Friday, June 21, 2013

Materialism In The News: Flying Teapots (which no one believes in) Are Superstition, Bolzmann Brains Are Just Groovy

Getting used to the new, evidence free, physics and its even more up and coming twin, physics and, presumably, other physical science freed of both logic and its subject matter, the knowable physical universe, gets some getting used to.  But while trying to get used to the breezy science surrounding jillions of universes and the myriad of contradicting declarations about those that are made, there are always things you've, somehow, never stumbled over.  I have to admit that Bolzmann Brains are new to me.  That could be because, as this article says,  "It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science."   That embarrassment might account for the dearth of pop-sci shows about them and short-of-breath descriptions of them elsewhere in the media. At least nothing like that has come my way, though I don't watch the Sy channel or Discover.  And I pretty much stopped watching Nova when it turned into adds for military contractors and string theory-materialist ideology.

In the short amount of time I've had to look into the idea, it's hard to get a single, clear description of these free-floating, disembodied, cosmically cosmopolitan gigabrains that come about because of predictions made on a now unfashionable steady-state universe but which, apparently, nonetheless, are taken seriously by some actual scientists who haven't been subjected to the same anathema as Rupert Sheldrake, Brian Josephson and the widely vilified Pons and Fleischman who were, after all, noted for their work in actual experimental and verifiable science before they were declared as banned and shunned.

It seems kind of unfair to me to blame Ludwig Bolzmann an extension of whose theories are used to generate either a limited number or these accidental brains as presenting the same kind of trouble that the tribbles posed for the velour* clad residents of The Enterprise.  These, perhaps, hair-brained brains would seem to be a modern invention, one serious enough that sci-guys and math-sluths publish papers about them. A recent  news story reassures us that the worry that they must eventually overpopulate the universe is probably due to insufficient mathematical analysis.  Since they seem to have been born within the limits of present day mathematical analysis and speculation, perhaps that is the way to make them disappear.  Or at least whittling them down to size.   I'm not making this up, you know, here

Hyper-Intelligent Superbrains Floating In Deep Space Probably Don't Outnumber Humanity, Say Physicists

Physicists say there is now good evidence that a legion of floating space brains are not spontaneously bursting into existence throughout the universe.

For about a decade there has been a theory (really a thought experiment) that so-called Boltzmann brains - self-aware conscious entities with no external physical presence - might exist in space.

The idea roughly goes - and we'd suggest further reading - that given a suitably dramatic timescale, energy and matter, it's possible that a consciousness could form into a working mind, of its own accord, in space.

Consciousness is commonly thought by scientists to be essentially an illusion, created by the interaction of a vast number of simple 'actors'. In the human brain these are neurons, of which we each have about 86 billion.

Yeah, accidental cosmic brains of ginormous proportion are possible, the human consciousness with which those are imagined is an illusion.  Though the statement that "consciousness is commonly thought by scientists to be essentially an illusion,"  is something I doubt.  I would guess that other than those whose motive seems to be far less discovering reliable information about the observable universe, it is primarily those who are based in theory motivated by materialism, naturalism, physicalism, who account for the denial of the one and only thing which we have direct access to, the experience of our own consciousness**.   I would imagine many of those conducting this "thought experiment" into disembodied "brains" are exactly the "brain only" types in other contexts, imagining and writing papers about imaginary minds without brains while denying the possibility that the very real phenomenon of human consciousness - I'd include animals but that's a different post - could exist apart from the brain.

Unless these guys can come up with the first bit of evidence that Bolzmann Brains, alternate universes, and a number of other crack-pot seeming inventions growing out of the desire to kill God once and for all, they should be considered as evidence of only one thing, that decadence I proposed has settled into contemporary physics.   From its traditional position as the emperor of science, the ultimate and ruling force of them all, physics is seeming less impressive an interpretation of physical reality than chemistry, these days.  But, then, I've been watching the Periodic Table of Videos over the past couple of months.

That little "thought experiment" passage in the quote above seems to me to be covering the theory at the other end, where some might expect Bolzmann Brains really originated.

* Had to look it up, I originally guessed orlon but didn't want the trekkies on my back as well as the sci-rangers.

**  I hope to post more on that later.

Update:  I forgot, I intended to include this somewhat related comment at a recent story in The Guardian, from "Ubermench 1"

"Do you have evidence that physicists believe this, or is this merely conjecture from a misunderstanding of the way theorists go about their work?"

I object to the attempt to be patronising. What makes you think I ( who have had scientific papers published ) am not a 'theorist' ?
Physicists who support the multiverse hypothesis do so on the basis that even though the 'laws of physics' may vary between universes, the laws of maths don't. That is precisely how the same mathematical string theory can come up with 10 ^ 500 'possible' types of universe.
It's a seemingly very reasonable assumption, because whilst one can imagine physical constants and properties varying, it is incredibly hard to imagine the laws of maths having any alternatives.
However, the argument that physics supervenes upon maths rather than maths upon physics is is not an argument for crazy universes in which 2 + 2 = 3. It is essentially an argument that there is actually only one possible type of universe.
It's worth pointing out that in 'eternal inflation' nobody really explains WHY bubble universes that pop up should have laws different from the meta laws of the background expanding space.
Physicists may be able to 'imagine' 10 ^ 500 universe types ( actually they can't as all the atoms in our universe could not contain a brain capable of imagining that many universes )...but I can also imagine unicorns.

I have no idea if "Ubermench" is a physicist who knows what he's talking about, as he claims, but his comment makes an enormous amount of sense to me.  I especially like his idea that, assuming the "brain only" hypothesis that there aren't enough atoms in the universe to make up enough brains to imagine the jillions of universes that are so breezily created by those who hate the idea of a Creator.  It forces the fact that when they start talking about these imaginary universes they're not really talking about universes, they're talking about numbers and wild conjectures, made in this one universe we can observe, within the minds of one peculiar kind of life on one little tiny planet in that enormous universe.  These multi-universe creators are vastly more arrogant and inconsistent than the religious folks they clearly disdain and despise.   They make the wildest speculations about the dimensions of God dreamed up in Jewish mysticism, the vastness of Brahma in some schools of Indian speculation and all other religious statements of that sort (many of which are clearly metaphorical, at least in their origins) modest and humble by comparison.

There is no way for them to hold the possibility of disembodied minds and the brain-only dogma and claim to be rationally consistent.  If there are other universes, there is no basis for assuming that human mathematics or physics or metaphysics apply there.  As I've pointed out, those systems which propose one and two dimensional universes would, through imposing human geometry on them, obliterate the basic assumptions of materialism, that the only real reality is that containing matter and physical forces acting on matter.  That takes more than two dimensions, by their own definition.

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