A useful post from Jim Manzi:
we actually do have good scientific explanations for many of the phenomena that were claimed to be unexplainable without an intelligent designer. But scientific knowledge is never absolute, so there are always gaps, and therefore always space for such an argument. The problem with both ID and multiverse theory is the same: Neither is true and neither is false in a scientific sense; they are metaphysical frameworks with the scientific task of inspiring testable hypotheses, but are not themselves scientific theories capable of testing through scientific means.
It’s tempting to see ID and multiverse theory as mirror images — one looking desperately to prove scientifically that humans are special, and the other desperately seeking to avoid this conclusion. This is almost, but not quite, appropriate in my view. The proper question to ask about both multiverse theory and ID is whether they are fruitful. Ultimately, either each framework will help scientists develop physical theories in the form of predictive rules that can be tested through observation, or it will not. It’s very hard to see how ID can do this, but I guess that anything’s possible. Multiverse theory is more likely to do so, if only because it is a point of view that embeds a metaphysic that is far more congenial to so many more smart scientists.
But to look to science to answer a metaphysical questions like “Did God create us?” or “Are there completely unobservable aspects of reality?” is a category error of the first order.
Yup. As I’ve said repeatedly, science isn’t about proving that there is no God — it can never do so. It s about understanding the universe as much as possible on the assumption that there is none, or at least none that is rigging the game. The question of whether or not God exists is entirely orthogonal, and unaddressable by science.
Interesting post – personally, I do believe that God is “rigging the game”, as it were. But he also wants us to understand science – so he only rigs the game when we aren’t looking ;} with Quantum Mechanics being the direct result!
Quantum mechanics, in the form of quantum computing, is one possible way of answering the question of whether the multiverse theory is correct. As I understand it, a quantum computer with enough qubit capacity is capable of doing computations that any conceivable non-quantum machine couldn’t do in times comparable to the age of the universe – and doing them in seconds.
So where is the computing being done? I might add that the universes accessed by a quantum computer to do its work are indeed completely unobservable, and inaccessible.
Another point worth making; again as I understand it, belief in God is not worth mentioning if one needs proof. Therefore, a watertight proof of God’s existence would be just as destructive to religion as a proof of the opposite.
We have a winner.
Regrettably, it would appear that seminaries do a poor job of educating would-be clergy in the importance of theological rigor.
“Belief” is not an intellectual assent. Rather, it is a way of living one’s life “as if” the believed in thing were factual. The “as if” in the face of unknowability is a useful descriptor for “faith”.
I am but a layperson, so you get what you pay for.
The multiverse conjecture posits that our little corner of creation is one in which life got lucky and grows virally. It is equally probable that our universe is run by an unknowable hand that pulls the strings.
The game is not rigged.
The only reason the multiverse concept exists is because quantum mechanics throws a monkey wrench into the nice tidy view of science that existed before it (and in most minds still today.) Suddenly, God (not the magician, just the creator) isn’t such an irrational concept when compared to the really unimaginable reality of the quantum world.
The concept of the multiverse is absurd. It’s infinity to the infinite power. Everything goes to infinity. It’s ridiculous.
To believe that a being more powerful than man exists takes a lot less credulity.
The multiverse conjecture posits that our little corner of creation is one in which life got lucky and grows virally.
Not exactly. In order for it to serve it’s purpose of explaining, ALL possibilities coexist (what does that mean?) Which means luck has nothing to do with it. We must exist. Along with an infinity of dopplegangers. Also an infinity that are not us. Plus a larger infinity of dead universes from point size to everything else.
To believe that a being more powerful than man exists takes a lot less credulity.
There are a lot of humans with more power than me. And if we suppose that intelligent life is elsewhere in numerous locations, then there’s a good chance of a being more powerful than any human. The problem with that thought is that even if true, it doesn’t say much. There’s a huge chasm between merely being more powerful than me and the usual concepts of deities.
Couple of points.
As Ken observed, quantum mechanics is a real monkey wrench. Almost all of man’s philosophical thought has been based upon either a deterministic (Newtonian) worldview or a deity/deities. QM is unfathomable. It is physically impossible to determine what is really going on in a situation where our senses don’t have sufficient resolution. It is akin to throwing a bowling ball into a Pottery Barn and determining the colors of the pottery from the tinkle, tinkle of the ensuing mayhem.
