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A nice thunderstorm rolled in late last night, leaving this morning quite shrouded in fog. I wish we called fog 'ground clouds' because thats what it is. The birds are singing as I drink my coffee and prepare packing my bowl with good dope. Its the simple things that make my morning. A used book I ordered came in, a physical hardcopy of "Deep Simplicity" I partially read it on my ebook and felt it good enough to add to the physical collection.
What it about and why do I want to read it? Understanding science has always been "my thing" ever since elementary school. What is fire, why does it rain, what are living things, what am I, Why do people act the way they do? Im someone who likes asking questions and getting answers. Science and math are about asking physical and logical questions and using certain methods to deduce rational answers to fit observations and axioms. I was provided A great many answers with logical consistency and reasonable axioms, which get know-it-alls like me get our rocks off. My interest has grown since then to a more general curiousity about all aspects of reality, not just what I can understand.
Natural processes have always inspired curiosity in me. Particularly some of the abstract geometrical structures that are tied to them (fractals baybeee!). Deep simplicity is about the history of our experements with those processes leading up to modern chaos theory, and how those processes defy our ability to predict them with any real certainty even with all our technological magic and computational powers. The reason your weather forcast only go out about a week is not a failure of the weather man or his tools but a hard mathematical limit on the knowability of dynamic systems prone to sensitive initial conditions.
Modern STEM has an unfortunate truth, the culture attracts many logos-obsessed acedemics with philosophies of absolute ridgid determinism and nihilistic agnosticism. Determinist and agnostics tend to find confort in both the logical riggor of mathematics and pridictive/explainative power of the scientific model. Attempting to use logical axioms and physical posseses to deny the concept free will, or of a God/maker/designer of the universe, with some idealistic Theory Of Everything.
I have no issues with these philosophies on their own, I even enbodied them during my angsty teen years. You can believe whatever you want as long as you aren't an obnoxious prick about it for all I care.
"How did everything start" Is pretty much the main focus of every creation myth, which pretty much all organized religions and big cults throughout all of human history and civilization have tried to answer in one way or another.
Turns out its a pretty big emotionally charged question that people seem to universally really care about the answer to, who would have thought.
In modern day we have:
and thats just the tip of the iceburg. theres thousands and thousands of relgions and cults with their own answers to the cosmic question of whodunnit? and whybeit?
Theres a misconception that the 'big bang theory' is a creation myth. Its not, and no grounded scientist will tell you such thing. The nature of the 'big bang' or whatever started it is still a complete mystery. Now, theoretical phycicist will tell you with good certainty what was happening a couple nano-seconds *after* the big bang, but not exactly at the moment of it or before.
That said, they also tend to just sweep it under the rug philosophically. There are no mysteries in the universe everything is explainable, except for what started it in the first place? but thats fine we can ignore that one thing and move on.... okay whatever.
Science is one of the only massively followed theories of reality that *doesn't* have a creation myth beyond
All the energy and matter in the universe was collapsed into a single infinitecimal point a couple nanoseconds into the universes birth
Which is a reasonable statement to make considering everything we know about the laws of physics and our ever-expanding universe. By rewinding the causal clock in super-computer simulations with the physical laws of reality we know do exist shows all matter and energy converge back into a single point of infintecimal space packed with basically infinite energy. Well all the energy in the observable universe anyway, we dont know if the total universe is actually infinite. Its a solid theory backed by reasonable evidence, but it doesn't try to explain a *why* or *how*. Thats what the above theories are all for.
The theoretical phyicist though, they sometimes like to make up their theories of the big bang and what it is, and them in particular whom *really* like to play in the godless sand. Painting pictures of realities where we are nothing more than statistical anomalies emerging from mindless foam. On a meaningless march, our existance is but a fluke in the cosmic sneeze that cares not for us.
Yeesh. Talk bout depressing ideas.
