Three Flukes Made Modern Science Possible

Roger Schlafly

Before giving you feedback on your essay, I just want to mention some thoughts of mine about what you wrote about commenting and critizising.

I not (yet) voted your essay nor did I post a comment on your essay page. But I already read your essay twice. And I read your latest comment and think you are on to something. Notwithstanding that your 21 ratings could amount to a high or a low appreciation for your essay, many voters seem to think that the voting comments are sufficient to make their points, without aiming at some feedback from the author for possible misunderstandings or overseen aspects of own reasonings.

Moreover, the first bunch of submitted essays obviously – at least in part – granted each other the priviledge to be amongst the essays that have more than 10 votes – and according to the rules therefore are subject to expert judgement.

The essays that came later are still not sufficiently voted, be it because the voters take their time until doing it immediately before the deadline, or they see no sense in voting since mathematically they assume there is an asymmetry of voting others essays and not having their own essay voted. That is at least what my point of view is – why should I vote a certain essay when even my comments don't get any replies (with minor exceptions!)?

Shouldn't it be the other way round: an author should reply and clarify if needed when there are critical arguments raised on what he has written. It seems to me that the whole discussion about judges, arxiv and the like does somewhat repeat in this contest on the same level the opponents of peer review are eager to argue against. What a mess that would be in adapting a double standard and then complaining about double standards.

Now to your essay. You wrote that certain historic lines in the evolution of science have been contingent. This can only be true when the universe we live in is not fully deterministic. Although we do not (yet) understand how a not-so-deterministic universe should look like, we nonetheless can deduce what a fully deterministic one looks like: it does not leave any room for the evolution of science to have been other than it was and therefore any speculation about an alternative history of science would be ill-defined.

Note that I do not presume you to having adopted that strictly deterministic world view. Since you also wrote about Darwinian evolution, the latter will also be suspicious to be ill-defined for the case that it is true that we live in a fully deterministic universe. Because then the reasons for Darwinian evolution to have happened (in every unknown detail) was pre-programed into the initial conditions exacly in the way it happened – up to the last bit of mutation – and therefore no “selection” ever took place in a strictly deterministic world!

Thus, believing in the big bang and also in a strictly deterministic universe poses the question about very, very, very special initial conditions. If we additionally assume that a black-box science will some day discover a “theory of everything” - then we would really live in a very special universe – wouldn't we? Even if there are myriads of other universes, each with slightly different initial conditions, our universe would arguably be a special one regarding the propper configuration to obtain the “full truth” about the universe. In other words, its configuration then would be such that its information processing would be perfectly set up to determine the “full truth”.

From the point of view that there could be many independent universes “out there”, this result of “speciality” may not be more than a simple computational truth, and there would be nothing to wonder about. But wait a minute, we do not at all know whether or not there does exist such a “theory for everything”, and if such a theory nonetheless would be possible, we do not know at all whether or not WE will ever be able to find it: according to a strictly deterministic world view, that information is hidden and totally inaccesible within the initial conditions of the universe (or if we believe that the universe has no origin in time, it is hidden in what globally happens “now” with every particle / wave in the universe while I type these lines of reasoning).

My whole argument amounts to the question whether or not those initial conditions themselves must be considered as contingent or not. You wrote about the eternal truth of mathematical relationships. I agree that there must be something about reality that truly is eternal. There should be some eternal truths, since otherwise truths would come and go randomly and no logical thinking would be reliable and we could stop here. I think one of these truths is that in a strictly deterministic universe where Darwinian evolution only seems to be governed by randomness, but in fact would be governed by some unimaginably “fine-tuned” initial conditions, the latter do not allow for any examination an especially not for any prediction of whether or not Artificial Intelligence will be able to produce further insights into the question whether or not our universe is deterministic or not!

