I pick this up from Thought Criminal, whose comments are worth reading, and to which I only add a sidebar:
Horgan: Steven Weinberg recently told me that science will never explain why there is something rather than nothing.
Hossenfelder: I agree with him. It’s not a scientific question, or at least I don’t see how to make a scientific question out of it. Unless of course you want to reinterpret “nothing” as “quantum vacuum” as Lawrence Krauss does. I would argue though that even a quantum vacuum is still something.
Horgan: If physics can’t solve that problem, does that mean we’ll always be stuck with religious explanations?
Hossenfelder: Religious explanation is an oxymoron. Religion is what people draw upon if they don’t want to admit that they have no explanation. Will we always be stuck with problems to which scientists don’t have an answer? Yes, I think so.
Horgan: Do you believe in God?
Hossenfelder: No.
Horgan: What is “the free will function”? And why doesn’t it persuade you that free will is real?
Hossenfelder: The free will function allows the universe to evolve in such a way that the future is neither determined by the past nor its becoming fundamentally random. If you want to hang on to the belief in free will, then you need to find a law for the universe’s evolution which is different from the laws in our current theories. This new evolution law must partly be based on a process that was neither random nor pre-determined. This process is what the free will function provides.
It doesn’t persuade me because the example that I constructed isn’t embedded into the current theories of nature and I don’t know whether it’s possible to do this. It is not a realistic construction – it is merely a proof of principle to demonstrate that is possible at all. And of course I am cognitively biased to believe in free will, so how much can I trust myself in my own argument?
A "cognitive bias" for free will is a bit of a cheat, but no more so than denying the "soul" but acknowledging "mind" or "self." Especially if you subdivide "self" into Id, Ego, and Superego, or just argue with yourself (I do!), but never consider: who's doing the arguing and who's being argued with? There is a Western (at least) bias toward dualism, mind in body, mind in brain, etc., that's hard to stand apart from (and soon we step onto Kierkegaard's stage, with the man who so stood apart from his existence that one day he found he had ceased to exist, without realizing it. (It's a joke, and a sharp one. Don't take everything seriously.). Equally hard is to explain who "I" and "myself" are in her sentence, aside from pieces of English grammar. Who, for example, is the "I" she is not trusting? Herself? And who is that, if not "I", to her? But where, in her scientific terms, is this "I" located?
Anyway, that's not my point. Nor is the discussion of the "free will function." It's the blithe designation of "religion" as "what people draw upon if they don’t want to admit that they have no explanation." I'll admit in my brief stint as a pastor people often asked me to explain to them matters for which they had no explanation, especially in the deaths of children and infants. I had no explanation, either. In their grief they sought answers. Did "religion" fail because it didn't provide them? (This is what TC means by the "God of the gaps" theory of God. Which is not a theologial construct; it's an informal one.) I don’t have an explanation for grief, and I imagine whatever one science comes up with will be less than helpful or enlightening. But then, I don’t consider religion the bastard twin of science.
"Informal" is really where I want the discussion to go. People generally denigrate theology, but look to it to "explain" God. And then they create "folk" explanations ("God won't give you a heavier burden than you can bear"; "God has a plan," or, especially at funerals, "God needed them to come back home.") which are shallower and less useful than theological ones, and proceed to use those flimsy examples of reasoning to say "religion" is for children and the ignorant, and aren't we smart not to be so blind?
It's all bosh, and a way of dismissing something you know nothing about. It's a straw man argument, actually. What Hossenfelder describes as "religion" wouldn't be recognized as valid by any Christian believer or theologian, and yet that crude caricature is "true" because it's somehow...scientific? Enlightened? Rational? And, of course, it only applies to Christianity. I don't know how it applies to Islam or Judaism, or any of the other great world religions (Buddhism, Taoism, Janism, etc., etc., etc.) Funny how flippant criticisms of religion always only apply to reductio ad absurdum descriptions of some flavors of Christianity.
If I were pressed to say what religion is, I would start with Derrida: “Religion is responsibility, or it is nothing at all.” Doesn’t really start to explain things you don’t have an explanation for, does it?
And yet what I really want to do is to introduce Hossenfelder to Godel's incompleteness theorem. True, the theorem applies to formal systems, but it's a useful construct for her informal and cobbled together "reasoning" (honestly, as TC points out, anyone not familiar with the history of "scientific reasoning" as applied to public policy shouldn't be allowed anything sharper than a rubber ball. American racism was "scientific," and led directly to public policy enforcing eugenics ("Three generations of imbeciles is enough!"), until the Nazis shamed us out of it when the reached the death camps at the end of the war, and we buried our own complicity even more quickly than we buried the idea the Civil War was about slavery.) Not to mention, of course, the "scientific" governance of Nazi Germany, and Stalinist Russia. Just for starters.
