is an intriguing connection between the anthropic principle and quantum mechanics. The Copenhagen interpretation, led by Bohr and given support by Heisenberg, attempts to bridge the gap between the classical world and the quantum world, by stating that something becomes manifest only after we’ve made a ‘measurement’. I think Bohr took this literally and John Wheeler, who was a loyal disciple of Bohr’s, took it even further when he extrapolated it to the cosmos. Paul Davies explores John Wheeler’s thesis in The Goldilocks Enigma, whereby Wheeler proposes a reverse causal relationship, a cosmological quantum loop in effect, between our observation of the universe and its existence. Most people find this too fantastical to entertain, yet it ties quantum mechanics to the anthropic principle in a fundamental way.

Elwes’ book also discusses quantum mechanics and explicates better than most I’ve read, when he expounds that the wave function (given by Schrodinger’s equation) ‘is no longer a valid description of the state of the particle. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that whenever someone (or perhaps something) takes a measurement, the quantum system mysteriously jumps from being smoothly spread out, to crystallizing at a specific position.’ (italics in the original)

One can’t help but compare Heisenberg’s book (Physics and Philosophy) with Schrodinger’s (What is Life?), which I reviewed in November 2009. Both men made fundamental contributions to quantum theory, for which they were both awarded Nobel prizes, yet they maintained philosophical differences over its ramifications. Schrodinger’s book is a far better read, not least because it’s more accessible. Both impress upon the reader the significance of mathematics in fathoming the universe’s secrets. Schrodinger appealed to Platonism whereas, to my surprise, Heisenberg appealed to the Pythagoreans, who influenced Plato’s Academy and its curriculum of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music – Pythagoras’s quadrivium. In particular, Heisenberg quotes Russell on Pythagoras: “I don’t know of any other man who has been as influential as he was in the sphere of thought.”

Quantum phenomena suggests to me that everything is connected. Why do radioactive half lives follow a totally predictable rule statistically but individually are not predictable at all? It’s like the decay exists at a holistic level rather than a unit level. Planck’s constant gives an epistemological limit to our ability to predict or know. At the other end of the scale, the universe exists for us at a time when we can make sense of it. Barrow, along with Douglas Shaw, entails Planck’s constant as a fundamental unit of time in an equation that suggests we understand it only because we are here at this specific time in its history. There is no other explanation, and maybe there is no other explanation required.

Addendum: Scientific American (through Paul J. Steinhardt) have a for-and-against discussion on the merits of Alan Guth's 30 year old inflationary theory, and include a reference to Roger Penrose's ideas that I discussed in a post last January.

God with no ego

2011-05-06T08:04:00.005+10:00

An unusual oxymoron, I know, but, like anything delivered tongue-in-cheek, it contains an element of serious conjecture. Many years ago (quarter of a century), I read a book on anthropology, which left no great impression on me except that the author said that there were 2 types of culture world wide. One cultural type had a religion based on a ‘creator’ or creation myth, and the other had a religion based on ancestor worship.

I would possibly add a third, which is religion based on the projection of the human psyche. In a historical context, religion has arisen primarily from an attempt to project our imagination beyond the grave. Fascination in the afterlife started early for humans, if ritual burials are anything to go by. By extension, the God of humans, in all the forms that we have, is largely manifest in the afterlife. The only ‘Earthly’ experiences of God or Gods occur in mythology.

Karen Armstrong, in her book, The History of God demonstrates how God has evolved over time as a reflection of the human psyche. I know that Armstrong is criticised on both sides of the religious divide, but The History of God is still one of the best books on religion I have read. It’s one of her earliest publications when she was still disillusioned by her experience as a Carmelite nun. A common theme in Armstrong’s writing is the connection between religion and myth.

I’ve referred to Ludwig Feuerbach in previous posts for his famous quote: God is the outward projection of the human psyche (I think he said ‘man’s inner nature’), so I’ve taken a bit of licence; but I think that’s as good a definition of God as you’re going to get. Feuerbach also said that ‘God is in man’s image’ not the other way round. He apparently claimed he wasn’t an atheist, yet I expect most people today would call him an atheist.

For most people, who have God as part of their existential belief, it is manifest as an internal mental experience yet is ‘sensed’ as external. Neurologist, Andrew Newberg of University of Pennsylvania, has demonstrated via brain imaging experiments that people’s experience of ‘religious feelings [God] do seem to be quite literally self-less’. This is why I claim that God is purely subjective, because everyone’s idea of God is different. I’ve long argued that a person’s idea of God says more about them than it says about God.

I would make an analogy with colour, because colour only occurs in some sentient creature’s mind, even though it is experienced as being external to the observer. There is, of course, an external cause for this experience, which is light reflected off objects. People can equally argue that there is an external cause for one’s experience of God, but I would argue that that experience is unique to that person. Colour can be tested, whereas God cannot.

Contrary to what people might think, I’m not judgemental about people’s belief in God – it’s not a litmus test for anything. But if God is a reflection of an individual’s ideal then judge the person and not their God.

When I was 16, I read Albert Camus’ La Peste (The Plague) and it challenged my idea of God. At the time, I knew nothing about Camus or his philosophy, or even his history with the French resistance during WWII. I also read L’Etranger (The Outsider) and, in both books, Camus, through his protagonists, challenges the Catholic Church. In La Peste, there is a scene where the 2 lead characters take a swim at night (if my memory serves me correctly) and, during a conversation, one of them conjectures that it would possibly be better for God if we didn’t believe in God. Now, this may seem the ultimate cynicism but it actually touched a chord with me at that time and at that age. A God who didn’t want you to believe in God would be a God with no ego. That is my ideal.

Sentience, free will and AI

2011-04-22T18:14:00.006+10:00

In the 2 April 2011 edition of New Scientist, the editorial was titled Rights for robots; We will know when it’s time to recognise artificial cognition. Implicit in the header and explicit in the text is the idea that robots will one day have sentience just like us. In fact they highlighted one passage: “We should look to the way people treat machines and have faith in our ability to detect consciousness.”

I am a self-confessed heretic on this subject because I don’t believe machine intelligence will ever be sentient, and I’m happy to stick my neck out in this forum so that one day I can possibly be proven wrong. One of the points of argument that the editorial makes is that ‘there is no agreed definition of consciousness’ and ‘there’s no way to tell that you aren’t the only conscious being in a world of zombies.’ In other words, you really don’t know if the person right next to you is conscious (or in a dream) so you’ll be forced to give a cognitive robot the same benefit of the doubt. I disagree.

Around the same time as reading this, I took part in a discussion on Rust Belt Philosophy about what sentience is. Firstly, I contend that sentience and consciousness are synonymous, and I think sentience is pretty pervasive in the animal kingdom. Does that mean that something that is unconscious is not sentient? Strictly speaking, yes, because I would define sentience as the ability to feel something, either emotionally or physically. Now, we often feel something emotionally when we dream, so arguably that makes one sentient when unconscious. But I see this as the exception that makes my definition more pertinent rather than the exception that proves me wrong.

In First Aid courses you are taught to squeeze someone’s fingers to see if they are conscious. So to feel something is directly correlated with consciousness and that’s also how I would define sentience. Much of the brain’s activity is subconscious even to the extent that problem-solving is often executed subliminally. I expect everyone has had the experience of trying to solve a puzzle, then leaving it for a period of time, only to solve it ‘spontaneously’ when they next encounter it. I believe the creative process often works in exactly the same way, which is why it feels so spontaneous and why we can’t explain it even after we’ve done it. This subconscious problem-solving is a well known cognitive phenomenon, so it’s not just a ‘folk theory’.

This complex subconscious activity observed in humans, I believe is quite different from the complex instinctive behaviour that we see in animals: birds building nests, bees building hives, spiders building webs, beavers building dams. These activities seem ‘hard-wired’, to borrow from the AI lexicon as we tend to do.

A bee does a complex dance to communicate where the honey is. No one believes that the bee cognitively works this out the way we would, so I expect it’s totally subconscious. So if a bee can perform complex behaviours without consciousness does that mean it doesn’t have consciousness at all? The obvious answer is yes, but let’s look at another scenario. The bee gets caught in a spider’s web and tries desperately to escape. Now I believe that in this situation the bee feels fear and, by my definition, that makes it sentient. This is an important point because it underpins virtually every other point I intend to make. Now, I don’t really know if the bee ‘feels’ anything at all, so it’s an assumption. But my assumption is that sentience, and therefore consciousness, started with feelings and not logic.

In last week’s issue of New Scientist, 16 April 2011, the cover features the topic, Free Will: The illusion we can’t live without. The article, written by freelance writer, Dan Jones, is headed The free will delusion. In effect, science argues quite strongly that free will is an illusion, but one we are reluctant to relinquish. Jones opens with a scenario in 2500 when free will has been scientifically disproved and human behaviour is totally predictable and deterministic. Now, I don’t think there’s really anything in the universe that’s totally predictable, including the remote possibility that Earth could one day be knocked off its orbit, but that’s the subject of another post. What’s more relevant to this discussion is Jones’ opening sentence where he says: ‘…neuroscientists know precisely how the hardware of the brain runs the software of the mind and dictates behaviour.’ Now, this is purely a piece of speculative fiction, so it’s not necessarily what Jones actually believes. But it’s the implicit assumption that the brain’s processes are identical to a computer’s that I find most interesting.

The gist of the article, by the way, is that when people really believe they have no free will, they behave very unempathetically towards others, amongst other aberrational behaviours. In other words, a belief in our ability to direct our own destiny is important to our psychological health. So, if the scientists are right, it’s best not to tell anyone. It’s ironic that telling people they have no free will makes them behave as if they don’t, when allowing them to believe they have free will gives their behaviour intentionality. Apparently, free will is a ‘state-of-mind’.

On a more recent post of Rust Belt Philosophy, I was reminded that, contrary to conventional wisdom, emotions play an important role in rational behaviour. Psychologists now generally believe that, without emotions, our decision-making ability is severely impaired. And, arguably, it’s emotions that play the key role in what we call free will. Certainly, it’s our emotions that are affected if we believe we have no control over our behaviour. Intentions are driven as much by emotion as they are by logic. In fact, most of us make decisions based on gut feelings and rationalise them accordingly. I’m not suggesting that we are all victims of our emotional needs like immature children, but that the interplay between emotions and rational thought are the key to our behaviours. More importantly, it’s our ability to ‘feel’ that not only separates us from machine intelligence in a physical sense, but makes our ‘thinking’ inherently different. It’s also what makes us sentient.

Many people believe that emotion can be programmed into computers to aid them in decision-making as well. I find this an interesting idea and I’ve explored it in my own fiction. If a computer reacted with horror every time we were to switch it off would that make it sentient? Actually, I don’t think it would, but it would certainly be interesting to see how people reacted. My point is that artificially giving AI emotions won’t make them sentient.

I believe feelings came first in the evolution of sentience, not logic, and I still don’t believe that there’s anything analogous to ‘software’ in the brain, except language and that’s specific to humans. We are the only species that ‘downloads’ a language to the next generation, but that doesn’t mean our brains run on algorithms.

So evidence in the animal kingdom, not just humans, suggests that sentience, and therefore consciousness, evolved from emotions, whereas computers have evolved from pure logic. Computers are still best at what we do worst, which is manipulate huge amounts of data. Which is why the human genome project actually took less time than predicted. And we still do best at what they do worst, which is make decisions based on a host of parameters including emotional factors as well as experiential ones.

Why we shouldn’t take religion too seriously

2011-04-03T11:16:00.006+10:00

This arose from an article in last week’s New Scientist titled Thou shalt believe – or not by Jonathan Lanman (26 March 2011, pp.38-9). Lanman lectures at the school of anthropology and Keble College, Oxford University. He’s giving a talk, entitled Atheism Explained, at St. Mary’s University College Twickenham, UK on 5 April (a couple of days away).

Lanman spent 2008 studying atheism in US, UK, Denmark and online. As a result of his research, Lanman made a distinction between what he calls ‘non-theism’ and ‘strong atheism’, whereby non-theists are effectively agnostic – they don’t really care – and strong atheists vigorously oppose religious belief on moral and political grounds. He found a curious correlation. In countries that are strongly and overtly religious, strong atheism is more predominate, whereas in countries like Sweden, where religion is not so strong, the converse is true. In his own words, there is a negative correlation between strong atheism and non-theism.

I live in Australia where there is a pervasive I-don’t-care attitude towards religious belief, so we are closer to the Swedish model than the American one. In fact, when I visited America a decade ago (both pre and post 911, as well as during) I would say the biggest difference between Australian and American culture is in religion. I spent a lot of time in Texas, where it was almost a culture shock. My experience with the blogosphere has only reinforced that impression.

What is obvious is that where religion takes on a political face then opposition is inevitable. In Australian politics there are all sorts of religious flavours amongst individual politicians, but they rarely become an issue. This wasn’t the case a couple of generations ago when there was a Protestant/Catholic divide through the entire country that started with education and permeated every community, including the small country town where I grew up. That all changed in the 1960s, and, with few exceptions, no one who remembers it wants to revisit it.

Now there is a greater mix of religions than ever, and the philosophy is largely live and let live. Even as a child, religion was seen as something deeply personal and intimate that wasn’t invaded or even shared, and that’s an attitude I’ve kept to this day. Religion, to me, is part of someone’s inner world, totally subjective, influenced by culture, yes, but ultimately personal and unique to the individual.

If people can’t joke about religion in the same way we joke about nationality, or if they feel the need to defend their beliefs in blood, then they are taking their religion too seriously. Even some atheists, in my view, take religion too seriously, when they fail, or refuse, to distinguish between secular adherents to a faith and fundamentalists. If we want to live together, then we can’t take religion too seriously no matter what one’s personal beliefs may be.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s story

2011-03-20T14:05:00.006+11:00

I’ve just completed reading Aayan Hirsi Ali’s autobiography, Infidel. It’s the latest book in my book club (refer my blog roll) following on from another autobiography from another refugee, Anh Do, The Happiest Refugee. Do is a stand-up comic and television celebrity in Australia, and his brother, Khoa, is a successful filmmaker and former Young Australian of the Year. They are ‘boat people’, who are stigmatised in this country, and Khoa was actually dangled over the side of a boat by pirates when he was only 2 years old. It has to be said that our major political parties show a clear deficit in moral and political courage on the issue of ‘boat people’.

But I’ve detoured before I’ve even got started. We, in the West, live in a bubble, though, occasionally, through television, films and books, like Hirsi Ali’s, we get a glimpse into another world that the rest of us would call hell. And this hell is not transient or momentary for these people, but relentless, unforgiving and even normal for those who grow up in it. Hirsi Ali is one of the few people who has straddled these 2 worlds, and that makes her book all the more compelling. As Aminata Forna wrote in the Evening Standard: “Hirsi Ali has invited [us] to walk a mile in her shoes. Most wouldn’t last a hundred yards.”

There are many issues touched on in her story, none perhaps more pertinent than identity, but I won’t start there. I will start with the apparent historical gap between some Islamic cultures and the modern Western world – a clash of civilisations, if you like. I remember the years between my teens and mid twenties were the most transformational, conflicted and depressing in my life. Like many of my generation, it was a time when I rejected my parents’ and society’s values, not to mention the religion I had grown up with, and sought a world view that I could call my own. To some extent that’s exactly what Hirsi Ali has done, only she had to jump from a culture still imbued with 6th Century social mores into the birth of the second millennium. I can fully understand what drove her, but, looking back on my own coming-of-age experience, I doubt that I could emulate her. What she achieved is a monumental leap compared to my short jump. For me, it was generational; for her, it was trans-cultural and it spanned millennia.

Much of her book deals with the treatment of women in traditional Muslim societies, treated, in her own words, as ‘minors’ not adults. One should not forget that the emancipation of women from vassals to independent, autonomous beings with their own rights has been a very lengthy process in Western society. Most societies have been historically patriarchal in both the East and West. The perception and treatment of women as second-class citizens is not confined to Islamic societies by any means. But it does appear that many Islamic cultures have the most barbaric treatment of women (enshrined in law in many countries) and are the most tardy in giving women the social status they deserve, which is equality to men.

This attitude, supported by quotes from the Qur’an, demonstrates how dangerous and misguided it is to take one’s morals from God. Because a morality supposedly given by God, in scripture, can’t be challenged and takes no account of individual circumstances, evolution of cultural norms, progress in scientific knowledge or empathy for ‘others’. And this last criterion is possibly the most important, because it is the ability to treat people outside one’s religion as ‘others’ that permits bigotry, violence and genocide, all in the name of one’s God. This is so apparent in the violence that swept through Hirsi Ali’s home country, Somalia, and became the second most salient factor, I believe, in the rejection of her own religion.

When I first saw Hirsi Ali interviewed on TV (7.30 Report, ABC Australia) after she left Holland for America, she made the statement that Islam could never coexist in a Western secular society, logically based on her experience in Holland. In an interview I heard on the radio last year (also in Australia, with Margaret Throsby) I felt she had softened her stance and she argued that Muslims could live in a secular society. She was careful to make a distinction between Islam as a religion and Islam as political ideology (refer my post Dec. 2010). My personal experience of Muslims is that they are as varied in their political views as any other group of people. I know of liberal Muslims possibly because I hold liberal views, so that should not be surprising. But it gives me a different view to those who think that all Muslims are fundamental Islamists, or potentially so. One of Hirsi Ali’s messages is that an over-dependence on tolerance in a secular society can cause its own backlash.

I’ve written elsewhere (The problems with fundamentalism, Jan. 2008) that the limits of tolerance is intolerance of others. In other words, I am intolerant of intolerance. When Muslims, or anyone else of political persuasion, start to preach intolerance towards any other group then the opposition towards that intolerance in a healthy secular society can be immense. Australia has experienced that on a national level about a decade ago and it was ugly. Xenophobia is very easily aroused in almost any nation it would appear. People who preach hatred and bigotry, no matter who they are or which group they represent, and no matter how cleverly they disguise their rhetoric, should all be treated the same – they should be refuted and denounced in the loudest voices at the highest levels of authority.

