Seeking God in science part 10: The Mind-Body Problem

The title of this series, "Seeking God in Science", was meant to be a metaphor.  This should not come as a surprise.  We are (almost certainly) not going to find a literal supernatural being using the scientific method.  But — and I cannot emphasize this enough — this is not because the scientific method is prejudiced against such an outcome.  This is a charge often leveled against science by religious apologists, that science assumes naturalism and so it is structurally incapable of discovering extra-natural truths.  This is absolutely false, and anyone who says this either does not understand the scientific method or they are deliberately misrepresenting the facts (a.k.a. lying).  The scientific method is simply to find the best explanation that accounts for all observations.  If that explanation turns out to be God, the method has no objections.

The fact that God turns out to be unnecessary to explain any observations is far from obvious.  For most of human history the very idea that God was unnecessary would have gotten you laughed out of the room (if not burned at the stake).  Even today the vast majority of people believe that there is some kind of supernatural force of entity at work in the world, either now or in the past, though the sphere of influence of this entity is often much smaller than it was in the past.  Many observations that were once attributed to gods are now widely accepted as natural phenomena: the behavior of stars and planets, weather, earthquakes, and so on.

But there are some observations that remain stubbornly mysterious, the so-called Big Questions.  How did we get here?  Why are we here?  And, possibly the most mysterious of all, what exactly are we?

My original plan for this series was to try to sneak up on these Big Questions step-by-step, starting with intuitively obvious things like the classical mechanics of rigid bodies (with chairs as my canonical example), moving from there to information theory, thermodynamics, and the theory of computation, and then, finally, quantum mechanics for the big finish.  But based on the feedback I've gotten so far I've decided that approach is probably not going to work.  The attention span of a modern audience, especially a young audience, isn't long enough to keep their interest long enough to get through all that.  Rather than throw in the towel I'm going to try something different: a full-frontal assault on one of the Big Questions without having laid all of the necessary groundwork beforehand.  This argument will necessarily have some holes in it, and we won't get all the way to the Answer.  But I hope that it will show that the problem is not beyond the scope of scientific inquiry.

The Biq Question I'm going to tackle here is the problem of consciousness.  What is it?  How does it work?  Can it be explained naturalistically, or is our conscious experience evidence of the supernatural or the divine?  Two spoiler alerts: first, no, consciousness is (almost certainly) not evidence of the supernatural.  And second, if you want to get closer to The Answer than I am going to get here, go read Daniel Dennett's book, "Consciousness Explained."  A word of warning, though: this is an academic work, and not particularly accessible.  One of my goals in this series was to present a more easily accessible account of Dennett's work.

So, to the task.  As always when we apply the scientific method we must start with a Problem, an observation that cannot be accounted for by our current best explanation, with the understanding that all observations are ultimately individual subjective experiences.  The existence of objective reality is not a given.  It is a hypothesis, the Objective Reality Hypothesis, that I have accepted to explain my observations of things like chairs and other humans.  Most other humans that I've met seem to accept the Objective Reality Hypothesis.  At least, they act as if they do.  All of my observations are consistent with the Meta-Objective-Reality-Hypothesis, namely, that most people accept that chairs and other people are real things external to themselves.  I don't need anything extra-physical like "chairness" to explain anything I observe about chairs, nor to explain anything I observe in other people's behavior in their interactions with chairs.  I have never met anyone who denied the objective existence of chairs.  If I were to ever meet such a person I would probably explain their behavior as trolling or mental illness.

Consciousness is different.  Consciousness is something I experience, and the behavior I observe in other people is consistent with the hypothesis that they experience it too.  But consciousness is very different from chairs.  I can see and touch chairs.  So can other people.  So can machines.  So can cats.  Moreover, when I see and touch a chair, someone else can see and touch the same chair.  We can agree on its properties, its location, its size and shape, the material it's made of, what color it is, how much it weighs.

None of these things are true of consciousness.  I can neither see nor touch consciousness, neither mine nor anyone else's.  The only reason I have to believe that consciousness exists at all is my direct subjective experience of it, and (my direct subjective experience of) the behavior I observe in others, and specifically, other people's testimony of experiencing consciousness, which seems to match my own personal subjective experience.

So one possibility that needs to be considered is that consciousness is an illusion.  There are subjective experiences that really don't correspond to anything objectively real.  I have to stress the distinction between an illusion and a delusion.  A delusion is a subjective experience that is not shared with others.  It may or may not correspond to something objectively real.  The voices that a schizophrenic hears might be coming from a supernatural realm, or they might just be the neurons in their brain misfiring and injecting signals directly into their auditory system, but either way they are literally hearing voices.  It's just that those voices aren't produced by vibrating air molecules.

Illusions are different.  They are common across most humans.  When most humans look at the rotating-snakes illusion, they (we) literally see motion even though the image is actually static.  The neurons in our brains that normally detect motion are being stimulated, just not by things actually moving in objective reality.  Or consider watching a movie, or being in a virtual-reality simulation, or even just looking at a photograph.  You are seeing things that aren't really there.

Of course, there is still something there — the screen.  It is just that the nature of the thing you perceive is different from the nature of the thing that is really there.  You — along with most other humans — perceive motion even though in objective reality there is none.

So the idea that consciousness is an illusion is not falsified by either the fact that you perceive it, nor the fact that everyone else seems to perceive it.

There is still a Problem, though: in order to have a subjective experience of anything at all there has to be something that is having the experience.  Consciousness is not just any old subjective experience, it is the subjective experience.  The very idea of "subjective experience" is inextricably entangled with consciousness.  It seems fundamentally impossible for a non-conscious entity to have a subjective experience.

And yet a non-conscious entity can act as if it is having a subjective experience.  Nowadays we can build an anthropomorphic robot, show it a chair, ask "What do you see?", and be completely unsurprised when the robot replies "I see a chair."  We can easily program the robot to respond "yes" when asked "Are you conscious?  Are you aware of your own existence?"

Let us stipulate that such a robot is not actually conscious, at least not necessarily.  It is at least possible (in fact, it seems likely, at least to me) that such a robot would not in fact be conscious, not actually have subjective experiences, notwithstanding its replies to inquiries.  It is possible that such a robot would be a philosophical zombie, an entity whose behavior is indistinguishable from a conscious entity but which is not in fact a conscious entity.

Is the reverse possible?  Is it possible to build a robot that is actually conscious, or is there something about being a biological entity that is required for consciousness?  Of course we don't yet know the answer to that, but we can observe that we can replace a lot of our biological parts with non-biological alternatives without threatening our claim to being conscious.  We can have artificial limbs, artificial hearts, at least partially artificial ears and eyes, and all that just with today's technology.  The only thing that is not clear is whether an artificial brain can be conscious, and, if so, how could we distinguish an artificial brain that is actually conscious from one that just acts as if it is.

We can also ask the converse: is it possible to have a conscious entity that does not act as if it is?  The answer there is almost certainly yes: there is a rare and horrific medical condition called "locked-in syndrome" which renders a person unable to move (except for their eyes) but they remain (as far as we can tell) fully conscious.  It is not hard to imagine a similar situation where even eye movements are affected.

In a situation like that, where a person's behavior was literally indistinguishable from someone under general anesthesia, how could we possibly know if they were conscious?  Well, one way is if they somehow recovered from their condition and were able to report their experience.  But note that for this to be possible they would have to remember the experience.  If you think about it, this is the only possible way we could distinguish between someone being fully immobile but conscious, and being under general anesthetic.  One of the distinguishing features of general anesthetic is that you can't remember what happened while you were under.  How can we be sure that a person under general anesthetic isn't actually conscious, but just loses the capacity to form memories?

I submit that this rhetorical question is actually a key to understanding consciousness.  I can't think of any way to make this argument rigorous because consciousness is such a slippery eel, but I submit that being able to form memories is essential to consciousness, a necessary (though obviously not sufficient) condition.  I'll make this argument in anther way: when I speak of my subjective experiences, what is the referent of the word "my"?  What is the thing having the experience?  Well, it's me, and a big part of what makes me "me" is my history.  The person I am is in some sense defined by my knowledge and experiences, which is to say, by things I remember.  Even if I suffer from amnesia (or simply old age), if I can still function as a human being, if I can talk or even just brush my teeth, I have to be remembering something in order to perform those tasks.  I can't conceive of any way that it could possibly make sense for a thing to be conscious without remembering anything.

As I mentioned before, memory might be necessary, but it alone is clearly not sufficient for consciousness.  Many non-conscious things have memory, with computers being the obvious example.  But human memory has an interesting feature which can be demonstrated by psychophysics experiments: it is malleable.  People can have the subjective experience of remembering things that demonstrably did not happen, that could not have happened.  This plays out on time scales both large and small.  On large time scales it is possible to implant false memories through suggestion.  On small time scales it is possible to show that your conscious awareness of your surroundings lags reality by a good fraction of a second, which is the time scale your neurons operate on, and that what you consciously perceive does not always correspond to objective reality.

