Quantum
Physics and Enlightenment
2000
Preface ix
Acknowledgements x
Introduction
Summary xi
I Quantum Theory I
2 Interpretations of Quantum Theory
3 Information theory
4 Liebniz’s Monads
5 Buddhism
6 Thinking about thinking
7 Consciousness and time
8 Kolmogorov, anatta, monads and the
wavefunction
9 Implications - From knowing to believing to
living
10 Conclusion
[Total 60,000 words, approx. 140 pages]
Quantum
Physics and Enlightenment takes the reader from no knowledge of quantum physics or Buddhism to an
understanding of how the two are paths to the same insight: all we have is the
present.
The ideas discussed here are neither provable nor
disprovable, and are therefore in the realm of metaphysics. Nevertheless, there
are many good reasons for choosing one idea over another when experimental
verification is not available.
While Buddhism and quantum physics are the main
themes, there are two supporting strands to this book: the philosophy of Liebniz
and modern Information Theory.
Liebniz’s thought seemed very strange to Bertrand
Russell, that arch-Newtonian. Strange, but coherent. A curiosity, rejected
because its conclusions (all we are is this present thought) seemed so
obviously false.
Information theory shows us that far the simplest
structure for the universe is one in which everything exists: an infinite
ensemble of universes, much as described by the Everett Interpretation of
quantum physics.
The book is intended to be read by anyone with a
basic school education. If you do not understand some of the ideas, the fault
is therefore mine. I welcome comments on areas I could expand on or clarify.
The first TWO chapters offer a standard introduction
to Quantum Physics, and readers familiar with these concepts should skip them.
Chapter FIVE is a basic introduction to Buddhism, and Buddhists are advised to
skip this chapter. Chapter SEVEN summarises my own interpretation of Liebniz,
which is based on Russell's. The Summary covers most of the ground of this book
in a very dense few pages. It is an unedited version of a paper written in 1999
and published in the Middle Way, the
journal of the Buddhist Society, in
February 2000.
I am handicapped by having at my disposal a toolbox
of symbols - English - designed to express a philosophy diametrically opposed
to the one presented in this book. Language is not good at communicating
metaphysical concepts; rigour is impossible. The text hops between three modes
of thought, which I call Newtonian, Quantum and Philosophical. The Newtonian
mode is the everyday common sense encapsulated in our languages. The Quantum
mode is the more precise ‘scientific’ way of thinking taught to physics
undergraduates. The philosophical mode is the most rigorous, taking nothing at
all for granted. In this mode, cogito
ergo sum (I think therefore I am) is a statement which makes two enormous
and unjustifiable assumptions: more rigorously, we can only say, ‘this thought
exists therefore something exists, of which this thought is all or part’.
Most, if not all, of the
ideas in this book belong to other people. In particular I would like to thank
Imogen Green, Bruno Marchal, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Vic Stenger, Jacques Mallah,
Desmond Biddulph, Mick Rook, Wei Dai, Max Tegmark and all on the
everything-list at eskimo.com.
This summary first appeared in the February
2000 issue of
The Middle Way, the journal of the Buddhist Society,
London
The discovery of the quantum nature of matter left
the physics community of the 1920s in a state of profound shock. It was, and
is, not possible to reconcile the observed facts with a universe which is
remotely Newtonian. All of the competing interpretations still force us to
abandon one or more cherished idea: time, locality, identity.
The fundamental problem in quantum physics can be
illuminated by a candle. As a candle emits a single photon (a particle of
light), a scientist can determine with extraordinary precision its probability
of being in any one place. A probability
‘wavefunction’ is said to emanate from the source, and the photon can be
anywhere allowed by that wavefunction. The details are computed by the
celebrated Schrödinger equation. The problem comes when you observe the photon,
and discover where it actually is. At
this moment, the wavefunction ‘collapses’ from a cloud around the candle to a
single point. This has led to a large number of metaphysical speculations. How
does the wavefunction ‘know’ it is being looked at? How can quantum mechanics
be formulated without recourse to the idea of the conscious observer, outside
the system, initiating that collapse? This is the problem.
In 1927, at the Solvay Conference, Niels Bohr
succeeded in constructing an orthodoxy (the Copenhagen interpretation) which
allowed physicists to continue building their armoury of quantum mechanical
techniques, while avoiding the frightening questions of what actually happens.
He simply said that it was meaningless to give a photon spatial attributes
until the wavefunction collapse. This developed into the creed of logical
positivism, adherents of which argue it is meaningless to discuss anything that
cannot produce concrete experimental results. Positivism is still a major
factor in the teaching of physics; students are still told to ‘shut up and
calculate’ rather than inquire after meaning.
The most intuitively accessible description of the
problem is the famous Schrödinger cat. In this thought experiment, a cat is
placed in a sealed box, along with a radioactive source. The source is set to
open a bottle of cyanide if it decays. There is a 50% chance of the source
decaying in the minute while the box is closed, so there is a 50% chance of us
seeing a live cat when the box is opened. But, according to Bohr, it does not
make sense to ask what happens before we make the observation (open the box).
The Copenhagen interpretation would have us believe that the cat is in a ‘superposition’
of the alive and dead states while the box is closed, and only becomes actually
dead or alive when we open the box to make our observation.
This, and various other paradoxes, has led wayward
physicists to question the orthodoxy and try to develop interpretations that
resolve the problems. Because this will not affect how physicists do quantum physics, this endeavour is
called metaphysics. Few respectable physicists will lend their name to such a
project. Notable exceptions include Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (based on Bohm’s pilot wave); Henry Stapp’s
papers deriving consciousness from quantum mechanics (based on Bohr’s
Copenhagen interpretation), and David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality (based on Everett).
Nevertheless, the icons of Newtonian physics are
crumbling. It is widely acknowledged that time can no longer be considered an
objective feature of reality (Barbour, Price, Stenger), or at least its
direction of travel is arbitrary. But the Everett ‘many worlds interpretation’,
or MWI, goes much further. It implies that nothing is objective. Everything
exists, and what you see in the plenitude is a function of how far you restrict
your view.
Everett simply posited that there is no wavefunction
collapse. In other words, the photon is emitted every which way simultaneously;
the cat is alive and dead at the same time; a pencil balanced on its point will
fall in all directions at once. We only
see one result, instead of all of them, because we observe a single path
through an ever-branching multitude of infinite universes, and we call that
path ‘our universe’. The process of splitting is called ‘decoherence’.
