Some it-from-bit proponents stretch this logic still further. They look on the universe as a giant
computer simulation. Among those
who have taken this view are Ed
Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram, both of whom hypothesize that the universe is a
“cellular automaton” … Perhaps the most radical cosmos-as-computer advocate is
the American physicist Frank Tipler … It involves no actual computer: his cosmos is all software, no hardware.
-- Jim Holt, Why does the World
Exist? (2012), p. 190
This Sunday morning’s New York Times brings an unexpected double-scoop of intellectual fare
(a reminder of why I still subscribe,
despite the spreading stain of the Narcisso-Traffickers that started in the “Style” section and
has infected almost everything else):
not one, but two lucid
reviews of recent philosophy-porn masquerading as physics porn (indeed, it is only that
beelzebubian visage behind the cosmographical mask, that merits the attention
of the non-physicist), by that excellent defender of clear thought, Dr. Edward Frenkel, whom we have previously had occasion to praise.
To have two reviews, by a
single reviewer on a single day, is unusual; one is in the Book section, one in the Week-in-Review.
The first piece, “Is the Universe a Simulation”, is less a
review than a reverie, using a
classic old novel of Bulgakov as a (fairly random) launch-point. Along the way, he restates the thesis
that philosophically-minded mathematicians largely embrace, that of Platonism: Were the Lord to launch another
universe somewhen, it might not evolve dinosaurs or Twitter, but Fermat’s Last
(or, Wiles’ first) Theorem will
still be true. Properly mulled-over, a lot may follow from this; consult our series of essays on the
implications of mathematical Realism, begun here:
Frenkel then manfully addresses the extremely tiresome thesis, that
the whole cosmos might be a hoax -- just one gigantic computer-simulation by
some pimpled hacker living off in his mother’s basement somewhere beyond Neptune,
or whatever-the-hell.
Similar ideas were discussed as far back as Plato (“Plato’s Cave”); the “Matrix” scenario of current
popular mythology is simply a
digital update, without really adding depth or plausibility to what is
essentially a theological (specifically:
diabolical) idea.
Abandoning the caution of Plato, for whom the notion was just an
allegory, “the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum” (Frenkel reports) “has argued
that we are more likely to be in such a simulation than not." (My own hunch: Bostrum himself is nothing but a
fragment of malware, invented to provide a much-needed rhyme for "nostrum"; but the rest of us are real.)
Frenkel then closes on a wholesome note, once again evoking the possibility of a timeless Platonic realm for the truths of mathematics. Actually I fail to detect any nexus between that idea and the It’s-all-an-illusion trope, other than that both were first propounded by Plato.
Frenkel then brings something new to the table by bringing
our attention to a recent paper, “Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical
Simulation”, written by a couple of physicists. These authors, after some introductory mumbo-jumbo,
making a logic-free leap from their own experience fiddling around with our
primitive Earth-computers (not even a quantum computer; more like a Model T), put forward that,
if this cosmos really is nothing but a simulation, on some extra-cosmic calculational
entity (which, in all likelihood, would bear no resemblance whatever, either
in hardware or software, to their idea of a computer -- as, in that
hypothesized world, there is no reason to posit a mirrored existence of
figments of the simulation -- no silicon, no electrons -- and the entity itself
need not be digital, since there exist other types of computation) then such
& such anomalies would no doubt appear (the exact nature of these being
extracted directly from the podex), and that, training our telescopes aloft,
these might detected in, umm, cosmic rays. (We pause to give the reader time to gasp at the iridescence of this idea.) For the
ancient Chinese, doubtless a similar insight: ultimate
Reality might resemble a giant abacus.
Note 1 : This
notion, that some tiny anomaly, some ‘wrinkle-in-time’ sort of thing, could tip
us off to the amazing fact that
the whole of history, mind, and reality
is all just one big fake, is apparently not new. Russell Standish (Theory of Nothing,
p. 83) cites David Deutsch, John Barrow, and Daniel Dennett as having each put forward some
variation on the basic idea.
