The New World Order?

In my occupation as an economist, I have acquired a nickname among my peers:  They call me “Dr. Doom”.  Anyone who has read this blog would probably feel that the nickname is a very appropriate one for me, but I actually earned it for a different reason.  As part of my job, I am called upon to give periodic outlooks to various audiences on the state of the economy, and I was always among the ranks of the extreme pessimists back at the start of the Great Recession, when I predicted that it would be a long and severe one, and then again, at the beginning of the recovery, when I predicted that it would be long and painful.  Now of course I wasn’t alone in making these predictions, and in fact the general outlook of most economists was rather bleak, but my relatively extreme pessimism, which has been rather relentless for the past six years, apparently set me apart in the eyes of my audiences.  It probably didn’t help that I took an equally dim long-term view, contending that unless our society makes some fundamental changes – reining in the national debt, raising the educational standards of our next generation, and making significant investments in replacing and improving our aging infrastructure – we are heading down a path of inexorable decline, and even crisis.  Again, I am certainly not the only one who has said such things, but apparently, to my audiences, mine has been one of the more shrill voices of warning. 

I have sometimes joked that the Great Recession was caused by a number of large companies trying to make a lot of money without actually producing anything, and the weak recovery has been caused by manufacturers trying to produce things without using any people.  This is hyperbole, of course, but as I look at the dismal state of employment – not just in the United States but also in parts of Europe and elsewhere in the world – I can’t help but think back to a remark supposedly once made by Henry Ford: that he liked to have a sizable, decently-paid workforce so that there would be people who could afford to buy his cars.  Such a sentiment seems quaint these days.

Now as an economist, I would be ostracized by my peers if I suggested that we should resort to artificial means to create jobs, such as paying people to build pyramids, or to dig holes and then fill them up again.  Still, as technology increasingly enables us to rely upon machinery to produce our most important goods and services, I can’t help but imagine a future world where everything is produced by machines – or at least all of the most important essentials, such as food, shelter, and home appliances.  To take this thought experiment even further, imagine that all of these machines were owned by a single corporation, or even a single person.  What would the rest of humanity have to do to procure these products?  One scenario might be that the world would be regulated by a socialist government, in which the products were allocated to those who needed them.  But would the owner of the machinery producing these tolerate such a system, and if so, why?  It would seem that the balance of power would lie squarely in favor of this owner, particularly if the machines were the sole producers of weapons, in addition to the other vital goods and services.  If not – if the owner were compelled to distribute everything for free by a government with the military capability to do so – then for all intents and purposes the production facilities would really be “owned” by that government.

So let us assume – either by ownership or by force – that these production facilities are controlled by a single entity: in fact a single person.  The socialist regime would then only come about as a result of a sort of voluntary altruism on the part of that person, and the rest of the world would be comprised of an entire population on the dole.  More likely, the procurement of vital goods would come at a price, and one that was set by him or her, on very monopolistic terms.  And since nobody else would be contributing to the production of these things, the ability to pay this “price” would become problematic.  The owner would literally have the lives of everyone else in his or her hands.

It reminds me of an episode from that classic television series, The Twilight Zone, in which a young boy has been endowed with god-like powers.  The world has been reduced to a handful of persons – his immediate family and their neighbors – who have been terrorized into a craven submission, endeavoring to only say and do things that will not displease him, lest they meet the unpleasant fate of all of those others who ran afoul of him.  Even if our ultimate capitalist is not quite so malevolent, his total power over others will compel them to find ways to offer something of “value” to him or her, in order to receive the necessaries of existence in return.  Now this may simply involve – at least for the most part – benign forms of entertainment or personal service – but it is hard to imagine anything else that could be offered.

In some ways, this actually does seem to be the trajectory that we are on.  In America, the proportion of manufacturing jobs has been steadily declining, while that of service jobs has increased, and a third type of employment, in which persons are compensated for thinking (e.g., as executives, consultants, accountants, engineers, and other professionals), has rapidly grown.  We seem to be moving toward a two-tiered society, in which “cognitive” employment and more skilled service jobs are well compensated (although, as satirized in movies such as Office Space, even these jobs can devolve into degrading, poorly paid lackey positions), while lower-level service and unskilled manufacturing jobs receive very meager wages.  And of course, our most successful entertainers – including professional athletes – are extremely well paid.  Another form of “entertainer”, the drug dealer, has become a prominent figure in the underclass and the underground economy (and those who control the production of these drugs are often at the heads of powerful private empires in foreign countries), while the less successful members of this group make up the huge prison population that is now a part of the American social system.  Other less successful and less powerful “entertainers”, such as strippers and prostitutes, lead lives that are only at one or two removes from those of prisoners and the destitute. 

