Chariots of the gods

During the 1970s, a Cinerama film with the same title as this post was exhibited and advertised with the following words: Can we say that the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent beings has been proved?

Although watching the film was worthwhile, because it shows many wonderful landscapes and artistic works, I was not convinced by the point it was trying to make. Eric von Däniken, author of the book of the same title, in which the film is based, seems to have very little faith in man’s creative capacity. As soon as a human production seems difficult, he always attributes it to the intervention of aliens. He does so with the pyramids of Egypt, the Mayan astronomical observatories, the mortar of the Incas, and many other things.

The (in)credulity of English writers

Charles Dickens

I am going to talk about three famous English writers, and their answers towards the pseudoscience of the time. One of them lived in the middle of the 19th century, another halfway between the 19th and 20th centuries, and practically all the work of the third was written in the 20th century.

Charles Dickens: His brush with pseudoscience appears in one of his best works (in my opinion the best): Bleak House. One of the characters, called Krook (who is really a crook), dies of spontaneous combustion.

The idea that the human body can ignite spontaneously arose from a series of anecdotal cases of people, often alcoholics, burning to death under dubious circumstances. Some argued that ingested alcohol could ignite spontaneously within the body, even though doctors claimed that the amount of alcohol needed to do so would have to be so large that the person would have died of alcohol poisoning long before igniting.

Pathological science, wishful science, or ironic science?

Irving Langmuir

In 1953, Irving Langmuir (Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry in 1932) gave a lecture on pathological science, a name he applied to the results of the investigations of perfectly honest scientists, enthusiastic about their work... but who are completely deluded. This is Lagmuir’s definition of pathological science, which Milton Rothman in 1990 called wishful science and John Horgan in 1996 called ironic science:

These are cases where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions.

Langmuir signalled five cases of pathological science:

A model for ChatGPT

How does ChatGPT work? Suppose we ignore for the moment that ChatGPT uses an artificial neural network, and represent its algorithm in the traditional way. This algorithm can be divided into two parts:

1. Training: ChatGPT is provided with data (text files), which are used to build two data sets:
1. A list of all the words that appear in any of the texts, without repetition, regardless of their order or the number of times each one appears.
2. An array of indices to the word list, reporting the number of times a given word occurs after a series of words. For example, if the following series appears in the texts: time travel, the indices of the words travel, and time will appear in the array, followed by the index of the next word, followed by the number of times that this sequence of three words appears in the set of texts used for training.

Relativism in science?

Karl Popper

As I have said in other posts, quoting Popper, a scientific theory can never be considered utterly confirmed. In other words, we can never be completely sure that it is true. But some people try to rely on this (and on Kant’s philosophy) to reach the conclusion that we cannot know anything about reality, that scientific knowledge is relative, and that science is no different from other human activities, such as arts or fashion, whose productions cannot be said to be true or false.

Against this position, in an article published in 1990 in defense of realism, Martin Gardner wrote the following paragraph, which in my opinion hits the center of the bull’s eye:

Cyberethics

Norbert Wiener

In 1948, Norbert Wiener created the term Cybernetics, applicable to a new technology, which he defined as follows:

The study of control and communication in the animal and the machine

Cybernetics has a lot to do with Robotics and with the use of computers and microprocessors to control and communicate; in other words, to do almost everything we use them for.

But what is being talked about right now, rather than Cybernetics, is Cyberethics: ethical issues related to the use of computers, social networks, and most tools that modern technology puts within our reach.

Roger Penrose versus William Craig

Roger Penrose

I thank Plácido Doménech Espí for drawing my attention to this debate held in 2019 between Roger Penrose and William Craig, entitled The Universe: How did it get here & why are we part of it?

Roger Penrose rose to fame as a cosmologist in 1970 when he proved, with Stephen Hawking, a theorem stating that the application of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity to the entire universe requires the existence of at least one singular point in the universe (a point where all the geodesics of the universe meet). In other words, the Big Bang.

In 1989, Penrose became one of the most famous scientific popularizers with The emperor’s new mind, a book with deep philosophical implications. Among other things, he proposed the following question, inspired by Gödel’s theorem: how is it possible that we can prove that a theorem is true, if it cannot be proved mathematically from a reasonable set of axioms? According to Penrose, this would indicate that human intelligence is qualitatively different from computing machines.

In 2004 he published a book of extremely hard popularization, The Road to Reality, which is full of equations, where he proposes a unification of Einstein’s general relativity with quantum mechanics (a theory of quantum gravity). Then came his own cosmological theory, Conformal cyclical cosmology (CCC), according to which the universe did not begin with the Big Bang, which would only be the beginning of the current aeon, but there would be an infinite succession of previous eons, each beginning with a Big Bang and evolving to global heat death, when all that would remain in the entire universe would be photons. At that moment, (no one knows how) the entropy would suddenly drop to a minimum value again, to start a new cycle.

William Craig has proposed the kalam cosmological argument, which can be summarized thus:

1. Whatever begins to exist, has a cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

William Lane Craig

Craig argues that the Big Bang was the beginning of the existence of the universe, so there must be a cause for that existence: an uncaused Creator, existing without beginning, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, enormously powerful, and omniscient, to be the author of the abstract world. In other word: God.

In the debate, Penrose began by arguing that there are three components of reality: an abstract or Platonic world (mathematics); a physical world (the material world); and a mental world (the world of consciousness). In addition, he points out the existence of three mysteries, which refer to the relationships between these three worlds:

1. The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics (Eugene Paul Wigner): Why does the abstract world describe so well the workings of the physical world?
2. The origin of consciousness: How can consciousness arise from the physical world?
3. The mind’s ability to understand the abstract world: Why can we understand mathematics and apply it to describe counterintuitive phenomena?

Craig agreed with Penrose’s analysis, and added this consideration:

The abstract world cannot be the cause of the other two worlds, the physical and the mental, because it has no causal power and cannot make decisions. It is not clear that the physical world is the cause of the mental world: Penrose himself admits that this is a mystery. Can the mental world be the cause of the physical and the abstract worlds? It appears it can: we have the experience that our minds can produce physical changes through human intentionality. Could there not be an omniscient mind who is the author of the physical and the abstract worlds? That would solve the problem of the origin of the three worlds.

To this, Penrose could only reply that he does not like this idea (he declares himself an atheist) and would rather think that the abstract world is primordial, although he does not know how the other two worlds could proceed from the abstract world.

The second part of the discussion dealt with the fine-tuning problem. Craig indicated that there are three solutions to the problem:

1. Universal constants must have the value they have.
2. Our existence in such a fine-tuned universe may be due to chance in a multiverse.
3. Our universe has been designed by a Creator.

Penrose began by denying that fine-tuning is a fact, although he ultimately declared himself agnostic about this question. He proposed his CCC theory as an explanation of the origin of our universe. Craig pointed out that this theory is just another multiverse theory, in time rather than in space, (most multiverses are supposed to exist in space). Penrose, for whom this idea seemed to be new, embraced it happily and asserted that his theory has been experimentally confirmed, an assertion most current cosmologists would not accept.

My conclusion from this debate: Penrose was mostly on the defensive, and he was unable to offer one convincing argument in favor of his atheism.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on Science, Faith and Atheism: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca