mills

Petichou linked to an article on some of the preoccupations of contemporary physicists, and I was struck by the paragraph above; Krauss’ is a curious concern.

It is often noted that one of the defining qualities of our universe is its comprehensibility, but it might just as well be said that comprehension is a defining quality of mind. This symmetry between the knowable universe and the knowing mind reflects an important quality of the latter: it does not merely observe, record, and inductively detect intelligible connections.

Rather: it encompasses, interiorizes, virtualizes, and explains holistically. That is to say that the mind is an organ which can contain within itself accurate models of all phenomena in the form of explanations. These models are akin to virtualizations: we can recreate within our minds even what we cannot observe, and we can do so such that those recreations are astonishingly isomorphic to their real counterparts.

This is the metaphorical basis for cognition: we construct metaphorical models (theories, ideas, terms) which retain the logical properties and relations of their subjects so that we are not dependent on accessibility for knowledge. We cannot, for example, see the Big Bang; the perplexing flow of time prevents it. Yet we can model it with incredibly acuity, and our virtualizing computational minds allow us to extract from those models conclusions which predict and explain the behavior of the physical universe.

Nothing about the multiverse would be different, regardless of its observational accessibility. I am surprised to read Krauss’ epistemological anxiety, since it would be an event unprecedented in the history of physical reality were we to encounter something fundamentally incomprehensible. I imagine David Deutsch, in particular, would object that such a development would be unlikely given the evolution of mind within physical reality, an evolution which has allowed the former to contain the latter with profound accuracy.

(In this sense, mind –including its externalized components, such as computer networks- may be the only element of reality which can in theory contain reality, although Walker Percy claimed that mind cannot, as a semiotic matter, contain itself: hence the success of the sciences and the failures of modern selfhood).

Sir Martin Rees in a TED lecture. He suggests that humans have evolved to this scale, an almost beautiful mean between stars and atomic particles, because we must be large enough to permit massive complexity in structure while small enough to experience minimal gravitational effects.

This idea reminds me of Schrödinger’s amazing explanation of why the fundamental components of human life -particularly DNA- are sized as they are.

It always makes me feel rather happy to think that everything had to be just so for our world, as we know it, to occur. Rees calls this quality of the universe its biophilia and describes it more here.

William T. Vollmann, Uncentering the Earth. Vollmann notes that what made the groping progression away from geocentrism (and other errors in astronomy) inevitable was less that they were not explanatory -they were, and worked with our metaphysics at the time!- but that they were not predictive.

Walker Percy felt this was a major element of the paradigmatic shift to what he called “scientism” in the West: as technology has become the most important concern of our civilization, the predictive capacity of any system of knowledge has become how we judge that system’s value. Technology needs theories that can predict how it can relate to and dominate the natural world: so what tells us what will happen is more important than anything else told.

Science has supremely powerful predictive capacities; it has very powerful explanatory capacities, although those explanations must necessarily be developed in inhuman language; it has virtually no capacity for generating human meaning. That is: it is observational, predictive, explanatory only in the ways dictated by the natural world’s contours.

Culture (religion, art, politics) has less powerful predictive capabilities (most believers will admit that its predictions are either eschatological or vague: this will happen to you at the end of time; this will happen after death; but nothing about what will happen to you if you inhale this or that bacteria or travel at a speed approaching that of light; and its predictions do not expand and refine themselves). Culture is better at providing morality and meaning, however, because it can exist apart from the natural world in the world of the mind and heart and in the language of human experience.

I note this only because I found Vollmann’s condensation fascinating: here is the point in which our obsession with understanding and predicting phenomena -with mastering the natural world and the future- begins to supersede our adherence to value systems of another sort.

“Predictive power grew ever more irresistible…” sounds almost Faustian. And perhaps it is.

Erwin Schrödinger, quoting an example used by Lord Kelvin, to demonstrate how small atoms are (that is: how many of them there are in everything, like glasses of water).

As he notes, however, it’s not so much that atoms are small as it is that we are large, very large. Schrödinger begins What Is Life?, which was sent to me by my dad, by pondering the relative size of organic life to its atomic constituents. Why are cells, organisms, humans so much larger than atoms and atomic events? Why are all fundamental physical processes so far beneath our sensory perception?

The question is not facile, although the immediate instinct is to say, as we do when we don’t understand something, “Because it is!” But Schrödinger arrives at an arresting conclusion: life is vastly larger in scale because at the atomic scale, individual atomic events are not reliably predictable. Due to the bizarre and irregular nature of individual molecular and atomic events, few repeatable phenomena are available for systems to organize their processes with; that is to say, you cannot build reliable, repeatable processes from atoms or molecules because they are too random. Life must use aggregates of millions of atoms or molecules.

In aggregates, atoms behave with statistical regularity despite individual irregularity. Schrödinger illustrates this with examples like diffusion and Brownian motion; in both cases, individual atoms behave with total and unpredictable irregularity, but in massive groups they behave with complete predictability. Just as one could not build a skyscraper on unpredictably shifting earth, so organic life must rely on the aggregation of atoms and molecules for the processes it uses to function (like diffusion, for example). Hence our sense organs all being far too massive to perceive all the fundamental phenomena of the universe’s compositional elements.

Abusing this remarkable observation, I thought it a nicely poetic metaphor for an epistemological phenomenon that has long irked me: the manner in which the more closely examined something is, the more fleeting its precise details are; there is a Heisenberg-like quality to reality, and I remember when as a child I was attempting to learn about JFK’s assassination how baffled I was that so many thousands of investigators, historians, academics, and law-enforcement personnel, working for decades, could not arrive at an indisputable conclusion. As I’ve grown older, I’ve seen that this is true of virtually every event, even those recorded on video or photographic media and witnessed by millions.

While this has nothing whatever to do with Schrödinger and Heisenberg, it struck me then that reality resists knowing: the more closely you examine it, the more space in between facts you see, the more chaotic the motion you seek to arrest, the more diffuse the facts you want to connect. Crystalline structures of conclusive meaning merely mask enormous spaces in their own lattices, spaces where the random trails of the unpredictable remain visible.

(Note: I’m not even discussing the inescapable fact that at the quantum level, and thus probably beyond it, mere observation demonstrably affects reality in ways that are scarcely believable).