Your memories are almost certainly false

[RexAllen]

It’s overwhelmingly probable that all of your memories are fake.

Consider:

Entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. The higher the entropy, the higher the disorder.

If a deck of cards is ordered by suit and then within each suit by ascending rank, then that’s a low entropy state. This is because out of the 8.06 * 10 to the 67th (52!) possible unique arrangements of the cards in a standard 52 card deck, there’s only 24 that fit that particular description.

A “random looking” arrangement of the deck is a high entropy state, because there are trillions of unique arrangements of a standard 52 card deck that will fit the description of looking “randomly shuffled”.

Same with the egg. There are (relatively) few ways to arrange the molecules of an egg that will result in it looking unbroken, compared to the huge number of ways that will result in it looking broken. SO, unbroken egg…low entropy. Broken egg…high entropy.

AND the same with the universe…there are (again, relatively) few ways to arrange the atoms of the universe in a way that makes it resemble what we see with people and trees and planets and stars and galaxies, compared with the gargantuan number of ways to arrange things so that it resembles a generic looking cloud of dust.

OKAY. Now.

Of the relatively few ways that the elementary particles of the universe can be arranged so as to resemble what we see around us today, only a tiny fraction of those particle arrangements will have values for momentum and position that are consistent with them having arrived at that state 13.7 billion years after something like the Big Bang.

The vast majority of the particle arrangements that macroscopically resemble the world around us will *instead* have particles in states (e.g., with positions and velocities) that are consistent with the particles having previously been in something more like a giant dust cloud.

By which I mean: If we take their current positions and velocities, and work backwards to see where they came from, and go back far enough in time, eventually we will not arrive at the Big Bang. Instead we will arrive at a state resembling a giant dust cloud (probably a very thin, spread-out dust cloud).

SO, bottom line:

Out of all the possible configurations that the universe could be in, ones that have people, and planets, and stars, and galaxies are extremely rare.

Further, even if we then only consider those extremely rare possible configurations that have people, and planets, and stars, and galaxies – the ones with particles in states (e.g., with positions and velocities) that are consistent with having arrived at this configuration 13.7 billion years after something like the Big Bang are STILL rare.

We don’t know the exact state of our universe’s particles, but in statistical mechanics the Principle of Indifference requires us to consider all possible microscopic states that are consistent with our current macroscopic state equally likely.

So given all of the above, and our current knowledge of the laws of physics, the most likely explanation is that all of your current memories are false and that yesterday the universe was in a HIGHER state of entropy, not a lower state (as would be required by any variation of the Big Bang theory).

Physical systems with low states of entropy are very rare, by definition. So it’s very improbable (but not impossible) that the unlikely low entropy state of the universe of today is the result of having evolved from an EVEN MORE UNLIKELY lower entropy universe that existed yesterday.

Instead, statistically it’s overwhelmingly more probable that the unlikely low entropy state of the universe today is the result of a random fluctuation from a HIGHER entropy universe that existed yesterday.

And thus your memories of a lower entropy yesterday are most likely due to this random fluctuation, not due to yesterday actually having had a lower entropy than today.

 

[Vlad_Vernski]

ok, that's quite an idea... but doesn't every spontaneous action increase the entropy of the universe... For the universe to become less random, more ordered, it would have to be increasing in energy... Since thermodynamics tells us that energy cannot be created or destroyed, I'm going to have to say that the universe is becoming more and more disordered, presumably from a very ordered point, to eventually a thin dust cloud..

 

[RexAllen]

ok, that's quite an idea... but doesn't every spontaneous action increase the entropy of the universe... For the universe to become less random, more ordered, it would have to be increasing in energy... Since thermodynamics tells us that energy cannot be created or destroyed, I'm going to have to say that the universe is becoming more and more disordered, presumably from a very ordered point, to eventually a thin dust cloud..

Two wikipedia articles of interest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincaré_recurrence_theorem

Also check out the references on the first article...

 

[apeiron]

And thus your memories of a lower entropy yesterday are most likely due to this random fluctuation, not due to yesterday actually having had a lower entropy than today.

Except brains and bodies are dissipative structures that pay for their order by their more rapid degradation of entropy gradients.

The second law of thermodynamics has more complex consequences than those you are using in your argument here.

 

[GeorgCantor]

Except brains and bodies are dissipative structures that pay for their order by their more rapid degradation of entropy gradients.

Did he say human bodies violated the 2LOT? What does the fact that human bodies obey the second LOT have to do with how likely it is for something similar to a universe and a conscious human being with memories to emerge out of a quantum 'soup'?

The second law of thermodynamics has more complex consequences than those you are using in your argument here.

