Programmed Reality

DNA is a self-replicating nucleic acid that supposedly encodes the instructions for building and maintaining cells of an organism.  With an ordered grouping of over a billion chemical base pairs which are identical for each cell in the organism, the unique DNA for a particular individual looks kind of like statements in a programming language.  This concept is not lost on Dr. Stephen Meyer (Ph.D., history and philosophy of science, Cambridge University), who posits that the source of information must be intelligent and therefore DNA, as information, is evidence of Intelligent Design.  He argues that all hypotheses that account for the development of this digital code, such as self-organization and RNA-first, have failed.  In a well publicized debate with Dr. Peter Atkins (Ph.D., theoretical chemistry, University of Leicester), a well known atheist and secular humanist, Atkins counters that information can come from natural mechanisms.  Sadly, Atkins resorts to insults and name calling, so the debate is kind of tainted, and he never got a chance to present his main argument in a methodical way because he let his anger get the best of him.  But it raised some very interesting questions, which I don't think either side of the argument has really gotten to the bottom of.

ID'ers trot out the Second Law of Thermodynamics and state that the fact that simple molecules can't self replicate without violating that Law proves Intelligent Design.  But it doesn't really.  The Second Law applies to the whole system, including many instances of increased disorder weighed against the fewer instances of increased order.  Net net, disorder TENDs to increase, but that doesn't mean that there can't be isolated examples of increased order in the universe. That seems to leave the door open to the possibility that one such example might be the creation of self-replicating molecules.

Another point of contention is about the nature of information, such as DNA.  Meyer is wrong if he is making a blanket assertion that information can only come from intelligence.  I could argue that, given a long enough period of time, if you leave a typewriter outdoors, hailstones will ultimately hit the keys in an order that creates recognizable poetry.  So the question boils down to this - was there enough time and proper conditions for evolutionary processes to create the self-replicating DNA molecule from non-self replicating molecules necessary for creating the mechanism for life?  

The math doesn't look good for the atheists.  Dr. Robert L. Piccioni, Ph.D., Physics from Stanford says that the odds of 3 billion randomly arranged base-pairs matching human DNA is about the same as drawing the ace of spades one billion times in a row from randomly shuffled decks of cards.  Harold Morowitz, a renowned physicist from Yale University and author of Origin of Cellular Life  (1993), declared that the odds for any kind of spontaneous generation of life from a combination of the standard life building blocks is one chance in 10E100000000000 (you read that right, that's 1 followed by 100,000,000,000 zeros).  Famed British Royal Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, proposed that such odds were one chance in 10E40000, or roughly "the same as the probability that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard could assemble a 747."  By the way, scientists generally set their "Impossibility Standard" at one chance in 10E50 (1 in a 100,000 billion, billion, billion, billion, billion).  So, the likelihood that life formed via combinatorial chemical evolution (the only theory that scientists really have) is, for all intents and purposes, zero.

Atkins, Dawkins, and other secular humanists insist that materialism and naturalism are pre-supposed and that there is no argument for the introduction of the logic of intelligence into science.  That sounds to me to be pretty closed minded, and closes the door a priori on certain avenues of inquiry.  Imagine if that mentality were applied to string theory, a theory which has no experimental evidence to start with.  One has to wonder why science is so illogically selective with respect to the disciplines that it accepts into its closed little world.

My interest in this goes beyond this specific debate.  I have a hobby of collecting evidence that our reality is programmed.  I'm not sure yet whether DNA has a place in that collection yet.  It will definitely need a little more thought.

 

Tags: dna, intelligent design, creationism, evolution, life, primordial soup, rna, intelligence, self replication, science
Categories: Life | Philosophy | Programmed Reality | Science

Last month, Lord Martin Rees, the president of Britain's Royal Society and "astronomer to the Queen of England", hosted the National Science Academy's first conference on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, which was attended by such scientific illuminaries as physicist Paul Davies, SETI founder and astrophysicist extraordinaire Frank Drake.  And the resulting sound bite of the week is "World-Leading Physicist Says 'They Could Exist in Forms We Can't Conceive'"?  

Really?  That's it?  That's news?  That's what we get from the world's leading thinkers on cosmology?

