Friday 14 October 2016

Unicorn multiverse, a more rational multiverse and Occam's razor




I grew up in a rational world of cause and effect in which the only supernatural events were those attributable to our Creator, e.g. the Resurrection of Christ and the creation by God of the universe from existential nothingness.

Also, everyone I knew  adhered to the Oxford English dictionary definition of the universe:
All existing things; the whole creation; the cosmos 

Since the confirmation of the Big Bang model for the origin of the universe there have been attempts to skate around the conclusion that every single entity in creation, from a quark to a human being to a supermassive black hole, ultimately originates with an uncaused first cause – God. In this sense everything is spiritual or supernatural. Nobody can pretend that anything is truly secular.  Moreover, this God has made us in God’s image,  having concepts of love, justice, truth and beauty regardless of gender, physical appearance, health, sexual preference, intelligence, race or creed. 

image credit: beforeitsnews.com
It has also become established that the probability of morally aware, truth seeking sentient beings like us emerging out of nothingness is zero without invoking a Creator with the properties of personhood. This follows from the unimaginable degree of fine tuning of the physical constants, initial entropy conditions and much else to allow life of any kind to exist anywhere in the universe.  For human civilisation to emerge there are innumerable extra conditions, such as protection from cosmic rays, the availability of the minerals for technology, visibility of an ordered firmament, fertile soil and a freely available abundance of water in liquid form. It all had to be done by an act of will which also imbued humans with the imago dei.

For some obscure reason (the italics are to vent my exasperation)  certain people, including some who purport to base their life on logic and reason, refuse to accept this state of affairs. Instead they have resorted to desperate hypotheses, the most well known of which is the multiverse.

 The implication is, if you can’t stomach living in one universe having a Creator who has made one universe tailored to  achieve the birth of humanity (it is now beyond reasonable doubt that our universe had to be precisely the size and structure it is for humanity, and any other sentient moral beings, to exist) then why not imagine there are an infinite number of eternal universes of which we happen to be one?  That removes the need for  a God since the whole ensemble of universes is eternal, i.e. self existing and having no beginning. And we don’t have to worry about relating to or praising or satisfying or understanding any deity.

Quite apart from the infinite multiverse concept being wholly against the foundation on which the exponential growth of peer reviewed science rests this leads to absurd conclusions, i.e it is invalidated  by reductio ad absurdum.

For example, the unicorn. 

It is necessary to be clear on just what infinity means. The OED defines ‘infinite’ as greater than any assignable quantity or countable number. This means greater than any number or quantity you can imagine. It means that you can multiply infinity by itself an infinite number of times and the result is still infinity, since both results fit the definition. It is also defined mathematically as any number divided by zero.Infinity divided by infinity is meaningless.

To dispense with God (again, why in the name of God would you want to dispense with God and reduce reality to a meaningless conglomerate of energy configurations with epiphenomena giving the illusion of consciousness and meaning?) you also have to invoke eternity, which is infinity applied to time.  An eternal infinite array of ‘universes’ would have to have existed forever, otherwise you would have to invoke a Creator to start the whole show and, heaven forbid, you would then have to try to understand this God.Even if it did last forever it would still be necessary to  explain why it existed at all.

It is not surprising that the use of the words ‘infinite’ and ‘eternal’ to describe reality is going to lead to bizarre and unscientific conclusions.  Applied to a hypothetical ‘multiverse’ it means that any conceivable event or being or set of laws can occur at any time in any place without anyone having to explain it. If one accepts the multiverse fantasy unicorns would be inevitable, along with anything you care to imagine, from Santa Claus to a flat earth.

 Every conceivable thing happens and it happens an infinite number of times. There are an infinite number of yous who have lived identical lives an infinite number of times in an infinite number of universes and this will continue for eternity. There are also an infinite number of yous with one extra atom, and an infinite number with two extra atoms, etc. etc. ad infinitum. There are also an infinite number of different worlds in which the concept of an infinite multiverse does not exist.

