There’s something about this book that looks very inviting. It’s got a nice velvety matte burgandy cover, simple text layout, and a artistic phographic inset right in the middle. I see this book and I think it will be filled with similar artistic renderings, bright and colourful, illustrating all the wonders of the universe, like an art history of cosmology. But alas, upon opening it, we see the same old stuff from every one of my plain cover physics and math textbooks:

I suppose I just built myself up for disappointment. But there’s something deeper doing on here. I think everybody, at some point or another, gets a semester or at least one class in their university careers where everything starts being woven together. For me I suddenly saw complex variables being applied in signal processing, differential equations solving mechanics problems, mechanics in quantum physics, quantum physics explaining particle behavior, and looking at particles in special relativity. Suddenly it was obvious that all these classes were talking about the same thing. Here it happens again, except this time the connection is of a much different nature.

It is this: The page above, in my General Relativity textbook, covers the same material as a textbook in one of my philosophy classes, even with the same terminology. I always said there was a connection between physics and philosophy.

Such thoughts always bring me to think about where I want to take my studies after undergrad. I still can’t decide if I like philosophy because it’s just one step higher in abstraction than cosmology (one step too far, say some), or if I like cosmology because it’s one of the areas of physics that has the most philosophical implications. I tell people that I want to study “Philosophy and Physics” but not “Philosophy of Physics”. Unfortunately there are many graduate programs in the latter but only a couple of the former.

But what would a program in “Philosophy and Physics” be, anyway? Today I realised what was lacking about the phrase, and refined it. What I’m really interested in, what’s been my motivation all along is this: The Philosophical Consequences of Physics. In particular, the philosophical consequences of cosmology. Now all I have to do is find a graduate program for it.

Somewhere along the way, before I knew who Richard Dawkins was, I read that Douglas Adams’s favourite book, The Blind Watchmaker, was written by him. A few years later I heard him mentioned in a university course on Human Evolution. Gradually I found out what this guy was about and realised that he believed and adamantly argued for many of the things that I believe I might believe.

I figured if I wanted to be able to articulate my own atheism in any coherent way, reading Richard Dawkins would be a great way to start. I don’t just want to be able to repeat his arguments, of course, since, although I say I’m an atheist, that’s only the short and easy answer. The real one involves postulating God in a particular cosmological context and concluding that you can’t trust anything he might say even if he did exist, so what’s the point in worshipping him?

At the same time that I was reaching the conclusion that I should read The Blind Watchmaker, I encountered a couple independent groups of people who recommended that I read Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe, which examines problems in evolution from a biochemical perspective.

I figured that it would be rather biased if I only read Dawkins to reinforce my own atheism, so for Christmas I asked for both books. I haven’t started reading either consistently yet, but I like being able to look at both aspects of the problem and consider them both in their own right. Atheist though I may be, I have nothing against a sound, well formed argument opposing it.

Many arguments against atheism, however, are far from that. Take for example the Atlas of Creation by Harun Yahya. Just in the summary there is enough to tell me that the book is complete nonsense. It’s not uncommon to hear that the fossil record can’t be trusted, but this book is about taking fossils which are millions of years old, comparing them to currently living species, and then concluding that since some species are essentially unchanged evolution must never have happened. Presumably the countless other fossils which do show evolution are still fake, since if even one species hasn’t changed in a few million years none of them could have.

Needless to say, I’m not going to be asking for Atlas of Creation for Christmas any time soon.

Some time ago Robert Sawyer removed the Google AdSense from his blog since outfits he would never recommend kept showing up. I’ve been having a similar problem lately.

It seems that whenever I start talking about physics, philosophy, cosmology, or related subjects the Google AdBot decides it would be a good time to push out ads for the book called The Final Theory. I’ve read the sample material on their website and said what I thought about it before, but it bears repeating: it’s complete nonsense.

Nonetheless, I’m can’t help but be tempted to read the whole thing (red pen at the ready), in the same sort of way people can’t help but stare at hideous traffic accidents. There’s just no way I could bring myself to pay for such a thing, and I’m not going to ask anybody else to pay for it either. It pains me to think that even just talking about it means that the ads will probably be even more frequent.

There are several other book ads that pop up about creationism, proof for the existence of God, etc. I have that same traffic accident curiosity about all of them. To satisfy myself I asked for the most oft mentioned one I know of for Christmas—Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe—but I also asked for Richard Dawkins’s reply to it, The Blind Watchmaker, for the sake of balance in the universe.

