"Bloody reductionist-materialist vandals!"

Exiting Ratusz-Arsenał Metro station by Aleja Solidarności yesterday, I came across this thought-provoking piece of street art featuring Prof Stephen Hawking (below), which has prompted me to write a blog post about it.

The quote, attributed to him, reads: Fundamentalna zasada rządząca wszechświatem: przyczyny występują przed skutkami, nigdy odwrotnie. ("The fundamental principle ruling the Universe: causes appear before the effects, not vice versa.")

Having done a bit of Googling, I can see this is a popular quote in Polish, though it's not one that appears in Hawking's own language, English. Googling further, the source of this quote is an article Hawking allegedly wrote for the Daily Mail, which was translated into Polish and appeared in the weekly Forum* in May 2010. Except - fishing out all the pieces by Hawking that appeared in the Daily Mail between 2009 and 2011, there's nothing remotely like this quote in any of them. I've scrolled through reams of Hawking quotes from various sources; again, this doesn't figure.

I suspect some creative journalist or 'translator' just made it up, using Hawking's name to lend respectability to the idea. In any case, Hawking's mind was way too sharp to line up cause and effect in such a simplistic manner. Time's arrow does indeed appear to use to fly in the direction of increasing entropy, but in a block universe, cause and effect could be simultaneous. String theory, 30 years old and neither proved nor disproved, suggests something similar. Some metaphysicists like Dean Radin or Rupert Sheldrake even posit that the mind can 'pull' effect out of a future, thus predating its cause.

The notion that causes appear before the effects and not vice versa is pure Newton; the classical physics of billiard balls and planets orbiting stars; "every action has an equal and opposite reaction". The discovery of quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle - and gaping holes in our understanding of what led up to the Big Bang, or the nature of dark matter and dark energy, suggest that our understanding of the Universe isn't up to the task of linking cause and effect in such a simplistic way. 

A brief acquaintance with retrocausality would disabuse the interested reader of the notion that cause must always precede effect, especially at the subatomic level. Feynman diagrams can run both ways, from left to right as well as right to left - implying a future that can take place before the past.

Even so, Hawking was definitely not a metaphysicist; for him, "heaven is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark". (And yes, this is a pukka Hawking quote.) Yet today, an ever-growing body of scientists and philosophers believe that consciousness is not merely an emergent phenomenon that evolved as neuronal activity in animals reached a critical mass, but a property fundamental to the Universe, manifesting itself to us in our minds, which are located for the duration of our biological lives in our brains. After which, the Return to Forever.

If you have ten minutes to spare, do watch this short interview with Prof Bernard Carr, mathematician and astronomer (who studied under Hawking at Cambridge, where he did his doctorate).

The notion that consciousness pervades the Universe, that there is something far deeper at work which our perceptions, wedded to realism on the human scale, have yet to fully fathom.

Reductionist-materialists often take pops at those whose worldview has room for the metaphysical and the supernatural with the same dogmatic zeal as the religious fundamentalists who state that the written word of God is All. The truth surely lies somewhere in between.

I am grateful, however, for 3fala.art for this mini-mural which at least raises some interesting questions.

* Forum appears every two weeks since 2013.

This time last year:
Viaduct at Węzeł Zamienie opens

This time two years ago:
Future, past

This time three years ago:
Birds return to the frozen ponds

This time five years ago:
Bending the forces of physics with your will

This time seven years ago:
Giving it up for Lent

This time nine years ago:
North-east of Warsaw West revisited

This time ten years ago:
Looking for answers

This time 11 years ago:
Fresh powder in Warsaw's parks

This time 13 years ago:
Another Lent starts

This time 15 years ago:
Okęcie dusk

Time and Consciousness

I wrote two weeks ago about consciousness and spacetime; I'd now like to separate time from space in the context of consciousness.