Again, this does not prove his idea is wrong. As far as i can see, RexAllen is trying to evaluate how likely it is for anything to emerge in a state that we might call a Big Bang and enfold to its current state. And as far as i can see his point, even the 2LOT is a statistical occurence that happens to make sense to us because if it had not, we wouldn't be here and definitely not made it that far development-wise.

 

[lawtonfogle]

It’s overwhelmingly probable that all of your memories are fake.

Consider:

Entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. The higher the entropy, the higher the disorder.

If a deck of cards is ordered by suit and then within each suit by ascending rank, then that’s a low entropy state. This is because out of the 8.06 * 10 to the 67th (52!) possible unique arrangements of the cards in a standard 52 card deck, there’s only 24 that fit that particular description.

A “random looking” arrangement of the deck is a high entropy state, because there are trillions of unique arrangements of a standard 52 card deck that will fit the description of looking “randomly shuffled”.

Same with the egg. There are (relatively) few ways to arrange the molecules of an egg that will result in it looking unbroken, compared to the huge number of ways that will result in it looking broken. SO, unbroken egg…low entropy. Broken egg…high entropy.

AND the same with the universe…there are (again, relatively) few ways to arrange the atoms of the universe in a way that makes it resemble what we see with people and trees and planets and stars and galaxies, compared with the gargantuan number of ways to arrange things so that it resembles a generic looking cloud of dust.

OKAY. Now.

Of the relatively few ways that the elementary particles of the universe can be arranged so as to resemble what we see around us today, only a tiny fraction of those particle arrangements will have values for momentum and position that are consistent with them having arrived at that state 13.7 billion years after something like the Big Bang.

The vast majority of the particle arrangements that macroscopically resemble the world around us will *instead* have particles in states (e.g., with positions and velocities) that are consistent with the particles having previously been in something more like a giant dust cloud.

By which I mean: If we take their current positions and velocities, and work backwards to see where they came from, and go back far enough in time, eventually we will not arrive at the Big Bang. Instead we will arrive at a state resembling a giant dust cloud (probably a very thin, spread-out dust cloud).

SO, bottom line:

Out of all the possible configurations that the universe could be in, ones that have people, and planets, and stars, and galaxies are extremely rare.

Further, even if we then only consider those extremely rare possible configurations that have people, and planets, and stars, and galaxies – the ones with particles in states (e.g., with positions and velocities) that are consistent with having arrived at this configuration 13.7 billion years after something like the Big Bang are STILL rare.

We don’t know the exact state of our universe’s particles, but in statistical mechanics the Principle of Indifference requires us to consider all possible microscopic states that are consistent with our current macroscopic state equally likely.

So given all of the above, and our current knowledge of the laws of physics, the most likely explanation is that all of your current memories are false and that yesterday the universe was in a HIGHER state of entropy, not a lower state (as would be required by any variation of the Big Bang theory).

Physical systems with low states of entropy are very rare, by definition. So it’s very improbable (but not impossible) that the unlikely low entropy state of the universe of today is the result of having evolved from an EVEN MORE UNLIKELY lower entropy universe that existed yesterday.

Instead, statistically it’s overwhelmingly more probable that the unlikely low entropy state of the universe today is the result of a random fluctuation from a HIGHER entropy universe that existed yesterday.

And thus your memories of a lower entropy yesterday are most likely due to this random fluctuation, not due to yesterday actually having had a lower entropy than today.

Anthropic principal, only in a universe where an intelligent entity exist is it possible for there to be questions and ideas such as these.

Thermodynamics, I can take energy from a to make b more ordered, though in the end, the total disorder in a AND b after the transaction will be greater than before the transaction. To put it in words of someone who almost discovered the sun...

"One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it."

 

[RexAllen]

Except brains and bodies are dissipative structures that pay for their order by their more rapid degradation of entropy gradients.

The second law of thermodynamics has more complex consequences than those you are using in your argument here.

Nothing in the original post contradicts the second law of thermodynamics. Read the wikipedia links and associated references.

This idea isn't original to me. In fact, it's not even especially obscure...note the article in the New York Times listed in the references to the first wikipedia link.

 

[madness]

It's a well known problem and I mentioned it in the last thread you posted. The answer is that if all our memories are false then so is the second law of thermodynamics - it undermines itself. That's why we need to assume the universe started with incredibly low entropy.

 

[disregardthat]

In the case of memories, they are "false" for entirely different reasons than this. We are remarkable incapable of maintaining an accurate picture/description of a situation over time. Our memories are also changing over time, even new elements can be included.

Taken in the general perspective, that something cannot be a "true" description/representation of something else over time, I will question this by asking what is a "true" description anyway?

