Thursday, October 1, 2020

A Singular Universe

Javier Sánchez Cañizares is one of the contributors to the book Preguntas sobre Ciencia y Fe, published in 2014 and republished this year. In 2020, Javier has published a book in Spanish with the same title as this post, which can be considered as a book on philosophy of science at a high level of popularization. The goal of the book is to show that materialistic reductionism has no chance of providing a correct complete explanation, as our universe is singular because of several different reasons:
  • Because the standard cosmological model tells us that the universe, which probably started at a singularity (the Big Bang) with extraordinary initial conditions (a very small entropy), appears to be finely tuned so that life can exist. This is the subject of the first chapter.
  • Because quantum mechanics, one of the two basic theories of contemporary physics (the other one is general relativity), raises the problem of the distinction between the quantum world and the classical world. None of the interpretations of quantum mechanics, or the concept of decoherence, have successfully solved the measurement problem that connects both worlds. The second chapter deals with this.
  • Because the existence of the human mind and the hard problem of consciousness bring up the need to redo all scientific activity, which up to now has been based exclusively on the action of efficient causes, while the existence of final causes is evident in man, despite the insistence of materialist reductionism in denying human freedom and in considering us as machines (see the post about Thomas Nagel's book recently published in this blog, which also touches on the subject, and whom Javier quotes). Reviewing this question is the subject of the third chapter, from which I have selected the following quotes (my translation and highlights):
Even if it is true that, today, we don’t have conclusive evidence about the relevance of quantum mechanics in the brain, the simple reference to complexity or emergence, as future explanations of the mind, leads to a dead end... The description of the lower level provides necessary but not sufficient conditions for the description of the higher level... The existence of correlations between the brain and the mind is peacefully admitted, but asserting which is the cause and which is the effect is absolutely hypothetical, insofar as the causality model is not specified, and a theoretical background is not given for the corresponding interpretation... Thus, reductionism is not just simplistic, but generally false.
In this context, the human mind and our scientific activity are totally related, and the second constitutes an exploration of reality different from that which non-human animals or inert beings can perform... The existence of an object of study is a relative fact, dependent on the analysis, but the existence of the subject is absolute and its determination is a singular fact that needs an explanation.
Knowing is different from simply having information... Nature is informative because it consists of differences, inequalities, which can be interpreted by human beings according to different levels of abstraction or description. And we are capable of extracting relevant information because we have minds. Information becomes knowledge when it is integrated into a coherent story by the subject... This primacy of a nature pregnant with information can only be perceived by minds capable of extracting it and dealing with it at different levels... The presence of information in the universe, and of human beings with immaterial mental properties - not necessarily linked to a specific material configuration - are two sides of the same singular coin.
  • The fourth chapter addresses complex dynamic systems (such as living beings) and raises the possibility of two types of emergence: epistemic with bottom-up causality, advocated by materialist reductionists, and ontological, with top-down causality, which the author considers more defensible at the current state of our knowledge. Let’s look at an interesting quote from this chapter: The very definition of complexity... is complex, because it cannot be described by means of universally defined parameters.

The following quote from the fourth chapter is a fairly representative summary of the book:
Whoever wants to maintain a global microscopic determinism of the universe should explain the existence of restrictions such as the second law of thermodynamics, the collapse of the wave function and the emergence of information and cognitive determination in nature, starting from laws much more basic. As I have tried to show in these pages, this is extraordinarily implausible.

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Standard Cosmology: Previous Next
Thematic Thread on Natural and Artificial Intelligence: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca

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