Even if we cheat and accept that our own universe started at the observed point 13.8 billion years ago, if we regard this as a purely random spontaneous irrational godless creation out of 'nothingness' (the term is sometimes incorrectly used to denote the energy filled quantum vacuum) then anything goes; there are no constraints. If a whole universe can come out of nothing, so can a unicorn. Even within our own universe the laws could break down at any point, say in the place you are now sitting, and so permit crazy things to happen without need of explanation - unicorns, vampires, tooth fairies  or anything you care to imagine can happen if you bring in inifinity.

Not surprisingly, if the whole ensemble of universes is eternal it does not obey the second law of thermodynamics because it would by now have decayed into total disorder.

The whole idea is an offense against the cherished foundational principle of Ockham's Razor (after William of Ockham, a priest, philosopher and scientist, 1285-1349. It is also spelt 'Occam'.) . This states that 'entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity' (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy). In formulating a new scientific theory always look for the simplest explanation. Western science has advanced since the Christian universities were set up in medieval England and Europe by sticking to this principle. The infinite eternal multiverse violates this principle.

There  are more rational concepts of a 'multiverse' which really mean one universe with parts that are separated and which could conceivably interact in some way. They are finite in time and space and must have been created, being regimes of the same universe with the same laws as the one we know. They only need to be invoked if we find aspects of our observable universe which could be powerfully explained by assuming such additional regimes. For example, one could postulate that  the Big Bang singularity generated more than one expanding pocket of space-time during the initial inflation stage. It would necessitate invoking extra dimensions beyond the space-time realm in which we live our material lives and construct our scientific theories.

If we are to continue sticking to the Ockham's razor principle we should be looking at our universe as imaginatively and creatively as possible. There is plenty in the real universe to explore and stretch our minds: over 95% of it is either dark energy or dark matter, the Standard Model of elementary particles  is incomplete, quantum phenomena seem beyond reductionist physics, consciousness has been shown beyond reasonable doubt to exist beyond the body, no testable theory of biological evolution exists and life has not even been defined. No doubt some powerful theories will be revealed to us and these may allow undreamed of technology when applied.

If you want to believe in an eternal, infinite ensemble of universes (i.e. return to an ancient, pre-Christian view of reality) rather than a rational loving Creator and just the one magnificent tailor-made universe you live in, no one can stop you. But please do not claim it is rational.

 See also
Hold onto the truth


John Sears, author
2077: Knights of Peace.

Reach me via cosmik.jo@gmail.com

Sunday 25 September 2016

Deep mystery of existence. 8. Critical mass of the early universe



Many people wonder why the universe is so massive. They say ‘what a wasteful God’.  The exact opposite applies. The importance of life in God’s scheme is highlighted by the need to create precisely the universe we have, in terms of mass and in many other ways which will not be dealt with in this post (e.g.the finest imaginable tuning of the physical constants and entropy of the universe at the Big Bang stage.)

Cosmologists and astrobiologists will confirm that it could not be any other mass and still sustain even bacterial life. Very slightly smaller in mass and life could not survive anywhere. Being marginally larger would also preclude life.  It has been calculated that if during the early expansion of the universe its mass had been out by the mass of a single coin the present universe could not harbour even bacteria. The precision is

 one part in a  trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. ..




Why does the universe have to have this mass? Because otherwise  two life precluding phenomena would occur as the early universe expanded following the Big Bang (the creation event when space, time, matter and energy came into existence as a point source of everything).

A marginally smaller  mass would have resulted in less gravity and the matter of the universe flying apart too rapidly to form stars and planets – in particular our planet Earth, which has a uniqueness which led not just to bacteria but to human civilization.

A marginally larger mass would have resulted in the early cosmic material coalescing rather than forming stars and planets. Not a trace or promise of life could exist in this scenario – even the stuff out of which bacteria are built would not have existed.

This precision is, according to the latest cosmological theory, a consequence of our three dimensional space being almost totally flat, i.e. only curved to an extremely small but unimaginablyprecise degree,  to 

one part in a trillion trillion trillion  trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion.

 It is impossible to visualize what is meant by curved or flat three dimensional space. It is a mathematical concept, but an analogy which is often used is that of an inflated balloon, where the surface of the balloon represents the 3 dimensional space in which we live.  If the balloon is large enough the space is as near to flat as you can make it without the balloon becoming infinitely large. Space is curved to just the precise amount needed to enable bacterial life to survive. To repeat:

 one part in a trillion trillion trillion  trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion

 With space that close to flat the mass density of the universe will have the necessary value to the degree of precision required.