One of my vices is watching American court TV programs, and based on my viewing of these, I’ve come to the unhappy conclusion that a whole social milieu has developed among the ranks of the unemployed and underemployed, particularly among young men.  One of the most common court cases involves a dispute between a young woman and a young man (usually an ex-boyfriend), in which she has given him a large sum of money, and contends that it was a loan, while he argues that it was a gift.  Almost invariably, the young men involved in these cases have smirks on their faces, indicating a sense of pride in what they have done, as if separating naïve young women from their money has become a new sport among their peers.  These “players”, who apparently have few avenues, or motivations (or both) to find productive employment, have resorted to this form of non-violent predation to demonstrate their intellectual prowess and social mastery over women.  Meanwhile, the number of unwed mothers continues to skyrocket within these social classes, and it is often the government, rather than the fathers of these children, that provide the necessary additional support to care for the children.

Of course, it is dangerous to wax too nostalgic about the “good old days” when most people were engaged in genuinely productive activities.  Primitive farm labor, grueling and often dangerous factory jobs in the industrial revolution, and the sweat shops that exist in developing nations today can hardly be regarded as the most ideal avenues for human beings to be producers of value.  And while drug dealing, scamming, and dodging paternal responsibilities are certainly not ways that young men should be occupying themselves, is it worse than being enlisted to kill other people, in military service?

If the trajectory of the modern economy is moving us away from one involving producing things, in the conventional sense, then we must take a clear-eyed view of what exactly it is moving us toward.  Will it continue to evolve into a two-tiered society, with thinkers, capitalists and successful entertainers at the top, and drug dealers, welfare recipients, scammers, and convicted felons at the bottom?  Is this an inevitable trajectory?  Or is a future economy possible in which everyone – or nearly everyone – can find avenues for providing something of value that will ensure a level of compensation commensurate with a dignified life?  It admittedly sounds like a utopian hope, but for me, contemplating it at least gives me the strength to face the increasingly dystopian world that seems to be unfolding, even in “affluent” countries such as America.

Apocalypse Then

What if the world ended and nobody knew about it . . . or cared?  It’s a strange question, and one that I never would have considered had it not been for Rick Roderick, a philosophy professor from Duke University, who sadly is no longer with us, having passed away over ten years ago.  I discovered Rick Roderick through his recorded lectures with the Teaching Company.  One of Professor Roderick’s areas of special interest was “postmodernism”, and if that sounds like a stodgy subject, then one is in for a real shock (and not an unpleasant one) when hearing Professor Roderick discuss it.  Listening to a lecture by this self-described son of a “con man”, with his west Texas drawl and sarcastic wit, is a little like having a conversation with a close friend about the meaning of life after you’ve just finished your first twelve-pack of beer.  Nothing is sacred, or taken too seriously; all beliefs – no matter how seemingly sound – are challenged; and no person is above suspicion . . . or ridicule.  Professor Roderick is particularly partial to those German and French philosophers who have cut through dogmatic and sterile presumptions about truth and meaning with a blunt axe, and proposed radical new conceptions of how to make sense of who we are and how we got that way: thinkers like Nietzsche, Sartre, Habermas, Foucalt, Derrida.  For him, they are kindred spirits, “hell-raisers” I suppose he might call them.  You may not agree with them, may not want to join their ranks, but you’re grateful that they came by and bashed the party, because the host and the guests were phony snobs, and things were getting very dull before these guys showed up.  (I highly recommend Rick Roderick’s lectures by the way: there are three sets of eight of them, all available for free for viewing and MP3 download at rickroderick.org.)

One of these Continental philosophers that Professor Roderick discussed was a man named Jean Baudrillard, and it is he that inspired the question I raised at the beginning of this entry about the end of the world.  Because Baudrillard believed that the apocalypse already has happened, some time late in the twentieth century.  It was not the result of a nuclear war, or a massive plague, or a worldwide geographical catastrophe like an asteroid strike.  No, the end came silently one day, when there were no longer any real people left in the world.  Our civilization had subtly transformed all of us in such a way that we had collectively become products conditioned by mass media, where the fictional dramas and other entertainments of television and the movies became more real and important to us than anything happening in our personal lives, and our own tastes, beliefs, desires, and goals were manufactured for us by the market-driven media apparatus that has dominated our conscious existence almost from birth.  In a sense, Baudrillard is suggesting that we have become a race of beings who only appear to be alive, awake, and volitional: a type of zombie.  And after reading Baudrillard, one can’t help but wonder if this is why zombie movies and television programs have become so popular these days.  It brings to mind a funny scene in one of those movies, Dawn of the Dead, where the zombies are milling about in a mall, pushing shopping carts and standing in front of shelves.  It is explained that these creatures, though dead, continue to engage in many of the activities that occupied their time when they were alive, because, after all, these activities didn’t really require any higher brain function.

But Baudrillard might have actually protested against such a comparison.  Zombies, after all, are still capable of a primal sort of violence, a “lust for life” as it were, as they pursue, capture, and tear apart living victims to eat their flesh.  We, on the other hand, have managed to completely divorce ourselves from any tangible evidence of the violence that underlies much of the basis of our existence.  Animals raised in factory farms, in conditions so inhumane that any pet lover would cringe if they allowed themselves to see it, are safely hidden away, and we need only encounter their remains as unrecognizable precision-cut pieces, neatly packaged in plastic, cardboard, and Styrofoam boxes.  And, for that matter, we’ve managed to insulate ourselves from our fellow human beings who have failed to succeed, and to conform, lest we feel an unsettling rush of compassion . . . or fear.  They are efficiently tucked away in prisons (America has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world), homeless shelters, and asylums.  For the most successful members of our society, our emotions are safely channeled into the manufactured dramas and entertainments that serve as our principle daily diversions.

