5th Blogiversary Post

Thank you to everyone who has visited. I’m extremely grateful to those who have commented: the discussions that have taken place have been very valuable.

(Brief retrospective meta-blogging follows.)

Actually, I “cheated” at the beginning. The first ten posts from June 2004 were drawn from an essay I had previously written and distributed to some friends and family members, which I called (tongue-in-cheek) “Steve’s Guide to Reality”. After a little while, though, the blog started to show some life, becoming more interactive (thanks to Justin and Peter for early comments). While the equilibrium frequency of posting turned out to be pretty low, it has held fairly steady.

I’m happy with the results. In addition to the comment and e-mail dialogues the blog has engendered, it has helped organize and record my thoughts much more effectively than the previous battered-notebook approach. Also, blogging has obviously facilitated taking advantage of the explosion of resources available to read and link to on the internet. I’m indebted to all the scholars, students and fellow laypeople who blog or otherwise post their work online.

Blogging is, then, a valuable tool which is helping me toward a goal: the development of a metaphysical worldview. This has been my number one “hobby” since I was a teenager, and I think I’ve made more progress in these last five years then ever before.

Thanks again.

I Heart Philpapers

David Chalmers announced here the creation of the philpapers.org site to aggregate and provide tools to explore philosophical works of all stripes. It looks stupendous. David Bourget has spearheaded this effort with Chalmers.

So, I was curious whether the site had any online papers or drafts by philosophers of science on the topic of emergent-spacetime approaches to quantum gravity research (I had not yet seen any to date). Voila, I found this nice paper by Jonathan Bain on the condensed-matter physics-based approaches.

There is no way someone outside a university setting like me could keep up with the work of philosophers without the internet. So, while I know I'm not the intended beneficiary of all this effort, I’m nonetheless extremely grateful to the individuals who have worked over the years to aggregate the online papers: including (in addition to Chalmers and Bourget) Brian Weatherson, Jonathan Ichikawa, and Wolfgang Schwarz.

Finally! (off-topic post)

28 years since the last Phillies championship and 25 years since the last city title in a major sport.

And what a great team. They are a well rounded, solid group of players, with stars we've seen develop over the years as well as clutch role players added recently. Great personalities who've given us wonderful entertainment and now the most satisfaction a fan can get.

Ryan Howard's victory lap -- picture by elisbrown -- flickr under creative commons license.

Off Topic: Election Post

March 24th is the deadline to register to vote, or to change party affiliation, prior to the April 22 Pennsylvania primary election. Please spread the word to anyone who might wish to register. Here's a link. Thanks.

Incremental Blog Improvements

Since blogger supports labels now, I created a bunch (which are on the sidebar) and went back and labeled most of the old posts. I'm uploading a photo of my smiling face to stick onto the profile page.

On Midi-chlorians

Attention: first geeky “Star Wars” post on this blog.

When the original Star Wars came out I was 13 years old and was duly blown away. I thought the "Force” was a pretty cool aspect of the movie, but that was as far as it went. Later on (college?), I heard some fans talk about the Force as if it were a seriously interesting philosophical idea. I disagreed and thought it was actually pretty lame on closer inspection.

Obi-Wan explained the Force thus: “an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.” Why is the Force only associated with living things (although it somehow binds the galaxy)? It seems like a kind of old-fashioned vitalism. There seems to be a kind of interactive dualism of Force and material world – this is basically is a traditional Cartesian template. This was reinforced when Obi-Wan’s spirit appeared after death. As an aside, I also thought the idea of the dark and light sides of the Force to be naïve and simplistic.

