Amanda Gefter - How Is it Possible to Get Something from Nothing?

Cool article, as is often the case, from Nautilus. This piece contains one of the best lines, ever: "Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is a natural source of quantum maggots." There is some context to this statement, going back to Aristotle and the thought that the arrival of maggots on rotting meat somehow happened like magic, a kind of "spontaneous generation."

The Bridge From Nowhere

How is it possible to get something from nothing?

By Amanda Gefter | August 7, 2014

THE QUESTION of being is the darkest in all philosophy.” So concluded William James in thinking about that most basic of riddles: how did something come from nothing? The question infuriates, James realized, because it demands an explanation while denying the very possibility of explanation. “From nothing to being there is no logical bridge,” he wrote.

In science, explanations are built of cause and effect. But if nothing is truly nothing, it lacks the power to cause. It’s not simply that we can’t find the right explanation—it’s that explanation itself fails in the face of nothing.

This failure hits us where it hurts. We are a narrative species. Our most basic understanding comes through stories, and how something came from nothing is the ultimate story, the primordial narrative, more fundamental than the hero’s journey or boy meets girl. Yet it is a story that undermines the notion of story. It is a narrative woven of self-destruction and paradox. 

How could it not be? It stars Nothing—a word that is a paradox by its mere existence as a word. It’s a noun, a thing, and yet it is no thing. The minute we imagine it or speak its name, we spoil its emptiness with the stain of meaning. One has to wonder, then, is the problem with nothingness or is the problem with us? Is it cosmic or linguistic? Existential or psychological? Is this a paradox of physics or a paradox of thought?

Either way, here’s the thing to remember: The solution to a paradox lies in the question, never in the answer. Somewhere there must be a glitch, a flawed assumption, a mistaken identity. In so succinct a question as “how did something come from nothing?” there aren’t many places to hide. Perhaps that is why we return again and again to the same old ideas in new and improved guises, playing the trajectory of science like a fugue, or variations on a theme. With each pass, we try to lay another stepping stone in James’s elusive bridge.

THE OLDEST STONE is this: If you can’t get something from nothing, try making nothing less like nothing. The ancient Greeks suggested that empty space is filled with substance—a plenum, an ether. Aristotle conceived of the ether as an unchanging fifth element, more perfect and heavenly in its invariance than earth, air, fire, or water. True nothingness was at odds with Aristotle’s physics, which said that bodies rise up or fall down as dictated by their rightful place in the natural order of things. Nothingness, however, would be perfectly symmetric—it would look the same from every angle—rendering absolute spatial directions like “up” and “down” utterly meaningless. An ether, Aristotle figured, could serve as a kind of cosmic compass, an ultimate reference frame against which all motion could be measured. For those who abhorred a vacuum, the ether banished every last trace of it. 

The ancient ether stuck around for millennia until it was re-imagined in the late 19th century by physicists like James Clerk Maxwell, who discovered that light behaves as a wave that always travels at a particular speed. What was waving, and speed relative to what? The ether was a handy answer, providing both a medium for light waves to travel through, and, as Aristotle originally imagined, a reference frame against which all change in the universe would unfold. But when Albert Michelson and Edward Morley set out to measure the motion of the Earth through the “ether wind” in 1887, they couldn’t find it. With his special theory of relativity, Einstein put the final nail in the coffin of the ether soon after.

For decades, we have looked at the ether as a historical oddity, a throwback. But it is harder to kill than we imagined. Today, it can be glimpsed in a new form: the Higgs field, which permeates the vacuum of empty space and whose excitation is the now-famous Higgs boson. The Higgs is what’s known as a scalar field, the only experimentally verified specimen of its kind. That means it has only a single value at every point in space (unlike the field that describes light, which at every point has both a size and direction). That’s important, because it means the field will look the same to any observer regardless of whether they are standing still or accelerating. 

What’s more, its quantum spin is zero, ensuring that it looks the same from every angle. Spin is a measure of how much you have to rotate a particle before it looks the same as when it started. Force-carrying particles (photons, gluons) have integer spin—rotations by 360 degrees will leave them unchanged. Matter particles (electrons, quarks) have half-integer spin, which means you’d have to rotate them twice, 720 degrees, before they’re back to where they started. But the Higgs has zero spin. No matter how you rotate it, it always looks the same. Just like empty space. Symmetry equals invisibility.

Following Aristotle’s intuition, physicists today conceive of nothing as the ultimate state of symmetry—a relentless sameness that precludes the differentiation one would need to define any “thing.” Indeed, as physicists run the cosmic film in reverse, tracing deep history back in time, they see the disparate shards of reality reunite and coalesce into an ever-growing symmetry, a symmetry that signifies an origin—and a nothing. 

The Higgs has become famous for giving elementary particles their mass, but this obscures its true meaning. After all, giving particles mass is easy—slow them down below the speed of light and, voilà, mass. The hard part is to give particles mass without breaking the primordial symmetry in the process. The Higgs field achieves this remarkable feat by taking on a nonzero value even in its lowest energy state. Crouching in every corner of empty space sit 246 gigaelectronvolts of Higgs—only we’ll never notice, because it’s the same at every point. Only a scalar field could hide in plain sight and get away with it. But elementary particles notice. Every time a particle’s mass breaks the symmetry of the universe, the Higgs is there, posing as empty space, repairing the damage. Constantly laboring in the shadows, the Higgs keeps the universe’s original symmetry intact. One can understand (if not forgive) the journalist’s inclination to wax religious about “the God particle”—even if Leon Lederman, who coined the reviled term, originally called it “the Goddamn particle” though his publisher wouldn’t let it fly. 

All this means that the Higgs field is closer to nothing than, say, Maxwell’s notion of the ether. It is our latest paintbrush for coloring in the void. With its unusual symmetry, the Higgs functions as nothing’s covert disguise—but it is not in itself nothing. It has structure; it interacts. The physical origin of its 246 gigaelectronvolts remains unknown. With the Higgs, we can approach the boundary with nothingness, but we cannot cross it.

