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.

Seeking God in Science part 5: Testimony

At the end of the last installment in this series I made a prediction: you believe that matter is made of atoms.  I am confident in making this prediction despite the fact that I have almost no information about who you are because, as far as I can tell, no one in the modern world denies it.  There are people who profess to believe in all kinds of crazy shit, but I have never heard of anyone alive today who denies that atoms are real.

Given this rather overwhelming consensus, it may surprise you to learn that there was legitimate scientific disagreement about the existence of atoms right up to the start of the 20th century.   At that point there was a lot of circumstantial evidence that atoms were real, mainly in the fact that when elements combined to form compounds they always did so in quantities that were ratios of small integers.  That fact could be explained by the existence of atoms, but it wasn't proof that they were actually real.  Back then there were alternative explanations that seemed to account for all the data just as well.

Today we have pictures of atoms, which would seem to make it a slam-dunk.  But we also have pictures of humans walking on the moon, and yet there is a whole industry of lunar landing denialists.  In fact, there are Artemis-mission denialists now!  So why aren't there atomic denialists?  It is actually not that hard to cook up an argument that atoms aren't real: the alleged "photographs" of atoms aren't actually photographs at all, they are just digital renderings of data from so-called "scanning electron microscopes", which aren't really microscopes at all.  A microscope is an device with lenses that magnify light.  Scanning electron microscopes don't have lenses.  They don't even have the magnetic fields that (allegedly) "focus" beams of (alleged) electrons in so-called "transmission electron microscopes".  So all of these "photographs" of atoms are necessarily heavily processed.  In other words, these pictures are literally photoshopped into existence.  (BTW, this is also true of most "normal" photographs taken using digital cameras.  The vast majority of digital cameras do some kind of processing on the data, even if it is just to compress it to make it smaller.  Apple iPhones in particular do a lot of actual image processing (i.e. "photoshopping") to try to make their pictures look better.

However, you have some first-hand evidence that the photos on your iPhone are not that different from reality because you can compare the photos you take with what you saw with your own eyes at the time.  But with photos of atoms that's not possible.  It is physically impossible to see an individual atom with your eyes, or even with an optical microscope.  The only way to get a "picture" of an atom is through some indirect and very complicated process, so complicated that people actually can earn a living by mastering them.

So how do you justify your belief in atoms?  Seriously, take a moment to stop and think about that before reading further.  I'll wait.

It might help to consider what happened that finally persuaded the scientific community that atoms were real.  That consensus was reached long before (so-called) pictures of atoms became available.  What is it that managed to turn a centuries-long running controversy into a universal consensus over the span of just a few years?

The answer to that question is a fellow named Albert Einstein.  Maybe you have heard of him?  He came up with relativity and E=mc².  He won a Nobel prize too, not for relativity, but rather for his explanation of something called the photoelectric effect, which helped pave the way to quantum mechanics.  And he also, on the side, advanced the definitive proof that atoms exist through a mathematical analysis of something called Brownian motion.  This is a phenomenon named after a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown, who, in 1827, published the first description of it.  Brownian motion is the apparently random motion of small particles suspended in a liquid (typically water) when viewed under a microscope.  It turns out that the minute details of how these particles move are exactly what you would expect if they were being pushed around by moving atoms.

That is what finally convinced the scientific community that atoms exist, but that is almost certainly not what convinced you.   Maybe you were aware of Brownian motion, but almost certainly you have never read Einstein's paper, and even if you have you almost certainly didn't understand it.  I certainly don't, and I have a more training in math and science than most people.

The reason you believe in atoms is almost certainly the same as the reason I believe in atoms, or at least why I started believing in atoms: someone in a position of authority, most likely a middle-school science teacher, told you that matter is made of atoms and you believed it.  But even if you were to become skeptical (or simply curious) and start to dig into the details, everything you find will be indirect: papers, articles, photos taken by other people.  In other words, all of the evidence you have for the existence of atoms takes the form of testimony, something you are told by another human rather than something you directly experience for yourself.

And this is not only true for atoms, but for the vast majority of what you and most people believe.  Do you believe that Bhutan exists?  Unless you have actually been there yourself, the only way you can know about it is through testimony.  Do you believe that the far side of the moon exists?   Black holes?  Texas blind salamanders?  Unless you are a member of some very privileged groups, you have no alternative but to rely at least to some extent on testimony to support these beliefs.

In fact the vast majority of what most people think they know comes from testimony and not direct first-hand experience.  This is not an indictment of testimony.  It's essential.  There is just too much information out there, especially in the modern world, to be able to acquire all of it first hand.  But not all testimony is created equal.  People lie, and people make mistakes.  So how can you tell when someone is telling you the truth, especially in a situation where you can't verify a claim first hand?  When I, or your science teacher, or Richard Feynman, tell you that matter is made of atoms, why should you believe us?