How did space get that flat? As usual in cosmology we have to turn to the mathematicians. The theory that has been proposed is known as cosmic inflation (in fact there is more than one version of this theory). The early universe, when it was only  a fraction of a second old, is postulated to have expanded at such an unimaginably high rate that space was forcefully smoothed out till it became virtually, but not quite, totally flat. This would explain why the universe as observed to today looks so isotropic (similar in structure in all directions) and is flat. But this would not explain why it dperts from absolute flatness to the ultra-fine degree required for a universe with living beings in it.

What could have made the universe expand so much so quickly before it was even a second old no one knows. It was probably not even dark energy (whatever that turns out to be) since that did not come into play until the universe was about 7 billion years old. At this stage it began to expand more rapidly, i.e. to accelerate, after being slowed down by gravitational forces. (If it had not accelerated in precisely the way it has that too would have precluded any kind of biological life. But that’s another story...).

One final point to bear in mind. The idea of increasing or decreasing the mass of the universe by the mass of a single coin having such huge existential significance for living systems applies only if this thought experiment is made at the very early stages of cosmic creation. If such a miniscule mass had been added or subtracted only, say, a million years ago, instead of 13.7 billion - i.e. after the elements, stars and planets had already  been formed - it would, as far as we know, have made no difference. Nevertheless, given that the total mass of the universe at its inception was the same as now, it is no less staggering to think that the mass of a single coin could mean the difference between life and no life some 13.7 billion years later.

As one who has only relatively recently become a follower of the cosmic Christ, the universal source of love,  I had not really understood what was meant when people talked about fearing God. Now I  am beginning to get the point.

 John Sears

Reach me at
cosmik.jo@gmail.com









Monday 12 September 2016

We, a Russian scifi dystopia preceding Brave New World and 1984



 We , a  Russian science fiction novel 
  by Yevgeny Zamyatin:

 a dystopian vision  preceding Brave New World and 1984



History & background


We was completed in Russia  about 1920 and  was the first work banned by the Soviet censorship bureau Goskomizdat in 1921. It was published in 1924 in New York, after being translated into English by Gregory Zilboorg. 


There are numerous comparisons of this novel with others of the 20th century, in particular Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1931)  and 1984 by George Orwell (1948). The film Metropolis (1927) , the original of which spawned several variant productions, also concerned a dehumanised world of robots.
George Orwell  wrote a review of We and may have been influenced by it before writing 1984 . He claims it probably inspired Huxley.

(summaries of Brave New World and 1984 are given at the end of this post)

 Summary of We



The book is set far in the future in an enclosed world known as the One State, separated from the greater world by  a Green Wall beyond which live hairy descendents of humans as we know them today. The world beyond the Green Wall was conquered 1000 years before the time of the story in a war lasting 200 years. This would have been fought by the founders of the One State against the humans known as the ancients and who would  in essence have been people like those living today. How much time had elapsed before this war is not apparent from the story (as far as I can discern).

Within the One State the citizens are known as numbers, since only numbers can be subject to the equations which govern their behaviour. Phenomena which are not mathematically describable (e.g. emotions) are inconvenient accidents or superfluous or meaningless.  Freedom is forbidden since it causes unhappiness. All occurs according to the will of the Benefactor, the god -figure of the One State, who compares himself to Jesus. Reference is also made to the management guru of the early 20th century, Taylor (the time and motion man whose methods were the order of the day  as mass production got underway and whose ideas were systematized in what was known as Scientific Management).

The ancient world and the one existing beyond  the Green Wall is acknowledged only via a museum, called the Ancient House, which presents and preserves the old world in a patronising way.

The main character is D-503, who writes an autobiographical account as events unfold, a male number whose designation starts with  the  consonant prefix D. Female numbers, such as that of the other main character,  I-330, have a vowel prefix.

Sex , although an anomaly, is necessary for mating and even pleasure, but the numbers have to be paired by the One State and restricted to certain pre-designated times. Offspring are reared by the One State, which interferes from the embryo stage onwards.