IF MAKING NOTHING less like nothing doesn’t answer the question “how did something come from nothing,” perhaps we ought to make cause less like a cause. This, too, has a history. The sudden appearance of maggots in the presence of rotting meat led to a widespread belief in spontaneous generation in the time of Aristotle; the breath of life could materialize from thin air. The boundary between nothing and something was shared with the one between life and death, spirit and matter, God and earth. This in turn brought to bear the whole complex of religion and faith, making for a rather comprehensive answer to our paradox. We accepted this theory for some 2,000 years, until it was dispelled by the microbiologist Louis Pasteur in 1864. Omne vivum ex vivo—all life from life. In the decades that followed, we saw spontaneous generation as yet another historical oddity. But, like the ether, today it is back again, wearing the sheep’s clothing of quantum fluctuations.

Wrought by uncertainty, quantum fluctuations are effects without causes, the noise beneath the signal, a primeval static, random to the bone. The rules of quantum mechanics allow—actually, require—energy (and, by E=mc², mass) to appear “out of nowhere,” from nothing. Creation ex nihilo—or so it seems.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is a natural source of quantum maggots. It says that certain pairs of physical features—position and momentum, energy and time—are bound together by a fundamental indeterminacy, so that the more accurately we specify one, the more ambiguous becomes the other. Together they form what’s known as a conjugate pair, and together they preclude the existence of nothingness. Home in on a spatial position and momentum will fluctuate wildly to compensate; specify smaller, more precise quantities of time and energy will vacillate across a wider swath of improbable values. In the shortest eye blinks, across the smallest distances, whole universes can boil up into existence, then disappear. Zoom in closely enough on the world and our calm, structured reality gives way to chaos and randomness.

Only these conjugate pairs are not in themselves random: They are the pairs of properties that would be impossible for an observer to measure simultaneously. In spite of the way quantum fluctuations are typically described, what sits “out there” in the world is not some preexisting reality wiggling around. Experiment has consistently proven that what sits “out there” isn’t sitting at all, but waiting. Unborn. Quantum fluctuations are not existential descriptions but conditional ones—they are not a reflection of what is, but of what could be, should an observer choose to make a particular measurement. It’s as if the observer’s ability to measure determines what exists. Ontology recapitulates epistemology. The uncertainty of nature is an uncertainty of observation.

The fundamental inability to assign determinate values to all the features of a physical system means that when an observer does make a measurement, the outcome will be truly random. At the tiny scales where quantum effects reign, the causal chain suffers a fatal kink. Quantum mechanics, said its founding father Niels Bohr, “is irreconcilable with the very idea of causality.” Einstein famously balked. “God doesn’t play dice,” he said, to which Bohr replied, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”

But perhaps it is we who are to blame for expecting causality to hold up in the first place. Evolution has trained us to find causal patterns at any cost. As our ancestors wandered the African savanna, the ability to suss out effects from their causes marked a line between life and death. She ate that speckled mushroom and then fell ill. The tiger crouched before it pounced. Narrative equals survival. Natural selection had no use for quantum physics—how were we to see it coming? Nonetheless, here it is. Causality is an approximation. Our minds, hungry for story, reel. 

Is that it, then? The answer to the question of “why being” is simply that there is no “why,” that existence is a random quantum fluctuation? Then we can forget explanation altogether and simply quantum leap across James’s bridge. How did something come from nothing? No reason. Unfortunately, the trick only takes us so far. While cosmologists do believe that the laws of quantum mechanics can spontaneously generate a universe, this story just passes the buck. For where did the laws come from? Remember, we wanted to explain how something came from nothing—not how something came from the preexisting laws of physics. Removing causality from the equation is not enough. The paradox stands.

THERE WAS NOTHING. Then, there was something. 

The lead character in this story is Time, Bearer of Change. Could the key to solving our paradox be the denial of time itself? If time, as Einstein said, is but a stubbornly persistent illusion, then we can dispense at once, not just with causality issuing from natural laws, but also with the question of where those laws came from. They didn’t come from anywhere, because nothing evolves. The narrative dissolves. There is no story. There is no bridge.

The notion of an eternal universe—or a cyclic one, fueled by eternal return—makes appearances in our earliest myths and stories, from Bantu mythology to the Australian Aboriginal “Dreamtime” to Anaximander’s cosmology to the Hindu Puranas texts. One can see the appeal. Eternity evades nothingness. 

In the modern era, this ancient idea returned as the steady-state theory, formulated by Sir James Jeans in the 1920s and refined and popularized by Fred Hoyle and others in the late 1940s. The universe expands, they said, but new matter is constantly popping into existence to fill in the gaps, so that, on net, the universe never changes at all. That theory turned out to be wrong. It was supplanted by the Big Bang theory and eternity was reduced to a mere 13.8 billion years. 

But in the 1960s, the eternal universe reappeared in a strange new form—specifically, in an equation that looked something like this: H(x)|Ψ> = 0. The physicists John Archibald Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt wrote the equation—which is now known as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, though DeWitt prefers to call it “that damned equation” (no relation to that goddamned particle)—in their attempt to apply the strange laws of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole, as described by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It’s the right-hand side of the thing that’s worth noting: zero. The total energy of the system is zilch. There is no time evolution. Nothing can happen. The problem, ultimately, is that Einstein’s universe is a four-dimensional spacetime, a combination of space and time. Quantum mechanics, meanwhile, requires the wavefunction of a physical system to evolve in time. But how can spacetime evolve in time when it is time? It’s an infuriating dilemma—a universe described by quantum mechanics is inevitably frozen. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation is steady-state cosmology inverted. Rather than a universe that always was, we find ourselves with a universe that never will be.

In and of itself, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation elegantly solves our problem. How did something come from nothing? It didn’t. Of course, it’s a perplexing solution given that, well, we’re here.
And that’s precisely the point. In quantum mechanics, nothing happens until an observer (be it a human or any other configuration of particles) makes a measurement. But when it comes to the universe as a whole, there is no observer. No one can stand outside the universe. The universe as a whole is stuck in an eternal instant. But things look different here on the inside.