Free speech be damned. What I really should do before anything else is figure out how to block those Final Theory ads from showing up in my AdSense.

…or at least an hour and a half over my lunch hour today. I went to see geologist Dr. Emil Silvestru speak about evidence for the biblical flood of Genesis.

The mechanism for a flood basically depends on some catastrophic plate tectonics, which is a theory I’ve heard before. I know very little about geology so I’m not able to comment logically on the theories he presented, but there was nothing glaringly wrong about it. Basically with large enough changes in the earth’s crust (and he presented some arguments as to the feasibility of such) you can get the kind of large scale flooding needed for a “global” flood. There is certainly enough water to do the job, if you just redistribute it appropriately. I would definitely have to look up some of the people he mentioned and some of the scientific articles he appealed to before I could say I was convinced even of the mere possibility though.

Where he ran into trouble was where he would try to fit this into a literal interpretation of the Bible, right down to the young Earth idea. Now if you told me that there was evidence for large scale tectonic events that could have caused massive flooding, wiping out much of the life on Earth, millions of years ago I might be inclined to believe you, especially if it happened at the time of one of the mass extinctions. On the other hand, this guy was saying this all happened 4500 years ago. He might as well have started arguing that the Earth is flat.

My favourite part was the diagram of Noah’s Ark, which included everything from people to elephants to a good old Tyrannosaurus Rex. Don’t worry about overcrowding though—he only had to take two of each type of animal, and they all diverged after the flood, presumably in an orgy of species differentiation lasting, I would assume, for only as long as they could without any humans noticing. Maybe it happened the same way God forcibly split up Noah’s family to form all the cultures around the world we have today.

Now if he could have presented a consistent argument to such I would give him more credit, but he constantly used to geological features that are tens of thousands to millions of years old as evidence for his flood. When questioned he said that all of it must have actually formed within the last few thousand years. The ice age, for example, only took about 500 years.

All of this he basically chalked up to errors in carbon dating. The difficulty in dating geological features accurately I can understand, but not to hundreds of orders of magnitude! A few thousand and a few million is quite a margin. And of course there are other methods of dating that cover different epochs and are often more accurate.

Even worse, he denies that civilisations like the Egyptians and the Chinese were ever around as long ago as 2500 BC, again calling it errors in carbon dating. I could swear we had other ways of dating things like human history (say, CALENDARS) but obviously I must just be brainwashed by my Old Earth scientific paradigm. It does solve one problem though—the Egyptians could have used dinosaurs to do all the heavy lifting when building the pyramids!

In Robert J. Sawyer’s book Mindscan, the main character has his mind copied and uploaded into a robotic version of himself so that he (in his new robotic body) can live on without fear of sudden death from a medical condition his original biological self suffers from. But once the copy is made, they can’t just murder the original…

“All right, Mr. Sullivan, you can come out now.” It was Dr. Killian’s voice, with its Jamaican lilt.

My heart sank. No…

“Mr. Sullivan? We’ve finished the scanning. It you’ll press the red button…”

It hit me like a ton of bricks, like a tidal wave of blood. No! I should be somewhere else, but I wasn’t.

Damn it all, I wasn’t.

“If you need help getting out…” offered Killian.

I reflexively brought up my hands, patting my chest, feeling the softness of it, feeling it rise and fall. Jesus Christ!

“Mr. Sullivan?”

“I’m coming, damn it. I’m coming.”

I hit the button without looking at it, and the bed slid out of the scanning tube, emerging feet-first; a breech birth. Damn! Damn! Damn!

I hadn’t exerted myself at all, but my breathing was rapid, shallow. If only—

I felt a hand cupping my elbow. “I’ve got you, Mr. Sullivan,” said Killian. “Upsa-daisy…” My feet connected with the harsh tile floor. I had known intellectually that it had been a fifty-fifty shot, but I’d only thought about what it was going to be like to wake up in a new, healthy, artificial body. I hadn’t really considered…”

– from “Mindscan”, by Robert J Sawyer

If this were possible, if you could duplicate yourself or copy your mind into another body, who would be the real you? What’s the definition of a person? An individual? That’s the sort of thing this book talks about. For a nonfiction approach to the problem of personhood, there’s Jeff McMahan’s The Ethics of Killing.