I-330 seduces D-503 to get his support in overthrowing the One State and controlling the Integral, a spaceship which he designed and which was intended to allow the One State  to spread  its paradigm  to the numerous inhabited planets that were thought to exist. (This belief was common in the 1920s and persists even today.) The Benefactor did not want them to make the same mistakes which were still being made on Earth outside the Green WalI: the One State is the only way.

  I-330 has other plans and is leading a revolt to take control of the Integral so that it can be used to spread the way of life of those not enslaved by the One State.

As the revolution gains ground the Benefactor orders the Great Operation, by which  the soul, the source of free will and unhappiness, is cut out by a surgeon. This is to be done on a large scale to thwart the revolution.  D-503 submits to this and so is cured of his erotic desire for I-330 as well as any thoughts of joining the revolt. 

Two minor love triangles develop. These involve O-90, with whom D-503 is officially paired by the One State, and the state poet, R-13. They are incidental to the main plot. 

At the end of the story D-503 is interviewed by the Benefactor , who regards himself, blasphemously, as a Christ figure.  D-503 also discovers that S -4711, who throughout he had assumed was a ‘guardian angel’ watching over him on behalf of the One State, was in fact secretly  part of the revolution.

D-503 had been indoctrinated to believe that the universe was infinite. I-330 points out to D-503 that if infinity is real then the revolution of the 200 year war could not be the final revolution -there is always a higher number than any number you can think of.  (I can’t see the logic here unless she is implying that an infinite universe must be eternal and therefore everything that can happen will happen an infinite number of times, including another revolution. JLS.) But S -4711 reveals to him its  finitude. The question is left hanging … what is beyond the finite universe?



Aspects of reality implicit in We and comparisons with 1984 and Brave New World
God

A transcendent creator is absent in We and replaced by the robotic Benefactor, constructed by a previous generation and designed to rule and control according to mathematical laws under which free will and freedom are eliminated because they cause unhappiness. Any kind of deviant behaviour is spotted by a kind of ‘guardian angel’ spy force and corrected, so that the offender is brought into line with the operation of the One State. 

In Brave New World all religion has been expunged from society but in this case there is no clear god substitute except that there is a techno-elite that eliminates all freedom and unhappiness by an embryo-engineered caste system in which people are  designed to be unambitious and satisfied with their lot. Anyone that does experience unhappiness is given the drug soma.

Orwell’s dystopia, 1984,  is not even intended to be benevolent. The inner party has created a mythical god called Big Brother, awareness of whom is promoted by the media of the time, and although the proles , at the bottom of the hierarchy, are told he does everything for their benefit in fact the Inner Party maintains brutal totalitarian control  and actually derives sadistic pleasure from the way it does so.

Cosmology

In We the official line is that the actual universe outside the Green Wall of the One State is infinite and includes many inhabited planets. This was a common  belief at the time, both in Soviet and western society, since the Big Bang cosmic model was barely known even as a concept and the rarity, if not total absence, of human populated planets other than ours was not known.
In the  Brave New World novel there is not any reference to the universe that I am aware of but in any case the bioengineered populace were programmed to be non-curious about this. Creativity, other than for utilitarian purposes, and searching for truth are regarded as diseases. 

Neither is there a reference to a universe in 1984 outside the three continents  of Oceana (where the story takes place) ,  Eastasia and Eurasia. 

Reproduction and rearing

The subjects of the We society, the One State, are called numbers which is appropriate in that the society has been scientifically designed to conform to a set of equations. Male and female numbers have intercourse at designated times with designated partner numbers and are indoctrinated from an early age to be submissive to the Benefactor. 

In Brave New World the five castes ranging from alphas to epsilon are modelled from test tube embryos emerging on a production line. Each of the succeeding castes is conditioned to be slightly less physically and intellectually impressive. The Alpha embryos are destined to become the leaders and thinkers of the World State.



Orwell’s world does not design people biologically, as in Brave New World . It is not necessary since the human spirit is brutally crushed, as explained below.