On the inside, an observer can’t measure the whole universe, and by necessity splits reality in two—observer and observed—by the simple yet profound fact that the observer cannot measure himself. As the physicist Raphael Bousso wrote, “Obviously the apparatus must have at least as many degrees of freedom as the system whose quantum state it attempts to establish.” The philosopher of science Thomas Breuer used a Gödelian argument to emphasize the same point: “No observer can obtain or store information sufficient to distinguish all states of a system in which he is contained.”
As observers, we are forever doomed to see only a piece of the larger puzzle of which we are a part. And that, it turns out, could be our saving grace. When the universe splits in two, the zero on the right-hand side of the equation takes on a new value. Things change. Physics happens. Time begins to flow. You might even say the universe is born.

If that sounds like retrocausation (the future causing events in the past)—well, it is. Quantum theory requires this strange reversal of time’s arrow. Wheeler emphasized this fact with his famous delayed choice experiment, which he first posed as a thought experiment but that was later demonstrated successfully in the lab. In the delayed choice, an observer’s measurement in the present determines the behavior of a particle in the past—a past that can stretch back for millions, even 13.8 billions, of years. The causal chain turns in on itself, its end links back to its beginning: James’s bridge is a loop.
Could it be that something is just what nothing looks like from the inside? If so, our discomfort with nothingness may have been hinting at something profound: It is our human nature that recoils at the notion of nothing, and yet it may also be our limited, human perspective that ultimately solves the paradox.

~ Amanda Gefter is a physics writer and author of Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn: A father, a daughter, the meaning of nothing and the beginning of everything. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Photo by Ben A. Pruchnie/Getty Images for Pace London

The Biocentric Multiverse - An Example of [Eroneously] Collapsing the Subjective and the Objective

A few years ago (2009), Dr. Robert Lanza published Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, a model he claims positions consciousness as foundation of the universe as we know it. In essence, he argues that our consciousness of the universe brings it into being, which is based on a faulty understanding of quantum mechanics.

Lanza, like Deepak Chopra and B Alan Wallace, relies on a misunderstanding of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to suggest that observation is necessary to the determination of the state of a quantum system. But there is research that disproves this interpretation.

First, here is an excellent explanation of Heisenberg's model (Geoff Brumfiel, Nature News, Sept 11, 2012):

At the foundation of quantum mechanics is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Simply put, the principle states that there is a fundamental limit to what one can know about a quantum system. For example, the more precisely one knows a particle's position, the less one can know about its momentum, and vice versa. The limit is expressed as a simple equation that is straightforward to prove mathematically.

Heisenberg sometimes explained the uncertainty principle as a problem of making measurements. His most well-known thought experiment involved photographing an electron. To take the picture, a scientist might bounce a light particle off the electron's surface. That would reveal its position, but it would also impart energy to the electron, causing it to move. Learning about the electron's position would create uncertainty in its velocity; and the act of measurement would produce the uncertainty needed to satisfy the principle.

He then reports some research [Rozema, L. A. et al. 2012. Phys. Rev. Lett. 109(100404)] that supports the belief that measurement does not always introduce more uncertainty in a system:

The researchers made a ‘weak’ measurement of the photon’s polarization in one plane — not enough to disturb it, but enough to produce a rough sense of its orientation. Next, they measured the polarization in the second plane. Then they made an exact, or 'strong', measurement of the first polarization to see whether it had been disturbed by the second measurement.

When the researchers did the experiment multiple times, they found that measurement of one polarization did not always disturb the other state as much as the uncertainty principle predicted. In the strongest case, the induced fuzziness was as little as half of what would be predicted by the uncertainty principle.

This research doesn't do away with the uncertainty principle, but it does demonstrate that it is possible to measure some features of a quantum system without introducing noise into the system.

A related idea is the Shroedinger's Cat thought experiment, which is often taken as proof of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. This model proposes that the act of observing a system results in the collapse of all possible states into one state, the observed state. This is known as the wavefunction collapse. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is one of the six basic tenets of the Copenhagen interpretation, a term that is actually a misnomer in that there was never any coherent interpretation associated with this model. The notion that there was a Copenhagen interpretation arose when Heisenberg used it in his refutation of David Bohm's model, a move he later regretted.

[Bohm's model, the implicate, explicate, and generative orders (via Wikipedia), proposes that

"things, such as particles, objects, and indeed subjects" exist as "semi-autonomous quasi-local features" of an underlying activity. These features can be considered to be independent only up to a certain level of approximation in which certain criteria are fulfilled.

Bohm, working with the then Stanford-based neuroscientist, Karl Pribram, extended this into a holonomic model of the brain.]

One of the more difficult aspects of the Copenhagen model, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, was also known as the EPR paradox, developed by  Albert Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen. One of the issues Einstein noted with the then-standard model of quantum mechanics is that it allowed for a version of quantum entanglement that violates the general theory of relativity - i.e., that nothing moves faster than the speed of light. But Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle allowed for exactly that, so the EPR paradox was developed. Via Wikipedia:

Heisenberg's principle was an attempt to provide a classical explanation of a quantum effect sometimes called non-locality. According to EPR there were two possible explanations. Either there was some interaction between the particles, even though they were separated, or the information about the outcome of all possible measurements was already present in both particles.

The EPR authors (EPR combines the first letter of the three men's last names) preferred the latter of these two explanations, which allowed that the general relativity remained intact. The EPR solution to the problem was local hidden variables, but Bell's Theorem has since been accepted as a successful refutation of the hidden variables.

A more recent model, the Relational quantum mechanics (RQM) model, developed by Carlo Rovelli in 1994, offers a way out of one of the more difficult aspects of the Copenhagen model, the EPR paradox. The RQM treats the state of a quantum system as being observer-dependent, that is, the state is the relation between the observer and the system.