 

[Vlad_Vernski]

Well that's a different discussion entirely, more of a psychology argument... If people remember something different than what actually happened, did it actually happen? Who is to say that events are not defined by perception?

 

[magpies]

Well my memorys are not false... And I personally wouldn't label the universe in terms of order/disorder because one mans order is the other ones disorder. As I understand it for the universe to be going into a more entropic state things would have to be getting more complex and well... they are imo.

 

[disregardthat]

Well that's a different discussion entirely, more of a psychology argument... If people remember something different than what actually happened, did it actually happen? Who is to say that events are not defined by perception?

I'd say it's more of a question of how our language and other forms of expressions relates to the world.

 

[magpies]

If I might can I ask these questions of you all?
How do you define order?
How do you define chaos?

 

[apeiron]

Nothing in the original post contradicts the second law of thermodynamics. Read the wikipedia links and associated references.

This idea isn't original to me. In fact, it's not even especially obscure...note the article in the New York Times listed in the references to the first wikipedia link.

Thanks, I'm familiar with the Boltzmann Brain argument. And the fact that it seems possible to extract ludicrous consequences from a premise is normally evidence there is something wrong with the premise.

In this case, it is that the second law is being used too simplistically. Entropy degrading systems in fact have high probability of occurring where there is an entropy gradient.

So if you truly want to calculate anthropic probabilities, you have to go back to the question of how such cosmological-scale gradients might arise.

Even your "dust cloud" universe would be still expanding, still cooling. It would still be a gradient (even if a much weaker, duller heat death one).

When thinking about the cosmological scale, you need to include both the global scale (the void, the vacuum, the de sitter event horizon) and the local (the dust, the atoms, the background radiation) in the calculations.

The void is often treated as if it is "just nothing" and so can be left out of entropy maths. Yet clearly it is a very orderly and continually developing "something".

Unless you take a completely solipsistic line with Boltzmann brain, saying that even all cosmological facts are the imaginings of a mind that fluctuates into momentary being. But then how would any entropic arguments be of interest if everything has been faked in this (now inexplicable) way?

 

[RexAllen]

Unless you take a completely solipsistic line with Boltzmann brain, saying that even all cosmological facts are the imaginings of a mind that fluctuates into momentary being. But then how would any entropic arguments be of interest if everything has been faked in this (now inexplicable) way?

Sean Carroll's From Eternity to Here has a good discussion of these issues.

Particularly this chapter:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/03/16/from-eternity-to-book-club-chapter-ten/

After the amusing diversions of the last chapter, here we resume again the main thread of argument. In Chapter Eight we talked a bit about the “reversibility objection” of Lohschmidt to Boltzmann’s attempts to derive the Second Law from kinetic theory in the 1870’s; now we pick up the historical thread in the 1890’s, when a similar controversy broke out over Zermelo’s “recurrence objection.” The underlying ideas are similar, but people have become a bit more sophisticated over the ensuing 20 years, and the arguments have become a bit more pointed. More importantly, they are still haunting us today.

One of the fun things about this chapter is the extent to which it is driven by direct quotations from great thinkers — Boltzmann, of course, but also Poincare, Nietzsche, Lucretius, Eddington, Feynman. That’s because the arguments they were making seem perfectly relevant to our present concerns, which isn’t always the case. Boltzmann tried very hard to defend his derivation of the Second Law, but by now it had sunk in that some additional ingredient was going to be needed — here we’re calling it the Past Hypothesis, but certainly you need something. He was driven to float the idea that the universe we see around us (which, to him, would have been our galaxy) was not representative of the wider whole, but was simply a local fluctuation away from equilibrium. It’s very educational to learn that ideas like “the multiverse” and “the anthropic principle” aren’t recent inventions of a new generation of postmodern physicists, but in fact have been part of respectable scientific discourse for over a century.

It’s in this chapter that we get to bring up the haunting idea of Boltzmann Brains — observers that fluctuate randomly out of thermal equilibrium, rather than arising naturally in the course of a gradual increase of entropy over billions of years. I tried my best to explain how such monstrosities would be the correct prediction of a model of an eternal universe with thermal fluctuations, but certainly are not observers like ourselves, which let's us conclude that that’s not the kind of world we live in. Hopefully the arguments made sense. One question people often ask is “how do we know we’re not Boltzmann Brains?” The realistic answer is that we can never prove that we’re not; but there is no reliable chain of argument that could ever convince us that we are, so the only sensible way to act is as if we are not. That’s the kind of radical foundational uncertainty that has been with us since Descartes, but most of us manage to get through the day without being overwhelmed by existential anxiety.