According to Everett’s MWI, the universe is
branching off every Planck Time (10-43 seconds) into countless
billions of other universes, each an unmoving snapshot in time, and each
branching out in turn. So as you turn the page in ‘this universe’, you go out
for a cup of tea in many others. When you roll a die, all numbers come up. In
billions of universes, you roll a six; in billions more, you get a one. In some
universes, the die turns into a diamond. None of these events contradicts any
known laws of physics. As the probability of anything happening is always one
(it will happen), Everett used the term, ‘measure’ to describe the relative
proportions of events. For example, the measure of dice showing one to five is
five times the measure of dice showing six, although there are infinitely many
universes corresponding to either category. David Deutsch calls the infinite
ensemble of snapshot universes the ‘multiverse’.
MWI is not the orthodoxy of the physics community,
but neither is any competing ontology. It makes precisely the same predictions
for the results of experiments as the Copenhagen or any other interpretation.
When positivism is accepted as the way to do science, anything that is ‘not
even wrong’ is widely ignored. Nevertheless, various polls of leading
physicists have concluded that, when pressed for an answer, more believe MWI
than anything else.
There are better reasons for supposing that MWI is
true. They centre on the principle of ‘Occam’s Razor’, which states that the
simplest theory compatible with the facts is the one we should choose.
Superficially, we should choose the MWI because it gives the same results as
the Copenhagen Interpretation, without the need for an observer-induced ‘wavefunction
collapse’. But more profoundly, the MWI makes the world we observe compatible
with a universe containing just one bit of information.
This startling idea can be attributed in outline to
Max Tegmark, Bruno Marchal and Jürgen Schmidhuber. To an information scientist
- and all of physics can be regarded as a subset of information science - the
information content of a system (its ‘Kolmogorov complexity’) is defined by the
length of the computer program required to generate it. The program to generate
an MWI system, an infinite multiverse, can be very short. Wei Dai has suggested
a counting algorithm. For example, the BASIC program LET A=A+1; GOTO START will
generate an enumerably infinite set of natural numbers. These can be mapped
onto an infinite physical multiverse - but its information content is almost
nil. On the other hand, the program
required to generate a single classical universe might be as large as the
universe itself.
By analogue, consider the Mandelbrot set, Ford
froth, or a fractal pattern. The expression, znew=z2 + c where
z and c are complex numbers, can
be used to generate infinitely complex, and beautiful ‘landscapes’ on
the screen of a computer (see Figure 1). An inhabitant of a Mandelbrot world
would see amazingly rich complexity all around. Mathematicians, outside the
Mandelbrot set, can understand that the Kolmogorov complexity of their world is
very small - a short equation.

Figure 1 (generated by the
University of Utah applet at http://www.hath.utah.edu/~alfeld/math/mandelbrot/mandelbrot.html)
Given that we know that something exists (cogito ergo sum), it only takes one
further assumption to give us MWI: that there exists the minimum possible
amount of information compatible with something existing. Only one bit of
information is required to distinguish between nothing and an infinite
universe. Anyone who advocates a different interpretation of quantum physics
has a lot of complexity to explain away.
Natural questions to ask at this point are: “so the
universe is infinite, but why do I
exist?”, “Why is my universe the way
it is?”, “How can you explain death, taxes and the value of pi?”. The answer is
in the ‘weak anthropic principle’, which accounts for the fact that we see a
stable, congenial environment around us. Most parts of the universe (or most
universes if you prefer) are not suited to life, but we can only exist in
universes hospitable to life, so only see those outcomes. This is the ‘Weak
Anthropic Principle’ (WAP). In 1974, Brandon Carter first proposed the WAP as
an explanation for the laws, constants and regularities that we see in the
cosmos.
I would go further in arguing that ‘laws’ are merely
those parameters that need to be within certain tolerances in order for us to
survive. Professor Victor Stenger runs an Internet page at the University of
Hawaii, which allows the user to choose certain initial parameters for a
universe, and have his computer calculate the resulting constants such as the
speed of light and atomic mass. Very
few are hospitable to life, but those few are the ones life inhabits. The very
Laws of Physics are subjective.
Most people have come to terms with the idea of an
infinite universe. An infinite ‘multiverse’ is no bigger. But the idea that
everything exists is frightening. It means, for one thing, that there is no
particular significance attached to you or me. All variations of you exist, all
variations of me; from almost all perspectives ‘we’ are pure noise in the
infinite plenitude. We have significance, existence, purely from a subjective
point of view.
To summarise the paper so far: there are good
grounds for believing that everything
exists. Everything includes an infinite number of beings of all possible
descriptions. It includes a Christian God and a devil. It includes an infinite
number of monkeys. It includes a thousand-foot ghost of my grandmother. It
includes every dream you have ever dreamed. Everything is true.
Knowing this, we can see that it is purely for
anthropic reasons - happenstance - that we pay any attention to our selves, or
the world that we chance to find around us. It is an infinitely tiny sliver of
an infinite multiverse.
We see ourselves as a
subject undergoing successive experiences in time in a classical universe
simply because our view is so restricted. If we could see the whole multiverse,
we would not be able to see anything: it is all noise unless you ‘squint’ and
look down a certain fissure in the multiverse, choosing a time line and spatial
co-ordinates.
What would someone who fully
understood and believed this feel? They would see that their universe is purely
subjective. Nothing is objective. Everything is relative to the observer:
space, time, truth. From an Archimedean perspective (outside the ‘multiverse’),
you can see what you like in the universe. It makes no sense to single out one
person, one universe, one set of physical laws or constants. As the Buddha
taught, individual things neither exist, nor do not exist. The three signs of
being, the characteristics common to all life, are impermanence, suffering, and
an absence of a soul.