Novelistically, the fancy is perhaps congenial, to any who enjoy
Sherlock Holmes, who figures out the whole mystery on the basis of some anomaly
in a bit of cigar-ash. But
given that the cosmos (of which we glimpse barely a smidgen) is one big
patchwork of mysteries and anomalies, a few of
which are more or less described (in ever-changing terms) by this or that
discipline of science, one should not
expect any such gotcha. (How
about the sudden arrival on our consciousness of “dark” energy and matter,
outweighing the homegrown kind several times over? Is that a roundoff-error? A software glitch?)
Note 2 : If
leprechauns exist, these too might be somehow reflected in the Microwave
Background Radiation.
[Update 27 February 2014] The keen-sighted philosopher-linguist Roger Lass suggests a much simpler experiment that
should settle this question once
and for all:
If we had spectacles of the right
shade of green, we could see leprechauns.
-- Roger Lass, On explaining
language change (1980), p. 86
Meta-note: For
those mesmerized by any invocation of the MBR, cf. Steven Weinberg’s account of
going back to the original measurements behind Hubble’s announcement of the
redshift law: Weinberg could
scarcely perceive any pattern in the data, and reckoned this another instance
(as with Galileo) of an intuitive perception of what must be true, being tricked-out as an experimental result.
* * *
~ Commercial break ~
For a mini-movie of
our own, try this:
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
Frenkel then closes on a wholesome note, once again evoking the possibility of a timeless Platonic realm for the truths of mathematics. Actually I fail to detect any nexus between that idea and the It’s-all-an-illusion trope, other than that both were first propounded by Plato.
~
Conceivably
what put Frenkel in mind of the (logically unrelated) Platonic-math idea
in the context of the World-as-Maya meme, is cross-flavoring from the other item
he reviewed today, Our Mathematical Universe, by Max Tegmark. Here he sinks his teeth into something more substantial than
that brain-afflatus by the Oxford philosopher: a recent, full-length (and lengthy) book, from a respected
traditional publisher, written by a tenured professor at one of the leading
universities of the exact sciences, M.I.T. And the formidable mathematician Edward Frenkel
does the reading public a great service, by suggesting (though he puts it
nicely) that the speculative portion of the book is hogwash.
The keynote for this graceful review, the concetto (‘conceit’ in the Elizabethan
sense) that provides the satiric theme, takes off from an incautious admission
from Tegmark, who (giving hostages to Fortune) describes his two selves -- the
mainstream physicist versus the Wild Ideas Guy -- as Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde. The former wrote the pretty
much run-of-the-mill sounding survey of modern physics for the Tired Business
Man (a much-practiced and apparently profitable genre); the latter pushes the farrr-out (though
possibly vacuous or untestable) theses,
(1) That all the world is not, as you might have thought, a
stage, or a panorama, whereon the romance and tragedy of our lives plays out,
but (basically) one great big scrawl on some (humanly meaningless) mathematical
blackboard;
and
(2) That our own universe is just one feuillet in a great flaky pastry of parallel worlds. (The universe, not as blanc-mange, as
with the monists, but as baclava.)
[Note: I am
paraphrasing. Tegmark himself puts
the matter less colorfully.]
These two ungainly theses are not, I suspect, actually logically related, pace their perpetrator. Tegmark suggests that (1) implies
(2), in that, as the reviewer summarizes, “he believes that any mathematical
structure spawns its own universe,
and that all of these universes exist in parallel and on an equal
footing.” Actually (2) has
been championed on two other, quite different grounds, neither purely mathematical: on the ground of physics (the Landscape idea), or of biology
(the cosmology-cum-Darwinism of Lee Smolin).
(You could also argue that (2) is implied by, or at least in the spirit of, the ancient and later medieval Principle of Plenitude.)
(You could also argue that (2) is implied by, or at least in the spirit of, the ancient and later medieval Principle of Plenitude.)