Baudrillard’s dystopian vision of our world was one where we had been subtly stripped of everything that made us authentic selves, and we didn’t care.  Reality has become a manufactured thing – a sort of high tech “bread and circuses” that was perhaps at one time deliberately crafted by big business and big government, but now is being orchestrated by the impersonal machine of civilization itself, because there aren’t even any authentic selves left in the upper echelons of society to direct the levers and curtains.  If this sounds strangely similar to some Hollywood movies that you might remember, it is no coincidence.  Baudrillard’s views inspired the movie The Matrix, where machines literally have taken over and created a synthetic, virtual world for entrapped human beings to live in.  And Baudrillard’s skepticism is actually just a modern incarnation of a grand tradition among French philosophers who have tackled the question of what it means to have an authentic existence, beginning with Descartes, who wondered how we would ever be able to tell if our lives were just illusions, projected into our minds by some sort of demon who could make us believe that we were living active lives, when we really were not.  It was the nightmare of The Matrix, imagined nearly four hundred years ago.  Other popular movies seem to have been inspired by this same vision: if not by direct exposure to Baudrillard and other postmodernists (because I doubt that many Hollywood writers and producers read philosophy), then maybe by exposure to Rick Roderick’s lectures.  The Truman Show comes to mind, in which a man is living in a television situation comedy and doesn’t even know it, and Wag the Dog, where government agents team up with a Hollywood filmmaker to create a fictitious war, in order to divert national attention away from a Presidential sex scandal.

But Professor Roderick, who was generally sympathetic to the views of the postmodernists, was not prepared to go to Baudrillard’s extreme conclusions.  In Roderick’s view, while our trajectory seemed to be in the direction of Baudrillard’s dystopia, we had not arrived there, yet.  The self is “under siege”, he contended, but it has not been extinguished.  He relates in one of his lectures how he read Baudrillard’s description of the war between the U.S. and Iraq (the first one, with the elder President Bush in charge) as merely a staged spectacle, and felt that here, for certain, Baudrillard had gone too far.  But then Roderick admitted that, when he spoke with persons who had participated in the war, as soldiers, they confessed that they had not seen much in the way of actual battle, but had witnessed it pretty much the same way that Americans back home had, via television monitors.  Roderick wondered if Baudrillard might not be so far off the mark after all.

In retrospect, it is easy to see how Professor Roderick, who made his Teaching Company lectures in the early 1990s, could imagine that we were imminently approaching a sort of apocalypse where the self would be overwhelmed by the synthetic reality of a post-modern age.  This was the era of the “Pax Americana”: just a few short years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when it seemed that there really were no genuine adversaries left in the world, and that all we had left to fear was ourselves (and our overseers).  In this era of American hegemony, coming on the heels of the victory of consumerism in the yuppie, “shop till you drop”, 1980s, one could imagine a “brave new world” where the citizenry was kept in check by a steady stream of entertaining diversions, along with vague, nondescript terrors that required constant government vigilance and intervention, like the “war on drugs”.  It seemed that, by the 1990s, the revolt against mediocrity, conformity, and social coercion which began with the beatniks in the 1950s and flowered with the hippies and civil rights activists of the 1960s had finally been beaten back into a permanent submission.  Yes, everyone was free to express himself or herself in any way that they chose (a token act of obeisance to those cultural revolutionaries and nonconformists of decades past), as long as these modes of expression were not truly threatening to the established order.  Wear a striped tie on a checkered shirt.  But don’t do anything genuinely subversive.

Still, even in the 1990s, I wonder if we were any less authentic as selves than, say, the typical serf living in Europe six hundred years ago, a factory worker during the first decades of the industrial revolution, or a contemporary Tupi tribesman of the Amazon rainforest.  Were their lives more rich, more autonomous, more engaged than our own?  Was the quality of their experiences more interesting, or more authentic?  And what of those persons who somehow managed to look away during the 20^th century calamites of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia?  Were they really living lives more authentic, purposeful, and self-directed than those of the succeeding generation?  If the authentic self has really gone into extinction, then perhaps that extinction occurred long before the emergence of “modernism” and “post-modernism”.

Rick Roderick passed away in 2002.  Had he lived to see the second Iraq War, he might have had even more cause for cynicism about Baudrillard’s theories.  There was nothing comfortable, or pleasantly distracting, about this war, even for its witnesses back home, and its legacy still haunts us.  Still, there is something uncomfortably Orwellian about the “war on terror”, which has now joined the “war on drugs” as one with no end in sight, no tangible enemy, and an ongoing justification for the government to compromise both our property rights and our civil liberties.

