QUANTUM REALITY
History and psychology have been the preferred methods of my own search for the underlying nature of our reality and whether or not it was deterministic and thus, predictable, and if not deterministic, why were some things apparently predictable and some things not? At one point in years past, I was reading everything I could get my hands on that related in any way to prophecy and alleged prophetic abilities. I wanted to know if anybody had ever made a prophecy that was specific enough in advance of an event to count as a real “hit” when the event transpired. For most people, a study of this kind includes the Bible because it is just loaded with “fulfilled prophecies.” Sorry, no cigar there because it can be easily demonstrated that those prophecies were written long after the events and were then projected back into the past. But I didn’t know that then. Nevertheless, at that time, I excluded the Bible from my review because I was more interested in a modern survival of such spectacular abilities where proofs of validity were available for critique.
Such a study necessarily includes an exploration of not only how the mind works in a strictly materialistic paradigm (I was majoring in biological sciences until my university career was cut short), but also staying open to what we are wont to call “paranormal” experiences to which physics gives more exotic interpretations. While I knew that such research was, in general, not mainstream, I did not yet realize back then that it was deliberately excluded and anathematized by “real” scientists. I put “real” in quotes because it is clear to me now, after all these years, that it is not real science that excludes study of the paranormal – non-repeatable events that carry dense information - but rather a degraded, often politically controlled science that, rightly or wrongly, sees prophetic abilities as a threat to control of the masses. I say “rightly or wrongly” because, as we have seen from our review of the authoritarian personality type in the previous volume, large masses of humanity can be driven to do very stupid and harmful things to others and themselves under the influence of a charismatic leader who they perceive to have authority, either from earthly or “higher” powers. In all times and places, those in power seek to maintain that power and a charismatic individual claiming a mandate from god who opposes the earthly power structure, can be very problematical indeed. In recent years, there has been a concerted effort amongst the constituted authorities of our world to defuse such potential threats to their power by portraying “cults” and “new religions” as frightening phenomena that can destroy lives via mind-control. Anything that is not already approved as “mainstream” is a threat to your family, health and sanity. The advantage of this type of propaganda to a ruling elite is obvious.
What is important here is that any truly scientific scientist who is searching for the truth about our reality, to explain phenomena and the order of the universe, will eventually end up facing the paranormal issues and if he is honest, he will not turn away. And if he pursues the clues where they lead, he will undoubtedly find himself defamed and shunned by his former colleagues for daring to go where the scientific authorities say “Thou shalt not go!” In our present historical milieu, the conditions that faced Anaxagoras and Socrates do not prevail explicitly, but things are definitely moving in that direction. Any person or group that offers an alternative explanation to the order of the universe than that accepted by either mainstream science or mainstream religions, is subject to being labeled a crackpot or a “cult” with rather dire repercussions thanks to a long campaign to create and destroy straw-man cult groups producing idiotic noise so as to smear any and every non-mainstream system that may produce a real signal with the same dirt. Meanwhile, of course, the truly vicious cults that have become mainstream religions do all the things that are pronounced to be “cultic” and thus “disruptive to society”, and even worse. And this is supposed to be a scientific age?
A scientist is supposed to have a complete and thorough knowledge, at first hand, of some subjects, and, therefore, is usually expected not to write on any topic of which he is not a master. However, the spread, both in width and depth, of the multifarious branches of knowledge … has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We… are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum-total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it. … I can see no escape from this dilemma … than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts, and theories … at the risk of making fools of ourselves. (Erwin Schrödinger (1944), “What is Life?”)
The absurdity of the situation is manifest in current day discourse about climate change which not only politicizes whether or not it is warming, cooling, changing long-term, short-term, human caused or driven by the sun or some other cause. The IPCC which made the “official pronouncement” that we were experiencing global warming and that it was caused by humans, so everybody has to pay now, has been shown repeatedly to be politically driven cooked data, and hundreds, if not thousands, of competent experts say so. Nevertheless, the alignment of the human caused global warmists with the powere politics of the day allows them to label those who advocate more carefully researched models as “climate change deniers” or “cults” with impunity and sometimes extremely harmful results on individual scientists. Nowadays, good climate science has become a dissident activity!
