Science

As a youngster growing up in the little town of Westford, Mass., with a mother who had Parkinson’s Disease but who could function pretty well because she was young, I was afraid of death and told my mother I would invent a magic pill that would keep me alive forever. So I decided to major in chemistry at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. But after a couple months of frustrations in my Quantitative Analysis class — I just didn’t have the patience to carry out the measurements plus the instructor was horrible — I said “To heck with this!” and switched to physics. After all, physics had been getting a lot of media play, what with the atom bomb and all, and might satisfy another craving I had which was to understand the universe. ha ha Well, I actually ended up as a physicist back in the 1950’s but as the years went on I gradually switched over to more mundane engineering work such as computer simulations of solid state transistors. My childhood dream of a pill to extend life forever had become a long forgotten and silly youthful fantasy.

But wait! Just recently I read where red wine can extend the lifespan of mice dosed with resveratrol, an ingredient of some red wines. In fact the report states that some scientists are already taking resveratrol in capsule form. The report also states that serious scientists have long derided the idea of life-extending elixirs. However, quoting from the report, “the door may now have been opened to drugs that exploit an ancient biological survival mechanism, that of switching the body’s resources from fertility to tissue maintenance. The improved tissue maintenance seems to extend life by cutting down on the degenerative diseases of aging”.

OK, is there still hope for me? And I didn’t even have to work on the magic pill project! ha ha

Discovered him again. I’ve always known about the man, the master theoretical physicist calculator who worked with Hans Bethe, an even more profound mathematical theorist of modern physics. But last night when I couldn’t sleep — yet again — I decided to read Dyson’s article in The New York Review of Books on Questions About Global Warming. Aileni had already certainly cautioned me about accepting Al Gore’s views on Global Warming, so I thought I’d tackle this article before hitting the others Aileni links to in Nexus, especially since I’ve been so in awe of Dyson over the years.

In this NYRB article Dyson reviews two books on global warming and provides his own prologue to the piece. In this prologue he shows that there is a rapid (twelve years) exchange of carbon between the atmosphere and vegetation which is very important for the long range future of global warming. Neither of the two books he reviews mentions it, he says. But he devotes considerable space to the book by Nordhaus who concludes that a “low-cost backstop” might provide the best climate policy. However, Nordhaus is reluctant to discuss this in any detail, partly because, as an economist and not a scientist, he does not wish to question the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which considers the science of climate change to be settled.

Dyson shows that the “low-cost backstop” option of Nordhaus has considerable potential in view of the evidence for rapid exchange of carbon between the atmosphere and plants. He considers it likely that genetically engineered carbon-eating trees could be developed within twenty years. These carbon-eating trees would convert the carbon from the atmosphere into root systems which are then buried underground so that the carbon is not returned to the atmosphere. Here is a great potential solution to the problem of reducing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

He spends less time on the book by Zedillo which covers a wider range of topics than the Nordhaus book. This book provides the minority opinions of Richard Lindzner of MIT who answers the question of whether the alarm of global warming is founded on fact with a resounding no. The majority opinions, most dogmatically presented by Howard Dalton of Great Britain, state that urgent action is needed now across the world to avert a major threat to the environment and human society. Dyson clearly questions this view.

After reading the NYRB article, I found an even more fascinating article by Dyson on the subject of climate change in which he goes deeper into his views on the subject. It reads very well and I strongly recommend it to any interested parties.

Finally, I was fortunate this morning to find a wonderful interview with Freeman Dyson by Robert Wright. It’s interesting what he says about religion. To him, religion is a way of life and not a matter of belief. He claims he is a Christian without the theology. What is left of Christianity when you take the theology away?, he is asked. Well almost the whole thing, he says, it’s a community of people in a church who are taking care of each other, and also there’s a great deal of beautiful language and there’s a great deal of music; it’s an art form much more than a philosophy. (Sounds a lot like humanistic UUism!) But he does believe there is some instinct of a mind at work in the universe. Not only that, but quantum physics shows that matter at the micro level is clearly not anything we can have experience of. The mathematical theory works just fine, but the reality of it is quite literally out of our world. He has much to say about the macro level as well. His bottom line is that the universe is filled with enormous mysteries of which we know very little indeed. One such mystery is the almost daily bursts of extremely intense gamma rays from completely unknown origins. But there are countless others. The universe is unimaginably amazing and mysterious.

