Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 209

April 20, 2021

Bruce Gordon: In quantum physics, “reality” really IS what we choose to observe

Philosopher and physicist Bruce Gordon, co-editor with William Dembski on The Nature of Nature, argues that idealist philosophy is the best way to make sense of the puzzling world of quantum physics:

Bruce Gordon: So what does the “delayed choice“ quantum eraser experiment do? Well, it tries to measure which path a particle would have taken after interference in the wave function has been created that is inconsistent with that particle’s behavior. So you’ve got a splitter of some sort. It’s going to divide the quantum wave function and send it along two different paths. Then you’re going to make a measurement along one of the paths to see what’s happening.

That interference can be turned off or on by choosing whether or not to look at which path the particle has taken after the interference already exists.

Now if you don’t look, you get an interference phenomenon at the end. If you do look, the wave function instantaneously collapses and you detect the particle along that pathway. So choosing to look erases the wave function and gives the system a particle history.

This experiment has been performed under what would be called Einstein Locality Conditions. In other words, no signal could have passed — subject to the limiting velocity of the speed of light — between the components of the system to cause the effect that you’re observing.

The very fact that we can make a causally disconnected choice of whether wave or particle phenomena are manifested in a quantum system essentially shows that there is no measurement-independent and causally connected, substantial material reality at the micro physical level. It is created by the measurement itself.

News, “In quantum physics, “reality” really is what we choose to observe” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Gordon explains that the quantum eraser experiment shows that there is no reality independent of measurement at the microphysical level. It is created by the measurement itself.

Here are stories from Bruce Gordon’s previous podcast with host Michael Egnor, where he defends idealism as a way of making sense of nature:

Why idealism is actually a practical philosophy. Not what you heard? Philosopher of science — and pianist — Bruce Gordon says, think again. Is reality fundamentally more like a mind than a physical object? Many are sure of the answer without understanding the question.

and

A physicist and philosopher examines panpsychism. Idealism says everything is an idea in the mind of God. Panpsychism says everything participates in consciousness (thus is not just an idea). Bruce Gordon thinks that, for a thing to be conscious, there must be something that it “is like” to be that thing. Can panpsychism demonstrate that?

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Published on April 20, 2021 19:04

From Bill Dembski: Automated driving and other failures of AI

In connection with a new book, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do (2021) by Erik J. Larson, Bill offers some thoughts on how human intelligence isn’t being — and can’t be — duplicated:

… it would be interesting to see what fully automated driving would look like in a place like Moldova. A U.S. friend of mine who happened to visit the country was surprised at how Moldovan drivers managed to miss hitting each other despite a lack of clear signals and rules about when to take an opportunity and when to hold back. When he asked his Moldovan guide how the drivers managed to avoid accidents, the guide answered with two words: “eye contact.” Apparently, the drivers could see in their eyes who was willing to hold back and who was ready to move forward. Now that’s a happy prospect for fully automated driving. Perhaps we need “level 6” automation, at which AI systems learn to read the eyes of drivers to determine whether they are going to hold back or make that left turn into oncoming traffic.

This example suggests to me that AI is hopelessly behind the full range of human intellectual capabilities. It also suggests that we, in the cossetted and sanitized environments that we have constructed for ourselves in the U.S., have no clue of what capabilities AI actually needs to achieve to truly match what humans can do. The shortfall facing AI is extreme.

William Dembski, “Automated driving and other failures of AI” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: In cossetted and sanitized environments in the U.S., Dembski says, we have no clue of what AI must achieve to truly match what humans can do.

You may also wish to read:

Artificial intelligence: Unseating the inevitability narrative. William Dembski: World-class chess, Go, and Jeopardy-playing programs are impressive, but they prove nothing about whether computers can be made to achieve AGI. In The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, Erik Larson shows that neither science nor philosophy back up the idea of an AI superintelligence taking over.

