The Illusion of Choice Part Four: The Big Bang Schema

            Up to this point we have the universe, we have life, we have consciousness, and we have communication. You may recall how I stressed the importance of cause and effect throughout this entire series. Well we discussed the effects, what about the root cause? What about the very beginning? This is where speculation really comes in. I mean, how do you possibly determine what happened before everything? That is not to say, that scientists are just guessing, but the theories are certainly not as solid as say evolution. We will explore my preferred theory, but first, more psychology. I want to preface this entire writing with a lesson on learning theory, particularly the idea of schemata and adaptation.

            Let’s start with what a schema is in the first place. It is essentially your entire understanding of a concept. This series, for example would be my schema on the existence and behavior of life and matter. Now, anyone who has ever tried to change someone’s mind knows, I will never convince you of what I am saying unless I first convince you that what you already think could be wrong. I must show you evidence that contradicts your current schema. Schemata, however, are resistant. For adults with long held beliefs, they will often ignore or distort contradictory information in order to fit it to their current schema. Children, on the other hand, must redevelop schemata constantly. Just think of all of the beliefs a child might have about the world that will eventually be proven wrong to them. Wait. There is no Santa Claus, meat comes from dead animals, I can’t be a cat when I grow up, next you’re going to tell me fluffy didn’t go to live on a farm.

            This is learning for a child. Their entire life is made up of trying to explain the world around them, only to find that their explanation doesn’t make sense after all, and then having to adapt to a new schema. If I asked you what 11 + 1 equals, you could tell me it was 12, that fits your current schema. But, what if I said no it’s not? it’s 100. Can you tell me why? Can you even accept that what I said is true? and I promise you it is. This entire series is my schema, and it might certainly be disproven at a later date. I accept that. I find it unlikely that anything will convince me against something as concrete as the theory of evolution, but for something like the origin of the universe, it is probably only a matter of time before certain aspects must be amended. I invite you to keep an open mind as you read this, and perhaps your own schema will be amended by the end.

By the way, the above math equation is true when the numbers are binary representations of values. Binary is a base two system. That means each place value represents two raised to an additional power. 11 + 1 is (2¹ + 2⁰) + 2⁰ = (2 + 1) + 1 = 4 = 2² + 0¹ + 0⁰ is 100. (That’s right there’s math in here too.)

So now that we are all caught up on 1920s psychology, let’s look at some scientific theories from this century. The most well-known theory for the origin of our universe is the big bang. Basically, the universe originated from a single point and expanded outward creating energy in the process. The greatest evidence for this theory is that observation of the known universe shows matter spreading outward in an ordered manner. This would of course imply that it is moving from some point of origin. Question. How did the bang occur? Answer. It’s complicated. Through use of mathematics beyond your wildest dreams, modern physicists have created a model in which the universe, upon coming into being, was populated with an energy field with a strong negative pressure. This drove expansion while simultaneously generating energy. When the field became too unstable to continue this process, the sudden cease in expansion led to the release of the energy from the field into the universe which drove the formation of matter. I told you it was complicated.

Okay, but energy can’t just come into being, there is such a thing as the law of conservation of energy. True. But not all energy is positive. Gravitational attraction is opposite the energy of matter. Time for more math, and negative numbers even. Don’t worry I won’t make you calculate the sum total of energy in the universe. Others have already done that. What did they find? The answer is about zero. Remember the saying every action has an equal but opposite reaction. Well for all of the energy in the universe, there is an equal amount of opposite or negative energy.

So, the energy can exist without breaking any physical laws, sure, but what triggered it to come into being? If no one has ever told you before, quantum physics is strange. Subatomic particles have demonstrated some very unusual properties, one of which is the ability to spontaneously come into being. Quantum uncertainty essentially explains away cause and effect and leaves only the effect. As you can imagine I am uneasy about accepting such reasoning, but it would explain how a universe could spontaneously come into being. I would argue that such events being explained without uncertainty by yet unobservable factors is still a possible development. Like I said, my entire outlook might one day be completely foreign to my present self.

Regardless, we are left with but one more burning question. What about before the big bang? The simple answer, it didn’t happen. Alright, hear me out. From our everyday perspective, time is constant. It appears constant. But actually, time is relative. Time and space are interwoven, and changes in one can affect the other. It is difficult to wrap your mind around, but the implication is this: if there is no space there is no time. What was there before the big bang? Nothing. There was no space, it had not yet come into being. Since there was no space, there was no time. We like to think of time as a fundamental concept that has just always been. Logically, though, this would fall apart when looking at the physical properties of the universe. Were the universe actually infinitely old, the processes currently in motion, stars burning for instance, would have all expired long ago. According to the current model, the laws of physics are the only thing that need precede the big bang. If we can accept that fundamental persistence, then we can have a contradiction free origin of the universe.

Is anyone still following me? Well, if you are, I thank you. This was certainly a very technical piece. Our next installment will be a look at the persistence of gods and human influence, as well as the logic of an argument for or against an illogical concept. Can you really ever disprove the existence of divinity? Should you really ever need to? Perhaps proof is the wrong approach.