So maybe your subjective experience of consciousness itself does not correspond to objective reality.  Maybe consciousness itself is an illusion.  That would explain why we can't measure it objectively, but on the other hand it raises another Problem.  When I say, "I have a subjective experience of seeing a chair" I mean more than the mere fact that I can see the chair, and that my behavior reflects the fact that I can see the chair.  I can build a robot that can see chairs and behave accordingly, but that robot won't (necessarily) have a subjective experience of seeing the chair.  The subjective experience is more than the mere seeing of the chair, it is being aware of seeing the chair.  But it is even more than that.  It is being aware of being aware of seeing the chair, and being aware of being aware of being aware of seeing the chair, and so on in a seemingly infinite loop.  A robot can be aware of seeing a chair (a better example would be that a self-driving car can be aware of objects around it like pedestrians and other cars).  But a robot (or a self-driving car) is not (necessarily) conscious.  The difference (or at least one of the differences) between awareness and consciousness is this recursive self-application of awareness to itself.

This observation would seem to eliminate the possibility that consciousness is an illusion.  If the subjective experience of consciousness is real (and it is, at least for me) then there has to be something real backing up that experience, some "substrate" for the emergent experience to emerge from, some base case for the recursion.  An old friend of mine in my JPL days, Joe Provenzano, put it like this: if consciousness is an illusion, who is being illused?  An illusion is a disconnect from objective reality, but there still has to be something at the other end of that disconnect.

That "something" is usually called a "mind", and the question of how the mind relates to the brain is called the mind-body problem.  There are two possibilities: the first is that minds can be explained entirely in terms of the material properties of people's brains in a manner analogous to how chairs can be explained entirely in terms of the material properties of the atoms that comprise them.  The weird and seemingly magical properties of minds are a consequence merely of the vastly greater complexity of brains compared to chairs.

The other possibility is that minds require something immaterial, something outside of the physical properties of the brain, to explain them.  I'm going to follow convention and call that a "soul", though I want to be clear that I don't intend for that word to carry any of the usual theological baggage associated with it.  A soul in this case may or may not be supernatural, may or may not have anything to do with any deity, may or may not be a natural phenomenon.  The only stipulation is that they exist outside of people's brains, including the possibility that they could exist outside of space and time itself.

I am, of course, ultimately going to argue in favor of material minds and against souls, though, again of course, I am only going to be able to make the tiniest dent in that argument here.  I'm going to just point out a few things that I hope will sow some seeds of doubt in you if you are currently an advocate of the soul hypothesis.

First, there are clear correlations between brain states and mental states, including consciousness.  The most obvious is that your conscious experience is strongly bound to the physical location of your body and hence to the physical location of your brain.  If your soul exists, its conscious perspective on the world is almost always the perspective of your physical body.  What is "here" and "now" to your consciousness is also "here" and "now" to your body and brain.  There are anecdotal reports of "out of body experiences" but there is no evidence that these are actually real in the sense that the experience corresponds to objective reality.  (It would be pretty easy to do an experiment to test this.  Most out-of-body experiences seem to happen in hospitals.  So take a piece of cardboard, write a random number on it, and mount it on the ceiling so that it can be seen from above but not from below.  If anyone claiming to have an out-of-body experience can tell you what that number is, that would be strong evidence that the experience was actually real.)

Second, using modern technology we can see, at least in broad brushstrokes, what kinds of brain activity correspond with being conscious as opposed to being asleep or under general anesthesia or in a coma.  Third, we can alter our subjective experience of consciousness with various chemicals (with general anesthesia being an extreme example).

So if souls are real, they have to interact with the brain somehow.  If nothing else, there has to be some mechanism by which the material things that influence consciousness exert that influence on the soul.  And that has to run both ways.  The soul has to also be able to influence the brain somehow.  Somewhere between the nerve impulses going in to the brain and the nerve impulses coming back out, there has to be something that happens differently than it would if souls did not exist.  If everything the brain does is exactly the same with and without souls, then, ipso facto, souls are not necessary to explain any observations.  That is the scientific definition of a thing that doesn't exist.  There might be technological limitations to our ever observing those differences, but there has to be something in the brain that could potentially be observed in principle that required souls to explain.  Otherwise, material minds would suffice.

There are two other potential explanations for consciousness besides souls and minds which I am going to list here just for completeness.  The first possibility is that I am the only truly conscious entity in the universe.  Despite the behavior of other humans being qualitatively indistinguishable from mine, they nonetheless do not actually have the same subjective experience as I do.  In other words, my consciousness is real, but yours isn't.  Your outward signs of consciousness are fake, a simulation of consciousness, not the real thing.  You are a philosophical zombie (PZ), a robot, an entity that behaves as if it is conscious but isn't really.  A closely related explanation is solipsism, which says that I am the only thing that actually exists and everything else that I perceive is just a figment of my imagination.

The problem with both of these is pretty obvious: they only work for me.  Of course, you can adopt variations on these hypotheses which say that your consciousness is the only legitimately real one, or that everyone (including me) is a figment of your imagination.  But you cannot consciously adopt the hypothesis that my consciousness is the only real one.  The problem with these hypotheses is the same as the problem with last-thursdayism: these are not individual hypotheses, they are a vast family of hypotheses (over 8 billion of them), all of which are consistent with the objective data, but only one of which can possibly be correct.  Solipsism and PZs cannot be falsified by data, but they can be eliminated as good explanations because every individual instance of these hypotheses requires special pleading in order to lay claim to being the best explanation.

I'm going to throw out one last Problem for the soul hypothesis: when do souls come into being, and how do they ultimately get bound to their corresponding brains and bodies?  A common claim among Christians is that souls are created at conception, but there are two problems with this.  First, at conception, the fertilized egg doesn't yet have a brain, or even anything that can be identified as the precursor of a brain.  And second, there is the phenomenon of identical twins, which are produced when a fertilized egg splits physically after its first cell division and produces two individuals with identical genes.  Do identical twins share a single soul?  If so, can one of a pair of identical twins be saved and the other not?  If not, where does the second soul come from?

My point in this article was not to solve the mind-body problem.  Mankind has been arguing over that for millennia and there is obviously no way I am going to cut that Gordian knot in a few thousand words.  What I wanted to do here is simply to demonstrate how even such a deep philosophical question can be subjected to scientific inquiry, and how the structure of that inquiry shares some similarity with the scientific inquiry into the nature of chairs and other seemingly mundane phenomena.

BTW, Grant Sanderson, the brilliant mind behind 3Blue1Brown, just released the second chapter in an excellent series on information theory and large language models.  I encourage you to watch it if you want to get a deeper understanding of information theory.  As some commenters have pointed out, the definition of information I have been using here is not the only one there is.  There are lots of different definitions, and a deep connection between information and entropy, which I have been trying very hard to avoid getting into.  Watching Grant's explanations will make it clearer why I have been trying so hard to avoid these details.  This series is about philosophy, and it's hard enough to write about without getting tangled in the technical weeds.  But there are plenty of resources out there if you want to get into the details.

Birthright Citizenship Hangs on by its Fingernails

The papers are burying the lede on the story of SCOTUS ruling in favor of birthright citizenship.  The headline should not be that it survived, it should be that the ruling was 5-4 on the Constitutional question.  In other words, birthright citizenship, a bedrock principle of law in the United states for over 150 years, survived by only a single vote.  That rescinding birthright citizenship could even be seriously considered was unthinkable a mere two years ago.  In that time it has gone from a fringe position to one vote short of being the law of the land.  This should terrify everyone who thinks their status as a U.S. citizen is secure.  It definitely terrifies me.  I have held a U.S. passport since I was ten years old.  But if push came to shove and I had to prove that I came by my passport legally, I 'm not sure I could.  I was not born in the U.S. and neither were my parents.  I have lived in the U.S. my entire conscious life but I have never voluntarily sworn fealty to her, and if asked to do so today I am not sure I would.

Putting that on the public record scares the shit out of me.  I am not even remotely confident that this will not come back to haunt me.  As I said, I have lived in the United States my entire conscious life (my family emigrated when I was five years old).  I played by the rules.  I have never been arrested.  I have never been unemployed.  I have never failed to pay my taxes.  I have never defaulted on a debt.  But the country I grew up in made an implicit bargain with me: in exchange for my good behavior, I was entitled to freedom of religion and freedom of speech.  I could say things like: "if I were asked to swear fealty to the United States today I'm not sure I would" without fear of having my citizenship -- or my TSA pre-check status -- revoked.

That trust now lies in flaming ruins.

If you think I'm being hyperbolic, you need to read the dissents in Trump v. Barbara.  Clarence Thomas writes, "[A]t the time of ratification, exclusive loyalty to the United States had long been a fundamental element of American citizenship."  [Emphasis added]  That might be true, but "exclusive loyalty" to the United States has never been an element of the law.  The word "loyalty" does not appear anywhere in the text of the Constitution.  Holding dual citizenship has always been legal in the U.S., and it is still legal today, at least ostensibly.

But Thomas makes it clear that conservatives have dual-citizenship in their crosshairs, writing, "if the Court were right that the Citizenship Clause did not require domicile, then it would have increased dual nationality, which would have provoked concern among 19th-century Americans."

The problem is that there is no statute that explicitly allows dual citizenship, nor is there one that prohibits it.  The legality of dual citizenship was not formally established until 1967 when the Supreme Court rules in Afroyim v. Rusk that dual citizenship was a Constitutional right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.  But here again the situation is not cut and dried because Afroyim overruled an earlier decision, Perez v. Brownell, where the court ruled that you could have your citizenship revoked if you actually exercised your rights as a dual citizen by, say, voting in a foreign election.

