Right and wrong in science and philosophy

Lent 2018: Day 22

“If  panpsychism is real, then life can have started with some form of consciousness that must have evolved very much from electrons to E. coli and Stentor, a single-celled organism with no neurons, to us.”

This is an almost incredible statement coming from Stuart A. Kauffman, a renowned scientist with a lifetime's work to draw observations from. Many of his peers will sneer dismissively, convinced that consciousness can only exist within the brain of living creatures – and nowhere else. In their conviction, they have cut themselves off from considering other alternatives.

Why trust one scientist and not another? At the end of the twelfth chapter of Humanity in a Creative Universe, I've pencilled the words “Kauffman is right/wrong.” It's binary. Kauffman's theory (not just his, I must add) is itself in superposition, like an electron in a quantum experiment. He is neither right nor wrong until such time as a conscious observer can peer into a box to view the result of a putative experiment designed to test subatomic matter for such properties as consciousness and will. As of time of writing, science has not unravelled these mysteries. Therefore it is as wrong to say that Kauffman is wrong as it is to say that he is right.

But could he be part right/part wrong? Kauffman talks about Aristotle's philosophical notion of the excluded middle, the answer to which, like the result of a quantum measurement, cannot be anything other than 'yes' or 'no'. The electron's spin, on measurement by a conscious observer, is either 'up' or 'down'. Before measurement, it is both. But ideas are not subatomic particles. Many philosophical, political or economic constructs are right up to a point. Some, being far from perfect, are just about good enough to stand the test of time – existentialism, social democracy, capitalism, quantitative easing. But this is not sufficient for Science.

Sceptics refer to the 'God of the Gaps' – what we humans don't understand, we tend to ascribe to the workings of a supernatural being, whether it's lightning or floods. Kauffman is careful to avoid talk of a supreme deity. When covering the history of science and philosophy, however, he describes how the notions of deism (a non-interfering God) and theism (an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God) competed with one another. He notes that Newton's worldview had the effect of relegating God from an omnipresent deity to the watchmaker that once made, and wound up the clock, and then stood back to let its motion unravel across the fullness of time. Rather, Kauffman's God is consciousness, distributed across space and time, continually evolving from electron to single-celled organism to us. This of course begs the question – what next?

Before moving on, some thoughts from my brother, who emailed me the following comments about Humanity in a Creative Universe (which he bought me, before buying a copy for himself).

“There are questions with unknown answers; then there are problems where we don't know the right questions to ask; and then there are the problems where we don't know or even have the language with which to formulate the questions. Kauffman has spent many years trying to formulate such a new language. 

"Prior to the Enlightenment, nearly all debate about heat and fire was couched in nouns rather than verbs; we now know that fire is a process. Science too is also a process - not simply a body of knowledge. Orthodox religions have become bodies of knowledge rather than emerging constructs; perhaps this is where the conflict between science and religions lies.”

This time two years ago:

Free thinking at the Second Vatican Council

This time four years ago:
Getting ul. Karczunkowska ready for Biedronka opening

This time five years ago: 

God's own risk

This time six years ago:
A third of the way through Lent

This time seven years ago:
Balancing surfeit and shortage

This time eight years ago:
Congruent consciousness

Free will and quantum mechanics

Lent 2018, Day 22

Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe spans three broad areas of learning - physics, biology and philosophy. He pushes at the boundaries of science towards panpsychism - the ancient notion than consciousness is pervasive throughout the universe. The Newtonian worldview based on the predictability of the paths of objects travelling through space has, says Kauffman, stunted our ability to see wonders as being anything other than that which must be.

According to classical physics, he says, "since the beginning of time, the universe is deterministic, and the present cannot have been different." This approach to life tends to rule out the existence of free will, as whatever we do is determined. "Only what actually happens can happen."

Yet the world of quantum mechanics does not work like this, nor does biology, evolution. The biosphere, he argues, unfolds in an unprestatable way - for to chaotic in its complexity for us to begin to plot how it will evolve in the future.