But, as the events in Somalia demonstrate, it’s not just religion that can inflame or justify violence. Clan differences are enough to justify the most heinous crimes. All through her story, Hirsi Ali describes how everyone could find fault with every other group they came in contact with. Muslims and Africans are not alone in this prejudicial bias – I grew up with it in a Western secular society. The more insular a society is, the more bigoted they are. This is why I agree with Hirsi Ali that children should not be segregated in their education. The more children mix with other ethnicities the less insular they become in their attitudes towards other groups.

In a post I wrote on Evil (one of my earliest posts, Oct. 2007) I expounded on the idea that most of the atrocities committed in the last century, and every century beforehand for that matter, were based on some form of tribalism or an ingroup-outgroup mentality. This tribalism could be familial, religious, political, ethnic or national, but it revolves around the idea of identity. We underestimate how powerful this is because it’s almost subconscious.

Hirsi Ali’s book is almost entirely about identity and her struggle to overcome its strangulation on her life. All the role models in her young life, both female and male, were imbued with the importance and necessity of identity with her clan and her religion. In her life, religion and culture were inseparable. Her grandmother made her learn her ancestry off by heart because it might one day save her life, and, in fact, it did when she was only 20 years old and a man held a knife to her throat. By reciting her ancestry back far enough she was able to claim she was his ‘sister’ and he let her go.

People often mistakenly believe that their conscience is God whispering in their mind’s ear, when, in fact, it’s almost entirely socially and culturally formed, especially when we are children. It’s only as adults that we begin to question the norms we are brought up with, and then only when we are exposed to other social norms. A way that societies tend to overcome this ‘questioning’ is to imbue a sense of their cultural ‘superiority’ over everyone else’s. This comes across so strongly in Hirsi Ali’s book, and I recognised it as part of my own upbringing. To me, it’s a sign of immaturity that someone can only justify their own position, morally, intellectually or socially, by ridiculing everyone else’s.

One of the strongest influences on Hirsi Ali and her sister, Haweya, were the Western novels that they were exposed to: not just literary standards but pulp fiction romances. It reinforced my view that storytelling, and art in general, is the best medium to transmit ideas. It was this exposure to novels that led them to believe that there were other cultures and other ways of living, especially for women. Stories are what-ifs – they put us in someone else’s shoes and challenge our view of the world. It’s not surprising that some of the world’s greatest writers have been persecuted for their subversiveness.

But this leads to the almost heretical notion that only a society open to new ideas can progress out of ossification. If there is one singular message from Hirsi Ali’s book it’s that fundamentalism (of any stripe) does not only have to be challenged, but overcome, if societies want to move forward and evolve for the betterment for everyone, and not just for those who want to hold the reigns of power.

The real gulf that Hirsi Ali jumped was not religious but educational. I’ve argued many times that ignorance is the greatest enemy facing the 21st Century. Religious fundamentalism is arguably the greatest obstacle to genuine knowledge and rational thinking in the world today. Somewhat surprisingly, this is just as relevant to America as it is to any Islamic nation. The major difference between Islamic fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism is geography, not beliefs.

Hirsi Ali is foremost a feminist. She once argued that Islam and the West can’t coexist, but she has since softened that stance. Perhaps, like me, she has met Muslim feminists who have found a way to reconcile their religious beliefs with their sense of independence and self-belief. Arguably, self-belief is the most important attribute a human being can foster. The corollary to this is that any culture that erodes that self-belief is toxic to itself.

I’ve written elsewhere (care of Don Cupitt, Sep. 09) that the only religion worth having is the one that you have hammered out for yourself. You don’t have to be an atheist to agree with Hirsi Ali’s basic philosophy of female emancipation, but you may have to challenge some aspects of scripture, both Christian and Islamic, if you want to live what you believe, which is what she has done.

A discussion on Wiki-Leaks without Assange

2011-03-02T19:58:00.003+11:00

This is, in effect, a follow-up from a previous post on Wiki-Leaks (The forgotten man, last month), though from a different point of view. It’s a truly international discussion with 3 participants from the US, one from Iceland and one from Berlin, chaired in front of a live TV audience in Australia. This discussion is more diverse than the 4 Corners programme I referenced in my earlier post, and, arguably, more balanced as well.

When Assange was first criticised for endangering lives, I admit I considered that to be irresponsible, but events have revealed, whether by good luck or good management, that those concerns have not materialised. This aspect of the debate on Wiki-Leaks is discussed at length in this programme. The other thing that is brought out in this discussion is that you really can’t preach transparency if you can’t practice it.

But I think the most significant aspect of all this is how the internet has changed the way information can be delivered. Closing down Wiki-Leaks will be like trying to put the genie back into the bottle. Whatever happens to Assange, the world’s media will never be the same again. Wiki-Leaks has changed the rules and I don’t think, short of totalitarian measures, they can be reversed.

Metaphysics in mathematics revisited

2011-02-19T15:55:00.007+11:00

I recently wrote a post on E. Brian Davies’ book, Why Beliefs Matter (Metaphysics in mathematics, science and religion). Davies is Professor of Mathematics at Kings College London, so his knowledge and erudition of the subject far outweighs mine. I feel that that imbalance was not represented in that post, so this is an attempt to redress it.

Davies’ book is structured in 5 parts: The Scientific Revolution; The Human Condition; The Nature of Mathematics; Sense and Nonsense; and Science and Religion.

Davies addresses mathematical Platonism in 2 parts: The Human Condition and The Nature of Mathematics. Due to the nature of my essay, I believe I gave him short thrift and, for the sake of fairness as well as completeness, I seek to make amends.

For a start, Davies discusses Platonism in its wider context, not just in relation to mathematics, but in its influence on Western thought, regarding religion as well as science. Many people have argued that Aquinas and Augustine were both influenced by Platonism, to the extent that Earth is an imperfect replica of Heaven where the perfect ‘forms’ of all earthly entities exist. There is a parallel view expressed in some interpretations of Taoism as well. Note that one doesn’t need a belief in ‘God’ to embrace this viewpoint, but one can see how it readily marries into such a belief.

Davies discusses at length Popper’s 3 worlds: World 1 (physical); World 2 (mental); and World 3 (cultural). Under a subsection: 2.7 Plato, Popper, Penrose; he compares Popper’s 3 worlds with Penrose’s that I expounded on in my previous post: Physical, Mental and Mathematical (Platonic). In fact, Davies concludes that they are the same. I’m sure Penrose would disagree and so do I.

There is a relationship between mathematics and the physical world that doesn’t exist with other cultural ideas. Even non-Platonists, like Paul Davies and Albert Einstein, acknowledge that the correlation between mathematical relationships and physical phenomena (like relativity and quantum mechanics for example) is a unique manifestation of human intelligence. In his book, The Mind of God (a reference to Hawking’s famous phrase) Paul Davies devotes an entire chapter to this topic, entitled The Mathematical Secret.

On the other hand, Brian Davies produces compelling arguments that mathematics is cultural rather than Platonic. He compares it to other cultural entities like language, music, art and stories, all of which are products of the human brain. In one of his terse statements in bold type he says: Mathematics is an aspect of human culture, just as are language, law, music and architecture.

But, as I’ve argued in one of my previous posts (Is mathematics evidence of a transcendental realm? Jan. 08) there is a fundamental difference. No one else could have written Hamlet other than Shakespeare and no one else could have composed Beethoven’s Ninth except Beethoven, but someone else could have discovered Schrodinger’s equations and someone else could have discovered Riemann’s geometry. These mathematical entities have an objectivity that great works of art don’t.

Likewise I think that comparisons with language are misleading. No one has mathematics as their first language, unless you want to include computers. Deaf people can have sign language as a first language, but mathematics is not a communicative language in the same way that first languages are. In fact, one might argue that mathematics is an explanatory language or an analytic language; it has no nouns or verbs, subjects and predicates. Instead it has equalities and inequalities, propositions, proofs, conjectures and deductions. Even music is more communicative than mathematics which leads to another analogy.

Is music the score on the page, the sounds that you hear or the emotion it creates in your head? Music only becomes manifest when it is played on a musical instrument, even if that musical instrument is the human voice. Likewise mathematics only becomes manifest when it is expressed by a human intelligence (and possibly a machine intelligence). But the difference is that mathematical concepts have been expressed by various cultures independently of each other. Mathematical concepts like quadratic equations, Pascal’s triangle and logarithms have been discovered (or invented) more than once.

Davies makes the point that invention is a necessary part of mathematics, and I wouldn’t disagree. But he goes further, and argues that the distinction between invention and discovery cannot be readily drawn, by comparing mathematics to material inventions. He argues that a stone axe may have been the result of an accidental discovery, and Galileo’s pendulum clock was as much a discovery as an invention. I would argue that Galileo discovered a principle of nature that he could exploit and people might say the same about mathematical discoveries, so the analogy can actually work against Davies’ own argument if one rewords it slightly.

In my previous post, I did Davies an injustice when I referred to his conclusion about mathematical Platonism being irrelevant. In section 3.2 The Irrelevance of Platonism, Davies explains how some constructivist theories (like Jordan algebras) don’t fit into Platonism by definition. I don’t know anything about Jordan algebras so I can’t comment. But the constructivist position, as best I understand it, says that the only mathematics we know is what we’ve created. A Platonist will argue that the one zillionth integer of pi exists even if no one has calculated it yet, whereas the constructivist says we’ll only know what it is when we have calculated it. Both positions are correct, but when it comes to proofs, there is merit in taking the constructivist approach, because a proof is only true when someone has taken the effort to prove it. This is why, if I haven’t misconstrued him, Davies calls himself a mathematical ‘pluralist’ because he can adjust his position from a classicalist to a formalist to a constructivist depending on the mathematics he’s examining. A classicalist would be a Platonist if I understand him correctly.

I still haven’t done Davies justice, which is why I recommend you read his book. Even though I disagree with him on certain philosophical points, his knowledge is far greater than mine, and the book, in its entirety, is a worthy contribution to philosophical discourse on mathematics, science and religion, and there aren’t a lot of books that merit that combined accolade.

The forgotten man

2011-02-19T11:22:00.007+11:00

This is excellent journalism, whatever your view is on the story. It makes me angry, because the person being punished is allegedly the person who brought us the famous video footage showing ‘collateral damage’ in Iraq, which Assange called ‘collateral murder’. Is he any different to the guy who attempted to stop the tanks going to Tiananmen Square? In both cases they have effectively disappeared and become enemies of the state in their own countries.

As the title of the programme says, Private Bradley Manning has become ‘the forgotten man’, as all news coverage focuses on the indictment of Julian Assange for an alleged double rape in Sweden.

I won’t make any character or personality judgements concerning Assange because they are irrelevant to the issue. Assange may be narcissistic and he may be a delusional crusader, but it doesn’t change the case against him or the arguments concerning his journalistic rights to make public, information that may embarrass heads of government. Because, as far as I can tell, that’s exactly what he’s done.

When this first came to a head, i.e. information was leaked, our (Australian) government toed the American party line and told us that what Assange had done was dangerous, jeopardised national security and put lives at risk in the field of combat. But, after examining the evidence, the Attorney General’s Department issued a statement saying Assange had done nothing illegal under Australian law.

It should be stated that, in Australia, Assange has a lot of support, especially from journalists. All journalists know that if they had obtained the same information they would have done the same thing. Whistleblowers are always persecuted by the body that they’ve betrayed, because you can’t whistleblow without betraying the hand that feeds you. Democracies like to think that they are fairer than other countries but if you whistleblow on your government, then, even in a democracy, you won’t escape the full force of the law they can bring to bear upon you. This is true of Australia just as it is of America.

It is evident from the 4 Corners programme (refer link) that they are attempting to break Manning through torture (solitary confinement 23 hrs a day is torture) so that he will turn evidence against Assange for espionage.

Assange’s barrister, Geoffrey Robertson QC, argues that Assange won’t get a fair trial in Sweden and it will be a closed court. Assange believes that the case in Sweden is really a ploy to get him to America so they can put him on trial for espionage. Robertson (another ex-pat Aussie) is a well known human rights lawyer and famously took on Salman Rushdie’s case when he was issued a death sentence fatwah by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989.

What’s most alarming in the entire programme, is footage from FOX News showing right wing political commentators recommending, on American national television, that Assange should be ‘taken out’ by CIA operatives.

The solution to unwanted news in America is apparently to shoot the messenger, literally.

Metaphysics in mathematics, science and religion

2011-02-06T11:34:00.029+11:00

Why Beliefs Matter; Reflections on the Nature of Science, by E. Brian Davies, is one of the best books I’ve read on science, philosophy and religion, and I’ve read lots of books in all those fields. Davies is Professor of Mathematics at King’s College London and a fellow of the Royal Society. He gives one of the best arguments I’ve encountered against mathematical Platonism, which is high praise indeed from a self-confessed mathematical Platonist like myself.

There is much in this book to be commended, not least his conscientiousness in separating philosophy from science and of pointing out that ‘beliefs’ like the anthropic principle are, in fact, metaphysical considerations rather than truly scientific (it can’t be tested). He outlines the significant difference between the philosophical and scientific ramifications of quantum mechanics, which I’ve expressed myself in a post on Science, Philosophy, Religion (November 2009).

More than anything else, he reinforces the intellectual reality that philosophy often deals with questions for which there may well be no definite answers. And whilst science can provide answers in the form of empirical evidence as well as mathematically based laws to explicate them, the bigger questions, concerning our existence, the origin of the universe and a potential higher purpose, remain elusive.

The scope of Davies' book includes the history of science, the mind-body problem, induction, determinism, artificial intelligence and the modern day ‘warfare’ between science and religion, especially in America (this is not an exhaustive list). I’ll only cover 2 apparently unrelated topics: mathematical Platonism and religion and science.

Davies has no particular barrow to push, and is candid in his disagreement with his fellows on all topics, expressing bewilderment, bordering on amusement, at the hostility one often encounters concerning questions for which there are no definitive answers. One such topic is the philosophy of mathematics and its various ‘schools of thought’ that borders on religious zeal. He calls himself a mathematical ‘pluralist’ because he can see merit in alternative views. As far as mathematical Platonism goes, he expresses appreciation of its appeal to both mathematicians and physicists without necessarily agreeing with them. In his conclusion he calls it ‘irrelevant’, but only because it doesn’t really provide any theoretical benefit. In other words, being a Platonist won’t give you an advantage in understanding mathematics – it’s purely a philosophical position, with no real practical ramifications in executing formulae or even searching for new ones.

He points out that mathematical Platonism has quasi-religious overtones, which I don’t shy away from. I’ve written at least 3 posts previously on this topic, so I won’t labour the point here. It’s a very good example of a philosophical position based more on a ‘feeling’ or ‘sense’ of abstract reality, which its proponents (like myself) then support with rational argument. One of Davies’ strongest arguments is that we are the only species (that we know of) in the entire universe who can not only appreciate mathematics but make it manifest. Without an intelligence like ours, it remains completely hidden which makes its apparent essentiality questionable.

I have 2 not-unrelated responses to this argument. Firstly, all the laws of the universe, that we have discovered, from quantum mechanics to relativity to thermodynamics to the DNA code, would remain complete secrets in the exact same way, yet the universe, that we observe and exist within, is completely dependent on all these things. Secondly, mathematics is the only way we can quantify and interpret these very same laws, which leads me to contend that the mathematics is just as essential as the laws themselves. DNA is a 4 letter code, by the way, that is completely analogous to computer code, so life entails mathematics at a fundamental level.

The alternative view to this is that mathematics is an intellectual construct, purely of human origin, that has allowed us to unravel some of nature’s deepest mysteries. Roger Penrose, whose Platonist philosophy is discussed in some detail by Davies, manages to incorporate both views in a non-contradictory though paradoxical manner, which is what sold me on mathematical Platonism eventually (see below). In other words, I am a convert who came to this position via Pythagoras. In my early years of studying science, I saw mathematics as a tool that physics had seconded, but even then I struggled to reconcile natural laws with their apparent and deeply enigmatic mathematical precision (more on this below).

Davies postulates a hypothetical that there may be a species somewhere in the universe who can fathom nature’s secrets heuristically without mathematics. I can remember, when I was much younger, contemplating the same scenario and even entertained writing a sci-fi story that incorporated such a species. However, I gave up on the enterprise, when I realised that, philosophically, my world-view had changed. Physics, especially quantum mechanics, is so fundamentally dependent on mathematics for its interpretation, that any other methodology appears impossible, which is not to say that it is. Whilst quantum mechanics remains a conundrum in terms of envisaging the ultimate reality of the universe (or universes), it remains, mathematically, a completely consistent and eminently reliable metatheory.

Of course Davies’ discussion on this topic is much more comprehensive than what I’ve presented. I’ve just re-read my post on Schrodinger’s book, What is Life? and his quote concerning mathematics, “…whose truth is not only unassailable, but is obviously there forever; the relations held and will hold irrespective of our inquiry into them. A mathematical truth is timeless, it does not come into being when we discover it.” Davies also quotes Einstein, who wasn’t a Platonist: “How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality.” This neatly encapsulates the paradoxical nature of mathematics that I described above.

Davies disputes the ‘independence’ claim because geometry and arithmetic didn’t evolve independently of the physical world that we’ve investigated since we first learnt to count. He also argues that not all ‘objects of reality’ can be defined or described mathematically, but he’s talking about ‘...the contents of our conversations and the products of our culture, in which mathematics is completely useless.’ No one would argue with that, but it’s obvious that Einstein’s ‘objects of reality’ are physical objects rather than cultural artefacts and mental constructs specific to the human race.

I disagree with Davies on his first point too, because mathematical investigations, at least since Newton, have evolved independently of the physical world only to be married back into it when our science has caught up with our mathematics. The most famous examples would include Riemann’s geometry being married to Einstein’s general theory of relativity and complex algebra being essential to Schrodinger’s equations for quantum mechanics. It’s as if mathematical discoveries precede physical discoveries, and, in fact, necessarily so.