In other words, your rights as a U.S. citizen are only as secure as the whims of the Supreme Court care to make it.  This has, of course, always been true in an academic sense, but the actual possibility that the Court would fuck with long-established precedents was not something anyone had to seriously consider.

Until now.

Invoking loyalty as an explicit criterion for citizenship should scare the hell out of you, and using residency as a proxy for loyalty should scare the hell out of you even more.  Loyalty to what exactly?  When I was a kid going to public school in Kentucky in the early 1970s we were made to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which always struck me as rather odd: "I pledge allegiance to the flag..."  What the fuck does that even mean, to pledge allegiance to a flag?  I can kind of understand what it means to pledge allegiance to a nation (though even that is fraught with all manner of difficulty if you actually stop to think about it) but a flag?  How does pledging allegiance to a flag not run afoul of the Biblical prohibition against idolatry?

Of course, the Pledge goes on to add, "... and to the republic for which it stands..."  But it is far from clear that the republic for which it stands even exists any  more.  The United States of American today bears almost no resemblance to the United States that I grew up in and have lived in my entire life since I was five.  I used to be proud to call myself an American, but now I am ashamed.  I used to feel like I knew this country, but I barely recognize it today.  Today we escaped the loss of birthright citizenship by one vote.  Tomorrow we may, by the same one vote, be forced to swear a loyalty oath if we want to keep our ctizenship.  To what?  To anything the Court decides.  To the nation.  To the flag.  To the Dear Leader.

Here is the oath I am willing to swear: I pledge allegiance to government by the people, of the people, and for the people, to representative democracy, to the rule of law rather than the rule of man, to individual freedom tempered by social responsibility and duty to care for our fellow humans, to the apparently not-so-self-evident truth that all men and women are created equal, and ought to be endowed with certain inalienable rights, one of which is the right to dissent without fear of retaliation by the State.

If the United States of America wants to revoke my citizenship (or even just my travel privileges) for standing up and saying that, then it is manifestly no longer worthy of anyone's allegiance.

PSA: I'm doing another debate tonight

Subject line says it all.  The link to the debate is here in case you want to watch it.  It starts at 8PM eastern time.  This one is with SFT who tends to be better behaved than JimBob.  I'm also teaming up with 1stAmender.  I've never done a team debate before so that should be interesting. 

Sorry about the late notice.  I've been busy with other things.  (This is also why I haven't posted another installment of the Seeking God in Science series in a while.)

Seeking God in Science part 9: Creating Information

It might appear that I have been going to some pretty extreme lengths to belabor the obvious: we live in a world populated by material objects made of atoms.  Atoms exist in particular places at particular times and move around according to laws.  Collections of atoms are called systems and the positions of atoms within a system are called states.  Correlations between states are called information.

All this might look like I'm trying to dodge some of the hard problems, but in fact it's the exact opposite.  I'm trying to set the stage for talking about one of the hard problems, namely, where does information come from?  How is it created?  For this question to even make sense we need a precise definition of what we are talking about, of what information actually is, which is why all this prep work has been necessary.

But we need more than just that, because not all information seems to be created equal.  There are some kinds of information whose creation appears straightforward.  For example, a thermometer contains information about the temperature of its surroundings.  But there is no great mystery there.  It's obviously just a straightforward natural process, though it turns out that this process is not quite as easy to describe as you might first suspect.  Still, there is no need to invoke anything beyond the simple lawful behavior of atoms (and few odds and ends like electrons and photons) to explain thermometers and light switches and cameras and even computers.  Thermometers and light switches and cameras and computers are all just Atoms Doing Their Thing (ADTT).

But there are two kinds of systems in nature that appear to be qualitatively different: DNA and human brains.  Both of these contain information (obviously) but the information contained in DNA and human brains seems at first glance to be of a qualitatively different character than that contained in thermometers and light switches and cameras.  But note well that I had to leave computers off that list.  It is not at all clear any more whether human brains are qualitatively different from computers, or exactly what distinguishes the behavior of brains and computers, at least in terms of the information they contain. Up until a few years ago this was still a philosophical problem.  There were legitimate-sounding arguments that there were things brains could do that computers could not, but these have all be utterly destroyed by technological progress over the last few decades.  It was once argued that computers could never beat humans at chess, or speak Chinese, or distinguish dogs from cats.  Just in my lifetime all of these things have gone from cutting-edge research to borderline trivial.  A computer that will utterly crush any human at chess today costs a few hundred dollars and fits comfortably in the palm of your hand.

But, of course, computers would not exist without human brains to build them.  Large Language Models would not work without a corpus of text generated by human brains to train on.  And brains would not exist without DNA.  So there still seems to be something special about DNA and brains, some quality that distinguishes them from thermometers and light switches and cameras.

What is this quality, where does it reside, and where does it originate?  Where exactly does the hypothesis that everything we observe can be accounted for by Atoms Doing Their Thing fail?

One possibility is the capacity of the human brain for invention, for creating new information.  LLMs can mimic the input-output behavior of brains, but only if they are first trained on a vast corpus of information that was produced by brains.  All that information had to originate somewhere.  The only possible source of that information, it would seem, is human brains, and specifically, some quality that brains have that computers lack for creativity and originality, for creating new and interesting information.  What else could it possibly be?

Notice that I quietly snuck a new concept in there: new and interesting information.  Creating information, that is, correlations between states of systems, is, as noted earlier, not hard.  Even creating new information is not hard: just flip a coin and look at it.  The information about which side landed up is new.  It didn't exist before the coin landed.  (Note that this might not actually be true, but that's a deep, deep rabbit hole, one which we will explore later.  But for now let's just assume that it is not possible to predict the result of a coin flip, and so it really does produce new information.)  But this information is obviously completely different than the kind of newness in an original novel or poem or invention.  So it is not just newness that matters, it is something else, and that "something else" is what I call being interesting.

What exactly makes new information interesting?  That question is even harder to answer than what makes something a chair, but it doesn't really matter.  What matters is that humans mostly agree on what "interesting" means in this context, just like they mostly agree on what a chair is, and so this agreement is itself an observation that we need to explain.  And eventually we will, but not just yet.

For now, let's just accept that humans seem to be able to recognize and (mostly) agree on some distinction between interesting and uninteresting information in much the same way that they can recognize and (mostly) agree on some distinction between chairs and non-chairs.  This turns out to have surprisingly far-reaching and profound implications.

Consider someone named Audrey who writes an original poem or essay or novel, and a second person named Paul who makes a copy of Audrey's work and puts his own name on it.  We call Audrey an Author and Paul a Plagiarist because Audrey has created new, interesting information and Paul hasn't.

But plagiarism is not limited to copying original work like poems and essays and novels.  Consider a journalist (let's call her Jane) who writes news stories.  Copying one of Jane's stories would also be considered plagiarism despite the fact that news stories are not original in the same sense that poems and essays and novels are.  Indeed, the whole point of journalism is the exact opposite.  The value of journalism is that the information it contains reflects objective facts and are not an invention of the author.  So why is journalism considered valuable work?  Why do news stories have by-lines?  Why is copying a new story and re-publishing it under your own name considered plagiarism?  Aren't news stories just facts?  How can you claim ownership over a fact?

The answer is that yes, news stories are "just facts", but they are a very particular kind of fact.  They are interesting facts.  They are relevant facts.  The value in journalism is not in the generation of the information -- that is done by current events.  The value in journalism is in the filtering, the separation of the wheat from the chaff, the relevant events from the irrelevant details, the interesting from the uninteresting.

This idea of "filtering out" relevant and interesting things from irrelevant and uninteresting things will turn out to be absolutely crucial to our understanding of the world.  It will turn out that everything can be understood in these terms, even the very existence of atoms, though it will be  a long, long time before we get there.  For now, I just want to point out that even the creation of original work like poems and novels and blog posts can be explained not as a phenomenon in its own right, separate from the kind of filtering that goes on in journalism, but as an instance of the exact same process.

I can tell you from personal experience that the contents of this blog did not spring fully formed into my mind.  What you are reading now is the result of a filtering process.  Before I write a single word, I have to do a lot of reading.  I don't have the mental capacity to remember everything I read, so I have to filter out the relevant and interesting bits from the irrelevant and uninteresting bits.  Then I start to kick around ideas for what to write about, and the same thing happens.  Ideas pop into my head and I mentally sift through them thinking, "Nope, that's crap.  Nope, that's crap.  Nope, nope, nope... well, hmm, maybe..."

Then I write a draft, read it over, decide it's crap, throw it out, and write something different.  I usually end up throwing out much more text than I actually publish.  Right now, as I write these very words, there is a pile of text in this file that I wrote earlier but decided was crap after reading it over.  I'm keeping it around just in case there turns out to be something salvageable in it, but most likely all of it is just going to get thrown out, never to been seen by any human eyes other than my own because, well, it's crap.  The text I'm planning to discard is, as I write this, about twice as long as the text I'm currently planning to keep and publish, and God only knows how many bad ideas flitted through my head that never even made it to the keyboard at all.