Professor Roderick, like many of the French intellectuals that he admired, was a fan of the cinema, and used examples from movies to exemplify many of his points.  One of his favorites was Blade Runner.  At the end of one of his lectures, he described the climactic scene of that movie, where the leader of the rebel androids impales his hand with a nail - an act which echoes that of a character in Jean Paul Sartre’s Roads to Freedom.  It is an irrational, painful, self-destructive act, and for that very reason is the highest expression of freedom, because it defies the innate, fundamental drive for self-preservation, for seeking self-gratification and avoiding pain, as well as all conditioning, all logic, and all social conventions that motivate one to behave in a manner that is not . . . counter-productive.

I don’t know if there is a silent apocalypse looming in our future like the one that Baudrillard envisioned, or, indeed, if it has actually already happened.  How does one remedy the death of the self?  Many years ago, I told a friend of mine of a nightmare that I had, in which I was in a world dominated by zombies, and I myself was a zombie, but harbored a secret desire to find a cure.  My friend said that he suspected that we all have had the same nightmare.  For Baudrillard, the cure was to out-absurd the absurdity of non-existence, to push this synthetic reality to the limits of endurance, and in doing so perhaps create the conditions for the re-emergence of an authentic self.  That sounds suspiciously like the counter-culture of the 1960s.  I suppose that it almost worked once.  Maybe it’s time to give it another try.

Has Physics Become the New Alchemy?

The science of physics was back in the headlines recently, as scientists contended that a subatomic particle discovered in July 2012 is now confirmed to have been a Higgs boson, or what has been called the "God particle".  This "landmark discovery" in physics will be celebrated by many, to be sure, but I won't be among their number.

A couple of years ago, some coworkers and I were talking about physics.  We weren't arguing about any particular theories in physics, but rather about the science in general: where it's come from and where it's going.  Physics has had a tumultuous century, as its practitioners have contended with observations that have made it increasingly difficult to maintain a coherent model that makes sense of everything.  One of my coworkers argued that this is all in the past: that the science has weathered these rough patches and come through in very good shape.  He referred me to a book entitled How Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival.  When I looked up the book in Amazon.com, I came across an interesting reader review, which included the following excerpt:

I haven't completely given up on entanglement signaling using the non-orthogonal Glauber coherent states with a pair of interferometers, Faraday rotators, phase plates et-al. I mean within orthodox quantum theory bearing in mind of course Stapp's general proof based on linearity, unitarity and implicitly orthogonality of the base states - the latter being the possible loop hole.

Of course, beyond that motivated by Daryl Bem's latest "feeling the future" data in people, both Stapp and I do agree that a more general non-orthodox extension of quantum theory - as general relativity is to special relativity as an analogy - with "signal nonlocality" violating Abner Shimony's "passion at a distance" and the Born rule that probability ~ squared modulus of complex Feynman histories quantum amplitude (e.g. Antony Valentini) is warranted by the facts.

A clue is that (ODLRO) spontaneous broken ground state symmetry ("More is different" emergent order) with Higgs amplitude and Goldstone phase quanta excited out of the Bose-Einstein c-number condensate does not obey the nonlocal linear unitary Schrodinger equation in entangled configuration space 3N + N. Rather, it obeys a low energy effective field local nonlinear non-unitary Landau-Ginzburg equation in single-particle ordinary 3D + 1 spacetime. Indeed, the gravitational field tetrads and spin connections for local inertial frames LIFs can emerge from such a Higgs-Goldstone field precipitated at the moment of creation of our observable universe sandwiched between our past particle horizon and our future de Sitter dark energy event horizon that may well be a Seth Lloyd computer and indeed the "hologram screen" invented by 't Hooft and Susskind. This would necessitate the Wheeler-Feynman-Hoyle-Narlikar-Cramer-Aharonov ideas of retro-causal advanced signal "transactional" "post-selections on the final cause hologram screen cosmic computer (e.g. P.K. Dick's VALIS & Teilhard de Chardin's "Omega Point."). Crazy idea to be sure, but is it crazy enough to be true? ;-)

It so happens that this particular comment was actually made by one of the hippie "saviors" of physics that the book is writing about.  Some might find his remarks to be a testament to the level of intellectual sophistication and brilliance that the science of physics has risen to.  I find them to be a bunch of nonsense.

I remember hearing similar nonsense when I was an undergraduate student in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in the mid-1980s, after I had enrolled in a class which discussed some of the modern problems of physics - I think it was called "Space, Time, and Matter" - as one of my electives.  The professor began the first class by saying something like: "We have discovered, in physics, that either one of three things is true: either the physical universe doesn't exist, or we (I assume he meant intelligent beings) don't exist, or there is nothing linking the first two."  Now this disheartening opening statement, along with a particularly heavy course load that semester, prompted me to drop the class.  I did, however, retain the textbooks that had accompanied the class, and made a point of reading them on my own.  These were Space, Time, and Spacetime by Lawrence Sklar, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science by E.A. Burtt, The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman, and Causality and Chance in Modern Physics by David Bohm.  While I highly recommend these books to anyone interested in the history of science, and the development of physics in particular, and can say that I came away with a high regard for their authors, I must also say that collectively they did little to change my low appraisal of the current condition that physics is in.