Social control

Zamyatin’s society is kept stable by daily indoctrination , regimentation and drilling of all its citizens (numbers) . Although free will is supposed to be a sin of the ancients it in fact still exists since the main number, D-503, is a rocket engineer who has designed the Integral and so must be creative. He also appears to be capable of philosophising. Also, there is a poet who writes anthems and poems for the One State.  The official line, however, is that any kind of freedom is an anomaly and causes unhappiness. 

In Huxley’s dystopia docility is engineered into the lower caste embryos (gammas, deltas and epsilons) coming off the production line. There is a World State run by ten World Controllers and all non-routine thinking is done by alphas and betas. Wherever discontent or undesirable emotions occur they are dealt with by the calming/stupefying drug Soma. Everyone is happy up to the moment of death (60) which nobody fears.  As in  We it is intended to be a human scientifically designed benevolent society in which everyone is happy.

The Inner Party of Orwell’s 1984 uses brute force , cheap gin, surveillance through telescreens, a restricted vocabulary called Newspeak and a strange way of disengaging people from reality called doublethink, which drills people to believe words denote  the opposite of their real meaning (good is bad, black is white etc.). It also incites hatred of a fictional enemy so as to direct public discontent away from the real enemy, the Inner Party. This is the daily ‘two minutes hate’ session broadcast via the telescreens, directed against Eastasia and Eurasia, which are portrayed as being perpetually at war with Oceana, with rocket bombs landing daily and shown to the masses on the ubiquitous telescreens. There is also a bogus underground movement against which the state claims it is protecting the citizens.  The proletariat (the proles) are not indoctrinated but kept stupefied with widely distributed  cheap gin.

I have tried to compare three godless ‘utopias’ which I suspect most of us would not want to live in even if, or perhaps because, all citizens are forced to be happy and content all the time. 

Scientific Atheism in the Soviet Union


The official state religion of the USSR  was Scientific Atheism. It was taught in schools and membership of the Russian Orthodox church was strongly discouraged.   It included a variation on Darwinism called Lamarkianism which until very recent discoveries in epigenetics and the central role of ‘junk’ DNA was ridiculed by western biologists and zoologists.
Scientific Atheism was beginning to be  preached at the time of We  so it is not surprising that a story which appears to be satirising this religion was banned. My view is that Zamyatin was trying to fool the censors by superficially  referring to Christianity in a negative way but that the party intelligentsia unfortunately saw through this.


My worldview


As a Christian I believe that God created the universe, made us in his image, incarnated his son into humanity as Jesus Christ, who was resurrected after crucifixion, later ascended into heaven (a  spiritual reality  which coexists with the material world) and at the Pentecost sent the Holy Spirit as a helper. Jesus Christ sanctifies humanity, is the visible image of the invisible God and assures us that the Creator is loving, gracious, just and merciful. 


John Sears
author
Reach me at
cosmik.jo@gmail.com



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Below are summaries of the plot of Brave New World and of 1984 lifted and slightly adapted from Wikipedia etc.. 

Brave New World
In the context of the book, the programme had proven successful. The lower castes' restricted abilities, ambitions and desires make them contented with their lot. There is no dissatisfaction because each caste member receives the same workload, food, housing, and soma ration. Nor is there any desire to change caste; conditioning reinforces the individual's place in the caste system. The upper castes (with a few exceptions) revel in the hedonistic and materialistic lifestyle provided for them.
People enjoy perfect health and youthfulness until death at age 60.[17] Death is not feared; the population is confident that everyone is happy, and since there are no families, there are no strong ties to mourn.
The novel opens in the Central London Hatching and Conditioning Centre, where the Director of the Hatchery and one of his assistants, Henry Foster, are giving a tour to a group of boys. The boys learn about the Bokanovsky and Podsnap Processes that allow the Hatchery to produce thousands of nearly identical human embryos. During the gestation period the embryos travel in bottles along a conveyor belt through a factory-like building, and are conditioned to belong to one of five castes: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, or Epsilon. The Alpha embryos are destined to become the leaders and thinkers of the World State. Each of the succeeding castes is conditioned to be slightly less physically and intellectually impressive. The Epsilons, stunted and stupefied by oxygen deprivation and chemical treatments, are destined to perform menial labor. Lenina Crowne, an employee at the factory, describes to the boys how she vaccinates embryos destined for tropical climates.
The Director then leads the boys to the Nursery, where they observe a group of Delta infants being reprogrammed to dislike books and flowers. The Director explains that this conditioning helps to make Deltas docile and eager consumers. He then tells the boys about the “hypnopaedic” (sleep-teaching) methods used to teach children the morals of the World State. In a room where older children are napping, a whispering voice is heard repeating a lesson in “Elementary Class Consciousness.”
Outside, the Director shows the boys hundreds of naked children engaged in sexual play and games like “Centrifugal Bumble-puppy.” Mustapha Mond, one of the ten World Controllers, introduces himself to the boys and begins to explain the history of the World State, focusing on the State’s successful efforts to remove strong emotions, desires, and human relationships from society.
Death is not talked about or feared. It is just accepted that everyone is happy. Noone is discontent because all are chemically engineered to their assigned social role .
Soma is a major pacifier,