Here’s Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, giving a recent TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk on her experience with half a brain. Her left brain was erased in a stroke, which she eventually recovered from. (Minds Erased, take note!) What’s amazing is her out-of-body experience of Nirvana when her left brain is shut down and her right brain alone experiences the world. Great and profound talk.

The New York Times has an article on her by Leslie Kaufman, the most popular article today, called A Superhighway to Bliss.

I found an interesting science-based discussion of the placebo effect with 18 comments on an interesting blog called Science-Based Medicine. The Q-Ray Ionized Bracelet, claimed to be a cure for chronic pain via the placebo effect, did not impress a judge who threw out the maker’s appeal of the Federal Trade Commission’s finding that the claim of a cure was fraudulent. The author of the article defends the judge’s ruling and goes on to give a pretty thorough discussion of the placebo effect. The comments are quite interesting too.

Perhaps I should mention the books I’m in the process of reading or have read recently. I just finished The Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton, and before that the Irish novel The Gathering by Anne Enright which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. Now I’m trying to simultaneously read The Private Life of the Brain by Susan Greenfield, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and Cosmic Jackpot by Paul Davies. I’ve already read the latter — see here — so this will be a re-read. Also, I’m still dabbling in Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality, a very heavy physics book for the “general reader”. Plus, there’s a bunch of stuff online on physics, cosmology, philosophy, and religion that I’m trying to keep up with. Incidentally, there’s a great put-down by Terry Eagleton of The God Delusion here.

My objective is to straddle science, philosophy and religion and see what kind of a mixture I might end up with, if any.

Science will be able to explain the mind. Patricia Churchland shows how here:

I mean my idea was something like this: consider the follow analogies. Suppose that you were in a time capsule and you were able to go back to, let’s say the 12th century, and say to a monk who was puzzling deeply about the nature of fire. And you said to him, Look, let me tell you what it is; it’s rapid oxidation and you would go on to talk about how exactly that occurred. Now the thing about it is that, since he does not even know about elements, he still thinks there’s just earth, air, fire and water, it isn’t going to make much sense to him. So you’ve given an answer, but lacking the surrounding theoretical context it would be very hard for him to make sense of it.

And my point about the brain now is that if I were given, in an analogous way, the answer to what it is that makes for conscious states in the brain, given that how much we don’t know about fundamentals in neuroscience, I would likely not be able to make sense of the answer.

How’s that for faith? But wait a minute. I thought it was science. Never mind.

Over the years I keep coming back to this thing. It’s because of the zen-like one-hand-clapping-like feeling I can get — and I assume “other minds” can get too — when I ask myself where all these thoughts and feelings come from in that little three-pound bunch of matter called the brain. This strange sensation isn’t always there but when I think hard enough about it, it pops out at me and gives me shivers, sort of similar to the feeling I get — and I assume “other minds” get too — when I ask myself when things began.

A few years back I came across a book, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory by David Chalmers, a young Australian philosopher, which deals with this strange mind-body dichotomy. He raises the question of the “explanatory gap” between mental phenomena and brain chemistry. But hard nosed philosophers like John Searle maintain a materialist stance, as this interview exerpt shows:

Look at this glass of water, for example. It’s liquid. Now, liquidity is a real feature, but the liquidity is explained by the behavior of the molecules, that is, the liquid behavior is explained by the behavior of the molecules, even though the liquidity is just a feature of the whole system of molecules. I can’t find a single molecule and say “This one is liquid, this one is wet, I’ll see if I can find you a dry one.” Similarly, I can’t find a single neuron and say “This one is conscious or this one is unconscious.” We’re talking about features of whole systems that are explained by the behavior of the microelements of those systems. So I think the philosophical problem is resolved. That is, I don’t have any worry about the philosophical mind-body problem. But the scientific problem — how exactly does the machinery do it? — that’s still very much up for grabs. And I’m in the middle of that battle as well, even though I’m not a neuroscientist. Okay, there are a whole lot of other philosophical problems left over, but that one I’m not worried about.

