Thursday 23 February 2017

The Mystery of Creation is Written in the Sky

When we think of creation we think of there needed to be a thing that creates and substance that is the building blocks of creation. "You can't get something from nothing" surely has to apply. When we think of mystery in science we think of the empty hearts of particle colliders where streams of particles with the energies of battleships at full-stream-ahead smash into each other and bully space into whispering the stories of new physics.
And yet, there is a place where mystery is everywhere and in everything we see. That place is the sky. Listening to the sky we hear the tepid hiss of microwaves, a gentle afterglow of the fires that formed all that is. The microwaves paint a celestial picture with the most delicate of watermarks, a pattern that has its origin in a subtle interplay of the strange and the unknown. The original canvas itself is a mystery. We see only the after-image. The canvas was an immaterial field which filled space. Unlike the electric or magnetic fields that build our technology, this field had no direction. It didn't go from there to here, it simply was where it was. Having no ends, it needed no origin. The field we call 'Higgs', responsible for the mass of particles, is the same: it comes from nowhere and goes nowhere.
The unknown field was different from the Higgs. It had an effect on space. The field tried to compress space, to shrink everything down. In a paradox of relativity, Einstein showed that such a pressure would make gravity blow space up. That's what happened. Space raced apart in a huge expansion which we call "Inflation". As this happened, the field was slowly losing its strength. This wasn't because space was tearing it apart, but because the field was born with a limited life. After a short time the field vanished and as it died, it ripped into space and made all the particles of matter and energy needed for a universe.
In a mystery of physics, the unknown field is labelled not the "Inflation" field, but the "Inflaton" field. (Perhaps this the same reason that the US distorts "Aluminium"). The Inflation field is a mystery. We haven't seen it in our experiments. We may never see it there, as it lives and dies in environments where universes are born. But we see it's beautiful legacy in the microwaves that fill the sky.
The watermarks on the sky are the result of ripples in the Inflaton canvas. They are ripples because of quantum mechanics, as quantum mechanics says that everything everywhere always ripples! The ripples are huge because inflation expanded the canvas again and again and again. There are ripples within ripples within ripples as waves like the splashes of pebbles in a pond spread then slowed. The canvas stretched, more pebbles, more waves. On and on this went, until the canvas was larger than we can ever imagine. The universe we see was the tiniest speck on the cosmic canvas of inflation.
And so, we see the effects of the Inflation, physics beyond what we know, and we see the tiniest wobbles of quantum uncertainty exploded to a size where they form the pattern for a cosmos.
The strangeness isn't over. A universe expanding isn't like the world we know - such a universe takes the laws of physics and flushes them away. You can't get something from nothing in our world, but in an expanding universe, you can. You can get creation for real, without a creator. The energy that fuels the expansion need never run out. The expansion stopped because inflation died out, not because it ran out of fuel.
Strange too is the short life of inflation. The story is beautiful but un
-imaginably brief. All that life, all the rippling of the canvas, lasted only 0.00000000000000000000000000000001 of a second. The birth pangs of our universe were short.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps there is more than one canvas. Perhaps inflation slowed and stopped here, but not everywhere. Perhaps universes are painted in countless skies, and minds will always wonder at the quantum artistry revealed.

Thursday 9 February 2017

Online abuse is out of control?

There is a recent TED talk about how the online abuse of women has "spiralled out of control". I have great sympathy for anyone who has experienced online abuse, but there is no mystery as to why this abuse occurs and how to deal with it. Abuse occurs because there are extremely vile people online, and current social media gives these people almost unlimited access to abuse anyone. 

We realised the problem of abuse decades ago in the early 90s when the Internet changed from being used mainly by academics to accessible by the general public. To deal with this change social forums like usenet were set up with moderation. This worked pretty well. What went wrong was that new social media were launched with no barriers to entry and, by default, everyone being accessible by everyone else. 

The idea that such wide open systems would be free from bullying and harassment was hopelessly naive. Instead of using online abuse as evidence of how broken our societies are, campaigners should insist that the terrible design flaws in social media such as Twitter and Facebook are fixed.

Thursday 2 February 2017

Why panpsychism isn't a solution to the mystery of consciousness

I have been reading an article by my philosopher friend Russell Blackford on panpsychism.

I take a stronger position on panpsychism, which is that it is simply false: There is a fundamental logical mistake with panpsychism, assuming the acceptance of "causal closure", that the brain is physical and all events that take place in the brain have physical causes. If all events in the brain have physical causes then those events are solutions of equations which enumerate physical laws. This is true in principle, even though such solutions may be intractable. Those solutions, by definition, cannot contain terms which incorporate panpsychism, because, if they did, panpsychism would be part of the physics of the brain. Therefore, it's not logically possible that any assertion we make about panpsychism can be because of panpsychism. Whatever the supposed mystery of mind is, that mystery cannot have panpsychism as the answer.

There are more subtle arguments against panpsychism, but the lack of causal effect on the brain is, in my view, the strongest.