1984
A  godless world devoid of the concept of truth, with the Party in total control and with god replaced by an elite who enjoy brutally controlling human beings as an and end and purpose in itself.  
Winston Smith is a low-ranking member of the ruling Party in London, in the nation of Oceania. Everywhere Winston goes, even his own home, the Party watches him through telescreens; everywhere he looks he sees the face of the Party’s seemingly omniscient leader, a figure known only as Big Brother. The Party controls everything in Oceania, even the people’s history and language. Currently, the Party is forcing the implementation of an invented language called Newspeak, which attempts to prevent political rebellion by eliminating all words related to it. Even thinking rebellious thoughts is illegal. Such thoughtcrime is, in fact, the worst of all crimes.
As the novel opens, Winston feels frustrated by the oppression and rigid control of the Party, which prohibits free thought, sex, and any expression of individuality. Winston dislikes the party and has illegally purchased a diary in which to write his criminal thoughts. He has also become fixated on a powerful Party member named O’Brien, whom Winston believes is a secret member of the Brotherhood—the mysterious, legendary group that works to overthrow the Party.
Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical records to fit the needs of the Party. He notices a coworker, a beautiful dark-haired girl, staring at him, and worries that she is an informant who will turn him in for his thoughtcrime. He is troubled by the Party’s control of history: the Party claims that Oceania has always been allied with Eastasia in a war against Eurasia, but Winston seems to recall a time when this was not true. The Party also claims that Emmanuel Goldstein, the alleged leader of the Brotherhood, is the most dangerous man alive, but this does not seem plausible to Winston. Winston spends his evenings wandering through the poorest neighborhoods in London, where the proletarians, or proles, live squalid lives, relatively free of Party monitoring.
One day, Winston receives a note from the dark-haired girl that reads “I love you.” She tells him her name, Julia, and they begin a covert affair, always on the lookout for signs of Party monitoring. Eventually they rent a room above the secondhand store in the prole district where Winston bought the diary. This relationship lasts for some time. Winston is sure that they will be caught and punished sooner or later (the fatalistic Winston knows that he has been doomed since he wrote his first diary entry), while Julia is more pragmatic and optimistic. As Winston’s affair with Julia progresses, his hatred for the Party grows more and more intense. At last, he receives the message that he has been waiting for: O’Brien wants to see him.
Winston and Julia travel to O’Brien’s luxurious apartment. As a member of the powerful Inner Party (Winston belongs to the Outer Party), O’Brien leads a life of luxury that Winston can only imagine. O’Brien confirms to Winston and Julia that, like them, he hates the Party, and says that he works against it as a member of the Brotherhood. He indoctrinates Winston and Julia into the Brotherhood, and gives Winston a copy of Emmanuel Goldstein’s book, the manifesto of the Brotherhood. Winston reads the book—an amalgam of several forms of class-based twentieth-century social theory—to Julia in the room above the store. Suddenly, soldiers barge in and seize them. Mr. Charrington, the proprietor of the store, is revealed as having been a member of the Thought Police all along.
Torn away from Julia and taken to a place called the Ministry of Love, Winston finds that O’Brien, too, is a Party spy who simply pretended to be a member of the Brotherhood in order to trap Winston into committing an open act of rebellion against the Party. O’Brien spends months torturing and brainwashing Winston, who struggles to resist. At last, O’Brien sends him to the dreaded Room 101, the final destination for anyone who opposes the Party. Here, O’Brien tells Winston that he will be forced to confront his worst fear. Throughout the novel, Winston has had recurring nightmares about rats; O’Brien now straps a cage full of rats onto Winston’s head and prepares to allow the rats to eat his face. Winston snaps, pleading with O’Brien to do it to Julia, not to him.
Giving up Julia is what O’Brien wanted from Winston all along. His spirit broken, Winston is released to the outside world. He meets Julia but no longer feels anything for her. He has accepted the Party entirely and has learned to love Big Brother.