My kids are into Star Wars now, and as a result I’ve watched the prequel trilogy several times on DVD. And in contrast to my thoughts above I actually kind of liked the “Midi-chlorian” idea (once I made out the dialogue). Here’s Qui-Gon: “Midi-chlorians are microscopic life-forms that reside within the cells of all living things and communicate with the Force.” He goes on to describe the relationship of humans and Midi-chlorians as symbiotic. Now, I think the status of Midi-chlorians as natural entities is an improvement on the mysterious spirit world of the force. I still don’t like that they are limited to living organisms – I think a system in which livings things are more clearly co-extensive in nature with the non-living world would be better. (Also, let me steer right past Anakin’s immaculate conception via Midi-chlorians). Still, I liked the fact that Midi-chlorians at least partly put the force back into the natural world. This is closer to a more interesting panexperientialist or pantheist worldview than the original dualistic worldview of the force.

Origin of Life Articles

This post by PZ Myers links to two articles on research into the origin of life. I didn't see any mention of an explicit role for Quantum Mechanics.

By the way, if case any of you haven't seen it yet, scienceblogs has usefully gathered together a number of good bloggers in one site.

Summer Break

I'm taking a break from my rigorous once a week (at most) blogging schedule. My beach reading assignment is David Lewis. Here's a naive question: should one's opinion of modal realism be influenced by the fact that physicists for their own reasons are increasingly postulating the existence of multiple worlds?

Delicious Blog Archive

Over on the side bar I now have a page which organizes my blog posts by topic. I used a service called del.icio.us to create this (thanks to a tip from Philosophy, et cetera).

Links

I started to expand and organize my links (over on the bottom right side). Suggestions on good links to add or on format are welcome.

Hiatus

I will be back after Labor Day. During this time I will be reading about the use of information as a foundational concept in interpreting quantum mechanics, and will post about it in September.

A Note on the Second Law

In my post on 'Conscious Experience and the Mystery of Time', I discussed the fact that the equations of our major physical theories are time-symmetric. There is no explanation for the one-directional and irreversible aspects of time in our experience. Of course there is one well-known theory within science which does incorporate an 'arrow of time': the second law of thermodynamics.

My paraphrase of the second law is that in a closed system, the dispersion of the energy within the system will increase in time. Of course, the constant flow of new energy into open systems can keep energy ordered and localized or foster an increase in order.

One of the interesting sub-plots of modern physics is to see whether a place for the arrow of time can be found as theorists work to integrate and surpass the twin monuments of the twentieth century: general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Toward a New Worldview

I think the ideas and arguments I’ve presented in the first seven posts can form a foundation for a new worldview. This new worldview makes sense of age-old philosophical dilemmas and helps bridge the gulf between the scientific perspective and religious beliefs about the nature of humanity and our place in the world.

The key to this worldview is the realization that the phenomenon of first-person experience, known to us through our own lives, must be a natural, fundamental, and irreducible feature of the world.

The universe, then, is not a world of "dead" matter moving in a void of space that we often picture when learning science. At the same time, our rich and compelling experience does not require a mystical explanation that a scientifically minded skeptic would reject. I envision us to be an integrated part of a world that naturally includes life, consciousness, knowledge, values, morals, and free will. Our experience is one of participating in the larger experience of this world.

Now, in my first introduction post I spoke about some of those difficult “big” questions that confront us. What about those? Well, to be sure, we can only begin to answer some of these. The new worldview begins to provide answers to questions about the fundamental nature of the universe and how our human lives arise from and fit into the universe. It is harder for me to yet envision answering certain other questions that represent an even higher “degree of difficulty”. For instance: Is there anything outside our universe? Why is there something rather than nothing? These sorts of questions are not about the universe and its contents but as phrased seem to demand an explanation transcending the natural universe as we now conceive of it. So, these embody an even deeper element of mystery.

Still, I think this new worldview represents progress. There is a lot more work to do, of course, and some of the ideas presented here may not hold up. But, I think the outlook is bright for us to gain an ever-greater grasp of our reality as time unfolds.

And what an exciting journey it is!

