Making Probability a creator god and The Menace Beneath The Charming Science Celebrity

Please note the important update in the post. It makes the point much more clearly. I will post a better revision of this later.

 I almost didn't listen to Krista Tippett's program this morning when I heard Brian Greene was going to be on it.  I find Greene almost as hard to take as I did Carl Sagan late in his career as Dr. Science.  Though Greene hasn't become quite as annoyingly mannered and isn't yet surrounded by the kind of glamour Sagan and his publicity folks generated, he is as prone to those two sins of celebrity scientists, being unaware of the rather large leaps of presumption he makes and being rather prone to discussing things in absolute term for which he has no more intellectual qualification than any other non-specialist.   You can add a third one, being naively unaware of the implications of what he is saying for him, his science and even for the ideological basis on which he is saying them.

I'll start here with the first of those because it was actually my entree into the brawl with materialism, free will.  It arose out of a section of the conversation that got onto the fashionable idea that there are parallel universes being generated all the time,  in some of the more extreme versions of this least parsimonious of all results of elevating probability mathematics into a creator god, whenever anything happens it generates entire universes that express all possible probabilistic calculations of alternative outcomes.

Dr. Greene: Right. We sit there, the math jumps out of the page, kind of grabs us by the lapel, slaps us in the face, and says, look at me. What this is telling you is there might be parallel universes. And we say, oh, that’s curious. Let’s think about that, investigate it. So that’s the typical rhythm of the way in which these ideas surface. This idea that you’re referring to comes out of quantum mechanics, which is this new way of describing the fundamental particles of nature that emerged in the early part of the 20th century. And the new idea is that you can only predict the probability of one outcome or another. Newton wouldn’t have said that. He would say tell me how things are and I’ll predict how they will be. Period. End of story. Quantum theory says, no, no, no. I can tell you there’s a 30% chance of this, 50% chance of that, 20% chance of that outcome over there. In fact, one of the proposals is that every outcome happens, they just happen in distinct realities in parallel universes.

Ms. Tippett: So somewhere, all of those possible outcomes were made manifests.

Dr. Greene: That’s right. So basically, any outcome allowed by the quantum laws of physics would see the light of day, but the light would be flowing through a different universe.

And if you don't believe that this kind of materialism has turned probability into a creator god, you may not be aware of these guys, who seem inevitably to be atheists who devote their lives in science to try to debunk most peoples' idea of a creator, have also calculated Boltzmann Brains into existence along with these other jillions of universes.   And, as they make these improbable seeming products of their probabilistic god some kind of disembodied flesh, they also reject the idea that people possess free will.   The evidence of that is where the conversation goes right after that.

Ms. Tippett: OK. So all of this science, um, without wanting to raises a lot of really basic philosophical — ancient philosophical questions about destiny and fate and choice. Do you — I understand that’s not what you’re studying and the mathematics doesn’t speak to that, directly...

Dr. Greene: Well, it sort of does. I mean, when you ask the question about choice, I presume you were indicating things like free will.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah.

Dr. Greene: And, you know, by no means would I say that we have got the be-all and end-all mathematical description of reality. We’re struggling to get there. But as a snapshot, if you look at the equations that we have today, there does not seem to be a place anywhere in those equations where you say, oh, OK, and here is where human free will comes in to how things are going to evolve. Right? There’s no term in the equations where that happens.

Ms. Tippett: OK. We’ll come back that (laughs). Um, I mean, so I keep — well, let me just do it. I keep thinking of another thing Einstein said, that science is good at describing what is, but it doesn’t describe what should be. And, there’s a way in which the way we’ve tended throughout human history to talk about something like free will or fate or destiny or choice or, you know, just the human condition, is in terms of what should be, what we can control. What life we create.

Dr. Greene: Right. So, we live our lives as if we do have control. And I think it’s the only way that you can live. You tell yourself this interesting, perhaps untrue, story that when you reach out for the glass, you’re making a choice to pick it up. And I do it, too. I sort of felt like I just picked that glass up because I made a choice. But fundamentally, I don’t think that I did.