And then, finally, after all that, after the reading and the writing and the rewriting and the re-rewriting, after at long last I click on the "publish" button, there is yet another filtering process that is performed by my audience (such as it is) where they -- you -- read what I wrote, decide if it has merit, and maybe, if I'm lucky, leave a comment, or recommend to someone else that they might want to read what I've written.  Maybe, some day, if I am very, very lucky, my words might get the attention of an agent or a publisher, whose entire job is to filter out relevant and interesting information from the torrent being constantly generated by aspiring writers all over the world, the vast majority of whom are doomed to never have anything enter their brains that gets past anyone else's filter and thus sink into quiet obscurity in the good company of countless prior generations of aspiring authors.

In other words, what we think of as originality is actually just the result of a lot of sifting through crap to find the good stuff.  Humans discover the good stuff, they recognize the good stuff, but they don't actually produce it.  Originality comes not from being the first to generate a new idea, but being the first to recognize it and promulgate it.  The actual generation of new ideas isn't the hard part.  The hard part is the filtering, recognizing the good ideas.

Notice how much this explains.  It explains why journalism is considered valuable work despite the fact that originality is antithetical to good journalism.  It explains why editing is considered valuable work.  It explains why people can make a living as literary agents and script readers.  It explains why AIs can be so good at writing really bad prose.  It explains why good ideas and good books and good blog posts are rare and can't just be generated on demand.

Now, this does not entirely eviscerate the notion that human brains are special, but it does take us down a peg.  The thing that makes us special is no longer our ability to come up with new ideas, but simply to recognize good ideas, which seems not quite as wonderful and special and magical as coming up with them in the first place.  But it still demands an explanation of how the filtering works, and why humans seem to be so much better at it than other animals.  (Whether we will actually turn out to be better at it than computers remains to be seen.)

As a sneak preview, the answer to this question will turn out to be that the laws of physics have built in to them a kind of "ur-filter", the mother of all filters, which ends up filtering out our ability to filter out interesting information.  Actually, there are two of these ur-filters.  One of them is Darwinian natural selection, which is a filter for the ability of a system to make a copy of itself.  And the second is something called quantum entanglement, which is a filter for the phenomenon of information itself.  Entanglement is what produces correlations between systems.  I have to emphasize that I do not expect you to believe any of this yet.  To say that there are a lot of details still to fill in would be a colossal understatement.  But sometimes it can help to follow the path if you know ahead of time where it is leading, even if the end is still very far off in the distance.

Seeking God in Science part 8: Caring

In the previous installment in this series I introduced the concept of information, which I defined as correlations between states.  Commenter Samuel (whose profile says he is a Young Earth Creationist) pointed out that:

Shannon entropy implicitly requires a mind to decide which distinct states will be recognized in order to assign a value to "n" (where n is the number of possible states.) [Emphasis added]

This is a fair criticism based on what I wrote:

Notice that when we say that a switch or a light has two states we have ignored a lot of details.  The actual physical state of a switch or a light includes a lot more than just whether it is on or off.  For starters, there is the actual physical location of the light or the switch.  A switch can be mounted on a wall, or it can be part of a lamp, or connected directly to some wires and not be mounted on anything at all.  But these kinds of details don't matter for the aspect of a light switch's behavior that we actually care about.  [Emphasis added.]

This implicitly tied my definition of information to the concept of caring about things.  What if there are correlations that we don't care about?  Do those correlations also contain information?

The answer is yes!  The reason I introduced things "that we actually care about" is not because this is essential to the concept of information, but just to make the concept easier to understand.   Information is not limited to things we care about, it's just easier to think about if we focus our attention on familiar examples like lights and switches and coins.  More specifically, it's easier to talk about if we limit our attention to things we have words for, and even more specifically, to words whose meanings are unambiguous.  Given that even prosaic words like "chair" have fuzzy boundaries, this is a tall order.

The reason for using a coin flip as an example is not because there is anything particularly special about coins per se, but that the procedure for flipping a coin is specifically designed to separate the possible states of the coin into two groups of states that can be easily and unambiguously distinguished from each other.  We call those groups of states "heads up" and "tails up", but those are not the only possible states the coin can be in.  A coin can be standing on edge, or spinning in the air, or bouncing on a hard surface.  And each of those descriptions actually encompasses a vast number of possible distinct physical states.  In fact, because the actual physical state of a coin (or anything else) involves the positions of atoms, the number of potential states might even be infinite.  We don't actually know if space and time are continuous or discrete.  If they are continuous, and if a physical process can cause two atoms to have positions that are perfectly correlated with each other, then the amount of information contained in that correlation would be infinite.

But here's the thing: even if this were possible, there is no way we could ever know.  The reasons are complicated and have to do with quantum mechanics which we haven't gotten to yet, so for now you will just have to trust me when I tell you that it is a fundamental fact of physics that any time you make a measurement the result must be discrete, and so can contain only a finite amount of information.

But all this is beside the point.  What actually matters is the claim often made by creationists that information cannot spontaneously emerge in nature.  This is absolute rubbish.  Information spontaneously emerges in nature all the time.  Any time the states of two systems become causally correlated, information is created.

However, there is still a potential valid criticism here.  It is possible that my definition of information as causal correlations between states is wrong, that it fails to adequately explain some observations.  Specifically, it fails to explain caring, i.e. the fact that we humans seem to be able to distinguish between information that we care about from information that we don't care about in the same way that we can distinguish chairs from non-chairs.  The information contained in books and newspapers and computers and DNA seems qualitatively different from the information contained in, say, a rock exposed to the elements.

There is no technical term to distinguish information in these two categories, and there is a reason for this: it turns out that there is no distinction.  But in order to explain why, I first have to lay out the argument for why there might be a distinction, and to do that I need words that distinguish between them.  In order not to prejudice the discussion, I'm simply going to call them type 1 and type 2.  Type 1 information comprises the correlations that arise from straightforward physical processes like rain falling on a rock.  Type 2 information is the kind that lives in human brains and DNA.

There are two main features that distinguish type 1 information from type 2.  First, type 2 information has a lot more complexity and structure than type 1, and second, type 2 information seems to be intimately related to intentionality, i.e. to caring about things.  (Note that here I am using the common definition of "intentionality", not the philosophical one.)  When we humans write books or blog posts or invent printing presses and computers, we do it in service of some kind of goal or purpose.  Likewise, the information in DNA seems to exist in service of the goal of producing life, without which the goals and purposes of human activities would obviously be moot.  In other words, type 2 information seems to have something to do not just with being correlated with something, but with caring about something.  And that distinction is ultimately rooted in our subjective experience of caring about things.  That subjective experience requires explanation.  One possible explanation is that caring is a fundamental component of objective reality, one that cannot be explained in terms of the mere movements of atoms.  It's kind of like "chairness" except that we ultimately were able to explain chairs in terms of the movements of atoms. But explaining caring is going to be a much tougher nut to crack.  We can see and touch chairs.  We can't see and touch caring.  We can't measure it.  Caring is a purely subjective experience (much like "believing").

Now, I am going to advance a hypothesis which I believe to be false, but which is designed to be a steel-manning of what some religious people believe.  I'm telegraphing this for two reasons.  If you are not religious, this is probably going to sound crazy, and I agree with you, it is.  But showing that it is crazy is actually not as easy as you might think.  And if you are religious, I'd be interested to know if you think I've gotten this right, if this is a fair representation of (part of) what you believe.  This hypothesis is intended to be a peer to the objective reality hypothesis.   I'm going to call it the transcendent mind hypothesis, but I could as well have called it the God-is-love hypothesis:

Our subjective sensation of caring is a sensory subjective experience that reflects a part of objective reality that lies beyond atoms, and therefore beyond what can be objectively measured, but which is nonetheless real.

In other words, our subjective experience of caring about things is every bit as much a reflection of reality as our subjective experience of seeing chairs.  In both cases we are experiencing something real, something outside of ourselves.  But in the case of chairs that something is made of atoms, and in the case of caring it is made of something else, something transcendent, and, most importantly, something that cares.  Specifically, something that cares about us, something that cares about our caring.  Something that could fairly be called God, even if it might diverge from standard theology in some details.

It is possible to show that this hypothesis is false, that it actually fails to account for all of our observations.  But doing that is much, much harder than I think most of my fellow atheists appreciate.  I think most atheists look at specific theologies, reject those (for very good reasons), but then end up throwing out the intentional baby with the theological bathwater.  In order to really explain caring you have to explain consciousness itself, and that is not easy.

I'm going to fast-forward through at least a dozen chapters and tell you what the answer is going to turn out to be: it is not necessary to posit a transcendent mind to explain our subjective experience of caring about things.  Caring can be explained in a purely materialistic way, purely as Atoms Doing Their Thing.  The TL;DR is that we were created by Darwinian evolution, a process which "cares" about reproductive fitness in the same way that water "cares" about flowing downhill to reach the ocean.  That process was physically reified here on earth as biological systems, and more specifically as a division of labor between genes encoded in DNA, and a phenotype that those genes produce.  One of the things that genes "figured out" out how to do is to build brains, because it turns out that genes that build brains have a reproductive advantage (in certain environments) over genes that don't.  And genes that build brains that care about things (like staying alive) have a reproductive advantage over genes that don't.