 

[Phrak]

I can be rather dense. How did you get from this,

We don’t know the exact state of our universe’s particles, but in statistical mechanics the Principle of Indifference requires us to consider all possible microscopic states that are consistent with our current macroscopic state equally likely.

to this?

So given all of the above, and our current knowledge of the laws of physics, the most likely explanation is that all of your current memories are false and that yesterday the universe was in a HIGHER state of entropy, not a lower state (as would be required by any variation of the Big Bang theory).

 

[RexAllen]

I can be rather dense. How did you get from this,

We don’t know the exact state of our universe’s particles, but in statistical mechanics the Principle of Indifference requires us to consider all possible microscopic states that are consistent with our current macroscopic state equally likely.

to this?

So given all of the above, and our current knowledge of the laws of physics, the most likely explanation is that all of your current memories are false and that yesterday the universe was in a HIGHER state of entropy, not a lower state (as would be required by any variation of the Big Bang theory).

It might make more sense if you put this between the two paragraphs that you quoted:

The vast majority of the particle arrangements that macroscopically resemble the world around us will *instead* have particles in states (e.g., with positions and velocities) that are consistent with the particles having previously been in something more like a giant dust cloud.

By which I mean: If we take their current positions and velocities, and work backwards to see where they came from, and go back far enough in time, eventually we will not arrive at the Big Bang. Instead we will arrive at a state resembling a giant dust cloud (probably a very thin, spread-out dust cloud).

 

[Char. Limit]

If I might can I ask these questions of you all?
How do you define order?
How do you define chaos?

Well, I'm no philosopher, but order to me is having fewer possible microstates, and chaos is having more possible microstates.

$$S=k \times ln{W}$$ FTW!

 

[Phrak]

It might make more sense if you put this between the two paragraphs that you quoted:

OK. Got it. Not so very different from stray thoughts of my own, but in very different words. Say we are willing to put aside, for the moment, the concept of linear time and replace it with the concept of multiple pasts and multiple futures, what would we cognitively record in memory? It should be safe to say that the process of cognition, and therefore memory storage itself is a process that involves an increase in entropy from information loss.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

Well that's a different discussion entirely, more of a psychology argument... If people remember something different than what actually happened, did it actually happen? Who is to say that events are not defined by perception?

Aside from epistemological issues there is a known phenomenon of degradation of information storage in the brain. Our minds do not like gaps though so when we do not clearly remember something we often unconsciously mend the gaps in the degraded memory by patching it with what ever information seems most likely or appropriate there by altering the stored memory.

edit: this is actually more along the lines of what I thought the thread was going to be about when I first clicked it.

 

[apeiron]

such monstrosities would be the correct prediction of a model of an eternal universe with thermal fluctuations

My question is still how do you get thermal fluctuations without a thermal gradient?

And if we must presume a gradient, then the second law states it is probable that the past of this gradient was more orderly, and the future will be more disorderly.

If our argument must invoke an eternity of time passing, then the universe must be asymptotically close to heat death. While the passage of time would seem to increase the changes of something very unlikely happening, it also increases the odds that it can't happen because there is less energy, less material, to generate candidate fluctuations.

The curve of dissipation being an exponential, the time it spends in the fluctuation generation realm is in fact vanishingly short compared to the time in which it is too heat dead to do anything of note.

All this is leaving aside the further issue of how any kind of arrangement of dust particles would mimic the complexity of a biological brain. What is this dust composed of? A suitable mix of atomic elements? Carbon, nitrogen and magnesium, etc.

And is this dust world then a realm without supernova and so complex atoms also conveniently fluctuate into being via thermal fluctuations (rather extreme ones if the dust is hydrogen, helium and lithium - the heat released by the fusion needed to assemble the brain would surely fry it before it happened).

 

[madness]

And if we must presume a gradient, then the second law states it is probable that the past of this gradient was more orderly, and the future will be more disorderly.

If our argument must invoke an eternity of time passing, then the universe must be asymptotically close to heat death. While the passage of time would seem to increase the changes of something very unlikely happening, it also increases the odds that it can't happen because there is less energy, less material, to generate candidate fluctuations.

The problem as I understand it, is that the law of increasing entropy works the same backwards and forwards in time, i.e. the disorder should increase backwards in time. This leads to the conclusion that the universe just appeared 1 second ago as a thermal fluctuation and all the dinosaur fossils and memories etc. are false. So the concept of heat death is inapplicable since the universe was always in that state, there is no asymptote.

This is why we assume a low entropy beginning - it circumvents all of these problems. And as I mentioned previously, the conclusion that all our memories are false undermines the argument we used to get there, since we invoked scientific laws which rely on the validity of our experience and memory.