Introduction

Over the years, I’ve been thinking about the difficult “big” questions which confront us. The list is familiar to everybody: “What is the universe and how did it come to be?” “Who are we and how do we fit in?” Hardest of all are the “Why” questions about life and the world. Given how busy we all are, it is natural that we don’t have a lot of time to worry about these questions. On the other hand it is frustrating that we know so little about the mysteries underlying our lives. Through some reading and thinking I have done, I’ve had some philosophical ideas which I am convinced meaningfully increase our grasp on reality. This is my attempt to summarize and share these through time. As a caveat, please note that this is an amateur effort. My lack of training in any relevant subject is a big handicap. What’s been great for me is that so many talented philosophers and scientists have undertaken to write books and articles accessible to a general audience. Still, the thrust of many of my ideas dont' seem to have penetrated into the general public.

Here’s the problem: in our culture, the two approaches we take to these big fundamental questions couldn’t be more different. On the one hand, we have science, which most of us look to for ever-increasing insight into the nature of reality. On the other hand, we have the variety of religious beliefs which provide so many people a foundation for understanding the mysteries of being. To state the obvious: science and religion represent two non-overlapping visions of reality that historically have been unable to connect with each other. I find this very unsatisfying.

The responses of people to this state of affairs might be very roughly categorized into 3 types. The first response would be a total or near total confidence that while science may not answer all the questions today, eventually it will. A second response would respect the effectiveness of science but retain a feeling that the scientific method is (and will continue to be) incapable of answering some of the most fundamental questions. A third response would be to reject or devalue science and have a basically non-scientific worldview based on one’s religion. I suspect a great deal of people reside in group number 2, and this leads them to straddle the divide by embracing science while still looking elsewhere for ultimate truths.

For the last several hundred years in western culture, science has been in the ascendancy. The increasing confidence in science is of course well founded in the great advances in our understanding of the natural world. As I will sometimes argue, however, the great successes of modern science have been accompanied by lack of progress in addressing some long-standing philosophical problems. Figuring out why this is so gives us a good roadmap toward gaining in our understanding of reality.

I don’t intend to discuss religion or religious ideas here. For billions of people, religion and personal faith will continue to be the anchor for understanding the world and for providing a template for living. I do have some ideas which point to some potential bridges between the scientific perspective and religious thought. However, I’ll leave to the reader to draw any connections to specific beliefs. I should also note that many people have been become interested in non-traditional approaches to spirituality. The manifestation of “New Age” thinking in particular may stem in part from unhappiness with the dichotomy between traditional religion and science. I have read a couple of books that would be classified as New Age. The problem I see with New Age ideas (which I try to avoid) is that the thinking is too fuzzy to be convincing to the skeptical, scientific-minded individual.

To digress a moment: another topic I won’t generally discuss here (and can’t do justice to anyway) is the role of art in understanding reality. Some might argue that the divide between art and science is as important a dichotomy as that between religion and science. My feeling on this is that great art offers oblique glimpses of a reality beyond our normal conception, but that it is religion and science which purport to directly answer fundamental questions.

Amidst the divide between science and religion, philosophy as an academic subject appears to have had less impact on the typical person’s thinking about reality. Philosophers have not had a large influence outside their professional community (philosophy has this in common with some other university-level humanities subjects). This is in contrast to past centuries, when thinkers who had a great impact on western culture often straddled what are now the hard divisions between the natural sciences and philosophy (and even theology). There are a number of possible explanations of this, but part of the story may be that science seemed to be doing quite well on its own, while at the same time much of modern philosophy wasn’t easy for either scientists or members of the general public to relate to.

Today, however, I think ideas from philosophers or best categorized as “philosophical” can help. The goal of these ideas is to increase our understanding of reality in a way that scientists will respect and perhaps make use of. At the same time, the ideas may point to common ground with religious thought that had not been clear before. Finally, I believe all of us can benefit from a better grasp of reality as a result of these ideas being brought forth, developed and discussed.

So, that’s the goal. The next several postings will discuss some of these ideas, and then I plan to add more through time. As a launching point and touchstone for much of my thinking, the next post will begin by taking on the mystery of consciousness.