Once again, we delve into the strange world of entangled particles that can only be defined as probabilities until measured. Here, Kauffman loses me again when making the link between 'responsible free human will' and the outcome of an experiment to define the position of an electron within an atom's shell. This is the area of his thinking that is most open to scientific criticism, namely that a conscious observer may somehow sway the outcome of such an experiment.

"Nothing in the past of the universe determines the outcome of measurement," he says; the spin of the entangled particles cannot be predicted by any Newtonian equation. Only the presence of a conscious observe will result in the outcome becoming known.

The controversial name of Dean Radin crops up again in this context; "...via Radin's tentative results, we have starting-grounds to think human consciousness can affect or mediate measurement. By extension, we can hope for such experience of will and also consciousness in humans made of quantum variables. And by similar argument, we can hope for responsible free will among electrons and consciousness when they measure one another..."

Wow! Heavy stuff! Electrons exhibiting consciousness! Well, classical science poo-poos the idea of consciousness residing anywhere outside the brains of higher-order animals, so the notion that a single-celled bacteria such as E. Coli could display signs of possessing consciousness, such as displaying emotions, is still far-fetched.

But more importantly, more practically, the idea that we can alter the outcome of an experiment by thinking about it smacks of paranormal research rather than proper science, confirmed by repeatability of findings and subject to robust peer review. Yet this is what Kauffman is setting out to do - make all this "consistent with the context of science".

One should know a bit more about the science than I do in order to judge, yet I feel that orthodox science is all too willing to dismiss this all as woolly thinking, lacking in theoretical or experiment-based rigour. Maybe Kauffman is right - maybe we should allow in some subjectivity, some personal feelings. He quotes physicist John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008, Manhatten Project, black-hole and worm-hole theorist) as saying that the universe is observing itself, that the universe only exists because consciousness (such as ours) is there to observe it.

More to follow!

This time last year:
Good thinking captured - the importance of jotting it down

This time two years ago:
Spirit of place and our own spirituality

This time three years ago:
Poland's road death toll falls but remains too high

This time six years ago:
My photos turned into beautiful watercolours

This time seven years ago:
Silver birches and blue skies

This time nine years ago:
Jeziorki's wetlands in late winter (2009)

This time ten years ago:
Jeziorki's wetlands in late winter (2008)

That was the winter that was

A very cold week for end-Feb/early March has ended with a return to plus zero temperatures, grey clouds and sleet. Time to look back over a lovely frosty week.

Below: trainload of empties - an ET22 electric freight loco approaches W-wa Jeziorki station with a rake of wagons used for carrying biomass (wood chips) used for co-firing along with coal at Siekierki. Note the third, unelectrified, track to the right of the photo - that's the one linking the power station to the sidings at W-wa Okęcie.

Below: wires in the sky, corner of ul. Trombity and ul. Kórnicka.

Below: tyre tracks on the frozen pond. If you can drive on it, after three nights with temperatures at -14C, walking on it poses no risk. Photo taken at night, under the light of a full moon. Exposure: 1/125 sec, f4.2, 12,800 ISO.

The third week of Lent is almost over; I am craving a gin and tonic. And a Weißbier. And pastrami on rye bread with pickle and mustard. Three weeks and four days to go.

This time last year:
Self-discipline, habits and Growth

This time four years ago:
Putin - tactical genius, strategic failure
[I had - the West had - evidently underestimated the man.]

This time five years ago:
Socialist Realist architecture in late winter sun

This time seven years ago:
The Cripple and the Storyteller - part II

This time eight years ago:
The station with no name

This time nine years ago:
Lenten thoughts on motoring

This time ten years ago:
Flowers, spring - already

Consciousness and its Role in the War between Science and Religion

Lent 2018: Day 20

Over the weekend, I strayed across an online discussion between scientists and religious zealots (fundamentalist Christian, Orthodox Jew and Muslim alike) about God and evolution. The discussion was relatively cordial, given the controversial subject matter. Tempers fray from time to time, but both sides remain firmly entrenched behind their barricades. “Consciousness resides within the brain!” “You cannot argue with a sacred text that's 3,000/2,000/1,400 years old!” “Science cannot explain x!”  “Your religion cannot explain y!” And so it goes, post after post, hour after hour. Don't these people get bored?