A few recent podcasts, in particular Lex Fridman's conversation with Donald Hoffman, have reinforced my appreciation of consciousness as the fundamental property of the Universe. Consciousness, I believe, is not something that emerged as a result of the evolution of life, but something that sparked the Big Bang and drove evolution. Donald Hoffman posits that spacetime is a product of consciousness, and not merely something found within spacetime, here and there, exclusively on planets hosting sentient life.

I want to consider the nature of Time in the context of Consciousness. Stephen Hawking's well-known A Brief History of Time, and Carlo Rovelli's (better, in my opinion) The Order of Time. Hawking's approach is purely scientific - attempting to define time in an objective, empirical manner. Full of black holes and entanglement, the book is the approach of a mathematician and physicist anchored in the 1980s. The term 'consciousness' does not enter in to it. 

Rovelli has the advantage of writing 30 years after Hawking, and so his book is more up to date with recent scientific thinking. Rovelli's big insight is that entropy is the only way of telling the direction of time. A mouldy strawberry will never recover its prime. A strawberry in its prime can only rot - it will never return to its seedling state. Hence, the Universe can never run time backwards. Most reactions are reversibly -  entropy is not. Interestingly, entropy hardly figures in Hawking's book; its first mention is on page 102, and then mainly in the context of black holes.

There's objective time, moving from past into future at the steady rate of one second per second. But - as Hawking and Rovelli both point out - that 'objective' time can be distorted by gravity. From Einstein on, the Newtonian notion of time being fixed across the Cosmos vanishes. Instead, the notion of time as witnessed by an observer at one specific location in the Cosmos takes over.

So time is subjective, rather than objective? Subjective time - time as perceived by you or me. This time cannot be measured by a clock, it can only be felt. We all feel that time passes more quickly as you get older. This is because at the age of 50, a year is just 2% of the life you've experienced thus far, while at the age of ten it is 10% - so at 50, a year feels five times shorter than it did when you were ten. And here, I believe, entropy kicks in. We feel we're getting older, there's less and less time left. So we are more determined as middle-aged adults to get stuff done - pressure a child does not feel. [As an aside, if you stroke your purring cat for five minutes, and then feel guilty that you must leave it and do something else, remember - you've been stroking it for 20 cat-minutes. From the cat's subjective experience, of course.]

You can slow down time, subjectively. Assume the plank position - legs and back ramrod straight, propped up on your elbows. Before you start, open the clock app in your phone, place it on the ground in front of you, select the stopwatch function and press 'start' as you begin holding the plank. And hold. Minute, two, three... four... five? Time's dragging... every tenth of a second that passes seems to do so more slowly. While I'm holding the plank, I listen to podcasts - ones that grip my attention. I focus on what I'm listening to, rather than looking at the stopwatch. Or toggle between the two for an interesting effect of time passing slowly and quickly, simultaneously.

[British spiritual philosopher, Rupert Spira, says that the past is where our forgotten memories go. If you still remember something, it remains - as a memory - in the present. I like this concept.]

Subjectively, your consciousness looks forward in time to an event or events, whilst elapsed time is measured in memories. When did that happen - two weeks ago or three weeks ago? A diary, calendar - or indeed blog - is useful for recalling the objective moment in time, but subjectively, some events stand out more than others. Qualia memories that have a habit of resurfacing from the past. I lived (as I wrote the other day) in Coventry for two academic years, but two specific days stand out far more strongly than all the rest.

Non-local consciousness is a supposed phenomenon that gives rise to remote viewing. The US government's Project Star Gate (parodied in the film The Men Who Stare At Goats, starring George Clooney) is claimed to have had one major success to its credit - finding a Soviet nuclear bomber that crashed in the jungle in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1979. This is an example of remote viewing across space, but another project the US government (allegedly) embarked upon dealt with remote viewing across time - the recruitment of 4,000 people who claimed to have the ability to see into the future to ask them to 'view' the year 2050 - from 1978 to 1991. What the experiment's organiser, Stephan A. Schwartz, was looking for was a consensus; salient points that featured across many of the remote viewings. Having predicted - or rather foreseen - the breakup of the Soviet Union and numerous pandemics, it seems they are on to something. [If this tickles your interest, here's a recent talk about it.]