The Jekyll/Hyde bifurcation can actually be detected in the very title of the book under
review, which reads in full:
OUR MATHEMATICAL
UNIVERSE
My Quest for the
Ultimate Nature of Reality
The principal title is unexceptionable: the universe can certainly be described
as “mathematical”, and has been so, with respectable success, at great
length. There are other adjectives one could likewise apply to the
thing, but “mathematical” is by now a no-brainer. The enterprise has indeed been successful in
unanticipated ways and to a degree that surprises its own practitioners: the theme of the “Unreasonable
Effectiveness of Mathematics”.
[Note: That is
indeed a phenomenon worth pondering.
But to conclude from the way that mathematics keeps saving the bacon of
physicists, to the exclusively ‘mathematical’
character of the universe, is no more convincing than the traditional
philosophical epigram, to the effect that the reason our minds can comprehend
the universe (well, some of it, somewhat) is because The Universe Itself Is Mind-Like.
Actually more sophisticated than either of these monicities,
is the following dual view, put forward by the great early-nineteenth-century
mathematician and physicist,
Hamilton (of quaternions and Hamiltonian fame):
There are, or may be imagined, two
dynamical sciences: one
subjective, a priori, metaphysical, deducible from meditation on our ideas of
Power, Space, Time; the other
objective, a posteriori, physical, discoverable by observation and generalization
of facts or phenomena: that these
two sciences are distinct in kind, but intimately and wonderfully connected, in
consequence of the ultimate union of the subjective and objective in God.
(quoted in Thomas Hankins, Sir William Rowan Hamilton
(1980), p. 175 ]
The subtitle, by contrast, is pure Philosophy Porn, of a
sort typically peddled by physicists. (For a classic polemic from a couple of generations
ago, see Susan Stebbing’s Philosophy and
the Physicists (1937).) You
should be wary of any book purporting to be hard science (as opposed to the
memoirs or musings of a hard-scientist) which contains in its title any of the
following words:
My
Quest
Ultimate
Nature-of-Reality
Tegmark’s subtitle manages to pack all of these into a
single confined space (rather like quarks).
~
Anyhow, in a nutshell, Tegmark’s gambit is to resolve the
puzzle of the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics by a kind of homeopathic-medical
reason: you see, math fits the
cosmic body (cures the disease) because, in its questy “ultimate nature”, it is the cosmic body, or rather vice
versa, if you please. Any
sophomore passing around the joint at a late-night bull-session, would be
stunned by such an insight. For us, it’s more like a koan or a tautology (well and good). But he wields this trope/tautology to arrive
at something in some ways equally
tautological (namely, as far as it goes,
which isn’t far), though its spiritual implications (if taken too seriously)
are odious: Namely, that a person
is (nothing but) “a pattern in space-time”.
(Recently I struggled through an initially catchy but ultimate
dreary book with a similar message, by a semi-Tegmarkian, Russell Standish,
called the Theory of Nothing.
More anon.)
No doubt aware of the danger that his scheme threatened to
dissolve into vapidity, Tegmark attempts to restore it to the coveted status of
an Empirical Hypothesis (we have learned, with Chomsky, to become very reverent
when we hear this phrase). Frenkel
quotes him: “One of the key testable predictions of the Mathematical Universe
Hypothesis is that physics
research will uncover further mathematical regularities in nature.” With this ludicrous lapalissade, Tegmark becomes the Thomas
Friedman of Mathematical Physics. Frenkel remarks, more gently,
though with satirical quotation-marks,
and with what, for anyone conversant with the philosophy of science, has
bite:
This “prediction” is as far from
the scientific method as the
purported universes are from one another.
~
Tegmark’s scheme amounts to a kind of Eliminative Immaterialism, quite different in ethos
from the Materialist variety found among those influenced by the more
nihilistic currents of neuroscience (and against which we have polemicized here),
but compassing the same end of
removing, from our view of life, everything that makes it worth living. Professor Frenkel is a
gentlemanly writer, but does permit himself this much by way of sarcastic
retort:
What accounts for consciousness, for example? “I think that consciousness is the way
information feels when being processed in certain complex ways,” Tegmark says.