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Published on April 20, 2021 18:34

April 19, 2021

Researchers: We might find extraterrestrial life in 5 to 10 years

The new James Webb Space Telescope, which launches in October, “could feasibly detect ammonia around six gas dwarf planets after just a few orbits”:

Gas dwarf planets have the potential to foster life. But because none of these super-Earths or mini-Neptunes exist within our solar system, scientists struggle to determine whether their atmospheres contain ammonia and other potential signs of living things.

American Physical Society, “Scientists may detect signs of extraterrestrial life in the next 5 to 10 years” at ScienceDaily

We shall see. It would be great to find them, but if we don’t, is that evidence too?

See also: SETI director warns: Those aliens could be malevolent. Harvard astronomer agrees: We’ve sent a lot of signals in recent years; they may have got them. But now what? Astronomer Avi Loeb has a low-risk practical idea: Look for alien debris on our still, lifeless, atmosphere-free Moon

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Published on April 19, 2021 20:36

Indian jumping ants can shrink and regrow their brains

In this type of ant colony, females other than the ueen can reproduce. If she dies, there is a struggle to succeed her and those who come out on top (gamergates) start laying eggs. Meanwhile, their brains shrink:

Penick and his colleagues found that when the ants take on the role of gamergate, their brains shrink by 19% on average. The shrinkage likely happens so that they can save energy to focus on producing eggs. Hormones trigger additional changes in the ants, including larger ovaries, less venom production and much longer lifespans.

“But what we didn’t know was if they had the capacity to regrow them back to their previous size,” Penick tells NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro on Weekend Edition. “The typical wisdom is that once you lose brain cells, they don’t come back.”

James Dubek, Peter Breslow, “The Incredible Shrinking And Growing Brains Of Indian Jumping Ants” at NPR

So they took the gamergates out of the colony and their brains did grow back.

“It tells us that brains are a lot more plastic and have a lot more abilities to change back and forth between their size than we knew,” Penick says. “And ants, their brains have some shared traits with humans, believe it or not. So now we’re looking at digging into some of the genetic and other neural mechanisms that are underlying these brain changes.”

James Dubek, Peter Breslow, “The Incredible Shrinking And Growing Brains Of Indian Jumping Ants” at NPR

The paper is open access. Note: “gamergates” does not refer to gaming. It’s formed from Greek words and means something like “workers with ovaries.”

It’s certainly true that the brain is plastic. but human brains can do more remarkable things than ant brains. People can function with split brains or half a brain or hardly any brain and be intellectually normal. We didn’t know that know that before brain scanning.. For example:

Yes, split brains are weird, but not the way you think. Scientists who dismiss consciousness and free will ignore the fact that the higher faculties of the mind cannot be split even by splitting the brain in half.

Some people think and speak with only half a brain. A new study sheds light on how they do it.

Boy born with 2% of brain does maths, loves science. Noah Wall’s story raises intriguing questions about the relationship between the brain and the mind

and

Four researchers whose work sheds light on the reality of the mind The brain can be cut in half, but the intellect and will cannot, says Michael Egnor. The intellect and will are metaphysically simple.

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Published on April 19, 2021 20:15

From a research paper: “It’s amazing how clear cut the change from ‘no dinosaurs’ to ‘all dinosaurs’ was.”

David Klinghoffer offers an introduction to Günter Bechly’s recent talk “Evidence Against Neo-Darwinism from the Fossil Record,” in which Bechly offers that quote from a paleontology paper at Nature Communications:

The paper acknowledges an “explosive increase in dinosaurian abundance.” As Dr. Bechly says, that’s the kind of observation you wouldn’t be surprised at coming from the dreaded “creationists,” and yet it’s a straightforward finding of mainstream paleontology. Watch the rest below, and enjoy.