Again, from Wikipedia:

The physical content of the theory is not to do with objects themselves, but the relations between them. As Rovelli puts it: "Quantum mechanics is a theory about the physical description of physical systems relative to other systems, and this is a complete description of the world".[2]

The essential idea behind RQM is that different observers may give different accounts of the same series of events: for example, to one observer at a given point in time, a system may be in a single, "collapsed" eigenstate, while to another observer at the same time, it may appear to be in a superposition of two or more states. Consequently, if quantum mechanics is to be a complete theory, RQM argues that the notion of "state" describes not the observed system itself, but the relationship, or correlation, between the system and its observer(s). The state vector of conventional quantum mechanics becomes a description of the correlation of some degrees of freedom in the observer, with respect to the observed system. However, it is held by RQM that this applies to all physical objects, whether or not they are conscious or macroscopic (all systems are quantum systems). Any "measurement event" is seen simply as an ordinary physical interaction, an establishment of the sort of correlation discussed above. The proponents of the relational interpretation argue that the approach clears up a number of traditional interpretational difficulties with quantum mechanics, while being simultaneously conceptually elegant and ontologically parsimonious.

The RQM model offers the best solution to the EPR Paradox, and it does so without relying on super-luminal information transfer (faster than the speed of light):

Thus the relational interpretation, by shedding the notion of an "absolute state" of the system, allows for an analysis of the EPR paradox which neither violates traditional locality constraints, nor implies superluminal information transfer, since we can assume that all observers are moving at comfortable sub-light velocities. And, most importantly, the results of every observer are in full accordance with those expected by conventional quantum mechanics.

Returning specifically the Biocentrism model of Lanza, Vinod Wadhawan (a condensed matter physicist) and Ajita Kamal (an evolutionary biologist) offered a great "debunking" of Lanza's model, noting that it is the philosophical stance known as idealism masquerading as science. The title of their article (2009) is "Biocentrism Demystified: A Response to Deepak Chopra and Robert Lanza’s Notion of a Conscious Universe," posted at Nirmukta.

Here is one small section in which they correct Lanza's misrepresentation of objective reality:

Lanza says “Space and time are simply the mind’s tools for putting everything together.” This is true , but there is a difference between being the ‘mind’s tools’ and being created by the mind itself. In the first instance the conscious perception of space and time is an experiential trick that the mind uses to make sense of the objective universe, and in the other space and time are actual physical manifestations of the mind. The former is tested and true while the latter is an idealistic notion that is not supported by science. The experiential conception of space and time is different from objective space and time that comprise the universe. This difference is similar to how color is different from photon frequency. The former is subjective while the latter is objective.

Can Lanza deny all the evidence that, whereas we humans emerged on the scene very recently, our Earth and the solar system and the universe at large have been there all along? What about all the objective evidence that life forms have emerged and evolved to greater and greater complexity, resulting in the emergence of humans at a certain stage in the evolutionary history of the Earth? What about all the fossil evidence for how biological and other forms of complexity have been evolving? How can humans arrogate to themselves the power to create objective reality?

Here is more from their long and erudite article, this section dealing with the many worlds model, another approach based on a dissatisfaction with the Copenhagen model:

Hugh Everett, during the mid-1950s, expressed total dissatisfaction with the Copenhagen interpretation: ‘The Copenhagen Interpretation is hopelessly incomplete because of its a priori reliance on classical physics … as well as a philosophic monstrosity with a “reality” concept for the macroscopic world and denial of the same for the microcosm.’ The Copenhagen interpretation implied that equations of quantum mechanics apply only to the microscopic world, and cease to be relevant in the macroscopic or ‘real’ world.

Everett offered a new interpretation, which presaged the modern ideas of quantum decoherence. Everett’s ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics is now taken more seriously, although not entirely in its original form. He simply let the mathematics of the quantum theory show the way for understanding logically the interface between the microscopic world and the macroscopic world. He made the observer an integral part of the system being observed, and introduced a universal wave function that applies comprehensively to the totality of the system being observed and the observer. This means that even macroscopic objects exist as quantum superpositions of all allowed quantum states. There is thus no need for the discontinuity of a wave-function collapse when a measurement is made on the microscopic quantum system in a macroscopic world.

Wave function bifurcation

Everett examined the question: What would things be like if no contributing quantum states to a superposition of states are banished artificially after seeing the results of an observation? He proved that the wave function of the observer would then bifurcate at each interaction of the observer with the system being observed. Suppose an electron can have two possible quantum states A and B, and its wave function is a linear superposition of these two. The evolution of the composite or universal wave function describing the electron and the observer would then contain two branches corresponding to each of the states A and B. Each branch has a copy of the observer, one which sees state A as a result of the measurement, and the other which sees state B. In accordance with the all-important principle of linear superposition in quantum mechanics, the branches do not influence each other, and each embarks on a different future (or a different ‘universe’), independent of the other. The copy of the observer in each universe is oblivious to the existence of other copies of itself and other universes, although the ‘full reality’ is that each possibility has actually happened. This reasoning can be made more abstract and general by removing the distinction between the observer and the observed, and stating that, at each interaction among the components of the composite system, the total or universal wave function would bifurcate as described above, giving rise to multiple universes or many worlds.

A modern and somewhat different version of this interpretation of quantum mechanics introduces the term quantum decoherence to rationalise how the branches become independent, and how each turns out to represent our classical or macroscopic reality. Quantum computing is now a reality, and it is based on such understanding of quantum mechanics.

And, finally, if one is to deal with Lanza's model, then one must deal with the definition of consciousness, a definition that is largely not agreed upon by an two theorists, it seems. Here is the refutation of Lanza's model on the grounds that he hopelessly muddles the definition of consciousness:

One criticism of biocentrism comes from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who says “It looks like an opposite of a theory, because he doesn’t explain how consciousness happens at all. He’s stopping where the fun begins.”