But long before this, the same divide was created between those scientists who thought that the paranormal ought and could be the subject of scientific study since there was so much evidence that strange things do happen, and those scientists that declared loudly and vehemently that no such things could possibly be happening (despite a host of respectable and careful observers who said they did happen) and that anyone who even looked into the matter was a “science denier” or a victim of that time’s equivalent of the term “cult”. i.e. clever frauds and hoaxes.
{skip long introductory section by Ark on where and how science has gone wrong towards the end of which he uses Decoherence as an example}
{This is Ark writing here}
So, we now know how really bad quantum theory is. It is in terrible shape, everything that is definite and real contradicts it. So, what to do?
The answer, from reading the contributions to this book and to other books and papers, lies in “decoherence”.
But what is this decoherence? Is it something that is objective? Or is it something that occurs only in the minds of some theoretical physicists? In order to answer this question we need to look into these minds.
What is this decoherence that is so fashionable nowadays? According to Wikipedia:
Quantum decoherence is the loss of coherence or ordering of the phase angles between the components of a system in a quantum superposition. …Decoherence does not generate actual wave function collapse. It only provides an explanation for the appearance of the wavefunction collapse, as the quantum nature of the system "leaks" into the environment. That is, components of the wavefunction are decoupled from a coherent system, and acquire phases from their immediate surroundings. A total superposition of the global or universal wavefunction still exists (and remains coherent at the global level), but its ultimate fate remains an interpretational issue. Specifically, decoherence does not attempt to explain the measurement problem. Rather, decoherence provides an explanation for the transition of the system to a mixture of states that seem to correspond to those states observers perceive. Moreover, our observation tells us that this mixture looks like a proper quantum ensemble in a measurement situation, as we observe that measurements lead to the "realization" of precisely one state in the "ensemble".
So, we learn that “it is a physical phenomenon”. Is it a definite phenomenon or not? If it is definite, then, according to Erich Joos, it would contradict quantum theory. That would be bad. So, I am deducing that it is not a very definite phenomenon. But, it is said that it is a “physical phenomenon”.
We learn from French Wikipedia that La théorie de la décohérence a été introduite par Hans Dieter Zeh en 1970.
So, let us check what Mr. Zeh has to say. According to Zeh’s article in the Decoherence book, this decoherence occurs when “the complete information about the passage of the particle is carried away (into the “environment”) in some physical form.”
INFORMATION AND ENVIRONMENT: WHAT IS HIDDEN BY DECOHERENCE
So, we have two new terms, one is information, the other one is “environment” – put in quotation marks by Zeh. Why in quotation marks? I checked the number of occurrences of “environment” in the book, and the result is 372. But I could not find even one precise definition. What I have found, however, is that
In quantum cosmology (where no environment exists), decoherence is only meaningful with respect to local observers (subsystems).
That there may be a problem with “environment of the Universe”, I can imagine, but then he goes on to say that decoherence is meaningful only with respect to a local observer. But what exactly is “local observer”? And does that mean that before there were any observers in the universe, this mysterious decoherence did not happen? Is decoherence really something physical or it happens only in the mind of a physicist? It is, in fact, a physicist who separates, in his mind, the Universe, in two parts; one part he calls “the system”, another part he calls “environment”. Then he starts calculating and comes up with some numbers. Another physicist will make the division in a different way, and will come up with a different set of numbers. So, it seems that all this decoherence business is another way of saying that quantum theory really is not able to get rid of subjectivity, and all this fashionable decoherence program is just a way to hide this fact under a pretentious name.
{end of Ark's comments. I return below}
INFORMATION THEORY AND HISTORY
As I said, any truly scientific scientist who is searching for the truth about our reality, to explain phenomena and the order of the universe, will eventually end up facing the paranormal issues and what he will find there, I suggest, is information.
Matter and energy comprise the surface structure of the universe. The surface structure of the universe is readily perceivable to our senses. The internal structure is more subtle…. It consists not only of matter and energy, but of information as well. (Stonier)
In the Aristotelian world view, the fact that you could heat metal meant simply that you were adding more of fire – one of the four elements, earth, water, air and fire – to it. We now know that heat is a form of information. Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, talked a great deal about ideas “in the air”, so to say, and he was certainly going in the right direction, but as we have also seen in Ark’s excerpts above, something really bad happened to separate the world of forms from the world of reality so completely. Historian of science, Wilbur Applebaum, in his book THE SCIENTIFIC EVOLUTION AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN SCIENCE Applebaum states:
Just as the nature of scientific thinking has changed, so has thinking about the creation of modern science. One viewpoint is that the foundations of modern science evolved from ideas developed during the late Middle Ages, and that therefore it makes better sense to speak of scientific evolution than of a scientific revolution. The position taken in this work is that while ideas about the natural world were indeed evolving during the Middle Ages, scholars continued to assume that certain fundamental principles inherited from the ancient world were correct. It was only during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that these principles were challenged and overturned in favor of new ones that constitute a basis for many ideas and approaches held today. Although the science of the seventeenth century is not the science of today, it laid the foundations for the study of the cosmos, matter, motion, life processes, and the means of acquiring knowledge of them that are fundamental to modern science.
Then, in ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION FROM COPERNICUS TO NEWTON, Applebaum adds details on the same subject:
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the universe was thought to be spherical, finite, geocentric, and completely filled with matter. By the end of the seventeenth century, the universe had come to be thought of as infinite, heliocentric, and possessed of vacuous spaces large and small. In the course of those two centuries, the belief that the heavens obeyed different laws from those on earth was abandoned. Analogies to mechanical action largely replaced explanations of natural events in terms of purpose, values, inherent qualities, and occult powers. Although the universe increasingly came to be seen as operating on principles similar to those determining the workings of a clock, the seventeenth century also gave birth to the immensely fruitful, yet decidedly non-mechanistic concept of universal gravitation; it also provided room for the operation of other nonmechanical principles.
Nowadays, it seems that “purpose, values, inherent qualities, and occult powers (possibly)” may actually be regaining their status as fundamental principles. Thanks to modern science, we are presently facing the necessity to uncouple information from the previously conceived as mechanical human brains where it generally resides in very subjective forms. Computer sciences and digital information technologies are effecting a macroscopic change in both science and philosophy.
Computing brings new opportunities and challenges to traditional philosophical activities. . . .computing is changing the way philosophers understand foundational concepts in philosophy, such as mind, consciousness, experience, reasoning, knowledge, truth, ethics and creativity. This trend in philosophical inquiry that incorporates computing in terms of a subject matter, a method, or a model has been gaining momentum steadily. (Luciano Floridi)
The old philosophical question: “If a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, does it produce a sound?” Can now be re-stated as: “Can Information Exist Outside the Human Brain?” Indeed it can and does and this fact is leading to a de-physicalization of nature. Our past, present and future are being re-shaped as variable intervals of current time. Past events can be registered and turned into projections of repetitions in the future. Dephysicalizing nature implies that the mental world is not just part of, but is the invironment and thus, history, which happens in time, a mental construct, is merely the dynamic interaction between human mind/human deeds and Cosmic mind/Cosmic deeds. So the tree question can now be examined within an entirely different paradigm. There can actually be two correct answers. If one insists that “sound” consists only of causing vibrations on an eardrum or other receiving device, then “no, the falling tree does not produce a sound.” But, if one defines sound as “patterns of compressed air produced by the crashing tree, then, “yes, the falling tree produces “sound” even if there is no one there to hear it.”
The first answer is egocentric and relativistic. Such solipsism gets in the way of any objective analysis of the universe and the phenomena within it. It would be like saying that if we leave the lights on, as soon as we leave the room, the light no longer shines. Or as soon as we turn off the radio or TV, the room is no longer filled with radio or TV wave transmissions.
There is a further consideration as well: the falling of the tree is an event that changes the information load throughout the entire universe. That tree, in that place, in that time, has fallen and the universe has been modified thereby and the information about that event has been added to what the Universe knows about itself. In the case of history, what do we do when the information that is an integral part of the cosmos has been concealed from us? What if our beliefs or allged “knowledge” is actually orthogonal to the Truth?
Scientists are beginning to explore the natural properties of information including its structure, dynamic behavior and statistical features. “Information is more than something we manipulate inside our heads.” Electronic devices transmit information in a physical form; DNA carries the information that instructs a single cell to become a lion or a mouse. That is, DNA is a physical substance that carries information and has been doing so for several billion years to our knowledge which highlights the fact that information existed long before human brains did! Both simple crystals and the genetic code of complex information stored in DNA preceded the appearance of the human brain by billions of years. The conclusion is that information obviously exists in forms wholly separate from human beings and that human beings, themselves, are products of information.