“Buddha keeps away from
these discriminations and looks upon the world as upon a passing cloud. To
Buddha every definitive thing is an illusion. He knows that whatever the mind
grasps and throws away is insubstantial; thus He transcends the pitfalls of
images and discriminative thought” (The
Teaching of the Buddha, p.104)
The same space-time that
contains you contains something else, when viewed from most perspectives. “To a
man a river seems like a river but to a hungry demon which sees fire in water,
it may seem to be like fire. Therefore, to speak to a man about a river
existing would have some sense, but to the demon it would have no meaning”
(ibid, p.110)
You are not an objective
feature of reality; your self does not exist as an independent entity within
the multiverse. But every event occurs. Time is not an objective feature of
reality: the time is always now and the thought you have now is an event within
the multiverse, not related to a thinker. Buddhaghosa says: “Mere suffering
exists, but no sufferer is found; The deeds are, but no doer is found” (in Visuddhimagga).
A full, deep understanding of physics is equivalent
in some ways to the Buddhist concept of enlightenment. The idea of self is
relinquished. The very fabric of reality is seen to be subjective. The
absurdity of attachments becomes clear. Ignorance and being are ended; the
events of warmth, loving kindness and compassion exist.
Perhaps Western science could be assimilated by
Buddhism, and Buddhism could be absorbed by science. Such a process would give
back to the West a basis for morality. The irony is that this has happened in a
billion worlds, and it will never happen in a billion others. To wish it on ‘our
universe’ is to miss the point entirely.
Introduction
This book is based on a very simple set of premises.
The entire argument is explained in the following sentence: The simplest
explanation for ‘your existence’ is that every thought exists, and that this
current thought ‘of yours’ is one sample from that infinite set. By simplicity,
I mean the universe with the minimum complexity, as defined by Kolmogorov.
The entire book is an expansion of that idea, and an
introduction to a number of independently-formulated but complementary concepts
from physics, Buddhism and philosophy. Each of these ideas is a different
perspective from which we can see the same simple fact.
It is unlikely that you will be persuaded of this
argument. Unlikely, for the same reason that Descartes thought ‘cogito ergo sum’ to be the most fundamental
knowledge possible. His idea, ‘I think, therefore I am’ contained the giant
leap of faith that is the root of every philosophical paradox: the unwarranted
assumption that, if there is a thought, there must be a thinker. It is entirely
understandable, and normal, for you to reject this argument outright as soon as
you hear it implies that ‘you’ do not exist. You do not exist as anything more
than this very thought.
Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) is the most accurate
theory physics has ever produced, and yet it offers a counter-intuitive view of
the world and begs more questions than it answers. This chapter begins at the
very basics with the double-slit experiment and the behaviour of a photon
emitted from a candle. It covers the EPR experiment and the Schrödinger’s Cat
paradox.
Quantum Physics is the science of things so small
that the quantum nature of reality has an effect. Quantum means 'discrete
amount' or 'portion'. Max Planck discovered in 1900 that you could not find
less than a certain minimum amount of anything. This minimum amount is now
called the Planck unit.
Quantum Physics is weird. Niels Böhr, the father of the orthodox 'Copenhagen Interpretation'
of quantum physics once said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory
has not understood it". To understand the weirdness completely, you just
need to know about three experiments: Light Bulb, Two Slits, and Schrödinger’s
Cat.
Two Slits
The simplest experiment to demonstrate quantum
weirdness involves shining a light through two parallel slits and looking at
the screen. It can be shown that a single photon (particle of light) can
interfere with itself, as if it travelled through both slits at once.
[2000 words explaining double-slit in detail, with
three diagrams.]
Light Bulb
Imagine a light bulb filament gives out a photon,
seemingly in a random direction. Erwin Schrödinger came up with a short
equation that correctly predicts the chances of finding that photon at any
given point. He envisaged a kind of
wave, like a ripple from a pebble dropped into a pond, spreading out from the
filament. Once you actually look at the photon, this 'wavefunction' collapses
into the single point at which the photon really is.
Schrödinger’s Cat
In this experiment, we take your pet cat and put it
in a box with a bottle of cyanide. We rig it up so that a detector looks at an
isolated electron and determines whether it is 'spin up' or 'spin down' (it can
have either characteristic, seemingly at random). If it is 'spin up', then the bottle is opened and the cat gets
it. Ten minutes later we open the box
and see if the cat is alive or dead. The question is: what state is the cat in
between the detector being activated and you opening the box. Nobody has
actually done this experiment (to my knowledge) but it does show up a paradox
that arises in certain interpretations.
[500 words total on Cat]
EPR
[500 words on EPR]
Summary and conclusion
If you dare to think about the meaning of quantum
theory, you have to believe one of the following things:
MENU
Your consciousness affects the
behaviour of subatomic particles
- or -
Particles move backwards as well as
forwards in time and appear in all possible places at once
- or -
The universe is splitting, every
Planck-time (10-43 seconds), into billions of parallel universes
- or -
The universe is interconnected with
faster-than-light transfers of information
----
Full English Breakfast
Coffee or Tea
These are the results of the different competing
interpretations of quantum physics. The meaning
of quantum physics is a bit of a taboo subject for physicists, but everyone
thinks about it. To make it all a bit more respectable, it is better to say
'ontology' rather than 'meaning' - although it is the same thing. The one thing
all the interpretations have in common is that each of them explains all the
facts and predicts every experiment's outcome correctly.
Otherwise respectable physicists can get quite
heated about how sensible their pet interpretation is and how crazy all the
others are. At the moment, there is about one new interpretation every three
months, but most of them fit into the following categories. For each example, I
shall try to explain what it means for Schrödinger’s poor cat.
Copenhagen Interpretation (CI)
This is the granddaddy of interpretations,
championed by the formidable Niels Böhr of Copenhagen University. He browbeat
all dissenters into submission (with the notable exception of Einstein) at a
Brussels conference sponsored by a philanthropist named Solvay in 1927. Böhr thereby stifled the debate for a
generation or two.
The CI stretches the meaning of the word ‘interpretation’.
It essentially says, "Thou shalt not ask what happens before ye
look". Böhr pointed out that the Schrödinger equation worked as a tool for
calculating where the particle would be, except that it 'collapsed' as soon as
you looked at the experiment. If anyone asked why this was, he would say,
"shut up and calculate" (or words to that effect).
When you do try to take Copenhagen seriously you
come to the conclusion that consciousness and particle physics are
inter-related. This is the thinking behind books such as The Dancing Wu-Li Masters.