The answer is that the actual existence of atoms is the best explanation of your first-hand subjective experience of having all of these people telling you that they exist, just as the actual existence of chairs is the best explanation for the fact that everyone agrees about chairs.  Consider what would have to be true if atoms did not exist.  How would you explain the fact that there is both a scientific and popular consensus that they do?  How would you explain the periodic table of the elements?  The atomic theory is much, much more than the simple assertion that atoms exist.  It is very specific about exactly how many kinds of atoms there are (92 in nature, a few more that we can create in nuclear reactors) and how they behave.  Moreover, there is no disagreement about any of this.  There is no scientific faction arguing for the existence of different kinds of atoms or an alternative periodic table.  There are not different denominations of physics or chemistry.  There is an absolute consensus about all of these details.  If people are lying or mistaken, they would all have to be lying or mistaken in exactly the same way.  It would have to be either an enormous coincidence or an enormous conspiracy, neither of which is very likely.  So the best explanation of this consensus is that the consensus is actually true.

But it's not just all that.  There is also your first-hand experience of reading these very words.  How do you explain that?  This is a blog post, so you are almost certainly reading it on a computer or a smart phone.  How does that work?  Well, there are these things called semiconductors which are made mainly of silicon atoms.  You can find vast quantities of excruciatingly detailed information about exactly how they work, and all of it will agree.  Again, there are only three possibilities: either all this information has been deliberately produced to deceive you, or it has been produced with good intentions but it is nonetheless wrong (but somehow all of these devices work anyway), or it is right.  By far the most likely explanation is that the information is right, and so atoms exist.

Moreover, this implies that the people who told you that atoms exist are trustworthy sources of information.  It doesn't mean that they are perfect, that they are never wrong, or that they never lie.  But at least in some cases, their testimony actually does align with objective reality and allows you to make correct predictions about the future.  If someone like this tells you something, there is at least the possibility that a good explanation for their testimony is that they actually know something, and are actually making a good faith attempt to impart that knowledge to you.

The existence of atoms is among a handful of explanations that are so well established that they can safely be labeled as scientific facts.  Included among these are relativity theory, thermodynamics, and of course the atomic theory.  The $64,000 question is now: can these "scientific facts" account for all of our observations?  Can they answer all of our questions?  In particular, can they answer the Big Questions:  What is consciousness?  What is love?  Do we have free will?  What is the standard for moral behavior?  What happens after we die?  And perhaps most importantly, why are we here?  What is the point?  Humans are just so damned complicated that it seems a priori impossible that all of our subjective experience could be accounted for in this way, that our entire existence can be reduced merely to "atoms doing their thing."

In the rest of this series I am going to argue that yes, it can, and I am going to explain exactly how.  But that is going to be a long row to hoe.  For now I want to present the argument for the opposing point of view to the best of my ability.  If I am going to claim that my explanation is the best one available, I have to be willing to put it up against the strongest alternatives.  So if you are an advocate for one of these alternative and I get something wrong here, let me know in the comments.

The claim that all of our subjective experiences can be accounted for by the behavior of atoms is not only wrong (this argument goes) it is manifestly absurd, a category error.  Subjective experience is a fundamentally different kind of phenomenon than anything an atom (or large groups of atoms) could possibly produce.  Atoms simply move around according to deterministic laws.  Nowhere in those laws is there anything even vaguely resembling everyday human subjective experiences like consciousness, love, shame, pride, joy, anger, sadness.  Atoms have no moral agency, and cannot acquire moral agency simply by being aggregated into sufficiently large collections.  There is something qualitatively different between human experience and the deterministic behavior of atoms.

Moreover, our very existence cannot be accounted for simply by Atoms Doing Their Thing.  Life is so mind-bogglingly complex that it cannot have been brought about by mere chance and deterministic laws.  Biological evolution can explain some of the characteristics of life, but it cannot explain how life arose in the first place, or how the universe itself arose in the first place.  To explain those it is necessary to hypothesize a Creator (or at least a creator).  Given that, it seems plausible that the reason we are here is that the Creator wanted us to be here, that we exist to fulfill some kind of purpose.  Moreoever, it seems plausible that the Creator has revealed that purpose to some of us, and that the people to whom that revelation has been made wrote it down so they could share it with the rest of us, and that is the reason holy texts exist.  These are not the results of humans making shit up out of whole cloth, they are the instruction manuals for life given to us by the Creator, because we are not expected to just figure it all out on our own.

That's about as far as I can get with steel-manning the religious position in general.  To go any further than that I have to grapple with the fact that there is a huge variety of holy texts on offer, and they don't all agree with each other (to put it mildly).  In fact, even by positing a Creator with a capital C I have already biased myself against certain Eastern traditions like Buddhism, which does not admit (or at least does not emphasize) a Creator, or even a creator.  So I simply don't know how to go further without advancing one religious tradition over another.  I am not a religious scholar.  I know a fair bit about Christianity, a little less about Islam and Judaism, and next to nothing about eastern traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Shintoism... I don't even know how long a list like that would end up being.

Going forward I am going to focus on western monotheism because of my own cultural biases and because it's what I know.  So I am going to talk about The Creator rather than a creator, which I intend to encompass as much as possible of Western monotheism, and specifically the traditions that grow out of the book of Genesis.  I'm going to focus mainly on Christianity, not because I want to exclude Judaism and Islam, but simply because I've studied the former more than the latter.

I'm going to leave it at that for now.  Next time I will start diving in to the details of how science can at least begin to answer some of the Big Questions.  Here's a teaser: the fact that we cannot definitively rule out the possibility that we are living in the Matrix will turn out to be very significant.