Karl,
There was a theology, Gnosticism, that posited a powerful, though not all powerful, deity who is a bit clumsy. It got lost early on. Politics or something. Be careful about false dichotomies.
Bottom line? Discussions like this are great fun, but we’ll never know. Mystery is God’s gift to man.
The stray mentions of quantum mechanics make me hope no one is confusing the “multiverse” of the cosmologists from the “many worlds” of quantum measurement.
I also don’t agree with the Discover article, or Manzi, that what’s at issue in the multiverse idea is the Anthropic principle, in either strength. I think it’s more a question of a multiverse becoming conceivable once people entertained the thought that the net energy of the universe may be zero, and that therefore nothing prevented its spontaneous emergence from — something — by a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum.
I also don’t agree it’s utterly untestable. If many universes are embedded in something, it follows some rules about “something” persist in our universe. If we can discover them, we can determine the existence and some of the nature of the “something” in which our universe is embedded. That would, in some sense, just change our definition of what “the universe” is. The difficulty in part is that “universe” is supposed to mean “everything,” and we have good evidence, as we think we do, that what we have been calling “the universe” can’t possibly fill all of space and time, then we begin very reasonably to wonder what’s “outside” our universe. Bing, multiverse.
I also also don’t agree ID is equally untestable. We almost know enough ourselves to design a new life form and seed another planet with it. It could quite possibly be proved that this is where we came from. Then what? Do we call it something else if it’s proved we do have a Creator, and he is indeed enormously more powerful, sophisticated, and possibly moral than we — but is still not infinite? Is God less God, so to speak, if he is not infinitely powerful et cetera — just effectively so for mere mortals such as ourselves?
Carl, your point is very interesting indeed – because it is quite possible that such entities may exist in the lifetimes of many here, and made by us – or at least the process started by us, at any rate.
Have a look at this link:
http://www.orionsarm.com/sophontology/toposophic_scales.html
Now consider whether the minds at the upper end of this range are deserving of the name “gods”. Especially since the ones at the upper end of the range are capable of more thoughts in a second than the whole of humanity has managed since the beginning of prehistory, and by many orders of magnitude.
How are the established Churches going to deal with the demonstrable existence of utterly incomprehensible intellects in our midst? They are going to have to start thinking about that, perhaps at around the end of the 2020s.
The latest Wolfram project, on answering questions rather than searching for answers, might be very interesting.
I read somewhere recently that someone had either created “life” in the laboratory, or come very close. The interesting thing about this pursuit is that I think for some people it represent the ultimate proof of god’s non-existence. Or at least, the ultimate proof of god’s non-necessity. The argument being that if someone in a white coat can make life in the lab under conditions similar to primordial earth, then certianly it could have happened by chance given enough time.
The thing is, it strikes me as support for intelligent design.
Some concepts of divinity can be tested with scientific evidence. I would note that religions involving activist supreme beings that sway earthly affairs regularly through the present have evolved to become more rare. It’s the religions that have current embodiments of divine power that are indistinguishable from nature that have thrived. Religion evolves (or is intelligently designed) to cohere with science.
In turn, science gives society with religions that are consistent with it the means to have religious freedom. So the co-evolution of science also continues.
Ye cats, Fletch, I’m good at jargon, but that link is pretty hairy.
Anyway, it’s a curious fact that when we dream of ET, we almost always dream of something that is very comparable to ourselves. At most they have more advanced technology, although not too far advanced, something we could see ourselves having in a mere 100 years or so.
But very rarely do we dream of ET being as much smarter than us as we are smarter than a horse, or cat. Or having technology that is not merely 100 years ahead of ours, but 100,000 years — an eyeblink in astronomical time-scales.
In part this is just a lack of imagination and interest. I mean, what would a species that much smarter than us have to say to us? What do we say to cats and horses? Not a lot, other than giddyap or whoa or there’s a nice kitty. The gulf is just too wide.