There is a sense that mathematics entails a world (at least in the abstract realm) greater than our world, with multiple dimensions that can extend to infinity, of which string theory represents a potential multitude. In other words, there is more mathematics than we need to describe our physical theories, which is why Max Tegmark argues that all mathematically possible universes could exist in a multiverse. If one takes this at face value, then the mathematical world extends beyond the physical world (as Penrose points out) in the same way that the physical world extends beyond our mental world. Hence the paradox that the mind is an effective subset of the physical world, and even if the physical world is not a subset of the mathematical world (as per Tegmark), it appears, at least, to follow mathematical rules, yet mathematics is a product of the human mind. Penrose represents this relationship between the physical, mental and mathematical (Platonic) worlds as a closed circuit, one being a subset of the one before, just as I’ve described them above. Davies also addresses this aspect of Penrose’s philosophical discourse in his book, but I’ll leave that for the reader to pursue if they’re interested.

In a section called The Human Condition, Davies introduces the subject of ‘induction’ by referring to Aristotle’s ‘four types’ of causes that he recorded and discussed in the 4th Century BC. He did this in reference to a clay pot. The ‘material cause’ is the materials that the pot is made from which is the clay. The ‘formal cause’ is its shape or form which is a pot or vase. The ‘efficient cause’ is the process involving the Potter who made it. And the ‘final cause’ is the whole reason it was made which is to store something.

I have to admit I’d never come across this before, despite having read and studied Aristotle at Uni, and Davies makes particular reference to the 4th ‘final cause’ which has disappeared in the philosophy of science, and is arguably the principal source of friction that lies between science and religion. Davies rightly points out that since Descartes, and even more so after Darwin, final cause has no place in science. This is a particular issue of contention I've had with many fundamentalists, like William Lane Craig (refer The God Hypothesis, December 2008). Even if there is a final cause for the universe, science can't tell us anything about it – it’s purely a metaphysical question.

Aristotle’s final cause refers to a human artefact, and it’s not difficult to see how God became an anthropomorphic equivalent who created the universe, life and us, which means we are the final cause. I really don’t have a problem with this, purely from a philosophical viewpoint, because it makes God dependent on us rather than the other way round. If we are the final cause then, without us, there is no reason for God to exist. Few people appreciate the reverse logic that this argument entails: it doesn’t make sense for God to exist without a purpose, and the only purpose we can come up with is us.

In a recent post (Cycles of Time, last month) I gave considerable space to the exposition of entropy, aka the 2nd law of thermodynamics. A corollary to the 2nd law is that the universe is not teleological and by inclusion neither is evolution. I would suggest that this, and not the Book of Genesis, is the main philosophical difference between science and religion. Religion infers that the universe has a purpose and science infers that it doesn’t.

Davies expounds at length on the indeterminism inherent in chaos theory as well as quantum mechanics. Another Davies (Paul Davies), when he still resided in Australia, wrote an excellent book on chaos theory called The Cosmic Blueprint. The significance of chaos theory, and its particular relationship with entropy, is that very small changes can lead to huge differential consequences. In a not-so-recent issue of New Scientist (16 October 2010) their feature article described how chaos theory appears to rule evolution. In particular, evolution is fractal in the same way that branching blood vessels are in the human body. Fractal relationships appear everywhere in nature; the best example being a coastline (Davies’ example in Cosmic Blueprint). The Mandelbrot set is fractal and so are Pollock’s paintings (like Blue Poles hanging in the Sydney Art Gallery). Fractals demonstrate the same relationship at all scales, which means, in evolutionary terms, that speciation branches appear in similar ratios at all levels. The article explains how, over 65 million years, major climatic events, major tectonic events and major evolutionary events all follow the same ‘chaotic’ patterns, though ‘...connections between them are hard to discern.’

Brian Davies, like Schrodinger (What is Life?), explains how radioactivity is statistically highly predictable whilst individualistically it is impossible to predict. In fact, Schrodinger begins his book with an exposition on how almost everything in physics is statistically determined from magnetism to the photo-electric effect to the behaviour of gases and fluids. It’s only at a macro scale that physics appears predictable. The point is that between chaos theory, the 2nd law of thermodynamics and quantum phenomena, the universe is a lottery. As Stephen Jay Gould famously said, if you were to rerun the universe you’d get a completely different result. This flies in the face of all religious philosophy.

The last 60 pages of Davies’ 240 page book (so 25%) is devoted to a section titled, Science and Religion. He starts off with a philosophical aphorism: “We must learn to live with the fact that some disagreements cannot be resolved.” Throughout his book he places terse statements in bold type like the following:

Christian theologians ignore the fundamentalist challenge at their own peril. It is the greatest threat to rational thought and toleration at the present time.

To outsiders like myself, America appears to be one of the most polarised societies in the Western world: politically, intellectually and religiously. The all-consuming debate between evolutionary science and fundamentalist religion really doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, certainly not to the same degree of hostility and, dare-I-say-it, desperation. It’s only taken on a global perspective because American culture is so pervasive, especially on the internet.

Davies points out that humanist philosophy goes back even further than Christianity, citing Socrates, Aristotle, Plato and even Confucius. Confucius is the earliest known philosopher (500 BC) to evoke a fundamentally empathetic approach to ethics: ‘Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself.’ He acknowledged the importance of trust between rulers and their subjects, arguing that trust was the last commodity a ruler could afford to lose. (Someone should point this out to Egypt’s Mubarak.) Davies argues that Mill's utilitarian philosophy has probably been the biggest influence on Western democracy, because it’s inherent in civil rights and feminist movements witnessed in the last half of the last century. Even though no one invoked Mill as the model to follow; utilitarianism is concerned with the greatest benefit to the greatest number.

At the end of his book, Davies discusses the religious views of famous scientific figures, both historical and contemporary. He is not afraid to criticise Dawkins’ The God Delusion, even though he obviously is not completely at odds with Dawkins’ philosophy. Dawkins polarises people almost like no one I know, yet he’s neither a villain nor a hero. He has a demeanour not unlike an Australian politician: provocative, rhetorically aggressive, disputatious, uncompromising and unapologetic. On the blogosphere, if you criticise Dawkins, as I have done a few times, you suddenly become a Christian apologist to his supporters. It’s a sign of insecurity that people can’t deal with criticism without adopting an extreme position. Davies, like myself, takes Dawkins to task for treating all religions and all religious followers the same. It doesn’t help his cause to alienate people who would otherwise support him. ‘The worst feature of Dawkins’ book is its failure to get to grips with the variety of religious belief. Dawkins’ real enemy is fundamentalism, but he attacks religion indiscriminately.’ I agree completely.

Davies ends with a poem by William Cecil Dampier, from which I’ll quote the last verse:

And Nature smiles – still unconfessed
The secret thought she thinks –
Inscrutable she guards unguessed
The Riddle of the Sphinx

Davies follows with these words:

The riddle of our place in the universe may never be solved, and I am content that this should be so. The struggle to divine the meaning of life is a part of being human.

Science can’t solve this riddle either; in fact it tells us that our existence is a completely arbitrary phenomenon built upon an accumulation of arbitrary phenomena. The end result (so far) is mind and mind seeks its own purpose because that’s its nature.

Addendum: I need to point out, in all fairness to Davies, that his discourse on mathematics is far more erudite than mine, which is not apparent from my presentation above.

Be afraid, be very afraid

2011-01-29T16:41:00.007+11:00

This video was attached to the following email:

Drone Controllers

For non-pilots, these controllers are in Nevada and are each flying a drone thousands of miles away in the combat zone in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Their left hand is on the throttle controlling the drone's engine.

Note all the buttons which perform various tasks without removing the hand from the throttle.

The right hand is flying the plane.

Welcome to the new world order. This is modern warfare.

Today's headline: 'Missiles fired from Nevada controlled drone aircraft kill Taliban leader'

Watch how it's done. Turn the speakers on & watch in full screen.

ALSO NOTICE THE COMFORT FROM WHICH THE "FLYERS" OPERATE.

I don’t know if this is a simulation or the real thing, but I commented on the deployment of military drones in a post I wrote last November, titled: We have to win the war against stupidity first.

If it’s the real thing then it makes me and anyone else who watches it something of a voyeur. I refuse to watch videoed assassinations because it feeds their purpose, but is this any different?

There are a lot of pertinent issues here, not least the implication that this is how wars will be fought in the future, but let’s start with the most obvious one: how is this perceived by non-Western eyes?

Let’s reverse the scenario: how would people in the West respond if this technology was adopted by Iran or North Korea or even Russia or China? At present I believe that only America and Israel actually deploy it. Is this a case of might is right? Those with the best military technology are axiomatically those with the moral prerogative to use it. Because that’s how it appears.

We routinely accuse suicide bombing as an act of cowardice, but is this perceived as any less cowardly by those who are on the receiving end?

Someone once pointed out, in reference to the deployment of U-boats by the Germans in WWI (but it actually applies to all military conflicts), if one’s opponent has a technological advantage then one’s only chance of success is to break the rules – in other words, play dirty. This is why suicide bombing is the weapon of choice by people who believe they are being invaded by a technologically superior force, especially when the superiority is indisputably dominant.

And there are other issues: the scenario is reminiscent of Milgram’s experiment, which demonstrated how easy it is to inflict mortal injuries on a complete stranger who is sight unseen. The couple in the video are so relaxed and detached from the life-and-death consequences of their actions that it makes me wonder if it’s not just a training session.

In the 1960s I can still remember reading a MAD magazine that satirically showed 2 chess opponents facing each other off with ballistic missile launchers instead of chess pieces and consequently destroying each other, the chess board and the room in which they were playing. It was a commentary on the cold war mentality of the time and the threat of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which could render the planet virtually uninhabitable without any army taking the field.

We no longer see that as a threat, but the idea of waging war without committing ground troops (which is theoretically the same scenario we have in the video) has strong political appeal despite the obvious moral issues that it raises.

There are 2 fundamental issues, one of which was addressed in my post last November. Firstly, the entire operation is dependent on ‘intelligence’ that the ‘target’ is the enemy. In Vietnam, the CIA used ‘assassination squads’ made up of local tribesmen to target specific enemies. Barry Petersen, an Australian seconded to the CIA in that conflict, fell out with his superiors when he refused to use Montagnard tribesmen, loyal to him, as assassination squads, despite their commendable military record (Frank Walker, The Tiger Man of Vietnam). His reasoning was that they would be used to settle personal vendettas, creating distrust and secondary enmity that would not help win the war. In a tribal environment, like Afghanistan and Iraq, this type of abuse of ‘intelligence’ can also occur.

But it’s the psychological component of this type of warfare that makes it most unpalatable, at least, to me. Unfortunately, intervention by Western military units have shown extraordinary lack of cultural sensitivity in the countries they become involved in. This was true in Vietnam, in Iraq, and, I suspect, Afghanistan. Sometimes military leaders on the ground recognise this when their political leaders don’t. America, in particular, doesn’t have a good record in this area.

If ones insists on waging a war without face to face involvement then the consequences will be dire for everyone concerned. The psychological impact on the civilians of a country being attacked by robotic planes can not be overstated. It will foster hate, resentment and a stubborn will to reek vengeance. All you have to do is put yourself in their shoes.

Cycles of Time – a new theory of cosmology

2011-01-16T07:28:00.025+11:00

Cycles of Time, subtitled An Extraordinary New View of the Universe, is a very recent book by Roger Penrose; so recent that I pre-ordered it. Anyone who has followed my blog over the last few years will know that I’m a big fan of Penrose. Along with Paul Davies and Richard Feynman, I think he’s one of the top physics writers for laypeople ever. John Gribbin and James Gleick are also very good but not quite in the same league in my opinion. Davies, Feynman and Penrose all have different strengths so comparisons are not entirely fair. Feynman was the great communicator of some of the most esoteric theories in physics and if you want to grasp the physics, he’s the best. Davies is, in my view, the best philosophical writer and also covers the widest field: covering topics like astrophysics, the origin of life, cosmology, chaos theory, the nature of time and in The Goldilocks Enigma the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Penrose is actually a mathematician and made significant contributions to tessellation (tiles, map boundaries etc), but he’s also won at least one award in physics (1988 Wolf Prize jointly with Stephen Hawking) and his dissertations on the subject of consciousness reveal him as an erudite and compelling polymath.

My favourite book of his is The Emperor’s New Mind(1989) where he first tackled the subject of consciousness and challenged the prevailing view that Artificial Intelligence would herald in a new consciousness equivalent to or better than our own. But the book also covers almost the entire field of physics, argues cogently for a Platonic view of mathematics, explains the role of entropy on a cosmic scale, and devotes an entire chapter to the contingent nature of ‘truth’ in science. A must-read for anyone who thinks we know everything or are on the verge of knowing everything.

Now I’m the first to admit that I can quickly get out of my depth on this topic, and I can’t defend all the arguments that Penrose delivers, because, quite frankly, I don’t understand all the physics that lay behind them, but he’s one of the few people, with the relevant intellectual credentials, who can challenge the prevailing view on our universe’s origins and not lose credibility in the process.

For a start, reading this book makes one realise how little we do know and how speculative some of our theories are. Many commentators treat theoreticians who challenge string theory, and its latest incantation, M theory, as modern-day luddites, which is entirely unfair considering that string theory has no experimental or observational successes to its name. In other words, it’s a work of mathematical genius that may or may not reflect reality. Penrose’s CCC (Conformal Cyclic Cosmology) is also a mathematically consistent theory with no empirical evidence to either confirm or deny it. (Penrose does suggest avenues of enquiry to rectify that however.)

I first came across CCC in a book, On Space and Time (2008), a collection of ‘essays’ by people like Alain Connes, Shahn Majid, Andrew Taylor and of course Sir Roger Penrose. It also included John Polkinghorne and Michael Heller to provide a theological perspective. Personally, I think it would have been a better book if it stuck to the physics, because I don’t think metaphysical philosophies are any help in understanding cosmology, even though one could argue that mathematical Platonism is a metaphysical philosophy. I don’t mind that people want to reconcile scientific knowledge with their personal religious beliefs, but it’s misleading to imply that religion can inform science. And science can only inform religion if one conscientiously rejects all the mythology that religions seem to attract and generate. Putting that personal caveat aside, I can highly recommend this book, edited by Shahn Majid, for an overview of current thinking on cosmology and all the mysteries that this topic entails. This is true frontier-science and that perspective should never be lost in any such discussion.

Getting back to Penrose, his latest book tackles cosmology on the grandest scale from the universe’s Big Bang to its inevitable demise. Along the way he challenges the accepted wisdom of inflation amongst other prevailing ideas. He commences with a detailed description of entropy because it lies at the heart of the conundrum as he sees it. It’s entropy that makes the Big Bang so very special, and he spends almost half the book on expounding why.

Penrose describes specific aspects of time that I referred to in a post last year (The enigma we call time, July 2010). He gives the same example I did of an egg falling off a table demonstrating the inherent relationship between entropy (the 2nd law of thermodynamics) and the arrow of time we are all familiar with. He even cites a film running backwards showing an egg reconstituting itself and rising from the floor as an example of time reversal and a violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics acting simultaneously, just as I did. He also explains how time doesn’t exist without mass, because for photons (light rays), which are massless, time is always zero.

The prevailing view, according to almost everything I read on this subject via science magazines, is that we live in a multiverse where universes pop out like exploding bubbles, of which the Big Bang and its consequent ‘inflation’ was just one. In the Christmas/New Year edition of New Scientist (25 December 2010/1 January 2011, p.9) there is an article that claims we may have ‘evidence’ of ‘bruising’ in the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) resulting from ‘collisions’ with other universes. (The cosmic background radiation was predicted by the Big Bang and discovered purely by accident, which makes it the best evidence we have that our universe did indeed begin with the Big Bang.)

Some people also believe there is an asymmetry to the universe, implying there is an ‘axis’, which would be consistent with us being ‘joined’ to a ‘neighbouring universe’. But be careful with all these speculative scenarios fed by inexplicable and potentially paradigm-changing observations – they just confirm how little we really know.

The multiverse in conjunction with the ‘anthropic principle’ appears to be the most widely accepted explanation for the how, why and wherewithal of our hard-to-believe existence. Because we live in possibly the only universe of an infinite number then naturally it is the only universe we have knowledge of. If all the other universes, or almost all, are uninhabitable then no one will ever observe them. Ergo we observe this universe because it’s the one that produced life, of which we are the ultimate example.

Paul Davies, in The Goldilocks Enigma, spends a page and a half discussing both the virtues and pitfalls of the multiverse proposition. In particular, he discusses what he calls ‘...the extreme multiverse model proposed by Max Tegmark in which all possible worlds of any description really exist…’ In other words, whatever mathematics allows can exist. Quoting Davies again: ‘The advantage of the extreme multiverse is that it explains everything because it contains everything.’ However, as he also points out, because it explains everything it virtually explains nothing. As someone else, a theologian (I can’t remember who), once pointed out, in a discussion with Richard Dawkins, it’s no more helpful than a ‘God-of-the-gaps’ argument, which also explains everything and therefore ultimately explains nothing.

Stephen Hawking has also come out with a new book with Leonard Mlodinow titled The Grand Design, which I haven’t read but read reviews of, in particular Scientific American. Someone in America (Dale, who has a blog, Faith in Honest Doubt) put me onto a radio podcast by some guys under the name, Reasonable Doubts, who ran a 3-part series on Buddhism. At the end of one of their programmes they took Hawking to task for making what they saw as the absurd claim that the universe could be ‘something from nothing’.

I left a comment on their blog that this was not a new idea:

I'm not sure why you got in a tiz about Hawkings' position, though I haven't read his latest book, but I read an editorial comment in Scientific American under the heading, Hawking vs God. The idea that the universe could be 'something for nothing' is not new. Paul Davies discussed it over 20 years ago in God and the New Physics (1983) in a chapter titled: Is the universe a free lunch? He says almost exactly what Hawking is credited with saying (according to Scientific American): the universe (according to the 'free lunch' scenario) can account for itself, the only thing that is unaccountable are the laws of nature that apparently brought it about. Davies quotes physicist, Alan Guth: "It's often said that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The universe, however, is a free lunch."

Davies, Hawking and Penrose are not loonies – they are all highly respected physicists. We’ve learned from Einstein and Bohr that nature doesn’t obey rules according to our common sense view of the world, and, arguably, the universe’s origin is the greatest of all unsolved mysteries. Why is there something instead of nothing? And is there any reason to assume that there wasn’t nothing before we had something?

