The Internal Family Systems model, which I have been working with for about a year and a half, states that “All parts want something positive for the individual and will use a variety of strategies to gain influence within the internal system.” This statement matches my experience. Every part of my mind has a goal that it cares about and a role that it takes on in order to achieve that goal. For example, I have a part that helps me figure out how I can make the most of the situation I’m in, because it wants to make sure I don’t have any regrets.  (Before I developed a better relationship with it, this part used to be more focused on berating me for missing out on fun.)

Sometimes, I will encounter resistance to taking a certain action from one or more of my parts. For example, I used to have a silencing part, which prevented me from speaking when it was afraid that I might say something that would look bad or hurt someone.

Other times, I will encounter broader objections to making a change in my behavior. Last week, I was considering scheduling more of my time. And that time, I got much more diffuse resistance: many of my parts had the vague sense that making this change would upset the balance, and feared that they might lose out, in the sense of not being able to perform their role as effectively. Some parts of me that cared about socializing were concerned that I might have to change my current pattern of meeting up with people, which involves a fair amount of spontaneity and last-minute planning. Some parts who cared that I get enough big chunks of time on my own to work were concerned that if I were planning things it might interfere with its current strategy, which involves a certain amount of deciding to isolate myself when I was in a mood conducive to working, not always predictable beforehand. I sensed a general fear of change coming from my parts.

This reminded me of a perspective I came up with a while back: that attachment (in the Buddhist sense) can be thought of as internal bureaucracy.

In any large organization with many moving parts, there will be a general resistance to change. This resistance occurs because each individual piece prefers by default to function in the existing system. There are exceptions, of course: some parts of the bureaucracy may see how certain benefits advance their goals—but embracing change is not the norm. Things are already working a certain way, and change in one part of the system will require other parts of it to adapt to the new ecosystem. And change takes effort. An example of this tendency in action would be resistance to simplifying our tax code. It’s broadly acknowledged that our system is not only quite inefficient, but path-dependent: it wouldn’t look the way it does if we were designing it from scratch. But at this point, accountants, lawyers, and IRS employees themselves, and even individuals who are used to filing taxes the current way, are all attached to the current system. If there were just one person or entity with an objection, it would be easy to address through negotiation, but it’s much harder to negotiate a solution with a bunch of different parties that all have something to lose from change in general.

Similarly, it’s easy enough for me to negotiate with individual parts of my mind (now that I’ve learned techniques for doing so, anyway), but implementing changes with broad implications is harder because there are many stakeholders.  And even small changes can interfere with the current roles and agendas of multiple parts of my mind.

My best model of the non-unitary nature of the mind tells me that attachment is best understood as emerging from the competing desires and roles of the various parts of our mind. Thinking of reducing attachment as cultivating a mental ecosystem that isn’t threatened by change, helps me feel much more positively towards the idea of detachment. Attachment isn’t my enemy—it’s a natural (though not strictly necessary) consequence of the competing agendas of my parts. Eliminating attachment also seems more tractable when I think of it as an emergent property. I can listen to the concerns of my parts and help them understand that evolving in the face of change instead of resisting it is in fact in their individual interest—which I sincerely believe.

I haven’t heard of anyone framing attachment quite this way before (by all means point me to a source if I’m wrong about this), so I’m quite eager to hear what other people think of this view. Does it make sense? Does it seem useful?

No related posts.

So whether science is broken or still works depends your definition of utility.  Kevin and I agreed on a measurement for scientific utility, based on (a) how well it explains observed phenomena, (b) how well it predicts new phenomena, and (c) how directly it leads to creation of technologies that improve human lives.  We can call it “explanatory power” or EP for short.  We might argue over the relative mix, but we agree that (a), (b) and (c) are all important.  Where we diverged came down to whether scientific utility was an absolute measure or a relative measure.  To quote Kevin:

EP(kev)=number of phenomena explained. Evidently, EP(rafe)=fraction of phenomena explained. I claim EP(kev) is more relevant to standard of living because if you can explain more phenomena, you can build more gizmos, means you can do more stuff with less effort, means a higher standard of living.