David Klinghoffer, “Dinosaurs and More: Bechly on the Fossil Record vs. Neo-Darwinism” at Evolution News and Science Today

See also: Günter Bechly: Paper says Cambrian Explosion took only 410,000 years From the paper’s media release: Moreover, the scientists’ data series reveal that the development of the fauna took place within a very short period. The transition from the “Ediacara biota” – multi-celled but very simply organisms – to the diverse Cambrian life forms occurred over less than 410,000 years.

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Published on April 19, 2021 19:21

String theory skeptic Peter Woit reflects on Stephen Hawking

Recently, Barry Arrington offered some thoughts on the late Stephen Hawking. He’s been gone long enough that we can make a reasonable stab at assessing his legacy. Columbia mathematician (and string theory skeptic) Peter Woit has thought about that in connection with the new book, Hawking Hawking by Charles Seife:

A large part of Hawking’s celebrity and income derived from his work as a popular author. His 1988 popular book, A Brief History of Time, was a huge success. Seife tells the story of how that book came about, partly motivated by the need for a new source of income. An initial manuscript due to Hawking was edited and improved a great deal before the published version was done. Many other books followed, and if you go to any bookstore with a science section, you’re likely to find quite a few of them for sale. The problem is that, on the whole, they’re not any good, and they’re not written by Hawking. Seife documents this sorry tale in some detail.

I first noticed this when I ran across a copy of God Created the Integers, a thick anthology of writing on mathematics, supposedly edited by and with commentary by Hawking. At least he’s listed as the sole author. Given the topic and the volume of material, it seemed highly implausible to me that Hawking was actually the author. For a review of the book, see here. Seife explains in detail that much of it is essentially plagiarized from other sources, and that to this day, it seems to be unknown who wrote the material (just that it clearly wasn’t Hawking).

At least this sort of thing got little attention, which unfortunately was not true of his 2010 The Grand Design, co-written with Leonard Mlodinow. I wrote about this book in some detail here. Put bluntly, it was an atrocious rehash of the worst nonsense about M-theory and the string theory landscape, with an argument for atheism thrown in to get more public attention. This is the sort of thing that has done a huge amount of damage to both the public understanding of fundamental physics, and even to the field itself.

Peter Woit, “Hawking Hawking” at Not Even Wrong

Okay but it’s only fair to say that a large proportion of the public loves that sort of pop physics and has little interest in the serious kind. And never would have had. Hawking did not create that situation.

See also: Stephen Hawking Was Sometimes Embarrassingly Stupid (Barry Arrington)

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Published on April 19, 2021 18:40

Coyne Believes a Version of “Turtles all the Way Down”

As our News Desk has noted, over at Mind Matters Michael Egnor engages with Jerry Coyne on whether, as a matter of logic, the cosmos can be self-existent. Egnor says no, and one reason he gives is the logical principle that any causal chain points to a first cause. He writes:

Imagine a chain hanging from the sky supporting a weight suspended in the air. Each link in the chain is a cause for the continued suspension of the links and the weight they hold up. However, the chain could not hold itself up alone. It can’t be “links all the way up.” Something at the beginning must be holding the chain up. And whatever holds the whole causal series up cannot just be another link in the chain. To be a “first cause,” whatever is holding up the chain must be something different from the chain itself.

Most of us are familiar with the amusing “turtles all the way down” story:

The following anecdote is told of William James. […] After a lecture on cosmology and the structure of the solar system, James was accosted by a little old lady.

“Your theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and the earth is a ball which rotates around it has a very convincing ring to it, Mr. James, but it’s wrong. I’ve got a better theory,” said the little old lady.

“And what is that, madam?” inquired James politely.

“That we live on a crust of earth which is on the back of a giant turtle.”

Not wishing to demolish this absurd little theory by bringing to bear the masses of scientific evidence he had at his command, James decided to gently dissuade his opponent by making her see some of the inadequacies of her position.

“If your theory is correct, madam,” he asked, “what does this turtle stand on?”

“You’re a very clever man, Mr. James, and that’s a very good question,” replied the little old lady, “but I have an answer to it. And it’s this: The first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger, turtle, who stands directly under him.”