What, may you ask, has any of this to do with Penrose’s CCC theory? It’s just a detour to synoptically describe the intellectual landscape that his theory inhabits.

As I alluded to earlier, Penrose focuses on the biggest conundrum in the universe, being entropy, and how it makes the Big Bang so ultra-ultra special. Few discussions I’ve read on cosmology even mention the role of entropy, yet it literally drives the entire universe’s evolution – Paul Davies doesn’t shy away from it in God and the New Physics - but otherwise, only Penrose puts it centre stage from my reading experience.

Both Davies and Penrose discuss it in terms of ‘phase space’ which is really hard to explain and really hard to envisage without thinking about dimensional space. But effectively the equation for entropy is the logarithm of a volume of phase space multiplied by Boltzmann’s constant: S = k log(V). The use of a logarithm allows one to differentiate between entropies in a dynamic system. Significantly, one can only ‘take away’ entropy by adding it to somewhere else that’s external to the ‘closed’ environment one is studying. The most obvious example is a refrigerator that keeps cold by dumping heat externally to the ambient air in a room (the fridge loses entropy by adding it externally). As Penrose points out, the only reason the Sun’s energy is ‘useful’ to us is because it’s a ‘locally’ hot spot in an otherwise cold space. If it was in thermal equilibrium with its environment it would be useless to Earth. ‘Work’ can only be done when there is an imbalance in energy (usually temperature) between a system and its environment.

But more significantly, to decrease the entropy in a ‘closed’ system (like a refrigerator or Earth) there must be an increase in entropy externally. So ultimately the entire universe’s entropy must always be increasing. The corollary to that is that the universe must have started with a very small entropy indeed, and that is what makes the Big Bang so very special. In fact Penrose calculates the ultimate phase space volume of the entire universe as e raised to the power of 10 raised to the power of 123, (e¹⁰)¹²³, or, if it’s easier to comprehend, take 10 raised to the power of 10 (10 plus 10 noughts) raised to the power of 123 (10 x 123 noughts). So That’s 1 with 123 x 10 noughts after it. To reverse this calculation, it means that the precision of the big bang to create the universe that we live in is one part in 10 to the 10 to 123, (1^-10)^-123. So that’s a precision of 0.00…(123x10 0’s)1.

Penrose takes the universe in its current state and extrapolates it back to its near-origin at the so-called inflationary stage between 10^-35 and 10^-32 seconds from its birth. He also extrapolates it into its distant future, making some assumptions, and finding that the two states are ‘conformally’ equivalent. One of his key assumptions is that the universe is inherently hyperbolic so it has a small but positive cosmological constant. This means that the universe will always expand and never collapse back onto itself. Penrose provides good arguments, that I won’t attempt to replicate here, that a ‘Big Bounce’ scenario could not produce the necessary entropic precision that we appear to need for the Big Bang. In other words, it would be a violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

Penrose’s future universe assumes that the universe would consist entirely of black holes, many of which exist at the centre of all known galaxies. As these black holes become ‘hotter’ than the space that surrounds them, they will evaporate through Hawking radiation, so that eventually the entire universe will be radiation in the form of electromagnetic waves and gravitons. Significantly there will be virtually no mass therefore no clocks, and, from what I can understand, that’s what makes the universe conformal. It will have a ‘conformal boundary’. Penrose’s bold hypothesis is that this conformal boundary will become the conformal boundary that we envisage at the end of the inflationary period of our universe. Hence the death of one universe becomes the birth of the next.

What of the conundrum of the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Penrose spends considerable time discussing whether or not information is lost in black holes, which is a contentious point. Hawking once argued that information was lost, but now argues otherwise. Penrose thinks he should have stuck to his guns. Many scientists believe it’s a serious flaw in cosmological thinking to consider that information could be lost in black holes. Many scientists and philosophers argue that ‘everything’ is information, including us. There’s an argument that teleportation is theoretically achievable, even on a macro scale, because everything is just information at base. I’ve never been convinced of that premise, but leaving that aside, I think that information could be lost in black holes and so does Penrose. If this is true then all information regarding our universe will no longer exist after all the black holes evaporate, and, arguably, entropy will be reset, along with time. I’ve simplified this part of Penrose’s treatise, so I may not be doing him justice, but I know that the loss of information through multiple black hole evaporation is crucial to his theory.

When I first came across this thesis in On Space and Time I admit that it appealed to me philosophically. The idea that the end of the universe could be mathematically and physically equivalent to its beginning, and therefore could recycle endlessly is an intellectually attractive idea. Nature is full of beginnings and endings on all sorts of scales, why not on the cosmological scale? Infinity is the scariest concept there is if you think about it seriously – the alternative is oblivion, nihilism effectively. We have a life of finite length that we are only aware of while we are living it, yet we know that existence goes on before we arrive and after we’re gone. Why should it be any different for the universe itself?

I admit I don’t understand all the physics, and there still seems to be the issue of going from a cold universe of maximum entropy to a hot universe of minimum entropy, yet Penrose seems to believe that his ‘conformal boundary’ at both ends allows for that eventuality.

It's women who choose, not men

2011-01-08T09:57:00.013+11:00

Not so recently, I told someone I had a blog and it was called Journeyman Philosopher and they couldn’t stop themselves from laughing. I said, ‘Yes, it is a bit wankerish.’ Especially for an Aussie. But I’m not and never will be the real thing – a philosopher, that is – yet I practice philosophy, by attempting to emulate the credo I have inscribed at the top. The truth is that none of us, who value knowledge for its own sake, ever stop learning, and I’ve made it a lifetime passion. This blog does little more than pass on and share, and occasionally provide insights. But I also attempt to provoke thought, and if I should ever fail at that then I should call it quits.

So this post is one of those thought-provoking ones, because it challenges centuries of culturally accepted norms. I’m a single bloke who’s never married, so I’m hardly an expert on relationships, but this is a philosophical position on relationships garnered both from experience and observation.

Recently, I took part in a discussion on Eli’s blog, Rustbelt Philosophy, whereby I cited Nietzsche from Beyond Good and Evil that most people take a philosophical position on visceral grounds and then rationalise it with an argument. As I commented on Eli’s blog, I think this is especially true for religious arguments, but it has wider applications as well. The more we invest in a theory (for example) the less likely we are to reject it, even in the face of conflicting evidence.

I’m currently reading Roger Penrose’s latest book, Cycles of Time (to be the subject of a future post) and he readily acknowledges his personal prejudices in outlining his iconoclastic theory for the origins of our universe. The point I’m making, and its relevance to this post, is that I too have prejudices that shape my views on this topic.

In the last decade or 2 there has been a strong and popular resurgence in Jane Austen’s novels (through film and TV), which indicates they have strong universal themes. Jane Austen suffered from the prejudices of her day when women were not supposed to earn money, and the class structure, in which she lived, precluded intelligent women, like herself, from attaining fulfilling lives. Everything was dependent on them marrying the right bloke, or more clinically, marrying into the right family. I have to say that I’ve seen examples of that narrow-minded thinking even in my own lifetime. Austen had her novels published through a male intermediary and on her grave there is no mention that she was an author because it was considered a slight for a woman to admit she had a profession.

But the theme of every Austen novel that I’ve seen (I haven’t read any of them) is that the woman finds the right bloke despite the obstacles that her society puts in her way. And the right bloke is the one who demonstrates that he’s a genuine friend and not someone who is playing the social game according to the rules of their society. Austen was an iconoclast in her own right, and the fact that her stories still ring true today, indicates that she was revealing a universal truth.

Somewhere in my childhood I realised that women are in fact the stronger sex, and that whilst men can’t live without women, they can live without us. But this is only one reason that I believe women should do the choosing and not the men. The mechanics of courtship also indicate that it is the woman who chooses even though the bloke thinks it’s him. I remember seeing a documentary on speed-dating once, and the facilitator made the exact same observation. Personally, I wasn’t surprised.

In many respects, I think the best analogy in the animal kingdom is with birds. The male really just wants to have sex, so what does he do? He sings or he flashes colourful plumage or he performs a dance or he builds a bower, and then the female chooses the one she thinks is best, not the other way round. Now, this is an analogy, but I think it applies to humans just as well. Whilst it is the woman who might arguably wear the plumage, she does the selecting, and it is the men who perform. We show off our wit and conversation, we drive flash cars and buy big houses and use whatever talents we may have to impress. I read somewhere recently (Scientific American Mind) that in mixed company it is the men who tell the jokes and the women who do the laughing.

So my argument is that we woo but women select. I believe this is the natural order and centuries of cultural, religious and political control have attempted to overturn it. All our institutions have been patriarchal and marriage is arguably the most patriarchal of them all.

And this is where my argument reflects the sentiment expressed by Nietzsche, because I have a rational justification to support my intuitively-premised prejudice. It is the woman who has most to lose in a relationship because she’s the one who gets pregnant. So what I’m arguing is that it should be her choice all the way down the line. It is the woman who should determine the parameters and limits of a relationship. It is she who should decide how intimate it should become and whether marriage is an option, not the bloke. I would even argue that men cope with rejection better than women. Our sex drive is like a tap, easy to turn on, not so easy to turn off, but that’s what masturbation is for.

Anyone who has read my book, Elvene, will recognise a feminist theme that pretty well reflects the philosophy I’ve outlined above. It wasn’t intentional, and it was only afterwards that I realised that I had encapsulated that theme into my writing. Considering it’s set in the future, not the past, it has little in common with Jane Austen. As one of its reviewers pointed out, the book also deals with relationship issues like respect, honesty and generosity of spirit.

In essence, I think the patriarchal cultural mores that we’ve had for centuries are not only past their use-by-date, but are in conflict with the natural order for human relationships. Our societies would be a lot more psychologically healthy if that was acknowledged.

Addendum: Yes, I changed the title.

The Number Devil by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

2011-01-02T13:06:00.004+11:00

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything really meaty on my blog and an entire year since I last wrote a post that reviewed a book on mathematics.

But what I really like about this particular post is that it renders the near to the global. This arose from a Christmas drink that I had with my neighbour across the road, Sarah, who lent me a book, that she never lends, on the proviso I write it up on my blog. So from my neighbour, who literally lives directly opposite me with her 2 sons, Andre and Emelio, to the blogosphere.

Over a bottle of Aussie red (Barossa Valley Shiraz 2008) – yes that’s worth mentioning because we both agreed that it was a bloody good drop (literally and figuratively) – we somehow got into a discussion on mathematics and the teaching of mathematics in particular, which led us to swapping books the next day.

On Christmas Day 2009, I published a post on The Bedside Book of Algebra (Michael Willers), which is the book I swapped with Sarah. The Number Devil; A Mathematical Adventure covers some of the same material but it’s aimed at a younger audience and it has a different approach. The whole purpose of this book it to reveal to young people that mathematics is a world worth exploring and not just a sadistic intellectual exercise designed by teachers to torment young developing minds. Sarah’s book has 2 bookmarks in it: one for her and one for her 7 year-old son; and her son’s bookmark is further advanced than hers.

It is written in novel-form and the premise of the narrative is very simple: the protagonist, Robert, is having tormenting dreams when he is visited by a devil, who calls himself the ‘Number Devil’ and begins to give him lessons in mathematics. It’s extremely clever, because it’s engaging and contains entertaining and informative illustrations, as well as providing exposition on some of the more esoteric mathematical concepts like infinity, transfinite numbers, combinations and permutations, Pascal’s triangle, Fibonacci numbers, prime numbers and Goldbach’s conjecture.

Whilst Enzensberger reveals the relationship between Pascal’s triangle and Fibonacci numbers, he doesn’t explain the relationship between Pascal’s triangle and the binomial theorem, which I learned in high school. He also explains the relationship between Pascal’s triangle and the combination algorithm, but not the way I learned it, which I think is more intuitive and useful. He uses diagonals (within Pascal’s triangle) whereas I learned it by using the rows.

The cleverness is that he provides these expositions without revealing to the reader how advanced these mathematical ‘lessons’ are. In fact, the reader is introduced to the ‘mysteries’ that have fascinated ‘ancients’ from many cultures across the world. Enzensberger’s inspired approach is to reveal the appeal of mathematics (that most mathematicians only find in adulthood) to young people before they are turned off it forever. He demonstrates that esoteric concepts can be taught without emphasising their esoterica.

Even the idea of a ‘number devil’ is inspired because mathematics is considered to be so devilish, and, in some cultures, mathematicians were considered to be devil’s apprentices (refer my recent post on Hypatia). In the second chapter (chapters are sequential nights of dreaming) Robert finds himself in a cave with the Number Devil, and the illustration is an obvious allusion to Plato’s cave, though no mention is made of this in the text.

At the end, the Number Devil takes Robert to ‘Number Heaven’ and ‘Number Hell’, though they appear to be the same place, where he meets some of the ‘masters’ like Russell, Fibonacci, Archimedes and a Chinese man whose name we don’t learn. We don’t meet Pythagoras who lives in a higher realm altogether, up in the clouds.

I’d recommend this book to any parent whose children show the slightest mathematical inclination and also adults who want an introduction to this esoteric world. As Sarah said, it’s like a mathematical version of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, which is a high enough recommendation in itself.

Oh, I should mention that the illustrations are by Rotraut Susanne Berner; they augment the text perfectly.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

2010-12-21T20:33:00.002+11:00

This woman should need no introduction, she’s been in the media in most Western countries I’m sure. I thought this was a really good interview (Tue. 21 Dec. 2010) because it gives an insight into her background as well as a candid exposition of her political and philosophical views.

I haven’t read either of her biographies, but I’ve read second-hand criticism which led me to believe she was anti-Islamic. This is not entirely true, depending on how one defines Islam. To quote her own words: “I have no problem with the religious dimension of Islam.” She’s not the first Muslim I’ve come across to differentiate between religious and political Islam. Most Westerners, especially since 9/11, believe that any such distinction is artificial. I beg to differ.

She makes it very clear that she’s against the imposition of Sharia law, the subjugation of women and any form of totalitarianism premised on religious-based scripture (irrespective of the religion). In short, she’s a feminist. She decries the trivial arguments over dress when there are other issues of far greater import, like arranged marriages, so-called circumcision of women and honour killings. (For an intelligent debate on whether the burqua should be ‘outlawed’ I refer you to this.)

What I found remarkable, and almost unimaginable, was how violent her childhood and upbringing were. There was violence in the school, violence in the home, violence in politics. As she points out it was so pervasive that a peaceful environment was considered unthinkable. One of the most poignant stories she tells was when she went to Holland to seek asylum, and on going to a Police Station to register, the policeman asked her if she would like a cup of coffee or tea. This was a revelation to her: that a man in uniform should offer a woman, a stranger and a foreigner, a cup of coffee or tea was simply mind-blowing.

It is beyond most of us to imagine a childhood where violence is the principal form of interrogation and negotiation between people in all walks of life: home, education and work; yet that was her life. That she can now talk of falling in love and of writing a letter to her unborn child for a hopeful future is close to miraculous.

What resonated with me was her argument that it doesn’t take 600 years to reconcile Islam with the modern secular world, but only 4 generations. I have Muslim friends, both in America and in Australia, and they belie the belief, held by many in Western societies, that Muslims can’t assimilate and yet keep their cultural and spiritual beliefs. They demonstrate to me that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is correct in her fundamental assumptions and philosophical approach.

On-line interview for Elvene

2010-12-11T14:00:00.001+11:00

This is a blatant promotion. Obviously the interview is totally contrived by the publisher, and if you press TOP at the end of my piece, you will get an overview of the current state of play in Oz publishing and distribution, from the perspective of one of the (minor) players.

Having said that, the questions were not vetted by me and the answers are all my own.

The term 'jack-of-all-trades' is a complete misnomer. Anyone who actually knows me, knows that I'm totally useless at all trades involving genuine dexterous skill. The rest is mostly true, though I've only written one screenplay and one novel that I'm willing to own up to.

The interview contains some of my philosophy on writing in 'nutshell' form, with the added relevance of referencing something that I've written.

Hypatia

2010-12-03T21:44:00.014+11:00

Last week I saw a movie by Alejandro Amenabar called Agora, which is effectively the story of Hypatia and her death at the hands of Christian zealots in Alexandria towards the end of the Roman Empire in AD 414. So the film is based on a real event and a real person, though it is a fictional account.

Amenabar also made the excellent film, The Sea Inside, starring Javier Bardem, which was also based on a real person’s life. In this case, a fictionalised account of a quadriplegic’s battle with the Church and government in Spain to take his own life through euthanasia.

I first came across Hypatia in Clifford A. Pickover’s encyclopedic tome, The Math Book, subtitled, From Pythagoras to the 57^th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics. He allots one double page (a page of brief exposition juxtaposed with a graphic or a photo) to each milestone he’s selected. He presents Hypatia as the first historically recognised woman mathematician. In fact she was a philosopher and teacher at the famous Library of Alexandria, even though she was a Greek, and like her father, practiced philosophy, science, mathematics and astronomy in the tradition of Plato and Aristotle. By accounts, she was attractive, but never married, and, according to Pickover, once said she was ‘wedded to the truth’. The film gives a plausible account of her celibacy, when her father explains to a suitor that, in order to marry, she would have to give up her pursuit of knowledge and that would be like a slow death for her.

The film stars Rachel Weisz in the role of Hypatia and it’s a convincing portrayal of an independent, highly intelligent woman, respected by men of political power and persuasion. The complex political scene is also well depicted with the rise of Christianity creating an escalating conflict with Jews that the waning Roman military government seems incapable of controlling.

It’s a time when the Christians are beginning to exert their newly-found political power, and their Biblical-derived authority justifies their intention to convert everyone to their cause or destroy those who oppose them. There is a scene where they drive all the Jews out of Alexandria, which they justify by citing Biblical text. The film, of course, resonates with 20^th Century examples of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and the role of religious fundamentalism in justifying human atrocities. Hypatia’s own slave (a fictionalised character, no doubt) is persuaded to join the Christians where he can turn his built-up resentment into justified slaughter.

