Ross Douthat suggests today that the country is ready for a return to religion. He recommends Spencer Klavan’s book Light of the Mind, Light of the World, which he describes this way:
It’s an argument that the materialist model of the universe as a closed physical system, in which units of matter bounce around like billiard balls, has been overthrown by the quantum revolution — which demonstrated, to the bafflement of many scientists, that probabilities only collapse into reality itself when a conscious mind is there to measure and observe.
This is simply not correct. To the extent that we know what's happening at all, wave equations collapse when they interact with the outside world. In the famous example of Schrödinger's cat, the state of the cat is undetermined as long as the box containing the cat is closed. When it's opened and interacts with its environment, the state collapses into either a dead cat or a live cat because, in some sense, the universe is then forced to make a decision.¹ It doesn't matter if anyone is watching.
Likewise, quantum computers perform calculations by taking advantage of superpositions of isolated qubits. When the calculation is complete, the computer measures the resulting state—and it's the interaction with the computer that causes the qubits to decohere and produce a single classical result. No conscious mind is required aside from the trivial one that we humans never know for sure what's going on until we see it ourselves. But as an argument for God that's as silly as suggesting that maybe all the food in your refrigerator appears only when you open the door.
Nobody is persuaded that God does or doesn't exist with logical reasoning like this. But to the extent logic matters, the issue has nothing to do with quantum mechanics. It has to do with whether the universe evolves following mathematical law—any mathematical law. If you believe it does, you're an atheist whether or not you call yourself one. If you don't believe it does, then pick a religion, any religion. You're a person of faith.
¹Or so we think. The collapse of the wave equation—aka decoherence—remains something of a mystery to this day. We have rules for measuring it, but no firm physical model to explain what's really happening.
I simply do not read anything that Ross writes. He is from the "other side".
It is more that he is stupid. He uses vocabulary to make it safe for NYT to publish him, but anyone who uses "quantum" outside of actual quantum mechanics just can't be taken seriously.
Start here:
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5359
Fantastic. Scott is so smart.
I distrust anything that Don'tDoThat says. In fact he reminds me of FDR talking about indecision. Something like "I'm never in doubt about what action to take. I just ask my congressman. And then do the opposite."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Fish_III
"the country is ready for a return to religion."
Like Europe has?
Right? Nobody is returning to old school organized religion. Where they are turning is non denominational religions that follow the ideals of Jesus without the panty sniffing focus on sex, who is banging who, who marries who, who can adopt, and all the other nonsense that conservative religions have bought into and is driving their flocks away.
I think there are lots of people who believe the universe follows mathematical laws AND believe in God. Just sayin'.
Well the question is: could (even) God create a universe that doesn't follow some organising laws which are therefore necessarily 'mathematical' - unless you can define a set of totally non-mathematical laws sufficient to the existence of physical reality
Just remember: "All's for the best in this best of all possible worlds" because God, being omniscient, omnipotent and perfect is incapable of creating anything that isn't inherently perfect.
As Leibnitz explained (as spoken by Candide in Voltaire's fine novel).
Yeah, the best minds of every generation have wrestled with these things. People who think it's one or the other need to learn a little more about one or the other. Or both.
Yes. The smartest mathematician I've ever met would dedicate all his whitepapers to God. Being chickenshit, we would remove the dedication before we filed the whitepapers as provisional patent applications.
Yeah, I'll give Kevin an ex cathedra pronouncement to match his own: "If you make absolutist declarations defining others' beliefs, you are wrong."
"the country is ready for a return to religion."
Like Europe has? Although if I lived there I wouldn't mind tax money going to keep up the historic churches. That's different.
The idea that the wave equation only collapses when observed is absurd.
Who gets to be the powerful observer? If my friend is in a room observing photons in an experiment does he exist only when I open the door and check on him? Are only people observers? How about cats?
(I do confess I’m not sure about my own existence till my wife informs me what’s planned for the day.)
Roger Penrose (certified really smart guy) suggested that things like photons can accumulate a sort of “weight” till they tip into one state and the wave collapses. No observer required. I’m sure I’ve botched that but that is the flavor of it.
There is a case where the observer causes something to appear. Think of an electron in a hydrogen atom. It can be argued that it has no position till observed. The electron is not orbiting the proton. There is a solution for the wave equation showing probabilities where it is likely to be around the proton. If you probe the atom with a super short laser pulse you will find the electron somewhere because you forced that to happen.
>>that probabilities only collapse into reality itself when a conscious mind is there to measure and observe.<<
Oh good grief. That's true of any physical or mathematical property or process. Pi didn't exist until some ancient Babylonian or Greek pondering the fascinating ratio of a circle's diameter to its radius summoned it into existence? The earth was the center of the universe before Copernicus and Galileo revealed the true structure of the solar system? And don't get me started on the knuckleheads who claim Albert Einstein showed that everything, including morality, is mathematically "relative." I had to explain to a guy once why "quantum physics" and "uncertainty" didn't apply to social or political situations.