Godel's theorem, though, posits (and proves!) that any formal system will generate a question to which is cannot provide the answer. This is, in part, why Newtonian physics ultimately gives way to relativity, which gives way to quantum mechanics. Questions Newton couldn't answer, Einstein did, but altering Newtonian physics, in part. Quantum mechanics went on to "play dice with the universe," in Einstein's phrase. But ultimately there are questions science cannot answer, like why does a mother grieve the death of her infant, and what do you tell her to comfort her? Or just to help her in her grief? Mindless platitudes about a "better place"? I would advise you not to, just from my experience.
This, by the way, doesn't impress me at all:
The free will function allows the universe to evolve in such a way that the future is neither determined by the past nor its becoming fundamentally random. If you want to hang on to the belief in free will, then you need to find a law for the universe’s evolution which is different from the laws in our current theories. This new evolution law must partly be based on a process that was neither random nor pre-determined. This process is what the free will function provides.
So you're just appealing to Aristotelean cause and effect reasoning to describe the universe as non-random, trading in the word "evolution" for the concept of "progress" or "movement forward," without bothering to define what "forward" is, or what motion is directing away from)where? The past? Is time indeed an arrow? But Einstein showed Tim is different in different places.), and to, or where "to" is (everywhere? Nowhere? Somewhere?), but comfortable with the acceptance (Aristotle again!) of a telos to it all. Even if it's just to keep going. But Aristotle was talking about living things, and life may well be an aberration in the universe, and if the telos of galaxies is to spin and whirl and run into each other, what's the evolution of the newly identified black hole sucking in a star the size of our sun on average per each solar day? Sounds a lot more like chaos to me than "evolution" or a "free will function." The "new evolution law" may need to be based on a non-random process, but a massive black hole slowly consuming everything around it and growing larger, not smaller, as it does so; and apparently having existed (by best guess) since the beginning of the universe itself (and how did that happen? What was here before space and matter?) How is "nothing" on such an absolute scale, possible? Is it even conceivable? I'll grant you my own death is not conceivable to me because I'm cognitively biased against imagining my own non-existence, but am I equally biased, and on the same basis, from conceiving a nothing out of which something came? Ex nihilo, nihil fit, is not a scientific principle, but it's surely a concept hard to get away from.
And if we have to step away from the Aristotelean explanation, don't we have to step into another system of explanations? And isn't that what Godel showed?
Which, granted, is not an argument for religion, especially as you so poorly define it. But it's a better argument than a reductio ad absurdum one, that relies so plainly on a straw man. Honestly, if you’re going to play in these fields, know what you’re talking about. To the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But you seem to think the things that don’t look like nails aren’t important enough to bother with. And suddenly you’ve left out so much of the universe, there isn’t enough to bother with.
From Catherine Maclennan, née MacDonald, crofter, Achadh nam Breac, Moydart.
“My mother was always at work, by day helping my father on the croft, and by night at wool and spinning, at night clothes and at day clothes for the family. My mother would be beseeching us to be careful in everything, to put value on time and to eschew idleness; that a night was coming in which no work could be done. She would be telling us about Mac Shiamain, and how he sought to be at work. If we were dilatory in putting on our clothes, and made an excuse for our prayers, my mother would say that God regarded heart and not speech, the mind and not the manner; and that we might clothe our souls with grace while clothing our bodies with raiment. My mother taught us what we should ask for in prayer, as she heard it from her own mother, and as she again heard it from the one who was before her.
“My mother would be asking us to sing our morning song to God down in the backhouse, as Mary’s lark was singing up in the clouds, and as Christ’s mavis was singing it yonder in the tree, giving glory to the God of the creatures for the repose of the night, for the light of the day, and for the joy of life. She would tell us that every creature on the earth here below and in the ocean beneath and in the air above was giving glory to the great God of the creatures and the worlds, of the virtues and the blessings, and would we be dumb!
“My dear mother reared her children in food and clothing, in love and charity. My heart loves the earth in which my beloved mother rests.”
Quoted from Carmina Gadelica: Hymns and Incantations collected in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the Last Century, by Alexander Carmichael (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press 1997), pp. 197, 621.That’s an example of “religion.” For the life of me, I can’t understand what it has to do with explaining something you can’t explain.
No comments:
Post a Comment