What if You've Never Made a Decision

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

T.S. Eliot—The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

If you choose not to decide

You still have made a choice.

Neil Peart (Rush)—Free Will

What if you've never made a decision?

That's the conclusion of Sam Harris in his book Free Will. 

Free will—the idea that we can make decisions about what we will do—has always had its philosophical problems. 

For instance, in Christianity, the entire edifice of sin is based upon the idea that we, as humans, have the capability to choose between right and wrong.  But, the Judeo-Christian God is also omniscient.  He knows how everything will turn out.  So how can we truly have free will if God already knows what we are going to choose?  Is our choice not then preordained?  There's no easy answer, and more than one Jesuit was locked up in the medieval equivalent of a cubicle trying to circle that square, let me tell you.

Things didn't get much better when Galileo and Newton came along.   According to science, up to the 20^th century, the universe was mechanistic, deterministic, unfolding like clockwork to its ultimate end.  If you knew, in theory, where every single particle was and where it was going at this instant of time, the entire future would be known to you.  So where is the free will in that?

The turn of the century saw the advent of quantum physics.  Reality was no longer deterministic.  Subatomic particles existed as probability functions—the electron could be here, or it could be over there.  When observed, the probability wave function collapsed.  One probability became equal to 1 (i.e. it happened) and all the others went to 0 (and didn't happen).  There was no way to know for certain, even in theory, which event would transpire.  So now the course of the universe was based on the roll of dice, on mere accident.  There's still no room for free will.

Compound this with some recent studies in brain science indicating that people who think they are exercising free will, have in fact, already made up their mind about issues long before they think they have made a decision, and you can see that the entire concept of free will is on some pretty shaky ground.  We're just a bunch of meat puppets.

This indeed is Harris's conclusion.  Now I admit to a bias up front.  Harris is a founder of this outfit that is called Project Reason that seeks to spread "secular values" in society.   This secular evangelism is just as annoying as Christian evangelism.  More so.  At least the Christians offer everlasting life in Paradise. The secular crowd: You are so incredibly insignificant that words in the English language cannot adequately convey how much you don't matter.  

Not only that the secular evangelist books God is Not Great and The God Delusion, which I've read, we're both, in my opinion, abysmal.  They didn't make their case.  And I'm  Scientist and an Agnostic—I should be an easy sell.

The problem, for me, is that Harris is trying to take science, which is  a useful tool to logically extend our senses to observe and predict nature, and turn it into a value-based philosophy.  But reason itself, as I've explained in the past, is a solid stone castle built in mid-air, held aloft by—you guessed it—faith.  Besides which, science is concerned with what is, not what should be.

Anyways, probably because of that, I was a little more critical of the book than I normally would have been.

We all imagine that we—our "selves"—exist, parked on top of our bodies, peering out through our eyes and instructing the machine we inhabit to make us a cup of tea or whatever, like the drivers of those big Imperial Walkers in Star Wars.

Cup of tea, then?

According to Harris, we may be in the vehicle, but we ain't drivin'.  You did not decide to have Weetabix instead of Corn Flakes this morning.  Your brain chemicals did that.   And even if you decided  that you were going to show those brain chemicals who's boss and go for the Corn Flakes, dammit, it's no good, because your brain chemicals already determined that before you did.

I can certainly go along for the ride and allow for the possibility that free will is an illusion.  After all, why should I think that I can change the course of the universe with but a thought, but a rock can't.  But If I'm going to buy that free will is an illusion, I insist that Harris takes the argument to its logical extent.

The notion that we have free will is intricately woven into our idea of self, of ego, of that feeling of continuity you have that you are you.  Harris takes this vital component of the self—will—and says that it is illusory, but that what is left of the self is still real.  Nonsense.  If free will is an illusion due to a bunch of brain chemicals burbling up to the "conscious mind," then so is the ego, your entire sense of self.  It's all burbling chmcials and dancing neurons.  The self is an epiphenomena induced by trillions of cells working symbiotically. The ego is an emergent property of a complex system.  A "transient landscape of the mind" as David Hume called it. 

So the knowledge that self and free will are an illusion doesn't really get us that far—unless you're a Zen Buddhist, in which case you can consider yourself Enlightened.  Just because you are convinced something is an illusion doesn’t mean it can be dispelled.  Ask a schizophrenic.  Ask a guy whose right foot hurts, even though he lost that foot five years ago.

The self—including the notion of free will—is an illusion that it is simply too difficult, and perhaps too valuable, not to maintain.   


And what is the difference between reality and an illusion that cannot be dispelled, especially when that illusion is being imagined by your self, an illusion?  OK, I just threw that one in to screw you guys up.

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 Problem of Induction, Demonstrated through Another Unfortunate Encounter with Justin

In actuality, there is an omnipotent and omniscient deity watching over all of the Universe, coordinating all of the myriad interactions between objects to make them seem to be collections of particles and waves that behave in perfect harmony with an inviolate set of natural laws. This is all an illusion, however; this deity is the Great Comedian, Shecky. At some point, known only to the mind of Shecky, He will abruptly drop the facade that causes the Universe to appear to make sense. This will happen at the Moment of Greatest Comedic Effect, when all will know Shecky’s Truth, and there will be much wailing and moaning and gnashing of teeth. So perfect and pure is the Comedy, however, that mere days later everyone will think back to the MGCE, nod their heads, and with a thoughtful and appreciative grin remark, “Yeah, that was pretty funny.”