Sawyer and McMahan, as is the general intuition (if there is such a thing), seem to only look at the fact that before some time there is one person and afterwards, two. Sullivan says he had a fifty-fifty chance of being in the new body, but I disagree. The Sullivan that went in to be scan was 100% guaranteed to come back out the same person, and he was 100% guaranteed to wake up in his new robotic body.

It’s almost as if, to wrap our heads around it, we picture there always being two people, who at some point just get split up into two bodies. One goes into Body A, the other into Body B, with a fifty-fifty chance of getting either particular one.

But before the split, there is only one person, and he will go into both Body A and Body B. There’s no chance involved. Sure, after that point, the world lines of the two copies diverge and are two different people, but they do not just share their history, they have the same history. The same family, the same ex-girlfriends, the same credit history, etc.

You may want to argue that the original physical body takes precedence, and the copy is a fundamentally new person, who never grew up in the suburbs, who never had a first kiss, and who never had to pay a bill (yet). You may have a point, but you can easily imagine a different situation (as McMahan does in his book) where not just the mind is copied into a robot but the original body is completely duplicated into two new copies, biological systems and all, and is destroyed in the process. Each version has equal claim to being the original, calling the other a copy (or, each have no claim at all). We just have no intuition to reconcile ourselves with the fact that two people were earlier the same single individual. Do you have any more claim to having been born from your mother than your brother does?

As always, it boils down to viewing the bigger picture (not just what the case is at two separate times), with a healthy does of my own prejudice about the unimportance of time. It’s just a dimension like any other.

The moral of the story is that if I ever have my mind duplicated into a robotic body, don’t ask which one is the original, because we both are. If you do, I’ll probably just bore you to death with philosophical ramblings.

Now I may only be one chapter into it so far, but I’m already falling in love with David Bohm and F. David Peat.

DAVID PEAT: As far back as I can remember, I was always interested in the universe. I can still remember standing under a street lamp one evening—I must have been eight or nine—and looking up into the sky and wondering if the light went on forever and ever, and what it meant for something to go on forever and ever, and if the universe ever came to an end. You know the sorts of questions. Well, pretty soon the idea began to excite me that the human mind was able to ask these sorts of questions and in some way comprehend the vastness of everything.

These sorts of ideas continued right through school, along with a feeling of the interconnectedness of everything. It was almost as if the entire universe were a living entity. But of course, when I got down to the serious business of studying science at university, all this changed. I felt that the deepest questions, particularly about the quantum theory, were never properly answered. It seemed pretty clear that most scientists were not really interested in these sorts of questions. They felt that they were not really related to their day-to-day research. Instead we were all encouraged to focus on getting concrete results that could be used in published papers and to work on problems that were “scientifically accpetable.” So faily early on, I found myself getting into hot water because I was always more excited by questions that I didn’t know how to answer than by more routine research. And of course, that’s not the way to build up an impressive list of scientific publications.

And later,

DAVID BOHM: I learned later that many of my fundamental interests were what other people called philosophical and that scientists tended to look down on philosophy as not being very serious This created a problem for me, as I was never able to see any inherent separation between science and philosophy …

I did not feel that it was worth going on with, not without a deeper philosophical ground and the spirit of common inquiry. You see, it is these very things that provide the interest and motivation for using mathematical techniques to study the nature of reality.

As I was reading those passages it slowly dawned on me that I kind of wanted to make out with them. Now you know the way to my heart.

There is no destiny and there is no fate, but I believe in both.

It is impossible to change your destiny. If you believe you have, it only means that you didn’t really know what your destiny was. By definition you cannot avoid your destiny and you cannot change your fate, because whatever you do or become means that that was what you were destined to do or to become. Your fate is what happens to you.

Does this mean that everything is fixed in the world and you can’t do anything to change it? If you believe that, and so you give up on life, then it was your destiny to do that, but if you don’t and choose to continue living life then that was your destiny.

It is a paradox but one that contains no information and holds no problem to resolve. To me questions of fate and destiny don’t matter at all since they are concepts defined only by what happens, not what is meant to happen.

Though it may imply a fixed universe, it just as easily implies the other. Nothing is meant to happen, it just happens. It is Douglas Adams’ tautology that is “the prime cause of everything in the Universe“, “anything that happens happens.”

The world is ours.

I think I’ve just developed a philosophical Theory of Everything, which is completely based on science and logical truths (statements which can not be false under any circumstance, like “Either Stephen Harper is the Prime Minister or Stephen Harper is not the Prime Minister”) and from which I can derive a complete set of ethics, morals, theory of being, and answer to any philosophical question you care to name.

