What Colour Is It Outside the Universe?

Sorry for the delay posting, but I was on my way back from Kabul, Afghanistan to North Vancouver, Canada.  I had lots of time to think about my post on long flights and layovers, but posting wasn't possible.  It turns out free airport Wi-Fi is one of the big lies of all airports.  Also, I was a little disappointed; I didn't really plan this thing out, but I expected that things would come together in this final entry.  But they didn't; my grand finale just kind of fizzles out like a damp squib.

The last few posts have demonstrated that science is not the engine of perfect rationality it is often perceived to be.  Logical induction and deduction are not, in the purest rational sense, justified.  Induction requires a faith in a rational, consistent universe where there is cause and effect.  Deduction relies ultimately on unproved, possibly unprovable, axioms.

But faith in religion (at least the Judeo-Christian ones) is not like faith in science, is it?  So how to the qualities of these faith differ.  To start off with I'll sum the entire breadth of human knowledge and faith in the next three bullets. 

Spiritualism: Spiritualism is faith in the supernatural.  In the case of monotheism (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) it is faith in an intelligent, purposeful, present, personal and omniscient God that exists independently of humankind and who is active and interested in the affairs of humans.   Polytheists belief in a pantheon of separate gods (such as the Norse or Egyptian mythologies, and some Hindu belief).  Pantheists believe that God and the universe are the same.  This entity is normally not imbued with traits like personality. They believe that “the eye by which I see God is the eye by which God sees me.” This includes some Hindu beliefs, Taoism and Zen Buddhists.

Idealism: This is the belief that the universe is essentially a mental construct. A solipsist is an idealist who believes that he is the only real thing in the universe and the rest is just a mental construct. A Buddhist who believes that reality is an illusion might be an Idealist.

Materialism: Nothing exists but matter, and all things are composed off matter. There is no immaterial thing, and there is no requirement to invoke a First Cause, or spirituality. Anything non-empirical leads to sophistry and illusion.  Scientific empiricism falls under materialism.

Religions are primary spiritual, with some, such as forms of Hinduism and Buddhism, perhaps veering towards idealism.  Science, being based up on empirical observation, is materialistic.  Science doesn't say that the supernatural does not exist, just that the supernatural lies beyond the ambit of science.

Here's another significant difference: Religious truth is revealed and eternal, whereas the truths of science are discovered and provisional. The scientist is taught from early on that she must be prepared to jettison her most cherished scientific beliefs in the face of significant empirical evidence to the contrary.  (Of course, this doesn’t happen in practice--for instance in the case of Albert Einstein's rejection of quantum physics).  In most monotheistic religions(systems with one God such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam), acolytes are taught to hold on to their faith despite evidence to the contrary.

Another big difference.  Monotheistic religious faiths are normative; they are concerned with the way people ought to be. They're moral (at least the ones I'm familiar with).  Science is positive; it is concerned only with the way things are.  

If we assume, for the sake of argument, that an objective universe exists and that you are not all just figments of my imagination dreamt up to keep my mind occupied, then we admit to a common reality shared by other minds.

Language--from Swahili to body language to mathematics--is the means by which we communicate between minds about the common reality we share.  So Ug the caveman, at some point, developed a word for "water," to express the common experience of that wet stuff that we like so much.  Even in other languages, where there is no communication between the cultures, we find that, in each, a word for water has developed.

We are sufficiently rooted in this common reality, it seems, that we can progress to abstractions.  So, for instance, abstractions such as astronomy and mathematics have developed independently in different cultures and, when compared, these abstractions have been compatible with each other, suggesting this common reality.

However, with creation myths, the common reality model fails.  Cultures have remarkably different creation myths, that do not correlate. This doesn’t of course, disprove God, but suggests that religious creation myths do not address a common reality.

Although supernatural creation myths do not generally correlate, they do exist in every culture I can think of. The universe, it seems, is unknowable through mere empiricism and logic.  It doesn’t stretch the bounds of imagination to suppose that humans of all ages have had an inkling that, in the vastness of the universe, they don't have an inkling.  So perhaps it's human nature to construct or (more usually) adopt a cohesive model of the universe to make sense of that which we don't understand.  It's a necessary anchor.

It said that "nature abhors a vacuum."  Perhaps the same is true of our minds.  Where a vacuum exists, we will create connections, extrapolate intuitive patterns we already know.  We see our Father who art in Heaven as a big beard in the sky, because our father--a figure of compassion and power from our pre-memories--was a big beard in the sky.  Or maybe we are actually interpolating patterns which are really out there, but not within our rational minds to grasp--that is to say maybe there is there is a God Supreme Being or gods, which are simply beyond our rational sense, but within the bounds of intuitive reckoning.