I'm not sure exactly when it was that I had given up on physics.  It may have been earlier in my undergraduate education, when I took the required sequence of core courses in that science.  Early in this sequence of courses, which covered the discovery of fundamental physical laws that made sense of the universe around us, including Newton's theory of gravitation, Boltzmann's kinetic theory of gases, Maxwell's equations that linked electricity and magnetism, and of course Einstein's theories that related energy to matter, I had a genuine admiration for the pioneers of this science, and their accomplishments.  But at some point, as the courses moved on to developments around the early part of the twentieth century, everything just seemed to get weird.  Things could be both waves and particles at the same time, and seemingly objective phenomena could change simply based upon whether they were being observed or not.  Atoms were found not to be the building blocks of the universe, and so a relentless search for smaller and smaller "subatomic" particles was conducted.  As I read through the catalog of these subatomic particles, broken down into family trees of successively smaller and more basic particles, I grew increasingly suspicious that - rather than real substances - these are merely creative fictions that try to preserve coherence in a paradigm that is becoming increasingly impossible to hold together.

I suspected as much when I encountered a book entitled The Tao of Physics many years ago, which attempted to turn defeat into victory by suggesting that modern physics had merely proven that the religions and philosophies of the Eastern mystics were right after all:  We exist in a universe of paradoxes, where two opposite things can both be true, and where sometimes logic simply has to be abandoned to get at the real truth.  If the logic has failed, this suggests to me instead that the underlying premises are flawed.  I could not celebrate the idea that a coherent model of the universe was based upon fundamental incoherence.

The final blow, for me, was when I discovered "string theory" or what has sometimes ambitiously been called "a theory of everything", which represents an attempt by physicists to come up with a single theory that explains all of the forces that have been identified in the physical universe (gravity, magnetism, attraction of particles at the subatomic level, etc.).  The success of this new model entails that one believe that the ultimate building blocks of the universe are one-dimensional "strings" that oscillate in ten dimensions (twenty-six according to one variant), of which only three are visible to us.  The theory (or theories, as there are several variants of this) are awash in an impressive array of higher mathematics, but lack one hallmark of classical scientific theories: they do not lend themselves to any empirical tests that can refute them.

I had already heard of string theory when I was working as an engineer in the late 1980s, and had pretty much concluded even back then that it was a bunch of bunk.  Coincidentally, not long after that, one of my fellow engineers came across a series of articles in a magazine - I think it was Popular Mechanics - by an individual who was attempting to reconstruct the science of physics from first principles.  Apparently that author - like me - had concluded that physics had become a science in need of an overhaul.  I wish I had saved those articles, as I noticed just a few years ago that someone else had attempted to do the same thing, and had written a book about it.  I have no idea if this was the same author who had written the series of articles decades ago.  Perhaps there have been attempts by several scientists, in this contemporary, pseudoscientific era of physics, to get us back onto a solid scientific foundation.

And I have concluded that physics has become a pseudoscience.  Many intelligent men are producing extremely sophisticated mathematical equations describing exotic flights of fancy that have no meaningful link to reality, like the complicated systems of epicycles that were constructed to explain the seemingly erratic movements of planets in the night sky.  The epicycles were required because the underlying model was flawed: the planets - and the sun - did not revolve around the earth.  When this model was replaced with one that better comported with reality, the explanations for the planetary movements became much simpler.  I'm reminded, too, of those Scholastic philosophers in centuries past who supposedly engaged in heated debates about how many angels could fit on a pinhead.  No doubt many of these were genuinely intelligent men - though foolishly misguided.  And of course the ancient art of alchemy also attracted many intelligent devotees, providing them with an outlet through which to apply their intellectual skills, even if this outlet was based upon a fictitious foundation.  But alchemy produced many colorful flights of fancy, not unlike those that are featured in contemporary television programs and popular articles that purport to explain the "discoveries" of modern physics.

Growing up as a child in the 1960s, I was one of those who were captivated by television programs such as Star Trek, which envisioned a world that would - by the end of the twentieth century - have begun manned space exploration in earnest, and also discovered radically new sources of energy.  It is disheartening now - well into the 21st century, to realize that the vision has not come to pass.  We are still producing electricity pretty much the same way that Thomas Edison did when he built his first generating station in the late 19th century.  We are still getting into outer space by using rockets that rely upon controlled explosive reactions, not unlike those that were used in fireworks displays in China 1500 years ago.  Physics is failing us, because it has failed to satisfactorily address some paradoxes encountered in the mid-twentieth century.

Some will argue that the revolution that we have seen in information and communication technology in the past few decades refutes this - that we have gone far beyond the achievements envisioned by Star Trek and other works of science fiction.  But I would contend that these are more achievements based upon the development of technique rather than theory, along with some genuine advances in mathematics.  Like some of the tangible products of alchemy, or like hypnotism, when it was called "animal magnetism", we have learned to harness processes which we have observed but don't fully understand.  I contend that, with genuine understanding, we could do much, much more.