There are different forms of energy: mechanical, chemical, electrical, heat, sound, light, nuclear, etc. In the same way, there are different forms of information. Human information is only one form. Computers impose their own logic patterns on information. The raw energy that is “informed” by the radio transmitter is electrical and might come from a steam energy device that imposes patterns of information on heat to cause it to produce electricity. At each step, the energy becomes more organized as it is processed by human created information machines. That is, under certain circumstances, machines can convert energy into information and vice versa. The same can be said for printing presses and computers, electronic signal generators, clocks, spinning wheels, looms and more. All machines, then, contain stored information. When a radio transmitter emitting radio waves carrying human information also imposes its own patterns of information such as frequency and modulation, on raw energy, there are then two levels of information to interpret. A comparison could be drawn here to information that is distorted by lies and distortion: the concealers of history attempt to impose their own modulation on the patterns of information and it is our job to attempt to read and interpret both.
The example of the radio and TV make an important point: we cannot perceive certain information until we have a DETECTOR. But we cannot confuse the detector with the system that interprets the data. For example, a radio that detects a signal sent in Morse Code does not interpret it. A book written in a foreign language may contain the most profound information in the cosmos, but it is incomprehensible to a reader who does not know the language though he can detect the words on the page. Our bodies with the five physical senses may be detectors of signals, but it is our brains that interpret and possibly decode the information. If we don’t know the language, or know it only poorly, we can’t read the book. And if other information is contained within the book “between the lines”, as is said, the poor reader is doubly hindered. That is, all detectors and decoders are not equal. Tiny clues, bits of information, were vital to Sherlock Holmes but meant nothing to Dr. Watson. The information was there, but what it conveyed depended on who perceived it and how it was decoded. In short, meaning is the interpretation of the information, but the information IS, it does not need to be perceived or understood or interpreted to exist, but it is of no use to us until we do decode it accurately.
Some rules of Information Theory have been established from the seminal work of biologist, Tom Stonier:
1) All organized structures contain information. No organized structure can exist without containing information.
2) The addition of information to a system manifests itself by causing a system to become more organized, or reorganized.
3) An organized system has the capacity to release or convey information.
4) Just as energy is defined as the capacity to perform work, Information is defined as the capacity to organize a system or to maintain it in an organized state.
Have said all that, I want to make a point with few images. These diagrams are taken from Sir Alister Hardy’s book “The Livingy Stream.” I would like you to just look at them one after the other and read the descriptions that are included with the image. Keep always in mind the four points just listed in respect of information.
{Skip images}
I’m not presenting these diagrams to create a platform to debate the origins of man. DNA studies show that man does, indeed, contain a smorgasbord of genetic code that is nearly identical to about any other creature on the planet one can name, so that we can take it as a given that life on our planet is all related and had its initial origins in the same primordial slime so to say. What is interesting to us here is the direction of the flow of this process which is simply depicted in the next diagram.
{Diagram showing the flow of evolution as a REVERSE RIVER SYSTEM}
What I want to draw your attention to is: line after line after line ending in extinction. More lines end than continue, and when they do continue, they continue in greatly modified forms – literally becoming new species. Looking at the chart of hominids, we see that man is also a part of this evolutionary process. When we look at the time scale, we see that man has been here less than 1/2000th of the total time displayed in the charts, let alone the totality of life on this planet from the beginning.
Our bodies are part of the same metabolic and chemical process that we call the Living System on this planet. This system has been continuing, without a pause, for 3.5 billion years, at least. We are all part of the same chemical reaction on the surface of this planet. And this reaction has been modified many thousands, or millions, of times over that period. We are, essentially, part of a vast, Living Stream flowing through Time.
What is important to notice about the diagrams of life forms on this planet is their resemblance to a flowing river. There are thousands and thousands of feeder lines… but all FLOWING IN REVERSE!
In short, life is something altogether different from any other process we know of in the Universe: it does not obey the traditional, accepted interpretation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
{Skip several pages discussion of Bryant Shiller's "The 5th Option" and origin of life theories, coming to this}:
What is all this trying to achieve?
