The Search for Truth

Confusion arises from the internal conflict between what you perceive the world to present itself as and what you intuitively understand it to be. Initially the gap between what man understood the world to be and what it actually was was quite large, superstition reigned and people were largely confused as to the inner goings on of the entire process. Over time the process complexified, building upon previously attained knowledge as best as they collectively could and assembling it into a more complex structure which would provide greater benefit to larger numbers of people.

Yet the fundamental scism remains, and the more we know, the more we know we don’t know. Will we ever reach a break-even point in our knowledge, where we understand so much that we see an ultimate end to what we all unconsciousnessly and collectively been trying to attain, with only a dim or sometimes absent understanding of some overlying, ultimate goal?

As I stated in my previous post on what I would consider to be intuitive smooth exponential growth of progress as an epiphenomenon of the smoothly accelerating rate of change, reality has shown progress to follow a sawtooth pattern of periodic setbacks where despite accelerating change, overlying progress is disrupted by outside factors. Richard Dawkins described the “sawtooth” pattern of biological evolution in his book The Ancestor’s Tale, as evidence that the epiphenomenon of progress does not exhibit a smoothly exponential effect at all, but only emergent exponential pattern disrupted periodically by temporary setbacks. But over time more and more progressive enhancements are preserved, the result of which, in biological evolution, is mammals, who usurped the earth after the fall of the dinosaurs. Brains had inadvertently triumphed over brawn, as the maximize-energy-towards-growth pattern of the simply conceived, tiny baby dinosaur who would continue to grow for the rest of his life was replaced by the complexly conceived placental mammal, which fed off its mother like a paracite in order to develop progressively larger brains. Or at least, progressively larger brains were one branch of the evolutionary tree of placental mammals, and one which coincidentally lead to a solution of a much bigger problem biological evolution by natural selection had been coping with throughout its entirety, namely that it was a blind process with very primitive mechanisms for conveying and utilizing past discoveries. It inadvertently came up with a past discovery conveying and comprehending mechanism, human consciousness, which soon took over the duty that only genes and behavioral mimicry had held alone for billions of years, and directed it in a manner which put the previous process to shame.

I reject the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress and instead advocate exponential and epiphenomnological view. I belive that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation, but rather that the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting in rational self-interest with no concept of what the final, modern result would be or what their contemporaries’ actions lead to.

However, I believe the sawtooth pattern is converging. The haphazard zigzagging has been following a trend. Lots of blind stumbling in the dark, emerging from random walks across patterns of matter and energy have ultimately resulted in the society we know, love, and cherish today. The pattern continues to converge as the mechanisms of change lock themselves into an exponential upward ramping, and has started changing society in such a way that it is scarcely able to comprehend.

Slowly human knowledge, which was initially so far from the truth, in the 20/20 hindsight of modern, scientific understanding of the universe, is converging upon the truth. Ontology, the study of reality itself, and epistemology, the study of knowledge, have converged into a new type of ontology, the graph structure of information relationships which defines the Semantic Web. With the advent of Semantic MediaWiki, the semantic relationships which define the web of human knowledge will be continually revised by forces dedicated to the construction and preservation of a complete web of human knowledge. The amount of data mining that can be performed on this web, particularly by extremely intelligent data mining experts such as the ones who work at Google, is a virtually limitless resource which has only begun to be tapped.  The natural limit of the kinds of associations that can be made, based on the structure of the universe, is the truth.

Progress as a universal epiphenomenon – Part 3: The Universe Itself

Okay, so, I know what you’re wondering: sure, progress in evolution and human society is great, but how the hell does that make progress a universal epiphenomenon.

Well, sadly, I don’t have a good answer for you. It’s just a conjecture. And about all I can respond with is highly theoretical stuff which will likely be proven wrong in the future. Or maybe it’s right, who knows? But to me: it fits the pattern, and that’s what I consider important.

Okay, so, let me introduce you to Dr. Lee Smolin:

Yes, there he is, chilling in his chair at Harvard.

Okay, so who the hell is he?

Well, you may or may not have heard of string theory. Lee Smolin has been working on a different theory called Loop Quantum Gravity. He just put out a book called “The Trouble With Physics” where he argues that physics has entered something of a post-modern age where the limits of experimental verifiability have been exceeded. Initially Smolin worked under the assumption that string theory and loop quantum gravity were both approximations of some underlying theory, but lately he has changed his mind and this book is the result.

For those of you who aren’t aware, scientists still don’t know how gravity works, at least in the world of the very small where the rules of quantum mechanics apply, the realm of the Planck scale. Einstein came up with a description of how it works on large systems, which says that gravity is essentially a warping of spacetime itself. But for now, scientists have been unable to find a way to work Einstein’s theory of relativity into the small scales where the laws of quantum mechanics operate. So while Einstein’s theory explains how gravity works, it doesn’t come close to explaining what gravity actually is. Only a theory of quantum gravitation can do that, and for now, we don’t have one. String theory is one explanation. Loop Quantum Gravity is another.

What does Loop Quantum Gravity say about gravity? (Certainly something, it’s in the title after all!) Well, one important aspect leads to one of Smolin’s hypotheses. At a certain critical density, say, that achieved at the center of a black hole, gravity becomes repulsive. When this happens, what you get is a new universe… spacetime crunches down to an infinitessimally small point, then the repulsive force of gravity causes this infinitesimally small super-dense bit of spacetime to explode, the result of which is a new universe with a slightly altered set of physics from the original. It’s a big bang, but one powered by the repulsive power of gravity, a “quantum bounce.”

This leads to an idea Smolin calls fecund universes. Rather than the universe being a once off sort of thing, universes themselves have been evolving over time. A black hole forms in a parent universe, and a fecund universe with slightly different physics is the result, and in turn, black holes form in this fecund universe, leading to another generation of fecund universes. What naturally follows is that the universes with the most descendants are the ones who have rules that are most conducive to forming black holes. Does this sound kind of like what happens in biology with natural selection: a naturally-originating consequence of a set of events results in progressive evolution, in this case, towards better black hole formation?

If this sort of cosmological evolution really exists, are we just the lucky by-products of it, or do we have some larger role to fulfill in the universe? Even if they were to accept Smolin’s hypothesis, existentialists and post-modernists will certainly say the former: we have no purpose, there is no universal progress metric, and we’re just the accidental offspring of a set of universes which has become progressively more adept at the art of making black holes.

I believe we’re something more, and I believe the two progress metrics I previously defined are resultant from the emergent process of the progressive evolution of physical law itself. This evokes what’s known as the weak anthropic principle, namely that the reason our universe and the physical law by which it operates seems so conducive to life is that there have been countless universes in the past that weren’t. We happened to luck out, and had our universe not been conducive to life, we wouldn’t have been here to care.

If a progressive pattern exists, just where is it taking us? Well, right now futurists forsee an event which they have labeled The Singularity occuring sometime in the next few decades. After The Singularity, humans will have produced technologies that outperform humans themselves in all aspects. After this happens, humans will be obsolete and the human age will have ended.

“The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs.”

– Nikola Tesla