I tried to process this information, but didn’t feel
much.
Why -- by what uncanny coincidence -- do the curviculous
abstrudelings of the Eliminativist mind or mouth (or other orifice), of
whichever (im)materialist stripe -- so resemble a spiraling pile of
sirreverence? Perhaps because, in
their innermost reality, they are a
pile of sirreverence.
~
Frenkel may be
in a sense overqualified
for grappling with the mathematical niceties of Tegmark’s thesis (1), taking
them more seriously than they deserve.
He scores a point against
the scheme in a brief passage that
will probably whiz by most readers,
implicitly alluding to the foundational debate of recent decades,
concerning the role of set theory versus category theory versus topos theory et
alia, and concludes that Tegmark fails the “What is Mathematics?” test,
concluding
Mathematical structures constitute
but a small island of modern mathematics.
Why would someone who believes that math is at the core of reality try to reduce all of reality to just
this island?
I doubt
however that this
observation strikes more than a
glancing blow at the ontological heart of Tegmark’s argument. Tegmark probably doesn’t want to reduce the cosmos specifically to set theory or
fibre-bundles or anything else, but rather to water the thesis to such
vagueness that it stands immune from refutation.
Compare J. M. Keynes’ Treatise on Probability (1921),
with its dismissal of certain mathematical window-dressing which loses the
reader in the details, all the while resting on epistemological fallacies.
Indeed, for the possible mathematical “handwaving” of
Tegmark, cf. the computational
sleight-of-hand in the scholarly paper Frenkel treats of in his other review,
that of “Constraints on … Simulation”.
(Again, I have abbreviated the title in line with the Chomskyan linguistic aesthetic.) I have made fun of the Hype Around the Higgs, but really that quest is quite well defined (though it has run
into experimental difficulties) compared with the suggested search for
(unspecified) anomalies in the running of the Entity wherein we are a
simulation on the assumption that
they will be analogous to the quirks of their own no doubt buggy software. Since the nature of the hypothesized computational device
which is running the universe as a sort of screen-saver is utterly unknown (to begin with, it
needn’t be digital), that cannot constitute a serious hypothesis in terms of
computer science. And the
suggestion that we might trot off and try to salt the tail of a cosmic ray so as to settle a fundamental
ontological and theological question, was probably made in jest. One imagines the scenario: “Look! That proton just zagged when it should have zigged -- ergo everything is just one big illusion
and life is meaningless! “ (Such a sally might serve our cocky
sophomore to lure a co-ed temporarily into his bed, but would not attract the
kind of woman one needs to marry.)
~
Historical Footnote:
This computer-simulation/Matrix meme is just the latest, technology-inspired
variation on a very old topos (using
that term now in its literary
rather than the mathematical sense): that Things Are Not As They Seem. But note that the latter overarching idea, comes in
two radically different flavors.
The one is that the universe as we experience it in reality makes less sense than it seems (in any morally or humanly recognizable
terms); the other, that it makes more. The former is found among pagans and atheists; the latter begins with
Plato, and culminates in Christianity.
Among polytheists, there is the notion of Maya -- an
all-encompassing "illusion (or more accurately a "delusion")”, as Wiki puts it -- for
Hindus. The pagan Greeks
held that there was another order of reality behind the one we can see, peopled
by gods and sylphs and whatnot, but so far from giving meaning to our lives
here below, Olympian society (and that of the satyrs and what have you) was no improvement
on our mortals petty folly here-below;
almost the contrary. In King Lear’s formulation:
“As
flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods.
They
kill us for their sport.”
Utterly otherwise is the Christian picture. Here too, things are not as they seem; but with this
difference: the deeper meaning is
not (if anything) worse, as among animists, for whom ill-intentioned
demons lurk behind every mutter; nor is it alien in kind to what
happens here, as in the bleakest views of the atheistic mechanists, for whom there is nothing but l’homme machine, or of contemporary reductionists, who
intuit nothing but Hermitian operators with no agenda beyond themselves. Rather, it supplements ourselves,
rounds us out, without abolishing us.