 

[GeorgCantor]

The problem as I understand it, is that the law of increasing entropy works the same backwards and forwards in time, i.e. the disorder should increase backwards in time.

I believe this is wrong. Can you explain why you think so? The 2nd LOT is still a great challenge to the idea that time does not flow, i.e. the thermodynamic arrow of time(low entropy to high entropy) is still valid, though there are hints from GR that the flow of time is not a fundamental ingredient of reality or even an illusion. This doesn't mean however, that "entropy works the same backwards and forwards in time", but just that the universe is in a sense "frozen" in one state that encompasses all possible states at once. Einstein had trouble understanding this weird consequesnce of his relativity and today it's still as incomprehensible as ever.

This leads to the conclusion that the universe just appeared 1 second ago as a thermal fluctuation and all the dinosaur fossils and memories etc. are false.

This could be the case but for different reasons, and your premise seems faulty to me.

So the concept of heat death is inapplicable since the universe was always in that state, there is no asymptote.

The second law of thermodynamics is almost a fundamental law in physics(not that there exists such a law). If you want to circumvent it, you have to explain how the universe is always in one state and the 2nd law is applicable.

This is why we assume a low entropy beginning - it circumvents all of these problems. And as I mentioned previously, the conclusion that all our memories are false undermines the argument we used to get there, since we invoked scientific laws which rely on the validity of our experience and memory.

If all our memories(or should i say "my memories"?) are wrong, we can't have access to truths. In that case, at a fundamental level everything that is known can be wrong.

 

[apeiron]

The problem as I understand it, is that the law of increasing entropy works the same backwards and forwards in time, i.e. the disorder should increase backwards in time.

The essence of it is that at the micro-causal level of description - such as when tracking the individual motions and collisions of a collection of independently moving gas particles - things seem time symmetric. Physical descriptions - whether Newtonian, relativistic or even QM - are mechanical and make equal sense whether read forwards or backwards.

The second law then arose as a macro-causal level description of nature. It captured the truth that the universe unwinds. It cools and expands. Work always results in waste heat. Time rolls everywhere forward. So at the macro-level, the global scale, nature is patently asymmetric.

Now science wants to reduce all macro-descriptions to micro-descriptions. Boltzmann is celebrated for his microstates ensemble model which treated the second law as a probabilistic statement and allowed an apparent reduction to a local, mechanical, time symmetric, description of what was really going on.

As a model, it is very good. But arguably incomplete because of what it left out to make a useful simplification of nature. And what it clearly leaves out is the question of the "shape of the container". When a collection of particles are doing their thing in a flask, someone has created the flask (a static box which reflects all the particles back on themselves, and the heat sink that allows the particles to cool to some max ent condition, yet not cool completely to the point they cease to move and become something else, like a bose condensate).

It indeed leaves out the macro-causal factors (the flask, the heat sink, the person who originally confined the particles). These initial conditions and boundary conditions are not modeled. Instead, the macro-view is only of some emergent global-scale property - a measurement of temperature, pressure, or maximum entropy.

When things get left out - especially the global causal factors, the downwards acting constraints - paradoxes of thinking must arise as a purely local, mechanical, micro-causal description is stretched to its limit.

Boltzmann's statistical mechanics was faced with the problem of, well, who ordered the universe's initially ordered state? A micro-causal loophole seemed to be that the time reversibility of the local mechanics means that anything can happen in the "wrong direction" as a fluctuation in apparent defiance of the second law. As long as the excursions did not exceed the limits set by the probabilistic descriptions at the emergent macro-level, then both the macro and micro view seemed in harmony. You had perfect symmetry as apparently demanded by mechanical equations of motion and action, and perfect asymmetry as encoded by the second law.

The error of thinking is then to try to do away completely with the global asymmetry in physical description. We see a world unwinding down an entropic gradient by expanding and cooling. But perhaps this is just a really big fluctuation in some greater equilibrium which has a timeless symmetry as its now global true state. So the second law, as a global statement, becomes reduced to merely a local law applying to some limited region of lucky fluctuation. And micro-causality or uber-reductionism wins.

Boltzmann's brain is a recent thought experiment to dramatise this possibility.

But there are plenty of people working on better ways of thinking about the second law and entropy issues.

Personally, I favour a model based on vagueness and its dichotomisation (or max symmetry => max asymmetry).

But generally, it pays not to confuse successful mechanical models with what might be actually true about reality. Better models - in the sense of more complete - await development.

 

[disregardthat]

I would ask OP, what constitutes a "true" memory?