But putting that to aside, yes, we feel we have control, we act as though we have control, and then Einstein’s quote comes into play, because once you have control, you can shape the future. And you can shape the future according to distinct values. And, yeah, I think that is the only way that we humans can live, at least, you know, in this epoch, you know, until we evolve to some other form. And sure there is no way to look to science to tell us how to shape things from some sense of value judgment.

[ Note:  Please read the update below before continuing ]

Which is where this becomes, in the most certain of fact, extremely dangerous.   A culture in which free will is not assumed in people is a very dangerous place to live.  That is the real life lesson of the political history still within living memory, it was the basic assumption behind all of the great genocidal regimes of the 20th century, regardless of where they are placed on the imaginary line of political identity.   In both fascistic regimes, especially the Nazi regime and the "Marxist" regimes, the devaluation of life into a manifestation of bio-chemistry is what allowed them to murder on an industrial scale.  We have the writings of the theorists of those political regimes who the despotic establishments based their systems on.  The consequences of those materialist views of human life provided no barriers to convenient depravity, in some cases depravity based on not even convenience but whimsy and paranoia.  I won't spare the tender feelings of genteel atheists by lying about that for them, it is as much a denial of those genocides to deny the bases of them as it is for the actual results of them.

That is what the evidence available indicates you can expect when a mechanistic, materialistic definition is given to living beings and, especially for our purposes, human beings.  Brian Greene's blithe unawareness of that implication of his denotation switcheroo, taming free will so it isn't a problem for his materialism, is astonishing considering that during the same program Greene has to admit that his area of science, the thing that his popular presentation of has made him famous, string theory, has no basis in evidence, whatsoever.

Audience member: Hi, Dr. Greene. What’s the best evidence we have for string theory right now? Some of the best and most credible evidence that you know of we have for string theory? Thanks.

Dr. Greene: Yeah. The evidence of string theory — that string theory is right, good. So other questions that you guys would like to (laughter). No, if you — so, the quick answer to your question is absolutely nothing. String theory is a completely mathematical undertaking, and at the moment, there’s no experiment that we can point to, which would say there is the evidence for this idea. And for that reason, string theory really should be called the string hypothesis. Theory in science is a very specific meaning. And string theory does not rise to that level, as yet. Now, having said that, let me just point out that we have tested quantum mechanics.

Greene then goes on to present the basis of his faith that if only there were ever any evidence that string theory will win out.  What he doesn't say is that the same evidence produces other theories which students adopt largely based on which side of the country they go to school in and with which proponents of which theory their academic qualifications were gathered from.  And there are people who look at the same evidence and they are string theory skeptics.

Compared to the speculations of these guys pass off as entirely respectable, and, remember, THEY were the ones who came up with Boltzmann brains, and the parallel universes are even more of a leap of faith, a faith which they've sold to large swaths of the so-called educated public, the lessons of 20th century history are real in every sense, more profoundly real, more absolutely and reliably real, in every sense real,  as D. T. Suzuki may have put it.

As is generally the case in programs when celebrity scientists are the focus, much is made in the program about the cultural importance of science in modern life and while that is true it also points out the danger of refusing to value the greater and more rich truth of history.  History is not based in speculations of what the probability god will do, it is based on what has become as real as it can possibly be, in the real lives of real beings.   And if there's something obvious about those who service this god of probability, they are a jealous priesthood, one which will not grant real legitimacy to the work of any they see as rivals, secular or religious.  And being arrogant, they dismiss, entirely even the entirely secular academic studies, such as history, which do, in fact, study reality in a much richer complexity, one which doesn't depend on massive layouts of public resources for giant super-colliders and massive research budgets.  And even though that has been done for their faith, the project to confirm the sect Greene promotes would require a collider larger than the solar system, or so I read from some of the scientific skeptics of his faith.