Answer: Survival of the SYSTEM over immense periods of time. Survival is a numbers game. The only obvious objective of the Living System at the Macro level is to develop both tactical and strategic defenses against total annihilation. The ultimate aim is to never run out of pieces. Is this merely chance, or is there purpose to this survival intent?
The planet seems to have all the offensive moves. But the Living System has a LOT of troops to muster. Plus, it has the ability to muster novel troops when the environment changes, and it does it rather quickly and well.
WHY?
The obvious answer seems to be the one thing that all members of the Living System have in common: the DNA library which propagates Life itself. It appears to be an important design feature that the Living System be permanent on the planet from the time of its origin until the future demise of the planet.
COMPLEXITY VS TIME
Question: is it a prime function of the Life system to gain in complexity over time so that an intelligent organism such as Homo Sapiens (and others) evolve? OR, is the prime function to survive through TIME, and humans are dispensable?
Because evolution is blind, no prediction can be made about which species or family of species will be successful in propagating the information encoded int its DNA forward to future generations, so the only conclusion is that “increased complexity” itself is not the goal of the Living System.
There is not and cannot be a complexity agenda because random catastrophic events have threatened in the past and threaten in the future.
A possible exception to this is the organism that can FORESEE catastrophe by some means and thereby avoid destruction.
CONSCIOUS AWARENESS – THE ULTIMATE EXTENSION OF FEEDBACK
Survival means having access to water and food, avoiding disease and predation, and being lucky. Survival also means avoidance of catastrophic events: flooding, drought, excessive heat or cold, forest fires, volcanoes; all can spell doom for an individual organism or ALL organisms in a particular habitat.
It is in this context that we can see that the faculty of conscious awareness adds a whole new dimension of feedback to the Living System. What is learning if not the filing in of memory with data and details about reality for future use of successful tactics and strategies of the past for helping an organism stay alive. In humans (most humans, that is), learning amounts to retention in memory of concepts that mirror reality. The extent of learning success is measured by how little difference there is between what is recalled from memory and the data that was placed into memory as a map of reality. In other words, the object in learning is to reduce to zero that difference. Added to this is the factor that humans can learn from a wide variety of sources, the most important being history. But obviously, if the history is false and does not represent a true depiction of the past and what needed to be survived and how it may have been done, then humanity is greatly hampered in its survival ability.
Since human intelligence is a direct result of the increasing complexity phenomenon characteristic throughout the Living System, the creation and operation of machines by humans is merely an extension of that very same Living System phenomenon. However, we need to notice that the moment we neglect to keep up the intelligent control that maintains order within the subsystems of our mechanical machines, they will spontaneously head in the direction of equilibrium and eventually cease to function – no differently than what happens when the intelligent controls that fuel and maintain Living System biological subsystems cease as occurs in the death of an organism.
{Skip discussion of William Fix's book "The Bone Peddlers"}
Evolutionists are often found taunting creationists that their miracles of special creation can, by definition, be neither proved nor disproved. Yet the evolutionists arrive at similar propositions, especially when they exclude any possibility of something that guides and propels evolutionary processes. Karl Popper remarked of such theories in Conjectures and Refutations (1963) that "A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific." The main difference between the believers in miracles of special creation and believers in accidental variations is that the former has God pulling the strings and the latter has only jostling atoms and molecules as its ultimate reality. Not much difference, eh?
It seems evident that evolution does function as a secular religion for many people. When they use the phrase 'no one doubts', they are implying that some ultimate revelation has been received that can only be understood by their high priests and devotees.
Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-founder of the theory of evolution, eventually came to the conclusion that natural selection could not account for man himself. He wrote that "nature never over-endows a species beyond the demands of everyday existence." This means that there is a major problem in accounting for many aspects of human beings - at least for some human beings. Stephen Jay Gould writes:
"The only honest alternative is to admit the strict continuity in kind between ourselves and chimpanzees. And what
do we lose thereby? Only an antiquated concept of soul..."
Here Gould is expressing the core of evolutionary materialism, "the postulate that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products." This is the pivot of the debate. What is more, as Zinoviev notes, this reduction of all mental and spiritual phenomena to 'by-products' of matter is no longer limited to biology and anthropology; it infects most of modern philosophy, the psychological and medical sciences, social systems, politics, and more. And this belief in evolution works to limit research in such a way as to confirm their basic 'postulate'.