-AMS

The Illusion of Choice Part Three: Expectations and Effects

            There is a clear difference between humans and other animals. There have been debates about whether other animals have souls. Where do dogs go when they die? A more haunting question, however, would be: what if there is no such thing as a soul? Consider yourself. You are, of course, a person. Now imagine you lost your arm in an accident. Are you still a person? What if you lost your heart, or your brain? What constitutes you, and what would no longer be you. Perhaps now it sounds more reasonable, that you are just an aggregate of different parts. There is no self, and the you of present is quite different from the you of years past. This is actually a fundamental Buddhist principle dating back to around 400 BCE, known as anātman, or non-self.

            I do not necessarily follow Buddhist teachings, and frankly disagree with several of the core principles upon which it is built. But since learning about it, I have found the explanations of non-self and consciousness quite compelling. The idea is that humans are dynamic. There is no part of you that persists without changing. Now, modern neuroscience has shown that neurons can survive the lifespan of their host. Still, the general concept is just that we are not so much entities, as ever changing parts and mental states. Consciousness, for instance, is what most would define as a person’s being. But it is not something that we are born with, it is merely the culmination of our experiences.

This is another case of the Buddhists being ahead of their time. The idea, proposed well before respectable psychology, is that consciousness is a result of mental formations developed from perceptions of sensations caused by interactions of the physical world. Remember, matter interacting in space. Living organisms developed with senses. In humans, these include sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, among others. Other organisms might have any combination of these as well as others that we couldn’t easily comprehend. However one senses the world, though, it happens first through physical interactions. Let’s take sound for instance. Hearing is the ability to detect disturbances in a medium that cause vibrations. When an appreciable vibration of air molecules occurs, it propagates outward. When it enters the ears, different mechanisms exist that attenuate and amplify the signal, and ultimately it is received through transduction via stimulation of tiny hairs within the inner ear. The characteristics of the sound, the volume, pitch, etc., are actually different physical characteristics of the vibration such as the amplitude and frequency of the wave through which the vibration propagates. The signal, once received, is sent through a network of cells to the brain, where it is analyzed and perceived. Hearing a sound is our perception of the vibrations in the air.

The next step, mental formations, is where things get really interesting. This is all of our associations with a physical object. For instance, imagine a cat. A person can hear a cat meow, feel a cat’s fur on their hands, see a cat move, but how does that cat make them feel? For someone who was attacked by a cat in the past, they might feel uneasy seeing a cat. For someone with a pet cat for which they care very deeply, they might smile when they hear a cat meow. These associations are built over time from our experiences and encompass almost every aspect of our day to day lives. The last step would be consciousness and this is essentially our awareness of objects and ability to discern them. In studying psychology one would find countless subtleties around perception and mental associations, but the core of our consciousness is the sum of our experiences.

What makes humans so much different from other organisms though? Certainly, any creature capable of sensing the world would have perceptions just the same. Humans, and some other animals evolved with a sense of self-awareness. We are not only conscious, but aware of our own consciousness. Furthermore, we are aware that others are both conscious and are aware of our own consciousness. This issue becomes very complex, very quickly, but suffice it to say, that self-awareness develops over time in much the same way that consciousness does. This can be seen in young children gradually discovering that the reflection in the mirror, is actually them; the baby picture of them, was them at a point in the past; and that an observer with closed eyes cannot see them, but an observer can see them whether or not they close their own eyes. This awareness and ability to discern is what has allowed us to create societies and work cooperatively toward common goals. There is one more thing that sets us apart, though.

The last area we need to cover is communication. Humans’ greatest trait has always been communication. Someone might say humans are smarter than other animals, but that is not just a natural trait. Human knowledge is a collective, and the sum is far greater than any one part. Our ability to communicate allows us to teach one another, and not just horizontally. I mean, of course, that I can teach you something, and you teach another that same thing, but also, I could teach a child something, and that child could grow up and then teach another child. Most of our knowledge is vertical. It has been accumulating over years for as long as human’s have been communicating. You probably couldn’t put together a lightbulb if someone was holding a gun to your head. Yet, here we are, in a world full of lightbulbs. It is all just knowledge passed down. Other animals do not have this same luxury, at least not to the same extent. Sure, parents can teach their young some things, but for the most part every life is learning the same things first hand, making the same mistakes their ancestors did. Imagine if cats could just tell their young about roads and cars, and they could in turn pass that down to their own kittens. After a few years, you would be hard pressed to ever find another cat dead on the road. So, don’t think we humans are so developed, we were simply given the luxury of a few millennia worth of experience in a few decades. We are the effect of all those before us, and ultimately everything is just cause and effect.

That is the purpose of this writing. All too often we look at the world and see it for what we have come to expect of it. We forget what is real. Cats are not good or bad or smelly, they are organs and systems, they are consciousness, they are experiencing and judging and expecting. There is no right or wrong there is only expectations and effects. This series will go on to look at some more applications, but the bulk of it all is here. The next time you see something that is just completely beyond belief, take another look. Look at the causes, look at the expectations, and remember that at the end of the day it is all just matter interacting in space. Anything more than that is just what you chose to make of it.