Hypatia would have been influenced by Pythagoras’s quadrivium, upon which Plato’s Academy was based: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. In the movie she is depicted as a ‘truth-seeker’, who questions Ptolemy’s version of the solar system and performs an experiment to prove to herself, if no one else, that the Earth could move without us being aware of its motion. I suspect this is poetic licence on the part of Amenabar, along with the inference that she may have foreseen that the Earth’s orbit is elliptical rather than circular. What matters, though, is that she took her philosophy very seriously, and she appreciated the role of mathematics in discerning truth in the natural world. There is a scene where she rejects Christianity on the basis that she can’t accept knowledge without questioning it. It would have gone against her very being.

There is also a scene in which the Church’s hierarchy reads the well-known text from Timothy: “I suffer not a woman to teach or to control a man”, which is directed at the Roman Prefect, who holds Hypatia in high regard. The priest claims this is the word of God, when, in fact, it’s the word of Paul. Paul, arguably, influenced the direction of Christianity even more than Jesus. After all, Jesus never wrote anything down, yet Paul’s ‘letters’ are predominant in the New Testament.

Hypatia’s death, in the film, is sanitised, but history records it as brutal in the extreme. One account is that she was dragged through the streets behind a chariot and the other is that she had her flesh scraped from her by shards of pottery or sharp shells. History also records that the Bishop, Cyril, held responsible for her death, was canonised as a saint. The film gives a credible political reason for her death: that she had too much influence over the Prefect, and while they couldn’t touch him in such a malicious way, they could her.

But I can’t help but wonder at the extent of their hatred, to so mutilate her body and exact such a brutal end to an educated woman. I can only conclude that she represented such a threat to their power for two reasons: one, she was a woman who refused to acknowledge their superiority both in terms of gender and in terms of religious authority; and two, she represented a search for knowledge beyond the scriptures that could ultimately challenge their authority. I think it was this last reason that motivated their hatred so strongly. As a philosopher, whose role it was to seek knowledge and question dogma, she represented a real threat, especially when she taught ‘disciples’, some of whom became political leaders. A woman who thinks was the most dangerous enemy they knew.

Laina Turner's Chiczofrenia

2010-11-14T18:52:00.000+11:00

Chiczofrenic is the term for the woman who is purposeful and intentional in how crazy their life may be. The goal with this book is to recognize many women drive themselves crazy, intentionally, by trying to be all they can. I firmly believe we can have it all. A great relationship, be a great mom, keep a good house (if that’s important to you), be a career woman, follow our dreams, work out, eat right, and many more. Women seem to have the knack of how to manage it all and not go crazy. Women seem to always take on more and more…and are successful at it.

Women have tried forever to pretend they fit in the norm even when the norm wasn’t what they wanted. I want women to embrace that more - without caring what anyone thinks. Learn to laugh at your own craziness and be cool at the same time. Be the strong individual you want to be while looking like a million bucks.

Being a woman is difficult and is a constant journey and evolution of self discovery. It’s not always an easy journey and through the process you realize everyone has her own issues. Her own brand of crazy which is my own kind of normal. Crazy but embracing it.

AVAILABLE at www.lainaturner.com/store and get a FREE copy of Stilettos & Scoundrels with purchase through November 15^th, 2010

Introduction
“There comes a time when you have to stand up and shout:
This is me damn it! I look the way I look, think the way I think, feel the way I feel, love the way I love! I am a whole complex package. Take me... or leave me. Accept me - or walk away! Do not try to make me feel like less of a person, just because I don't fit your idea of who I should be and don't try to change me to fit your mold. If I need to change, I alone will make that decision.
When you are strong enough to love yourself 100%, good, and bad - you will be amazed at the opportunities that life presents you.”
Stacey Charter

Chiczofrenic = intentionally crazy and loving it
Chiczofrenic is my coined term for the woman who is purposeful and intentional in how crazy their life may be. I came upon this shift on a plane ride back from a conference and thought how even though I enjoyed the conference, I wasn’t as passionate as maybe I should’ve been about business. That led me to think about what I was passionate about. After much brainstorming- I realized this was it.
The goal with this book is to recognize that so many of us women drive ourselves crazy, intentionally, by trying to be all we can be. I firmly believe we can have it all. A great relationship, marriage, be a great friend, a great mom, keep a good house (if that’s important to you, it’s not one of my top five), be a career woman, follow our dreams, work out, eat right, and many other things. However, somewhere while trying to accomplish all this, we can tend to go a little nuts. Some more than others, and some longer than others. I used to think I was normal. HA! What a reality check I’ve had. Normal is relative. I’m sure Howard Hughes and Andy Warhol thought they were normal.
Know it’s ok to feel overwhelmed with all you have to do to have it all. Life isn’t easy. However, we all deserve to have what we want. Women seem to have the knack of how to manage it all and not go too crazy. Women seem to always take on more and more…and dammit, we’re successful at it.
Being a woman is difficult and a constant evolution of self-discovery. It’s not an easy journey and through the process you realize every woman has her own issues, her own brand of crazy, which is my favorite kind of normal. Crazy is fine. Embrace it.
Women have tried forever to pretend they fit in the norm even when the norm wasn’t what they wanted. I want women to embrace what it is they truly want - without caring what anyone thinks. Learn to laugh at your own craziness and be cool at the same time. Be the strong individuals we all want to be while looking like a million bucks.
Introspect:
What’s your mission statement as a woman?

“Well, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
I really wanna know (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
Tell me, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
'Cause I really wanna know (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)”
“Who are you?” by The Who

CHAPTER 1 – opening stuff
Shhhh…mommy’s crazy but don’t tell.
“Each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love

            My daughter started saying that phrase when she was about three. Now to be fair, she used it interchangeably with her father and me, so it’s not as if she singled me out to be the crazy one. She would go to her dad and whisper in his ear “Shhhh…mommy’s crazy but don’t tell,” and then giggle. She would say the same to me “Shhhh…daddy’s crazy but don’t tell,” but would then tell him she only said he was handsome (yes, she was manipulative even at three) and giggle in her adorable way making it very difficult to stay mad at her. She never tried to fool me…hmmm? Out of the mouth of babes they say.
The textbook definition of crazy can be insane, fantastic, strange, ridiculous, extremely fond of, or very good or excellent. I think most of us can be any one or more of those things at any given time. When someone calls you crazy it may mean they think you’re a bit off balance. I say embrace it. If someone calls you crazy say ‘thank you’. It takes a lot of skill and talent to be crazy. Crazy is an art form and we all have an artist within us wanting to get out, if it’s not already.
I used to have a rainbows and marshmallow life. Well, I thought I did. I think now, looking back, that I just wanted it to be that way, and I was in denial of reality because life is never rainbows and marshmallows. I had high expectations of what I felt my life should be and didn’t allow any thoughts that didn’t coincide with those expectations to surface, thinking I could control all outcomes. Now that worked pretty well for thirty-six years and then my perfect world started to crumble. I realized I couldn’t control everything. How could that be? Silly as it seems, I was somewhat shocked at my fallibility. I hadn’t ever really experienced something beyond my control.
My life didn’t start to change in one huge Hiroshima type bang, which would’ve probably been easier, but rather it was like termites working on eating away the wood structures at your house. Where you know there’s damage and there’s going to be ruin at some point but because it’s gradual, you’re able to keep yourself positive on the outcome (denial) until one day your house falls over. And you’re like “Oh, Shit! Now what do I do?” Regardless of the cheesy analogy, the point I’m trying to make is that the realization that your life is a fucking mess and you have no idea how to fix it doesn’t happen overnight. Most of us have been there at one time or another.
I’ve been asked by friends if writing this book was therapy for me and I guess it probably has been in a way. But, when I started writing, that wasn’t my intent. I was thinking more along the lines of being able to share my story, my version of crazy, with people who might be encouraged by knowing that they aren’t the only ones going through this. I know for a long time I thought I was the only one who was losing it and didn’t know where to turn. I’ve learned everyone has baggage, and issues, and their own brand of crazy. No one is perfect, even if they appear to be. I think life is about identifying your brand of crazy and embracing who you are, knowing none of us have it all together all the time. Which when you think about it isn’t all that unusual. Life is ever-changing and you must roll with it.
How did this all start you’re wondering? This realization of my craziness? Well, much like the opening chapter in a fiction book, I woke up one day and realized I was afraid. It was a dark and stormy night. Afraid my life was going to be a series of days much like yesterday and the day before that. The way today would be and probably tomorrow. I realized I was coasting because it was relatively easy but it wasn’t making me happy. I just hadn’t realized for a long time that my life wasn’t making me happy, because it was supposed to right? I had everything I should want. I was doing what people wanted me to do, what I thought I was supposed to be doing as a working mother and wife, and I was doing a pretty good job at it. However, I wasn’t happy in the truly fulfilled sort of way. Looking back I would have handled things much differently when I came to this realization, knowing what I know now, it’s easy to know what to do after the fact and sure would be nice to have do-over’s in life. Fear is what compelled me to make some bad decisions. Fear can be a bastard.
As a normally confident person who went through life up to this point believing I could do anything, and being successful at it, I was, for the first time, afraid, unsure, and not confident with what my heart wanted me to do. All the insecurities I had been repressing for years and years, unbeknownst to me under the guise of my confident business self came crashing to the forefront. I went from being a stoic bitch- who didn’t ever get emotional or weak, to crying at the drop of a hat and not wanting to do anything. I went from working eighty hours a week to barely being able to work the minimum. For me the minimum was still pretty good, but I knew it wasn’t what people expected, it wasn’t what I expected out of myself, and it made me feel even worse. I resisted for a long time acknowledging that I was depressed and anxious. Why? Because I needed to be perfect. I had to have my shit together. People came to me for help and advice. I would think, are they nuts to seek my opinion? I have no idea what I’m doing.
I was supposed to be strong, not weak. I didn’t need anyone, and I took care of everyone (it’s how I felt most comfortable). I got married at twenty-six. I buried my mother at twenty-nine, had a child, got my MBA and PhD. Quit talking to my dad, and had another child. Made a lot of money, lost a lot of money. Lost my husband (well, to be honest I sent him away), met my best friend, who is also my soul mate, and yes, it’s complicated beyond words. All of this in the span of three years (and counting). I went days where I wouldn’t leave my bed unless I had to and wondered when the shitstorm that was my life would end or when the reality television I was sucked into watching would cease to be entertaining and the boredom would force me to be motivated. What made it worse is that I was still able to maintain, barely, and I knew what I needed to do to get myself out of the financial, emotional, and mental rut I was in.
However, I couldn’t do it. I sometimes wished I would really have a breakdown so I could not have to face trying to make it all work again. I would’ve almost preferred not knowing what I needed to do to make things better. Then I could’ve at least lived in a true state of ignorance. Ignorance is bliss and it’s true, as cliché as it is. But, as is life, it’s never that easy. I would make deals with myself to make it seem better, like I was taking action. I would allow myself to wallow and stay in bed all day watching TV and eating Smart Ones (those are Weight Watchers microwavable food for those who don’t know; at least I was eating somewhat healthy). Then when it was late enough to drink wine (a whole bottle or more) I would tell myself that I’d allow myself one more day of self pity and then the next day I’d bounce back and do what I needed to do. What I was capable of. What needed to happen in order to make my dreams come true? I’d even get somewhat excited about my plan. But then I wouldn’t follow through. Doubt, sadness, and anxiety would take over and the cycle would start all over with the bargaining. How did I stop it? I’m sure I haven’t completely, but I’m hoping by the time I finish this book I will have. Hey, maybe it’ll be therapy after all. At the very least, I know it’s somewhat entertaining and people can laugh at my craziness and stupidity at times.
This isn’t meant to be an autobiography, although it may seem like it, but rather a snapshot of the roughest times in my life so far. I sure hope it stays that way. I also hope by sharing, it might help someone else not feel alone.
AVAILABLE at www.lainaturner.com/store and get a FREE copy of Stilettos & Scoundrels with purchase through November 15^th, 2010

     Laina Turner-Molaski
Laina Turner-Molaski is a business woman, mom, author, Professor, and a major supporter of shopping. She has an undying love for shoes and coffee, which is why she created her main character and alter-ego Presley Thurman.
With a lot of letters after her name and a ton of student loan debt, she is always working to pay the bills. While she enjoys her day job, her passion is writing, and she uses a lot of company time writing her fiction or working on her social website for women, Chiczofrenic.com. She is hoping to sell her book before she gets fired from her day job for goofing off.
Laina is currently living in Indiana, with her family, and is always writing something, whether it’s blogs, articles, business journals and books or ideas for her next novel. She is continuously doing what she loves which is writing or drinking coffee.

You can check out her ramblings at www.lainaturner.com.

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We have to win the war against stupidity first

2010-11-06T14:43:00.008+11:00

In Oz, we have a paper called The Australian, which was created by Rupert Murdoch when he was still a young bloke. Overseas visitors, therefore, may find it anomalous that in last weekend’s The Weekend Australian Magazine there was an article by Johann Hari that was critical of US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Specifically, the use of drones in the so-called war on terror. The same magazine, by the way, runs a weekly column by one of Australia’s leading left-wing commentators, Phillip Adams, and has done so for decades. In his country of origin, it appears, Murdoch is something of a softie. Having said that, the article cannot be found on the magazine’s web page. Murdoch wouldn’t want to dilute his overseas persona apparently.

If I could provide a link, I obviously would, because I can’t relate this story any more eloquently than the journalist does. He starts off by asking the reader to imagine the street, where they live, being bombed by a robotic plane controlled by pilots on the other side of the world in a ‘rogue state’ called the USA. A bit of poetic licence on my part, because Hari does not use the term ‘rogue state’ and he asks you to imagine that the drone is controlled from Pakistan, not America. Significantly, the ‘pilots’ are sitting at a console with a joy stick as if they’re playing a video game. But this ‘game’ has both fatal and global consequences.

The gist of Hari’s article is that this policy, endorsed by Obama’s administration and “the only show in town” according to some back-room analysts, is that it actually enlists more jihadists than it destroys.

David Kilcullen, an Australian expert on Afghanistan and once advisor to the American State Department ‘…has shown that two percent of the people killed by the robot-planes in Pakistan are jihadis. The remaining 98 percent are as innocent as the victims of 9/11. He says: “It’s not moral.” And it gets worse: “Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially as drone strikes have increased.”’

David Kilcullen, who was once advisor to Condoleezza Rice during Bush’s administration, once said in an ABC (Oz BC) radio interview, that ‘…we need to get out of the business of invading other people’s countries because we believe they may harbour terrorists.’

‘Juan Cole, Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Michigan, puts it more bluntly: “When you bomb people and kill their family, it pisses them off. They form lifelong grudges… This is not rocket science. If they were not sympathetic to the Taliban and al-Qa’ida before, after you bomb the shit out of them they will be.”’

According to Hari, drones were originally developed by Israel and are routinely deployed to bomb the Gaza Strip. Not surprisingly, the US government won’t even officially acknowledge that their programme exists. Having said that, Bob Woodward, in his book, Obama’s Wars, claims that ‘the US has an immediate plan to bomb 150 targets in Pakistan if there is a jihadi attack inside America.’ In other words, the people who promote this strategy see it as a deterrent, when all evidence points to the opposite outcome. As Hari points out, in 2004, a ‘report commissioned by Donald Rumsfeld said that “American direct intervention in the Muslim world” was the primary reason for jihadism'.

I could fill this entire post with pertinent quotes, but the message is clear to anyone who engages their brain over their emotions: you don’t stop people building bombs to kill innocent civilians in your country by doing it to them in their country.

ELVENE, the 2nd edition

2010-10-17T10:22:00.013+11:00

Click on picture to get full screen and then click again to zoom

My one and only novel, ELVENE, has been published as an e-book by IP (Interactive Publications) and also POD at Glasshouse Books, a Queensland based company. The cover is by Aaron Pocock, so it’s an all-Aussie affair, though I believe Dr. David Reiter, who founded IP, is an ex-pat American.

I haven’t met David or Aaron, or even spoken to them, such is the facility of the internet. Even though IP engaged Aaron (I paid for the artwork), we corresponded via an intermediary, and I’m very pleased with the results. I believe he captured both the atmosphere and the right degree of sensuality that is reflected in the text itself. I’ve always been a strong believer that the cover should reflect the content of the book, both contextually and emotionally.

If you read the blurb on the web site (written by me) you may be mistaken in the belief that this is a variation on James Cameron’s Avatar. Nothing against Avatar, but I need to point out that ELVENE was written in 2001/2, about 8 years before Avatar was released, but I suspect we have been influenced by the same predecessors, in particular, Frank Herbert’s 1965 classic, DUNE. If any of you have seen Miyazaki’s anime, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (refer my recent post, 5 Oct.10) you may also see some similarities. I did when I saw it in 2006, even though it was first released in 1984. Obviously I can’t be influenced by something I didn’t even know existed, but I’m happy to be compared with Miyazaki anytime.

The book contains oblique references to Clarke, Kubrick, Coleridge, Kipling and even Barbarella (her ship was called Alfie for you train-spotters). So, whilst Avatar could be best described as Dune meets Dances with Wolves, Elvene is Dune meets Dances with Wolves, meets Ursula Le Guin, meets Ian Fleming, meets Barbarella, meets Edgar Rice Burroughs. So my influences began with the comic books I read in the 1950’s, not to mention the radio serials I listened to before TV (yes, I’m that old). At the age of 9, I started writing my own Tarzan scripts, and I started drawing my own superheroes about the same time, possibly a bit older.

I once described ELVENE as a graphic novel without the graphics, and more than one person has told me that it’s ‘a very visual story’. An interesting achievement, considering I believe description to be the most boring form of prose (refer my August post on Creative Writing).

Most people who’ve read it ask: where’s the next one? Well, the truth is that I have started a sequel but I find it hard to believe I will ever write anything as good as ELVENE again. It really feels like an aberration to me. I’m not a writer as a profession, more a hobbyist, nevertheless I’m proud of my achievement. It’s not for everyone, but I’ve found that women like it in particular, including those who have never read a Sci-Fi book before. Maybe it’s a Sci-Fi book for people who don’t read Sci-Fi. I can only let others be the judge.

Two unsolicited reviews can be found at YABooksCentral: one by a teenager and one by a retired schoolteacher (both women).

Another review can be found here by Kay Hart.

Also available on Amazon, iBookstore, Lightning Source (Ingram) and ContentReserve.com.