The logic behind this criticism is obvious. Without a descriptive explanation for consciousness and how it ‘creates’ the universe, biocentrism is not useful. In essence, Lanza calls for the abandonment of modern theoretical physics and its replacement with a magical solution. Here are a few questions that one might ask of the idea:

1. What is this consciousness?
2. Why does this consciousness exist?
3. What is the nature of the interaction between this consciousness and the universe?
4. Is the problem of infinite regression applicable to consciousness itself?
5. Even if Lanza’s interpretation of the anthropic principle is a valid argument against modern theoretical physics, does the biocentric model of consciousness create a bigger ontological problem than the one it attempts to solve?

And this:

Consider this statement by Lanza:

“Consciousness cannot exist without a living, biological creature to embody its perceptive powers of creation.“

How can consciousness create the universe if it doesn’t exist? How can the “living, biological creature” exist if the universe has not been created yet? It becomes apparent that Lanza is muddling the meaning of the word ‘consciousness.’ In one sense he equates it to subjective experience that is tied to a physical brain. In another, he assigns to consciousness a spatio-temporal logic that exists outside of physical manifestation. In this case, the above questions become: 1. What is this spatio-temporal logic?; 2. Why does this spatio-temporal logic exist? and so on…

The Cartesian Theater

Daniel Dennett’s criticism of biocentrism centres on Lanza’s non-explanation of the nature of consciousness. In fact, even from a biological perspective Lanza’s conception of consciousness is unclear. For example, he consistently equates consciousness with subjective experience while stressing its independence from the objective universe (see Lanza’s quote below). This is an appeal to the widespread but erroneous intuition towards Cartesian Dualism. In this view, consciousness (subjective experience) belongs to a different plane of reality than the one on which the material universe is constructed. Lanza requires this general definition of consciousness to construct his theory of biocentrism. He uses it in the same way that Descartes used it – as a semantic tool to deconstruct reality. In fact, Lanza’s theory of biocentrism is a sophisticated non-explanation for the ‘brain in a vat’ problem that plagued philosophers for centuries. However, instead of subscribing to Cartesian Dualism, he attempts a Cartesian Monism by invoking quantum mechanics. To be exact, his view is Monistic Idealism - the idea that consciousness is everything- but the Cartesian bias is an essential element in his arguments.

Lanza's model relies on a form of dualism that is disguised as idealistic monism.

Furthermore, his denial of any scientific understanding of consciousness is a straw man argument and it is empty, considering that Lanza proposes no useful mechanism for consciousness, nor a definition, but still gives it a central role in his theory of the universe.

For me, the Relational quantum mechanics model offers the best solution to many of the problems of quantum theory, including the role of consciousness. It is an essentially postmodern model of physics, while much of earlier quantum theory is still bogged down in an mechanistic model.

All of that is simply my way of saying that the article below, a defense of the Biocentric model from Jonathan Lyons at Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies is sadly misguided.

A Biocentric Multiverse

Jønathan Lyons
Ethical Technology

Posted: Mar 24, 2014

I’ve been thinking of ways in which Biocentric Universe Theory and multiverse theory could both be true. What if our nature as conscious beings inhabiting a multiverse of endless possibilities, where we are quantum-superposition beings, actually all adds up to us creating the multiverse, while perceiving time and space only within the limitations of our immediately observable, three-spatial/one-time-dimensional universe?

Down the rabbit hole!



Big Guns in the physics community are embracing multiverse theory more and more. One interpretation of this theory is that everything that can possibly happen, does happen, in one universe or another.

Background: Robert Lanza’s Biocentric Universe Theory

Robert Paul Lanza is an American medical doctor, scientist, Chief Scientific Officer of Advanced Cell Technology and Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine. (For more on Dr. Lanza, and for some fascinating essays and articles containing further insight into Biocentric Universe Theory, visit his Website: http://www.robertlanza.com/

• At subatomic level, everything exists in an undefined state until observed
• Example: Double-slit experiment

• The Observer Effect

• Because of this evidence, holds Biocentric Universe Theory, it is consciousness that creates the universe as we know it, and not the other way around.

Each but the last of those statements is experimentally proven; the last is a tantalizing possibility, and one I wish to continue to learn about.

A multiverse — that is, an infinite number of universes — could be stacked one on top of the other in even a tiny, single, spatial dimension in addition to the three spatial dimensions and single time dimension we experience. And in an eleven-dimensional multiverse, there are plenty of dimensions left to go around after we account for the four we can perceive.

al outcomes. Next, consider the observer effect: That the universe does not become solid until it is observed is demonstrated by the dual-slit experiment and the observer effect. What this means is that at the subatomic level, the entire universe exists as a colossal Schroedinger Probability wave, existing only as potentialites.

Until, that is, it is observed.

At that point the wave function collapses from whatever probabilities were possible to the single, actual outcome. Before it is observed. the universe exists in a superposition:

“Quantum superposition is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics that holds that a physical system—such as an electron—exists partly in all its particular theoretically possible states (or, configuration of its properties) simultaneously; but when measured or observed, it gives a result corresponding to only one of the possible configurations (as described in interpretation of quantum mechanics).”

In Biocentric Universe Theory, as I mentioned, consciousness thereby gives rise to the universe, and not the other way around. It does so through the act of observation. In observing the universe, we cause the collapse of the Probability Wave to its single outcome. In our universe, anyway.

What if the act of observation is the tool by which new universes are created?

Comic Interlude: An actual product you can buy over at ThinkGeek: “$20 kit produces trillions of universes."

Are you willing to take on the responsibility that comes with bringing trillions of universes into existence, each teeming with sentient life? That's something to ponder before plunking down $20 for this make-your-own-universe kit, created by <artist Jonathon Keats.

If two events are possible, quantum theory assumes that both occur simultaneously - until an observer determines the outcome. For example, in Schrödinger's famous thought experiment, in which his cat may have been killed with a 50 per cent probability, the cat is both alive and dead until someone checks. When the observation is made, the universe splits into two, one for each possible outcome. For example, Schrödinger's cat would be alive in one universe and dead in the other universe.”