(In Hegelian terms, we are thus aufgehoben
-- sublated -- in the fuller reality.) True, for Plato in his famous cave, we are but shadows
-- but, crucially, shadows cast by something, something real and round --
rounder and realer than our temporary shadow selves, as an object is to the shadows cast. For behind that trio of ill-laid
crooked sticks, there thrones an abstract Triangle in the Platonic realm (where, whatever the varying lengths of its legs, the sum of its internal angles in radians is eternally, or rather extratemporally, pi; behind and above this loaf’s cost in
drachmae, the fullness of the Natural Numbers in their calm infinitude; and behind and beyond and above ourselves …. Ah, we must wait for Christianity to
get a glimpse of that!
And here I mean not merely the vision of the simple, who
imagine that one day the curtain will rise, and from there on nothing but lollipops and sugar-plums (though even that
vision is preferable to the leaden landscape of Hades or of Sheol). Nay rather, even for the best and
most skeptical among us -- “a sense that life has a plot” (Frederick Buechner, The
Sacred Journey ,1982), or C.S. Lewis’s metaphor of reality as of kind of intricate Persian carpet,
which now we see only from the underside (a tangle of thread-ends, only
hinting at the greater order verso):
whereas then, we shall see the pattern plain.
The “golden rule” is not specifically
Christian, but no matter: No thanks; you can keep your olive branch. It does not even rise to the level of a poisoned
chalice: more like a stale Twinkie.
~
The general idea (2)
has three interrelated variants:
the Landscape; the
Multiverse; and the Many-worlds view of metaphysics. This last is an offspring of Bohmian quantum-mechanics out
of modal logic, and is favored today by many philosophers.
As for the Landscape, its status as a sheer dead-end to
explanatory physics, has been well pointed out by physicists, and we need not
add to that. But this
complexus of ideas yields moral implications as well, whose effects, again, are
largely deleterious. Back to
Standish:
The appeal of euthanasia is to end
suffering. But how could it do
that if the suffering person has first-person immortality? The euthanased person may no longer be
in your world, in your life, but would nevertheless be experiencing continued
suffering in another universe, if not greater suffering beause of your actions. This for me is a
powerful argument against euthanasia.
-- Russell Standish, Theory of
Nothing (2006; 2nd edn. 2011), p. 150
Actually it is an argument -- not powerful, but sophomoric
to the point of imbecility -- against doing anything at all, ever. Why pay this parking-ticket, or return
this library book, when in another universe ‘twill remain unpaid, unreturned?
Through equally twisted reasoning, he pretends to arrive,
not at nihilism, but -- well, who knows, it is intended as an olive branch:
Quantum immortality is thus a very
good incentive to behave altruistically, a grounding for the golden rule of
Christianity.
-- Russell Standish, Theory of
Nothing (2006; 2nd edn. 2011), p. 150
~
The theses that our cosmos is either (1) just a sort of computer-game, or (2) just
a randomly-constituted sliver in a randomized stack of non-communicating random
slivers, are two of the most
noxious ideas of our time, and Edward Frenkel has done a service by cocking an
informed and skeptical eyebrow at both of them. But there is a third burning issue of our day, that of
the Zombie Apocalypse, which he has left unaddressed. For that, we must turn to Professor Noam Chomsky.
(Note that that is a monostich, all by itself.)
[Update May 2016]
While performing routine janitorial services on this blog, I discovered
that this crucial contribution by the renowned Professor Chomsky, has been suppressed from the Internet!
As of even date, what you get, when you click, is this:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/02/16/1278055/-Noam-Chomsky-Breaks-Down-the-Zombie-Apocalypse?detail=hide
This story has been removed.
This story has been unpublished and
you do not have permission to view it.
At least they admit it! In the future, you’ll see nothing, or else clicking
the link will introduce a virus, to your hard disk or your brain.