Since if it would be strictly deterministic, mine and also your thoughts about these issues would be strictly determined – but the latter would not guarantee that our thoughts would also be determined to reflect any fundamental truth about the bigger picture of reality. And the same would then also be true for any kind of AI-governed black-box science – since the very assumption of some very special but in-principle unknowable initial conditions in a fully deterministic world would already be the ultimate black-box that no AI could ever hack since it lacks a complete description of all the particles / waves in our universe at any time!

Roger Schlafly
Responding to your call for comments, I thought I would read your essay. But I couldn’t get past the first paragraph before disagreeing with the essay:

“...you have to accept the universality of mathematical truths and be receptive to the idea that we live in a clockwork universe where nature behaves in an orderly way.”

No. In fact, “you have to accept the universality of” relationships that can be represented using mathematical symbols; a very different thing to “mathematical truths”.

Yes, clearly “nature behaves in an orderly way” due to the abovementioned relationships. But no: the abovementioned relationships do not imply that “we live in a clockwork universe”, because it is apparent that, in the real physical world, the numbers are very often refusing to play ball. The problem of the misbehaving numbers is not some error or misunderstanding on the part of physicists, it is just a fact.

Dreary, dreary, dreary (from my point of view). Then I got to the absolute drivel, and absurd ideas about computers/ AIs, on page 6:

“They may even get to the artificial intelligence singularity, and people might become slaves to super-intelligent robots that take over the world. The laws of physics would become implicit in the trillion-parameter models being used. The computers could deduce everything we can with our theories and much more, but the poor mortals would have no conceptual understanding of how the world works.”

The above irrational imaginings are seemingly due to not knowing how computers work. In fact, binary digits don’t even exist, except in the human imagination. The technical article “Logic Signal Voltage Levels” (https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/digital/chpt-3/logic-signal-voltage-levels ) explains the connection between voltage and binary digits/ “logic states” in computers. If you read this technical article will notice that there is no necessary connection between voltage (a measurable aspect of the world) and binary digits, which are not a measurable aspect of the world. In other words, binary digits/ “logic states” are merely an idea that human beings have imposed on voltages, where the whole setup including circuits and transistors makes the idea work. Binary digits only exist in the human imagination, and there is no actual logic being performed by computers/ AIs.

Roger Schlafly
No matter what some scientists in the past thought, “quantum randomness” gives the lie to any idea of a clockwork universe. This “randomness” is not due to some error or misunderstanding on the part of physicists, it is an integral part of how the universe works.

The point about the linked article is that binary digits don’t exist, except in the human imagination: what exists is voltage, which is a measurable aspect of the real physical world.

“Every time a computer adds two numbers”

A computer is not adding two numbers: there are no numbers, and there is no addition.

There are no numbers, there are only voltages used to represent numbers:

1. Different number systems (hexadecimal or binary) can be used to represent the same number. In other words, two completely different arrays of voltages can represent the same number.
2. In addition to this, binary numbers are symbolically represented by arrays of higher and lower voltages. In general the higher voltage will represent the binary digit one, but in fact the lower voltage can also be used to represent the binary digit one. Once again, depending on the setup, two completely different arrays of voltages can represent the same number, where “101” and “010” could represent the very same number.
3. In addition to this, binary digits can be represented using different voltage ranges. In the case where the higher voltage is used to represent the binary digit one, the binary digit one does not correspond to a particular voltage number.
4. In addition to this, there are no numbers, there are just arrays of interconnected voltages.

There is no addition:
A computer is not adding two numbers. People who knew the properties of voltages, transistors and circuits, created computers using voltages, transistors and circuits to symbolise the adding of two numbers.

Roger Schlafly
What does this have to do with your essay? I am refuting what you say in your essay.

I have just explained why there are no numbers in computers, and why computers are not doing addition, and I might well have added that “logic gates” are not doing logic. “Logic gates” / transistors are useful because they can be used to symbolise logic, if you place them in the right setting of circuits and voltages, and with the right computer program.