Quantum physicists say that this is exactly what happens. The ongoing, infinite production of the multiverse would, therefore, be an ongoing act of creation caused by observation continuously collapsing probability wave, continuously forcing subatomic particle from a quantum superposition representing all possibilities open to them, not to a single outcome, but to a single outcome in a single universe; it would also cause every other possibility represented by the probability wave to occur in every universe where the same event is being observed.

Enter time:

• "Time is just an illusion. Einstein told us that."
• "What quantum physicists and Einstein tell us is that everything is happening simultaneously."
• "There is no time for the Universe and there is no size for the Universe."

​If all time is simultaneous, than our nature as conscious beings could also be described as our nature as quantum-superposition beings; consider the Scrodinger’s Cat thought experiment:

“One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.

—Erwin Schrödinger, Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik (The present situation in quantum mechanics), Naturwissenschaften (translated by John D. Trimmer in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society)”

While I would argue that the cat’s consciousness would probably play some role in the timing of the wave’s collapse, the main point is this: by this reasoning, when we enter a period in which the cat may or may not be dead, then its living or dead status has not been observed, and the cat herself exists in a superposition — that is, if you will, neither zero (dead) nor one (alive), but both, simultaneously.

If all time is simultaneous, then we humans are simultaneously one (alive) during our lifespans and zero (dead) outside our lifespans. Meaning that we, and all forms of life, are beings who exist in superposition, spread out across time and the multiverse, expressing every potentiality that could ever be — indeed, creating every such potentiality.

Because if our nature is that of conscious beings inhabiting a multiverse of endless possibilities, where we are quantum-superposition beings, all of this actually adds up to us creating the multiverse by observing parts of it, while perceiving time and space only within the limitations of our immediately observable, three-spatial/one-time-dimensional universe.

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Jønathan Lyons is an affiliate scholar for the IEET. He is also a transhumanist parent, an essayist, and an author of experimental fiction both long and short. He lives in central Pennsylvania and teaches at Bucknell University. His fiction publications include Minnows: A Shattered Novel.

Information Theory: There Are Two Flavors of Uncertainty in Our Lives - Math Helps with Both

In the June (No. 2, 2013) issue of Nautilus magazine, Santa Fe Institute Research Fellow (SFI specializes in complexity science) Simon DeDeo describes how both natural and social uncertainty impact our lives and how mathematics offers a tool to make uncertainty a little less uncertain. 

Here is a brief summary of the article from the SFI website:

DeDeo touches on chance in art and literature, information theory, and the differences between uncertainty arising from the objective material world and that arising from thinking, competing agents. 

"One might imagine a science fiction device—a probability meter—that would measure the differential contribution of nature and humankind to the uncertainty of an outcome," DeDeo writes. "How much uncertainty in the average corporate boardroom is due to nature (e.g., the chances of bad weather delaying a shipment of parts) and how much to the strategic creation of uncertainties by human participants (e.g., the refusal to disclose final production targets to one’s suppliers)? Of course, such a meter could wreak havoc in any real boardroom—and itself be a source of its own readings." 

• Read issue 2 of Nautilus magazine, "Uncertainty" (June 2013)
• Read the inaugural issue of Nautilus, "Human Uniqueness" (May 2013)
• Read an article in The New York Times about Nautilus magazine (May 6, 2013)

Nautilus: Science Connected is a new magazine that examines, from a variety of perspectives, how science is connected to our lives. The articles combine the sciences, culture, and philosophy into a transdisciplinary story "told by the world’s leading thinkers and writers."

This is an excellent find - I am grateful to the folks at SFI for pointing it out in their news blog.

The Coin Toss and the Love Triangle

Information Theory: There are two flavors of uncertainty in our lives, Math helps with both

BY SIMON DEDEO

“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” (Ecclesiastes 9:11, King James Bible [Pure Cambridge Authorized Version])

Chance appears to name a single, unitary thing. But its genealogy, its family history, turns out to be a tangled one. One way to understand its branching origins is to turn to literature: We may look, in turn, to two very different novels.

Anton Chigurh, the antagonist of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, forces his victims to guess the outcome of a coin toss, taking their life if they guess in error. McCarthy’s villain forces blind chance into his victims’ lives in the most brutal way. That chance is entirely contained, not in Chigurh, but in the toss—in nature itself. This is one source of uncertainty.

To understand the second source, we travel as far as possible from McCarthy’s American Southwest. The first volume of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove ends with Milly Theale, a wealthy American heiress, visiting the National Gallery in London. To her surprise she sees an acquaintance, Merton Densher, in the company of her best friend, Kate Croy. The plot of the book from this point forward hinges on a single question: will Milly learn what the reader already knows—that Merton and Kate are in love and secretly engaged to be married.

In the sequence, told from Milly’s point of view, we see how Kate—caught sharing an intimate afternoon—acts in such a way as to generate an alternate hypothesis for her friend: that Merton may well be keen on her, but that she, Kate, is not keen on him.

Here are uncertainties not otherwise found in nature: probabilities about probabilities, beliefs about beliefs held by others.

For many of us, the material world of the coin toss may be a byword for chance. But the cognitive world of the love triangle is just as fraught and, at its limits, just as much a form of chance as a tumbling coin. We humans are capable of introducing a degree of uncertainty both dizzying and unavoidable.

Therefore, Ecclesiastes was right twice over. Uncertainties—both natural and human—must be dealt with even by the swift, strong, wise, and able. Our objective is to demonstrate the depths of each kind of uncertainty and to introduce mathematics that can help us come to terms with both.

I. THE COIN TOSS

“What’s the most you ever saw lost on a coin toss?”
(No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy [2005])

Sufficiently many fictional murderers have toyed with their victims that, today, the idea borders on cliché and parody. But Chigurh’s game chills us still, perhaps because of the concentrated form of his message. His impartial, deadly coin toss is a reminder of the dominance of chance in our own lives.