The Festival of Dangerous Ideas

2010-10-10T11:15:00.001+11:00

This is a post where I really don't have much to say at all, because this video says it all.

If you can't access the video, you can still read the transcript.

Where else would you find a truly international panel, with representatives from Indonesia, Pakistan, America, England and, of course, the host nation, Oz? I think the only internationally renowned participant is Geoffrey Robertson QC, who famously took up Salman Rushdie's case when he was subjected to a death-sentence fatwa by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini (late 1980s early 90s). I suspect the rest of the panel are only well-known in their countries of origin.

Believe me, this discussion is well worth the 1 hour of your time.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki

2010-10-05T19:40:00.005+11:00

I’ve just read this 7 volume graphic novel over a single weekend. I saw the anime version a few years back at a cinematic mini-festival of his work. As it turned out, it was the first of his movies I ever saw, and it’s still my favourite. Most people would declare Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke as his best works, and they’re probably right, but I liked Nausicaa because certain elements of the story resonated with my own modest fictional creation, Elvene. You can see a Japanese trailer of the anime here.

The movie was released in 1984 and the graphic novels were only translated into English in 1997. I didn’t even know they existed until I looked it up on the Internet to inform a friend. And then a graphic novelist guest at our book club (see my blog list) told me that the local library has all 7 volumes; they’re catalogued under ‘graphic novel – teenager’. Even though Miyazaki is better known for his animated movies (Studio Ghibli), the film version of Nausicaa barely scratches the surface. The graphic novels are on the scale of Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or Dune. Of the 7 volumes, the shortest is 120 pages and the last is over 200 pages. If Miyazaki wasn’t Japanese, I’m sure this would be a classic of the genre.

Being Japanese, they’re read from right to left, so the back cover is actually the front cover and vice versa. I thought: why didn’t they just reverse the pagination for Western readers? But, of course, the graphics have to be read right to left as well. In other words, to Westernise them they’d have to be mirror-reversed, so wisely the publishers left them alone.

On the inside back cover (front cover for us) Miyazake explains the inspiration for the character. Of course, Nausicaa was originally a character in Homer’s The Odyssey, but Miyazaki first came across her in Bernard Evslin’s Japanese translation of a dictionary of Greek mythology. Evslin apparently gave 3 pages to Nausicaa but only one page each to Zeus and Achilles, so Miyazaki was a little disappointed when he read Homer’s original and found that she played such a small yet pivotal role in Odysseus’s journey. He was also influenced by a Japanese fictional heroine in The Tales of Past and Present called “the princess who loved insects”.

Those who are familiar with Miyazaki know that all his stories have strong female roles, and, personally, I think Nausicaa is the best of them, albeit she is one of the youngest.

But this reference to Homer’s Odyssey raises a point that has long fascinated me about graphic novels (or comic books, as they were known when I was a kid). They are arguably the only literary form which echoes back to the mythical world of the ancients, where characters have god-like abilities with human attributes. Now some of you may ask what about fantasy fiction of the sword and wizard variety? King Arthur, Merlin and Gandalf surely fall into that category. Yes, they are somewhat in between, but they are not superheroes, of whom Superman is the archetype. Bryan Singer’s film version, Superman Returns, which polarised critics and audiences, makes the allusion to Christ most overtly, and I suspect, deliberately.

It’s not just the Bible that provides a literary world where humanity and Gods meet (well there are 2 God characters in the Bible, the Father and the Son, not to mention Satan). Moses talked to a burning bush, Abraham was visited by angels, and Jesus conversed with Satan, God and ordinary mortals, including prostitutes.

The Mahabharata is a classic Hindu text involving deities and warring families, and of course there’s Homer’s tales, where the Greek gods take sides in battles and make deals with mortals.

Well, Miyazake’s Nausicaa falls into this category, in my view, even though there’s not a deity in sight. Nausicaa is probably the most Christ-like character I’ve come across in contemporary fiction since Superman. However that’s a Western interpretation – I expect Miyazaki would be more influenced by the Goddess of Mercy (Guan Yin in China, Kannon in Japan).

Nausicaa is a warrior princess with prodigious fighting abilities but her greatest ability is to empathise with all living creatures and to win over people to her side through her sheer personality and integrity. This last attribute is actually the most believable part of the novel, and when she continually wins respect and trust, Miyazaki convinces us that this human aspect of her character is real. But there are supernatural qualities as well. Her heart is so pure that she is able to lead the most evil character in the story into the afterlife (reminiscent of a scene in Harry Potter with a different outcome). In the last volume there is a warrior-god intent on destruction (an artificial life-form) whom she bends to her will through her sheer compassion because he believes she is his mother.

There are numerous other characters, but Princess Kushana is probably the most complex. She is involved in a mortal struggle with her emperor father and throne-contender brothers, but the most interesting relationship she has is with her ambitious Chief of Staff, Kurotowa. Early in the story she tries to have him killed, much later she saves his life.

Like Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki’s tale is a cautionary one about how humanity is destroying the ecology of the planet. Other subplots warn against religious dogma being used as a political weapon to manipulate people into war, and petty royal rivalries decimating populations through war and creating starving refugee communities out of the survivors.

There are, of course, a small group of characters who see Nausicaa as a prophet, and even a goddess, which creates problems for her in and of itself.

This is a rich story of many layers, not just a boy’s (or girl’s) own adventure. Nausicaa is a classic of the graphic novel genre – it’s just not recognised as such because it’s not American.

Happiness and the role of empathy

2010-09-23T16:33:00.010+10:00

It’s been a while between posts but I’ve been busy on many fronts, including preparing Elvene for a second edition as an e-book and POD (print on demand). I’ll write a future post on that when it’s released in a couple of months. I’m also back to working full time (my real job is an engineer) so my time is spread thinner than it used to be.

I subscribe to Philosophy Now, which is an excellent magazine even if its publication is as erratic as my blog, and it always comes out with a theme. In this issue (No 80, August/September 2010) the theme, always given on the cover, is the human condition: is it really that bad? This post arose from a conflation in my mind of two of its essays. One on Compassion & Peace by Michael Allen Fox, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Canada and Adjunct Professor; School of Humanities, University of New England, Australia. (Philosophy Now is a UK publication, btw.) The other was an essay by Dr. Kathleen O’Dwyer, who describes herself as ‘a scholar, teacher and author’ (my type of academic). Her essay is titled Can we be happy? But it’s really a discussion of Bertrand Russell’s treatise, The Conquest of Happiness, with a few other references thrown in like Freud, Laing and Grayling, amongst others.

I will dive right in with a working definition that O’Dwyer provides and is hard to beat:

“…a feeling of well-being – physical, emotional, spiritual or psychological; a feeling that one’s needs are being met – or at least that one has the power to strive towards the satisfaction of the most significant of such needs; a feeling that one is being authentic in living one’s life and in one’s relations with significant others; a feeling that one is using one’s potential as far as this is possible; a feeling that one is contributing to life in some way – that one’s life is making a difference.”

As she says, it’s all about ‘feeling’, which is not only highly subjective but based on perceptions. Nevertheless, she covers most bases, and, in particular, the sense of freedom to pursue one’s dreams and the requisite need to feel belonged, though she doesn’t use either of those phrases specifically. However, I would argue that these are the 2 fundamental criteria that one can distill from her synopsis.

Her discussion of Russell leads to talk about the opposite of happiness, its apparent causes and how to overcome it. Russell, like myself, suffered from depression in his early years, and this invariably affords a degree of self-examination that can either lead to self-obsession or revelation, and, in my case, both: one came before the other; and I don’t have to tell you in what order.

But Russell expresses the release or transcendence from this ‘possession’ rather succinctly as “a diminishing preoccupation with myself”. And this is the key to happiness in a nutshell, as also expressed by psychiatrist, George Vaillant, from the Harvard Medical School and interviewed in May this year on ABC’s 7.30 Report (see embedded video below).

And this segues into empathy, which I contend is the most important word in the English language. Fox goes to some length to explain the differences between compassion, empathy, sympathy and sacrifice, which, personally, I find unnecessary. They all extend from the inherent ability to put oneself in someone else’s shoes, and that is effectively what empathy is. So I put empathy at the head of all these terms and the source of altruism for most people. Studies have been done to demonstrate that reading fiction improves empathy (refer my post on Storytelling, July 2009). The psychometric test is very simple: determining the emotional content of eyes with no other available cues. As a writer, I don’t find this surprising, because, without empathy, fiction simply doesn’t work. As I mentioned in that post, the reader becomes an actor in their own mind but they’re not consciously aware of it.

But, more significantly, I would argue that all art exercises empathy, because it’s the projection of one individual’s imagination into another’s. Many artists, myself included, feel it’s their duty to put the reader or their audience in someone else’s shoes. It’s no surprise to me that art flourishes in all human societies and is often the most resilient endeavour when oppression is dominant.

But, more significant to the topic at hand, empathy and happiness are inseparable in my view. Contrary to some people’s beliefs and political ideologies, one rarely, if ever, gains happiness over another person’s suffering. Hence the message of Fox’s essay: peace and compassion go hand in hand.

The theme of Russell’s thesis (as revealed by O’Dwyer) and the message illuminated by George Vaillant below are exactly the same. We don’t find happiness in self-obsession, but in its opposite: the ability to empathise and give love to others.

How to create an imaginary, believable world.

2010-08-14T13:11:00.012+10:00

Earlier this week (last Tuesday, in fact) I was invited to take a U3A class as a 'guest speaker', with the title of this post as the topic. I was invited by Shirley Randles, whom I already knew (see below). In preparation, I wrote out the following, even though I had no intention of reading it out; just an exercise to collect my thoughts. As it turned out, Shirley wasn't able to attend due to a family illness, and the 'talk' became a free-form discussion that made the 1+3/4 hrs go very quickly. In the last 15-20 minutes, I gave them a short writing exercise, which everyone seemed to enjoy and perform admirably.

Some of you may have read a post I wrote last year on Storytelling (Jul.09), so there is some repetition, though a different emphasis, in this post.

Firstly, I want to thank Shirley for inviting me to come and talk. I just want to say that I’m not a bestselling author, or even a prolific writer. But I have given courses in creative writing and Shirley interviewed me a few years back and liked what I write and liked what I had to say as well.

Science fiction and fantasy are my genres, but what I have to say applies to all genres, because all fiction involves immersing your reader in an imaginary world. And if that world is not believable then you won’t engage them. We call it suspension of disbelief. It’s very similar to being in a dream, because, whilst we are in a dream, we believe it totally, even though, when we awake and analyse it, it defies our common sense view of the world. And I will come back to the dream analogy later, because I think it’s more than a coincidence; I think that stories are the language of dreams.

There are 3 components to all stories: character, plot and world. I don’t know if any of you saw the PIXAR exhibition a couple of years ago at ACMI, but it was broken down into those 3 areas, only they called plot ‘story’. Now, everyone knows about plot and character, but most people don’t pay much attention to world. It is largely seen as a sub-component of plot. But I make the distinction, if for no other reason, than they all require different skills as a writer.

But I’m going to talk about plot and character first, because the world only makes sense in the context of the other two. And also, character and plot are very important components in making a story believable.

It is through character that a reader is engaged. The character, especially the protagonist, is your window into a story. In fact, I think character is the most important component of all. When I think of an idea for a story, it always comes with the character foremost. I can’t speak for other writers, but, for me, the character invariably comes with the initial idea.

All stories are an interaction between plot and character, and I have a particular philosophical view on this. The character and plot are the inner and outer world of the story, and this has a direct parallel in real life. We all, individually, have an inner and outer world, and, in life, the outer world is fate and the inner world is free will. So, to me, fate and free will are not contradictory but complementary. Fate represents everything we have no control over and free will represents our own actions. So, in a story, the plot is synonymous to fate and character is synonymous to free will. Just like in real life, a character is challenged, shaped and changed by fate: the events that directly impact on him or her. And this is the fundamental secret to storytelling. The character in the story reacts to events, and, as a result, changes and, hopefully, grows.

Now, I’m going to take this analogy one step further, because, ideally, as a writer, I believe you should give your characters free will. As Colleen McCullough once said, you play God in that you create all the obstacles and hurdles for your characters to deal with, but, for me, the creative process only works when the characters take on a life of their own.

To explain what I mean, I will quote the famous artist, M.C. Escher: "While drawing I sometimes feel as if I were a spiritualist medium, controlled by the creatures I am conjuring up." Now, I think most artists have experienced this at some point, but especially writers. When you are in the zone (to use a sporting reference) you can feel like you are channeling a character. I call it a Zen experience. Richard Tognetti, the virtuoso violinist with the ACO (Australian Chamber Orchestra) once made the comment that it’s like ‘you’re not there’, which I thought summed it up perfectly. Strange as it may sound, the best writing you will ever do is when your ego is not involved – you are just a medium, as Escher so eloquently put it.

There is a philosophical debate amongst writers about whether to outline or not to outline. Most of the writers I’ve met, argue that you shouldn’t, whereas most books you read on the topic argue that you should. Both Peter Temple and Peter Corris argue that you shouldn’t. Stephen King is contemptuous of anyone who does an outline, whereas J.K. Rowling famously plotted out all 7 novels of Harry Potter. My advice: you have to find what works for you.

Personally, I do an outline but it’s very broad brush – it’s like scaffolding that I follow. I found this technique through trial and error, and I suggest that anyone else should do the same. It’s what works for me and you have to find what works for you.

Now, I’m finally going to talk about world. After all, it’s what this talk is meant to be about, isn’t it? Well, yes and no. To create a believable world actually starts with character in my opinion. The more real your characters are, the more likely you are to engage your readers. This is why books like Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series are so successful, even though the worlds and the plots they describe are so fantastical.

All works of fiction are a combination of reality and fantasy, and how you mix them varies according to genre. But grounding a story in a believable character is not only the easiest method, it’s also the most successful. The quickest way to break the spell in a story, for me, is to make the character do something completely out of character. So-called reversals, where the hero suddenly turns out to be the villain are the cheapest of plot devices as far as I am concerned. There are exceptions, and to give one example: Snape in Harry Potter is actually a ‘double-agent’ so his reversal is totally believable, and when we learn about it, a lot of things suddenly make sense. Also, having a character who is not what they appear to be is not what I am talking about here. Ideally, a character reveals themselves gradually over the story, and can even change and grow, as I described above, but a complete reversal is a lot harder to swallow, especially when it’s done as a final ‘twist’ to dupe the reader.

The first thing to know about world is to understand what it is not. It is not just background or setting; it’s an interactive component of the story. One of the things that distinguishes fiction from non-fiction is the message, because the message is always emotive in fiction. You have to engage the reader emotionally and that includes the world. There are 5 narrative styles that I am aware of, though some people may contend that there are less or more. Basically, they are description, exposition, dialogue, action and introspection. By introspection I mean what’s going on inside the character’s head. Most books on writing will tell you that exposition is the most boring, but I disagree. I think that description is the most boring – it’s the part of the text that readers will skip over to get on with the story.

If you read the classics from the 19th century and even early, or not-so-early, 20th century you will find that writers would describe scenes in great detail. TV and movies changed all that, for 2 reasons. One, we became more impatient, and two, cinema and video eliminated completely the need for description. So novels started to develop a shorthand whereby scenes are more like impressionists' paintings. But what’s more important, when you set up a scene, is to create atmosphere and mood, because that’s what engages the reader emotionally.

And here I return to my earlier reference to dreams, because I believe that dreams are our primal language. The language of dreams is imagery and emotion, and that’s also the language of story. The reason I believe that written stories (as opposed to cinema) facilitate imagery in our minds is because we do it in our dreams. The medium for a novel is not the words on the page but the reader’s imagination. You have to engage the reader’s imagination, otherwise the story is lifeless, just words on a page.

One final point, which brings me back to character. If you tell the story from a character’s point of view, then you engage that character’s emotions and senses. So if you relate a scene through the character’s eyes, ears, nose and touch, then you overcome the boredom of description more readily.

The enigma we call time

2010-07-23T20:15:00.010+10:00

The June 2010 edition of Scientific American had an article called Is Time an Illusion? The article was written by Craig Callendar, who is a ‘philosophy professor at the University of California, San Diego’, and explains how 20th Century physics has all but explained time away. In fact, according to him, some scientists believe it has. It reminds me of how many scientists believe that free will and consciousness have been explained away as well, or, if not, then the terms have passed their use-by-date. I once had a brief correspondence with Peter Watson who wrote A Terrible Beauty, an extraordinarily well-researched and well-written book that attempts to cover the great minds and great ideas of the 20th Century, mostly in art and science, rather than politics and history. He contended that words like imagination and mind were no longer meaningful because they referred to an inner state of which we have no real understanding. He effectively argued that everything we contemplate as ‘internal’ is really dependent on our ‘external’ world, including the language we used to express it. But I’m getting off the track before I’ve even started. My point is that time, like consciousness and free will, and even imagination, are all experiences that we all have, which makes them as real as any empirically derived quantity that we know.

But isn’t time an empirically derived quantity as well? Well, that’s effectively the subject of Callendar’s essay. Attempts to rewrite Einstein’s theory of general relativity (gravity) in the same form as electromagnetism, as John Wheeler and Bryce De-Witt did in the late 1960s, resulted in an equation where time (denoted as t) simply disappeared. As Callendar explains, time is the real stumbling block to any attempt at a theory for quantum gravity, which attempts to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein’s general relativity. According to the theory of relativity, time is completely dependent on the observer, where the perceived sequence of events can differ from one observer to another depending on their relative positions and velocities, though causality is always conserved. On the other hand, quantum mechanics, through entanglement, can defy Einstein’s equations altogether (see my post on Entanglement, Jan 2010).

But let’s start with our experience of time, since it entails our entire life, from the moment we start storing memories up to our death. And this storing of memories is a crucial point, otherwise we’d have no sense of time at all, no sense of past or future, just a continuous present. Oliver Sacks, in his book, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, tells the story of a man who suffered retrograde amnesia (The lost mariner) through excessive alcoholism, and in the 1970s when Sacks met him, still thought he was living in 1949 or thereabouts when he left the navy after WW2. The man was unable to create new memories so that he was effectively stuck in time, at least psychologically.