 A few voices try to bridge the gulf. It seems some of them are attempting to set up their own religions, throwing in some scientific words here and some theology there... messy. I did not join in the debate, I was learning more about their mindset than about anything scientific or religious that they were promoting. But a useful lesson; once dug in, it is difficult to change the mind of an intellectually stubborn person.

I believe life is for continual learning, for personal growth, gained through experience and through interaction with others - reading what they have written, or listening to what they are saying. This means the ability for one's thinking on a difficult subject to change, or to sharpen in focus and conviction, on the basis of experience and insight. Indeed, this blog was intended from the outset to record, how over the course of the years, my thinking has matured,

In my personal search for meaning within this universe, I'd set off with a fundamental rule not to challenge accepted scientific fact. Given that quantum mechanics has been proven by a vast number of experimental and theoretical scientists over the past 90 years - to eleven decimal points - it cannot be dismissed. However, science still has a vast amount to prove. Basic things, such as what was before Big Bang? Will the universe continue expanding indefinitely, or will the rate of expansion slow down, stop, and then start collapsing in upon itself? And if so – then what? And if not – then what?  And where is the seat of (human) consciousness? Is consciousness really limited to the brain? What further particles (and properties thereof) remain to be found at subatomic level?

With so many unknowns, it is wrong for scientists to dismiss constructs such as panpsychism as 'unscientific'. Until proved otherwise, it's a theory, like any other, like Sir Roger Penrose's Orch-OR theory (consciousness residing in microtubules within the protein).

Following the arguments online, it became clear to me after a short while that on both sides were people with a particular personality problem – they had a great need to persuade people as to their point of view. They would bang away at one another for hours, while I went out for a walk, did shopping, sorted out the recycling etc – I returned to the debate, and there they were, still arguing. “Is this the right room for an argument?” “I've told you once!” “No you didn't!” “Yes I did...” Monty Python's argument sketch gets the tone right. Why bother marshalling facts, quotes, links etc, and firing them at people who are entirely convinced that they are right and you are wrong? 

Reading Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe is a great antidote to this approach. I seek, I am not interested in entrenching my world view. It must expand, taking in new stuff that's come to light, it must evolve, it must become more refined, more nuanced. Reading an author who's well-grounded in science and philosophy is a good route towards uncovering meaning.

The science often loses me; the world of biology, axons and dendro-dendritic complex dynamics, the methylation of chromosomes to bring about epigenetic changes... I plough on, feeling (not knowing) that I should trust that Kauffman's science is sound. Because on the basis of that science, he is pushing against the known frontiers of what the scientific community finds acceptable. Beyond that is, what scientists would say, lies 'mystical woo'; the result of the cognitive bias known as wishful thinking.

This time last year:
The atoms within us

This time four years ago:
Our house gets connected to the town drains

This time five years ago:
No more revelations

This time seven years ago:
Free will vs. destiny

Linking subatomic physics to consciousness, via biology and the brain

Lent 2018: Day 16

My grasp of quantum mechanics is sketchy, but the basic notions of uncertainty and superposition  - defined only at the moment of conscious observation - I can just about understand. But how do we get from the electron to the human brain? Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe promises to make that jump, but in the chapter in which he set out the main theory - that of the Poised Realm - I find myself out of my depths with the physics.

We are being asked to visualise a graph in which the x-axis goes from order, via criticality, to chaos. Wow! This I get. But then there's the y-axis... This goes from quantum coherence, via quantum decoherence, to quantum recoherence. Here I am lost. But this we must get if we are to understand Kauffman's Poised Realm concept, the world he proposes between the classic physics of Isaac Newton and the strange quantum world within the atom. This - he states - is nothing less than consciousness. A grand statement, but is it one I will accept? Or indeed an intellectually capable of accepting?