“But what does this second turtle stand on?” persisted James patiently.

To this, the little old lady crowed triumphantly,

“It’s no use, Mr. James—it’s turtles all the way down.”— J. R. Ross, Constraints on Variables in Syntax, 1967

Coyne would certainly howl in disdain and ridicule at the rube who believed in turtles all the way down. Isn’t it ironic, then, that he himself believes in a similar story except instead of “turtles all the way down” he believes in “links all the way up.”

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Published on April 19, 2021 06:29

April 18, 2021

Sabine Hossenfelder: Does the universe have higher dimensions?

This is Part 1:

Now, it might seem entirely obvious today that you can do geometry in any number of dimensions, but it’s actually a fairly recent development. It wasn’t until eighteen forty-three, that the British mathematician Arthur Cayley wrote about the “Analytical Geometry of (n) Dimensions” where n could be any positive integer. Higher Dimensional Geometry sounds innocent, but it was a big step towards abstract mathematical thinking. It marked the beginning of what is now called “pure mathematics”, that is mathematics pursued for its own sake, and not necessarily because it has an application.

However, abstract mathematical concepts often turn out to be useful for physics. And these higher dimensional geometries came in really handy for physicists because in physics, we usually do not only deal with things that sit in particular places, but with things that also move in particular directions. If you have a particle, for example, then to describe what it does you need both a position and a momentum, where the momentum tells you the direction into which the particle moves. So, actually each particle is described by a vector in a six dimensional space, with three entries for the position and three entries for the momentum. This six-dimensional space is called phase-space.

By dealing with phase-spaces, physicists became quite used to dealing with higher dimensional geometries. And, naturally, they began to wonder if not the *actual space that we live in could have more dimensions. This idea was first pursued by the Finnish physicist Gunnar Nordström, who, in 1914, tried to use a 4th dimension of space to describe gravity. It didn’t work though.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “Does the Universe have higher dimensions? Part 1” at BackRe(Action)

This is Part 2:

As I explained in the previous video, if one adds 7 dimensions of space to our normal three dimensions, then one can describe all of the fundamental forces of nature geometrically. And that sounds like a really promising idea for a unified theory of physics. Indeed, in the early 1980s, the string theorist Edward Witten thought it was intriguing that seven additional dimensions of space is also the maximum for supergravity.

However, that numerical coincidence turned out to not lead anywhere. This geometric construction of fundamental forces which is called Kaluza-Klein theory, suffers from several problems that no one has managed to solved.

One problem is that the radii of these extra dimensions are unstable. So they could grow or shrink away, and that’s not compatible with observation. Another problem is that some of the particles we know come in two different versions, a left handed and a right handed one. And these two version do not behave the same way. This is called chirality. That particles behave this way is an observational fact, but it does not fit with the Kaluza-Klein idea. Witten actually worried about this in his 1981 paper.
Enter string theory. Sabine Hossenfelder, “Does the Universe have higher dimensions? Part 2” at BackRe(Action)

String theory predicted 26 dimensions. Supersymmetry brought it down to ten. You probably get the picture though.

This creates the same problem that people had with Kaluza-Klein theory a century ago: If these dimensions exist, where are they? And string theorists answered the question the same way: We can’t see them, because they are curled up to small radii.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “Does the Universe have higher dimensions? Part 2” at BackRe(Action)

The difference between quantum mechanics and string theory is that quantum mechanics is weird but demonstrable. String theory is weird, period. Gotta be a message in that somewhere.

To understand what a two-dimensional world would be like, try Flatland (1884).