My personal belief is that some of us do indeed have psychic powers to 'see' across space and time, but those powers are weak and they occur rarely across society. But collectively, there could be something in this approach.

The question is - to what extent is this intuition, to what extent educated guesswork, and to what extent a genuine supernatural power to peer accurately into something that hasn't happened yet? If the latter, then how does consciousness permeate across time? If, as some panpsychists claim, consciousness is uniformly spread across space - could it not also be said to be uniformly spread across time? 

And if consciousness exists simultaneously across time - what does that mean for notions of reincarnation and spiritual evolution? From this point of view - my long-held belief in a journey from Zero to One must be examined to consider whether we're at Zero and One at the same time - or is it neither and both? I suspect that the unfolding of the Universe is a one-way process that does indeed follow time's arrow from (imperfect) past to (perfect) future. There's only one way to find out... Live on, in curiosity, in observation.

One for me to ponder on for future posts.

This time last year:
Altered states - higher planes

This time six years ago:
Warsaw-Radom line modernisation - Czachówek

This time 12 years ago:
Climbing Mogielica

Time - religion and metaphysics

Lent 2020 - Day 30

How religion sees time is interesting. I was thinking about the second verse of the traditional Polish carol Wśród nocnej ciszy while writing yesterday's post about prophesy, and in it pops the notion of time:

Ach, witaj Zbawco z dawna żądany,
Cztery tysiące lat wyglądany
Na Ciebie króle, prorocy
Czekali, a Tyś tej nocy
Nam się objawił.

"We greet ye, Saviour, desired for ages,
Looked out for for four thousand years,
For you kings and prophets
Waited, and you this night
Appeared to us."

Jesus's birth to a virgin was foretold for a period of time twice as long before his birth as the time between His birth and our age. But four thousand years - to be more accurate, four thousand and four years, was the span of time between the creation of the Earth by God and the birth of Jesus, according to Archbishop Ussher, Primate of All Ireland, in 1650. The Augustinian notion of the Six Ages of the World, which inspired Ussher, stems from II Peter 3:8 - "One day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." The interpretation was taken to mean that mankind would live through six 1,000 year periods, with the seventh being eternity in heaven. Taking this literally, Ussher indicated that Jesus would come again in glory to judge the living and the dead around 2000 AD.

Pre-Enlightenment Man lived in the here and now. A lifetime was, well, a lifetime. There was no notion of bigly huge numbers; there were stars and there were planets, but these were just 'up there', rather than billions of light years away. Time passed with the seasons. A time to sow, a time to reap. And after a gruelling life of toil, a time to die, and then hopefully to rest in God's eternal home.

Science has given us a grasp of the enormity of the universe, helped by mathematical notations such as orders of magnitude. We understand time better than our forefathers, and yet... and yet.

I have written about the late Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and Carlo Rovelli's (much briefer) The Order of Time. Rovelli's more recent work (30 years after Hawking) has the advantage of being easier to grasp conceptually and of benefiting from 30 additional years of theoretical physics to draw on. Both books advance our (layperson's) perception greatly.

The key lesson from Rovelli is that time goes from past to future, in one, irreversible direction only, because of entropy. Rudolf Clausius's equation for entropy change, ΔS ≥1 is, according to Rovelli, "the only equation of fundamental physics that knows any difference between past and future. The only one that speaks of the flowing of time." This is is significant in the age of quantum mechanics; other equations are reversible, whereas if you leave a glass of hot water in a cold room, the water will only tend to get cold. It is here we can witness the passage of time.

Time is granular; it comes in units. The shortest unit of time is Planck time (5.39 x 10^-44 second), the time it takes light to travel one Planck length (1.616 x 10^-35 metres, the shortest unit of distance in the universe) in a vacuum. Both being discrete units, there is no thing as half a Planck time or a third of a Planck length; they are absolutes.