Infinite universes spontaniously popping into and out of existance for no apparent reason besides statistics and that they can. Each having different physical laws some which can allow life and some dont. Multiversal Observer based Darwinism.
Theories of the multiverse eventually get so out there, become so abstract and detached from anything close to human knowability in their attempts to explain reality. Its fun to theorize but lets not get self-important about it. At the end of the day we are left with theories that are as equal in unfalsifyability to just saying "because God did it".
As it turns out, people are self-serving in their philosophies and dont mind jumping through as many logical hoops as needed to arrive at the conclusions they want. Pick your poison and enjoy the show.
Science produces physical answers to physical questions, math produces logical answers to logical questions. Physical properties, shape, and logical mechanics are key aspects of the universe for sure, but its very close minded to say with absolute certainty they are the *only* aspects of the universe.
I personally believe that there are spiritual and incomprehensibly abstract parts of the universe as well that no amount of atom smashing or detector building or logical theorizing will ever be able to answer. you have to look elsewhere for those kinds of spiritual and abstract questions. The tapistry of reality is a beautiful weve of logic, emotion, explaination, mystery, rationality, irrationality.
Regardless of your personal ideas towards philosophy and theology, and really just being a person in general, one thing you should stive to be is open minded. Fundimentalist of all forms are guilty of being close minded. No matter who you are or what your position, thinking your 'truth' is the only kind which deserves to exist whether spiritual or logical is a big ingredient to the worst genocides in human history. Please try to open your mind, and more importantly, your heart.
With all the effort science and math has done to kill the magic, equate the mystery, confine the possibilites, one might think that things were close to an end. That logic had won and that all had been explained. The Determinist cheered. Yet the battle had not yet been won.
Yet, there were still mysteries that refuse to yield to understanding. Mysteries of life and chaos and complexity, of conciousness and emotion and love, mysteries of fantastical structures beyond our physical realm which govern us from afar in the most abstract planes of existance, thought so very disconnected till now.
Even with all the effort of the smartest minds they could not bring wonder low. Admiting they could not defeat their ancient enemy time being, they chose avert their gaze and ridicule instead. Anything truth which was not perfectly true or false, detectable or measurable, was sneered at with contempt.
The very smartest people would like you to believe everything has been more or less puzzled out. That there are no great wonders to life anymore. They want everything in the universe to be a perfectly defined cog in a meaningless cosmic machine with no maker. A perfect example is chemist and physicist who thing that because they understand all the physical properties of the universe they can for certain state that the universe is *purely* physical.
Mystery and wonder are looked at with scorn by the overly-logical academics becuase it undermines the illusion of control their deterministic certainty gives. A world view that everything can be explained even if our finite primate brains cant understand that explaination. That if it cannot be proven or detected, it does not exist like ocrams razor is a unbreakable law.
As a former scientific realist who became disillusined with living in the meaningless machine, tired of feeling the dispair of certainty that I had no control over my future. Tired of an explaination to everything, when those explainations failed to bring forth signifigance I looked elsewhere. I found the mystery eventually after trying for so very long. Meditation, divination, 'spiritual awakening of the third eye' None of that worked for me. Then I stumbled across certain stubstances and found the mystery had come to find me on the borders of expanding conciousness. There the divine conversated with me, there I felt the cosmic love that eminates out of and brings forth everything. I had found the possibilities of our potential. I will talk about that in more detail another time.
Einstein, the figurehead for the smartest of us primates to walk this earth in modern history, the guy who redifined entire fields of physics with his very succesful and experementally comfirmed theories of spacetime. With nothing more than cute thought experements of people falling off buildings and being in rockets no less. Yet even the best of us are still susceptible to bias, predjeduce, and our own incorrect axioms. He was no exception.