The world today is sorely in need of another Isaac Newton, or Albert Einstein: a true visionary who can help us to break free of the failed paradigm of physics which hampers us today and give us an entirely new one.  Perhaps this achievement has already been accomplished, but is lying, unread, ignored, or even suppressed, in an old series of magazine articles, a failed book, or a dissertation rejected by an academic committee wedded to the old paradigm.  As Thomas Kuhn explained in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the development of science is not an orderly process.  When a paradigm needs to be replaced, there will be entrenched defenders of it that need to be overcome.  Hence, for anyone - particularly those in an academic environment - who wishes to reconstruct physics, the task will be a daunting one, even an overwhelming one.  My personal hope lies with the next generation of young geniuses who, while benefiting from an education in the United States or Europe, are not held hostage to the establishment there.  I would not be surprised if our next Isaac Newton comes from China, from India, or from a rising third world country.  Whoever he or she is, the world - the future of our civilization - will be deeply indebted to them.  I only wish that I live long enough to see it, and perhaps have the opportunity to meet them and shake their hand.

Information as Reality

I read an interesting book last year by an Oxford physicist, Vlatko Vedral, entitled Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information.  In this book, Professor Vedral postulates that the ultimate building block of reality is not atoms or subatomic particles, but actually information, or rather, bits of information.  Now this is not "information" as we use the term in daily conversation, but rather more like information understood in terms of computer bits ("1s and 0s") and in the way that it was defined by engineer Claude Shannon when he developed methods for maximizing the quality of communications across telephone wires.  Shannon's "information theory" dealt with probabilities and the concept of entropy: the tendency for all things in the universe to tend toward a state of randomness and disorder.  Such entropic forces impede upon common everyday communications, whether by traditional telephone wires and radio waves, or across modern fiber optic systems, in the form of interference, signal degradation, and static, which threaten to corrupt or even destroy the information that is being transferred.  Shannon's insight was that the information content of messages was roughly proportional to their complexity, where "complexity" can be understood as the unlikelihood that a set of signs or symbols which are used to convey a particular message could have been produced through a chance combination of those particular signs or symbols.  Hence, messages with more information require longer strings of such signs and symbols to be effectively conveyed.  Shannon devised methods for encoding messages (before they were sent) and decoding them (after they were received) in a manner that efficiently and effectively preserved their information content, protecting them from line "noise" and degradation that could undermine communications, cause messages to get misinterpreted or misread, or even make messages unintelligible altogether.

Vedral draws a parallel between Shannon's processes (which are now a standard feature of all communication systems) and the transmission of information content among living organisms, through genes and chromosomes.  Noting the redundancy in the building blocks of DNA "messages" transmitted through the genes, Vedral contends that this is a form of "error correction" comparable to the methods that Shannon developed for preserving messages.  It ensures that the characteristics of living organisms are preserved for future generations.  It allows for a method of preserving information far more effective and enduring than, for example, the methods that human civilizations have used in attempting to preserve their own "messages" across the spans of time: through written records, stored artifacts, or even stone monuments.  (One must question, however, just what kind of universal "message" then is being conveyed through this process of information preservation through natural selection.  It seems to be: "I have lived, and I have outdone my competitors in avoiding predators, finding and consuming prey or other food, and surviving long enough to produce offspring.")

But Vedral goes even further.  He observes that the random mutations that occur in genes and chromosomes across generations do not all constitute a disruptive "noise" which merely degrades the quality of the original messages.  Rather, those mutations which are favored by natural selection are preserved in the descendants that bear them, and in fact lead to an increase in the general complexity of life on earth (i.e., through greater variety within and among different species, and in the enhanced physical attributes and behavior patterns developed by members of these species).  There is a law in physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that all processes in the universe tend to move things to a greater state of randomness and disorder, a state of higher entropy.  But it has long been observed that the evolution of life on earth - and of human civilization - has constituted a movement in the opposite direction, a sort of "swimming against the tide", or "negentropy", as it has sometimes been termed.  Vedral equates this increase in biological complexity to the creation of "biological information from no prior biological information", and sees in it an example of "creation ex nihilo".  This last observation is an important one, for it serves as one of the springboards for Vedral's boldest claim, that if one accepts that it is information that is the fundamental building block of existence, then one can understand how the universe itself came into existence: how something came out of nothing.

I don't pretend to understand all of the aspects of Vedral's theories, particularly when he proceeds to tie them in with the labryinthine concepts of modern physics, such as quantum theory.  The linking of information to the beginning of the universe reminds me of a conjecture that my best friend shared with me a long time ago about why he thought the universe was created.  Imagine, he said, that there was a God, but no created universe.  What would God think about?  There would be no perceptions or experiences of an external reality.  There would be no memories to reflect upon, since nothing had literally happened.  There would be no emotions - at least not in any substantial sense - since there was nothing tangible to love, to hate, or to react to in any way.  And there would not even be a meaningful sense of identity or self-concept, because there would be nothing else in existence that could call God by a name, perceive God, love God, hate God,  fear God, or worship God.  There would just be this Entity existing in a void.  My friend concluded that God would be compelled (perhaps too strong a word to link to a perfect being not bound by causality - "inspired" might be more appropriate, if even that is allowed) to create something else.