More recently, Henry Stapp at the University of
California has written papers such as On
Quantum Theories of the Mind (1997). Stapp's central thesis is that the synapses in your brain
are so small that quantum effects are significant. This means that there is
quantum uncertainty about whether a neuron will fire or not - and this degree
of freedom that nature has allows for the interaction of ‘mind’ and ‘matter’.
What happens to the cat? You are not allowed to ask.
Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI)
The various paradoxes that the Copenhagen
Interpretation gave rise to (particularly Schrödinger’s cat, and Einstein's
dislike of "spooky action at a distance") led others to keep on
trying to find a better interpretation.
The simplest was put forward by a student, Hugh
Everett, in 1958. He said that the Schrödinger equation does not collapse. Most
scientists laughed at him, because they could see that the photon, for example,
was in just one place when they looked, not in all possible places. But after a
couple of decades, this issue was resolved with the concept of decoherence - the
idea that different universes can very quickly branch apart, so that there is
very little relationship between them after a tiny fraction of a second.
This has led to what should strictly be called the
'post-Everett' Interpretation, but is still usually called MWI. It is now one
of the most popular interpretations and has won some impromptu beauty contests
at physics conferences. Unfortunately it means that billions of ‘you’ are
splitting off every fraction of a second into discrete universes and it implies
that everything possible exists in one universe or another. This comes up with
its own set of hard-to-digest concepts, such as the fact that a 500-year-old
you exists in some universes, whereas in others you died at birth.
In 1997, Max Tegmark at Princeton University and
Bruno Marchal in Belgium proposed an experiment to prove that MWI was correct.
It involved pointing a loaded gun at your head and pulling the trigger. Of
course, you will only survive in those universes where the gun, for whatever reason,
fails to go off. If you get a misfire every time, you can satisfy yourself -
with an arbitrarily high level of confidence - that MWI is true. Of course, in
most universes your family will be weeping at your funeral (or possibly just
shaking their heads and muttering). The further implications of MWI are
discussed in detail at the end of this chapter.
What happens to the cat? It is dead in half of the
subsequent universes and alive in the other half.
Pilot Waves, Hidden Variables and the Implicate Order
David Bohm (1917-1992) was a very brilliant
physicist and that's why people went along with him when he came up with an
elegant but more complicated theory to explain the same set of phenomena
(normally, more complicated theories are disqualified by the principle known as
Occam’s Razor).
Bohm's theory follows on some original insights by
Prince Louis de Broglie (1892-1987), who first studied the wave-like properties
of the behaviour of particles in 1924. De Broglie suggested that, in addition
to the normal wavefunction of the Copenhagen Interpretation, there is a second
wave that determines a precise position for the particle at any particular
time. In this theory, there is some 'hidden variable' that determines the
precise position of the photon.
Sadly, John von Neumann (1903-1957) wrote a paper in
1932 ‘proving’ that this theory was impossible. Von Neumann was such a great
mathematician that nobody bothered to check his maths until 1966, when John
Bell (1928-1990) proved he had bodged it and there could be hidden variables
after all - but only if particles could communicate faster than light (this is
called 'nonlocality'). In 1982 Alain Aspect demonstrated that this superluminal
signalling did appear to exist, although David Mermin then showed that you could
not actually signal anything. There is still some argument about whether this
means very much.
Bohm's theory was that the second wave was indeed
faster than light, and moreover it did not get weaker with distance but
instantly permeated the entire universe, acting as a guide for the movement of
the photon. This is why it is called a 'pilot wave'.
This theory explains the paradoxes of quantum
physics perfectly. But it introduces a new faster-than-light wave and some
hidden mechanism for deciding where it goes - to create an 'implicate order'.
That's quite a lot of extra baggage, and scientists like to travel light. Worse
still, Bohm went on to become a mystic, identifying his 'implicate order' with
Eastern spirituality and spawning books like Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics. That is heretical behaviour in the eyes of
most physicists.
What happens to the cat? It is either alive, or not alive, as determined by the implicate
order.
Consistent Histories
The Consistent Histories interpretation, put forward
by Robert Griffiths in 1984, works backwards from the result of an experiment,
arguing that only a few possible histories are consistent with the rules of
quantum mechanics. It is an interesting idea but not very popular because it
still does not seem to explain how a particle can go through two slits and
interfere with itself. Roland Omnés, in The
Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (1994) wrote down 80 equations in a
single chapter and came to the conclusion that the 'consistent histories'
interpretation was much the same as the Copenhagen.
What happens to the Cat? Again, you're not supposed
to ask.
Alternate Histories
The Alternate Histories Interpretation is quite
different, being similar to the Many-Worlds Interpretation, but with the
insistence that only the actual outcome is the real world and the ones we are
not in do not actually exist. Unfortunately this gets us right back to their
being some kind of 'collapse'.
What happens to the cat? Again, you're not supposed
to ask.
Time Reversibility
Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was a genius who
developed a new approach to quantum mechanics. He formalised its crowning
achievement, Quantum Electrodynamics, which is the most accurate scientific
theory ever devised. He also developed
the Feynman Diagram, which represents the interaction of two particles as the
exchange of a third particle. This
diagram has time on one axis and space on the other and the interaction can be
viewed as happening both in forward and in reverse time.
An electron, on its way from point A to point B, can
bump into a photon. In the diagram this can be drawn as sending it backwards
not just in space, but also in time. Then it bumps into another photon, which
sends it forward in time again, but in a different direction in space. In this
way, it can be in two places at once.
There is little doubt that a Feynman diagram offers
the easiest way to predict the results of a subatomic experiment. Many
physicists have seen the power of this tool and taken the next step, arguing
that reverse time travel is what actually happens in reality. Victor Stenger of
the University of Hawaii argues strongly for this ontology in his book, Atomic Reality (unpublished as this book
goes to press). Of course, for a
layman, it is hard to understand why a photon bounces around in such a way that
it appears in two slits at once.
What happens to the Cat? You will need to ask Vic
Stenger. I did not understand when he explained it to me.
Transactional Interpretation
Like Stenger's, John Cramer's Transactional
Interpretation relies on the fundamental time-symmetry of the universe. He
argues that particles perform a kind of 'handshake' in the course of
interacting. One sends out a wave forward in time, and another sends one out
backwards in time.
What happens to the Cat? Ask Cramer.
Further implications of the MWI
If everything exists, how can you attribute
objective existence to any one or other particular pattern in the white noise
of the plenitude? From outside the multiverse - 'Archimedes's point' - you cannot.