Like I said, that is vastly oversimplified.  It sweeps huge swathes of complexity and nuance under the rug.  But I didn't want to make you wait months before the Big Reveal.  In the chapters that follow I promise I will lift up the rug and tidy up properly.  But it's a big job.  The path to enlightenment is not an easy one.

Seeking God in Science part 7: Information, Knowledge and Belief

We are now finally ready to tackle three of the thorniest topics the human intellect has ever grappled with, the concepts of information, knowledge, and belief.  The relevance of these concepts to the scientific search for God should be obvious, but I want to be explicit about it because, as ever in this series, we're going to apply the scientific method.  That always begins with the identification of a Problem.  The Problem that is going to motivate our inquiry into information is the observation that our DNA appears to contain information, so we have to explain where that information came from.  Information generally seems to have its origins in some kind of intelligent agent, and so perhaps an intelligent agent is necessary to produce information.  If so there must be some kind of intelligent agent behind our DNA, and that agent might be God.

Likewise knowledge and belief also seem to have something to do with God.  You will often hear people say, "I believe in God", or "I believe in science", or "I know mommy is in heaven" or "I know there is a chair in the storage room."  We are going to try to construct a theory that explains these and many more observations about how people use the words "knowledge", "belief", and "information" in much the same way that we constructed a theory to explain our observations about how people use the word "chair."

Let's start with information because that is the least controversial, and there is actually an established scientific theory that explains it.  There can be little doubt that the word "information" refers to something real.  We live in the information age.  Books and computers store information.  Human activities create new information in the form of books and tweets and blog posts and research papers.  Information can be destroyed if your hard drive breaks and you don't have a backup.  Information can be copied and transmitted from place to place.  But what exactly is this stuff that is being created and destroyed and moved around?  What is it made of?  Is human intelligence required in order to produce it, or can it be created by some purely mechanistic process?

As a first cut we might guess that information is made of atoms, because everything is mode of atoms.  But this fails to explain some of our observations.  In particular, it fails to explain how information moves from one place to another.  To move a material object from one place to another you have to move the atoms that comprise that object.  And of course it is possible to move information this way too.  When a material object containing information (like a book or a thumb drive) moves from one place to another, the information it contains moves with it.  But it is possible to move the information contained in a material object without moving the object that contains it.  This is happening right now as you read this article.  Information is moving from a web server into your browser, and onto your computer screen, and into your eyes, and into your brain.  Before that, the information moved out of my brain and into my laptop, and from there (eventually) to the server.  But there are no atoms moving between these various locations, only light and electrical signals.

There is another important difference between how information can move from place to place and how material objects move.  A given material object can only be in one location at a time.  If you move a chair from A to B then at the end of that process the chair is no longer at A.  But you can move information from A to B and at the end of that process the information can be in both locations at the same time.  Not only that, but in some situations it is possible to make copies that are so good that you can't tell which one is the copy and which is the original.  (This is actually possible with material objects too.  Modern manufacturing processes can produce material objects that are for all practical purposes indistinguishable from one another.  When we get to quantum mechanics we will encounter objects that are indistinguishable not just for practical purposes but totally indistinguishable by any possible experiment.  Atoms are actually examples of such objects.  This will turn out to have truly profound implications.)

There is a final observation we can make that provides the vital clue about what information actually is: the same material object can contain different information at different times.  Again, your computer screen is the perfect example of this.  Right now, the screen contains some information.  Scroll, or go to a different web site or application, and your screen will contain different information even though it still contains all the same atoms as before.

You might want to pause and ponder before you go on to the next paragraph.  See if you can come up with a theory of information that explains all of these observations.  Here's a hint (massive spoiler alert): there is a reason that I'm talking about information immediately after introducing the concepts of systems and states.

The answer is that information is not a system, not a Thing.  Information is a state.  But it is a very special kind of state.  Not all states contain information.  If you turn your computer monitor off, then it will no longer contain any information (or at least a lot less that it does right now).  But how can we quantify this?  How do we distinguish information-containing states from states that don't contain information, or states that contain more information from states that contain less?

These questions were answered in the 1940s by Claude Shannon, who is one of the more famous scientists in history (so if you didn't figure out the answer to what information is, don't feel too bad, it really is a hard problem).  To help you better understand the answer I want to start by pointing out another feature that distinguishes information from other kinds of states: information is invariably about something.  The news is information about current events.  History is information about the past.  Your eyes give you information about your surroundings.  And so on and so on.  Information is always a relation between a thing that contains information and another thing that is the object of that information.

In fact, this turns out to be the distinguishing feature of information, and it is what allows us to formally quantify the amount of information contained in a state.  The more that the state of one system constrains the state of another, the more information is contained there.

This is all best illustrated with a simple example: consider a light switch.  It can be in one of two positions, on or off.  In the case of an old-school mechanical switch, these states are distinguished by the actual physical location of atoms.  A mechanical switch has two pieces of metal inside called contacts.  If there is space between the contacts, the switch is off.  If not, if the contacts are touching each other, the switch is on.  The light that the switch controls can likewise be in one of two states, which we also call on and off, even though these are radically different in character fro the state of the switch.  "On" means there is light being emitted, and "off" means there isn't.  The light contains information about the state of the switch.  If the light is in the on state, then so is the switch.  If the light is off, then so is the switch.

The quantity of information is the extent to which knowing the state of one system allows you to narrow down the possible states of another.  In the case of our light switch, both the switch and the light can be in one of two possible states.  If we know the state of either the switch or the light then we can narrow down the state of the other from 2 possibilities down to 1.  We typically express this quantity as a logarithm, specifically the base-2 logarithm, and the result is the familiar unit called a bit.  The base-2 logarithm of 2 is 1, so the switch and the light each contain 1 bit of information.  A base pair in a DNA molecule can be one of four possible bases, so every base pair contains 2 bits of information.

Notice that when we say that a switch or a light has two states we have ignored a lot of details.  The actual physical state of a switch or a light includes a lot more than just whether it is on or off.  For starters, there is the actual physical location of the light or the switch.  A switch can be mounted on a wall, or it can be part of a lamp, or connected directly to some wires and not be mounted on anything at all.  But these kinds of details don't matter for the aspect of a light switch's behavior that we actually care about.  Sometimes the actual location of a Thing contains information that we care about -- think of a lighthouse or a "Do Not Disturb" sign.  But even here, these things contain information by virtue of their location being correlated with some other state.  In the case of a light house, its location is correlated with nearby navigation hazards.  In the case of a do-not-disturb sign, its location (outside or inside the door) is correlated with someone's desire not to be disturbed.

The reason DNA can be said to contain information is that the sequences of base pairs in a DNA molecule correlates with the amino acid sequences -- and hence the shapes, and hence the functional properties -- of proteins.  We are nowhere near ready to actually get into biology.  I just wanted to mention that to show that this definition of information applies (or at least that it's plausible).

Note that creating information does not require intelligence.  Any physical process that causes the states of two systems to become correlated creates information.  There is an old joke about using a rock tied to a string as a weather station.  If the rock is wet, it's raining.  If the rock is moving, it's windy.  If the rock is warm, it's sunny.  This sounds funny, but it is actually true.  The rock really does contain information about the weather.  If you doubt this, consider that you can play the role of the rock.  If you stand outside, then your physical state will be correlated with the weather.  If it's raining, you will get wet.  If it's windy, your hair will get blown around.  If it is sunny, you will get warm.  And then your sensory nerves will transmit that information to your brain, where that information gets turned into knowledge about the weather.

The reason people think that information requires intelligence is that they conflate information and knowledge.  They are, of course, related, but they are not identical.  A rock or a light switch or a book or a computer monitor can contain information, but it seems a stretch to say that a light switch "knows" whether or not a light is on.  When you read a book or a blog post, information is transferred from the text into your brain, but that may or may not produce knowledge.  If you look at text written in a foreign language, the information in that text is still transferred to your brain -- you see exactly the same letter shapes as someone who does understand the language.  You have exactly as much information about the state of the system.  What you lack is a way to attach meaning to that information, to relate that information to anything other than the state of the book.

It's not just text.  A few years ago I was traveling in Africa and found a snake in our room.  That snake turned out to be a black mamba, one of the deadliest snakes in the world.  But I didn't know that until I got a guide to look at it.  I had all the information about the snake -- how big it was, what color it was -- but I didn't know it was dangerous until someone told me.

Knowledge is more than information, more than just a simple correlation between physical states.  Books contain information, but they don't know things.  Likewise, a DNA molecule contains information (about how to make a protein) but it would be weird to say (except perhaps as a metaphor) that the DNA molecule knows how to make a protein.

In fact, it's not hard to show that knowledge requires consciousness.  Consider a situation where you have momentarily forgotten where you left your car keys.  In that moment it is fair to say that you do not know where your car keys are.  But the information about where they are must still be lurking inside your brain somewhere, otherwise you wouldn't be able to recover the memory and find your keys.

Information is objective.  Knowledge is subjective.

What about belief?  Philosophers argue about this a lot.  The commonly accepted definition of knowledge among philosophers is "justified true belief".  In other words, knowledge is a kind of belief, one which cannot be false.  You can believe false things, but you can't know false things.