Thursday 1 September 2016

The honeybee: intelligence in a miniature brain


A previous post referred to the widespread occurrence of intelligence in the natural world, even in brainless amoebae. See Intelligence without brains. It is obvious to everyone that hives have a kind of collective intelligence – a mystery in itself. But the individual insect within the colony also has intelligence, despite its miniature brain, the size of a grass seed.


For every hundred thousand neurons in the human brain (85 billion in all) there is only one in the bee’s equivalent. Here are some examples from the New Scientist in What’s the buzz? by David Robson (24 November 2012). They involve mental feats by individual bees and a growing repertoire of complex behaviour by groups of them. (NB Workers are all females and fall into two groups: foragers and nurses. Drones are males with the sole purpose of mating.)

  • The waggle dance is performed in the hive by a forager to indicate to her fellow foragers the direction and distance of nectar bearing flowers. This is well known. However, while it is performing this dance another foraging bee will sometimes butt the head of the dancer to indicate that it has found a spider at a particular place.

  • Nurse bees perform a wide variety of housekeeping tasks: spring cleaning, mutual grooming, guarding entrances against intruders and air conditioning in hot weather. The air conditioning is achieved by sprinkling water over the honeycomb and using their wings to produce a cool draft.

  • Workers have been observed to have over 60 patterns of behaviour, including 6 different kinds of dance. (Lars Chittkka Current Biology, vol.19, p.R995). This compares with 120 for bottlenose dolphins, 50 for beavers and 30 for rabbits.

  • Bees are aware of the concept of symmetry. If they see a variety of symmetric shapes and a variety of asymmetric shapes, and if they are rewarded only when a symmetric shape is chosen, they will select any shape which has symmetry from a random collection of shapes of all kinds.

  • They can find their way through a maze using abstract signs. They can also understand that different signs mean different things in different situations. They are much better than most primates at this.

     

  • When confronted with a variety of tasks they are able to assess their chances of succeeding and act accordingly. (The evidence for this is not conclusive but it seems likely from experiments to date.)

The article also points out severe limitations of the bee’s intelligence. Visual processing is confined to recognising outlines and only a small part of a scene can be taken in at once. Memory recall is very limited. Nevertheless this is another example of the extraordinary ubiquity of intelligence in the natural world, even in organisms with no neurons or brains as we understand them, such as amoebae. And it is my opinion that this is somehow connected with the process of evolution. Far from being a blind random process of natural selection plus random mutations evolution proceeds by intelligent cooperation and competition. Intelligence is a sustainer and driver of life.

Recently I became aware of plants which were precisely conserving their starch supply through the night using a simple mathematical formula and inputs from both their biological clocks and the number of starch molecules present in the plants.

It is also becoming increasingly apparent that intelligence in nature is not caused by arrangements of matter. These are secondary to something much more fundamental which is beyond our power to discern.

  
 Where it comes from is another question. Humans have an extraordinary variety and amount of reasoning capacity but I believe it is much more than this which makes us fundamentally different from the natural world around us.

Thursday 18 August 2016

Our precious planet. Part 1: a safe place in the cosmos (updated 2016)



[This is an updated version of the post initially published 3 years ago]
In the next four posts (including this one)  I hope to show the strange combination of circumstances which have led to our civilization. You could dismiss it as the god of chance, since chance can be used to explain anything or nothing. Or you could say it had to be like this or we would not be here to witness it. Fortunately, early man didn't take this defeatest attitude: if he had there would be no science.