We can look backward and see that we (probably) came from apes.  But where are we going?  Because we can imagine Perfection, perhaps religious faith embodies a perfection for which we strive.  Where, as Terry Pratchett puts it, "the falling angel meets the rising ape."

Or perhaps it is a sheer act of will to accept something as an certainty--Jesus, Buddha-nature, miracles, Zeus--despite the mutterings of our rational minds.  To collectively impose order on the universe.

Anyways, a rather lame end to my series on Faith in Science and Religion.  Kind of got all vague and blathery in the end, but on the other hand I'm not the first to delve into the deep sea of basic principles and come up with a handful of mush.

What do I believe?  Well, for what it matters, I suppose it's kind of  Zen like thing--the ego is an illusion, the universe is an undifferentiated whole, etc. When I help someone else, I help myself.  When I die, I'm done, but it's like a cell dying in a body.  The universe carries on, energy, like the energy I am made of, is indestructible. I also believe in the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics; that is to say an alternate universe is created for every quantum possibility.  So there are an inconceivable number of universes, and a universe somewhere that is exactly like any universe you can imagine.  And the whole thing got started by some impossible, absurd bootstrap; it invented itself.

But it does bother me that I don't know and (if I am practically certain of anything, I'm certain of this) never will know what colour it is outside the universe.  I'm hoping it's orange. I like orange.

Why Philosophers Like to Run Around Naked

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.

    -- Albert Einstein

"Are you a philosopher? Where's your sponge?"

  -- from Small Gods by Terry Pratchett 

In the previous few philosophical perambulations we've demonstrated that both logical induction and deduction are, ultimately, rationally unjustified beliefs.  But there is more to the scientific method that just induction and deduction. Recall that I defined the scientific method earlier as forming a hypothesis, predicting an outcome based on the hypothesis, and then devising an experiment to test it.

But where does the hypothesis come from?  A young biochemical student with an IQ of 170 once said, "For every fact, there is an infinity of hypotheses." That may seem kind of a flippant statement, but he was quite serious.  It bothered him so much that he was expelled from school for failing grades and later had a nervous breakdown from thinking about it too much.  The man's name was Robert Pirsig, and he went on to write a philosophical magnum opus called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  (Incidentally the book was rejected by 121 publishers, a record for any book which went on to be a bestseller.)

In logic the development of hypotheses has been called abductive reasoning, which as far as I can tell is a fancy word for an educated guess. Silly word, really, not to mention that abduction has rather sinister connotations.

The thing about hypotheses is that they are essentially a creative process.  They are often intuitive--that is to say, in one moment the hypothesis is nowhere to be found and the next it pops right into buddy's head.  They even have a word for it in informal science lexicon: Eureka.  "I've found it!"  In religious circles it is known as an epiphany.

These insights don't appear from nowhere though; I'm not trying to imply some mystical source.  Normally hours, days, even years of backbreaking rational analysis has preceded the intuitive realization.  There is sometimes a sense of being stuck, of having chased down every lead to a dead end.  The Eureka Moment is often precipitated when the mind is preoccupied with something else, often mundane, such as driving, and the insight comes about as some kind of connection or pattern recognition between the two.  

Here's some famous scientific epiphanies:

• It may be apocryphal, but Archimedes is said to have had an epiphany while drawing  a bath and realizing that the he volume of an irregular object could be determined y the volume of water it displaced. At this, he is said to have run naked through the streets of Syracuse crying "Eureka!"  This is why philosophers, to this day, like to run around naked with a sponge.

• Rene Descartes had his inspiration for the geometric coordinate system (x, y and z axes) while lying in bed and watching a fly on the wall and realizing he could describe it's position as a function of its distance from the walls and ceiling.  

• Philo Farnworth conceived the television while tilling a field; the motion of the till was the inspiration for the scanning electron beam.

• Here's what Albert Einstein said about his revelation on the Theory of Relativity.

I started the conversation with him in the following way: "Recently I have been working on a difficult problem, today I come here to do battle against that problem with you" We discussed every aspect of this problem. Then suddenly I understood where the key to this problem lay. Next day I came back to him again and said to him without even saying hello, "thank you. I've completely solved the problem

• Mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss even discovered a Eureka Theorem, so named because he exclaimed, "I have the result, only I do not yet know how to get to it"

Well, I feel bad because there's not single woman in that whole list and it is females that are supposed to be more predisposed towards non-algorihtmic thinking--women's intuition and all that. 