-AMS

The Illusion of Choice Part Two: Evolution Is Not "Just" a Theory

            Welcome back to everything that ever was and will be. When we left off, we had just generalized the entirety of the universe to matter interacting in space. Great! Now, let’s take a look at how those interactions got us from rocks to cats. In case you didn’t read the title, here is a hint. It happened primarily through evolution. I would like to take a moment now, to go on a little rant about anyone who has ever uttered the phrase evolution is just a theory, because such individuals are so ignorant to the definition of a scientific theory that I can only imagine they need be told what it means before they immediately and abruptly change their mind.

A scientific theory is based on substantial evidence and might in fact be the only reasonable proposition for a particular phenomenon presently known. Such uncontested theories could even be generally accepted as truth, as there seems little probability of new evidence ever contradicting them. Let me hammer this in even more by naming a few “theories.” Gravity, plate tectonics, and Newton’s laws of motion are all scientific theories. Sure, maybe special relativity has a few holes in it, particularly when you try to fit it to the current model of quantum physics, but do not try to tell me Newtonian physics are just a theory and that we can’t really be sure if friction is even a thing. The problem, I believe, comes from people not understanding the difference between scientific theory and scientific fact. The latter does not actually exist. Scientists deal in evidence, not facts. The very nature of science, is that it can be changed at any point in time by the introduction of new evidence. This holds true for evolution as well, but currently no such evidence would even suggest a plausible alternative.

Okay, rant over. Let’s talk about evolution. I would hope that at this point everyone would know the general principles underlying evolution. Organisms develop different traits through pure happenstance from spontaneous genetic mutations. When such traits provide an advantage for the survival and reproduction of that organism, it increases the statistical probability that its mutated genes will persist. Over very long periods of time these small differences can have significant impacts on the number of organisms that either do or do not possess a certain mutation. Again, over very long periods of time these slight changes will add up and eventually create undeniable distinctions in species. While the differences between some species might be slight and arguably insignificant, there is no denying that cats are distinct from the western lowland gorilla.

That’s the basics of it. Let’s go over some of the aspects that commonly trip people up. There is an all too common misconception about evolution, that humans evolved from monkeys. That is absolutely not true, and really doesn’t even make sense. Evolution is not linear, it’s branching, like a tree. Humans and monkeys share a common ancestor, as do most all species. It is certainly possible that some simultaneous evolution occurred, but this would still go clear back to single celled organisms that happened to develop independently of each other. Another misconception is that humans are the pinnacle of evolution. Just like there is no last branch on a living tree, each species alive today is the most evolved of their kind. This also means that humans will certainly continue to evolve over the years and will eventually become distinct enough from present day humans to be considered a different species. Humans living in different conditions could even branch off to form more than one different species each sharing the common Homo sapiens ancestor.

When did it all begin though. It is fairly easy to picture evolution between closer relatives, and even possible to see it on a very small scale. Imagining something as complicated as animals coming from nonliving matter, however, is a little harder to wrap your head around. This is, of course, a big jump that occurred over millennia. We cannot forget the many steps in between. You can follow more complicated animals back to simpler animals and very simple macroorganisms to microorganisms. The jump from single celled to multicellular organisms was hugely impactful, but not too hard to believe, in hindsight, what with the development of cell walls and compartmentalization. The jump from nonliving to single celled organisms is the real kicker. This is where life as we know it comes into existence. Thinking about it, one might imagine getting something from nothing, but you must remember what life actually is.

Time for a quick biochemistry lesson. Atoms bind together to form molecules. A few examples include phosphates, nitrogenous bases, and monosaccharides also known as simple sugars. None of these are living things, cells, or even appreciable components of such. It would not be beyond belief for them to spontaneously form from water and carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous compounds in the presence of energy (lightning for instance). So, one time in a billion years, lightning happens to strike a puddle of water, and everything is just right to form some of these chemical compounds. It was bound to happen eventually.

Well, as it turns out, these chemical compounds are the components of ribonucleic and deoxyribonucleic acids (RNA and DNA). You might recognize these compounds as those that encode and initiate the synthesis of proteins as well as self-replicate. It may not seem like much, but really that is all you need. RNA or DNA forms spontaneously by chance, and replication takes over from there. That is life. The first living organism is theorized to have been a single loop of either RNA or DNA free floating within a cell. Everything else, as they say, is history. Evolution took its course and a few billion years later we have cats roaming the earth.

That is how life got here. Humans, though, are a separate beast. Animals developed this thing known as consciousness, and that has made us slightly different from other living organisms. Some animals took it a step farther and developed a sense of self-awareness, an ability to recognize one’s own consciousness and distinction from the environment. Humans took that and ran with it developing communication to such a degree that two individuals can express and understand abstract concepts through an indirect medium, as I am attempting to do right now with you. We will explore this fascinating and complex development in depth next week.

-AMS