As far as I know I’m not saying anything new or cranky here; only trying, as a layman who follows science, to list the factors that make our planet unusual and tailor-made to our requirements. If you can find anything in the following that needs challenging, correcting or clarifying please let me know. 

Part 1 shows how the Earth and Sun are placed in a benign part of a hostile universe and in a region where the 92 elements of the periodic table are available (e.g.carbon,  oxygen, silicon, iron, uranium).

Part 2 will show how the Earth and its companion Moon have provided the conditions needed for biological evolution.

Part 3 will show that our civilization’s development also depended on the properties of the Earth and the Moon.

Part 4 will show how life and civilization could only have emerged not just where they did, but when they did.

 Part 1. A safe place in the cosmos

The universe contains of the order of a hundred billion galaxies which basically fall into three different types: irregular, elliptical and spiral.  Each galaxy contains around a hundred billon stars but only spiral galaxies, like the one in which the Earth and Sun are situated, are likely to have safe zones.

About 25% of galaxies are irregular chaotic swarms of stars with abundant gas and dust. Any planetary system attached to one of these stars is likely to be bathed in radiation hostile to life and subject to a randomly changing interstellar environment in which ‘nearby’ supernovas explode frequently. This is unfortunate since they contain a lot of young stars, not too dissimilar to the Sun, which synthesise the elements (e.g. carbon) needed for life.

Some 65% are elliptical galaxies in which the stars rotate around a central black hole in an ellipse. Because of its oval shaped orbit a star within such a galaxy is periodically brought in close to the black hole and bathed in lethal radiation. In addition, the stars in elliptical galaxies are smaller than the Sun and unable to manufacture the elements needed for life.

The remaining 10% are spiral galaxies, which include our own Milky Way. Although largely hostile to life these have safe regions and the Sun with its companion planets is in one of them. The Sun orbits the galaxy in a rare circular path so that it is not transported too near the central black hole, which give off dangerous radiation.  Also, it is in a ‘young star zone’ where the 92 chemical elements found and needed on Earth have been produced by supernovas (exploding stars) and not in a globular cluster (see below) or other regions of our galaxy where these chemicals are not present.
Supermassive black holes seem to be a normal feature of spiral galaxies but the one at the centre of ours is unusually small (4 million solar masses) and appears to have optimized  the production and distribution of supernovae. Somehow a balance has been achieved between two conflicting requirements for life: the abundance of elements needed for life and a radiation environment which is, by cosmic standards, benign. The halo of dark matter around and at right angles to the Milky Way Galaxy is also appears to be playing a life crucial role

See also ET life should be local

These are densely packed masses of stars within galaxies and any star inside a cluster is unlikely to have life-bearing planets because they are made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium and because the orbit of a star within a cluster is  unstable. Globular clusters were made in the early life of the universe, before most chemical elements were manufactured in large stars and released into interstellar space to form the clouds of matter out of which new stars, planets and life itself are formed. 

Several things about the Sun are optimum for life:
  • It is a  rare G2 yellow dwarf which emits light suitable for photosynthesis (needed to power plant life and produce oxygen) and which is maximally transmitted through water (important for submarine life). 
  • The Sun is also the right size and mass (a large majority of stars are not). The overall stability of a star is closely related to these.
  • It is situated well away from damaging gamma rays and X-rays, i.e.  from gamma-ray bursts, black holes or supernovas.
  • Unlike many stars, it is not part of a multiple star system, which would give us chaotic conditions alien to life.
  • It does not behave violently (by cosmic standards!) in its present quiescent phase which began 50,000 years ago and will end in 50,000 years time. Outside this time window even the relatively stable sun flares up enough to preclude advanced life.
All this adds up to our galaxy, our position in it and the nature of the Sun, providing a rare cosmic opportunity for life to evolve. This combination of circumstances is on top of the extraordinary fine tuning of the physics of the universe to permit life to exist. (How it starts we don't know. We don't even know what it is, i.e what holds the multifarious multitude of diverse, integrated processes within a living organism in being and  what causes continual correction to the millions of errors each day, until death sets in.)
John
Author, 2077: Knights of Peace



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