All well and good, but how do we perceive time and why is important to religion, especially in the context of prophesy? As we age, we perceive time to accelerate. This is because our consciousness has experienced more of it when we're older; for a ten year-old, one year represents 10% of their lifetime. For a 50 year-old, one year represents but 2% of their lifetime. You are accelerating towards the end of your days, from the moment you become conscious of the passage of time as an infant.

For religions, the End of Days has to be sufficiently close at hand to be scary - this makes the social control function easier to apply. I am an optimist; I do believe there's an infinitely long-term plan for our universe. Stretch out your horizons beyond one human life-span and eternity sitting on a cloud with a harp praising God sounds a bit limited.

The past, on the other hand, is as illusory as the future. When I wake up each morning, the past (the recent past, the distant past) becomes nothing more than a tool-bag of useful experience needed to live out the rest of my life. Artefacts are on the shelf; books, photos, mementos that nudge the memory and draw out memories. But memories - those qualia memories of subjective experiences from the past - can come unbidden, or can be triggered by smells, sights, sounds, sensations or tastes.

These form the thread that link the current you - the current assemblage of atoms, molecules and proteins - the stuff that knit you - and what you once were. The notion that there's not a single atom in you that was there nine years ago (quoted by Bill Bryson) or seven years ago (quoted by Richard Swinburne) becomes significant. Rationalists would say that your long-term memory is stored somewhere within your brain. However, science has yet to pin it down, or even define 'memory' on agreed terms. Those memories from your past abide within you, despite the 'youness' of you having changed over time. So when you reach back to a memory from decades ago - an embarrassing childhood moment that can still make you cringe - and there you are - that's your soul.

This time four years ago:
Easter Everywhere, Lent reaches an end

This time eight years ago:
Sunset shots, first bike ride to work

This time ten years ago:
Poland's trains ran faster before the war

This time 11 years ago:
Winter in spring: surely this must be the last snow?

This time 12 years ago:
Surely THIS must be the last snow?

A Brief History of Time review, Part 2

Lent 2018, Day 44

My Lenten quest this year strolls along the boundary layer between Science and Religion; an important area of inquiry through which few humans tread. I have come to have a deep respect for Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe - the words 'humanity' and 'creative' being all-important descriptors of the word 'universe'. Kauffman's world view is more open to notions of the universe having a direction and purpose; of a universal consciousness that's continually evolving. Steven Hawking's A Brief History of Time hails from a passing age, in which it was believed that before too long, science would be able to explain everything.

As I wrote yesterday in Part 1 of my review, Hawking's bestseller remains a milestone in popular-science writing. It sets out the two theories of how we understand this universe in which we live, at the subatomic level (quantum mechanics) and at the galactic level (relativity). It also explains black holes, the radiation (subsequently named Hawking radiation) that seeps out of them, despite previous theories that nothing should escape their gravitational pull. And Hawking describes Time as an arrow that flies only one way - and why that should be.

So there we are, at the end of chapter 9, cheering on scientific progress in its quest to unify all theories into one, so we end up understanding everything. But hold on... Chapter 10 is called The Unification of Physics, and in it, Hawking explains the current (as of 1988) thinking in terms of unifying quantum theory with relativity. It was all meant to be so simple... "In 1928, physicist and Nobel prize winner Max Born [said] 'Physics, as we know it, will be over in six months'. " Hawking continues; "I still believe that there are grounds for cautious optimism that we many now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature."

Aafter introducing the then-trendy superstring theory (space-time was thought to consist of ten or 26 dimensions back in 1988), he asks: "But can there really be such a unified theory? Or are we perhaps just chasing a mirage?" Kauffman believes that a Grand Unified Theory, a single set of rules that consistently describes and explains everything, is exactly that.