Here’s how I visualize the picture:

Kevin suggests that EP is a function of the curve labeled “Scientific Knowledge” whereas I feel it’s a function “the gap” in red.  My argument for why the gap is the relevant measure parallels the three components of EP:

a) “Explaining observed phenomena” means maximizing the quality and quantity of all observed phenomena.  It’s not enough to explain a subset of phenomena better and better if the number of new phenomena keeps increasing.  For instance, let’s say you came upon Earth in 1980 and did a scientific study to understand how personal computers worked.  You spend the next 20 years coming up with a theory that explains them perfectly, but this assumes they are being used in isolation.   How then do you explain the new behaviors they start exhibiting once they are connected up via the internet?  While your theory might have been perfectly useful in 1980, it becomes next to worthless by the year 2000.

b) Similarly, if you were looking to predict how a single computer were to behave, your theory that worked 100% of the time in 1980 would work only a small fraction of the time in 2000.

c) Technology is a bit tricker to understand from this perspective, but I believe it’s ultimately the same.  Kevin’s definition of “doing more stuff with less effort” is fine, but what it doesn’t address is how the “stuff that we want done” is a moving target.  In 1980 I wanted my computer to allow me to type words into it, remember them, print them out, etc.  By 2000 that function was subsumed: practically every computer program had this functionality built in, even games and email software (like the one I’m using to compose this blog entry now).  What I want out of my computer in 2000 includs word processing, but also involves a growing set of tasks on top of that.  More importantly, the category of “stuff that we want done” by technology is self-referentially — which is to say, exponentially — growing at all times.  In other words, technology’s utility depends on how well it bridges the gap on the chart above.

To be fair, Kevin might object that I have drawn the chart wrong because technology (being self-referential) always keeps the gap within bridgeable reach.  This is what we were arguing about in the comments of the first post regarding cardinalities and ordinalities.  So it could be that this whole argument hinges not on our definition of utility but rather whether the gap really is getting untenably bigger or not.

What do you think?  Is the gap getting bigger?  Do you buy either Kevin’s or my definition of utility?  Do you have another definition entirely?

Perhaps the most clarifying question of all (to my mind) is the following: Given your current understanding of what science is, how would you feel if your child said they were going to become a scientist?

Related posts:

1. The New Scientific Enlightenment
2. Why Falsifiability is Insufficient for Scientific Reasoning
3. Is Science Broken?

This interview was done as part of the New Cancer Mentality initiative:

New Cancer Mentality is a grassroots organization focused on giving cancer patients a virual townhall to ask their questions to leading oncologists and researchers about their work. Furthermore, New Cancer Mentality focuses on bringing about collaboration between researchers as well as giving researchers an online forum to share their views and what needs to be done to cure this disease.

If you’d like to learn more or join the movement, check out blog and contact David.

Related posts:

1. Physics.Cancer.GOV
2. Preventing Cancer Through DNA Replacement?
3. Approaching a Cure for Cancer

No related posts.

I’ve begun a series of posts that I hope will illustrate the gap, which I believe has to do with the fundamental difference between epidemiology (which is based on statistical observation) and etiology (which seeks to find causal mechanisms for observed phenomena):

• A1 vs. A2 Milk
• Medicine 2.0
• Sunlight vs. Vitamin D
• Animals vs. Plants
• Sugars

Once I’ve completed these posts, I’ll attempt to explain the nature of the gap and what it means for the future of scientific inquiry.

Related posts:

1. Invisible Etiology
2. Scientific Singularity?
3. Medicine 2.0

This question, perhaps above all, is the basis for scientific inquiry.  Yet we rarely ask it in this way and we rarely step back to the very basic assumptions we hold about the possible form of answer we might expect.  For instance, is matter fundamental?  Meaning, if we could not talk about particles and mass, could we understand the universe as well (or better) than we currently do?

Einstein showed that there is an equivalence between matter and energy (E=mc^2), but what does that really mean?  Personally, I’m kinda stumped when it comes to understanding energy, and I suspect that many other people are too if they think about it.  Then there’s that pesky c^2 part of the equation, which seems even more nebulous.  Physics 101 tells us that c is the velocity at which light (a form of energy) travels, and that any velocity squared is acceleration.  Also we learn that velocity is distance over time.  But now we have even more to ponder because distance is a measure of something called space — anyone got a good definition of that?  And time, well, you don’t have to be Einstein to know how relative that can be.