Sorry for my tone, but it's about time these guys got caught up with science fiction writers from 50 years ago.  Check out a 1959 movie called "Invisible Invaders."  Or at a minimum, take Carl Sagan's brainchild from the late 70's, "Contact" (film treatment in 1979, book in 1985, and movie in 1997) featuring a highly advanced extraterrestrial race who can appear to us in any form they want.  I'm sure there were many other writers who considered that a civilization advanced enough to cross millions of light years of space, might be advanced enough to learn how to cloak.  I certainly pondered that idea as a kid.  

No doubt, these guys are a bright bunch.  But not necessarily seeing the forest for the trees.  Take SETI, for example.

We tend to assign attributes of our own civilization and our own values to other potential civilizations.  But there is really no reason to assume that once life forms on a particular planet that it will evolve into a life form that is eager to communicate.  One could argue that the intelligence of dolphins, elephants, and humans are roughly equivalent (turn the clock back 50,000 years and look at what we assume about the behavior of each species; is there much difference?)  We don’t see dolphins building SETI dishes.  Using Drake's own equation for counting the number of ET civilizations that we might be able to communicate with, we need to consider the duration of a civilization communicating with electromagnetic radiation in the radio spectrum.  One can make the assumption that it might be similar to ours and in the range of 50-100 years.  But this is a big assumption.  Maybe ET modulates magnetic fields, or seismic waves, maybe they got fully wired for broadband internet before discovering radio wave propagation, maybe they communicate via telepathy, or entanglement, or some form of communication that is completely unknown to us.  Expecting them to have a period of radio wave technology that just happens to overlap ours is probably quite unlikely.  When I made reasonable assumptions for the factors in the Drake Equation in my book "The Universe - Solved!", I got the result of .08 overlapping radio wave civilizations per galaxy, making it unlikely that SETI will find anything before funding dries up.

On the other hand, modifying the Drake Equation to estimate the likelihood of ET visitation, I came to the following conclusion: If 50% of intelligent life forms can make it to Type III status, there should be thousands of migrating/colonizing/traveling species in our neighborhood.  On the other hand, would they even care about us?  When we take a walk through a field, do we attempt to communicate with the ants in an anthill?  If the field is ready to be leveled in order to make room for a housing development, do we attempt to save the ants?  No.  Why not?  Because they are so far beneath our intellect level or our perceived level of net worth, that such endeavors are simply not worth our time.  Now imagine what a Type II or III civilization might be like.  Consider how far we have progressed (some might say, regressed) as a society since the hunter/gatherer stage of human evolution 10,000 years ago.  Further, consider that we are accelerating in this progression exponentially.  So, for all practical purposes, it is impossible to even imagine where we might be in 10,000 years.  Telepathic communication, control of time and space, simultaneous access to parallel universes, full merge with AI?  Some futurists predict these things in hundreds of years, not 10,000.  Furthermore, since 100 million years represents less than 1% of the lifetime of our galaxy, it is not unrealistic to assume that Type III civilizations may be 100’s of millions of years advanced compared to our own society.  Given the foregoing discussion, it is easy to make an argument that it is highly unlikely that ETs are zipping about in our atmosphere in vehicles that appear to be no more than 50 years ahead of our technology (they supposedly crash, after all).  The only possible “True ET” explanation is that extremely advanced species either intentionally appear in a form that makes us realize that they are here (not unlike the father figure in the Carl Sagan movie “Contact”) or they don't appear to us at all.  The above section was taken from my book and written in 2007.

Lord Martin Rees, you should have saved yourself the expense of a conference and picked up a copy of "Contact" and "The Universe - Solved!"

Tags: astronomy, cosmology, extraterrestrial, et, alien, kardashev, ufo, disclosure, frank drake, drake equation, carl sagan, contact
Categories: Cosmology | General | Philosophy | Science

Think we understand that big object in the night sky?  Guess again.  The moon is full of mysteries, some of which baffle scientists more the more we learn about it.  Admittedly, the source of many of these reports has not been fully verified, and I don't have the time to do the full research.  But hey, this is a blog and by definition, I can take liberties with my sources and talk about whatever I want, right?

For example, rocks from the moon and the earth reportedly have very different minerals; the earth has high concentrations of iron, the moon does not.  This implies that they were not formed from the same source, nor was the moon once part of the earth, as previously thought.