“Everybody knows about number representations”

Do they? What are numbers? The real world, including bodies, brains and the physical correlates of consciousness, is built out of real-world categories (examples would be mass, energy, position), real-world lawful relationships, and real-world numbers. Numbers representing the real world are obtained from measurement of the real world (e.g. by physicists). People use symbols to represent these real world numbers, but the real world numbers are not in any way implied by the symbols that are used to represent them (except from the point of view of pre-existing educated human beings), and the symbols of numbers don’t reverse-engineer themselves and transmogrify into real-world numbers.

The voltages, circuits, and transistors in computers, that might well be used to represent real-world numbers, real-world categories, and real-world lawful relationships (possibly including the physical correlates of consciousness), don’t reverse-engineer themselves and transmogrify into real-world numbers, real-world categories, and real-world lawful relationships, and real-world consciousness.

Roger Schlafly
Yes, so that is why your:

“They may even get to the artificial intelligence singularity, and people might become slaves to super-intelligent robots that take over the world. The laws of physics would become implicit in the trillion-parameter models being used. The computers could deduce everything we can with our theories and much more, but the poor mortals would have no conceptual understanding of how the world works.”

is complete nonsense. I object to your propagation of this complete and utter nonsense.

Roger Schlafly

Hi MustardGorilla, I now read your essay once again.

You nicely and reasonably worked out the first fluke, although I would suggest that even before human beings began to systematically examine the mathematical precisions of the heavens, they must have had a deep intuition that the world is, in certain areas, deeply ordered. For example humans self-evidently know that their bodies usually follow their inner intents (surely within the limits of what can be achieved by human bodies), for example lifting an arm etc. This is also a kind of order, although not a mathematically predetermined one, and not subject to rigorous proofs, since bodies can also misbehave (illness etc.).

Since mathematics starts with counting, it is no wonder that it exists, since in everyday life, things are countable. The wonder, at least to me, is that it can be extended to ever more abstract objects in the minds of human beings, like for example an uncountable infinity. Here I would be cautious whether or not such an uncountable infinity has any counterpart in the natural world, although that infinity can be proven to be consistent with the basic assumptions of mathematics. This surely poses the question whether or not a consistent mathematical object and its constituents must have any counterparts in the physical world, or are just a concatenation of logical operations in the human mind.

The next fluke you rightfully mention is solar and lunar eclipses:

“What if we had no eclipses? And if the sky were cloudy all the time, we would have no Astronomy. No stars, no moon, no planets, and no celestial mechanics. Where would we even get the idea of a clockwork universe?”

Very good question in my opinion and a remarkable fluke indeed. Someone like me is tempted to say that it looks a bit like fine-tuning for the purpose of discovering the wonders of creation for everybody to see if one is willing to look.

Your third fluke is also surely remarkable. In the dark ages, there were no bibles written in other languages than Latin or Greek around in Europe, this had to wait until Guttenberg came along. Only the curches had complete scripts of the holy texts. People must have relied on what had been preached from the pulpit. Only after Guttenberg people where able to study the holy texts and think about them. This must have been a real step towards proving and / or disproving what was said from the pulpit. Unless this happened, people were already creative in developing ever more sophisticated tools for everyday life as well as ever sophisticated theories about the regularities in the world. After the bible was accessible for everyone, civilisation refined its system of justice, based on what has been found in the bible and on what has been found out about logical deduction / induction. We therefore should do a little justice to christianity, since Newton and surely others were inspired by the bible to blieve that within creation there must be deep order. If they did not believe that, they rarely would have figured out what we know today.