There are lots of problems with this definition.  The most well-known one is that the requirement to be "justified" doesn't work.  That requirement is there to prevent lucky guesses to qualify as knowledge.  To be considered knowledge, a belief has to not only be right, but it has to have a good reason why it's right.  For example, if someone says, "I know my team will win the game tomorrow" that doesn't really count as knowledge even if their team actually does win unless they can explain how they know this.  (Maybe the fix was in!)

But it turns out that justification is not enough.  Not all justifications are "valid" for transforming belief into knowledge.  For example, imagine you are walking in the desert searching for water.  You see what looks like water in the distance.  It is actually a mirage, but you don't know that.  It looks like water to you, but it isn't.  However, by pure coincidence, there is also a well in the same location where you see the mirage.  So your belief that there is water in the distance is actually true, but the reason you believe it is false.  So does this count as knowledge?  (This is called the Gettier problem, after Edmund Gettier, the philosopher who first pointed it out.)

But I want to point out a much more serious problem with the usual definition: it is circular!  In order to determine whether a belief is knowledge you have to determine whether or not it is true.  How do you do that?  Unless you know that the belief is true you can't know whether or not it is knowledge.  The whole point of distinguishing between knowledge and belief is that beliefs can be false, and we want to discharge that uncertainty.  But merely knowing is not enough.  If we believe something, that belief might be knowledge on the usual definition, but we aren't content with the mere possibility of knowing.  We yearn for certainty.  We want to not only know, we want to know that we know!  And now we are in an infinite regress.  As I've already pointed out many times, we can never be certain that reality is real, that we are not living in a simulation, and so we can never be certain that the Objective Reality Hypothesis is true, and so we can never be certain that anything we believe about reality is true.  The best we can do is to say that the Objective Reality Hypothesis is the best explanation for our subjective experience that there are chairs, and for our subjective experience that everyone agrees that there are chairs.

Even pure mathematical truths fall to this problem.  Many people believe that there are Platonic truths that can be known completely independent of any observation.  Math and logic are usually cited as examples of this.  But this too is false.  Even as obvious a "truth" as 1+1=2 is actually not at all obvious.  In the early 20th century, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell published a monumental three-volume work called "Principia Mathematica" which was intended to put all of mathematics on a solid Platonic foundation.  It famously takes 300 pages to prove that 1+1=2.

This is probably the only reason anyone remembers Principia Mathematica.  No one actually reads it any more because, shortly after it was published, Kurt Gödel showed that what it was trying to do was actually impossible and the entire project was doomed from the start.

Another good example is Euclid's parallel postulate.  For 2000 years, Euclid's Elements was the canonical example of mathematical reasoning.  It purported to develop all of geometry from five axioms, the last of which said that given a line and a point not on that line you can draw exactly one line through the point that is parallel to the given line.  This axiom was awkwardly longer than the other four, and mathematicians tried in vain for 2000 years to prove it was true using only the other four axioms.  The reason they failed is because, despite the fact that for 2000 years no one questioned the truth of this axiom, it is not actually true.

There is in fact nothing in the entire history of alleged Platonic truths that has stood the test of time.  Again and again, things that were intuitively obvious were shown to be false.  Not even the so-called "three laws of thought and logic" stand up to scrutiny.  The "law" of the excluded middle is falsified by the Liar Paradox.  The "law" of non-contradiction is simple question-begging: the problem with contradictions is that they lead (with a few other innocuous-seeming assumptions) to all propositions being true, but this is only a problem is you assume that there exist propositions that are false, and that requires you to assume that objective reality exists.  The "law" of identity falls to the Ship of Theseus problem.

One of the beautiful things about the scientific method is that it allows us to easily cut through all of these philosophical Gordian knots simply by asking: is knowledge real?  Do we actually need it in order to explain any observations?  The answer is, no, we don't.  Remember the definition of the scientific method: Find the best explanation that accounts for all the observed data, and act as if that explanation is correct until you encounter contradictory data or a better explanation.  Note that it says nothing about truth.  The closest it comes is acting as if an explanation is correct until it is falsified or a better explanation is found.  The fact that science converges towards something is an empirical observation, not something built in to the method.  We can give a label to "the thing that science appears to converge towards" and call it the truth, but this truth is different from metaphysical Truth.  Metaphysical Truth cannot change.  Scientific truth can, with new data and better explanations.

Knowledge on this view is simply the conscious awareness of the current best explanation.  It is a subjective sensation, not an objective fact.  (Indeed, the very existence of objective facts is a hypothesis to explain the subjective sensation that we know things!)  Specifically, knowledge is the subjective sensation of certainty.  Once we are sufficiently confident in a belief, we call it "knowledge" even though there isn't a sharp distinction between the two, just as there is no sharp distinction between a hypothesis and a theory.  Once a hypothesis withstands a certain level of scrutiny, once it has passed a certain number of tests, once we are sufficiently confident in it, we call it a theory or a "fact" even though there is no bright line.

An interesting consequence of this view is that knowledge depends on context.  When "knowing" is just shorthand for "believing with very high certainty" then it is possible for people to "know" (i.e. believe with very high certainty) mutually contradictory things simply because they have different subjective experiences.  It is possible for someone to know (i.e. believe with very high certainty) that (say) the earth is 6000 years old because everyone they have contact with says so, while at the same time someone else knows (i.e. believes with very high certainty) that the earth is 4 billion years old for the exact same reason.

There is only one thing that you can even potentially know with absolute certainty and that is your own subjective experiences.  Everything else you think you know is actually nothing more than things you believe with very high certainty as a result of those experiences.

Big News: The Plausibility of Abiogenesis Has Been Experimentally Demonstrated

From earliest recorded history mankind has wondered how life on earth first arose.  The current diversity of life on earth is spectacularly well-explained by Darwinian (or Dawkinsian) evolution, the process of replication with random variation plus natural selection.  Things that are better at making copies of themselves make more copies.  What makes something better at reproducing in one environment almost always makes it worse in a different environment.  Lungs are a big win if you live on land, gills generally work better if you live under water.  Earth has a large variety of environments, and so a variety of life has evolved to exploit them.

But this leaves a crucial question unanswered: how did this process get started?  Even the simplest living thing today is far too complicated to have arisen by pure chance.  There has been a lot of speculation and plausible hypotheses, but no actual answer.  The belief that life began as a purely naturalistic process has always required a kernel of faith.

Until now.  In the last year and a half there have been two papers published that have removed the last vestiges of reasonable doubt.  The first one was a computer model, and the second, published just three months ago, is an actual laboratory experiment.  (Here is a more accessible description.)

But before I describe these papers I want to show you a little back-of-the-envelope calculation that illustrates why they are so significant.  To kick start evolution we need to somehow make a replicator, a thing capable of making copies of itself.  In order to assess the likelihood that a replicator can arise by purely naturalistic processes we need to know two things.  First, what is the most complicated thing that could plausibly arise by pure chance, without life?  And second, what is the simplest plausible replicator?  If there is a big gap between these two, then we have a big Problem, a big gap in our explanation.

A likely candidate for a minimal replicator is an RNA molecule because RNA is a biological multi-tasker: it can both carry genetic information and catalyze chemical reactions of the sort that happen in living things.  RNA, like its close chemical cousin DNA, is a polymer, a molecule that consists of a chain of small building blocks called bases.  Both RNA and DNA have four different bases.  Three of these are the same: adenine, cytosine, and guanine.  The fourth base in DNA is thymine while in RNA it is uracil.  These are commonly abbreviated ATCG and AUCG, but these details don't really matter.  What matters is that in each case there are four different bases, and in both cases these bases are arranged in a linear sequence.  This makes it really easy to compute how many possible DNA or RNA molecules there are with a given length: it's just 4 raised to the power of the length of the chain.  (Strictly speaking you have to divide this number by two because if you take a sequence and reverse it you end up with the same molecule, but that turns out not to matter.)

It has been experimentally demonstrated that the bases that form RNA (and DNA and proteins) form spontaneously in conditions likely to have existed on earth in its early days.  It has also been experimentally demonstrated that these bases spontaneously link together to form chains.   What had not been experimentally demonstrated until now was that these spontaneously generated RNA chains could form replicators.  In fact, there seemed to be a pretty big gap between the complexity of the chains that had been formed in labs and what would be needed to self-replicate, but this was hard to assess because we didn't actually know how short a replicator could be.

It is pretty straightforward to predict what this value should be.  We start by estimating how much material we could have to work with.  Earth's current biomass, i.e. the total mass of all the organic compounds on earth is about 500 GTC (gigatons of carbon).  Note that this is only a tiny fraction of the total carbon on earth.  That figure is 1.85 billion GTC.  Only about one in a million carbon atoms on earth are part of an organic molecule.  So it is possible that the biomass of the early earth was much higher, but that will ultimately turn out not to matter.