Kant famously argued in his Critique of Pure Reason, that both time and space were projections of the human mind. Personally, I always had a problem with Kant’s thesis on this subject, because I contend that both time and space exist independently of the human mind. In fact, they are the very fabric of the universe, but I’m getting ahead of myself again.

Without memory we would have no sense of the past and without imagination, no sense of the future. Brian Boyd, in his book The Origin of Stories (see my review called Storytelling, July 2009) referenced neurological evidence to explain how we use the same parts of the brain when we envisage the past as we do when we envisage the future. In both cases, we create the scenario in our mind, so how do we tell the difference?

Raymond Tallis, who writes a regular column in Philosophy Now (Tallis in Wonderland), wrote a very insightful essay in the April/May 2010 edition (the Is God really Dead? issue) ‘on the true mystery of memory’, where he explains the fundamental difference between memory in humans and memory in computers. It is impossible for me to do justice to such a brilliant essay, but effectively he questions how does the neuron or neurons, that supposedly store the memory, know or tell us when the memory was made in a temporal sense, even though it is something that we all intuitively sense. On the other hand, memory in a computer simply has a date and time stamp on it, a label in effect, but is otherwise physically identical to when it was created.

In the case of the brain, it’s in the hippocampus, where long term memories are generated, new neurons are created when something eventful happens which ties events together. Long term memory is facilitated by association, and so is learning, which is why analogies and metaphors are so useful for comprehending new knowledge, but I’m getting off the track again.

The human brain, and any other brain, one expects, recreates the memory in our imagination so that it’s not always accurate and certainly lacks photographic detail, but somehow conjures up a sense of past, even distance in time. Why are we able to distinguish this from an imaginary scenario that has never actually happened? Of course we can’t always, and false memories have been clinically demonstrated to occur.

Have you ever noticed that in dreams (see previous post), we experience a continuous present? Our dreams never have a history and never a future, they just happen, and often morph into a new scenario in such a way that any dislocation in time is not even registered, except when we wake up and try to recall them. Sometimes in a dream, I have a sense of memory attached to it, like I’ve had the dream before, yet when I wake up that sense is immediately lost. I wonder if this is what happens when people experience déjà vu (when they’re awake of course). I’ve had episodes of TGA (Transient Global Amnesia) where one’s thoughts seem to go in loops. It’s very disorienting, even scary, and the first time I experienced this, I described it to my GP as being like ‘memories from the future’, which made him seriously consider referring me to a psychiatrist.

So time, as we experience it, is intrinsically related to memory, yet there is another way we experience time, all the time, at least while we are conscious. And it is this ‘other way’ that made me challenge Kant’s thesis, when I first read it and was asked to write an essay on it. All animals, with sight, experience time through their eyes, because our eyes record the world quite literally as it passes us by, in so many frames a second. In the case of humans it’s twenty something. Movies and television need to have a higher frequency (24 from memory) in order for us to see movement fluidly. But many birds have a higher rate than us, so they would see a TV as jerky. When we see small birds flick their heads about in quick movement, they would see the same movement as fluid, which is why they can catch insects in mid-flight and we haven’t got Buckley’s. The point is that we literally see time, but different species see time at different rates.

We all know that our very existence in this world, on a cosmic scale, is just a blink, and a subliminal blink at that. On the scale of the universe at large, we barely register. Yet think upon this: without consciousness, time might as well not exist, because without consciousness the idea of a past or future is irrelevant, arguably non-existent. In this sense, Kant was right. It is only consciousness that has a sense of past and future; certainly nothing inanimate has a sense of past and future, even if it exists in a causal relationship with something else.

But of course, we believe that time does exist without consciousness, because we believe the universe had a cosmic history long before consciousness even evolved and will continue to exist long after the planet, upon which we are dependent for our very existence, and the sun, upon which we are dependent for all our needs, both cease to exist.

There has been one term that keeps cropping up in this dissertation, which has time written all over it, and it’s called causality. Causality is totally independent of the human mind or any other mind (I’m not going to argue about the ‘mind of God’). Causality, which we not only witness every day, but is intrinsic to all physical phenomena, is the greatest evidence we have that time is real. Even Einstein’s theories of relativity, which, as Callendar argues, effectively dismisses the idea of a universal time (or absolute time) still allow for causality.

David Hume famously challenged our common sense view of causality, arguing that it can never be proven; only that one event has followed another. John Searle gives the best counter-argument I’ve read, in his book, Mind, but I won’t digress as both of their arguments are outside the scope of this topic. However, every animal that pursues its own food believes in causality, even if they don’t think about it the way philosophers do. Causality only makes sense if time exists, so if causality is a real phenomenon then so is time. I might add that causality is also a lynch pin of physics, otherwise conservation of momentum suddenly becomes a non sequitur.

My knowledge of relativity theory and quantum mechanics is very rudimentary, to say the least, nevertheless I believe I know enough to explain a few basic principles. In a way, light replaces time in relativity theory; that’s because, for a ray of light, time really does not exist. For a photon, time is always zero – it only becomes a temporal entity for an observer who either receives it or transmits it. That is why light is always the shortest distance between 2 events, whether you want to travel between them or send a message. Einstein’s great revelation was to appreciate that this effectively turned time into a dimension that was commensurate with a spatial dimension. Equations for space-time include a term that is the speed of light multiplied by time, which effectively gives another dimension in addition to the other 3 dimensions of space that we are familiar with. You can literally see this dimension of time when you look at a night sky or peer through an astronomical telescope, because the stars you are observing are not only separated from us by space but also by time – thousands of years in fact.

But quantum mechanics is even more bizarre and difficult to reconcile with our common-or-garden view of the world. A lot of quantum weirdness stems from the fact that under certain conditions, like quantum tunneling and entanglement, time and space seem to become irrelevant. Entanglement implies that instantaneous connections are possible, across any distance, completely contrary to the restraints of relativity that I described above (see addendum below). And quantum tunneling also disregards relativity theory, where time can literally disappear, albeit temporarily and within energy constraints (refer my post, Oct.09).

But relativity and quantum mechanics are not the end of the story of time in physics; there is another aspect, which is perhaps even more intriguing, because it gives us the well-known arrow of time. Last year I wrote a review of Erwin Schrodinger’s book, What is Life? (Nov.09), a recommended read to anyone with an interest in philosophy or science. In it, Schrodinger reveals that one of his heroes was Ludwig Boltzmann, and it was Boltzmann, who elucidated for us, the second law of thermodynamics, otherwise known as entropy. It is entropy that apparently drives the arrow of time, as Penrose, Feynman and Schrodinger have all pointed out in various books aimed at laypeople, like myself. But it was Penrose who first explained it to me (in The Emperor’s New Mind) that whilst both relativity theory and quantum mechanics allow for time reversal, entropy does not.

Callendar, very early in his Scientific American article, posits the idea that time may be an emergent property of the universe, and entropy seems to fit that role. Entropy is why you can’t reconstitute an egg into its original form after you’ve dropped it on the floor, broken its shell and spilled all its contents into the carpet. You can run a film backwards showing a broken egg coming back together and rising from the floor with no trace of a stain on the carpet, but we immediately know it’s false. And that’s exactly what you would expect to see if time ran backwards, even though it never does. The two perceptions are related: entropy says that the egg can’t be recovered from its fall and so does the arrow of time; they are the same thing.

But Penrose, in his exposition, goes further, and explains that the entire cosmos follows this law, from the moment of the Big Bang until the death throes of the universe – it’s a universal law.

But this in itself begs another question: if a photon experiences zero time and the early universe (as well as its death) was just entirely radiation, where then is time? And without time, how did the universe evolve into a realm that is not entirely radiation. Well, there is a clue in the radiation itself, because all radiation has a frequency and from the frequency it has an energy, defined by Planck’s famous equation: E = hf. Where f is frequency and h is Planck’s constant. So the very equation, that gives us the energy of the universe, also entails time, because frequency is meaningless without time. But if photons have zero time, how is this possible? Also, if any particle approaches the same velocity as the photon, so does its time approach zero. And this happens when something falls into a black hole, so it becomes frozen in time to an external observer. Perhaps there is more than one type of time. A relativistic time that varies from one observer to another (this is a known fact, because the accuracy of GPS signals transmitted from satellites are dependent on it) and an entropic time that drives the entire universe and stops time from running backwards, thus ensuring causality is never violated. And what of time in quantum mechanics? Well, quantum mechanics hints that there is something about our universe that we still don’t know or understand, and to (mis)quote Wittgenstein: Of that which one does not know, one should not speak.

Addendum: Timmo, who is a real physicist, has pointed out that my comment on entanglement could be misconstrued. Specifically, entanglement does not allow faster-than-light communication. For a more comprehensive discussion on entanglement, I refer you to an earlier post.

Addendum 2: I revisited this topic in Oct. 2011 with a post, Where does time go? (in quantum mechanics).

What dreams are made of

2010-06-20T10:22:00.006+10:00

Last week’s New Scientist (12 June 2010) had a very interesting article on dreams, in particular ‘lucid dreaming’, by Jessica Hamzelou. She references numerous people: Ursula Voss (University of Franfurt), Patrick McNamara (Boston University), Allan Hobson (Harvard Medical School), Eric Nofzinger (University of Pittsburgh) Victor Spoormaker (Utrecht University) and Michael Czisch (Max Planck Institute); so it’s a serious topic all over the world.

Ursula Voss argues that there are 2 states of consciousness, which she calls primary and secondary. ‘Primary’ being what most animals perceive: raw sensations and emotions; whereas ‘secondary’ is unique to humans, according to Voss, because only humans are “aware of being aware”. This in itself is an interesting premise.

I don’t agree with the well-known supposition that most animals don’t have a sense of ‘self’ because they don’t recognise themselves in a mirror. Even New Scientist reported on challenges to this view many years ago (before I started blogging). The lack of recognition of one’s own reflection is obviously a cognitive misperception, but it doesn’t axiomatically mean that the animal doesn’t have a sense of its own individuality relative to other members of its own species, which is how I would define a sense of self. In other words, a sense of self is the ability to differentiate one’s self from others. The fact that it mistakenly perceives its own reflection as an ‘other’, doesn’t imply the converse: that it can’t distinguish its self from a genuine other – in fact, if anything, it confirms that cognitive ability, albeit erroneously.

That’s a slight detour to the main topic, nevertheless it’s relevant, because I believe it’s not what Voss is referring to, which is our ability ‘to reflect upon ourselves and our feelings’. It’s hard to imagine that any animal can contemplate upon its own thoughts the way we do. What makes us unique, cognitively, is our ability to create concepts within concepts ad infinitum, which is why I can write an essay like this, but no other primate can. I always thought this was my own personal philosophical insight until I read Godel Escher Bach and realised that Douglas Hofstadter had reached it many years before. And, as Hofstadter would point out, it’s this very ability which allows us to look at ourselves almost objectively, just as we do others, that we call self-contemplation. If this is what Voss is referring to, when she talks about ‘secondary consciousness’, then I would probably agree with her premise.

So what has this to do with dreams? Well, one of the aspects of dreams, that distinguishes them from reality, is that they defy rational expectations, yet we seem totally acceptant of this. Voss contends that it’s because we lose our ‘secondary’ consciousness during dreaming that we lose our rational radar, so to speak (my turn of phrase, not hers).

The article argues that with lucid dreaming we can get our secondary consciousness back, and there is some neurological evidence to support this conjecture, but I’m getting ahead of myself. For those who haven’t come across the term before, lucid dreaming is the ability to take conscious control of one’s dream. In effect, one becomes aware that one is dreaming. Hamzelou even provides a 5-step procedure to induce lucid dreams.

Now, from personal experience, any time I’ve realised I’m dreaming, it immediately pops me out of the dream. Nevertheless, I believe I’ve experienced lucid dreaming, or at least, a form of it. According to Patrick McNamara (Boston University), our dream life goes down hill as we age, especially once we’ve passed adolescence. Well, I have a very rich dream life, virtually every night, but then I’ve learnt, from anecdotal evidence at least, that storytellers seem to dream more or recall them more than other people do. I’d be interested if there was any hard evidence to support this.

Certainly, storytellers understand the connection between story and dreaming, because, like stories, dreams put us in situations that we don’t face everyday. In fact, it has been argued that dreams evolutionary purpose was to remind us that the world can be a dangerous place. But I’m getting off the track again, because, as a storyteller, I believe that my stories come from the same place that my dreams do. In other words, in my dreams I meet all sorts of characters that I would never meet in real life, and have experiences that I would never have in real life. But I’ve long been aware that there are 2 parts to my dream: one part being generated by some unknown source and the other part being my subjective experience of it. In the dream, I behave as a conscious being, just as I would in the real world, and I wonder if this is what is meant by lucid dreaming. Likewise, when one is writing a story, there is often a sense that it comes from an unknown source, and you consciously inhabit the character who is experiencing it. Which is exactly what actors do, by the way, only the dream they are inhabiting is a movie set or a stage.

Neurological studies have shown that there is one area of the brain that shuts down during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep which is the signature behavioural symptom of dreaming. The ‘dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was remarkably subdued during REM sleep, compared with during wakefulness.’ Allan Hobson (Harvard) believes that this is our rationality filter (again, my term, not his) because its inactivity correlates with our acceptance of completely irrational and dislocated events. Neurological studies of lucid dreams have been difficult to capture, but one intriguing finding has been an increase in a specific brainwave at 40 hertz in the frontal regions. In fact, the neurological studies done so far, point to brain activity being somewhere in between normal REM sleep and full wakefulness. The studies aren’t sensitive enough to determine if the DLFPC plays a role in lucid dreams or not, but the 40 hertz brainwave is certainly more characteristic of wakefulness.

To me, dreams are what-if scenarios, and are opportunities to gain self-knowledge. I’ve long believed that one can learn from one’s dreams, not in a Jungian or Freudian sense, but more pragmatically. I’ve always believed that the way I behave in a dream simulates the way I would behave in real life. If I behave in a way that I’m not comfortable with, it makes me contemplate ways of self-improvement. Dreams allow us to face situations that we might not want to confront in reality. It’s our ability for self-reflection, that Voss calls secondary consciousness, that makes dreams valuable tools for self-knowledge. Stories often serve the same purpose. A story that really impacts on us, is usually one that confronts issues relevant to our lives, or makes us aware of issues we prefer to ignore. In this sense, both dreams and stories can be a good antidote for denial.

Why religion is not the root of all evil

2010-05-23T10:42:00.006+10:00

I heard an interview with William Dalrymple last week (19 May 2010, Sydney time) who is currently attending the Sydney Writers’ Festival. The interview centred around his latest book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.

Dalrymple was born in Edinburgh but has traveled widely in India and the book apparently examines the lives of nine religious followers in India. I haven’t read the book myself, but, following the interview, I’m tempted to seek it out.

As the title of his book suggests, Dalrymple appears fascinated with the religious in general, although he gave no indication in the interview what his own beliefs may be. His knowledge of India’s religions seems extensive and there are a couple of points he raised which I found relevant to the West’s perspective on Eastern religions and the current antagonistic attitudes towards religious issues: Islam, in particular.

As I say, I haven’t read the book, but the gist of it, according to the interview, is that he interviewed nine people, who lead distinctly different cultural lives in India, and wrote a chapter on each one. One of the points he raised, which I found relevant to my own viewpoint, is the idea that God exists inside us and not out there. This is something that I’ve discussed before and I don’t wish to dwell on here, but he inferred that the idea can be found in Sufism as well as Hinduism. It should be pointed out, by the way, that there is not one Hindu religion, and, in fact, Hinduism is really a collection of religions, that the West tend to put all in one conceptual basket. Dalrymple remarked on the similarity between Islamic Sufism and some types of Hinduism, which have flourished in India. In particular, he pointed out that the Sufis are the strongest opponents of Wahhabi-style Islam in Pakistan, which is very similar to the fundamentalism of the Taliban. I raise this point, because many people are unaware that there is huge diversity in Islam, with liberal attitudes pitted against conservative attitudes, the same as we find in any society worldwide, secular or otherwise.

This contradicts the view expressed by Hitchens and Harris (Dawkins has never expressed it, as far as I’m aware, but I’m sure he would concur) that people with moderate religious views somehow give succour to the fundamentalists and extremists in the world. This is a view, which is not just counter-productive, it’s divisive, simplistic, falsely based and deeply prejudicial. And it makes me bloody angry.

These are very intelligent, very knowledgeable and very articulate men, but this stance is an intellectualisation of a deeply held prejudice against religion in general. Because they are atheists, they believe it gives them a special position – they see themselves as being outside the equation – because they have no religious belief, they are objective, which gives them a special status. My point is that they can hardly ask for people with religious views to show tolerance towards each other if they can intellectualise their own intolerance towards all religions. By expressing the view, no matter how obtuse, that any religious tolerance somehow creates a shelter or cover for extremists, they are fomenting intolerance towards those who are actually practicing tolerance.

Dawkins was in Australia for an international Atheist convention in Melbourne, earlier this year. Religion is not a hot topic in this country, but, of course, it becomes a hot topic while he’s visiting, which makes me really glad that he doesn’t live here full time. On a TV panel show, he made the provocative inference that no evil has ever come from atheism. So atheists are not only intellectually superior to everyone else but they are also morally superior. What he said and what he meant, is that no atheist has ever attempted genocide on a religious group because of his or her atheism (therefore religious belief) but lots of political groups have, which may or may not be atheistic. In other words, when it comes to practicing genocide, whether the identification of the outgroup is religious or political becomes irrelevant. We don’t need religion to create politically unstable groups, they can be created by atheists as easily as they can by religious zealots. Dawkins, of course, chooses his words carefully, to give the impression that no atheist would ever indulge in an act of genocide, be it psychological or physical, but we all know that political ideology is no less dangerous than religious ideology.

One of Dawkins’ favourite utterances is: “There is no such thing as a Muslim child.” If one takes that statement to its logical conclusion, he’s advocating that all children should be disassociated from their cultural heritage. Is he aware of how totalitarian that idea is? He wants to live in a mono-culture, where everyone gets the correct education that axiomatically will ensure they will never believe in the delusion of God. Well, I don’t want to live in that world, so, frankly, he can have it.