While there is something tantalizing about Vedral's theories, there is also something somehow hollow in his concept of information as a basis of reality.  For the information described by Vedral and Shannon can be characterized in terms of content and complexity, but not really in terms of quality.  There is nothing in their theories that really get at the heart of why information matters.  I actually think that my friend was closer to the mark - to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre: "Existence precedes essence."  There is no information in a meaningful sense without an entity, or entities, that use the information.  There has been much talk in science in recent decades about complexity and chaos, but what may appear to be complex to one organism - an elaborate architectural design to its human admirers, for example - may appear to be chaotic to other organisms - such as the birds that sit upon it.  For a sufficiently intelligent organism, with a suitable breadth and depth of perception and memory, it could very well be that nothing would appear chaotic, while for others, most of their surrounding environment may be the sheer embodiment of chaos.  Chaos, then, is complexity uncomprehended.  And information - no matter how complex - is only as real as the living beings that use it.

Personal Monuments

In my post last month, I speculated about what an intelligent race of beings might want to leave behind to mark their existence and, after having decided upon the content, how they might preserve messages that could be interpreted in a meaningful way by intelligent beings in some distant future.

Perhaps a first step in answering this question is to bring the question "down to earth", so to speak, in a much more familiar context.  Because all of us, in one way or another, and at some point in our lives, ponder over our posterities: what we would like to leave behind or bequeath as testaments to our existence.

Years ago, when I was a young man, I used to encounter, on my daily commute to work, an overpass that spanned the highway on which was scrawled, in big letters, "Kathy Keller, I love you".  It so happened that I was taking an undergraduate class in English Composition, and the instructor gave us an assignment to pick any object or experience in our lives, and write about it: first in a postive context, and then in a negative context.  I chose this overpass graffiti.  In my positive composition, I extolled the powerful sentiment embodied in that graffiti, and how it imbued a dreary piece of public architecture with expressions of timeless love and devotion, thereby overcoming and transcending the cold, lifeless, impersonal constructions that permeate our modern landscape..  In my negative composition, I excoriated the self-absorbed delinquents who thoughtlessly defaced a piece of public property because they thought that the exaggerated importance of their personal dramas justified it.

I don't know who Kathy Keller is (or was), nor do I have a clue who the ardent lover was who made her name familiar to millions of highway commuters over a span of many years.  For all I know, their relationship was a fleeting one, and the lovers moved on to other romantic liaisons long before the public testimonial of their particular romance was finally blotted out from public view.  But there was something genuinely poignant about that highway graffiti.  For a stretch of time, someone left a simple but touching legacy of his existence, declaring, in essence: "I lived, and I loved."  Is there anything really more genuinely important to say about one's time in this world?

During the past twenty-four hours, my computer had crashed, and it put me into something of a panic.  This computer has really become a primary nexus of my own existence.  I use it for carrying out many if not most of the important projects that I am engaged in.  There are records of the correspondences that I have had with all of the people who have been an important part of my life.  And, in this computer there are written journals and transcriptions of journals that cover periods of my life going all the way back to the age of fifteen.  Now, I should say that I have always endeavored to make copies of  the more important files in my computer, and I have an external drive that regularly backs up my files.  But still, the thought that I might lose even a part of what is saved on this computer (perhaps because the crash was due to a virus which also affected my external drive) was a terrifying one.  It would be like a part of the record of my own existence was permanently ripped away and destroyed.  Fortunately, I was able to bring the computer back up and running today, and of course the first thing I did was make additional remote copies of my important files.

But I wonder: after I am dead and gone, who is really going to care about what was on this computer?  Who will miss its contents?  Of what use or interest are even my journals to anyone else?  Turning the question around, why would I be interested in the written records of anyone else's existence?  What would motivate me to preserve them, read them, study them?  I have, of course, read the biographies of other human beings, just as every reader of this blog probably has.  Why?  Answering just for myself, I would say that what drew me to read these biographies was that I felt these individuals had left a tangible, positive legacy in their accomplishments, and so I wanted to see what it was about their character, their upbringing, their religious views, and philosophy of life that might have accounted for their successes.  Winston Churchill, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, St. Paul, Clarence Darrow, Gandhi, and Benjamin Disraeli - these were persons who to me seemed to make a difference in their lives, in a lasting and beneficial way.  Of course, I have been motivated to read about the lives of other individuals who were not necessarily world-changers - Houdini, Harpo Marx, William Shatner, and even Moe Howard of the Three Stooges come to mind - but in this case it was simply that I had grown - through reading about their exploits or seeing their performances - to want to know more about them.  (We all, if we are completely honest, must admit to a prurient interest in the private lives of our favorite entertainers.)  And then there was the interest to read about persons who had not left a positive legacy, but rather a negative one - like Hitler, Albert Speer, and the decadent Roman Caesars who succeeded Augustus - and in this case - aside from prurient curiosity - the interest was motivated to learn what had been responsible in these men's lives for making the bad choices, or choosing the dark course, that they did.  Finally, there was an interest in the lives of world changers whose lasting legacy was not unequivocally good or evil, but nonetheless important and significant, such as Napoleon's.