Hawking sets out three possibilities:

"1) There really is a complete unified theory, which we will someday discover if we are smart enough.

2) There is no ultimate theory of the universe, just an infinite sequence of theories that describe the universe ever more accurately.

3) There is no theory of the universe; events cannot be predicted beyond a certain extent but occur in a random and arbitrary manner."

I intuitively rule out possibility 1) on the grounds that we are not smart enough. The complexity of the universe (be it just our biodiversity or our human economy here on planet earth) is growing so rapidly that it would be folly to believe that we could. I'm happy enough with 2); an infinite sequence will take an eternity to unravel - to me, that feels instinctively right. And 3) also seems right - until eternity minus one chronon, when all (and I mean ALL) will become totally clear.

Hawking then sets up a straw-man argument... "Some would argue for possibility 3) on the grounds that if there were a complete set of laws, that would infringe God's freedom to change his mind and intervene in the world. It's a bit like the old paradox: Can God make a stone so heavy that he can't lift it?" Reductionist materialist scientists can take pops at medieval views of God and they can do it well; but it's time for religions to reconsider the notion of a supreme deity in much the same way that scientists (including Einstein himself) had to reconsider the laws of nature once the theory of quantum mechanics was proven to be correct.

Kauffman could also suggest a fourth possibility, namely that the laws of nature, the universal constants, the boundary conditions, are themselves evolving - so science is ultimately chasing a moving target. Kauffman's view of the universe is far grander that the dry calculus of classical physics. Positing consciousness as a property of matter, along with mass and energy hugely complicates mankind's search for a final theory. Those biologists who insist that the seat of consciousness resides exclusively in the human brain (and in the brain of higher-order animals) have yet to prove it, just as theoretical physicists have yet to unify quantum theory and relativity.

But then Kauffman has yet to prove that consciousness resides in subatomic particles; experiments into the way the conscious human observer can influence the outcome of quantum experiments by force of will are are a long way off from showing any conclusive results.

One way or another, science is far from 'over'; it behoves those of us who take the view of the universe as being purposeful, travelling in an untidy line from Zero to One, through chaos to order, to keep up with the latest discoveries in cosmology and particle physics.

Let me give the last word to Hawking: "What would it mean if we actually did discover the ultimate theory of the universe? If the theory was mathematically consistent and always gave predictions that agreed with observations, we could be reasonably confident that it was the right one. It would bring to an end a long and glorious chapter in the history of humanity's intellectual struggle to understand the universe." But Hawking acknowledges that this is not all... "Even if we do discover a complete unified theory, it would not mean that we would be able to predict events in general." This is because of a) the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics limits our powers of prediction and b) the equations would be, says Hawking, too complex to solve "except in very simple situations."

But even so, "A complete, consistent, unified theory is only the first step, our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence." Phew! Here's Hawking getting very close how I see Heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla what have you - total consciousness, awareness of everything.

Well worth taking the trouble to read. Steven Hawking's great message to mankind was "be curious, be determined." He most certainly was both. He inspired many people to inquire more deeply into the nature of our universe. Striving to make the most of our potential as human beings is a noble aim.

On my own journey from Zero to One, I feel that this Lent I have taken another small step forward; life is a quest to learn; don't come to me for spiritual answers but for an open-ended discussion from which I hope all parties will increase their understanding at least a bit. See this life as but a short stage in an eternally long learning process.

This time three years ago:
"We don't need no [tertiary] education"

This time four years ago:
Arthur's Seat - Edinburgh's urban mountain

This time six years ago:
Heaven

This time seven years ago:
A wee taste of Edinburgh

This time eight years ago:
First long bike ride of the season

This time nine years ago:
Life returns to Jeziorki

This time ten years ago:
Early spring dusk

A Brief History of Time - review, Part 1 - Introduction

Lent 2018: Day 42

Never before in my 60 years has a stranger on public transport ever asked me about a book I was reading. This week, two fellow passengers did just that, as I was sat there with my copy of Steven Hawking's best seller. That a book by the British scientist, who died on 14 March, should so well known as to prompt comments from people here in Poland says much about its fame.