But this fact makes me suspicious of most arguments about God as a matter of testable physical reality, with everyone going back and forth about whether infinitely wise and powerful beings can exist, yadda yadda. Without doubt, if they could conceive of such a thing, each dog kept as a pet by us would call us God. Why not? So far as he (the dog) can tell, we have infinite power, infinite knowledge. (We probably do appear more like Greek gods than Christian God, because we get angry, are sometimes careless, et cetera. We don’t have the Christian God’s infinitely equable temperament, at least the one He displays in the New Testament.)
Still, if we were serious about ET and what he might be like, and God, if he is to physically exist, we would need to ask why there can’t be a spectrum of intelligent beings out there, amongst which we might rate only trivially above the house cat or pigeon. Doesn’t that complicate the issue? I think so.
On the other hand, one could argue that we actually do represent the upper limit on intelligence, given building blocks (cells and DNA and stuff) not to dissimilar to our building blocks. Why not? Cheetahs represent the upper limit on running speed, if you’re made of bones and muscles and so forth. You could not design a cheetah using the same building materials and have it run 400 MPH.
The cheetah’s speciality is speed, and evolution has driven it to the extreme limit in that category. In the same sense, our speciality may be intelligence, and, if so, it’s likely evolution has already driven us to the extreme limit in that category. It may simply not be possible to have a smarter creature made of flesh and blood than us. In which case, yeah, ET won’t be smarter than us, nor dumber — and all those Star Trek episodes in which they only differ from us by having funny ears or green skin — and kissing the girls is just as much fo a turn-on — will prove to be right.
Roy, why are you warning me of “false dichotomies”? I merely made a logically correct observation.
Carl, if we were restricted to evolution as the sole means, then maybe you’d be correct about the upper limit on intelligence. But we have a number of avenues for increasing human intelligence.
Having said that, biological limitations don’t seem that harsh. Whales can maintain a far larger brain than humans can. Seems to me that the intelligence potential has a lot of room to grow.
We recognize that intelligence has aspects that could be enhanced. Computers can do some types of computations and some kinds of memory retrieval at better than human levels. But whatever intelligence is, it’s not clear how much it can be enhanced.
There seems to be a common SF theme that we may someday become more than human with superhuman intelligence. I note that those superhumans seem to all have (universally wacky) religious beliefs of some kind.
Why is that I wonder?
Karl,
I was referring to your statement “and the usual concepts of deities”. The Gnostics believe in a God that certainly does not fit the usual concepts. Many other minor religions, mostly multi-theistic, do not ascribe omnipotence and omniscience to their deities. Hope that clarifies a bit. No criticism of your observations. I’m just a bit anal.
Roy
There seems to be a common SF theme that we may someday become more than human with superhuman intelligence. I note that those superhumans seem to all have (universally wacky) religious beliefs of some kind.
Why is that I wonder?
I think there’s a couple of reasons. First, superhumans (and other superintelligences) wouldn’t be so interesting if they had the same mundane beliefs, hopes, and interests as the rest of us. Suppose Colossus of the Forbin Project was interested in holding down a steady job (a good paying job running US nuclear defense) rather than ruling humanity. A Terminator would make a decent life guard (once proper buoyancy was obtained), but that’s a lot less sexy career choice for a movie role than human genocide and mass killer.
A common shtick is to make superintelligence inscrutable. That way the audience can’t easily perceive how weak the author’s characterization of the superintelligence is. I think the book and movie, 2010 does something along these lines.
Then I think there’s the category of author who thinks superintelligence will result in some sort of metaphysical or belief system breakthrough. That is, smart beings are more spiritual (among other things) than dumb beings. There’s some pretty crazy stuff that comes from this crowd. But strangely enough, I think that might occur in practice too. I imagine some of the attempts at a superintelligence in humanity’s future will be by such parties.
Karl says: Having said that, biological limitations don’t seem that harsh. Whales can maintain a far larger brain than humans can. Seems to me that the intelligence potential has a lot of room to grow.
Picking a nit here I know, but size shouldn’t necessarily ascribe to use. If humans had a brain the size of a whale’s, whose to say we wouldn’t be dumber than a box of rocks?
Carl, your post makes a hidden assumption; that all ETs are made of protoplasm. (Incidentally, I take your point about the link; most of it is made up but almost all understandable if you take a run up at it.)