* diameter to it's circumference
Schroedinger's cat is a joke - intended as a reductio ad absurdum of what some other physicists had said. The uncertainty is in the timing of the emission of the particle, but that is resolved when it is measured in the geiger counter. Geiger counters can give an audible click, so the listening observer of the experiment knows the fate of the cat before it actually dies - he doesn't need to open the box. But who is making the decision as to whether the cat is or will be dead - the geiger counter, the observer or the universe?
But as Kevin says quantum mechanics has nothing to do with religious faith. If you want to know how things work, you don't pray for gods to explain them to you, you do a real experiment (not the Schroedinger's cat fake one). That there is ultimately uncertainty and phenomena are not completely explained does not diminish the utility of quantum mechanics.
Religion was originally a means of assigning causes to events, but as science developed and found real causes that aspect has receded. Now it is more a matter of reinforcing group solidarity - although it was obviously that in the time of the Old Testament, which is largely about the Chosen People against their enemies. People don't go to church to communicate with spirits, they do it to cement the bonds with their community. Trump is exploiting this as he excites religio-racial partisanship. Evidently Douthat thinks this is good, as religion sort of revives with MAGA.
"But as Kevin says quantum mechanics has nothing to do with religious faith."
Quantum mechanics clearly transcends reductionism and faith. I wouldn't be dismissive of religion generally without assuring myself that I fully understand all religions.
"the country is ready for a return to religion."
Social conservatives have been pulling that one since the dawn of civilization.
Whenever I read someone writing something like "the country is ready for a return to religion.", I'm forced to add another person to my list of morons to forever ignore.
That list is ever-growing, but it frees up a lot of my time for doing more productive things.
DoubThat has been proselytizing like this since the 90's in Dallas. He is exactly the type of naive fool that people like Bannon love to use for their dirty work.
I've been saying that the country is ready for an end to religion for about fifty years. Regrettably, so far I've been wrong.
Well, not all wrong. "None" is the fastest-growing religious category in the US, and has been for a generation now. Progress!
When I'm feeling optimistic, I tell myself that the increasingly aggressive conduct of the Christian right is the last desperate thrashings of a dying sub-culture. When I'm feeling pessimistic, I think that my optimistic self is entirely full of it.
The attempt to use quantum indeterminacy to sneak "the conscious mind" (and therefore, somehow or other, God) back into the center of cosmology is not just wrong but farcically wrong.
The gap between classical and quantum physics is, in part, just the gap between a description of the world that is broadly amenable to human common sense, however powerfully extended by mathematical reasoning, and one that is not--that requires *completely* abandoning the former mode of reasoning for the latter.
" The collapse of the wave equation—aka decoherence—remains something of a mystery to this day. We have rules for measuring it, but no firm physical model to explain what's really happening."
A problem is that our explanation for what is really happening needs to be presented in materialistic, reductionist terms. That is a human deficiency - no need to saddle the universe with it. As Morgenau and Murphy state in their book: Asking whether an electron is a particle or a wave is like asking what color are elephants' eggs, assuming that elephants do lay eggs.
You can believe in a god that created a universe that follows mathematical rules and not be an theist. You can even believe that violations of those rules require divine intervention and are commonly known as miracles.
As Styx says, it's all The Grand Illusion.
Now, who writes the songs the whole world sings???
Saying that you believe that the Universe follows rules, and we have some capacity to understand them is a belief system, nay, a religion in and of itself. The question then becomes, who wrote the rules?
As for religions vs. cults...basically is religions are self consistent and at least somewhat connected to the real world. And most importantly, they have to play well with others--at least in this day in age, though wasn't always the case. Cults can morph into religions and religions can devolve into cults.
"Saying that you believe that the Universe follows rules, and we have some capacity to understand them is a belief system, nay, a religion in and of itself. The question then becomes, who wrote the rules?"
It is hard to deny that the universe is governed by laws. It would seem that there were principles/ an intelligence that preceded the universe. We sense the universe within a representation of our five senses. There is no reason to believe that that particular representation is complete. The question is : What is our incomplete representation (of the universe) a representation of? If someone chooses to believe that our incomplete representation is a representation of "the vast one," I have a hard time disagreeing with that someone.
As a science fiction writer (I'm not sure who, but it might have been Heinlein) once said "if you didn't believe in gravity, you couldn't even walk across a room".
We can observe that the universe we can see is consistent at a fundamental level. Since astrophysicists have observed this consistency over distances of billions of light years, it doesn't take "faith" to infer that the universe has rules. For that matter, in the absence of laws of nature it's hard to account for the existence of existence.
"that the country is ready for a return to religion"
I do believe that the US is still the most religious country, compared with other wealthy, modern, western countries. About 40% of the US believes in Creationism (Genesis, Noah and the flood, 6,000 year old earth, etc.), and disbelieves evolution. We have mandatory teaching of the bible (Trump Bible?) in Oklahoma public schools, and mandatory 10 commandment displays (Protestant version) in Texas public schools.
How much more religion does this asshole think we need forced down our throats? Does he think that when Orange Il Duce is reelected he will cancel the 1st Amendment?