 

[madness]

Sorry I haven't had time to read fully the replies to my post. The source is Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos, which I hope is an acceptable source (there is a whole section about this problem so I don't think it's going to be wrong). Some quotes:

"Since Newton's laws of physics have no built-in spatio temporal orientation, all of the reasoning we have used to argue that systems will evolve from lower to higher entropy toward the futre works equally well when applied toward the past"

"Thus, there is an overwhelming probability that the entropy of a physical system will be higher in what we call the future, but there is the same overwhelming probability that it was higher in what we call the past"

He goes on to say that if we find a half melted ice cube in a glass of water, we may assume they will be more melted in half an hour, but with the same confidence could assume they were more melted half an hour ago. Hence the universe is overwhelmingly likely to have formed as a fluctuation from equilibrium, in which case our memories and false and the scientific argument is invalidated. Hence we assume that the universe started at high entropy to avoid the issue.

Edit: I changed "less melted half an hour ago" to "more melted half an hour ago" which is what it should have said.

 

[magpies]

Why would you honestly ever say your memorys are false? Doesn't that just sound awful anyway you look at it? It would be like going into work and saying to your boss hey just so you know... I am a fake.

 

[apeiron]

Sorry I haven't had time to read fully the replies to my post. The source is Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos, which I hope is an acceptable source (there is a whole section about this problem so I don't think it's going to be wrong).

Again, the basis of the argument is that a microstates approach to modelling entropy cannot give you a global arrow of time. And that is really no surprise is it? The arrow is the emergent property of an entropy gradient. For a system at equilbrium, there is no gradient, and so no global macrostate change, and so no global property of "time" in a meaningful sense.

What Greene is arguing is that the Boltzmann ensemble model of entropy (and so interpretations of the second law made in those terms) only predicts what is the most probable state of a system - the maximum entropy of a system gone to general equilibrium. Now if we just take that statement in isolation, then we feel justified in saying that it is most probable that a systems is always at equilibrium. This in turn justifies us to say it is most probable that any system not yet at equilbrium is more likely to be a local fluctuation of some global state of equilibrium than that it is a global state of disequilbrium (lower entropy) still on its way to maximum entropy equilibrium.

What justifies all this is that no direction to time and change is wired into the Newtonian mechanical model of action. So even despite the observational evidence of everyday life and the big bang, we must look on this as most likely a story of local fluctuations from global equilibriums. Hence the Boltzmann brain if we just consider the occurence of our conscious awareness. Or various cosmological views which see the whole big bang as such a local fluctuation.

There is certainly a problem here about how to explain the observation that the universe originated in a state of low entropy. But philosophically, the extrapolation of micro-physical models to arrive at patent paradoxes like "fake memories" is not really getting us anywhere (except to show that this line of thinking is indeed pathologically self-defeating).

The message really is that we should look to what the models are omitting, which again is the macro-physical features of reality. We observe gradients and an arrow of time (that is what the second law actually talks about) and so why not extrapolate from them?

 

[RexAllen]

Moving to philosophy:

The main motivation in this post and my previous one is to illustrate that reason and observation aren't enough to pierce the veil of perception to reveal what really exists.

As Kant pointed out, the difficulty is not that we can conclude too little but rather that we can conclude too much. From the structure of our experience of the world, it is possible to deduce contradictory particular claims about how things really are.

“According to Kant, it is vital always to distinguish between the distinct realms of phenomena and noumena. Phenomena are the appearances, which constitute the our experience; noumena are the (presumed) things themselves, which constitute reality. All of our synthetic a priori judgments apply only to the phenomenal realm, not the noumenal. (It is only at this level, with respect to what we can experience, that we are justified in imposing the structure of our concepts onto the objects of our knowledge.) Since the thing in itself (Ding an sich) would by definition be entirely independent of our experience of it, we are utterly ignorant of the noumenal realm.

Thus, on Kant’s view, the most fundamental laws of nature, like the truths of mathematics, are knowable precisely because they make no effort to describe the world as it really is but rather prescribe the structure of the world as we experience it. By applying the pure forms of sensible intuition and the pure concepts of the understanding, we achieve a systematic view of the phenomenal realm but learn nothing of the noumenal realm. Math and science are certainly true of the phenomena; only metaphysics claims to instruct us about the noumena.

By the nature of reason itself, we are required to suppose our own existence as substantial beings and the possibility of our free action in a world of causal regularity. The absence of any formal justification for these notions makes it impossible for us to claim that we know them to be true, but it can in no way diminish the depth of our belief that they are.”

It seems to me that the true fundamental facts are our observations, not physical facts per se. Physics is just a summary of human experience. We construct plausible scientific narratives that are consistent with what we observe, BUT these are descriptive metaphors, not explanations. Our observations are such that it is *as though* electrons exist...not that electrons *actually* exist.