On hearing of Prof Hawking's death, I reached for A Brief History of Time from my father's bookshelf. Like many of his books it is neatly bound in clear polythene, and catalogued (with the number 19). My father wrote 'Xmas 1988' on the half-title page; the publisher's copyright pages says this is the seventh(!) reprint, dated 1988 - of a book that first appeared in 1988. Verily, a best seller, with over ten million sold by 2008.

Pencilled notes in the margins and underlined phrases or sentences from beginning to end, plus numerous newspaper and magazine cuttings (including one from Scientific American, dated December 1991) suggest that not only did my father read the book from end to end, but he continued to return it as and when new stuff came to light. Looking at my father's notes from nearly 30 years ago, when he was 65, I can see a vital interest, intellectual curiosity and broad background knowledge.

Thirty years is a long time in science. The number of subatomic particles know to science has grown, as has the number of galaxies in the known universe, and the number of stars within those galaxies. The age of the universe is given as being between 10 and 15 billion years, today scientific consensus says 13.8 billion years. Gravitational waves had never been detected. Planets orbiting other stars had never been detected. Dark matter is mentioned only in passing, just three sentences in a paragraph about the rate of expansion of the universe. Dark energy is not mentioned at all (now reckoned to be 67.3% of everything the universe consists of). We now know far more - and the more science discovers, the more it realises it still doesn't know. "Ultimately," writes Hawking, "most physicists hope to find a unified theory that will explain all four forces [gravity, electromagnetism, weak- and strong nuclear force] as different aspects of a single force. Indeed, many would say that this is the prime goal of physics today."

Having read Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe (2016), it seems that that goal has been abandoned as astrophysicists and nuclear physicists peer further into the unknown and come up with more questions than answers. Hawking is still of the Newtonian old school of reductionist materialism, believing that mankind was on the verge of discovering all the answers through quadratic equations that elegantly piece together the pieces of the jigsaw into one Grand United Theory. Kauffman is far more cautious - and more metaphysical. He believes there's far more out there than phenomena that are calculable; his background in theoretical biology gives him a messier cosmology than Hawking's. Kauffman mentions Steven Weinberg Dream of a Final Theory (1998), and says that the "hard-headed realism" of scientists who chase such a theory, who try to tie up all the loose ends and tell us - "here it all is, finally solved " - robs our human lives of mystery and magic.

I feel there's more than a little of that with Hawking. While he does a grand job of explaining the incredibly complex and often counter-intuitive cosmos down to the subatomic particle, I detect a certain intellectual arrogance - the universe as a problem for the scientist to solve, to reduce down to numbers and formulae.

A Brief History of Time should not be attempted by a lay reader without some basic understanding of the building blocks of our universe; the notion of spacetime, singularity, quantum uncertainty. Coming at this cold expecting a Dummy's Guide approach will not work. Having said that, Wikipedia is a wonderful tool (for me, the biggest single achievement of the Internet Age), and the ability to pick up at least a superficial grasp of a new concept (such as the Pauli exclusion principle) is very helpful in tackling this book.

Hawkings breaks the subject down into chapters dealing with the universe, the elementary particles, black holes, and of course, time itself. This makes is easier to get one's head around it all; plus, for the lay reader, there is famously only one equation in the book, which is E=mc².

The rest of my review of A Brief History of Time here.

This time last year:
Eyes without a face

This time two years ago:
London blooms in yellow

This time three years ago:
London's Docklands: a case-study in urban regeneration

This time four years ago:
Scotland and its language 

This time five years ago:
Death, our sister

This time six years ago:
First bike ride to work of the year 

This time eight years ago:
Poland's trains ran faster before the war

This time nine years ago:
Winter in spring: surely this must be the last snow?

This time ten years ago:
Surely THIS must be the last snow?