But how Kauffman got here is beyond me. I can only assume that the maths is right, that quantum coherence and decoherence, being proven phenomena (both of which I entirely fail to grasp), can be somehow related to the x-axis, or order sliding into chaos via criticality... This now needs to be taken to the point where practical experiments and further calculations are needed to see whether Kauffman is barking up the wrong tree, exhibiting some cognitive bias such as wishful thinking, or is indeed breaking new ground in philosophy and science.

Science has a habit of moving forward. "Until a decade ago, physicists had calculated that at a body temperature of 300K, that is [300 degrees centigrade] above absolute zero, [ie. +27C], decoherence would occur rapidly, and coherence would decay with a half-life of a femtosecond [10 to the power of minus 15]. All physicists agreed that important quantum effects could not happen within the warm, wet environment of a living body," notes Kauffman.

That was then. But in 2007, a group at University of California Berkeley measured quantum coherence in chlorophyll, the light-harvesting molecule crucial for photosynthesis. They found the electron was quantum-coherent for a thousand times longer than expected.This has been tested again since and it is now established that light-harvesting molecules demonstrate long-lived quantum coherence [whatever that means!].

The upshot of that 2007 experiment is that the field of quantum biology is taking off, says Kauffman. The search for the seat of human consciousness, which began in philosophy before spreading into neuroscience, is now extending further into the quantum world.

As science pushes its boundaries forward, old certainties are challenged, new frontiers uncovered, our understanding broadened. But where we are in regards to consciousness is utterly fundamental to our sense of self. Are we indeed just meat robots, automatons, who at best have the ability to witness, but not alter, the universe unfolding around us? "The Poised Realm," Kauffman tells us, "may transform our thinking in biology, mind/brain and beyond". The implications for organised religions are massive, by the way.

The crucial question in all this revolves around whether consciousness and will can have an effect on the physical world around us; if so, how - and to what extent. Kauffman's level-headed, scientific approach based on repeatable experiments and peer review keeps us away from New Age mysticism and spoon-bending. This is getting wobbly; it's not like he's either right or wrong - it may be that he's both right and wrong at the same time, neither and both, until someone opens the box.

More to follow.

This time last year:
Lent begins - the Big Questions

This time three years ago:
How does God speak to us? 

This time four years ago:
Spring makes itself felt in Ealing

This time five years ago:
Waiting for the warmth to return to Warsaw

This time six years ago:
Remembering Poland's 'Accursed Soldiers'

This time seven years ago:
Getting the balance right between work and play 

This time nine years ago:
Sublime Jeziorki sunset

This time ten years ago:
Sunrise getting earlier

The Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics

Lent 2018: Day 15

Two weeks gone, no meat, no alcohol, lots of exercise (managed nine chin-ups to the bar yesterday morning). I'm also reading Stuart A. Kauffman's Humans in a Creative Universe; I'm almost half-way through. It's an outstanding book for me; here is a scientist telling me that my spiritual search for that middle way between religion and science is essentially correct. The book provides a basis of belief in panpsychism (consciousness distributed across the universe), and questions the reductionist materialism that since Isaac Newton has suggested to us that we have no bearing on how the universe evolves.

This is no New Age wishy-washy touchy-feely twaddle, but the profound contemplations of a scientist and thinker with a solid grounding in the history of science and philosophy, and an understanding of what happens at the subatomic level. The result of his pondering is a theory that we are participating in the creation of new possibilities, which then become actual. And our role in willing those possibilities to become actualities.

Key to this is to understand that which science, as yet, does not understand - the 'known unknowns', as it were. I have touched more than once on this blog the notion of Dark Energy, the mysterious force that makes up over 68% of the universe. (Dark Matter makes up another 27%.) Science has no explanation for either. [Here's an interesting and readable article on Dark Energy and Dark Matter from NASA.] We don't know what it is, how it interacts with visible matter.