It is only from within the multiverse, from a limited perspective, that any
particular pattern emerges. This has the dramatic consequence that you do not
exist as an objective feature of reality. You are real only to yourself. You
have subjective existence only. [100-200 further words]
Summary
There is no evidence for one interpretation rather
than another. However, it can be argued that the 'Many Worlds Interpretation'
(MWI) makes fewer assumptions than the others and dissolves more paradoxes. If
MWI is true, and I believe that it is, then no structure in the 'multiverse'
has any objective significance. You only exist to you and anyone else who
chooses to see you within the infinite potential of the plenitude. There is no
significance whatsovevr to the particular pattern you think of as yourself.
This is a common thread, arrived at independently in the following chapters.
3
Kolmogorov demonstrated that the information content
of a system could be defined by the length of the computer program required to
generate it. Tegmark, Marchal and Schmidhuber point out that the program needed
to generate an infinite MWI ‘multiverse’ is very short indeed, whereas the
program needed to generate one ‘single universe’, as we think of ‘our own
universe’ would be extremely large.
A.N. Kolmogorov (1903-1987) developed a notion of
complexity based on randomness. In 1933, he used the recently-developed theory
of effective computability to resolve the problem of the proper definition of a
random sequence - something that had been discussed by Laplace but was, until
Kolmogorov, unresolved.
A key question is: how does one generate a physical
world? Is there really a physical world? How would we define it? A good
exchange on the subject occurred between Jacques Mallah of Princeton and Bruno
Marchal of Brussels on the ‘everything-list’ newsgroup:
Marchal had described how he implemented a ‘Universal
Dovetailer’ reality-generator on his Macintosh SE/30 in 1990, and was arguing
that the Macintosh itself could be viewed as ‘local décor’: it does not matter
what substrate the universe is generated by.
Jacques Mallah:
> Of course, in
your Macintosh example, the UD was itself implemented by
>some other mathematical
structure - your "local decor".
Does that matter?
Bruno Marchal:
A big part of my
reasoning is that it *doesn't matter* indeed. For most
people this is a
difficulty.
Jacques Mallah
>Actually, I would
say that any mathematical structure that has real
>existence (in the
strong sense) should be called "physical".I do not know
>of any better
definition for "physical existence".
Bruno Marchal:
What is that strong
sense of existence? And why do you want
to
classify as physical
any mathematical structures.
If you do that (a
little like Tegmark) you are obliged to explain how
we feel a difference
between physicalness and mathematicalness (why is
there math courses
and physics courses) etc.
Tegmark, like
Everett, *do* distinguish the first and third person,
which helps to make
sense of that idea. The physical would be
some mathematical
structures sufficiently rich for having "inside
point of views"
(through SAS point of views for exemple).
The physical point of
view (pov) would correspond to these internal pov.
Jacques Mallah:
>Nowhere did I say
that _only_ a "physical" system could implement a
>computation. But you did bring to my attention the fact
that I should make
>the definition of
"implementation" more clear on this point. In other
>places, I do
point out that one computation can implement another. (In
>turn, the second
one might implement another, etc.; the first one will
>therefore
implement all of those.)
>So, your
objection is irrelevant. You do believe
a UD implements other
>computations.
Bruno Marchal:
Sure. Yes. UD
implements all computations, and even all implementations
of all computations.
Summary
Kolmogorov shows us that the whole can be very much
simpler than its parts. If we assume everything exists, then we can 'generate'
it with a very short algoithm. If we assume just one classical universe exists,
we have to explain where a near-infiite amount of information came from. It is
therefore much more parsimonious to believe that everything exists. Again,
there is no significance to the pattern you call yourself. It is not an
objective feature of reality and can only be seen if you set out to look for a
you-shaped pattern. We should not be surprised to find that we are -
'environment' and 'self' - as we are. This 'you'-pattern is bound to exist.
[8000 words]
“I find in these thoughts so
many things which alarm me, and which almost all men, if I am not mistaken,
will find so shocking, that I do not see of what use a writing can be, which
apparently all the world will reject’ -
Arnaud, letter to Liebniz, c1695
Liebniz is best known for inventing the
infinitescimal calculus just ahead of Newton, and for his assertion that, since
God is good and God created the world, we must be living in the best of all
possible worlds. If this or that particular horror were to be removed,
something worse would have to take its place. This doctrine was the public
output of a paid philosopher, and is based on some preposterous premises,
including an omnipotent being. Liebniz’s real beliefs were quite different, and
unpublished. For this reason, Russell observed, “Liebniz was one of the supreme
intellects of all time, but as a human being he was not admirable”.
Liebniz’s true philosophy, as revealed by Russell
and Couturat at the dawn of the 20th Century, almost 300 years after
his death, is quite different. Before going into detail on his schema, it is
worth looking at some of the remarkable ideas Liebniz created based on pure
logic. The references are to Russell's 'Extracts from Liebniz'.
Liebniz believed in quantum physics and in an
infinite number of parallel universes. Furthermore, he came to the conclusion
that, from the outside the multiverse is all one, and it is purely subjective
perceptions that break it into 'meaningful' parts. All of these concepts are
introduced in a single paragraph (G.II.278):
"Matter
is not continuous but discrete, and actually infinitely divided, though no
assignable part of space is without
matter. But space, like time, is something not substantial, but ideal, and
consists in possibilities... And thus there are no divisions in it but such as
are made by the mind, and the part is posterior to the whole".
This one paragraph is amazingly prescient: quantum
physics ("matter is discrete"); many worlds ("space, like
time... consists in possibilities"); the denial that objective things
exist ("no divisions in it but such as are made by the mind"). The
next paragraph caps it all by introducing the notion of Kolmogorov complexity:
"Unity is divisible, but not resolvable; for
the fractions which are parts of unity are have less simple notions, because
integers (less simple than unity) always enter into the notions of fractions...
Parts are not always simpler than the whole, though they are always less than
the whole".
This has clear parallels with Marchal and Tegmark's
idea that the entire multiverse, the Unity in Liebniz's words, is simpler than
its own parts. This is a truly remarkable concept to have arisen in the 17th
Century.