Some lunar rocks supposedly contain brass (a man-made alloy not found naturally), mica, and pure titanium.  Stranger still, Uranium 236 and Neptunium 237, elemental isotopes not found in nature on earth, have been found in rock samples.

The solar system is known to be about 4.5 billion years old, the oldest earth rock is 3.7 billion years old, yet some lunar rocks have been dated to an ages ranging from 4.5 to 5.3 billion years.  The lunar soil is a billion years older than its rocks and of a different composition.

Instruments left behind from Apollo missions detected a "wind of water" in 1971.

Some moon rocks are magnetized, although the moon has no magnetic fields.  Where did the magnetic property of the rocks come from?

Measurements indicate that the moon is less dense at the core than at the crust, which is counter to conventional "geo-logic."

No one really understands where the moon came from.  Due to differences in composition, it can't have come from the earth, nor from the same material from which the earth was created. Impacts on the moon (meteors or artificial objects crashed into the surface) have resulted in the measurement of a "ringing" reverberation, sometimes for hours before dying down.  Such an effect typically only occurs in a hollow object, leading some to speculated that the moon is hollow at its core.  No cosmological process can explain this.

The moon is the only satellite to revolve around its planet in a near circular orbit where one side always faces it.

The moon takes up the same angular size in the sky as the sun; hence the possibility of perfect solar eclipses.  No other planet-moon combination comes close.

Most all other satellites orbit their planet in line with the planets ecliptic plane.  But the moon is off by 5 degrees.  Why?

The scientific community has been struggling with these anomalies for many years.  A little internet research and one can easily find creative scientific explanations for most of the above anomalies. Unfortunately, they do not all peacefully coexist.

Programmed Reality has another explanation.  The moon is simply a programmed part of our reality, like everything else.  Its size was selected to create eclipses, its distance to facilitate exploration and generate tides and resultant tidal tables to make boating courses a little more complex.  Reasons for other anomalies have yet to be discovered, but serve to provoke investigation and discourse.  And, of course, without its beautiful prominence in the sky, we might never have known Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade", Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon," and the name of Frank Zappa's daughter. 

Tags: moon, hollow, cosmology, solar system
Categories: Cosmology | Philosophy | Programmed Reality | Science

A great article in Scientific American, "A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity," is well worth the read.  

Locality in physics is the idea that things are only influenced by forces that are local or nearby.  The water boiling on the stovetop does so because of the energy imparted from the flame beneath.  Even the sounds coming out of your radio are decoded from the electromagnetic disturbance in the air next to the antenna, which has been propagating from the radio transmitter at the speed of light.  But, think we all, nothing can influence anything remotely without a "chain reaction" disturbance, which according to Einstein can not exceed the speed of light.  

However, says Quantum Mechanics, there is something called entanglement.  No, not the kind you had with Becky under the bleachers in high school.  This kinds of entanglement says that particles that once "interacted" are forever entangled, whereby their properties are reflected in each other's behavior.  For example, take 2 particles that came from the same reaction and separate them by galactic distances.  What one does, the other will follow.  This has been proven to a distance of at least 18 km and seems to violate Einstein's theory of Special Relativity.

Einstein, of course, took issue with this whole concept in his famous EPR paper, preferring to believe that "hidden variables" were responsible for the effect.  But, in 1964, physicist John Bell developed a mathematical proof that no local theory can account for all of Quantum Mechanics experimental results.  In other words, the world is non-local.  Period.  It is as if, says the SciAm article, "a fist in Des Moines can break a nose in Dallas without affecting any other physical thing anywhere in the heartand. "  Alain Aspect later performed convincing experiments that demonstrated this non-locality.  45 years after John Bell's proof, scientists are coming to terms with the idea that the world is non-local and special relativity has limitations.  Both ideas are mind-blowing.

But, as usual, there are a couple of clever paradigms that get around it all, each of which are equally mind-blowing.  In one, our old friend the "Many Worlds" theory, zillions of parallel universes are spawned every second, which account for the seeming non-locality of reality.  In the other, "history plays itself out not in the three-dimensional spacetime of special relativity but rather this gigantic and unfamiliar configuration space, out of which the illusion of three-dimensionality somehow emerges."