Dark Energy and Dark Matter are thought to fill the universe, existing within and between galaxies. Telescope stuff (except you can't see or detect them). But at the microscope - electron microscope - level, there's the strange world of quantum mechanics, with its own set of mysteries that science cannot (at present) answer. Kauffman lists the main four.

Not wishing to get too technical, I fear I may lose some scientific accuracy in my description of them. At the heart of quantum mechanics is the measurement of the physical properties of subatomic particles - such as position, momentum, spin, and polarisation.

The first mystery is Nonlocality.

When the spin of two entangled but distant (no, I don't get this) electrons are measured, the outcome is always symmetrical (if one is observed to spin up, the other will always be observed to spin down, or vice versa). How two entangled electrons can be so far is apart is beyond me, but this has been proven to be true over decades of experimentation. Observations can be up to 190km apart (the record to date); this happens simultaneously - that is, faster than the speed of light.  How can that be? Science cannot answer. This is Einstein's "spooky action at a distance".

The second mystery is the instantaneous change in wave function on measurement.

Back to Schrodinger's famous cat. An independent particle is in superposition (you can only work out the probability of where it might be) until such time as you observe it. And then, on measurement, instantly, a single wave function is created (again, I don't get, but please follow). So the cat is alive and dead at the same time until the very instant you open the box - and then you see the result. "If n particles are entangled and one is measured, instantaneously the entangled wave function of the remaining n-1 changes!" This, says Kauffman remains unexplained, despite having been seen to be true since the early 1990s.

The third mystery is 'which-way information'.

Are photons waves or particles? I wrote about this earlier; the double-slit experiment (Thomas Young, 1801) showed that letting light through a single slit gives the scattered points suggesting particles, while letting it in through two slits gives interference patterns suggesting waves. 'Which-way information' says that they cannot be observed as both waves, and as particles, at the same time. The observer sees either one, or the other.

The fourth and final mystery: there is no deductive mechanism for measurement.

There are two or more possibilities as to the position of a particle, but there is no deductive mechanism, no algorithm or robot, that can work out the measurement outcomes - a conscious observer is needed to actually peer into the box. Is the cat alive or dead? A robot won't be able to tell, infers Kauffman. The cat remains in superposition - alive and dead, while the robot opens the box and applies its sensors to check on its health. It is only when a human looks at the data collected by the robot do we learn about the cat's status.

It is incredibly difficult to get one's mind into the atom, to understand beyond the basic notion of the nucleus (formed by neutrons and protons) surrounded by a shell of electrons which are either waves or particles - or indeed both waves and particles, except we can't tell which until we observe them. And then they to strange things, spooky things - affecting one another at great distances, faster than the speed of light, except we don't know that until we observe them.

What's all this got to do with religion? Kauffman is suggesting that we have the power to make the difference between different possibilities and turn one of them into something actual.

This we shall get to in coming chapters... More soon.

This time last year:
Lent starts tomorrow

This time two years ago:
Coincidence and survival

This time five years ago
The Book of Revelations

This time six years ago:
Strong late-winter sunshine

This time seven years ago:
Best pics from February 2011

This time eight years ago:
Kensington

This time ten years ago:
End of the line

Mid-winter in late Feb

Work and duties have slowed down my Lenten reading and writing. The paces, however, keep on keeping on (average of over 12,000 this week). Temperatures have plummeted; overnight low was -15C, daytime high today -7C. The ponds have frozen over.

Below: a sight humans rarely get to see - when one can wander across to where the herons nest (the trees to the left). The pond by the top end of ul. Trombity.

Below: the pond on ul. Pozytywki - also solidly frozen after nearly a week of sub-zero temperatures. Rare for it to get so cold in late February

Below: out in Jakubowizna, another Eric Ravilious-style landscape.