The point I’m making is that we make certain assumptions out of necessity regarding what we accept as fundamental, and then we rarely revisit those assumptions, even when faced with difficulty reconciling observed phenomena with these assumptions.  Case in point: what exactly is dark energy and dark matter?  The answer is, nobody knows.  These are concepts that were made up to allow equations to balance; the “dark” refers in some sense to the fact that we really have no clue.  The good news is that, thanks to Einstein, once we figure out what one of them is, we’ll know what the other is :-)

The most difficult part of challenging our assumptions is knowing that we are making assumptions in the first place.  Certain assumptions are so ingrained in the culture that they have become metaphysical.  That is, they transcend the realm of something we can inquire about and are unintentionally exalted as part of the very nature of reality.  In the Western scientific tradition, matter — that is to say material stuff — has been the primary metaphysical assumption since The Enlightenment.  But this hasn’t always been so, even in the West; go back and read Plato and Aristotle if you don’t believe me.  Furthermore, even today there are thriving societies, economic powerhouses, which have a different relationship to matter and don’t necessarily view it as fundamental.

Until recently physicists scoffed at anyone who deigned to suggest that there was anything in the universe except matter and energy.  Space and time were not really thought of as existing “in” the universe so much as defining the boundaries of it.  In other words, there is no universally accepted equation that transforms matter into time, and no agreement on how many dimensions (spatial or otherwise) there ultimately are.  But I’d like to point out a metaphysical shift that has occurred in the last 30 years or so, coinciding — not so coincidentally I suspect — with the rise of computer technology.  And that is the notion that information is fundamental.  That the universe is a giant computer and that all the matter and energy we see around us is somehow an artifact of this universal computation.

Now I bring this up not because I believe an informational metaphysics is superior or more true than a material one, but rather to illustrate the cultural relativity of what you might perceive to be self-evident.  Because if you received a university education in the U.S. it is very likely that you were not taught to believe information is somehow more fundamental than, say, a photon or an electromagnetic wave.  It’s easy for most of us “educated” types to see how information can arise out of matter/energy, but not the other way around.

In the end, whatever metaphysics you adhere to defines the rules of rational inquiry you follow when seeking higher truth.  The physical sciences don’t just depend on materialism, they derive from it.  Without the notion of a fundamental particle, there would have been no chemistry, no physics.  And as any philosopher of science will attest, these two sciences have indelibly shaped inquiry in all of the biological and social sciences as well.

The ultimate validity of any metaphysics — and any scientific models derived from it — is determined by how well it serves us in understanding the world around us, predicting the future we will find ourselves in, and also creating the world we want to find ourselves in.  So it is worth examining whether our metaphysical assumptions are serving those purposes from time to time, especially when we find ourselves faced with existential challenges, as we seem to be with greater frequency these days.

Of course the difficulty with metaphysical mind-shift is that our very minds have been shaped by the metaphysics of our culture.  It’s not so easy to try alternative metaphysics on like they were a new pair of jeans.  If I asked you to accept, for instance, that information was fundamental, and then asked you to derive matter and energy from it, would you know even where to start?  Or perhaps information alone isn’t enough, maybe you need to add consciousness.  Or maybe the breakthroughs we are looking for will come if we demote the physical and begin with life-itself, as my friends at the Autognomics Institute have done.

One night, not too long ago, I woke up and the following diagram popped into my head:

While I don’t really understand it all myself, I’m trying it on as my metaphysics for 2010 and seeing what happens.  A couple of things that are implied by the relationships I will point out.

One is that it is composed of single-color triangles, any one of which can be used as a metaphysics by itself (I guess that makes the whole diagram a metametaphysics, but that’s a separate story).  My theory is that, in Pythagorean fashion, if you start with any two vertices you can derive the third.  For example, on the purple triangle, if you know enough about the nature of space and energy, you can derive what time is.

Another implication is that concepts close to one another on the diagram are close semantically (e.g. time and event).  A corollary of this proximity is that opposing vertices are dualisms, like matter and energy, or dynamic and state.