For connoisseurs, this whole shifty business bears the unmistakeable digital
fingerprints of …
This is not a glimpse of hidden Reality. Rather, it is a *simulation* of such a glimpse, whose Being is restricted to the silver screen. |
~
Weiteres zum Thema:
For more on the limits of simulation, try this:
For more on
Maya, the multiverse, and the Landscape, this:
The topic of “narcisso-trafficking” is largely foreign to
this post, referring not to anything discussed here, but to the infected areas
surrounding the remaining atolls of the main NYT news section and the (partly
corrupted) Book Review.
However, readers have enjoyed the coinage, so here is a link to some essays on the subject.
~
Noch Weiteres zum Thema:
Just a musing note on the possible nature of the
hypothetical Entity with which the ‘simulation’ (i.e., the actual universe --
the real world) takes place. The more you strip away unwarranted
hidden assumptions about what the thing might be like (Sequential? -- Not
necessarily; Digital? -- Not
necessarily; Silicon-based? -- Not
necessarily; Physically embodied
at all? -- Not necessarily; etc.) the
more we are left with a recedingly distant conjectural Whatnot, of unknown
character, and of baffling vastness, which, for humility and simpliticy, we might as well call (to coin a
phrase) “the Mind of God.”
And a Christian will have no special objection to that metaphorical
depiction -- though with one proviso:
that the puppets or rather “avatars” in this all-encompassing Simulation
(if you enjoy that rather insipid metaphor) are divinely/’cybernetically’
provided with Free Will. That is the
redoubt which the eliminativists and mechanists are ever intent to storm, and
that is what the Historical Church would defend, if need be by the sword.
~
For an alternate take on it all, try this:
http://murphybros.blogspot.com/2010/12/murphys-theory-of-cosmology.html
~
~ Posthumous Endorsement ~
"If I were alive
today, and in the mood for a mystery,
this is what I'd be
reading: "
(I am James Monroe, by jingo,
and I approved this message.)
~
~
~
[Update 17 May 2014]
An op-ed this morning, by the excellent columnist Joel Achenbach,
refines the point:
It was the science story of the
year: Astrophysicists held a news conference at Harvard on March 17 announcing
that their South Pole telescope had found evidence of gravity waves from the
dawn of time.
Cosmology doesn’t get any bigger than this. The discovery was
hailed as confirmation of a mind-boggling addendum to the big-bang theory,
something called “cosmic inflation” that describes the universe beginning not
in a stately expansion but with a brief, exponentially rapid, inflationary
spasm.
Science is a demanding and
unforgiving business, and great discoveries are greeted not with parades and
champagne but rather with questions, doubts and demands for more data. So it is
that, in recent days, scientists in the astrophysics community have been vocalizing
their concern that the South Pole
experiment, known as BICEP2, may have detected only the signature of dust in
our own galaxy.
These doubters say, in effect, that
rather than seeing the aftershock of the birth of the universe the scientists may have seen only some
schmutz in the foreground, as if they needed to clean their eyeglasses.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/big-bang-backlash-bicep2-discovery-of-gravity-waves-questioned-by-cosmologists/2014/05/16/e575b2fc-db07-11e3-bda1-9b46b2066796_story.html
A claim of having proved Inflation, only to meet (it may be)
the most humiliating possible Deflation.
Achenbach relevantly quotes Sagan: “extraordinary claims
demand extraordinary evidence”.
And yet more: Cosmology does get any bigger than that, when it
pretends to have settled fundamental philosophical/theological/existential
questions (which “tensor B-modes”, however tasty to the cognoscenti, are not,
being purely physics-internal). A fortiori, claims to have motivated, or
even proved, the (I repeat: diabolical) thesis that all the world is worse than dirt on the lens -- good
honest dirt, after all, at least is of the earth -- that it is a mere Simulation
-- a farce, kluged-up not even by an
(in)decent Devil, but merely some pimpled Programmer -- all morality, all
emotion, all human values of less
moment than the bumf with which said Programmer wipes his arse -- such a
philosophical program requires rather more than a conjecture that some … future experiment might detect a wanton
ripple in this or that, which should occasion the conjecture's proponents to exclaim, “That’s
it!”, and to toast the event with some warm champagne, left over from some previous pseudo-sighting of the Higgs boson.
