Tag: cosmology

Kalam the Incorrigible as a Moral Good

Mark DavisLeave a comment

I’ve previously complained that the Kalam Cosmological Argument is drivel, but a recent video reminded me that intellectual sophistication can arise from confronting drivel, because it helps expose more people to the tenuous, changing, and incomplete journey of modern science and philosophical interpretation/translation. I knew I was largely in alignment with modern science when I wrote that particular post (and others), but the video, considering the figures involved, provides additional compelling insights to push the viewer into thinking more carefully about the challenges and limits of our collective understanding of who we are, where we came from, and what it means to be here now.

I highly recommend it:

And what I think is most worth emphasizing and that may not be understood by laypeople and religious supplicants, or may not be internalized as deeply as it should be, includes:

  1. Our everyday experience and intuitions about similarly-sized matter are simply not applicable to quantum and relativistic scales, or to the implications of cosmological theories. “Causality” is one of those concepts. We see this in everything from the simple case of radioactive decay to contra-causal quantum experiments, and ultimately in the question of causation as applied to the universe itself.
  2. Science operates by applying metaphors, finding the limitations of those metaphors, filtering by empirical results, and then using the refined science as a new metaphor. Most of those metaphors are incompatible with everyday experience. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be so vexingly difficult to understand.
  3. Many philosophical worries about logical inconsistency are abstractly derived from everyday reasoning and may not apply to modern understandings of causality, space, and time.
  4. Humility about what we don’t know and effort to unravel it remains the best approach to our mysterious selves and the world.
… Read the rest

A Learning Smorgasbord

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Compliments of a discovery by Futurism, the paper The Autodidactic Universe by a smorgasbord of contemporary science and technology thinkers caught my attention for several reasons. First was Jaron Lanier as a co-author. I knew Jaron’s dad, Ellery, when I was a researcher at NMSU’s now defunct Computing Research Laboratory. Ellery had returned to school to get his psychology PhD during retirement. In an odd coincidence, my brother had also rented a trailer next to the geodesic dome Jaron helped design and Ellery lived after my brother became emancipated in his teens. Ellery may have been his landlord, but I am not certain of that.

The paper is an odd piece of kit that I read over two days in fits and spurts with intervening power lifting interludes (I recently maxed out my Bowflex and am considering next steps!). It initially has the feel of physicists trying to reach into machine learning as if the domain specialists clearly missed something that the hardcore physical scientists have known all along. But that concern dissipated fairly quickly and the paper settled into showing isomorphisms between various physical theories and the state evolution of neural networks. OK, no big deal. Perhaps they were taken by the realization that the mathematics of tensors was a useful way to describe network matrices and gradient descent learning. They then riffed on that and looked at the broader similarities between the temporal evolution of learning and quantum field theory, approaches to quantum gravity, and cosmological ideas.

The paper, being a smorgasbord, then investigates the time evolution of graphs using a lens of graph theory. The core realization, as I gleaned it, is that there are more complex graphs (visually as well as based on the diversity of connectivity within the graph) and pointlessly uniform or empty ones.… Read the rest

Indifference and the Cosmos

Mark DavisLeave a comment

I am a political independent, though that does not mean that I vote willy-nilly. I have, in fact, been reliably center left for most of my adult life, save one youthfully rebellious moment when I voted Libertarian, more as a statement than a commitment to the principles of libertarianism per se. I regret that vote now, given additional exposure to the party and the kinds of people it attracts. To me, the extremes of the American political system build around radical positions, and the increasingly noxious conspiracy theories and unhinged rhetoric is nothing like the cautious, problem-solving utopia that might make me politically happy, or at least wince less.

Some might claim I am indifferent. I would not argue with that. In the face of revolution, I would require a likely impossible proof of a better outcome before committing. How can we possibly see into such a permeable and contingent future, or weigh the goods and harms in the face of the unknown? This idea of indifference, as a tempering of our epistemic insights, serves as a basis for an essential idea in probabilistic reasoning where it even has the name, the principle of indifference, or, variously, and in contradistinction with Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, the principle of insufficient reason.

So how does indifference work in probabilistic reasoning? Consider a Bayesian formulation: we inductively guess based on a combination of a priori probabilities combined with a posteriori evidences. What is the likelihood of the next word in an English sentence being “is”? Indifference suggests that we treat each word as likely as any other, but we know straight away that “is” occurs much more often than “Manichaeistic” in English texts because we can count words.… Read the rest

A, B, C time!