Incidentally, the light bulb--the symbol often drawn over people's head to signify a Eureka Moment--was not discovered by a Eureka Moment.  Rather it developed over time, in a crucible of intense competition by several parties vying to win the race to the first commercially viable small light bulb.

But the thing about intuition is that is essentially non-rational as well.  It's like an instantaneous leap from one mindset to another.  A good analogy is humour.  You're at the pub, and drop your best joke:

Q: What did the Zen Buddhist say to the hot dog stand guy?

A: Make me one with everything.

And everyone laugh except poor old Gus, who doesn't get it.  Now you go back and explain the joke to Gus, but he isn't going to laugh now.  The funny part of the joke, the essence of the humour, was the intuitive leap as you suddenly understand the play in language involved. If you have to go back and rationally explain it, it's not "funny."

Carl Jung called  it "perception by the unconscious." In psychology it has been related to trans-rational pattern matching process. Roger Penrose, mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford (which is another way of saying "one of the smartest guys in the world") set out to show in his 1994 book Shadows of the Mind (not to be confused with Shadows of the Mind by Mark Alders which is a gay sci-fi/romance novel), that human consciousness is ultimately non-algorithmic (i.e. intuitive) and cannot be modeled by a algorithmic machine (such as any computer of which we can currently conceive).  He even goes so far as to say that a machine cannot, in principle, have developed Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. (I should, though, mention that Penrose's view is not widely accepted in the scientific community.)

I've half a mind to order this.

Here then is another aspect of the scientific method that is, if not necessarily, then potentially non-rational in nature.  Science often lurches forward suddenly due to these sudden, essentially non-rational insights.  And this "sudden insight" into truth, often accompanied by a deep sense of satisfaction or joy, is a little more close to the capital F religious Faith, too.  This isn’t abstruse arguments about the nature of induction, but more of "I see the light!" kind of faith.  Poet William Wordsworth called faith a "passionate intuition."

So having determined, I think, that there is indeed an element of faith in science--at least in the sense that it requires rationally unjustified belief, we'll wrap up our epistemological excursion next time with a little discussion on how faith in science differs from other types of faiths.

The Problem of Deduction: Turtles All The Way Down

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

     -- Stephen Hawking,  A Brief History of Time

So in our giant adventure into the epistemological underpinnings of science so far, we've discovered that induction is entirely self-referential.  Of course you know that the sun will rise tomorrow, but other than the fact that's it's always risen before, you don't have that strong an argument.  The reason most people consider it convincing is because of our faith in an orderly universe.

The other big tool in the knowledge toolbox is deduction.  As its name implies, it's kind of the opposite of induction.  With induction you take specific instances (the sun has risen every day since I can remember) and apply a general rule (the sun always rises). With deduction you have  general rule and apply it to specific instances. This is the realm of mathematics and logic. 

For example:

Premise:          A triangle has three angles that add up to 180º.

Observation:   Two angles of a certain triangle add up to 120º.

Conclusion:    The third angle is 60º.

Elementary, my dear Watson.

But this is not quite as elementary as it gets.  How do we know a triangle has 180º?  Well, in Euclidean geometry we base it on a more fundamental theorem, and the more fundamental theorems are based ultimately on axioms.  These are the really obvious things, like all right angles are equal, or the whole is greater than a part.  Euclid, the Greek Father of Geometry who lived around 300 BC, developed five postulates that have stood quite nicely for the last 2500 years, and there are plenty of proofs out there that use these axioms to prove that a triangle, indeed, has 180º.  And using these geometric or mathematical axioms and theorems developed on these axioms, we get all kinds of wonderful things like a good chunk of geometry, mathematics and physics.

But what about these axioms?  They aren't, in fact, based on anything.  They are supposed to be self-evident.  I mean, who wouldn't accept Euclid's notion that "things that are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another"?

We have no justification for them at all apart from "Well, it's obvious, isn’t it?"  So in fact we have a similar problem as we had with induction. We're left to accept that the axioms are true but unprovable. The entire edifice is constructed on the backs of these turtles that we call axioms.  But what are the turtles standing on?

Well, brilliant mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell made it his early life's work to sort this.  His masterpiece, co-written with Alfred North Whitehead, was a book called Principia Mathematica, a seminal work of logic on par with Aristotle's Organon.   

Page 378 of Principia Mathematica finally gets around to 1+1=2.