INFORMATION SYSTEMS
The writings of many great researchers, including Carl Jung and physicists and mathematicians, suggest that Plato was correct and that there are immaterial realities such as souls, archetypes, consciousness independent of physical brains, and more. The evidence for this is actually more considerable than the rags and tatters of evidence that are glued together to attempt to validate macroevolution. And, of course, this means that the advocates of materialistic Darwinism are the ones who are laboring under one of history's greatest delusions.
Quantum physics indicates that not only does 'matter' seem to dissolve into patterned vibrations at the most fundamental levels, it has become apparent that there is a structuring role played by consciousness. There is now much accumulated evidence that mind does exist separate from the physical brain and that the phenomena such as telepathy are not only demonstrable, but they conform to models of the Universe with non-local causes.
In other words, the world has changed under the materialist evolutionist's feet and there is much more to our reality than the naive realism upon which neo-Darwinism is based. The fact that most contemporary evolutionists still cling to the old-fashioned, crude and mechanical theories in spite of the well-known developments in other scientific fields is more proof of the religious character of their beliefs.
And here we come to an interesting idea: the difficulty for both believers in purely mechanistic evolution and the creationists is that any cosmology that is sufficiently explanatory of the phenomena we observe in our universe, has deeper dynamics and implications. The evolutionists and creationists both do not seem to be capable of the truly abstract, subtle thinking required to parse these implications. It is as though both types are confined within a set of cognitive restrictions that drive their perceptions, experiences and priorities. When we collect the data on these types of individuals - and they are found in all classes and professions - we find a certain common factor that has been identified as the 'authoritarian personality type' which we have discussed in the previous volume and again, above, in Ark’s discussion of the corruption of science.
{skip stuff}
We need to depersonalize intelligence from its egocentric roots and expand its meaning and application to include some fundamental characteristics of the universe in general. Neither intelligence nor information can be derived from random events because, according to the laws of thermodynamics, neither exists in that environment. And there is no practical point in deferring the origin of intelligence to the natural laws of nature because they are ruled by the 2nd Law and are the spontaneous tendency towards the equilibrium state and greater randomness.
It appears obvious that if the source of such intelligence could not derive from the fledgling biosphere itself (from within the random states of its chemical constituents), then it has to come from outside.
So, we come back to Information Theory. It may be that the laws of the Universe of Information may be quite the reverse of our own material world, and our material world may actually be embedded in, or extruded by, such a hypercosmic realm.
We cannot look for the source of such intelligence within the known natural order as reflected within the laws of nature, therefore the intelligence that characterizes life on our planet must have been imported as an integral part of its phenotype vehicle – the primitive system of life implanted her billions of years ago.
THE DESIGNER
It seems obvious that the only kind of designer that could manage to overcome all of the difficulties of designing a biological system of life, and who was able to seed the planet with billions of prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells 3.8 billion years ago would be an intelligence that is not constrained by space and time. No ordinary ET civilization will do because if we consider such, we are faced with the same problem of “who created life on their planet?”
The question of the source of an intelligence that chronologically must precede human intelligence is a complex and controversial issue. One must postulate the existence of a Primary Universal Intelligence” that would both precede and could give rise to the source intelligence responsible for the design of the Living System.
The fact remains that from our limited temporal perspective, the universe indeed defies our common sense. It is not the theories of reality that are weird, what is abundantly clear is that it is the reality itself that is weird.
Despite the compelling evidence of design of the Living System, why would it be necessary to assume that the intelligence that gave rise to life on our planet would have to have had the form and function of our kind of biological life? In fact, it seems obvious that it would only be a “higher” kind of life that would have the faculties and capabilities of doing so. That is, there should be no imperative to constrain the designer to a mere biological entity or entities. The logical definition necessary for a designer of anything is that it has the necessary intelligence and skills to accomplish the task. Is there something special about biology such that our kind of intelligence can only exist within its wetware format?
Intelligence is the reciprocal of randomness and therefore cannot be derived from it. The physical universe is entropic under the firm grip of the 2nd law. For living systems to exist, the intervention of intelligence is required. It seems that what we must conclude from a systems analysis as that done by Bryant Shiller, is that there exists a Primal Core Intelligence in our Universe ultimately responsible for the design of any systems in that universe, including biological life.