Your next assumption, the inevitability of computers and even AI, can really be seen as the consequence and the success of a deterministic, clockwork world view that had its beginnings with the ancient astronomers, and its subsequent refinement towards an exclusive worldview of mechanistic causality: Aristotle's final causes more and more lost their meaning within science. The more astonishing it is for me that with the new era of AI, these final causes seem to have a revival in somewhat new clothes: AI is supposed to deliver the final answers to questions that human beings haven't been able to answer yet. AI itself is seen as somewhat the teleologically pre-determined end point of fundamental scientific research. But that is only a belief, based on the successes of the clockwork world view. However, according to the bible, there exists another mode of prediction, it is called prophecy. There are many prophecies that already fullfilled. To name only one, the one that made christianity possible in the first place, was discovered by a retired Scotland Yard Inspector. His name was Sir Robert Anderson, and he deciphered a prophecy in the book of Daniel, Chapter 9, 25-27, so that we can determine the day Jesus Christ has ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey. We therefore can also deduce when Jesus began to preach, he was 29 years old (in the epistles it is stated that he was around 30 years old when he began to preach).

This is only one of many examples which, together with biblical archeology and language examination show that the book of Daniel must have been written long before Christ was born. Understanding Darwinian evolution without genetics is a matter of fact, but we should not forget that is also a matter of fact that we have no clue how the first self-replicating thing (something very, very complicated which must be stable and reliably copy itself for Darwinian evolution to at all take place) came into the world.

“What if Science had developed without reliable mathematics and a belief in universal laws? … Eventually, they would get computers and neural nets and scale up to large language models. They would make science problem-solving engines where they would feed in data and get valuable predictions.”

No, I think this is fantasy. To faciliate a computer, to produce semi-conductors and all the rest, you surely need some reliable mathematics and moreover a kind of conceptual framework how nature works, at least in its coars-grained appearance.

“If we had gotten to large language models before classical mechanics, we might have developed a very different idea of science. Science would be all about feeding large datasets into black boxes for artificially intelligent predictions.”

Again no, since you need tested, reliable theories to build something that complicated like a computer array. In other words, you need a sufficiently accurate model in your head how nature behaves, otherwise building a computer like we have today counterfactually makes no sense at all.

All in all I found that your essay expresses some memorable flukes, worth thinking about in my opinion!

Roger Schlafly

Thank you also MustardGorilla for evaluating my comments.

Best wishes
AquamarineTapir

Global externalities and Black Box Science happened in spite of the flukes that made modern science possible. Some interesting points regarding math, astronomy and Christianity. The latter did promote the nuclear family but don't see it cultivating the individualism you mention. Not much room in our essays to make definitive connections. Seems natural for the ancients as well as the moderns to be drawn to astronomy and its wonders, mysteries explained with religion and finally science. Soft science is with us but also a bastardized science with a business agenda, robbing science of a more purist focus and replacing it with a bias for the commercial. That's the distortion I see that needs correcting.

Roger Schlafly You searched for historical reasons for the development of our science. I think your explanations are good, and even if they are not, they are a base for further improvements.

You made even some predictions, i.e. about GPT10. We will see. Only your Black box science is too simplified, but this essay is short, and time is limited for such research. I would add here that guessing of physical formulae also belongs to this black box and p-value. Although we do not know p-values at such guessing, we can estimate it and later we can improve it. Namely, I guessed formulae for the elementary particle masses in past, and they are evident in intranet. Best wishes

Roger Schlafly Hello, MustardGorilla. I like that you included Medieval Christianity as a reason FOR science forming as a Western program. Not for reasons of religious approval, but as an expression of fairness and historical insight about how things really happened. Christianity is traditionally pilloried as an enemy of science, with examples like Bruno and Galileo. Although there was indeed intolerance, the basic concept of a rational creator nourished the background supposition that the universe was a rational system that humans (minds "in the image of God," which btw is how Galileo himself argued it!) could study and figure out. Good work overall, too.

Also, would you (and anyone reading this) please take a look at my essay too, which attempts to disprove AI reductionism about minds. I use both a philosophical argument about existential knowledge (a sort of update of Descartes famous experiment) plus inferences from quantum mechanics. Thanks, and rem. again: this is the last day to rate essays!