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Published on April 18, 2021 20:19

Michael Egnor to Jerry Coyne: Why the universe itself can’t be the most fundamental thing

Michael Egnor

Neurosurgeon Egnor is here responding to Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne. Coyne, he says, “is mistaken in dismissing my observation that proofs of God’s existence follow the same logical structure as any other scientific theory”:

As philosophers have noted over the past several thousand years, there are many reasons why the universe cannot be the most fundamental thing that exists. I’ll discuss two of them here:

First, as Aquinas notes in his first Three Ways, change, cause, and existence in nature cannot go backward forever in an essential causal chain. “Essential” causal chains require the continued existence of all the causes in the chain. Forces and states in nature tend to be essential causal chains — the warming of the air in summer is due to the direct radiance from the sun due to tilt of the earth as it revolves around the sun which is due to gravitation as described by general relativity, etc. If any step in the causal chain from gravitation to summer warmth is eliminated, the effect is eliminated. If the earth ceased to tilt or revolve, or the sun cease to shine, or gravity cease to operate, summer would cease.

But these ordered causal chains in the universe can’t regress to infinity because there must be a fully actual cause at the beginning that gets the chain going. That fully actual cause cannot itself depend on any other cause within the system. Otherwise, how would it start?

Imagine a chain hanging from the sky supporting a weight suspended in the air. Each link in the chain is a cause for the continued suspension of the links and the weight they hold up. However, the chain could not hold itself up alone. It can’t be “links all the way up.” Something at the beginning must be holding the chain up. And whatever holds the whole causal series up cannot just be another link in the chain. To be a “first cause,” whatever is holding up the chain must be something different from the chain itself.

In the same way, the cause of the universe must be something other than the universe itself and must have the power to cause things independently of the laws of nature. That is what all men call God.

A second reason why the universe cannot be the most fundamental thing is the principle of sufficient reason…

Michael Egnor, “Why the universe itself can’t be the most fundamental thing” at Mind Matters News

Jerry Coyne

Takehome: Logical thinking helps us understand why the universe cannot simply exist without a power behind it. Let’s follow the logic.

You may also wish to read: Here’s why an argument for God’s existence is scientific: The form of reasoning and the type of evidence accepted is the same as with Newton’s theories or Darwin’s. We can observe God’s effects in the natural world just as we inferred the existence of the Big Bang and black holes by observing their effects. (Michael Egnor)

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Published on April 18, 2021 19:16

Robert J. Marks: How materialism proves unbounded scientific ignorance

Engineering prof Marks reminds us, there is an infinite number of things that are true that we cannot prove scientifically and never will:

The final conclusion of scientific materialism, also known as scientism, is nicely captured in a question chemist Peter Atkins asked philosopher William Lane Craig in a debate: “Do you deny that science can account for everything?”

Robert J. Marks, “How materialism proves unbounded scientific ignorance” at Mind Matters News

Scientism’s assumption that science can establish everything is self-refuting. Careful analysis shows that there is an infinite number of things that are true that we cannot prove scientifically and never will.

Stephen Hawking saw the tip of the iceberg of this truth when he said, “Up to now, most people have implicitly assumed that there is an ultimate theory, that we will eventually discover.” This Theory of Everything, as it is often called, would link together all physical aspects of the universe under one vast umbrella theory. Some are still searching. But Hawking abandoned the search. In defending his switch of position, Hawking invoked Kurt Gödel (1906–1978):

Some people will be very disappointed if there is not an ultimate theory, that can be formulated as a finite number of principles. I used to belong to that camp, but I have changed my mind. I’m now glad that our search for understanding will never come to an end, and that we will always have the challenge of new discovery. Without it, we would stagnate. Gödel’s theorem ensured there would always be a job for mathematicians.

STEPHEN HAWKING, “GÖDEL AND THE END OF PHYSICS” AT TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY (PUBLIC LECTURE, MARCH 8, 2002)

Takehome: Mathematician Kurt Gödel showed that there is an infinite number of truths that are provably unprovable. That’s bad news for scientism, though not for science.

You may also wish to read: Gregory Chaitin’s “almost” meeting with Kurt Gödel. This hard-to-find anecdote gives some sense of the encouraging but eccentric math genius.

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Published on April 18, 2021 18:38

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