We must differentiate between a core intelligence and laws of nature. Random processes adhere to the dictates of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, whereas intelligence and its products can be considered as selective promoters of order by channeling energy in ways that defy those dictates (decoupling entropy energy from entropy order).
Thus, the intelligent designer and its own history need have nothing in common with our kind of biologically evolved species intelligence. It is sufficient simply to postulate its prior existence. The attainable proof of design must exist within the design itself. And that evidence of design is all we need to validate to know the origin of life on our planet. The body of evidence within the system itself may be the ONLY tangible evidence of the existence of the designer that we may ever have occasion to experience. The designer may be logically unknowable, not so the evidence.
WETWARE INFORMATION SYSTEMS
It is impossible to perform useful work without an input of both energy and information. But, as noted, machines can convert energy into information and information into energy. This leads to some interesting thoughts in terms of human beings as receivers and transmitters.
I already posed the question above: what happens if our knowledge and/or beliefs are orthogonal to the Truth? Another way to think about this is: what if the information we add to a system is not information at all, but nonsense or lies? What will happen to the organization of that system? I discussed this problem in Volume I of the SECRET HISTORY OF THE WORLD in terms of physiological receptors on cells that are unlocked for the transfer of information by the chemical binding of ligands.
{Skip ligand discussion}
The important thing about this is, however, the comparison to information that is or is not accepted by the individual, society, or nation: is it accurate information derived from the natural processeses of receiving signals, decoding and interpreting them correctly, and acting based on organizing, information?
{skip}
Now, if we think of information as ligands, we can see that accepting as true something that is not, may not only block our ability to receive the proper messages of what IS true, it may even send contradictory messages with possibly dire consequences.
A human being, human societies and possibly, the human race at large, are organized structures loaded with information and receptors just waiting for the ligands of external information to come along and unlock cascades of appropriate responses. I think it is a dangerous proposition to think that these structures are not coupled in a tight way to our planet, itself and the planet to the solar system. It is a dangerous proposition to think that what happens on this planet as a result of human activities, is not sending a signal to the planet or even to the cosmos directly. It is also a very dangerous proposition to think that the planet, the solar system, and even the universe at large cannot and does not communicate with human beings; and cometary events – among many natural phenomena - may very well be one form of such communication. The question is: do we have adequate receivers and decoders?
{skip}
EVOLUTION AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE
In this context, we come now back to the question was raised in the previous volume: is it possible that human beings actually attract destruction to earth by their socio-political structures and behavior?
{skip}
Evolution amounts to the continual adaptation of biological life to the changing biosphere of our planet. These conditions can change either very slowly or very quickly. In any given species, most particularly human beings, many small, unexpressed genetic changes can accumulate in a population that are damped down by other genes, or simply not important enough to make a significant, external change. This can go on for generations until a single additional mutation brings a whole suite of changes together and causes them to be expressed in a particular newborn. If they are adaptive to survival, they will be passed on vigorously. There are other variations in genes that are neither particularly adaptive or detrimental for a long time until one day, the biosphere changes, and something that is just one variation within a range of variations becomes crucial to survival. This Is explained in detail in Bryant Shiller’s systems analysis but I’m going to try to condense it here quickly utilizing two of the excellent graphs he created.
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What has happened here is that, not only have the genes for cold adaptation been passed on, but also, entire suites of genes associated with the morphology and of that group of individuals, including their neurophysiology. If it continues to get colder and colder, the graph will continue to creep to the left until it reaches the biological limit at which point the entire population might be extincted. What you should note here is that the information conveyed by cold acts as an analog to a ligand binding to receptors of a population, i.e. individuals who then act as cells in the group, releasing their own cascade of information into the environment and the group at large.
Notably, it is obvious from this example, that biological species do not “adapt” in the sense of changes taking place within members after a change has occurred to the environment, but rather that the species is already prepared by having many biological variations present within the distribution curve so that a survival response to changes in the environment – information - are already present. A change within a species is not a “response” to the environment by individuals that “change and adapt”, but rather the selective survival of already existing attributes within specific individuals. When a dramatic event occurs, it is obviously too late for the species to try to “adapt.” What saves the day for the species as a whole are the subtle but consistent chance mutations and other changes that have occurred in the DNA of a specie’ organisms passed on via sexual reproduction and the incredible variety that can be manifested by genetic recombination. Additionally, there are the possible rapid mutations that can be imposed from cosmic sources; they may be minute, but taken in the context of the connectivity of genetic attributes, can be profound. These changes, however they occur, are the source of variation of individual attribute values within the species population. The larger the population, the more complete and continuous will be the distribution curve and more efficient the survival mechanisms built into the species. The survivors will then constitute the basis for reshaping the species genetic makeup. Considering that, it may even be indicative that a massive “kill event” is on the horizon when a given population increases dramatically and the Living System itself is aware and seeks its own survival by ensuring a wide variety species attributes.