I don't see what introducing the "physical world" buys us in our attempts to explain our orderly conscious experiences. If it is intended to explain the order and consistency of our experiences, then what explains the physical world's order and consistency? It seems to me that we've just changed the question, not answered it. And in the process introduced the additional question of how consciousness arises from matter.

So we have our orderly conscious experiences and we want to explain them. To do this, we need some context to place these experiences in. So we postulate the existence of an orderly external universe that “causes” our experiences. But then we have to explain what caused this orderly external universe, and also the particular initial conditions and causal laws that result in what we observe.

So this is basically Kant's first antinomy of pure reason. Either there is a first cause, which itself is uncaused, OR there is an infinite chain of prior causes stretching infinitely far into the past. But why this particular infinite chain as opposed to some other? In fact, why our particular "infinite chain of prior causes" or "first cause" instead of Nothing existing at all?

It seems that either way (infinite chain or first cause), at the end you are left with only one reasonable conclusion: There is no reason that things are this way. They just are.

BUT...we could have just said that about our conscious experiences to start with and saved ourselves the trouble of postulating a whole physical universe.

 

[apeiron]

Since the thing in itself (Ding an sich) would by definition be entirely independent of our experience of it, we are utterly ignorant of the noumenal realm.

Never had too much love for Kant.

Of course we have no direct experience of reality. That is the modelling insight. But "entirely independent" and "utterly ignorant"? That is the quite unjustified next step.

We have patently improved our models of reality over time. And so the intelligent person moves on to talk about the epistemological basis of that improvement. Exploring modern modelling theory.

But I don't see any real connection with the OP. And it is a question already hammered to death many times.

 

[disregardthat]

Of course we have no direct experience of reality. That is the modelling insight. But "entirely independent" and "utterly ignorant"? That is the quite unjustified next step.

We have patently improved our models of reality over time. And so the intelligent person moves on to talk about the epistemological basis of that improvement. Exploring modern modelling theory.

I'd say, applying concepts of our models of phenomena to noumena would be the unjustified step, for it generally makes no sense to say that we have a description of the structureless noumenal world. Structure is imposed, and that destroyes the possibility of having any meaningful scientific knowledge of the noumenal world. Langauge is formed in relation to phenomena and phenomena only, and I don't see the reason to suggest that it in some way applies to noumena.

--------------------

I liked your post RexAllen.

It seems to me that the true fundamental facts are our observations, not physical facts per se. Physics is just a summary of human experience. We construct plausible scientific narratives that are consistent with what we observe, BUT these are descriptive metaphors, not explanations. Our observations are such that it is *as though* electrons exist...not that electrons *actually* exist.

What is meant by "actually existing"?
As phenomenal objects electrons do exist in the consistency of language in scientific models, but it would not make sense to call them "noumenal objects".

 

[RexAllen]

I liked your post RexAllen.

Excellent!

Sean Carroll's "From Eternity To Here", Pg. 182 (my comments follow the quote):

Cognitive Instability

I know from experience that not everyone is convinced by this argument. One stumbling block is the crucial assertion that what we start with is knowledge of our present macrostate, including some small-scale details about a photograph or a history book or a memory lurking in our brains. Although it seems like a fairly innocent assumption, we have an intuitive feeling that we don't know something only about the present; we *know* something about the past, because we see it, in a way that we don't see the future. Cosmology is a good example, just because the speed of light plays an important role, and we have a palpable sense of "looking at an event in the past." When we try to reconstruct the history of the universe it's tempting to look at (for example) the cosmic microwave background and say, "I can *see* what the universe was like almost 14 billion years ago; I don't have to appeal to any fancy Past Hypothesis to reason my way into drawing any conclusions."

That's not right. When we look at the cosmic microwave background (or light from any other distant source, or a photograph of any purported past event), we're not looking at the past. We're observing what certain photons are doing right here and now. When we scan our radio telescope across the sky and observe a bath of radiation at about 2.7 Kelvin that is very close to uniform in every direction, we've learned something about the radiation passing through our *present* location, which we then need to extrapolate backward to infer something about the past. It's conceivable that this uniform radiation came from a past that was actually highly non-uniform, but from which a set of finely tuned conspiracies between temperatures and Doppler shifts and gravitational effects produced a very smooth-looking set of photons arriving at us today. You may say that's very unlikely, but the time-reverse of that is exactly what we would expect if we took a typical microstate within our present macrostate and evolved it toward a Big Crunch. The truth is, we don't have any more direct empirical access to the past than we have to the future, unless we allow ourselves to assume a Past Hypothesis.