I have no problem explaining all of these ideas via programmed reality.

Special Relativity has to do with our senses, not with reality.  True simultaneity is possible because our reality is an illusion.  And there is no speed limit in the truer underlying construct.  So particles have no problem being entangled.  

Many Worlds can be implemented by multiple instances of reality processes.  Anyone familiar with computing can appreciate how instances of programs can be "forked" (in Unix parlance) or "spawned" (Windows, VMS, etc.).  You've probably even seen it on your buggy Windows PC, when instances of browsers keep popping up like crazy and you can't kill the tasks fast enough and end up either doing a hard shutdown or waiting until the little bastard blue-screens.  Well, if the universe is just run by a program, why can't the program fork itself whenever it needs to, explaining all of the mysteries of QM that can't be explained by wave functions.  

And then there is "configuration space."  Nothing more complex than multiple instances of the reality program running, with the conscious entity having the ability to move between them, experiencing reality and all the experimental mysteries of Quantum Mechanics.

Hey physicists - get your heads out of the physics books and start thinking about computer science!

(thanks to Poet1960 for allowing me to use his great artwork) 

Tags: nonlocality, non-locality, quantum mechanics, programmed reality, many worlds, parallel universes, entanglement, relativity, special relativity, physics, computer science
Categories: Philosophy | Programmed Reality | Quantum Mechanics

Here's an interesting idea.  To avoid an impending disaster, all you have to do is forget your past.  So says physicist Saibal Mitra at the University of Amsterdam.  Even changing the past seems to be possible, believe it or not.

His idea is predicated on accepting our old friend, the Everett interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, aka the Many Universes theory.  According to Mitra, if the collective observers memory is reset prior to a cataclysmic event, such as a species ending asteroid impact, the state of the universe becomes "undetermined."  As a result, it has an equal likelihood of following any of the many subsequent paths, most of which should have nothing to do with an asteroid impact.  And so, by selectively forgetting our past, we can avoid certain doom by starting with a clean slate of future outcomes.  See this New Scientist article.

There is something unsettling about the logic, but his paper seems to be on firm footing: http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.3825.  And the implications are fascinating.  Not happy with how last year's Superbowl turned out?  Keep a single copy of the event, erase everyone's memory, replace all archived bits of history relating to the game, and then we can all sit back and watch the recording again.  Mitra says if we do that, there's a good chance Arizona will win.  Watching the same tape!  Well, maybe not the same tape.  Because once the universe became undetermined again, the physical tape could have encoded any number of outcomes.

This a vaguely reminiscent of "Last Thursdayism," which is one of the possible aspects of Programmed Reality.  Once the universe is reset from an observational standpoint, we would never know the difference and an entirely different future course of events is possible.  If you make the restart point somewhere in our current past, then the recent past can be changed too.  Programmed Reality explains it all! 

Tags: everett interpretation, last thursdayism, quantum mechanics, programmed reality, parallel universes, many worlds
Categories: Philosophy | Programmed Reality | Quantum Mechanics

Think about what it means to make a decision.  The cashier gave you too much change – do you tell him/her?  It seems like you make your choice based on past events (your parents taught you that it was deceitful to take something that shouldn’t be yours) or the current state of your mind (the cashier is really cute, maybe I’ll get a few points by pointing out the mistake).  Upon further analysis, it really seems that the exact state of your brain (memories, neural pathways and triggers) and the state of external stimuli might be fully responsible for each decision and action.  However, one could make the same argument for a computer, which function is based on the concept of a finite state machine (each action is fully determined by the state of the machine and its inputs).  This idea essentially boils down to us being nothing more than robots.  Are you okay with that?  

What about the following scenario:

Two kids with the same parents grow up in the same environment.  Why do they frequently have a completely different set of values?  One gives the money back to the cashier without question; one keeps the money without question.  Why?  It can’t be purely due to genetics.  And it can’t be purely due to upbringing.  Determinists would argue that slight differences in genetics or environment may have a domino effect on the value systems of the individual.  But, could it also be due to the possibility that these are two different souls, which have evolved differently?  Believers in reincarnation might say that the former has learned a universal lesson in a previous incarnation and is perhaps an older, or more experienced, soul.  It is therefore natural for that person to make such a decision, whereas the sibling’s soul has not yet learned that universal lesson.  We can’t be sure, but it does seem odd that people often talk of the deep personality differences between their children that are observable at such a young age that environmental differences are precluded.  This tends to lend support to the idea that there is a “ghost in the machine.”