They investigated what the axiom turtles were standing on, and uncovered even more basic turtles.  But what were those turtles standing on?  Here's what Russell had to say of the effort later in life:

I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith. I thought that certainty is more likely to be found in mathematics than elsewhere. But I discovered that many mathematical demonstrations, which my teachers wanted me to accept, were full of fallacies ... I was continually reminded of the fable about the elephant and the tortoise. Having constructed an elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I found the elephant tottering, and proceeded to construct a tortoise to keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was no more secure than the elephant, and after some twenty years of arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable.

     --Portraits from Memory, 1956

A little while later another brilliant mathematician named Kurt Gödel, in a masterful piece of logic called, informally, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, showed that any (non-trivial) system based on axioms would be either incomplete or internally inconsistent. 

In other words, in our commonly used axiom-based systems (geometry, mathematics, logic) there will always be truths that will remain unknown.  You can go outside the system to add new axioms (drawing a larger circle around your circle, so to speak) but that system itself will be subject to the same incompleteness or inconsistency.  And so on.

Rudy Rucker has managed better than anyone else, I think, describe Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems:

The proof of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem is so simple, and so sneaky, that it is almost embarrassing to relate. His basic procedure is as follows:

1.                 Someone introduces Gödel to a UTM, a machine that is supposed to be a Universal Truth Machine, capable of correctly answering any question at all.

2.                Gödel asks for the program and the circuit design of the UTM. The program may be complicated, but it can only be finitely long. Call the program P(UTM) for Program of the Universal Truth Machine.

3.                Smiling a little, Gödel writes out the following sentence: "The machine constructed on the basis of the program P(UTM) will never say that this sentence is true." Call this sentence G for Gödel. Note that G is equivalent to: "UTM will never say G is true."

4.                Now Gödel laughs his high laugh and asks UTM whether G is true or not.

5.                If UTM says G is true, then "UTM will never say G is true" is false. If "UTM will never say G is true" is false, then G is false (since G = "UTM will never say G is true"). So if UTM says G is true, then G is in fact false, and UTM has made a false statement. So UTM will never say that G is true, since UTM makes only true statements.

6.                 We have established that UTM will never say G is true. So "UTM will never say G is true" is in fact a true statement. So G is true (since G = "UTM will never say G is true").

"I know a truth that UTM can never utter," Gödel says. "I know that G is true. UTM is not truly universal."

It was a particularly mind-bending piece of work.  He basically took the knife of logic and applied it to itself. I highly recommend that, if you are interested and diligent, you read the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, a fun book which really does justice to the staggering implications of this.

So logic itself is based on a number of unprovable axioms which we accept on faith.  Which poses a bit or a problem as wonderfully articulated by G.K. Chesterton: 

You can only find truth with logic if you've already found truth without it.

What's more, even if these axioms are true, Gödel showed that any system upon which they are based is necessary incomplete and/or internally inconsistent.  There will be truths which the system cannot determine.

Two millennia ago, Pliny the Elder, the Roman philosopher and naturalist, said that "the only certainty is that nothing is certain."  But I see no reason why that would be certain.

Interesting that these great minds throughout the ages have applied the knife of rationality with a surgeon's precision to find one certain true thing.  But logic does not to seem up to the task.  So where then to find it? 

 

The Taliban

Come Mr. Taliban

Tally me banana

     --with apologies to Harry Belafonte

The Taliban are the most secretive movement since the dreaded Khmer Rouge of 1970s Cambodia.  They arose from the badlands of southern Afghanistan, from the Pashtuns, a people as tough as the weeds that eke life from the dust here.

They were an army of invalids, bred in vicious insurgency against the Russian invasion of 1979 and the chaos the Russinas left behind.  The Taliban's recluse leader Mullah Omar has but one eye, and, when the Taliban ruled, the government Cabinet was far short of the requisite number of eyes, legs and fingers.

The Pashtuns of the south established the only strong central governments in Afghanistan over the last three hundred years, though even these were not a republic or federations, but more the iron fist of the strongest warlord among many.  The Pashtun share Afghanistan unhappily with the Persian Tajiks and Turkic Uzbeks of the North, and the Mongol-Persian Hazzara. These ethnic groups are further divided along tribal lines and then into clans.  Unless united against a common foe, the tribes and clans tend to fall to fighting each other.

It seems Afghanistan's geographical fate, in the the middle of Asia, is to be pawns of greater powers, such as the Turks, Russia, Britain, Iran, Pakistan and the United States. Small wonder Afghans have a reputation as unreliable allies, given the number of times the area has changed hands over the centuries.  In Pakistan they say "You can rent an Afghan, but not buy him."