Indeed, the Past Hypothesis is more than just "allowed"; it's completely necessary, if we hope to tell a sensible story about the universe. Imagine that we simply refused to invoke such an idea and stuck solely with the data given to us by our current macrostate, including the state of our brains and our photographs and our history books. We would then predict with strong probability that the past as well as the future was a high-entropy state, and that all of the low-entropy features of our present condition arose as random fluctuations. That sounds bad enough, but the reality is worse. Under such circumstances, among the things that randomly fluctuated into existence are all of the pieces of information we traditionally use to justify our understanding of the laws of physics, or for that matter all of the mental states (or written-down arguments) we traditionally use to justify mathematics and logic and the scientific method. Such assumptions, in other words, give us absolutely no reason to believe that we have justified anything, including those assumptions themselves.

David Albert has referred to such a conundrum as *cognitive instability* - the condition that we face when a set of assumptions undermines the reasons we might have used to justify those very assumptions. It is a kind of helplessness that can't be escaped without reaching beyond the present moment. Without the Past Hypothesis, we simply can't tell any intelligible story about the world; so we seem to be stuck with it, or stuck with trying to find a theory that actually explains it.

So it seems to me that physicalism (the proposal that our experiences are "caused" by an independently existing material world) is riddled with "cognative instabilities". As is any theory that proposes a causal mechanism for conscious experience.

There is no sensible story to be told about existence.

Sean says: "Without the Past Hypothesis, we simply can't tell any intelligible story about the world"

I'd go further and say that even with the Past Hypothesis you can't tell any intelligible story about the world. We *can* say that the "big bang" theory is consistent with what we observe. But so is a higher-entropy past. And so is platonism. And so are a lot of things.

BUT these things all inevitably lead to more questions. There seem to be only two possible "final" answers:

1) Everything exists.

2) Reality is essentially arbitrary. There is no reason why existence is this way as opposed to some other way. It just is.

Note that option 1 can actually be collapsed into option 2: Why does everything exist? There is no reason, it just does.

Again, Kant's first antinomy:

“Suppose we were to accept the big bang hypothesis concerning the origin of the universe. Only a short-sighted person would think that we have then answered the question of how the world began. For what caused the bang? Any answer will suppose that something already existed. So the hypothesis cannot explain the origin of things. The quest for an origin leads us forever backwards into the past. But either it is unsatisfiable- in which case, how does cosmology explain the existence of the world? - or it comes to rest in the postulation of a causa sui - in which case, we have left the scientific question unanswered and taking refuge in theology. Science itself pushes us towards the antinomy, by forcing us always to the limits of nature.”

 

[RexAllen]

Never had too much love for Kant.

Why not?

Of course we have no direct experience of reality. That is the modelling insight. But "entirely independent" and "utterly ignorant"? That is the quite unjustified next step.

Where did Kant, Hume, and Berkeley go wrong then?

 

[apeiron]

BUT these things all inevitably lead to more questions. There seem to be only two possible "final" answers:

1) Everything exists.

2) Reality is essentially arbitrary. There is no reason why existence is this way as opposed to some other way. It just is.

Note that option 1 can actually be collapsed into option 2: Why does everything exist? There is no reason, it just does.

I don't think you are really focusing on what is being positively stated under this fluctuation hypothesis.

It says that "you and your world of experience, including all the logical notions with which you are constructing your current argument" are simply a "one instant" fleeting fluctuation. A random eruption of order that exists for about 10^30 seconds.

I am waiting for some further fleshing out of what actually does erupt into being? You mention that the eruption was within a thermal dust cloud. Well in what way could any arrangement of dust form a pattern in interaction? Dust is defined by its lack of interaction, except for gravity.

If you are claiming that just the right kind of atomic material erupts out of a quantum fluctuation to be a living, pumping, experiencing brain for a brief moment, then perhaps we can think of a brief flash of existence, before the poor Boltzmann brain gruesomely fails - boiling away in whatever vacuum it appeared in.

But you need to do more work pinning down what you are actually prepared to claim about the nature and duration of this fluctuation.

Before we are justified in rejecting reality, we would need a better fleshed out alternative.

 

[apeiron]

Why not?

Precisely because he argued in antinomies (incompatible dichotomies) whereas I side with the more ancient metaphysical principal that dichotomies are about fundamental compatibilities. Opposites make each other true (That is, A + not-A = everything that is possible concerning A).

Where did Kant, Hume, and Berkeley go wrong then?

Hume went right surely. Modelling is about models and measurements - having a causal model in your head, and then measuring the strength of its correlation with the world.