Daniel Dennett's Darwinian Mind: An Interview with a 'Dangerous' Man
by Chris Floyd
The outspoken philosopher of science distills his rigorous conceptions of consciousness, and aims withering fire at the dialogue between science and religion.
I n matters of the mind—the exploration of consciousness, its correlation with the body, its evolutionary foundations, and the possibilities of its creation through computer technology—few voices today speak as boldly as that of philosopher Daniel Dennett. His best-selling works—among them Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea—have provoked fierce debates with their rigorous arguments, eloquent polemic and witty, no-holds-barred approach to intellectual combat. He is often ranked alongside Richard Dawkins as one of the most powerful—and, in some circles, feared—proponents of thorough-going Darwinism.
Dennett has famously called Darwinism a "universal acid," cutting through every aspect of science, culture, religion, art and human thought. "The question is," he writes in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, "what does it leave behind? I have tried to show that once it passes through everything, we are left with stronger, sounder versions of our most important ideas. Some of the traditional details perish, and some of these are losses to be regretted, but...what remains is more than enough to build on."
Consciousness has arisen from the unwilled, unordained algorithmic processes of natural selection, says Dennett, whose work delivers a strong, extensive attack on the "argument from design" or the "anthropic principle." But a world without a Creator or an "Ultimate Meaning" is not a world without creation or meaning, he insists. When viewed through the solvent of Darwinism, he writes, "the ‘miracles’ of life and consciousness turn out to be even better than we imagined back when we were sure they were inexplicable."
Dennett’s prominence does not rest solely on his high public profile in the scientific controversies of our day; it is also based on a large body of academic work dealing with various aspects of the mind, stretching back almost 40 years. Dennett has long been associated with Tufts University, where he is now Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. Boston-born, Oxford-educated, he now divides his time between North Andover, Massachusetts, and his farm in Maine, where he grows hay and blueberries, and makes cider wine.
In this exclusive interview with Science & Spirit, Dennett talks about his ideas on consciousness, evolution, free will, and the "slowly eroding domain" of religion.
Science & Spirit: Can you give us an overview of your ideas on consciousness? What is it? Where does it come from? Where might it be going?
Dennett: The problem I have answering your question is that my views on consciousness are initially very counterintuitive, and hence all too easy to misinterpret, so any short summary is bound to be misleading. Those whose curiosity is piqued by what I say here are beseeched to consult the long version carefully. Aside from my books, there are dozens of articles available free on my website, at www.ase.tufts.edu/cogstud.
With that caveat behind us (and convinced that in spite of it, some people will leap on what I say here and confidently ride off with a caricature), I claim that consciousness is not some extra glow or aura or "quale" caused by the activities made possible by the functional organization of the mature cortex; consciousness is those various activities. One is conscious of those contents whose representations briefly monopolize certain cortical resources, in competition with many other representations. The losers—lacking "political clout" in this competition—quickly fade leaving few if any traces, and that’s the only difference between being a conscious content and being an unconscious content.
There is no separate medium in the brain, where a content can "appear" and thus be guaranteed a shot at consciousness. Consciousness is not like television—it is like fame. One’s "access" to these representations is not a matter of perceiving them with some further inner sensory apparatus; one’s access is simply a matter of their being influential when they are. So consciousness is fame in the brain, or cerebral celebrity. That entails, of course, that those who claim they can imagine a being that has all these competitive activities, all the functional benefits and incidental features of such activities, in the cortex but is not conscious are simply mistaken. They can no more imagine this coherently than they can imagine a being that has all the metabolic, reproductive, and self-regulatory powers of a living thing but is not alive.
There is no privileged center, no soul, no place where it all comes together—aside from the brain itself. Actually, Aristotle’s concept of a soul is not bad—the "vegetative soul" of a plant is not a thing somewhere in the plant; it is simply its homeostatic organization, the proper functioning of its various systems, maintaining the plant’s life. A conscious human soul is the same sort of phenomenon, not a thing, but a way of being organized and maintaining that organization. Parts of that organization are more persistent, and play more salient (and hence reportable) roles than others, but the boundaries between them—like the threshold of human fame—are far from sharp.
S&S: What are the implications of all this for the notion of free will and moral choice?
Dennett: The implications of all this for the notion of free will are many. I have come to realize over the years that the hidden agenda for most people concerned about consciousness and the brain (and evolution, and artificial intelligence) is a worry that unless there is a bit of us that is somehow different, and mysteriously insulated from the material world, we can’t have free will—and then life will have no meaning. That is an understandable mistake. My 1984 book, Elbow Room: the Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, set out to expose this mistake in all its forms and show how what really matters in free will is handsomely preserved in my vision of how the brain works. I am returning to this subject in my next book, with a more detailed theory that takes advantage of the tremendous advances of outlook in the last 15 years.
S&S: What then of religion, or, more specifically, of the relationship between religion and science? Stephen Jay Gould speaks of "Non-Overlapping Magesteria," where the two realms of knowledge—or inquiry—stay within their own spheres, operating with mutual respect but maintaining a strict policy of non-interference. Is this possible, in your views? Is it even desirable?