Below: outside the domek on the działka. Bathroom's done, kitchen next, once the frosts ease.

This time last year:
Ten years of digital photography

This two years ago:
Between atheism and creationism

This time three years ago:
A peek into the Afterlife
[the best piece I've written about my spiritual quest]

This time four years ago:
The new dupes of Moscow

This time five years ago:
Late-winter commuting, Jeziorki

This time six years ago:
My Nikon D80 five years on

This time seven years ago:
My Nikon D80 four years on

This time nine years ago:
Nikon D80 two years on

This time ten years ago:
Nikon D80 one year on

Of Consciousness and Will within the Universe

Lent 2018: Day Nine

Stuart A. Kauffman throws us a philosophical challenge. "Are We Zombies with, at Best, Witnessing Minds?" This is what the deterministic physics of reductive materialism would boil us down to.

Kauffman's answer is that we are not. We have the will, the consciousness, to turn the Possible into the Actual. His reasoning is new - this is not Aristotelian, nor Newtonian nor Darwinian - this is post-quantum thinking. Here goes...

"I will propose a new Triad: Actuals, Possibles, and Mind, where mind acausally observes mediating quantum measurement, transforming Possibles to new Actuals, which then acausally enable new Possibles for mind to observe again, hence in a continuous status nascendi. This Triad, I will propose, includes quantum variables, such as electrons exchanging protons, consciously observing and measuring one another, and acting with free will, and human conscious, free-willed mind. This will lead to a radical panpsychism; wherever measurement occurs so do consciousness and free will... [T]he proposal that mind acausally 'mediates' measurement is in principle testable. One way would be to show that human conscious attention nonlocally, hence acausally, can alter the outcome of measurement."

Wow. Strong stuff... many scientists might indeed argue - flaky stuff, bordering on paranormal studies. Especially in that Dean Radin, who Kauffman quotes several times in this book, is not someone that conventional science takes all that seriously (from Wikipedia: "Radin's ideas and work have been criticized by scientists and philosophers skeptical of paranormal claims.") But let's move on. Kauffman also quotes Sir Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff who associate quantum measurement with flashes of consciousness and choice. "If this is testable... and confirmed... we will have to consider that consciousness and free will did not emerge with life, but as part of the universe, like pressure and temperature, was used as life evolved, possibly sentient and acting from the start, and that consciousness became ever more integrated and refined and diversified, as we ourselves experience."

Let that sink in for a while. Consciousness - not something that came as a result of an evolving biosphere, but predating any form of life, out there from the very beginnings of the universe.

Panpsychism. The notion that consciousness pervades the entire universe. Panpsychists see themselves as minds in a world of mind.

I kind of came to this conclusion myself, last September, my copy of Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe by my bedside, unread beyond the prologue. I wrote (here) in an entirely unscientific manner, that I see "consciousness as a part of the universe, along with matter and energy".

That was just my intuition, something I felt, not a hypothesis observed, measured, tested repeatedly and peer-reviewed. Gut feeling. But here's another scientific voice... Adam Frank puts it thus: "Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the universe not contained in the laws of particles. There is also the more radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to the list of things, such as mass or electric charge, that the world is built of. "

This suggests that science is moving into areas hitherto considered flaky because conventional Newtonian explanations fail to hold water at either the subatomic level nor at the cosmological level. What is this Dark Energy that makes up nearly 68.3% of the energy in the known universe? How many more subatomic particles are there for us to discover? It is this stalemate of classical physics that Kauffman and others are attempting to break through. This would change our view of the universe and its ultimate purpose.

This time two years ago:
The Devil is indeed Doubt

This time three years ago:
Are you aware of your consciousness?

This time four years ago:
"Why are all the good historians British?"

This time six years ago:
Central Warsaw, evening rush-hour

This time seven years ago:
Cold and getting colder

This time nine years ago:
Uwaga! Sople!

This time ten years ago:
Ul. Poloneza at its worst