People like to point to all the conflicts in the world of the last half century, from Ireland to the Balkans to the Middle East as examples of how religion creates conflicts. The unstated corollary is that if we could rid the world of religion we would rid it of its main source of conflict. This is not just naïve, it’s blatantly wrong. All these conflicts are about the haves and have-nots. Almost all conflicts, including the most recent one in Thailand are about one group having economical control over another. That’s what happened in Ireland, in former Yugoslavia, and, most significantly, in Palestine. In many parts of the world, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan being typical examples, religion and politics are inseparable. It’s naïve in the extreme to believe, from the vantage of a secular society, that if you rid a society of its religious beliefs you will somehow rid it of its politics, or make the politics more stable. You make the politics more stable by getting rid of nepotism and corruption. In Afghanistan, the religious fundamentalists have persuasion and political credibility because the current alternative solution is corrupt and financially self-serving.

It should be obvious for anyone who follows my blog that I’m not anti-atheist. In fact, I’ve done my best to stay out of this debate. But, to be honest, I refuse to take sides in the way some commentators infer we should. I don’t see it as an US and THEM debate, because I don’t live in a country where people with religious agendas are trying to take control of the parliament. We have self-confessed creationists in our political system, but, as was demonstrated on the same panel that Dawkins was on, they are reluctant to express that view in public, and they have no agenda, hidden or otherwise, for changing the school curricula. I live in a country where you can have a religious point of view and you won’t be hung up and scrutinised by every political commentator in the land.

Religion has a bad rap, not helped by the Catholic Church’s ‘above the law’ attitude towards sexual abuse scandals, but religious belief per se should never be the litmus test for someone’s intelligence, moral integrity or strength of character, either way.

Aerodynamics demystified

2010-05-09T11:29:00.006+10:00

I know: you don’t believe me; but you haven’t read Henk Tennekes’s book, The Simple Science of Flight; From Insects to Jumbo Jets. This is a book that should be taught in high school, not to get people into the aerospace industry, but to demonstrate how science works in the real world. It is probably the best example I’ve come across, ever.

I admit, I have an advantage with this book, because I have an engineering background, but the truth is that anyone, with a rudimentary high school education in mathematics, should be able to follow this book. By rudimentary, I mean you don’t need to know calculus, just how to manipulate basic equations. Aerodynamics is one of the most esoteric subjects on the planet – all the more reason that Tennekes’s book should be part of a high school curriculum. It demonstrates the availability of science to the layperson better than any book I’ve read on a single subject.

Firstly, you must appreciate that mathematics is about the relationship between numbers rather than the numbers themselves. This is why an equation can be written without any numbers at all, but with symbols (letters of the alphabet) representing numbers. The numbers can have any value as long as the relationship between them is dictated by the equation. So, for an equation containing 3 symbols, if you know 2 of the values, you can work out the third. Elementary, really. To give an example from Tennekes’s book:

W/S=0.38 V²

Where W is the weight of the flying object (in Newtons), S is the area of the wing (square metres) and V is cruising speed (metres per second). 0.38 is a factor dependent on the angle of attack of the wing (average 6 degrees) and the density of the medium (0.3125 kg/m3; air at sea level). What Tennekes reveals graphically is that you can apply this equation to everything from a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) to an Airbus A380 on what he calls The Great Flight Diagram. (Mind you, his graph is logarithmic along both axes, but that’s being academic, quite literally.)

I’ve used a small sleight-of-hand here, because the equation for the graph is actually:

W/S = c x W^1/3

W/S (weight divided by wing area which gives pressure) is called ‘wing loading’ and is proportional to the cubed root of the Weight, which is a direct consequence of the first equation (that I haven’t explained, though Tennekes does). Tennekes’s ‘Great Flight Diagram’ employs the second equation, but gives V (flight cruise speed) as one of the axes (horizontal) against Weight (vertical axis); both logarithmic as I said. At the risk of confusing you, the second equation graphs better (it gives a straight line on a logarithmic scale) but the relationships of both equations are effectively entailed in the one graph, because W, W/S and V can all be read from it.

I was amazed that one equation could virtually cover the entire range of flight dynamics for winged objects on the planet. The equations also effectively explain the range of flight dynamics that nature allows to take place. The heavier something is, the faster it has to fly to stay in the air, which is why 747s consistently fly 200 times faster than fruit flies. The equation shows that there is a relationship between weight, wing area and air speed at all scales, and while that relationship can be stretched it has limits. Flyers (both natural and artificial) left of the curve are slow for their size and ones to the right are fast for their size – they represent the effective limits. (A line on a graph is called a ‘curve’, even if it’s straight, to distinguish it from a grid-line.) So a side-benefit of the book is that it provides a demonstration of how mathematics is not only a tool of analysis, but how it reveals nature’s limits within a specific medium – in this case, air in earth’s gravitational field. It reminded me of why I fell in love with physics when I was in high school – nature’s secrets revealed through mathematics.

The iconic Supermarine Spitfire is one of the few that is right on the curve, but, as Tennekes points out, it was built to climb fast as an interceptor, not for outright speed.

Now, for those who know more about this subject than I do, they may ask: what about Reynolds numbers? Well, I know Reynolds numbers are used by aeronautical engineers to scale up aerodynamic phenomena from small scale models they use in wind tunnels to full scale aeroplanes. Tennekes conveniently leaves this out, but then he’s not explaining how we use models to provide data for their full scale equivalents – he’s explaining what happens at full scale no matter what the scale is. So speed increases with weight and therefore scale – we are not looking for a conversion factor to take us from one scale to another, which is what Reynolds numbers do. (Actually, there’s a lot more to Reynolds numbers than that, but it’s beyond my intellectual ken.) I’m not an aeronautical engineer, though I did work in a very minor role on the design of a wind tunnel once. By minor role, I took minutes of the meetings held by the real experts.

When I was in high school, I was told that winged flight was all explained by the Bernoulli effect, which Tennekes describes as a ‘polite fiction’. So, that little gem alone, makes Tennekes’s book a worthwhile addition to any school’s science library.

But the real value in this book comes when he starts to talk about migrating birds and the relationship between energy and flight. Not only does he compare aeroplanes with other forms of transport, thus explaining why flight is the most economical means of travel over long distances, as nature has already proven with birds, but he analyses what it takes for the longest flying birds to achieve their goals, and how they live at the limit of what nature allows them to do. Again, he uses mathematics, that the reader can work out for themselves, to convert calories from food into muscle power into flight speed and distance, to verify that the very best traveled migratory birds don’t cheat nature, but live at its limits.

The most extraordinary example being bar-tailed godwits that fly across the entire Pacific Ocean from Alaska to New Zealand and to Australia’s Northern Territory – a total of 11,000 km non-stop (7,000 miles). It’s such a feat that Tennekes claims it requires a rethink on the metabolic efficiency of the muscles of these birds, and he provides the numbers to support his argument. He also explains how birds can convert fat directly into energy for muscles, something we can’t do (we have to convert it into sugar first). He also explains how some migratory birds even start to atrophy their wing muscles and heart muscles to extend their trip – they literally burn up their own muscles for fuel.

So he combines physics with biology with zoology with mathematics, all in one chapter, on one specific subject: bird migration.

He uses another equation, along with a graphic display of vectors, that explains how flapping wings work on exactly the same principle as ice skating in humans. What’s more, he doesn’t even tell the reader that he’s working with vectors, or use trigonometry to explain it, yet anyone would be able to understand the connection. That’s just brilliant exposition.

In a nutshell (without the diagrams) power equals force times speed: P=FV. For the same amount of Power, you can have a large Force and small Velocity or the converse.

In other words, a large force times a small velocity can be transformed into a small force with a large velocity, with very little energy loss if friction is minimalised. This applies to both skaters and birds. The large force, in skating, is your leg pushing sideways against your skate, with a small sideways velocity, resulting in a large velocity forwards, from a small force on the skate backwards. Because the skate is at a slight angle, the force sideways (from your leg) is much greater than the force backwards, but it translates into a high velocity forwards.

The same applies to birds on their downstroke: a large force vertically, at a slight forward angle, gives a higher velocity forward. Tennekes says that the ratio of wing tip velocity to forward velocity for birds is typically 1 to 3, though varies between 2 and 4. If a bird wants to fly faster, they don’t flap quicker, they increase the amplitude, which, at the same frequency, increases wing tip speed, which increases forward flight speed. Simple, isn’t it? The sound you hear when pigeons or doves take off vertically is there wing tips actually touching (on both strokes). Actually, what you hear is the whistle of air escaping the closed gap, as a continuous chirp, which is their flapping frequency. So when they take off, they don’t double their wing flapping frequency, they double their wing flapping amplitude, which doubles their wing tip speed at the same frequency: the wing tip has to travel double the distance in the same time.

One possible point of confusion is a term Tennekes uses called ‘specific energy consumption’, which is a ratio, not an amount of energy as its description implies. It is used to compare energy consumption or energy efficiency between different birds (or planes), irrespective of what units of energy one uses. The inversion of the ratio gives the glide ratio (for both birds and planes) or what the French call ‘Finesse’ – a term that has special appeal to Tennekes. So a lower energy consumption gives a longer guide ratio, or vice versa, as one would expect.

Tennekes finally gets into esoteric territory when he discusses drag and vortices, but he’s clever enough to perform an integral without introducing his readers to calculus. He’s even more clever when he derives an equation based on vortices and links it back to the original equation that I referenced at the beginning of this post. Again, he’s demonstrating how mathematics keeps us honest. To give another, completely unrelated example: if Einstein’s general theory of relativity couldn’t be linked to Newton’s general equation of gravity, then Einstein would have had to abandon it. Tennekes does exactly the same thing for exactly the same reason: to show that his new equation agrees with what has already been demonstrated empirically. Although it’s not his equation, but Ludwig Prandtl’s, whom he calls the ‘German grandfather of aerodynamics’.

Prandtl based his equation on an analogy with electromagnetic induction, which Tennekes explains in some detail. They both deal with an induced phenomenon that occurs in a circular loop perpendicular to the core axis. Vortices create drag, but in aerodynamics it actually goes down with speed, which is highly counterintuitive, but explains why flight is so economical compared to other forms of travel, both for birds and for planes. The drag from vortices is called ‘induced’ drag, not to be confused with ‘frictional’ drag that does increase with air speed, so at some point there is an optimal speed, and, logically, Tennekes provides the equation that gives us that as well. He also explains how it’s the vortices from wing tips that cause many long distance flyers, like geese and swans, to fly in V formation. The vortex supplies an updraft just aft and adjacent to the wingtip that the following bird takes advantage of.

Tennekes uses his equations to explain why human-powered flight is the reserve of professional cyclists, and not a recreational sport like hang-gliding or conventional gliding. Americans apparently use the term, sailplane, instead of glider, and Tennekes uses both without explaining he’s referring to the same thing.

Tennekes reveals that his doctoral thesis (in 1964) critiqued the Concorde (still on the drawing board back then) as ‘a step backward in the history of aviation.’ This was considered heretical at the time, but not now, as history has demonstrated to his credit.

The Concorde is now given as an example, in psychology, of how humans are the only species that don’t know when to give up (called the ‘Concorde effect’). Unlike other species, humans evaluate the effort they’ve put into an endeavour, and sometimes, the more effort they invest, the more determined they become to succeed. Whether this is a good or bad trait is purely subjective, but it can evolve into a combination of pride, egotism and even denial. In the case of the Concorde, Tennekes likens it to a manifestation of ‘megalomania’, comparable to Howard Hughes’ infamous Spruce Goose.

Tennekes’s favourite plane is the Boeing 747, which is the complete antithesis to the Concorde, in evolutionary terms, and developed at the same time; apparently so it could be converted to a freight plane when supersonic flight became the expected norm. So, in some respects, the 747, and its successors, were an ironic by-product of the Concorde-inspired thinking of the time.

My only criticism of Tennekes is that he persistently refers to a budgerigar as a parakeet. This is parochialism on my part: in Australia, where they are native, we call them budgies.

To have or not to have free will

2010-04-11T15:20:00.023+10:00

In some respects this post is a continuation of the last one. The following week’s issue of New Scientist (3 April 2010) had a cover story on ‘Frontiers of the Mind’ covering what it called Nine Big Brain Questions. One of these addressed the question of free will, which happened to be where my last post ended. In the commentary on question 8: How Powerful is the Subconscious? New Scientist refers to well-known studies demonstrating that neuron activity precedes conscious decision-making by 50 milliseconds. In fact, John-Dylan Haynes of the Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience, Berlin, has ‘found brain activity up to 10 seconds before a conscious decision to move [a finger].’ To quote Haynes: “The conscious mind is not free. What we think of as ‘free will’ is actually found in the subconscious.”

New Scientist actually reported Haynes' work in this field back in their 19 April 2008 issue. Curiously, in the same issue, they carried an interview with Jill Bolte Taylor, who was recovering from a stroke, and claimed that she "was consciously choosing and rebuilding my brain to be what I wanted it to be". I wrote to New Scientist at the time, and the letter can still be found on the Net:

You report John-Dylan Haynes finding it possible to detect a decision to press a button up to 7 seconds before subjects are aware of deciding to do so (19 April, p 14). Haynes then concludes: "I think it says there is no free will."
In the same issue Michael Reilly interviews Jill Bolte Taylor, who says she "was consciously choosing and rebuilding my brain to be what I wanted it to be" while recovering from a stroke affecting her cerebral cortex (p 42) . Taylor obviously believes she was executing free will.
If free will is an illusion, Taylor's experience suggests that the brain can subconsciously rewire itself while giving us the illusion that it was our decision to make it do so. There comes a point where the illusion makes less sense than the reality.

To add more confusion, during the last week, I heard an interview with Norman Doidge MD, Research psychiatrist at the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Centre and the University of Toronto, who wrote the book, The Brain That Changes Itself. I haven’t read the book, but the interview was all about brain plasticity, and Doidge specifically asserts that we can physically change our brains, just through thought.

What Haynes' experimentation demonstrates is that consciousness is dependent on brain neuronal activity, and that’s exactly the point I made in my last post. Our subconscious becomes conscious when it goes ‘global’, so one would expect a time-lapse between a ‘local’ brain activity (that is subconscious) and the more global brain activity (that is conscious). But the weird part is that Taylor’s experience, and Doidge’s assertions, is that our conscious thoughts can also affect our brain at the neuron level. This reminds me of Douglas Hofstadter’s thesis that we all are a ‘strange loop’, that he introduced in his book, Godel, Escher, Bach, and then elaborated on in a book called I am a Strange Loop. I’ve read the former tome but not the latter one (refer my post on AI & Consciousness, Feb.2009).

We will learn more and more about consciousness, I’m sure, but I’m not at all sure that we will ever truly understand it. As John Searle points out in his book, Mind, at the end of the day, it is an experience, and a totally subjective experience at that. In regard to studying it and analysing it, we can only ever treat it as an objective phenomenon. The Dalai Lama makes the same point in his book, The Universe in a Single Atom.

People tend to think about this from a purely reductionist viewpoint: once we understand the correlation between neuron activity and conscious experience, the mystery stops being a mystery. But I disagree: I expect the more we understand, the bigger the mystery will become. If consciousness is no less weird than quantum mechanics, I’ll be very surprised. And we are already seeing quite a lot of weirdness, when consciousness is clearly dependent on neuronal activity, and yet the brain’s plasticity can be affected by conscious thought.

So where does this leave free will? Well, I don’t think that we are automatons, and I admit I would find it very depressing if that was the case. The last of the Nine Questions in last week’s New Scientist, asks: will AI ever become sentient? In its response, New Scientist reports on some of the latest developments in AI, where they talk about ‘subconscious’ and ‘conscious’ layers of activity (read software). Raul Arrables of the Carlos III University of Madrid, has developed ‘software agents’ called IDA (Intelligent Distribution Agent) and is currently working on LIDA (Learning IDA). By ‘subconcious’ and ‘conscious’ levels, the scientists are really talking about tiers of ‘decision-making’, or a hierarchic learning structure, which is an idea I’ve explored in my own fiction. At the top level, the AI has goals, which are effectively criteria of success or failure. At the lower level it explores various avenues until something is ‘found’ that can be passed onto the higher level. In effect, the higher level chooses the best option from the lower level. The scientists working on this 2 level arrangement, have even given their AI ‘emotions’, which are built-in biases that direct them in certain directions. I also explored this in my fiction, with the notion of artificial attachment to a human subject that would simulate loyalty.

But, even in my fiction, I tend to agree with Searle, that these are all simulations, which might conceivably convince a human that an AI entity really thinks like us. But I don’t believe the brain is a computer, so I think it will only ever be an analogy or a very good simulation.

Both this development in AI and the conscious/subconscious loop we seem to have in our own brains reminds me of the ‘Bayesian’ model of the brain developed by Karl Friston and also reported in New Scientist (31 May 2008). They mention it again in an unrelated article in last week’s issue – one of the little unremarkable reports they do – this time on how the brain predicts the future. Friston effectively argues that the brain, and therefore the mind, makes predictions and then modifies the predictions based on feedback. It’s effectively how the scientific method works as well, but we do it all the time in everyday encounters, without even thinking about it. But Friston argues that it works at the neuron level as well as the cognitive level. Neuron pathways are reinforced through use, which is a point that Norman Doidge makes in his interview. We now know that the brain literally rewires itself, based on repeated neuron firings.

Because we think in a language, which has become a default ‘software’ for ourselves, we tend to think that we really are just ‘wetware’ computers, yet we don’t share this ability with other species. We are the only species that ‘downloads’ a language to our progeny, independently of our genetic material. And our genetic material (DNA) really is software, as it is for every life form on the planet. We have a 4-letter code that provides the instructions to create an entire organism, materially and functionally – nature’s greatest magical trick.

One of the most important aspects of consciousness, not only in humans, but for most of the animal kingdom (one suspects) is that we all ‘feel’. I don’t expect an AI ever to feel anything, even if we programme it to have emotions.

But it is because we can all ‘feel’, that our lives mean so much to us. So, whether we have free will or not, what really matters is what we feel. And without feeling, I would argue that we would not only be not human, but not sentient.

Footnote: If you're interested in neuroscience at all, the interview linked above is well worth listening to, even though it's 40 mins long.