Just to cap it all, Liebniz believes that space and
time are relative (G.VII.363): "I hold space to be something merely
relative, as time is" Liebniz deduces this since space is entirely uniform
and is therefore only distinguishable, one point from another, by reference to
the bodies in space. If there were no
such bodies, all points in space would be the same one point: "To suppose
two things indiscernable is to suppose the same thing under two names... an
impossible fiction".
A major premise of this book is that nothing in the
multiverse exists as a separate entity unless viewed by someone who has a
partial view. An omniscient being would see nothing. In his later writings
(1712), Liebniz alludes to this also (G.IV.450): "The explanation of all
phenomena by nothing but the mutually
conspiring perceptions of monads, setting aside corporeal substance, I hold to
be useful for the fundamental inspection of things".
Nevertheless, Liebniz did hold some ideas that still
seem quite strange. A funamental concept in his thought was the
'pre-established harmony'. This held that the a person's body acted in a
certain way due to some sort of pre-established programme, with no relationship
to a mind or soul. But the mind or soul operates a parallel program, so that -
for example - when a person decides to move a limb, the limb moves at the same
time, as the physical and mental programmes are synchronised in time. This
concept is developed to circumvent the enigma of how the body interacts with
the soul. Liebnitz thought it 'vulgar' that there should be some kind of organ
able to interface between the two. To me, this begs the quewstion: why assume a
physical world at all? The mental programme is sufficient and there need be no
physical world at all. In this chapter, I simply drop the physical and
interpret Liebnitz's thought on this basis.
[Libniz's 5 axioms, and from there to monads, 500
words, based on para at end]
Liebniz coined the term, 'monad', to denote somehing
quite similar to the 'Observer Moment' of the previous chapter on Information
Theory...
On the basis of this logical framework, Liebnitz
concluded that there was no interaction between any one monad and any
other. However, each monad's own 'inner
nature' is such that it has within it a perfect copy of the information regarding
its place in the universe. G.IV.484: "And accordingly, since each of these
substances accurately represents the whole universe in its own way and from a
certain point of view... there will be a perfect agreement between all these
substances, which wll have the result as if they had communication with one
another... such as the mass of ordinary philosophers suppose."
In G.VI.607, Liebniz concludes: "There is no
way of explaining how a Monad can be altered in quality or internally changed
by any other created thing... The monads have no windows through which anything
could come in or go out."
So, a monad could contain the thought, 'I am James,
and I had chicken for lunch, along with my friend Robert at 13:07 to 14:45 GMT
on 1st April, 2001' - and although it has no contact with anything else in the
universe, there will be another monad with the thought, 'I am Robert and I had
lunch with my friend James from 13:07 to 14:45 GMT on 1st April, 2001'.
This is startlingly similar to the conclusion of the
Quantum Physics and Information Theory chapters. However, in these chapters, I
argue that each 'thought' or 'observer moment' is related to others only in
that - since all thoughts/OMs exist - there must be a correspondingly 'related'
thought/OM. But these relationships are subjective only. With Liebnitz, the
monads actually do have relationships as a matter of objective fact, since
there is a physical universe which echoes, or plays out, the intended motions
of the monads.
.........
Summary
Liebnitz believed that each monad - a concept
similar to an observer moment - had within itself an innate knowledge of the
universe seen from its perspective. However, it does not interact with other
monads or anything else for that matter. This is very similar to the idea, in
the Information theory and MWI chapters, that each thought or Observer Moment,
contains its own memories which, while not objectively related to any other
thought or OM, will happen to be true memories since all thoughts/OMs,
including the 'remembered' thought/OM, exist.
These concepts were not arrived at through religious
introspection, nor through scientific analysis of the physical world. Liebniz
deduced all of this through pure, daring, logic.
.......... adapt to bridge into monad definition
above.
A core idea in Liebniz's logic is: “Semper igitur
praedicatum seu consequens inest subjecto seu antecidenti…” (“Always therefore
the predicate or consequent inheres in the subject or antecedent”, Liebniz in Opuscules et Fragments inédits de Liebniz)
What Liebniz is saying is that all true statements
are analytic, i.e. they are of the form, ‘a red box is a box’ - relating a
property of a person or object (redness) to that person or object (a box). Any
statement that does not do so must be
untrue. Any statement about an object must assert that an object has a
property, Opuscules, p.521
However, every object is infinitely complex, for it
includes in its self its relationship with every other object in the universe: “Every
singular subject involves the whole universe in its perfect notion”.
This applies also to Liebniz’s famous monads. Each
includes within itself is relationship with all other monads.
.....
Liebniz was remarkable in implying that there is one
substance, not necessarily a body and a soul. In his letters to Arnaud,
(G.II.118) he writes: "it is the animated substance, to which this matter
belongs, which is truly one being, and matter taken as mere mass is only a pure
phenomenon or well-founded appearance."
…
One of Liebniz’s most significant ideas was that
there were two types of space: one subjective (the perceptions of each
individual monad) and one objective view, which Russell called ‘the assemblage
of points of view of the various monads’ (History
of Western Philosophy). This distinction is discussed in the previous
chapter on information theory. The individual perceives a ‘self’ undergoing
successive experiences in ‘time’, but objectively, there is no time or motion
in the block universe.
[4,000
words]
An introduction
to Buddhist Philosophy
There are as many interpretations of Buddhism as
there are of quantum physics. However, there is a core doctrine - the four
noble truths and anatta - that is common to all the main schools: Theravada,
Mahayana, and Zen.
Buddhism is presented here very briefly, for the
purposes of drawing out the parallels with the other strands in the book. I ask
the majority of Buddhists, who will view this cut-down version as a travesty,
to skip this chapter or accept my apologies.
The Four Noble Truths
1. Things are unsatisfactory.
This unsatisfactoriness, or suffering, is called ‘dukkha’ in the Pali language
of the major Buddhist scriptures.
2. Things are unsatisfactory
because we would rather they were different.
3. Things will cease being
unsatisfactory if we stop wanting them to be different.
4. There is a path to achieving
this cessation of unsatisfactoriness, and that is the Noble Eightfold Path.
On first inspection, the first three truths seem
glib, almost obvious. But this is a very deep truth, which really does need to
be contemplated for some time before the penny drops.