He once infamously said "God does not play dice!" in relation to the subject of quantum mechanics and its very statistical and unpredictable nature. The idea that God is all knowing directly contradicts the idea of inherent randomness that propegates into the future. "If god is all powerful, can they make a stone they cannot lift?" "If god is all knowing, can they make a universe an unknowable future? If God knows everything, that means the future has already been written in stone, so how can there be free will and choice?".
many decades after the fact, quantum mechanics and its inherent randomness is accepted canon and poster child of new age scientific revolutions. QM implies that not only does God play dice, but also they are a huge fan of yatzee!
There are possible resolutions to this if you loosen up on the typical assumptions western religion imposes on the concept of God. Personally, the one I go with is that 'God' whichever version you like, is not such a control freak to *need* to be all knowing. Perhaps for free will to really exist requires uncertainty and possibilities.
Also, Imagine for a second you were an all-knowing eternal being capable of intelligence and emotion. You ever watch a TV show or movie or listen to a song so many times you dont want to anymore because its boring or unstimulating? Imagine how terribly boring it would be to know everything always. No suprises or entertainment or potential for *new* in your eternal life. No exciting possibilites to be explored. Sounds like a hellish existance to me. What all-intelligent being would want an eternity spent in boredom? No, All concious beings require suprises and possibilites and curious creative playful musings of infinite potential or its not worth existing, Supreme Being/Godhead or not.
If you are all powerful, why not make a universe of entertainment where even *you* get a little entertaining suprise here and there once in awhile. The universe is not a machine of many cogs but a stage of many actors free to play their part how they want and have choices without the shackles of a written future.
Beings and structures and complexities coming into of existance because its fun and exciting and stimulating to exist! That is more along the lines of the zen buddhist view of God known as the godhead, a playful artisian that wants to have fun and be suprised!
Modern theologist tend to have an antagonistic view of science due to its aforementioned lack of spiritual substance and agnostic/athiestic ideas among big-wig scientist. Some scientist are just plain know-it-all skeptic douchbags who nobody likes and it paints a bad image of the community as a whole. Things werent always this way though.
Historically, many European scientist like Newton tended to be some variant of christian or catholic. Deducing the laws of reality was a sacred task of religous importance. Understanding the beautiful symetries and structures born of Gods divine wisdom. The movement of celestial bodies were literally heavenly. A far cry from what the philosophies of science and math are now. Some food for thought.
There is comfort in certainty, smugness in knowing. To determinist its too hard a pill to swallow that there may be mysteries tin life that are unsolvable, ununderstandable by *principle*. That the universe intentionally conspires to keep some of its secrets guarded even to itself. That a God might enjoy a suprise every once in awhile. Godels incompleteness theorem already states mathematics can never be truly complete and consistent they way mathematicians want it to be. Its likely science has its own version of the incompleteness theorem. But dont try telling them that, or you get the fingers-in-the-ear treatment.
Contradictions are a part of life. Sometimes they represent gaps in our knowledge, sometimes it means we made the wrong assumptions, sometimes they represent the eternal duality and flow of the cosmic oroboros, dao style. Most people dont do want contradictions in their ideas the same way they dont want holes in their floor. Yet some of the best and most symbollically resonant ideas are full of contradictions. The Dao as mentioned, the oroboros, the biblical battle of Light and dark, the informational duality of one and zero, of yes and no. The most complex and mysterious of natural structures arising from the most simple of rules and basic canons. Contradiction can mean balance, which is an integral to the structure of reality, and to keeping the great mystery alive.
People especially hate contradictions that directly poke holes in their own fundimental beliefs. Denial, anger, and violent rejection are common outcomes when confronted by realities that dont line up with our own preconcieved conceptions. Nobody is perfect, were emotional animals first and logical beings second, no shame. Everyones wrong about something all the time. However you think the world works, whatever model you use to construct your subjective reality,is incomplete. As finite being we have to contend with that when the seams start to tear.