When materialists go after free will, when they insist on reducing the mind to chemistry, they are playing with lives, real, actual lives and on the scale of millions if not more.  And, as mentioned here yesterday, they insist on exempting their own thoughts from that view of thinking because it would make it impossible for their thoughts to be any more than a result of a chemical process, based on the particular chemistry present in their materialistic brains, not having the full range of possible chemical combinations available when they come up with their new arrangement of molecules.  In fact, I would think that the probability of two of them coming up with the same idea, arrangement of molecules is infinitesimally small. Perhaps the idea that even two of these guys are talking about the same thing is an illusion and there aren't even two string theorists who are even talking about the same thing.  No, wait, if there is something obvious about bio chemistry in a living being, no string theorist could hold the same idea for more than a short period of time before their brain chemistry altered the idea of string theory they articulated a few minutes before.   And that is only a slight peek into the consequences of materialism for science, its ability to produce a reliable idea on the shifting sands of biochemistry under the operations of probability in living beings,  oh, sorry, biological systems open to constant new inputs and the deaths of parts of the system.  Recovering an idea in a form that was reliably consistent would seem to make science, as Greene and all other scientists imagine it, impossible.

UPDATE:   I mixed up the sections of the interview while putting the edit I posted up.  Here is the even more telling exchange about free will.

Audience member: Thank you, Dr. Greene. Thank you for all your work and the way it’s informing my guild. I’m a theologian. So I have two questions, really. I either did not understand or am not convinced or persuaded by your conversation about free will. Because it sounds as if your proposal situates us in a very deterministic universe. And that we are simply, in some sense, almost robots acting out of these general laws. And that there’s no novelty within this very, very complex and creative entity that we are as conscious beings. That’s my first.

Dr. Greene: So, yes, it is hard to accept (laughter). But I wouldn’t…

Audience member: So, can you say something…

Dr. Greene: ...I wouldn’t go as far as to say there’s no novelty. but yes, free will may go away.
Female three: So, free will, meaning choice. There’s no such thing as choice?

Dr. Greene: That’s right.

Audience member: I do not choose to love. I do not choose to extend myself. I don’t choose to live, to get back to Camus.

Dr. Greene: Well, it all depends on what you mean by choose. So, if by choose, you mean that you could have done otherwise, then I would say yes. But I would say that you need to redefine the meaning of the word choose. Choose is the sensation of choosing. Now it is the fact that the laws of physics were just playing themselves out, and that is fundamentally why you did what you did. But to choose is to have the sensation of making that choice. And we all have that sensation. And that is a definition which I think works well. It does require a little bit of rejiggering of your intuition to recognize that it may be the case that it — the laws of physics that are behind the scenes doing it all. But yes, that sensation of choice is real. And that’s what we should redefine free will to mean.

Audience member: Free will to…

Dr. Greene: Free will is the sensation of making the choice. Even though, behind the scenes, the laws of physics were pulling the strings (laughter).

Audience member: Thank you. I’m still not persuaded (laughter). My second question, though, has to do with positing the divine reality, which, you know, let’s use the God word. Why do you keep positing it above and beyond, since we in the theological guild are not doing that anymore?

Dr. Greene: Well if you use the word God to mean a being that is composed of the same stuff that we see in the world around us, governed by the same laws that that stuff is governed by, then God is a perfectly coherent and sensible idea. And if that’s what you mean by it, then we’re talking the same language. But if you mean what traditionally is meant by God, which is a being that can intercede, that can cause things to happen that are not governed by the laws of physics, then we are talking different languages.


And I should say I’m not saying that that idea is wrong. It may be right. It may be that God is behind it all. Maybe God set it all up and, you know, there’s some variations of these ideas where God sits back and lets it all play itself out. And that could well be what’s going on. What I really mean to say is not that the idea is wrong, but as a scientist, I find it profoundly uninteresting, because it gives me no new insight into any of the deep questions that we’ve been talking about here. Doesn’t help me calculate anything. Doesn’t help me gain some insight into these big mysteries. It simply takes one mystery and uses another three-letter-word to re-label that mystery. And that is why I don’t find it interesting. Not that it’s wrong, I don’t find it interesting.

This section shows just how intimately Greene's desire to debunk God is tied into his materialistic insistence on destroying the meaning of free will.   It's hard to decide what is the more basic desideratum, insisting on the supremacy of materialism and so their professional prestige or destroying God.  Those are the overriding motives, and they don't mind rather naively and ignorantly killing off free will and with astonishing insouciance, the possibility that thoughts can surpass the peculiar biochemistry that they insist on to achieve truth or their still cluelessly insisted on objectivity.  You can't get an objective and universal result from the specific, particular and randomly incomplete components that go into that result.  Certainly not one that someone with different antecedent components has to or even possibly could agree with.