The Taliban arose in southern Afghanistan, particularly in Kandahar, their spiritual home, as well as in the wild frontier lands of northern Pakistan.  Talib means "student" in Pashto and the Taliban were students of the many madrassas, or religious schools that acted as Pakistan orphanages and poor houses for the war torn Pashtun youth during the Russian occupation. The mullahs teaching them were not Islamic scholars, and the teachings reflected more the political aspirations of Islamist Pakistan interests, as well as the practices of the extremely old-skool Muslim Pashtun clans.  Also these young men had grown up in Pakistan, and did not have the connection to the Afghan history that the previous generation, the mujahedeen, had.  In short, all they learned was a crude perversion of Islam, their way around a Kalashnikov and an unnatural fear of women.

Originally drawn to southern Afghanistan by the excesses of mujahedeen turned warlords, the Taliban, led by Mullah Omar, created an immediate positive impression by attacking a particularly felonious warlord who had just kidnapped and raped two local girls, and hanging him from the barrel of a tank.  Hard to fault them for that, really.

The Taliban were welcomed in southern Afghanistan, as their influence spread.  Their modus operandi was to move in, clean up the town and then instill a strict form of sharia law.  The movement spread very quickly, partly due to an effective military mobility by the Taliban, and partly because many foes simply switched sides when faced with a perceived superior force.

But while the Taliban were accepted in their Pashtun home base to the south, the more laid back Tajiks and the relatively cosmopolitan residents of the capital of Kabul weren't too crazy about the whole "let's all grow beards and beat women with iron bars" routine.  Or with the downright un-Afghan lack of compromise of the Taliban, who would move into Tajik or Hazzara areas and install Pashtun leaders from out of town.

So a civil war erupted, but soon the Taliban had control of over 90% of the country, including overthrowing (and gruesomely killing) Afghan President Rabbani.  They were (and still are, to some extent) supported by Pakistan's ISI, who saw the Taliban as friendly to Pakistan, and as force strong enough to stabilize trade routes so that Pakistan could move goods north through Afghanistan. 

The US were originally favourable to the Taliban as well, as they overthrew a government beholden to Russia.  But as news got out about the Taliban's civilian massacres and ruthlessness, and their directives virtually enslaving women, they kind of lost their lustre with the Clinton administration and with popular sentiment in the US.  Gleefully blowing up the ancient Bamyan Buddhas didn't do them any PR favours either.

But it should be made clear that the Taliban were not Islamist per se.  They had no aspirations outside Afghanistan and the immediate region, and no inclinations towards a global jihad against infidels in general and American in particular.  That particular spin was added partly by the ever-mischievous Pakistan intelligence service (ISI) and the Arabs who came to fight in Afghanistan against the godless hordes of Russia, in particular an Arab named Osama bin Laden.

Osama bin Laden was a big pain in the ass for Saudi Arabia, who enjoy good relations with the US and could get along just fine without bin Laden's whole "I keeeeil you!  Death to America!" spiel.  They were happy to see him gainfully occupied far away in Afghanistan.  The Taliban didn’t mind him though, especially since Osama was shelling out money by the truckload.  The stone-age puritans and the virulent misanthrope had some ideological divergence, but their interests aligned. 

Following 9/11, the US demanded that the Taliban turn over bin Laden and were not overly impressed with the Taliban's "up yours" response.  Consequently, three months later, the Taliban were out of power and fleeing to far-flung villages and into Pakistan.  Progress against the Taliban was effective until King George II of the US fumbled the ball and went off to Iraq.  This provided the Taliban with an opportunity to regroup. Taliban resistance continues to be resilient in the Pashtun lands from which they hail.  The hope for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is that the central government will be stable and strong enough to resist a Taliban incursion after ISAF pulls out in 2014.

Who knows? There are so many factors that have the potential to swing events one way or another:  Pakistan's handling of the Taliban on their own northern frontier, deteriorating Iran-US relations, the revolts in other Mideast countries, the US and European economies, among others.  We live in interesting times.

Myself, I think this whole Islamist business is an interesting sideshow to the coming cold war between China and the US.  The Islamists, for all their palpable hatred of the west, are not an existential threat to Canada or the US.  The best they can hope for at this point is to fly a plane into a another building or get really lucky with a suitcase nuke or something.  That's nothing for old farts like me who grew up under the constant threat of instant nuclear annihilation.  On the other hand, I really don't have much of a knack for foreign policy so best not to listen to me.