Many people expect that if elected the Orange Il Duce will certainly try to cancel the 1st amendment. He's certainly expressed a desire to imprison people who criticize him.
Any opinion column that sites a book by Rod Dreher is immediately invalid.
It depends on what era of Dreher. Prior to 10 years or so ago he was still mostly sane.
And you didn't have a problem with any of these three claims?
not surprisingly religious people have always taken what science is saying and tried to show how that supports the existence of God. When the world was thought to be mechanical they argued for a designer God behind the mechanisms. Now that science seems to be indeterministic they try to find God in the cracks. Neither of these should ever have been convincing.
But at the same time trying to rule out God on the basis that science works makes atheists look to have a shallow understanding of religion. After all the position of the Catholic church is that God created the world according to physical laws and that He intervenes at important times by way of miracles, that is rare violations of those laws. That is clearly a theistic view that not just allows for the world to advance according to mathematical laws. And the Catholic church is a pretty big church to ignore in ones coverage of religion.
There also have been theists who believe that God has anticipated all of our free will decisions and so is able to incorporate them into the mathematical laws that govern the universe. I suppose it is more open whether that is a real theism where God could just disappear after the creation of the world and nothing else would change. But it does seem that somebody who believes this is not an atheist.
I don't think there are any good reasons to be a theist. (By which I mean evidence based reasons, it may well make people happier to be theists, or easier for them to live a moral life) But the mere acceptance of science is not enough to rule out atheism.
“Nobody is persuaded that God does or doesn't exist with logical reasoning like this.” I agree.
“It has to with whether the universe evolves following mathematical law—any mathematical law. If you believe it does, you're an atheist whether or not you call yourself one.” Wrong.
Allow me to remind you of the three “logic” rules. Rule #1: Logic is meaningless until you establish the interest that is being served. Rule #2: Logic is meaningless until you establish the interest that is being served. Rule #3: Logic is meaningless until you establish the interest that is being served.
For example, what interest will be served when Republicans and Democrats disagree? Will it be the people who vote for one party, or will it be America? If the former, then one party benefited in the short term by following the immoral “do unto others before they do unto you” principle at America’s expense, and both parties will suffer in the long term because America just got weaker. If the latter, then America benefits in the short term because both parties paid a price in the short term by following the moral “treat others the way you would want to be treated if the shoe was on the other foot” principle, and both parties will benefit in the long term because America just got stronger.
What if America is one of the parties? And what if that party is one of the parties? And so on. What should we call the ultimate party? Mind if I call that God?
Does the universe follow mathematical laws? Yes. Am I an atheist? No, but that’s what I used to call myself. I was confused. I’m better now.
Or were you looking for loopholes? If yes, then my apologies.
Douthat’s whole analysis is suspect, as he includes favorable comments re loony Rod Dreher’s new book about creepy mysteries!
That's not really how it works either. In fact, no one really knows what wave functions do, if indeed they do anything at all. Collapse violates special relativity so no one in the business really much believes it anymore. In the relative state formulation, there is no collapse. Ever. In the Bohm interpretation, it creates a nonlocal quantum potential. In Quantum Bayesianism, it encodes what the observer expects. And, yes, whether you like it or not, John Wheeler thought conscious observation was involved. He said a phenomenon isn't a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon. I personally think the wave function doesn't mean anything at all. It is a bridging abstraction, a way of representing what nature in fact does in language that our brains are capable of using to reason. It doesn't do anything because it belongs to us, not to nature. The wave function is not an element of reality.
As for Douthat, he should stop explaining things he doesn't understand. Religious bigotry is religious bigotry. Own it.
Eminent Australian physicist Paul Davies once observed during a televised conversation that there was an order to the universe - a set of principles and directions that underpinned the natural world - whose origin he didn't pretend to be able to explain. If it pleased some people to call the origin "god", he had no objection.
But the idea of a god who experienced human emotions and had a gender and decided where we were going to spend eternity was too silly for words. He was so obviously a creation of humans in their own image that it was astonishing anyone could take the bullshit seriously.
That's always seemed to me to be all one needs to believe to dispose of the Great Religion Question.
It may be that believing the universe follows mathematical law means you're an atheist, but the converse isn't true.
The fundamental nature of the world may be truly random. Indeed, it appears to be truly random. In a random universe like ours, mathematics can precisely describe what you cannot know about the evolution of the universe.
I wouldn't be too hard on people who think the collapse of wave function when "observed" would prompt them to claim it confirms their prior belief in a universal "observer." Of course they would conclude that. Physics at this deep level is *really* hard to comprehend regardless of one's religious belief. They argue incessantly about what *wave functions* are and what it means for one to *collapse*.
In the end, it's all math.
But I think we can all agree that Ross Douthat is wrong. There will never be, nor should there ever be, a "return" to religion, which is the root cause of much of the evil in the world.
You're stating your position too strongly, just as he is. We don't actually know whether or not consciousness collapses the wave function. We just don't. Roger Penrose thinks gravity does it. Sean Carroll thinks there is no collapse at all. Others bring consciousness into it. I was annoyed by his unequivocal statement; please don't respond with another unjustified dogmatic statement.
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