The numbers we are about to deal with are going to get very big so it will be convenient to swtich to scientific notation.  Unfortunately, the Blogger platform doesn't make it easy to create superscripts, so I am going to use the conventional 10^X notation to denote 10 raised to the power of X.  500 GTC is 500 x 10^9 = 5x10^11 tons = 5x10^14 kilograms of carbon.  Let's be conservative and round this down to just 10^14 kg.  To get the number of carbon atoms we multiply by Avogadro's number 6x10^23, and divide by 12 (because the atomic weight of carbon is 12 —six protons and six neutrons).  Since we are just doing a very rough estimate here, we can safely ignore everything but the exponents and arrive at a final figure of (very roughly) 10^45 carbon atoms.  The RNA/DNA bases all have less than six carbon atoms, so this is enough to make 10^44 RNA/DNA bases.  Of course, not all organic molecules are RNA/DNA bases, so let's round this down to 10^40.  That's dividing by ten thousand, which seems pretty conservative.

The other thing we need to take into account is how much time we have to find a replicator.  How fast do these chemical reactions takes place?  How long does it take to stick a new base onto an RNA chain, or take one away?  We can get a rough estimate by looking at how long it takes for a living organism to reproduce.  The well-known bacteria E. coli takes about 40 minutes to reproduce, and it has 4.7 million bases in its genome.  That's about 1000 bases per second, but this is likely a serious overestimate for prebiotic earth.  Life has had billions of years to optimize its reproductive chemistry, so let's be conservative and assume that it takes a full second to build a new RNA molecule in a prebiotic earth.  There are 60x60x24x365 = 7x10^7 seconds in a year.  Again, let's be conservative and round this down to 10^7.  But then we need to multiply this by the amount of time we have to produce a replicator.  Earth is four billion years old, so if we can do it in (say) a million years that is the blink of an eye on that time scale.  So we have 10^40 bases, and 10^7 years which gives us time to do 10^14 different experiments.  Note that this is not to say that we can only try 10^14 different combinations.  All of those 10^40 bases are floating around in the primordial soup and mixing and matching and forming different sequences at the same time.  So every second we can try a huge number of combinations.  How many?  That is a little tricky to compute because we don't know how long a sequence we actually need.  Again, let's be conservative and look at the smallest currently existing natural replicators to guide us.  These are called viroids, and they have a few hundred bases.  Let's round this up to 1000.  So every second we can potentially try 10^37 different sequences.  Multiply that by 10^14 seconds and we can roll the abiogenetic dice a total of 10^50 times in a million years.

Is that enough?  If the minimal replicator that we're looking for is roughly the same size as a modern viroid, i.e. a few hundred bases, then no, it's not enough.  Not even close.  And so for a very long time the abiogenesis hypothesis relied to a certain extent on an article of faith: a replicator that is much shorter than anything that exists on earth today is possible.  Another way of looking at it is that this hypothesis made a falsifiable prediction that a much smaller replicator is possible.

For a long time there have been some good theoretical reasons for believing that shorter replicators are possible, but no actual experimental proof.  These theoretical reasons have to do with information theory and the theory of computation and a theoretical construct called a Quine.  That is a deep thicket of weeds that I want to avoid here, though it is all rather fascinating if you feel like diving in.  The bottom line is that under some not-entirely-unreasonable assumptions you can demonstrate mathematically that self-replicating systems are possible with as little as 132 bits of information, which is the equivalent of 66 base pairs.  That is easily in range of what can be achieved with 10^50 trials.  The math goes like this: suppose you have an extremely unlikely event with odds 1 in N where N is a very large number.  If you do exactly N trials then the odds that this event will occur is about 2 in 3 (the exact value is 1-1/e, about 63%).  After that the odds rise dramatically.  If you do 2N trials then the odds of the event happening are 87%.  If you do 10N trials the odds rise to over 99%.

In other words: if you do 10^50 trials, and there exists a replicator whose odds of arising by chance are better than 1 in 10^49, then you are practically guaranteed to find it.  Those are the odds for a biological replicator with about 80 base pairs (because 10^49 is approximately 4^80).

And now we have an actual experimental demonstration of an RNA replicator with 45 bases (it is called QT45).  So even if we are off in our estimate of 10^50 trials by many, many orders of magnitude (and remember that we arrived at that number by making some very conservative assumptions) it is still a virtual certainty that a replicator will arise spontaneously almost immediately (on cosmic and geological time scales) on a planet with liquid water and a biomass the size of earth's.

It is important to be clear about what this experiment actually shows.  It does not show that this is how life actually began.  It does not show that QT45 is the original replicator.  All this experiment shows is that small biological replicators are possible.  But that is enough.  If they are possible, and they are small enough (and QT45 passes the necessary threshold by a huge margin), then the spontaneous generation of replicators is inevitable.  Abiogenesis no longer requires any leaps of faith.  The details of how it actually happened are still TBD and probably always will be.  But the mere fact that a naturalistic explanation has now been demonstrated to be possible beyond any reasonable doubt completely destroys intelligent design.  As long as there was room for doubt that purely naturalistic abiogenesis was possible, there was room for a reasonable belief that some kind of intelligent designer was necessary.  But that argument has now been blown out of the water.  We no longer need to guess how small a replicator can be, nor do we need to guess how likely it was for one to arise by chance.  Now we know.

Intelligent design advocates will object to this by pointing out that this replicator did not arise in nature but was created in a lab, which was created by intelligent humans.  But this completely misses the point.  What matters here is not how this replicator was created, but the fact that it was possible to create it at all.  This replicator is almost certainly not the one that originally sparked life here on earth.  It is almost certainly not the smallest possible replicator.  It is almost certainly not the most effective replicator of its size.  It is actually not a particularly good replicator.  But it is also almost certainly not the last replicator of this size that we are going to find.  The fact that one replicator this small exists means that it is virtually certain that there are others, and that some of them will be smaller, and some of them will be better.  And yes, these things can be created simply by tossing the parts into bin and shaking them up — as long as your bin is the size of a planet and you shake for a few million years, though for obvious reasons that is not an experiment we are likely to be able to replicate.

The other paper, published last year, which demonstrated all of these things happening in a computer model is the icing on the cake.  The results here are not directly comparable to a biological system.  There are good reasons to believe that the computer model captures the dynamics of a biological system, but that is a very deep rabbit hole.  But the main takeaway is that the replicators which arose in the computer model are of comparable complexity to the QT45 replicator.

This is the last nail in the coffin of intelligent design theory.  Before these results, intelligent design could only be criticized as an argument from ignorance: just because we don't know the details of the process that produced the first replicator doesn't mean that it was not a naturalistic process.  All it means is that we have not yet worked out the details.  But now we have.  The last gap in our understanding of the naturalistic origins of life on earth has now been definitively closed.

Seeking God in Science part 6: Systems and States

In the previous two installments we talked about chairs, specifically, what distinguishes a chair from a non-chair.  We considered and rejected the "chairness hypothesis" in favor of the atomic theory, which says that chairs — and all physical objects (at least inanimate ones) — are made of atoms.  (N.B. I am actually a human, notwithstanding my fondness for em-dashes.)  What makes a chair a chair is not some mysterious metaphysical "chairness" but simply the arrangement of a bunch of atoms.  If the atoms are arranged in a way that we humans recognize as a chair, i.e. a thing that you can sit on (or at least a thing that resembles a thing that you can sit on) then it's a chair.  The line that separates chairs from non-chairs is fuzzy.

Note that although "chairness" might sound a little silly,  the idea is not quite as absurd as it might seem.  It goes back to Plato, and there are people who take this concept quite seriously.  In fact, that article I just linked to points out a potential Problem:

[S]ome modern philosophers declare that chairs dont exist at all, really there exist only “particles arranged chairwise”. Why, they say, should we privilege the particles arranged “chairwise” as being a thing but not, say, the particles arranged as “my nose + the Taj Mahal + the moon”. No, they say, there are no composite objects such as chairs, otherwise we must accept crazy, gerrymandered objects like the nose-Taj Mahal-moon. Only the fundamental particles (whatever they turn out to be) exist. Awkwardly, this means you dont exist, only “particles arranged Acerwise” [Note: this text is part of an answer to a question posed by someone named Acer], but we can still talk about chairs, plants , planets and people as if they existed. Some of us (myself for one) find it hard to accept that we don't exist..."

Personally, I think this is a straw man.  Chairs obviously exist, as does your nose, and the Taj Mahal, and the moon.  If you want to, you can aggregate all of these into a composite object and give it a name.  The nose-mahal-moon exists too.  It's not particularly useful to give that particular collection of Things a name, but there is nothing stopping you if that's your jam.  And there are examples of weird collections of Things that are useful to consider in the aggregate and so we do as a matter of course give them names: Universities.  Corporations.  Governments.  Museums.  Research laboratories.  Movie studios.  All of these consist at least partly of Things, which are made of atoms arranged in particular ways.

The question I want to begin to address now is: what else is there?  Do we need anything other than Atoms Arranged in Particular Ways to explain any of our observations?  Yes, we do.  At the very least we need light to explain the fact that we can see things.  Light is not made of atoms.  In fact, Light is some seriously weird shit.  I'll be talking a lot more about light in later installments, but for now it's enough simply to observe that we need it to explain observations and, whatever it's made of, it's not made of atoms.

What else might we need?  What about heat?  We observe that things get hot and cold, but the repertoire of atoms doesn't seem to necessarily change with temperature.  A chair can be hot one moment, and the exact same chair made of the exact same atoms can become cold at a later moment.  Maybe the difference between a hot chair a cold one is that a hot chair contains more "hotness" (a.k.a. heat) than the cold one.