From the accidents we have avoided or been met with, to the relationships we have formed and the institutions we have come to be associated with—each fact about ourselves appears to depend on a series of events, any one of which could have gone another way. To stand on top of a tower of such coincidences and look down gives us a hint of vertigo. Which aspects of life are real, we ask, and which simply luck?

This question is, on the one hand, at the heart of much literature and art; on the other, it is a hardheaded question in the mathematical sciences.

In particular, the branch of mathematics known as information theory concerns itself with how to describe chance and uncertainty. It reconciles the unlikeliness of any particular life with the intuitive sense that the shape of one’s life is not simply a matter of chance.

To see how, let us begin at the beginning, at the base of the tower of coincidences. Suppose Chigurh’s coin toss is fair—equally likely to come out heads or tails. What are the possible strategies his victim should consider? Always guess tails? Heads? Some alternation?

Should the toss be fair, no strategy is better than another. Indeed, strategies are indistinguishable from each other. This is due to the symmetry of the problem: We can swap the labels on each side of Chigurh’s coin at any time and thereby convert any prescription into any other. In McCarthy’s desert landscape, strategy and reason are meaningless. The vertigo of chance is upon us.

This, of course, doesn’t describe the world we normally confront. In our world there is predictability, with a preference between outcomes1 and the possibility of rational choice. Broken symmetries make reason relevant to our lives.

But this doesn’t rescue us from the vertigo of chance. Suppose, for example, Chigurh’s coin is slightly more likely to come up heads. Now, strategies are distinguishable. For a heads-biased coin, the preferred and most rational strategy is always to guess heads.

In the course of your life you need to make many decisions. What if you had to guess the coin toss more than once? Consider tossing the biased coin a thousand times. Since each toss is independent of the one before, the most likely outcome is the repeated occurrence of the most likely outcome of each one separately. And thus, of all the possible histories we could foresee, the strangest sequence of all, an unbroken run of heads:

HHHHH ... H, 1,000 times

is the single most likely. Our intuition is that such a sequence will never, in fact, occur.

And of course we are correct. Fix the bias of the coin at 60 percent heads. The chance of heads on a first toss is (by definition) 6 in 10; of two heads in a row, a little over 1 in 3. The chance of three heads in a row is only a little better than 1 in 5.

The chances of an unbroken run decrease exponentially; the chance of ten heads in a row is less than 1 percent, and a few more doublings suffice to place the chances beyond the astronomical. It is unlikely to see an unbroken run of heads in 80 tosses, even if one completes such a sequence once every second for the 13 billion years the universe has existed.

We’ve established that a string of unbroken heads is extremely unlikely. But any other history is even more so. As time passes, every narrative becomes an extreme rarity. Despite the existence of a most rational choice, the particulars of your life describe a very unlikely path. The biased coin, which signifies the possibility of reason, does not relieve our vertigo after all.

Yet we also know that some things are routine, expected—even, at times, part of our birthright—and others less ordinary. A friendship might depend on having shared a freshman seminar, but is it so unlikely to have made a friend in college?

This intuition has a mathematical grounding in what is called the typical set. The typical set is the mathematics behind our feeling of normalcy. It reconciles reason and chance by linking the nature of the singular event to the properties of the history it belongs to. More than biased probabilities, it challenges the vertigo of pure chance.

Consider the space of all possible histories: an exhaustive list of every sequence of events that might have occurred. Every coin toss, every decision ever made. The typical set bounds a very small region in this space and describes the path that we, as time goes on, are increasingly likely to follow. Given a prescription for the probabilities of individual decisions, the typical set picks a list of histories whose rates of uncertainty accumulation become increasingly close to each other, and match, on the average, the intrinsic rate of the probabilities themselves2.

Let’s return to the freshman seminar. Your college life is a series of chance events whose probabilities are set by a finite list of constraints: your major, your age, and so on. As your college days run on, the set of possible histories you are likely to experience converges with those found in the typical set your constraints define. Each individual history is rich in idiosyncrasy while being drawn from a narrowly circumscribed set of possibilities that is much smaller than the space of all that might happen3.

We are left in a profoundly ambiguous place. The typical set rescues normalcy but also dictates typical lives, common stories: boy meets girl, dog bites man. This wisdom was also known to the author of Ecclesiastes, who wrote that there was “nothing new under the sun.” To the swiftest, the race might go once, or even twice, but on the longest scales of time no streak is left unbroken.

At the same time, our pasts and our futures—even our most likely futures—are, in their details, profoundly unlikely things.

An information theorist may not know the exact world we live in, but she does know that, in the long run, it’s a world in the typical set. And she also knows that she doesn’t know anything else4.

So much for coin tosses and freshman seminar assignments: things external to ourselves, driven by the chances of the physical world5. These material things, however, are not the only—or even the most important—sources of life’s uncertainty. To see that, we turn from Cormac McCarthy’s American Southwest to Henry James’s London.

Read the whole interesting article.

Todd Kashdan, Ph.D. on Curiosity (All in the Mind Podcast)

On this week's All in the Mind, Lynne Malcolm speaks with Todd Kashdan, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and Professor of Psychology at George Mason University, about his first book, Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life (2009). The hardcover is currently only $6.24 at Amazon.

Kashdan is also co-editor of Mindfulness, Acceptance, and Positive Psychology: The Seven Foundations of Well-Being (2013) and Designing Positive Psychology: Taking Stock and Moving Forward (2011).

Here is the publisher's ad copy for Curious?:

Dead cats. That's the image many people conjure up when you mention curiosity. An image perpetuated by a dusty old proverb that has long represented the extent of our understanding of the term. This book might not put the proverb to rest, but it will flip it upside down: far from killing anything, curiosity breathes new life into almost everything it touches. 

In Curious? Dr. Todd Kashdan offers a profound new message missing from so many books on happiness: the greatest opportunities for joy, purpose, and personal growth don't, in fact, happen when we're searching for happiness. They happen when we are mindful, when we explore what's novel, and when we live in the moment and embrace uncertainty. Positive events last longer and we can extract more pleasure and meaning from them when we are open to new experiences and relish the unknown. 