I realize that thinking in these terms is awkward, but I’m trying to suspend my linguistic and logical predispositions just enough to grok the physical consequences of these metaphysical axioms.  I’ll let you know if anything comes of it, and hopefully you will tell me if you have any metaphysical insights of your own.

Related posts:

1. Universal Constants
2. The Process
3. Epidemiology vs. Etiology

So how to respond to this challenge? My vision for the next two years is to begin laying out a new mathematical approach to the study of evolution. Allow me to explain.

Currently, the field of evolutionary theory revolves around the study of models. As I discussed a few posts ago, a model takes a real-world situation and reduces it to those features that are considered essential. The model can then be analyzed mathematically, and hopefully the results tell you something useful about the original real-world problem.

Models are powerful tools for understanding the world, but they have a fundamental limitation: they always depend crucially on the particular simplifying assumptions made at the model’s inception. A different set of simplifying assumptions might yield completely different conclusions, and it’s often unclear which model is more relevant to the natural world.

This problem is ubiquitous in mathematical biology: a paper might devote pages and pages of mathematical analysis to understanding one particular model, but if that model were changed just slightly, all that analysis would suddenly be invalid. The question in my mind is always “What insight do we gain from our mathematics?” All the technical derivation in the world is of limited value unless it can help us reach broader conclusions.

My vision is to shift the focus of evolutionary research from models to theories. A theory, like a model, rests on certain fundamental assumptions, but in the case of a theory these assumptions are so broad as to apply to any system in question. For example, a theory might specify “Individuals interact, reproduce, and die in some manner”, whereas a model would have to specify the particular manner in which this occurs. So a single theory can encompass many (even infinitely many) models. It’s like the difference between saying “3+4=4+3″ versus “x+y=y+x for any real numbers x and y”. Moving from models to theories is a leap forward in abstraction, generality, and power.

Shifting to theories also changes the kinds of conclusions you can reach. Models produce predictions: specific outcomes that would occur if reality indeed conformed to the assumptions of the model. Theories produce theorems: general statements that apply to any system of the type in question. A theorem won’t tell you exactly what will happen, but it can characterize of the space of possibilities. And that’s what I think is needed in evolutionary theory: a general understanding of what can or cannot result from evolution, and how this depends on the certain features of an evolutionary process.

So that’s my research agenda in a nutshell. I’m extremely excited to see where this leads, and I’m looking forward to sharing more in the future.

Related posts:

1. Evolutionary Game Theory and Archaeology
2. Generalized Evolutionary Theory
3. Symbolic Representation is the Key to Major Evolutionary Transitions?

Lee Smolin claims that AP is bad and favors a Cosmological Natural Selection view instead (on grounds of falsifiability).  I believe this is a false dichotomy and that they are really one and the same.  Here’s why:

1. Normally natural selection requires some form of “replication” or it’s not actually natural selection.   But replication is not needed if you start with an infinity of heterogeneous universes.  In other words replication is simulated via the anthropic lens over the life-supporting subset of all possible universes.
2. Replication is a red herring anyway since it presupposes time (or at least well-ordered events).
3. I conjecture that the distribution of universes is unimportant, as long as all possible universes are represented in the multiverse (i.e. the distribution can be random).

It’s worth noting that this is a purely a metaphysical/logical argument and says nothing about specific physics or cosmologies.  One of the things that makes it hard to see why this is true from reading the Smolin/Susskind debate is that they bounce between the logical argument and various proposed, unimportant details (like whether black holes are the replication mechanism in question or not).

More importantly though, we hear scientists call one another “unscientific” whenever they propose an hypothesis that is unfalsifiable.  Here’s why I think that’s problematic:

• Ever since Popper, science has been obsessed with falsifiability, which is really about assuring consistency.
• Godel proved that there are true statements that cannot be proved.
• More specifically he unpacked “truth” into completeness + consistency and showed that we can’t have both simultaneously.
• Due to extant complexity (let alone potential infinity) completeness is out the window.
• If science is only concerned with consistency, then it’s a pointless endeavor; I can sit here all day and generate tautologies that are neither interesting nor useful.
• If science is about truth, then there needs to be a way of expanding the set of discovered tautologies along the completeness dimension as well.
• There are at least three formal logical systems which do that without sacrificing consistency: deduction, induction and abduction.
• Only deduction is formally falsifiable.
• But science relies on induction and many other forms of evidence too (statistical reasoning, clinical trials, simulation, storytelling, etc); this is the “democracy” Smolin himself referrs to in his TED talk.
• The structure of the Anthropic Principle is abduction.  So is the structure of Occam’s Razor.  And depending on who you believe Bayesian inference is either induction or abduction.
• Conjecture: Newton’s Calculus is a formalism based on abduction.
• Conjecture: strong emergence (aka novel emergence) is fundamentally abduction.  This may be why science has such a hard time with it.
• Conjecture: natural selection is fundamentally emergence/abduction.  This may be why Creationists have such a hard time with it.