 

Tags: free will, consciousness
Categories: Life | Philosophy

The following is an excerpt from my book, "The Universe - Solved!"  It is a thought experiment that seems to prove the existence of the soul...

Given that in the primate world there is a continuum of neural complexity from lemurs to humans, it is safe to say that somewhere there is a species with roughly half the neural complexity of a human.  Per the atheistic way of thinking, such a species would therefore have half the consciousness of a human.  Let’s arbitrarily define the level of neural complexity on a scale from 0 to 1, 1 being human.  Out primate friend would then have a neural complexity, and therefore, consciousness, of .5.  Later in this chapter we will present the strong evidence of the distributed nature of the brain; namely, that there is no single specific place where a memory resides or a specific component of a visual image is captured.  From the cases involving brain tumors and brain loss due to injuries, it is clear that we could remove half of a human’s brain and that person would continue to be conscious.  Maybe only half as conscious as before, not unlike waking up on a beach in Cancun during spring break after a night of bad tequila.  

Here comes the thought experiment part.  Imagine the possibility of a brain transplant.  It’s not hard to do, given that the brain is simply an organ, like the many others that are routinely subject to transplant with today’s surgical techniques.  There are certainly a lot more connections to a brain compared with, say, a liver, but it’s really just a matter of time before it is possible and then ultimately perfected.  Just as the cloning procedure is working its way up the species complexity scale (lab mice, sheep, humans), so will the brain transplant procedure.  A head transplant, for example, was performed by Case Western Reserve University neurosurgeon Dr. Robert White on a rhesus monkey in 1970.  It survived for eight days and exhibited many normal functions.  Cross-species transplants, also known as xenotransplants, have long since been proven to be possible, with chimpanzee kidneys in humans, pig livers in humans, cynomolgus monkey hearts in baboons, and baboon hearts in humans all achieving some level of success.  The main reasons that experimentation and advances in that field are slow to progress are the controversial ethical issue (it is right for pigs to become organ factories?) and the fear of cross-species viral infections.  But, ethical and safety issues aside, it is reasonable to assume that with sufficient technology, it will be possible to transplant a human brain or portion thereof into our primate that nominally has a .5 consciousness level.  Let’s further imagine that the process could become fairly straightforward, like plugging a new motherboard into a computer.  As long as the interfaces line up from a physical and networking standpoint, the procedure is “plug and play.”  

So let’s imagine our human subject, Nick, and 2 lesser primates, Magilla and Kong.  We remove Nick’s brain and attach it to Magilla’s body.  Nick should retain his memories and consciousness, but feel really different, since his sensory input is completely new.  We would have to conclude that he maintained a continuous, albeit altered, stream of identity.  If Karl Pribham and others are right, we could theoretically put half of Nick’s brain into Magilla and the other half in Kong.  Where is his identity now?  Which body does the old Nick feel that he is in?  If we took the biological reductionist point of view, we would have to say that his consciousness is in both primates.  That must be very confusing, receiving two separate sets of sensory stimuli and two distinct developing sets of new memories.  Given that the state of the two primates is fairly consistent with the state of two similar natural primates, namely that they each have a brain of .5 neural complexity, why should there be a single conscious identity occupying both bodies in the case of Kong and Magilla, but two distinct identities in the natural case?  My answer is simple, invoking Occam’s Razor.  Nick’s soul simply chose which primate to move into along with his brain.  Alternately, his soul could have said, “This is ridiculous.  I’m returning to the spirit domain.  Let some other souls fight over those abominations.” 

 

Tags: brain transplant, soul, existence
Categories: Future Tech | Philosophy

There is much talk these days about the coming Singularity.  We are about 37 years away, according to Ray Kurzweil.  For some, the prospect is exhilarating - enhanced mental capacity, ability to experience fantasy simulations, immortality.  For others, the specter of the Singularity is frightening - AI's run amok, all Terminator-like.  Then there are those who question the entire idea.  A lively debate on our forum triggered this post as we contrasted the position of transhumanists (aka cybernetic totalists) and singularity-skeptics.