I suppose, too, that I might like to know more of the details of the lives of persons who I cared about in a more immediate and personal way.  I might also be motivated to read biographies of others who faced challenges in their lives similar to ones that I have encountered, or who had similar goals and motivations.

But as time moves inexorably forward, spanning generations, and centuries, and millenia, will the lives that we see as important or meaningful today be regarded as such then, if they are remembered at all?  In some distant future age, when the civilizations in existence today have fallen and faded from memory, who will care about the exploits of a Washington, a Lincoln, a Churchill, or a Gandhi?  Who will want to study and learn the lessons of their lives?  What tangible legacy will these men have really left behind, if any?

Maybe, in the end, the most important, most enduring legacy of each of our lives will be a very simple one.  Perhaps it will even be the message embodied in that highway overpass graffiti:

I lived, and I loved.

An Emerald Tablet for the Mayan Apocalypse

The dreaded day has come.  The final date on the Mayan calendar which, as many have contended in recent years, indicates the end of an era - or perhaps even of human civilization itself.  I thought that this would be the perfect day to start a blog, particularly if, as some Mayan calendar enthusiasts have suggested, this date marking the end of an era also marks the beginning of a new one.

But the date also served as both the inspiration for the title of my blog, and also for the theme of this first posting.  Long before the Mayan calendar hysteria started, I had often pondered just what we would want to leave to posterity if we knew that the end of human civilization was imminent.  What enduring artifacts would we like to leave behind - perhaps for some distant future (and possibly non-human) civilization to discover and ponder?  What would we want these to say about us, and the type of existence that we had?  Would there be some type of final lesson that we would want to bequeath to a future civilization - a lesson perhaps that we had wished we had learnt much sooner? 

The lesson might be a negative one, along the lines of: "We messed up.  And here's how we did it.  Don't repeat these mistakes!"  Or it might be a positive one, highlighting the things that we thought were the most glorious aspects of our collective existence.  Perhaps there would even be positive lessons to leave behind: prescriptions for how future societies (and individuals) can find the truly good life and what comprise  genuinely important and meaningful goals.  We might set our sights a little lower, and decide instead to leave behind a "time capsule" with summary characteristics of our collective experience and accumulated knowledge, preserved in some relatively translatable form (like the maps, mathematical symbols, and "Sounds of Earth" recordings put into the interstellar Voyager probes in 1977).

I am certain that, if we truly do want to leave behind a legacy for future posterity, it will have to be an intentional one.  The sobering lessons from the Life After People television programs have been that the physical evidences of our existence on Earth will begin to fade from the moment that our civilization ends, and, in geologic time, will almost certainly be destined to disappear entirely.  Even within the relatively tiny timespan that makes up human existence, there have been civilizations which have risen and fell, and all but faded from the memory of later generations.  As an Egyptian temple priest once explained to the Greek lawgiver Solon, more than two thousand years ago:

Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education, and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either amongst us or among yourselves.

We flatter ourselves that the progress of our own civilization has given it a firmer hold on posterity, but I suspect that its accumulated knowledge and memory, too, could easily succumb to an extensive disaster or series of disasters, whether natural or man-made.  And then the survivors of only a few generations later, upon encountering scattered physical evidences of the technical marvels which had been possessed by this "lost civilization", might regard them, uncomprehendingly, as the characters did in the science fiction novel A Canticle for Liebowitz : religious relics which possess supernatural or symbolic power.

If, then, some civilization wanted to preserve a message for future posterity - something that would endure the ravages of time, and that could be interpreted by a future civilization, perhaps populated with a people (or species) completely unlike those that made up its own - how would it do so?  The message would probably have to be simple - perhaps relying upon mathematical or other symbols - but also substantive: it would have to "mean" something - carry something of real value to its future recipients.  A lesson, a warning, a revelation.

               

Of course, there have been legends in our own past of civilizations, secret societies, or religious fraternities that have attempted to do exactly that.  Some have suggested that the monoliths which are scattered throughout our planet, such as the pyramids, are examples of attempts at such simple, but enduring messages.  The title that I have selected for this blog is another example, on a smaller scale: the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus.  Legend has it that Hermes Trismegistus was a prophet - of Egyptian or even Atlantean origin - who became a god through the wisdom that he had acquired.  The Emerald Tablet - ascribed to him - purports to contain fundamental alchemical secrets within its thirteen to fifteen simple verses.

I don't begin to claim that the Emerald Tablet is a legitimate example of the preservation of lost or arcane wisdom.  Alchemy has had a perennial allure to minds who hunger after hidden knowledge, but it is no doubt rife with chicanery, as so many (if not all) of these purported "secret doctrines" are.  But still, I am tantalized by the idea that a medium not unlike this one might be our own recourse, someday, should we ever feel that our collective time on earth is drawing to an end.

And so, at the purported end of an epoch in human civilization, and (I hope) the beginning of a new one, I think it fitting to raise the question, which may very well be a recurring theme in future posts on this blog:  What is our central message - what is it that we would like the unknown (and perhaps distant heirs) to our civilization to learn from our experience?  And, of equally critical importance - how do we convey it?