INSIGHTS

The Reflections page develops a metaphysical point of view that emerges from what modern science tell us about the material universe and what I see as spiritual and metaphysical reflections of that knowledge. Fundamental to this metaphysical view is the idea that the universe is not an accident: it has been created and it is purposeful. The Creator (Spirit) is defined as what exists without dimension outside of our spacetime. The view of human nature is that the distinguishing feature of our material existence is self-awareness and that our life in spacetime is, at its core, an interplay of the material and the spiritual. This page presents essays that elaborate on several issues relating to the interplay of the material and spiritual in the universe and in our lives.

Singularity
all of material existence emerged from awareness and all of material existence rests on a foundation of uncertainty

All cosmological observations to date are consistent with the idea that our universe began 13.8±0.13 billion years ago in an explosion known as the big bang. The big bang started from a vanishingly small object known as a singularity. Except for a very short (< 10^-32 seconds) period of initial inflation, the expansion of the universe has taken place ever since then in accordance with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity: a theory that has been verified to great accuracy in many experiments. According to this theory, spacetime, the coordinates that we use to order our existence and describe the results of our observations, began with the big bang and continues to expand as our universe expands. In this view spacetime is not a mental construct; it is an inherent part of nature. Spacetime is defined by the existence of matter and the curvature of spacetime is responsible for the gravity that governs the motion of matter. Time, the coordinate we use to define “before” and “after”, began with the big bang. That is why the question of what existed before the big bang is a meaningless scientific question. The singularity from which the big bang emerged is outside of our spacetime.

Paul Dirac (1902-1984) was one of the early pioneers of quantum mechanics and one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20^th century.
It was he who first made quantum mechanics consistent with Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity: a connection that leads to the prediction of the existence of antimatter and lays the foundations of modern quantum field theory. Dirac won the Nobel Prize in 1933 (together with Schrödinger) for his work in quantum mechanics. He became the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge: the same chair occupied by Sir Isaac Newton and, today, by Stephen Hawking. In his beautiful textbook, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, first published in 1930, Dirac introduced the concept of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle with the following statement:

There is a limit to the fineness of our powers of observation and the smallness of the accompanying disturbance—a limit which is inherent in the nature of things and can never be surpassed by improved technique or increased skill on the part of the observer.¹ (emphasis mine)

The uncertainty principle effects measurements at all length scales, though such effects are completely negligible at the scale of classical physics. But what Dirac recognized is that the spacetime with which we describe the results of our observations is subject to complete uncertainty when we try to use coordinates less than some limiting size. If we try to observe nature with spacetime below this limit, we will so hopelessly disturb nature that causality will no longer apply and there is only uncertainty. Whatever existence there may be below this limit, a region usually referred to as the vacuum or void, is total, unobservable uncertainty.

What is the limiting size of spacetime? It is generally assumed that as the universe expanded from the singularity it passed through a spacetime state where everything was unified and only one force was in play. This is the point at which gravitational and quantum forces are of equal strength: they are unified. The natural spatial length at which this unification occurs is based on the values of three experimentally determined universal constants: Planck’s constant from quantum mechanics, the speed of light from Special Relativity, and the gravitational constant (a number that comes into play in all gravitational interactions) from General Relativity. This length is called the Planck length and, using the present day values of the constants, it is of the order of 10^-35 meters. It seems logical to associate the observation limit with this unification limit: the singularity in which everything was unified was outside of our spacetime and therefore also in the realm of the unobservable.

So, observation tells us that all that exists in the universe emerged from a singularity that lies outside of spacetime and that there is a region of uncertainty at the base of the spacetime defining all of material existence. In the Reflections I defined all that exists outside of spacetime as Spirit so, with this definition, our observations could be rephrased as:

all of material existence emerged from Spirit and all of material existence currently rests on a foundation of uncertainty.

The question is: What is Spirit? The first thing to remember is that there can be no scientific answer to that question (scientific theories can only be tested within our spacetime.) It is a completely metaphysical question.

Other metaphysical choices are to believe that Spirit is simply uncertainty itself or to deny that it exists at all. That is the point of view taken by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their recent and popular book, The Grand Design². They choose to believe in the existence of a multiverse that contains an infinite (they admit to only 10⁵⁰⁰) number of universes each with their own spacetime and physical laws. In their view each universe arises from spontaneous creation. (This is, in principle, no different from the idea that each universe arises from fluctuations in an infinite quantum vacuum that I discussed in the Reflections.) Their explanation for the fact that the conditions required for self-aware life to exist in our universe are nothing short of miraculous (probability of 10^-100?) is simply that an event with a probability approaching 0 is bound to occur in a population approaching infinity. (In a truly infinite population, it will occur infinite times!) Their metaphysical choice then leads to the belief that the universe is an accident; everything is random; there is nothing outside of the multiverse so there is, literally, no room for Spirit. It is important to keep in mind that the theory of the multiverse is a metaphysical theory based on mathematics and imagination. It is not a scientific theory since it can neither be verified or falsified by observation. Looking back in time, our science stops at the singularity.