Dr. Kashdan uses science, story, and practical exercises to show you how to become what he calls a curious explorer—a person who's comfortable with risk and challenge and who functions optimally in an unstable, unpredictable world. Here's a blueprint for building lasting, meaningful relationships, improving health, increasing creativity, and boosting productivity. Aren't you curious to know more?

Below the All in the Mind podcast, I am including a brief essay from Kashdan about curiosity and why you should read his book.

Curiosity

Sunday 12 May 2013

• Listen now
• Download audio 

IMAGE: TODD KASHDAN - PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY
Todd Kashdan believes it's misguided to search for the elusive state of happiness.

After years of working as a clinical psychologist he says that the missing ingredient to a fulfilling life is curiosity. The greatest opportunities for joy, meaning and personal growth come when we are mindful, curious and embrace uncertainty. He describes the benefits of nurturing our own curiosity and outlines some ways that we can use it in our daily lives.

Guests

Todd Kashdan, Professor of Psychology, Clinical psychologist, George Mason University, Virginia, United States 

Presenter: Lynne Malcolm

Publications

Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life by Todd Kashdan, PH.D 

* * * * * * *

How Curious? Will Help You

Without question, happiness is important. Who doesn't want to be happy and wish the same for  their loved ones? But this book is not limited to happiness. This is a book about living a life that matters with a broader view about what the "good life" entails. Much of what we desire often has nothing to do with happiness but is just as important. This includes meaning and purpose in life, wisdom, satisfying relationships, the ability to tolerate distress, spirituality, creativity, compassion, feeling a sense of competence and mastery, and so on. Sometimes trying to be happy actually gets in the way of making inroads toward these other elements. Effectively handling the pain and stress that life brings is an essential part of creating a rich, meaningful existence.

When you adopt this broad view of what matters, an important question remains that this entire book hinges on. What is essential to creating a fulfilling life? The answer is…

• Being curious.
• Being open to new experiences.
• Being able to effectively manage ambiguity and uncertainty.
• Being able to adapt to the demands required of different situations (what I call "psychological flexibility”).
• Discovering our strengths, deepest values, and what it is we are passionate about.
• Strengthening connections to these values and passionate pursuits so that we can pursue a life aligned with them.

This book provides a closer look at curiosity; a neglected and underappreciated strength in our arsenal. People regularly ignore curiosity because it appears, on the surface, to be a very obvious, simple, impotent emotion—something unusual appears or someone captivates us by a story, we feel curious, and direct our attention to explore further. But while this emotion seemed simplistic even to me, as I began my research, I soon discovered that curiosity is a deeper, more complex phenomenon that plays a critical role in what makes people’s lives most worth living. Curiosity is the spark plug that ignites other factors that contribute to happiness and meaning in life. You can't work with strengths until you spot them and investigate them. You can't be grateful without being curious about what benefits you received in your life.

Besides a better understanding of curiosity, readers will be introduced to strategies for becoming a more curious explorer. By reclaiming curiosity and learning how to wield it, readers will be able to demonstrably alter the quality of their lives. A good portion of this book focuses on how to find, create, and sustain fulfilling moments and a fulfilling life.

If there was ever a time point to be curious and flexible, it's now. In today's climate of heightened financial instability, many of us are finding ourselves in stressful places that we never expected. Many of us are being pushed to search for new paths and new sources of meaning. Based on the latest scientific knowledge, this book provides the tools to be fulfilled even when uncertain times are making it increasingly difficult.

This book challenges some conventional assumptions about how to achieve lasting fulfillment. Besides presenting ideas, I am going to present solutions informed by research conducted by myself and other scientists.

I am going to show you how to transform boring, mundane, and routine moments to be more energizing and interesting.

I am going to show how these moments can be deepened so that you can create lasting interests and passions.I am going to offer a new perspective about relationships and social interactions as the ultimate source of personal growth. I will show you why it is essential to attend to what we don't know about people, and how they differ from us, instead of relying on what we already know and how they are similar to us.

I am going to show you how being curious is an effective strategy for managing anxiety and stress. Some fascinating research shows how working with, instead of against, anxiety is a springboard for finding meaning and purpose in the aftermath of loss and trauma. You are going to be exposed to techniques for making it more likely that you "grow" from difficult life events.

I am going to show you how to invigorate your work, your parenting, or any activity to be more energizing and rewarding. This includes how people find a purpose or "calling" in life. If you are in a leadership position, I am going to show you how to supercharge your organization so that the people in it are more engaged, productive, innovative, and better able to manage conflict and change.

We are all familiar with the experience of being curious. Although we are hardwired to be curious, and some of us experience it more frequently and intensely, it has become clear that any of us can become more curious—at any age.

When we explore the new, we strengthen connections between nerve cells in our brain. We also create neuronal connections between different parts of the brain that didn’t previously exist. This is called "neural plasticity." The same brain that remembers an event is not the same brain that experienced it. We can become more open to new experiences, more comfortable dealing with tension and anxiety, and more intelligent, wiser, and resilient. By taking part in activities that energize our curiosity, we can reverse some of the natural degeneration that occurs with age. In fact, there are promising signs that searching for novelty and exploring our world reduces the risk for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.

With the right mind-set, there is novelty to be found everywhere. We can be curious anytime. Brief techniques can have large, profound effects on your life. I will show you the skills for how to wield this profound strength and the science behind them.

These and other topics are fueled by groundbreaking research on the importance of being alive in the present moment with an attitude of openness and curiosity. This book will do more than intrigue you with fascinating stories and research. It provides the tools to unleash the curious explorer within you.

I believe this book has the potential to transform people's lives. It can change how people, relationships, and organizations operate. If you are a leader (whether it is a business, classroom, or household), you can directly benefit from using this as a reference for how to motivate people and create a productive, enjoyable, creative, and meaningful environment.