There is no one true definition of what constitutes “Science.”  We hear reference to the so-called Scientific Method.  Ultimately, the holy Scientific Method is whatever scientists as a whole do; no more and no less.  To say otherwise is ad hominem.  Now I’m not claiming that ad hominem argument shouldn’t be counted as scientific evidence, but anyone who bows before Popper would.  The irony there is that ad hominem is a form of Bayesian inference.  And if you’re keeping score, that means that anyone who claims that you are being unscientific if you don’t forsake all unfalsifiable idols, is themselves committing the sin of inconsistency.  Which by their own logic means they are unscientific too.

To which I respectfully submit, their pants are on fire, hanging from a telephone wire.  And that’s a scientific fact.

Related posts:

1. The New Scientific Enlightenment
2. Scientific Singularity?
3. The Process

Even among mathematicians, applied math has an odd reputation. Many pure mathematicians (those who spend their time working on purely abstract problems) regard applied math as mere “computation”, as if we were essentially glorified calculators.

But applied mathematics is not about discovering new numbers, nor solving crimes, nor cranking out long calculations (though some of that is involved). At heart, applied math is about creating, refining, and analyzing models.

The “applied” in applied math means that we work on problems that are in some way relevant to the “real world”. However, the real world is a complicated place, and virtually any system you might want to investigate has far too many interactions and unknowns to be understood completely. Imagine, for example, trying to understand the physical properties of a gas by first specifying the mass, volume, and exact location of each of billions of molecules, and then trying to predict where each particle will be in the next instant, and then the instant after that. Even if you were somehow able to do all these calculations, your answer would be valid only for that particular gas in that particular configuration, and would give you little insight into the behavior of gases in general.

So when we want to understand a system, we don’t attempt to incorporate every potentially relevant detail. Instead, we model it: we focus on what we believe to be the essential features of the problem and throw out everything else. All models are oversimplifications, but if they are well-constructed, that is, if we have picked the right features to keep and the right ones to discard, they can provide valuable insight into the real-world problem we are studying.

All models incorporate a trade-off, which I’ve (poorly) illustrated here:

We often hear about models on the right end of this spectrum: models of
of large-scale, complex phenomena such as the global climate or economy. These models incorporate many different variables in order to be as accurate as possible in predicting reality. The trade-off is that there is generally less insight to be gained from such models, because cause and effect relationships can be difficult to untangle with so many variables involved.

Mathematicians are more interested in the simple end. Unlike complex models, which can generally only be analyzed through computer simulation, simple models can often be analyzed using a pencil and paper. Though they do not describe reality as accurately as complex models, they illustrate very clearly how and why certain effects lead to certain outcomes. Simple models also have the advantage of generality: the same set of simple features may be present in a wide variety of systems. The more variables and complications you throw in, the more your model becomes tied to the one specific problem you started with.

I’ve written a lot in this blog about the Prisoners’ Dilemma as a model for cooperation. The essence of the model is this: two players each have a choice whether or not to cooperate with the other. If a player decides to cooperate, they pay some cost, and the other player gains some benefit. Of course, cooperation happens in many different forms in human and animal life, and you could study any particular cooperative behavior by tracing its social and/or cognitive basis, as well as its evolutionary origin. But by studying the particularly abstract, simple model that is the Prisoners’ Dilemma, you can gain some insight into the phenomenon of cooperation in general: when and why it evolves, and how it is maintained.

The purpose and method of developing and analyzing models is a strangely absent topic from high school and college math and science classes (a welcome exception is a course I’m currently TAing at Boston University that teaches quantitative reasoning to non-science majors). But given the role that models play in our economy as well as in science, and the catastrophic consequences of their failure, I think that communicating an understanding of the modeling process should be a central goal of science education.