When an organism survives a change in the biosphere, all of its genetic potentials also survive whether they are related to that particular environmental change or not. As mentioned above, we can’t exclude that there is some sort of relationship in terms of information. One or another of these attributes that might be irrelevant at the time, may prove crucial later with another change in the environment. And, it is only when the biosphere conditions that correspond to a species attribute changes that a “selection” process kicks in and has the effect of removing “selected” individuals from the gene pool, as well as their genes (and information) that failed. Natural “selection” essentially reflects the pressure exerted by the external environment on the various traits of a species which can be manifold.
Obviously, this system just described works at the psychological level as well. For example, famed astronomer, Fred Hoyle once wrote:
Science is unique to human activities in that it possesses vast areas of certain knowledge. The collective opinion of scientists in these areas about any problem covered by them will almost always be correct. It is unlikely that much in these areas will be changed in the future, even in a thousand years. And because technology rests almost exclusively on these areas the products of technology work as they are intended to do.
But for areas of uncertain knowledge the story is very different. Indeed the story is pretty well the exact opposite, with the collective opinion of scientists almost always incorrect.
There is an easy proof of this statement. Because of the large number of scientists nowadays and because of the large financial support which they enjoy, uncertain problems would mostly have been cleared up already if it were otherwise. So you can be pretty certain that wherever problems resist solution for an appreciable time by an appreciable number of scientists the ideas used for attacking them must be wrong.
It is therefore a mistake to have anything to do with popular ideas for solving uncertain issues, and the more respectable the ideas may be the more certain it is that they are wrong. […]
More than a century ago Alfred Russell Wallace noticed that the higher qualities of Man are acausal, like the Universe itself. Where human qualities have been honed by evolution and natural selection there is very little difference between one individual and another. Given equivalent opportunities for training, healthy human males of age 20 will hardly differ in their abilities to run at pace by more than 10 percent between the Olympic runner and the average.
But for the higher qualities it is very much otherwise. From enquiries among teachers of art, Wallace estimated that for every child who draws instinctively and correctly there are a hundred that don’t. The proportions are much the same in music and mathematics. And for those who are outstanding in these fields the proportions are more like one in a million. Having made this point Wallace then made the striking argument that, while the abilities with small spread like running would have been important to the survival of primitive man, the higher qualities had no survival value at all.
Over a span of 12 years spent in the Amazon and in the forests of the East Indies, Wallace is said to have discovered 30,000 new species off his own bat. He lived by shipping his specimens to an agent in London who then marketed them to museums. During most of the time, when he wasn’t writing epoch-making papers on biological evolution, he lived with primitive tribesmen. Wallace therefore knew a great deal about the modes of survival of primitive man, probably more than anybody else of his generation and probably more than anybody does today. His views on the matter therefore carry weight. What he said was that in his experience he never saw a situation in which an aptitude for mathematics would have been of help to primitive tribes. So little numerate were they that in 12 years he saw only a few who could count as far as 10.
His conclusion was the higher qualities, the qualities with large variability from individual to individual, had not been derived from natural selection.
Abilities derived from natural selection have small spread. Abilities not derived from natural selection have wide spreads. […]
I think the higher qualities must be of genetic origin, the same as the rest. The mystery is that we have to be endowed with the relevant genes in advance of them being useful. The time order of events is inverted from what we would normally expect it to be, a concept that is of course gall and wormwood to respectable opinion. The objection is that it explodes one’s concepts, raising all manner of new ideas. Which is exactly what respectability dislikes, because it is only in times of stagnation that respectability flourishes.
I would like to suggest that perhaps, there is a suite of genes involved with these “higher abilities” that Hoyle describes, that do have survival value and these higher abilities are those rare events that convey a great deal of information to us not only by virtue of their existence, but possibly, that is also their function.