For us to be perfectly happy with the world, we
either need to change it so that it fits our ideal or change ourselves so that
the world as it is becomes our ideal. In the West, we are constantly attempting
the former. This is futile, because we cannot make the world perfect; we cannot
possess all of the world, which is what most people want. It is, however,
possible to change ourselves. Unfortunately, it is not easy; but at least it is
possible.
Dukkha: unsatisfactoriness
I have translated ‘dukkha’ to mean
unsatisfactoriness. In general use, it can also mean sorrow and misery. It
applies to our deep unhappiness at the loss of a loved one, and to our mild
irritation at the broadcasters when we try to find an interesting program on
television. I want my life to be different: I do not want the battery on my
laptop to expire before my train reaches Zürich. I do not want this cold I
picked up in Chamonix. I do not want my nice view to vanish as we enter a
tunnel. I want this book to be finished. I do not want my mother to be
suffering after her recent hip operation. In general, things are pretty
unsatisfactory. All these unsatisfactorinesses are dukkha.
Samudaya: the origin of unatisfactoriness
My room service menu is lousy. I want smoked salmon.
I am unhappy. What has made me unhappy? The chefs, the hoteliers who created
the menu? Or my desire for smoked salmon? The second noble truth is that the
cause, the origin, of suffering, is our own desire.
This is a universal truth, and applies to all
suffering. If we are ill, we blame the disease. In fact, if we lived in the
present, and stopped wanting to feel different, we would cease to suffer.
When a family member dies, it is natural to think of
this as a bad event in itself. It is a stand-alone bad thing. Buddhists point
out that value judgements can only be made by people. The death of my father is
only unsatisfactory if I wish he were still alive, rather than accepting the
here and now as it is. This wishing is an essential ingredient in the
unhappiness. Sorrow cannot exist unless we wish the world to be other that the
way it is.
This is one of the hardest things for non-Buddhists
to accept. The very idea that all our anguish is of our own making arouses
people to anger: how dare you say I have only myself to blame for this
suffering? There are many parables designed to deliver the message far more
subtly that I have done here.
Nirodha: the truth of freedom from suffering
The third truth, the truth of emancipation, follows
logically from the second: stop wishing things to be other than they are, and
you will stop causing suffering for yourself. If I stop wanting salmon, the
fact that it is not on the menu will not bother me. The same is true, but less
intuitively so, of illness. If I stop thinking about being sick, but live in
the present, then I stop suffering.
Magga: the path to the freedom from suffering
The Noble Eightfold Path is essentially a technique
for living in the present. One who lives in the present and sees things as they
are is enlightened, (has reached Nirvana). The way to achieve this is to act
like an enlightened person until eventually one becomes enlightened. That is,
acting selflessly until one becomes selfless. The Path is a list of specific
selfless things one must do, which come under the general headings of wisdom,
ethical behaviour, and mental discipline. The Noble Eightfold Path (after
Rahula) is as follows:
1. Right understanding (wisdom:
seeing things as they are; understanding the Four Noble Truths)
2. Right thought (wisdom:
thoughts of love, selflessness, detachment)
3. Right speech (ethics: no
lies, hurtful or foolish speech)
4. Right action (ethics: not
harming others)
5. Right livelihood (ethics: do
not make money by helping people to harm themselves or others)
6. Right effort (discipline:
preventing and eliminating negative states of mind)
7. Right mindfulness
(discipline: to be aware, attentive to the activity of the mind and body)
8. Right concentration
(discipline: meditation to achieve thought-free awareness)
Anatta: no self
“There is no unmoving mover behind the movement. It
is only movement. It is not correct to say that life is moving, but life is
movement itself. Life and movement are not two different things. In other
words, there is no thinker behind the thought. Thought itself is the thinker.
If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found.”
(Walpola
Rahula, ibid)
Buddhist philosophy of assimilation.
Wittgenstein…
[15,000 words]
epistemology
and anthropic reasoning
Epistemology
and reasons for favouring the MWI-plenitude world-view.
MWI offers a universe of a very few bits in
complexity. I argue that just one bit is needed for MWI, against the
inconceivably large number for the other interpretations. Occam’s time-proven
principle states that we should always prefer the simplest explanation
consistent with the facts. This chapter also discusses the Weak Anthropic
Principle (WAP).
[2000 words]
Trying to
understand this view of reality, and what it means for you.
[The section discusses the difficulties of seeing
from the outside something that has no outside. Our brains are not predisposed
to grasping this concept because there is no evolutionary advantage in doing
so. 2000 words]
If everything
is true, and there are no objective relationships, how is science useful?
[How can we move from speaking in one subjective
context to another? How can we overcome the barriers of a language which has
evolved to describe a subjective, self-referential reality? 1500 words]
You are only
your current thought
Time does not exist as an objective feature of
reality. Hence, there can be no objective progression of thoughts through time,
and hence no consciousness. This very thought is all that exists of ‘you’. That
does not mean that all of the patterns that you think of as ‘I’ do not exist.
They do, but someone needs to be looking out for them in order to give them any
significance over the ‘white noise’ of the infinite multiverse. Everything
exists.
The key to this chapter is the recognition that
Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum is
incorrect. It is a leap of faith to say I
think, let alone I exist. All we
can say is, ‘this thought exists, therefore a thought exists’. This thought may
be a thought replete with ideas of an objective outside world. But like Liebniz’s
monads, it may be just a self-contained thought.
I argue that a self-contained thought it all it is.
It has no objective relationship with anything else: no past thoughts or future
thoughts. No physical brain. No ‘you’.
However, it is a complex thought and, as argued
earlier, the simplest explanation for complexity is that everything exists. So
another thought, which we might recognize as a thought of the same ‘person’ one
‘second later’, exists. In fact, all of the thoughts that you imagine making up
your life, do exist. But so do all the tiniest variations of them. It still
makes no sense to speak of an objective ‘you’ - it is as fatuous as pointing at
a square piece of pastry, saying ‘there’s a fish!’ and cutting a fish shape out
of the square to prove it.
[6,000 words]
How the
Buddhist way is implied by the MWI-plenitude world-view
A recap of the ideas of the book, set against the
writings of the Buddhaghosa (from Visuddhimagga).
[12,000 words]
Could this synthesis of Buddhist philosophy and
Western physics give us back a basis for making moral choices? And would it
matter if it did?