     -- blogger Mike Marsh.  

Science acquires knowledge primarily through through two methods of inference: inductive reasoning (extrapolating specific cases to a general proposition), and deductive reasoning (interpolating a general proposition to a specific case).

When we observe empirical phenomena in nature and propose a general theory to account for these observations we are using inductive reasoning.  Example:

Specific cases:  In my experience, every time I have ever banged my head against the wall, it is immediately followed by pain the area where I've banged it.

General Theory:  If you bang your head on  wall, your head will hurt.

What could possibly easier than that, right? Well, the philosophers can never seem to leave well enough alone, can they?  So about two hundred years ago the great Scottish philosopher David Hume formulated the "problem of induction" (when he wasn't chasing sheep about). 

Let's give an example of the Problem of Induction, using a conversation with my contrarian friend Justin at  party.

Me:   So, pancakes tomorrow morning at Pancake Haus then?

J:       If it comes, yes.

Me:   What do you mean "If it comes"?

J:       Well, if the sun rises and morning comes. Then I'm in for pancakes.

Me:   Well of course the sun will rise tomorrow.

J:       Really?  What makes you think that?

Me:   How many beers have you had?  The sun rises every morning.

J:       Well, yes it's risen every morning since I can remember, I grant you.  But what makes you think it'll rise tomorrow?

Me:   Well, because it's risen every other morning, for all time, since anyone can remember, so much so that we can predict to the minute when the corona is going to pop over the horizon.

J:       I don't disagree with your data--that the sun has always risen in our experience.  I just disagree with your theory--that it will rise tomorrow.  What's the basis of your theory?

Me:   Well the sun has always risen before.

J:       I know, we've established that.

Me:   So if it's always risen before, then it'll rise again tomorrow.  Duh!

J:       Well, it could rise tomorrow. On the other hand, Shecky, the Great Comedian might decide he needs a giggle and drop his MGCE on us. So you can't be absolutely certain the sun will rise tomorrow.

Me:      Justin, you are truly the most exasperating collection of subatomic particles ever to aspire to conscious thought.  OK, fine!  I can't be certain that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I can be 99.9999% sure.

J:       How many nines is that?

Me:   A bunch, smartass.

J:       And why's that? 

Me:   Because the sun has risen 999,999 times before.

J:       And so the probability of the sun rising tomorrow is based wholly on what has happened in the past, with absolutely no bearing on what might before the sun rises tomorrow?

Me:   Well, when you put it that way...

J:       A moment ago we established that, just because the sun has always risen in the past does not mean it will rise tomorrow.  It seems to me you are merely taking a weaker stance of the same position now, by claiming that since it has risen a million times in the past, it will almost certainly rise tomorrow.

Me:   Well, what could possibly stop the sun rising tomorrow Justin? 

J:       Well, any number of things. Shecky, the Great Comedian--

Me:   --can cram his MGCE where the sun don't shine. The chances of that happening are infinitesimal. 

J:       But you have to allow for the chance, however infinitesimal, right?  I mean it may be that Shecky just made up his mind moments ago and that, because his mind is already made up, there is actually a 100% chance that the sun will not rise tomorrow.

Me:   Arrrgh, my brain!.

J:       You've already opened the door here. I'm not asking for much.  I'm just saying that there's a chance of that.

Me:   OK, OK fine.

J:       So, in fact, you can't tell me with any probability whatsoever that the sun is going to rise tomorrow, can you?

Me:   I'm going to get another beer.  Don't wait up.

J:       But we're still on for pancakes tomorrow morning, right?

Believe it or not, conversations with Justin are actually like that.

So here, illustrated, is the "problem of induction."  It s not rational.  It is ultimately a circular argument relying on itself for justification.  We see a pattern and we extrapolate from that a general principle, but there is no explanation for the principle other than the fact that we saw the pattern.

Indeed, finding patterns is one of the things that we do best. How long does your turn signal mechanically click before you pick up a beat, before every third click is just a tad bit louder?  In that case, the pattern isn't even there. Pattern recognition is a basis of human intelligence.  Perhaps we evolved that way; perhaps recognizing similarities in different situations ("You know, last time I saw one of those orange and black stripey things, it didn't end well.") made us more evolutionary fit.  Indeed, I would argue that pattern recognition brings us satisfaction, even joy.  Music can be described as a flux of harmonious patterns.  Poets often relate disparate experiences through patterns of metaphor and simile, creating a sort of intuitive leap for the reader, evoking a satisfaction akin to "getting" a joke.

I guess the question is this:  are those patterns we tease out using inductive reasoning really there as part of an underlying order, or is this human beings following a evolutionary imperative to impose design upon the universe?