Well, considering I just thought this up which doing the dishes, it might not be as concrete as I make it sound, but I have confident in it nonetheless.

Since I don’t believe that there is anything close to “research” or “discovery” in philosophy, it’s a bit strange that I care so much about it. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody’s already came up with the same idea. But that’s all part of the theory.

I love tautologies.

Perhaps I should save it for my PhD thesis.

In every wood, in every spring
There is a different green

from “I Sit Beside the Fire” by JRR Tolkien

I’m always reminded of the above whenever anybody irritates me by saying “If you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all,” but today I’m reminded of it for a different reason.

Charley mentioned to me a while back that some cultures don’t differentiate between green and yellow, instead calling them different shades of the same colour. I realised that we do it in English too. Most of the time the only people differentiating between mauve and puce — both weird purplish colours — are paint companies. (Did anybody else know that all sorts of colour names have specific numerical definitions, at least according to wikipedia? Puce is #CC8899.) This begs the question, how many colours are there?

The first obvious problem is that you have to define what a colour is. Ask a web designer and they’ll say about 16 million, while a kindergartener might name a dozen. Someone who thinks they’re very clever might say there’s only three primary colours. I can’t help but suspect that the three fundamental colours are biological. We have three types of cones that detect light in our eyes, but some animals have 4 or 5, effectively giving them 4 or 5 primary colours. Birds, for example, have a cone which can see ultraviolet light.

Further complicating things is that there’s no way to see what colours another person is seeing. While two people may say a ball is red, the mental image one person assigns to that particular combination of light that makes “red” might actually be “green” to the other person. Somewhere in our brains there’s a translation between input from our retinas and a mental image of a colour, and there’s no reason to think everybody has the same translation, even though the English word attached might be the same.

Now this point about colour being arbitrary is often used as an example to support some idea that reality is subjective — I think that was Charley’s original point in bringing this up. However, colour is special in that there is no second sense to confirm what we see. Two people see a ball, and since both can touch it and confirm it’s there, they know that they both see the same ball, but there’s no way to compare mental pictures.

The strangest artefact of this conversion of wavelengths or energies into a mental image is the twisting of a linear scale into a circular one. Why should the end of the spectrum wrap back onto the other end? Red goes to orange goes to yellow goes to green goes to blue goes to purple goes to red. This I can’t find a biological explanation for, but if anybody knows I’d like to hear.

Granted, the underlying physics of light is quantum so there is a specific number of energies of light that a person’s eye can see, but human perception muddies it all up. Trying to understand the resultant continuous perception in a discrete kind of way doesn’t seem informative to me, as convenient as it might be. The problem of discretizing continuous variables plagues psychology, philosophy, and all the social sciences. I think we’d get a lot more from these disciplines if we made a habit of conceptualizing them in continuous terms.

I spent some time looking at a few graduate programs today, and I’ve realised a few things.

I’ve really known this all along, but I’m definitely prefer being an annonymous student in the back of the class to the keener up front on a first name basis with the prof. Maybe just metaphorically. I still sit up front after all. The idea of defending a Ph.D thesis, for example, is a little daunting. But of course I know I certaintly won’t get myself anywhere if I don’t try.

Today I was concentrating on degrees which combine Philosophy and Physics. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive by any means, but it’s very difficult to find universities that have programs that deal with the connection. They all tend to be largely Philosophy programs concentrating on Philosophy of Science, whereas I would like a program founded mostly in current physical theory with philosophical considerations.

Yes, I am a scientific elitist. And though the term has negative connotations, I really can’t shake myself away from it. Philosophy without being based in science is, I think, completely uninformative. Even worse, I found myself scoffing at every Department of Philosophy web site that mentioned “research”. There are no discoveries in Philosophy. Indeed it’s a common criticism to call string theory philosophical.

I guess the main thing holding me back right now is just that — this feeling that anything philosophical is inferior. A Ph.D in Physics holds a lot more weight with me than one in Philosophy. Not just because everybody tends to be impressed at the difficulty of the former, but I really feel that you can say more with science.

Nonetheless, just as Philosophy without physics is meaningless, in some sense so is physics without philosophy. Maybe that’s what I can write my thesis about. For now I just have to see how my philosophy minor goes, and try to decide what to do for grad school.