Related posts:

1. The Future of Evolutionary Theory?
2. This Sentence is False
3. Complex Systems Concept Summary

Now lets assume there is some process for picking out universes from the multiverse.  Since there’s no time in the multiverse, the process has no beginning and no end.  It’s like a computer program, but it’s infinitely complex.  Let’s call it The Process.

If The Process is infinitely complex and has no beginning and no end, what can we know about it?  We know that it picks some universes but not others, which effectively creates an “in group” (all those that are picked) and an “out group” (all those that are not).  Of course, both sets are infinite and still have no structure.  But note that all the universes in one group or the other now stand in relation to one another.  That is, they share the property of “in-ness” or “out-ness”, and between the two groups there’s the relationship of “different”.

The Process further divides these sub-multiverses in unknown ways, and this sorting creates other relationships between universes.  You can visualize a network of universes with the connections representing these relationships.  The network is infinite, and if you consider any subset of the network, it’s also infinite.  But these subnetworks are no longer arbitrary, they are networks themselves and networks have structure.  And since a subnetwork by definition shares the same connection relationships as the original network it is a “sub” of, the subnetwork is structurally similar to the network itself.  That is, the network is self-similar, which in mathematical terms means it’s fractal.  Of course this fractal we are talking about is infinite, and so wherever you start, it’s turtles all the way down, and all the way up.

Notice that the process of identifying subnetworks does something interesting, it creates an asymmetry that wasn’t distinguishable before.  For any network N, if you choose a subnetwork, n, then N “contains” n but not vice versa.  This containment relationship can viewed as a network where the connections are arrows, meaning they have directionality, N –> n.  You may have noticed that we just went from talking about a network of universes to a network of networks (of universes), but that’s okay.  Remember the multiverse is infinitely infinite, and we’re just chatting about some arbitrary aspects of it.  There’s lots of other aspects we could talk about instead, but it’s starting to get interesting here, so let’s continue….

Somewhere in the fractal multiverse network of networks described by The Process there is a subnetwork (actually an infinite number of them) where the structure is like this: each universe is connected to by only one other universe but connects to an infinite number.  Let’s call this structure, Time, and note that there are an infinity of subnetworks of the network which have this Time structure.  Unless stated otherwise, I’ll be talking from now on about networks with Time structure.

Remember though, the multiverse itself has no structure; The Process overlays structure on top of it and thereby allows us to know about things like Time.

Now let’s start using the words network, system, particle, entity, agent and universe interchangeably, so we can say things like “time network”, “temporal system”, “particles over time”, and “A causes B” to refer to roughly the same thing.  I realize that by overloading these terms I’m jacking into (and hopefully hijacking) your intuition about what these words mean, but that’s my intent.  Hopefully you’ll continue playing along by my rules and try not to project what you already know onto this alternative cosmology.

When we use the words network, system, particle, entity and agent, you might wonder whether we are talking about a universe or a multiverse.  The answer is Yes.   Remember, the multiverse is infinitely infinite and self-similar, so in some sense we can say it contains itself.  We have a hard time with infinity so this concept is mind-boggling, but if you follow the logic, hopefully you’ll accept this paradox as true.  So lets just use the word universe from now on and forget about multiverses.  And to not get confused, let’s refer to what we used to think of as the Universe as the known universe instead.  The known universe is where you live (or more precisely where you think you live) along with everyone and everything you know about or can imagine.

The known universe is expanding the more you learn about it.  The known universe is temporal.  And as we know from Einstein, it must therefore also be spatial — remember it’s not space and time but rather the spacetime continuum.  The known universe consists of particles (i.e. matter) and therefore — also thanks to Einstein — it consists of energy.  Time, space, matter and energy here may or may not be totally in sync with our intuitions of them, but just suppose they are the same thing and that our intuition is slightly biased by our particular experiences in life and could use adjustment.