"Why does the universe go to all this bother of existing?"

Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:

But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.

       -- Richard Wilbur, Epistemology

It's apparently well-accepted what the base assumptions of science are.  I found several sites outlining anywhere from two to six basic assumptions, yet, curiously, no source.  Or maybe not so curious.   Basic assumptions are, after all, supposed to be self-evident, so perhaps they require no source?  Anyway, they were all more or less similar.

The most inclusive example I could find were those of Kitty Ferguson's in her excellent essay Fire the Equations: Science Religion and the Search for God, which I've just read and realized that she basically beat me to what I was going to say here, and says it more beautifully than I could have said it, thereby completely wasting the last two decades of my life.  Thanks Kitty.

Kitty's assumptions are that the universe is:    

• rational
• accessible 
• contingent 
• objective 
• unified

It's interesting, as Ferguson points out, that these basic tenets, developed in the 17^th century and still accepted today, were written by scientists who were devoutly religious (at least would be by modern standards).  So their assumptions were not in conflict with their religious beliefs. On the contrary, many of the assumptions of science were also assumptions of Christianity.

Assumption:  The universe is...	Science	(Christian) Faith
Rational	The universe follows laws.	God is rational and we can see his symmetry and plan in the universe around us.
Accessible	The reality of the universe can be explored empirically (though the senses).	The way to God can be found in his creation.
Contingent	There is cause and effect.	All around is an effect; God is the cause.
Objective	The universe exists outside of the self.  The existence is shared by rational observers.	God exists outside of the self.
Unified	There is an underlying set of laws that describes the universe.	There is one God that describes the universe.

Trouble with this "science" business started brewing a little before the time of Galileo. Contrary to popular opinion, the Church did not have a huge issue with the earth orbiting the sun at the time (see Wade Rowland's excellent treatise on the subject, Galileo's Mistake).  Copernicus had already floated the idea almost a century beforehand and the guys working in Rome were no dummies. They had already practically resigned themselves to a heliocentric model, and were busy developing weasel clauses to maintain ecclesiastical consistency.

The real issue was Galileo's implication the universe could be completely known through science. Where, in such an equation, was there room for God?  This clockwork universe, in the words of Pope Urban VIII "imposed necessity on the Lord Almighty."

It turns out Galileo was wrong--at least by what we think we know today.  Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and Chaos Theory demonstrate that neither empirical (inductive reasoning) nor logic (deductive reasoning) is capable of describing the universe completely.  Score one for the Pope.  At least until Darwin came along and pretty much nuked creationism.

In theory, there is still no conflict between religion and science.  Again, using the Christian religion as an example, it is possible that a supernatural omnipotent being created the Earth a few thousand years ago and then, being omnipotent, set the whole ruse up with the fossils and the carbon dating. 

There's no conflict with science.  Because God is (presumably) beyond empirical understanding ("supernatural") then the question of his existence lies outside the realm of science.  The proposition "Well an omnipotent God created everything and just made it look like we evolved from monkeys," is non-falsifiable, therefore non-scientific.  There is no conceivable evidence  anyone could present that would refute the hypothesis.

However, if God, or the Godhead, or a Supreme Being is empirically real--if he can seen or heard or otherwise sensed in a non-metaphorical sense--then his existence does become a question for science.  A most interesting proposition.

Of course there are other forms of spirituality besides the monotheistic personal god, such as, for example Buddha and Zen enlightenment.  Parallels have been drawn between, for example, Zen and some recent findings in quantum physics.  Many former dualities have disappeared at the quantum or relativistic levels (form/emptiness, time/space, energy/mass, cause/effect) and shown that reductionism, at a subatomic level, breaks down.  An event becomes a part of its context. It cannot be teased be out as an independent observable phenomenon, but can only be understood in an interdependent way with what is happening around it.

"Ultimate reality," in science, doesn't look anything like the grand clockwork universe of Newtons's day.  That apocryphal apple that dropped on Newton's head we believe today was made of protein and sugar polymers, and those polymers were made of atoms of carbon, and oxygen and hydrogen.  And those hydrogen atoms were comprised of a nucleus, comprising about one billionth of the volume of the atom, orbited by a distant, tiny electron smeared over some multi-dimensional probability cloud, all afloat in a frothing sea of virtual particles which tend to exist more than actually exist.  The apple didn’t bonk Newton on the head so much as a swarm of electromagnetic impulses on the surface of the apple interacted with Newton's head, itself a swarm of electromagnetic activity.  Today's model is more akin to a pile of leaves whipped into dance by a fickle gust of wind than Galileo's intricate clock.

I'm not sure our "modern" view is as comforting.  According to what we know, the universe cannot be known.   We can't answer Stephen Hawking's question, "Why does the universe go to al this bother of existing?"  


In the meantime, here we are--apparently--these brief, howling back eddies in the tide of entropy, clinging to the surface of an infinitesimal speck somewhere in the middle of the granddaddy of all explosions and going, "WTF, man?  W-T-F?"

Oops--went a little off the rails there. Next up--inductive and deductive reasoning.  Let's blow the doors off those puppies!