I really don’t know whether non-protoplasmic intelligences can evolve from scratch. However, that does not preclude them arising. For example, maybe (just maybe) the Wolfram project will be able to create enough emergent behaviour to cross the border of sapience. Ten or fifteen years from now, the proposition that non-protoplasmic intelligence can arise with some help might just have an existence proof – sitting on your desk.
Carl, if we were restricted to evolution as the sole means, then maybe you’d be correct about the upper limit on intelligence.
Phoo, Karl, it can be proved fairly easily that evolution finds any upper limit, given enough time. Now it’s up to you to argue that the 4 million years or so of human evolution hasn’t been enough time to find the maximum limit of intelligence. That will be difficult. You need to argue we’re in some kind of local maximum, and the higher global maximum is separated from us by some weird unbridgeable gulf of modification. You can’t there from here kind of thing — e.g. we’d have to go back to Australopithecus and start down another track.
Another approach, however, is to argue that intelligence is not a survival value, i.e. that beyond a certain point increasing intelligence decreases the survival probability. Given the fecundity of highly geeky people, I’m not sure that isn’t the better argument.
But we have a number of avenues for increasing human intelligence
You can only increase intelligence if it can be increased, and if it can be increased, my argument goes, then evolution may already have done so.
Carl, your post makes a hidden assumption; that all ETs are made of protoplasm.
No. I’m just assuming that whatever you make intelligence out of, it has similar upper limits. Why so? Well, people typically do argue that the properties of very high level abstract objects have very little to do with what they’re made from, at the most basic level. it doesn’t matter, the story goes, whether your clever artificial intelligence program runs on silicon transisters or neurons; they will both reach similar limits of “general intelligence” capability.
They may well solve general problems differently, e.g. the silicon might have an edge in speed of scalar computation, while the neurons might have an edge in massively parallel computation, so the silicon AI solves the chess problem by traversing an enormous search tree of possibilities really really fast, while the neural net solves the same problem by some kind of one-step global pattern-matching.
They may also have different abilities in specialized skills, e.g. the silicon AI can add 16-digit numbers better, the neurons may be able to recognize faces faster.
But generalized problem-solving seems unlikely to be tied to one or a few underlying characteristics of the hardware. It seems much more likely to be something characteristic of the algorithms that run on the hardware, and it would be strange if there were algorithms that high-level that could be implemented far more effectively on one kind of hardware (silicon) than another (protein).
This is all speculation, of course. Except for the one curious fact, which is that no silcon-based intelligence has, so far as we know, evolved at all, let alone out-evolved ourselves. It hasn’t done so on this planet, self-evidently, and despite the fact that there’s plenty of silicon here. Has it done so elsewhere? Well, maybe. But the early Earth is awfully typical of planets, so far as we know. It’s hard to imagine something very very different, which would favor evolution of silicon life.
Maybe silicon life can’t evolve on its own? It has to be designed and created by e.g. protein life? I dunno…didn’t we already have this argument 150 years ago over protein life itself? With the Darwinists saying, in response to those who asserted a Creator was necessary for protein life, that if (protein) life was possible at all, then there’s no reason to doubt 4 billion years of evolution wouldn’t create it. It’s seems a little weird to argue that protein live can spontaneously evolve — but silicon life (or whatever) requires a Creator and a Book of Genesis.
Multiverse + anthropic principle arguments actually do make testable predictions, and are therefore falsifiable. In this sense they are different from theories of dieties.
An example of a testable prediction is one about the cosmological constant. Fermionic and bosonic fields contribute negatively and positively (respectively) to the constant. Naively, if they do not cancel out, the constant ends up 120 orders of magnitude too big. The anthropic argument is that if it is too big, the universe either collapses too soon, or expands too fast, for life to arise. So, we should expect to be in a region of the multiverse where the laws of physics are such that they *do* cancel almost exactly.
The testable prediction is that this cancellation will be only as good as it has to be. If the cosmological constant is (say) 10,000 times smaller than a limiting value beyond which life is unlikely to arise, that is strong evidence against the anthropic explanation.
I do think that’s intriguing… I’m not really sure how the multiverse theory could ever be measureable by us, since it would literally be something outside of our universe.
But, of course, there will always be something out there to try to get God out of the picture. All the same, it’s very interesting to hear a teacher talk about this. I wish someone in the class would’ve asked him about that.