We haven’t really talked explicitly about laws of nature, fundamental constants, invariant equations or even mathematics.  And I kinda jumped the gun when bringing Einstein into the equation (so to speak).  But it’s really hard to follow a line of thought without some sort of logical paradigm, some structure of thought.  In the end it doesn’t really matter what I’m saying, what you’re hearing, or whether any of this is “true”.  I’m just telling you a story, and hopefully it’s amusing enough for you to finish reading.

Originally we talked about The Process, which is infinitely complex and which describes all sorts of possible realities.  The known universe is one of those possibilities, one in which we see structure and patterns, order and complexity all around us.  Somewhere “out there” there may be portions of the multiverse (whoops, I said I wasn’t going to use that term anymore, sorry) where it’s still appears, unstructured and thus unknowable.  But let’s come back to the known universe and the “knowable” universe.

Because of the fact that we are here in the known universe thinking and talking about it, and not in some unknown or unknowable part, the non-random patterns that we see may look to us like universal laws (E=mc^2, the second law of thermodynamics, etc.)  Well, we know that even these laws are not truly universal, they apply to only certain scopes.   For example, “relativistic but not classical or quantum realms”, or “closed systems but not open systems.”  String theorists are looking for universal laws, but so far none have been found.  But let’s just grant them that they will eventually find some (or one).  How would we be able to distinguish between a true Law and just a pattern that is very very persistent over all known scopes?

How about we stop using the word “law” and instead replace it with the word “principle” to suggest that it may really just be a pattern that we see in the known universe.  And as the known universe expands via our increase in knowledge/understanding/awareness, we might find exceptions to the pattern.  After all, that’s what’s happened to every “law” ever considered in the history of science so far, and why should that pattern stop?  (Sorry, my paradox detector just went off, let me reset it….)

Coming back to principles, there’s one that emerged from the last few paragraphs, did you notice it?  Cosmologists call it the Anthropic Principle, which is the notion that the universe appears ordered in the particular way that it does with these nifty laws and constants because of the very cosmic coincidence that we are here observing it!  In other words, we live (and can only live) in the known universe, by definition.  And we wouldn’t be “here” and able to “notice” anything if we were in some unknowable part.  That’s a pretty trippy concept, but one that many physicists take very seriously.  It’s the same kind of argument as for why we haven’t been contacted by aliens yet: there’s a decent chance we are the most advanced intelligence out there and we’ll have to wait for others to catch up so we can communicate.  It’s also the reason that your keys are always in the last place you look.

Remember the Anthropic Principle because it’s really useful.  It has the same logical structure as Darwinian evolution and other “emergent” phenomena.  Is this Generalized Anthropic Principal (GAP) a universal/fundamental one?  Who knows.  Probably not.  We anthropic agents are so self-absorbed.

Another principle that emerges from our cosmology is Coherence.  Because of The Process, birds of a feather flock together.  Actually, The Process defines which birds are of which feather, so this is a tautology, though it’s fun to think of it as “like attracts like”.  But we know that really it’s just co-incidence: the birds exist at the same Time.  Using the analogy of birds, we can ask whether these coincident birds are different birds or the same bird.  But it’s a silly question because the answer is Yes.  Think of quantum coherence, if you like.

Now let’s say we are talking about particles and not birds, and instead of Coherence we’ll say Gravity.  Isn’t it the same thing?  We talk about stars and planets and other astral bodies as if they were coherent entities, but If there were no gravity, would those entities exist?  Or let’s talk about the Cooperation of the cells in your body; without it, would you exist?  We’ve all heard about the “law of attraction” from The Secret, isn’t it the same thing?  You imagine the future you want, and that acts as a beacon guiding you in every decision you make, every micro-decision, every unconscious action until at some point you find yourself living in the future you imagined.  Coherence, cooperation, attraction, unity.  Same thing.

Here’s a secret: there is no Process.  Or if you prefer, The Process is completely random.  Yet that doesn’t change anything I’ve said above.  Think of it this way: in an infinite series of random numbers, all patterns appear eventually, right?  So “somewhere” in the infinite randomness, The Process “produces” the structure I’ve been talking about.  Or maybe the fact that we’re anthropically talking about it produces the structure.  We are The Process.  Or more generally, we humans are part of The Process.  The Process is the universe.

Related posts:

1. The New Scientific Enlightenment
2. Why Falsifiability is Insufficient for Scientific Reasoning
3. Notes from TED