So back to the book. One of the greatest mysteries of the 21st century as far as science and math are concerned is the nature of living beings, information, entropy and 'chaos' in natural processes. Theres been a shadow lurking in the field of STEM ever since newtons day which threw a wrench into pretty much all of classical science and mathematics. But well get to that. First lets appreciate the raw ego present in the european STEM community during the 1800s, and their subsequent humbling.
You see, once newton derived his universal equations, scientific and mathematical smugness over the certainty of reality reached an all-time high.
If one could calculate the movement of the earth around the sun or the moon around the earth or a piece of space rubble from another piece of space rubble, then one could also theoretically predict the movement of particles against other particles. There was a sense that we had 'solved' the mechanics of the universe.
Holding the equations in our hands made us the masters, and if a sufficently advanced and intelligent being held those same equations they could be a god (or a demon). forever seeing into the past as well as the future all at once. It could rewind the paths of particles to the very beginning of time and trace their paths through to the end of time from equations and present information alone.
Such a being would be virtually omniscent. This deterministic, all knowing being is philosophically refered to as "Laplaces Demon"
Yeah you could really tell scientific determinism was smelling its own farts with this one haha. If only it was that simple.
So as you might figure, there was a problem somewhere. There were actually many problems but the first was a particularly nasty problem that Newton himself knew about but just kind of ignored with the law of gravitation.
The two body equation which used the laws of gravitation worked really well for two body systems. With it one could predict the orbits of two bodies in relation to eachother. The sun and earth, earth and moon, moon and sun, venus and jupiter, two specks of space dust. great. The moment you throw in a third body the whole thing collapses. The equation completely fails when you try to use it on the solar system as a whole with all its moving parts. This is known as the three body problem
Oof. So what was the problem? You might figure it has something to do with the fact that newtons gravity law is actually an incomplete special-case version of einsteins version of gravity. Nope, even with einsteins up to date equations still no dice.
As it turns out, as a guy 200 years later after newton would figure out, There is no way to perfectly predict the orbits of the bodies! Even though they obey deterministic laws....What? The solar system is whats now known as a 'non-linear dynamical system prone to sensitive conditions'... WHAT? Ill spare you the jargon and boil it down to this nugget of novelty. In order to perfectly predict the motion of a single *particle* requires infinite precision, which requires infinite computational power.
We humans can be a little bit arrogant at our own place at the top of the cognative ladder. We think were *so* special that our conciousness is a little higher up on the rungs that as a society we developed a superiority complex over it.
Thinking that the beautiful structures arisen from logical throught are *our* creations. The mind is a powerful thing. Thoughts can be thunk which have never been thunk before. Invisible connections can be seen between all aspects of our world. Its easy to get concieted about that power.
But we didn't create those connections, we dont have the right to claim ownership of logic. These are universal concepts and canons that exist everywhere at all times accesible to all intelligent beings.
Confusing invention with discovery, mental tools with universal canons. Many believe that 'math' is nothing more than a human invention, a tool to be used for measurement and deduction, a useful fiction. That the axioms of logic and abstractions associated are not 'real'. Again this ties into the 'everything that isnt physically tangible isnt real' mentality.
Reality, or God, or the universe, or whatever you want to call it, has other ideas. They do not share our biases and complexes towards physical structures and the cognative seperation between the abstract and physical.
From realitys perspective logic is as equally tangable as shape. They are connected and relate to eachother. The square root of negative 1 is as 'real' as any atom. Physicist have been forced to reckon with that concept fact after the terribly abstract complex and irrational numbers started showing up in their best and most descriptive theories of our tangable reality.
Any person can use a computer to generate and study the mandelbrot set as a natural object with all its infinite detail and beautiful complexity. Just as any person can take a boat and sail down the coastline to chart and measure all its infinite detail.
the physical symmetry of shape, the logical mechanics of algebra. Two sides of a coin. Two ways of looking at the same thing. Numbers are real and they play an important, observable role to the physical universe even if hardcore physical realist deny it. The nature of numerical statistics is fundimental to modern thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, which are fundimental to everything else of greater complexity.