Mark DavisLeave a comment

time-flows-awayThis might get technical, despite the vaguely Sesame Street quality to the title. You see, philosophers have long worried over time and causality, and rightly so, going back to the Greeks like Heraclitus and Parmenides, as well as their documenters many years later. Is time a series of events one after another or is that a perceptual mistake? For if everything comes from some cascade of events that precede it, it is illogical to presume that something might emerge from nothing (Parmenides). And, contra, perhaps all things are in a state of permanent change and all such perceptions are confused (Heraclitus). The latter has some opaque formulations in the appreciation of the Einsteinian relativistic form of combining space and time together while still preserving the symmetry of time in the basic equations, allowing for the rolling forward and backward of the space-time picture without much in the way of consequences.

So Lee Smolin’s re-injection of time as a real phenomena in Time Reborn takes us from A and B theories of time to something slightly new, which might be called a C theory. This theory builds on Smolin’s previous work where he proposed an evolutionary model of cosmology to explain how the precarious constants of our observed universe might have come into being. In Smolin’s super-cosmology, many universes come to be and not be at an alarming rate. Indeed, perhaps in every little black hole is another one. But many of these universes are not very viable because they lack the physical constants needed to last a long time and for entities like us to evolve to try to comprehend them. This does away with any mysteries about the Anthropic Principle: we are just survivors.… Read the rest

Apache Point Memories

Mark DavisLeave a comment

When I was eight or nine, I traveled with my father up into the rarefied air of the Sacramento Mountains of Southern New Mexico. Getting there was long, hot and complicated. Our VW van pushed up over the mountain passes as thunderheads rolled in from the west, plum and steel-gray, and the sky flashed and shuddered under the monsoonal effects of the late-summer deserts. I avoided touching the metal surfaces of the VW van as my father, a professor of electrical engineering, explained how the lighting, were it to hit the car, would likely melt the tires and travel through the shell of the van and into the ground below.

We were in search of another kind of lightning, however, as we passed through the Border Patrol check-point near White Sands and ascended into the Ponderosa Pines of the high, western mountains. The van chugged along but kept ascending and any limitations it may have had were lost on my youthful mind as the smell of pine needles and the cooler air rolled in through the open windows until we finally slowed to a crunching stop in a gravel lot near a couple of unimpressive shacks. We were above the clouds, with just the tops of the cumulonimbus visible to the south and west.

I knew that I was at a place called Sunspot and that there were telescopes there that were used to look at the sun. It was an act of technological disregard of the countless warnings I had received about looking at the sun as a child, including when my father brought home dense smoked filters from the Naval Observatory in Washington DC when I was four to let us watch a full solar eclipse.… Read the rest

Cosmologies and Theories of Everything

Mark Davis1 Comment

Zach, fictional though he is, is not the only one interested in cosmological theories. But what form do these theories take? A Theory of Everything or TOE is a theory that intends to explain the entire observable universe using a compact specification of equations and the conceptual arguments that support them. In the modern sense, a TOE is a physical explanation of the large-scale structure of the universe. Later, we can start to expand the TOE to look for “bridging laws” that help justify other phenomena that approach the human scale.

What are our alternatives? The previous post mentioned the Catholic Church’s embrace of Big Bang cosmology as justifying Genesis. Apologist and philosopher of religion William Lane Craig also elaborately evaluates Big Bang theories as substantiating theism by supporting creation at the singularity event.

But do these notions change the underlying TOEs? No, in general. The best that they can do is accept the TOE as an input and make a deductive argument based on assumptions that are not excluded by the TOE. For apologists, that means that the singularity event provides a divide between a non-temporal pre-universe and the current universe–effectively between non-existence and existence. But that is not the only TOE available to us. There are a range of TOEs that have been devised.  The following is derived from Marcus Hutter’s A Complete Theory of Everything (Will Be Subjective):

  1. (G) Geocentric model: Ancient notion that the Earth is at the center of the known universe.
  2. (H) Heliocentric model: Evolution of the model to centralize on the Sun.
  3. (E) Effective theories: General relativity, quantum electrodynamics, and Newtonian mechanics, but without a unifying architecture.
  4. (P) Standard model of particle physics: Beginning of unification that contains numerous arbitrary parameters and has yet to unify gravity.
… Read the rest