[Explain why there is a need for a basis for moral
choices]
1 - morality
The religion of the West could be characterised as
conscientious nihilism: science with a residual Christian conscience. With no
moral foundation, this residue can evaporate, leaving us with pure nihilism.
And nihilism is the basis for sociopathic behaviour: acting purely selfishly,
with no qualms about lying, cheating, murdering.
All religions offer a basis for morality: act for
the good of the group and you will be rewarded (with heaven or a fortunate
rebirth). Act antisocially, and you will be punished (with hell or a lower rebirth).
Buddhism, like all other religions, has a simple
mechanism for the masses: karmic law has the same effect as the Christian
heaven and hell. Unlike other religions, Buddhism also gives a logical reason.
Selfish behaviour tends to result in personal unhappiness; selfless behaviour
results in greater happiness. In fact, selflessness is the path to ultimate
happiness, Nirvana.
2 - Buddhist philosophy of assimilation
3 - why bother?
[8000 words]
objective vs subjective, 1st person vs 3rd
person, the observer-moment
What I mean by using 'objective' is that, unless a
thought defines it, a group of thoughts can not exist. Archimedes, viewing the
multiverse from without, cannot see any groups of thoughts unless he
specifically chooses to - in which case he can see anything, choose any group
he likes. But what would be the point of that? Archimedes can just imagine
something without bothering to look at the multiverse, as he knows for sure
that something is there.
You could say, "well this very present thought
of mine is defining a group of thoughts as all the ones I remember, and calling
that group 'Me'". Congratulations, you have defined yourself into
existence! But why do so? What is the point? What objectives will you meet? The
only thing you achieve is pander to an urge that is a component of your very
present thought - an urge to believe 'I exist!'
So this is why I say it is meaningless to declare
that ‘you’ or ‘I’
exist. It is meaningless to say anything particular
thing exists if
everything exists. This means that observers
('selves') do not exist, if you define them as groups of thoughts - unless they
literally think themselves into existence! The reason I mention Buddhism now
and then is that I just happened to notice that this is Buddhist philosophy too
- Nirvana is when you stop willing yourself into existence, and simply enjoy
all there is to enjoy, your very present thought.
A common 'koan' runs: 'if there is no self, who is
it that achieves
enlightenment?' This paradox is traditionally not
susceptible to logic, so I am feeling rather pleased with 'myself' for having
come up with the beginnings of a logical answer.
Three completely different areas of study are
pointing in one counter-intuitive direction. Information theory, quantum
physics and philosophy (particularly Liebniz and Buddhism) all suggest that the
Newtonian world we take for granted is an illusion. The reality is something
you cannot accept: nothing exists of you but this very present thought, this
thought that you are a human being in such-and-such surroundings, reading this
sentence.
For an information theorist, all systems - including
the universe - can be thought of as information. The information content of a
system is defined by the length of the shortest formula (computer program)
which can generate that system. What is the simplest explanation for the
existence of the universe? That the formula is ‘count to infinity’ - a very
short program indeed. Within that infinite series is every system in our
infinite universe. The alternative would be to program a single universe: that
would take a formula which specified every molecule in your body - something
mind-bogglingly complex. So, the simplest explanation consistent with your
thinking this thought is: all thoughts exists, this is one of them. There is no
relationship between this thought of yours and any physical body. No
relationship between your memories and a ‘past’.
From quantum physics, we learn that the Newtonian
world-view is false. There are many competing interpretations, but the most
parsimonious appears to be the Everett ‘Relative State’ formulation, or ‘Many
Worlds Interpretation’ of quantum mechanics. This simply states that, compared
with the orthodox ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of 1927, there is no ‘wave
function collapse’ - i.e. the universe splits in all directions, rather than
following the one time-line that we think of as our universe. This implies that
all possible universes exist. What we think of as ‘time’ is one line connecting
many ‘snapshot’ universes together. This line is purely subjective. It is not
an objective feature of reality. Hence, our own existence is merely our current
thought in this very universe.
Buddhism teaches us anatta: the doctrine of no-self.
The thought without the thinker. The Buddha seemed to come to this conclusion
on the basis of similar lines of reasoning to Liebniz: all we can operate on
are our own logical constructs. You can make no true statement about a thing
that is not included in the nature of that thing…
What does all of this mean in practice? That there
is no practice. That ‘you’ are a disembodied thought. An immortal thought. I
hope you like it.
References
Barbour, Julian, 1999: The end of Time, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London
Bohm, David and Hiley, BJ,
1993, The Undivided Universe,
Routledge, London
Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, 1966, The Teaching of the Buddha, Kosaido,
Tokyo
Carter, Brandon, 1974: ‘Large Number Coincidences
and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology’ in Longair, M.S. (ed), Confrontation of Cosmological Theories
with Observational Data, pp 291-298, IAU.
Couturat, Louis, 1901, La Logique de Liebniz
Couturat, Louis, 1903, Opuscules et Fragments inédits de Liebniz
Dai, Wei, comments from the ‘everything-list’
at <http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/>
Deutsch, David, 1997, The Fabric of Reality, Penguin
Everett III, Hugh, 1957, "Relative State" Formulation of Quantum Mechanics,
Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol 29, No. 3, pages 454-462
Kapra, Fritjof, 1975 The Tao of Physics, Wildwood House
Kolmogorov, A. N, 1965, Inf. Transmission Vol. 1,
No. 3
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1998, PhD thesis for the University of Lille
Visuddhimagga, Pali Text Society, London
Pickover, Clifford A, 1995: Keys to Infinity, John Wiley & Sons, New York
Price, Huw, 1996: Time’s arrow and the Archimedes Point, Oxford University Press
Rahula, Walpola, 1959: What the Buddha Taught, Unwin, Surrey
Russell, Bertrand, A History of Western Philosophy
Russell, Bertrand, The Philosophy of Liebniz, 1992, Routledge, London
Russell, Bertrand, Our Knowledge of the External World
Schmidhuber, Jürgen, 1997, A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe and Everything,
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Stapp, Henry, Values and the Quantum Conception of Man,
1995, contribution to UNESCO symposium on Science and Culture, Tokyo
Stenger, Victor, The
Timeless Quantum, work in progress
Tegmark,
Max, 1995, Does the universe in fact
contain almost no information? , Foundations of Physics Letters, Vol 9, No.
1, 1996, pages 25-42