It turns out, after a very very long story, that we don't need "hotness" to explain why some thing are hot and others aren't any more than we need "chairness" to explain why some things are chairs and others aren't.  Hotness and coldness, it turns out, are actually just the result of atoms moving in a particular way.  Atoms, it turns out, are always jiggling around with tiny random motions.  The faster they jiggle, the hotter the object.

Note that there is a lot of heavy rhetorical lifting being done by the slogan "the faster they jiggle, the hotter the object."  Hidden underneath these eight words are two entire fields of scientific study: thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.  I don't want to get into those weeds, but it is important to know that the weeds are there.

So besides atoms and light, is there anything else we need to explain our observations?  The answer turns out to be mostly "no".   Why just "mostly"?  Because there are some other things that are required to explain things like nuclear reactors, black holes, the movements of galaxies, and other esoteric phenomena.  But for things that happen here on earth and in our solar system (outside of nuclear reactors and particle accelerators) atoms and light are all you need.  Again, this apparent simplicity is covering up a lot of hidden complexity, but for our purposes we can ignore most of that complexity and just go with the intuition that atoms arranged in some ways make chairs and atoms arranged in different ways make noses and atoms arranged in yet other ways make the moon and the Taj Mahal.

There is a technical term for an arrangement of things.  It's called a state, as in a "state of being".   There is also a technical term for the things that are arranged in a particular state: those are called a system.  So a chair, a nose, the moon, and the Taj Mahal are all systems of atoms, and those systems are in particular states which we label "chair", "nose", "moon" and so on.

The concept of "state" is much more general than that.  The state of a system comprises more than just what category of Thing it belongs to.  It can also include things like that system's location, its state of repair, its temperature.  In the case of something like a folding chair, the state can include whether or not the chair is folded or deployed.  In the case of (say) an electronic device, its state can include things like "broken" vs "in good repair", or "on" vs "off".

Thinking in terms of systems and states is extremely general and powerful.  These concepts allow us to talk about a huge variety of seemingly disparate ideas in a unified manner.  We no longer have to spend mental energy debating whether a folding chair is still a chair when it is folded, or whether a broken chair is a chair.  All of these things -- chairs, folding chairs, broken chairs, non-chairs -- are just systems of atoms in different states.  The ideas if "chairs", "folding chairs", "broken chairs" are just labels that we attach to those states.  The labels themselves have no particular significance, except insofar as they allow us to group together different kinds of systems and states in ways that have significance to us for one purpose or another (for example, if want something to sit on).

The boundaries that constitute a system are also flexible.  If you take a chair and paint it, you are allowed to consider the paint as now being part of the system that you call "the chair".  This kind of flexibility is particularly useful when talking about living things, where atoms are constantly coming and going.  A system where atoms come and go is called an open system, and one where the repertoire of atoms is fixed is called a closed system.  (If absolutely nothing comes and goes then it is an isolated system, an idea which will become very important when we start talking about quantum mechanics.)

It is tempting to equate systems with nouns like "chair" and "desk", and states with adjectives like "folded" or "broken".  But there are many nouns that actually refer to states of systems rather than the systems themselves.  A common example is nouns that refer to activities, like "contest", "golf", or "election."  Some nouns are chimeras that can refer to both systems and states.  "Football", for example, can be a general reference to a particular sport (i.e. a collection of activities, i.e. a state), or it can mean a physical Thing, the kind of ball that is used to play the sport of (American) football.

For modern readers, familiar examples of nouns that refer to states are things having to do with computers: software, data, program, web page, bug, security hole, app.  We think of these things as, well, things, nouns, but when we ask what software is made of we run into trouble because software isn't really made of anything.  Software is not a system, it's a state, specifically, a state of a system we call a computer.  And it's a very specific kind of state of that system: it's a state of that computer's memory.  And it's even more specific than that: software is a state of a computer's memory that can be seen as binary digits, ones and zeros.

What do I mean by "can be seen as"?  Aren't the ones and zeros in computer memory just an objective fact?  The somewhat surprising answer to that question is: no, they are not.  The only objective fact inside a modern computer's memory is the presence or absence of electrons in certain locations.  (I haven't talked about electrons yet.  I'm going to ask you to suspend disbelief and assume that what you were taught about electricity in high school science class is actually true.)  And even that gets a little questionable when we get to quantum mechanics.

At this point you may have noticed that I seem to be doing some pretty frantic hand-waving.  I'm having to explain hedges like "can be seen as" and throwing in new concepts like electrons and their presence or absence at certain locations, and then questioning whether that even makes sense to talk about.  There are two reasons for this.  The first is that the real truth has a lot of complicated details.  There is a reason that it took thousands of really smart people a couple of centuries to figure all this stuff out.  Even today, [climbing this learning curve takes years](https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/04/the-scientific-method-part-4-eating.html).  It is possible to present an easier-to-understand simplified version, which is what I am necessarily doing here.  This is not a graduate-level physics course.  But every now and then I feel honor-bound to peel back the curtain and give you a glimpse of the complicated details so that you will continue to trust me not to mislead you.  After all, my testimony is all I have to offer, so I am going to bend over backwards to preserve its value.

But the more important reason is that the idea of systems and states are not in and of themselves part of any explanation.   What they are instead is a kind of framework for constructing explanations, a sort of Erector Set for scientific theories.  By forcing ourselves to talk in terms of systems and states we impose a self-discipline that frees us from much of the vagueness and ambiguity of the English language.  We no longer have to fret about puzzles like, "What is software made of?"  Software isn't made of anything.  Software is not a system, it is a state of a system.  It's the same with chairs.  Chairs are a system (of atoms) but chairness is a state.  Note that the statement, "Chairness is a state," is an explanation.   It is an explanation that conforms to the constraint that it be couched in terms of systems and states.

Why would we want to tie our hands in this way?  Maybe there are observations that require explanations that cannot (or simply do not) conform, or for which the best explanation is one that just happens not to conform.  That's possible.  But so for, in the four-hundred-year-long history of modern science, no counterexample has ever been successfully demonstrated.  All successful scientific theories to date conform to this constraint, and it's actually not hard to see why: it's because the world happens to be such that it lends itself to being described in terms of things that actually exist in some foundational way (systems) and the behaviors that those things can exhibit (states).  There are technical terms for all this.  The list of things that are considered to make up systems is called the ontology of the theory, and the description of behaviors (i.e. how systems transition between states) is called the dynamics of the theory.  The familiar physics of everyday life, the kind they teach in high school physics classes, and which mostly corresponds with common sense, is called classical mechanics.   The ontology of classical mechanics comprises objects that exist and move around in three-dimensional space (i.e. atoms) and the dynamics are Newton's laws of motion, and Maxwell's laws of electrodynamics.  And if you want to get fancy, you can throw in relativity, both special and general, under the classical umbrella too.

I have to emphasize here again that none of the details actually matter for our purposes.  What matters is that all of what I have just described is entirely uncontroversial.  You don't have to understand any of the details of these scientific theories.  All you have to know is that they exist, and everyone who takes the time to understand them comes to the same understanding of what these theories say.   And this is an observation that itself has an explanation, namely, that these theories correspond, at least approximately, to actual objective truth.  In other words, the Objective Reality Hypothesis is correct.

That's the easy part.  We have in hand scientific theories that explain a lot of our subjective experiences.  Does that mean we're done?  Can these theories explain all of our subjective experience?  Or are there still Problems that remain to be solved?  Yes, of course there are!  One of the many elephants in the room is the fact that we are able to construct scientific theories at all!  In order to get to this point, two things had to be true.  First, the universe had to be such that constructing scientific theories was even possible.  In other words, the Objective Reality Hypothesis, or something like it, had to be true to begin with.  In order to discern the laws by which the universe behaves, it is necessary that the universe actually behaves according to laws, which our universe apparently does.  But why does our universe behave according to laws?  And why does it behave according to the particular laws that seem to apply?  There is no immediately obvious explanation for that.

The second apparent requirement for our discovery of scientific laws is that we have the ability to reason, to invent mathematics and technologies that allow us to build scientific instruments and electronic computers and generally carry out the scientific enterprise.  How did that happen?   Again, there is nothing immediately obvious in the behavior of atom that should lead them to naturally make brains, let alone such uncommonly capable brains as ours.

And then there are all kinds of additional mysteries not directly connected to science, but which are nonetheless part of our subjective experience.  Where does consciousness come from?  Where does our sense of right and wrong come from?  And what is the point of all of this?

I touched on this at the end of the last installment, and I don't want to belabor it. I just mention it here for completeness, and also to reiterate my promise that, despite the fact that this chapter was rather dry and technical, I am going to get to the hard questions and not just sweep them under the rug.  But to do that I had to lay some foundations.  Next time I will start to talk about information, and it is not possible to understand information without first understanding what systems and states are.

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Public Service Announcement for those of you who made it to the end: I am going to be doing another debate with MadeByJimBob on Wednesday, April 29 Thursday, May 7 at 9PM Eastern time.  The topic is going to be "Is belief in God a reasonable position?"  It will be on the same venue as last time, Modern Day Debate.  They haven't posted it yet so I can't give you a link, but as soon as they do I'll update this announcement.  Tune in and watch the sparks fly.