The point of view that I developed is based on the metaphysical choice to believe that Spirit is awareness (or, if you prefer, consciousness). So, with this choice for all that exists outside of our spacetime, the summary of our observations about the origin and nature of our spacetime reads:

In this view, the singularity from which all existence emerged is awareness. Awareness operates to produce certainty out of uncertainty. This operation establishes a direction for the evolution of our universe and the existence of this direction allows for a definition of the purpose and meaning of material existence. I believe the direction is related to the evolution of self-aware beings in the universe: invoking what might be called the ultimate anthropic principle.

The singularity was infused with the creative principles (natural laws) that governed the birth and continue to govern the evolution of our universe. The goal of all science is to become aware of those natural laws through observation and reason. We already know from quantum mechanics that indeterminism (uncertainty) is at the core of these natural laws. Spirit, all that is outside of our spacetime, cannot directly enter and affect the material world inside spacetime. That would be a contradiction of the nature of Spirit. Furthermore, because of the inherent indeterminism of the material world, not even an omniscient awareness (operating within our spacetime) could predict the detailed unfolding of the universe. This would put a contradictory limit on the presumed omniscience of Spirit, the Creator. There is, however, a means for Spirit (Awareness) to indirectly affect the material world by acting in cooperation with self-aware beings whose existence includes an immaterial aspect that is outside of spacetime. On the planet Earth, those beings are us and our immaterial aspect is what we call our individual soul. I say "cooperate" because, just as indeterminism is at the heart of the natural world, free will is at the heart of human nature. (Further discussion of the idea of an individual soul is presented below in the essay "Emergence of Spirit".)

Once again, I want to point out that the metaphysical choice of Spirit as Awareness is just as valid as the choice of Spirit as uncertainty or the complete denial of the existence of Spirit and there is no scientific test that can be used to distinguish among these choices. I believe, however, that the effects of direction, purpose and meaning implied by the choice of Spirit as Awareness are reflected in the evolution of our own self-awareness and are observable to anyone whose mind is open to the possibility.

1. P.A.M. Dirac,The Principles of Quantum Mechanics,Oxford University Press, 4th ed, 1958 (first published 1930), 3-4.

2. Stephen Hawking and Leaonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, Bantam Books, 2010.

Emergence in Nature

An army ant is an almost blind minimally intelligent creature. Put a hundred of them on a flat surface and they will wander in circles until they die of exhaustion. But put a half a million of them together and they become a superorganism displaying amazing intelligence and survivability. A new level of existence - the colony- has emerged.

As a physicist who began his research career in experimental particle physics I fully appreciate the value of reductionist thinking. Looking at matter through increasingly powerful "microscopes", the discovery of the nucleus led to an understanding of atomic structure; the discovery of the proton and neutron led to an understanding of nuclear structure; the discovery of quarks has led to an understanding of the forces holding the proton and neutron together. And so it continues: one of the objectives of the experiments planned for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is to probe even deeper to look for possible structure within the quarks. (The discovery of quark structure would completely change our current physics model for the nature of matter.) We are trying to understand the nature of the whole (matter) by discovering all of its constituent parts and, hopefully, the relationships among the parts. The latter is important, because, as Dirac once pointed out, if you want to understand the game of chess you have to know the rules governing the interaction of the pieces: whether the pieces are made of ivory or wood is irrelevant.

But looking beyond the "simple" world of particles and fields we find there are many complex adaptive systems that require a different kind of thinking in order to understand them. These are systems with so many individual parts and with such a multiplicity of relationships (interactions) among the parts that the whole of the system is larger than the sum of its parts. The added element is the network of relationships among the parts that obeys its own rules; e.g., scalability, self-similarity, regulation, self-organization, etc. A new phenomenon (level of existence) has emerged from the complex system because of this network of interactions. The limits of reductionist thinking come about because reductionism does not usually attempt to understand the rules of the network itself (as opposed to the rules operating within the individual links) or to take into account the two-way feedback between the network and the environment in which the system is embedded. This two-way feedback implies there is a top-down causality at work whereby the emergent collective state produces changes in the individual agents through the network. To understand the real world in which we live and function, reductionist thinking must be complemented by network thinking

There are many examples of emergent phenomena in the world around us. The most obvious ones are those associated with the origin and evolution of life. About a billion years after the formation of the earth single cell organisms emerged from the complex soup of organic molecules that had formed in the early oceans. The exact sequence of events leading to this emergence is not yet understood: it's the ultimate chicken and egg question - Which came first, the membrane or the protein replication systems inside the membrane? But, however it happened, it's clear that a new level of existence had appeared on the planet. Biology had emerged from chemistry and an understanding of biological evolution cannot be reduced to an understanding of chemistry. Because of the increasing complexity of the environment (much of it caused by life itself) and of individual biological structures (genetics) the evolution of the biosphere has produced incredible biodiversity and the emergence of complex social systems. The social systems in turn have caused changes in the individuals; for example, the emergence of language in human society.

A vivid example of emergent phenomena can be found in the behavior of insect colonies. Take, for example, the army ants of the Brazilian rain forest¹. Each individual ant is nearly blind and displays only rudimentary intelligence. It can respond to certain chemical signals from other ants, has an instinct to find food and fight intruders. If you put a hundred army ants together on a flat surface they will wander around in circles until they die of exhaustion. If you put a half a million of them together they will form a super organism that displays a very sophisticated collective intelligence that has no leader or central coordinator.
When foraging,the collective will march in a fan shaped swarm efficiently devouring everything in its path, carrying away that which can't be immediately eaten.