Nice analogy, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, but philosphers like Thomas Nagel in this excerpt from his paper, Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem has a different view:

Suppose, as seems likely, that I taste the smoke of my cigar when and only when my brain is in a certain physical state. What gets in the way of the thought that the experiential state of which I am introspectively aware is the physical state? The problem lies in the lack of any conceivable internal connection between a modification of my subjective point of view and a modification of the physico-chemical activity of my brain. The two may correspond extensionally as exactly as you like, but identity requires more than that. If they are the same state, it must be impossible for the one to exist without the other. And while we may have good empirical reasons to believe that that is true, the understanding of such an impossibility requires that the necessity of the connection between the two become intellectually transparent to us. In the case of conscious states and physiological states, it isnt just that we dont see such a necessary connection: it seems in advance that a necessary connection between two such different things is unimaginable. They seem logically unrelated.

Thus Nagel agrees with Chalmers in that there is a clear separation and an explanatory gap, remaining unclosed, between the mental and the physical. But neither Nagel nor Chalmers go as far as Descartes in proposing a “substances dualism”, rather Chalmers defines a “property dualism” ultimately resolvable by some kind of information-based theory, while Nagel suggests that altogether new thoeretical concepts must be found. Neither philosopher is willing to invoke the supernatural, i.e., is ready to propose a human soul as a resolution. But at least they recognize there’s a problem for the strict materialist view. I certainly do, based on the feelings I described in my first aparagraph.

Alvin Plantinga — see a previous post of mine — I find accepts mind-body dualism but I couldn’t possibly reproduce his arguments here, mainly because I don’t know what they are yet, and even if I did I’m not sure I could believe them or reproduce them. Anyway, I can’t bring myself to believe the materialists. This whole post has been an exercise to get my thoughts straightened out and maybe get some reactions and opinions on this baffling subject.

OK, time for something really heavy: the quantum universe. Once upon a time, when the big bang was ready to go, all places were one place, all times were one time, and all things the same thing. Has the universe, billions of years later, forgotten?

Perhaps not. John Stewart Bell was an Irish physicist who proposed an experiment that would test for possible nonlocal effects. His experiment was carried out by two groups, each of which obtained the same positive result: nonlocality exists! So, what is this nonlocality? Nonlocality is when one quantum event must excite another quantum event BUT, and this is a big BUT, there is no time for the one event to effect the other.

It’s as though everything is connected together just as it was in the beginning. It suggests that a memory exists in the universe, a memory of the great unity that once was.

For a deeper discussion of this, and other equally weird interpretations of nonlocality, see the book by Timothy Ferris, “The Whole Shebang”, pages 283 -289. I’m on my second, or maybe third, reading of this book which is written for the lay person. It’s well worth a read.

There I go again! Back to my favorite question. It’s actually a pretty good one I think. Why IS there anything here at all, and what’s more, where did it come from? I can feel the awe whenever I focus on these thoughts. Yes, it’s awe, awesome, even shock and awe, or awe and shock, really really weird.

OK, I’m not the only one who asks such a question. In fact, I bet we all do. But here’s a link where this question is specifically taken up. It’s a rather long article by an Arthur Witherall entitled “The Fundamental Question”. Here’s the first sentence: Many philosophers have expressed a feeling of awe when they come to address what Martin Heidegger has called the fundamental question of metaphysics: “why is there something instead of nothing?”.

And while I’m on a roll here, how about the question of where did it come from anyway? Well, many will say God created it. And then someone else will say, “Who created God?” Cosmologists and astrophysicists are working on this question and I’ve been rereading the fine book by Timothy Ferris entitled “The Whole Shebang”, a very readable book for the layman on how it all got here, including theories of the Big Bang.

BUT, after pouring over this book off and on for the last several years, and also other books of a more or less technical nature, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s almost easier to say, “Forget it! God did it!” than to try to understand the latest cosmological theories of the universe, or as the case may be, universes. In fact there is a thing called nonlocality that has been verified experimentally and means any two parts of this vast universe (or universes?) can under certain conditions instantaneously connect! Forget the speed of light. That’s slow stuff! OK, I’m over the top. Over and out. Time for bed.

But there is more!

I’m back reading David Chalmers again. His book, “The Conscious Mind” I purchased about ten years ago and have been dipping into it off and on ever since.

Why are we conscious if the brain is a machine, a computer? Why did a blob of matter, just basically meat, develop a conscious mind? Why was it necessary in a materialistic world? Isn’t the world strictly physical and ruled by the laws of physics? Of course. Well then, why was consciousness necessary, or was it just a silly accident?