Read the full article, which is of great sociological
interest beyond its relevance for
physics. And some of the readers’
comments as well; as:
The usual argument for inflation is
that scalar perturbations cannot produce B-modes in the polarization of the
cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), and that the only possibility to
generate them is through tensor perturbations (gravitational waves). Vector perturbations
(local rotational modes) are not really considered.
But if a local privileged space
direction exists due to space-time geometry, local rotation around this
direction can be present in the early Universe and generate CMB B-modes.
For a more upbeat presentation of the BICEP2 results:
“This is a totally new, independent
piece of cosmological evidence that the inflationary picture fits together,”
says theoretical physicist Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, who proposed the idea of inflation in 1980. He
adds that the study is “definitely” worthy of a Nobel prize.
[Update 19 June 2014]
Now, after weeks of wrangling,
discussion and debate with peer reviewers and other astrophysicists, the group,
which goes by the name Bicep, has published its paper in the journal Physical
Review Letters. The authors, led by John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics, write that they stand by their discovery — but they
also now acknowledge that it is possible that interstellar dust might have
produced much or even all of their signal.
“The basic takeaway has not
changed; we have high confidence in our results,” Dr. Kovac said in a phone
call.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/science/space/scientists-debate-gravity-wave-detection-claim.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
To acknowledge that mere dust, rather than gravity waves, “might
have produced … all of their signal”
[emphasis added], yet to maintain that the takeaway has not changed, is
paradoxical on the face of it. On croit rêver.
I found your article alright, but it is a little too 'clever worded' for me. I like plain speech. But I very much love your critique against the idea that 'everything is mathematics'. I found it trying to find a good critique of the film The Matrix which pushes that Gnostic theme---that reality is illusory, and fabricated by evil entities, but if we acquire gnosis then we become supermen.
ReplyDeletemany people look to that film as some kind of warning about the hidden cabal, but it is more disinfo--PRETENDING to help but using mind control to promote what those who say push philosophy porn do.
WHY would they DO that? Well the prevailing philosophy of psychologism is Computationalism. The idea that we are computers/robots/machines. So it suits the creators of this modern myth that we see the universe and nature as a computer stimulation of meaninglessness. And it suits what has been said to be the end goal of the ones with the cash and power behind the scenes who manage perception. End goal? To have us believe we are weak machines, and to gag for 'transhumanist' technological 'implant-upgrades' so we can become 'supermen'---the 'consumers' who can afford it that is. For themselves and their kids.
Where I do not agree with you is where you say how Christianity is unlike other religious belief systems regarding paranoia:
"Utterly otherwise is the Christian picture. Here too, things are not as they seem; but with this difference: the deeper meaning is not (if anything) worse, as among animists, for whom ill-intentioned demons lurk behind every mutter; nor is it alien in kind to what happens here, as in the bleakest views of the atheistic mechanists, for whom there is nothing but l’homme machine, or of contemporary reductionists, who intuit nothing but Hermitian operators with no agenda beyond themselves. Rather, it supplements outselves, rounds us out, without abolishing us." Please tell me you are joking. Christian belief has been THE most paranoid belief system I know of. They have demonized nearly everything in their history. Even the air, which was supposed to be the realm of 'Satan'. As I understand it the toxic choice offered by the mind-manipulators is 'either Christianity or Satanism?' when both feed off each other, are inverse mindsets of each other and thus make sure to keep you in that patriarchal mindset.
As you seem to know, the ones pushing the 'all is math-ists' want you to feel everything is meaningless. ONLY spirituality which understanding nature and spirit as a dynamic continuum is a threat to people who are nihilist death cults.