For example, Jaron Lanier's "One Half of a Manifesto" published in Wired and edge.org, suggests that our inability to develop advances in software will, at least for now, prevent the Singularity from happening according to the Moore's Law pace.  One great quote from his demi-manifesto: "Just as some newborn race of superintelligent robots are about to consume all humanity, our dear old species will likely be saved by a Windows crash. The poor robots will linger pathetically, begging us to reboot them, even though they'll know it would do no good."  Kurzweil countered with a couple specific examples of successful software advances, such as speech recognition (which is probably due more to algorithm development than software techniques).

I must admit, I am also disheartened by the slow pace of software advances.  Kurzweil is not the only guy on the planet to have spent his career living and breathing software and complex computational systems.  I've written my share of gnarly assembly code, neural nets, and trading systems.  But, it seems to be that it takes almost as long to open a Word document, boot up, or render a 3D object on today's blazingly fast PCs as it did 20 years ago on a machine running at less than 1% of today's clock rate.  Kurzweil claims that we have simply forgotten: "Jaron has forgotten just how unresponsive, unwieldy, and limited they were."

So, I wondered, who is right?  Are there objective tests out there?  I found an interesting article in PC World that compared the boot-up time from a 1981 PC to that of a 2001 PC.  Interestingly, the 2001 was over 3 times slower (51 seconds for boot up) than its 20-year predecessor (16 seconds).  My 2007 Thinkpad - over 50 seconds.  Yes, I know that Vista is much more sophisticated than MS-DOS and therefore consumes much more disk and memory and takes that much more time to load.  But really, are those 3D spinning doodads really helping me work better?

Then I found a benchmark comparison on the performance on 6 different Word versions over the years.  Summing 5 typical operations, the fastest version was Word 95 at 3 seconds.  Word 2007 clocked in at 12 seconds (in this test, they all ran on the same machine).

In summary, software has become bloated.  Developers don't think about performance as much as they used to because memory and CPU speed is cheap.  Instead, the trend in software development is layers of abstraction and frameworks on top of frameworks.  Developers have become increasingly specialized ("I don't do "Tiles", I only do "Struts") and very few get the big picture.

What does this have to do with the Singularity?  Simply this - With some notable exceptions, software development has not even come close to following Moore's Law in terms of performance or reliability.  Yet, the Singularity predictions depend on it.  So don't sell your humanity stock anytime soon.

 

 
Tags: singularity, transhumanism, futurism, ai, software
Categories: AI | Future Tech | Philosophy

One of the sections of "The Universe - Solved!" that generated a bit of controversy was my assertion that there is really nothing that we can know with conviction to be true.  An exerpt:

"2+2=4?  Not in Base 3, where 2+2=11.  In Base 10 (or any base >4), 2+2=4 by convention, but only in an abstract way, and not necessarily always true in the real world.  If you add 2 puddles of water to 2 puddles of water, you still have 2 (albeit larger) puddles of water.  For a more conventional example, a 2-mile straight line laid end-to-end with another 2-mile straight line will not add up to exactly 4 miles in length due to relativity and the curvature of space-time in all locales.  Therefore, 2+2=4 can not be universally true."  

In addition, You have no way of knowing whether the convention that 2+2=4 is only true in the false reality that we think we are in, but not in the real one.  Again, from the book: "So, maybe all we can know for sure is what is happening to us at this exact instant.  Then again, how do we know that we aren’t in a dream right now???  So, the set of things that are 100% true is simply the null set!"

Some readers have argued with these assertions.  

So, imagine my pleasure when I read the following quote in the July 26 - August 1 issue of New Scientist magazine by esteemed mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose: ""Do we know for certain that 2 plus 2 equals 4?  Of course we don't.  Maybe every time everybody in the whole world has ever done that calculation and reasoned it through, they've made a mistake.  Maybe it isn't 4, it's really 5.  There is a very, very small chance that this has happened."  His argument is based on the logic of reason, which was different than my argument, but the result was the same nonetheless.

Thank you, Roger, for your enlightened point of view.  I would gladly send you a free autographed book.  Please send me your address. 

 

Tags: philosophy, reason, logic, programmed reality
Categories: Programmed Reality | Philosophy