When we use numbers in every day life we typically use integers. You count your fingers 1,2,3,4,5... Integers are what various civilizations worked with since the beginning of agriculture and trading. Counting plants, people, food, its a useful thing.
Now adays the negative extention of the number line is taught in schools as a trivial thing, but for thousands of years people didn't accept the negatives or zero as things. Equations were written in numerous different ways just to not include them.
Mathematicians are particularly slow to accept new concepts that shake the cage of their foundations but negative numbers and zero did eventually start being considered 'things' in their own right. And the concequences are still being observed.
We have Zero, cool. We have 1, neat. What if there were numbers *between* zero and one? PWoooosh I just saved you a thousand years of advancement. To be fair, rational fractions were known since the greeks. Its a neat fact that integers can come together to create an infinite series of fractional ratios for every expression of two integers. The Mandelbrot set actually visually encodes this infinite series through 'signpost' on its bulbs.
Video that shows this off "Number Sequences In The Mandelbrot Set"
When we use decimals we are using a new kind of number, the reals. There are two kinds of reals, rational and irrational. The rationals (ratio, rational, get it?) can be expressed as a ratio of two integers. 1/2 3/4 5/7. You get it. Most of the finite decimals can be expressed as fractions or at least repeating cyclic series of decimals. Pretty standard stuff so far.
The irrationals are where things start to get fucky. The irrationals are every real number that *cant* be expressed by A/B integers. Every single number with an infinite non-repeating decimal that goes on forever. Pi is the big example but there are many irrational mathematical constants.
The main point in explaining all this is to lay you with this very important fact about precision. There are an infinite amount of irrational numbers between every rational number, infinite seas of uncountably infinite numbers lay between any definable measureable number. and The universe works with *all of these* infinitely undefinable irrational numbers.
So now lets put our theories to the test. Lets repurpose every single atom in the observable universe to build the ultimate quantum super computer. Lets give it the sole objective of computing the absolute position of a single particle with ultimate precision.
That computation would never happen in a finite amount of time. The irrationals are so infinite that they are *more* infinite than the infinite set of rationals.
How much information is in the universe? Video
Computing A Universe Simulation video
The consequence of this is that when we try to graph the movement of particles in phase space or nonlinear dynamical functions to see if they at least form predictable or stable cycles we end up with infinitely complex shapes which encode that infinite irrational precsion into their very geometry, known as strange attractors (Kinds of fractals!!!)
And so those very proud determinist who thought they had won the philosophical war were swiftly kicked in the balls and supplexed by our mysterious universe once more in the 19th and 20th century, humbled by the nature of our infinite universe brimming with possibilities and a helping of beautiful infinite shapes encoding those possibilities.
Did all of that interest you at all? Would you like to know more? I want to talk about one more positive of deep simplicity not thus mentioned. It is written for normal people who aren't familiar with all the nutty jargon the STEM field is so full. The author is a scientist yes, but they passed everything through their very non-technical wife to make sure it is understandable by the average schmuck.
I mentioned before that I am interested in Science and math, but I am no scientist or mathematician. I never took calculus or went to a 4 year college, I learned a trade as a Mechatronics engineer and maintenance technician fixing machines and replacing parts. That doesn't mean I don't love learning about the topics in my free time.
Richard feyman made a great point in his time educating. Any smart prick can spout over-technical definitions and near-arcane jargon that will be understood by nobody but those already 'in the know' with years of formal schooling under the belt. This over-jargonization of the STEM fields leads to disconnect from the average person and a kind of vocabular elitism.
It takes a real genius to take the big picture of those complex ideas and words and distill them into an explaination understandable by a 5 year old. It isn't about memorizing equations or laws to plug and chug answers, its understanding what those equations say about the world. What they *mean*. OOOh spooky, now im mixing science with philosophy, heresy!
Okay Im done. Read the book if you want to. If not IDC.