Dennett: The problem with any proposed detente in which science and religion are ceded separate bailiwicks or "magisteria" is that, as some wag has put it, this amounts to rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which Caesar says God can have. The most recent attempt, by Gould, has not found much favor among the religious precisely because he proposes to leave them so little. Of course, I’m certainly not suggesting that he should have left them more.
There are no factual assertions that religion can reasonably claim as its own, off limits to science. Many who readily grant this have not considered its implications. It means, for instance, that there are no factual assertions about the origin of the universe or its future trajectory, or about historical events (floods, the parting of seas, burning bushes, etc.), about the goal or purpose of life, or about the existence of an afterlife and so on, that are off limits to science. After all, assertions about the purpose or function of organs, the lack of purpose or function of, say, pebbles or galaxies, and assertions about the physical impossibility of psychokinesis, clairvoyance, poltergeists, trance channeling, etc. are all within the purview of science; so are the parallel assertions that strike closer to the traditionally exempt dogmas of long-established religions. You can’t consistently accept that expert scientific testimony can convict a charlatan of faking miracle cures and then deny that the same testimony counts just as conclusively—"beyond a reasonable doubt"—against any factual claims of violations of physical law to be found in the Bible or other religious texts or traditions.
What does that leave for religion to talk about? Moral injunctions and declarations of love (and hate, unfortunately), and other ceremonial speech acts. The moral codes of all the major religions are a treasury of ethical wisdom, agreeing on core precepts, and disagreeing on others that are intuitively less compelling, both to those who honor them and those who don’t. The very fact that we agree that there are moral limits that trump any claim of religious freedom—we wouldn’t accept a religion that engaged in human sacrifice or slavery, for instance—shows that we do not cede to religion, to any religion, the final authority on moral injunctions.
Centuries of ethical research and reflection, by philosophers, political theorists, economists, and other secular thinkers have not yet achieved a consensus on any Grand Unified Theory of ethics, but there is a broad, stable consensus on how to conduct such an inquiry, how to resolve ethical quandaries, and how to deal with as-yet unresolved differences. Religion plays a major role as a source of possible injunctions and precepts, and as a rallying point for public appeal and organization, but it does not set the ground rules of ethical agreement and disagreement, and hence cannot claim ethics or morality as its particular province.
That leaves ceremonial speech acts as religion’s surviving domain. These play a huge role in stabilizing the attitudes and policies of those who participate in them, but the trouble is that ceremony without power does not appear to be a stable arrangement—and appearances here are all important. Once a monarch is stripped of all political power, as in Great Britain, the traditions and trappings tend to lose some of their psychological force, so that their sole surviving function—focusing the solidarity of the citizenry—is somewhat undercut. Whether or not to abolish the monarchy becomes an ever less momentous decision, rather like whether or not to celebrate a national holiday always on a Monday, instead of on its traditional calendar date. Recognizing this threat of erosion, religious people will seldom acknowledge in public that their God has been reduced to something like a figurehead, a mere constitutional monarch, even while their practices and decisions presuppose that this is so.
It is seldom remarked (though often observed in private, I daresay) that many, many people who profess belief in God do not really act the way people who believed in God would act; they act the way people would act who believed in believing in God. That is, they manifestly think that believing in God is—would be—a good thing, a state of mind to be encouraged, by example if possible, so they defend belief-in-God with whatever rhetorical and political tools they can muster. They ask for God’s help, but do not risk anything on receiving it, for instance. They thank God for their blessings, but, following the principle that God helps those who help themselves, they proceed with the major decisions of their lives as if they were going it alone.
Those few individuals who clearly do act as if they believed in God, really believed in God, are in striking contrast: the Christian Scientists who opt for divine intervention over medical attention, for instance, or those who give all their goods to one church or another in expectation of the Apocalypse, or those who eagerly seek martyrdom.
Not wanting the contrast to be so stark, the believers in belief-in-God respond with the doctrine that it is a sin (or at least a doctrinal error) to count on God’s existence to have any particular effect. This has the nice effect of making the behavior of a believer in belief-in-God and the behavior of a believer in God so similar as to be all but indistinguishable.
Once nothing follows from a belief in God that doesn’t equally follow from the presumably weaker creed that it would be good if I believed in God—a doctrine that is readily available to the atheist, after all—religion has been so laundered of content that it is quite possibly consistent with science. Peter de Vries, a genuine believer in God and probably the funniest writer on religion ever, has his hyper-liberal Reverend Mackerel (in his book The Mackerel Plaza) preach the following line: "It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us."
The Reverend Mackerel’s God can co-exist peacefully with science. So can Santa Claus, who need not exist in order to make our yuletide season more jolly.
Saturday, 4 October 2008
CDS 041008-JLR CRSS-STDNT UNEMPLYMNT
///////////////INFORMATION DOPAMINATED
///////////////// Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought."
— Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan (2006)
/////////////////"The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" are our most precious artifacts of early Greek culture. Aside from the dry and voiceless remains of archeological sites, the poems are the last surviving impressions of the society that created them - what the people hoped for, what they despaired of, and how they managed their social and political lives. The poems are time machines - imperfect, surely - that show us people who were so like us, and so different, too. And they are still revealing new truths about the prehistoric civilization that has exerted such a strong formative influence over the art, the history, and even the psychology of the West.
///////////////////Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the "logic of science"; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can't be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically—but... let's not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let's face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).
///////////////////
///////////////// Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought."
— Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan (2006)
/////////////////"The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" are our most precious artifacts of early Greek culture. Aside from the dry and voiceless remains of archeological sites, the poems are the last surviving impressions of the society that created them - what the people hoped for, what they despaired of, and how they managed their social and political lives. The poems are time machines - imperfect, surely - that show us people who were so like us, and so different, too. And they are still revealing new truths about the prehistoric civilization that has exerted such a strong formative influence over the art, the history, and even the psychology of the West.
///////////////////Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the "logic of science"; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can't be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically—but... let's not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let's face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).
///////////////////
Thursday, 2 October 2008
PANGON
Do We Live in a Giant Cosmic Bubble?
By Clara Moskowitz, Staff Writer
posted: 30 September 2008 06:48 am ET
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This Chandra X-ray photograph shows Cassiopeia A (Cas A, for short), the youngest supernova remnant in the Milky Way. Credit: NASA/CXC/MIT/UMass Amherst/M.D.Stage et al.
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This Chandra X-ray photograph shows Cassiopeia A (Cas A, for short), the youngest supernova remnant in the Milky Way. Credit: NASA/CXC/MIT/UMass Amherst/M.D.Stage et al.
Mugshots of some of the two dozen supernova explosions captured by NASA's Swift satellite. Credit: NASA
If the notion of dark energy sounds improbable, get ready for an even more outlandish suggestion.
Earth may be trapped in an abnormal bubble of space-time that is particularly void of matter. Scientists say this condition could account for the apparent acceleration of the universe's expansion, for which dark energy currently is the leading explanation.
Dark energy is the name given to the hypothetical force that could be drawing all the stuff in the universe outward at an ever-increasing rate. Current thinking is that 74 percent of the universe could be made up of this exotic dark energy, with another 21 percent being dark matter, and normal matter comprising the remaining 5 percent.
Until now, there has been no good way to choose between dark energy or the void explanation, but a new study outlines a potential test of the bubble scenario.
If we were in an unusually sparse area of the universe, then things could look farther away than they really are and there would be no need to rely on dark energy as an explanation for certain astronomical observations.
"If we lived in a very large under-density, then the space-time itself wouldn't be accelerating," said researcher Timothy Clifton of Oxford University in England. "It would just be that the observations, if interpreted in the usual way, would look like they were."
Scientists first detected the acceleration by noting that distant supernovae seemed to be moving away from us faster than they should be. One type of supernova (called Type Ia) is a useful distance indicator, because the explosions always have the same intrinsic brightness. Since light gets dimmer the farther it travels, that means that when the supernovae appear faint to us, they are far away, and when they appear bright, they are closer in.
But if we happened to be in a portion of the universe with less matter in it than normal, then the space-time around us would be different than it is outside, because matter warps space-time. Light travelling from supernovae outside our bubble would appear dimmer, because the light would diverge more than we would expect once it got inside our void.
One problem with the void idea, though, is that it negates a principle that has reined in astronomy for more than 450 years: namely, that our place in the universe isn't special. When Nicholas Copernicus argued that it made much more sense for the Earth to be revolving around the sun than vice versa, it revolutionized science. Since then, most theories have to pass the Copernican test. If they require our planet to be unique, or our position to be exalted, the ideas often seem unlikely.
"This idea that we live in a void would really be a statement that we live in a special place," Clifton told SPACE.com. "The regular cosmological model is based on the idea that where we live is a typical place in the universe. This would be a contradiction to the Copernican principle."
Clifton, along with Oxford researchers Pedro G. Ferreira and Kate Land, say that in coming years we may be able to distinguish between dark energy and the void. They point to the upcoming Joint Dark Energy Mission, planned by NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy to launch in 2014 or 2015. The satellite aims to measure the expansion of the universe precisely by observing about 2,300 supernovae.
The scientists suggest that by looking at a large number of supernovae in a certain region of the universe, they should be able to tell whether the objects are really accelerating away, or if their light is merely being distorted in a void.
The new study will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
* Top 10 Strangest Things in Space
////////////////////////The immortal Game was a chess game played on 21 June 1851 by Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky. The very bold sacrifices made by Anderssen to finally secure victory have made it one of the most famous chess games of all time. Anderssen gave up both rooks and then his queen, checkmating his opponent with his three remaining minor pieces. It has been called an achievement "perhaps unparalleled in chess literature."[1]
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///////////////////////SHIREY SANKRANTI-JLR CRSS
////////////////////////AARA LAW PRACTICE,BRNISON AVE BPPEAL
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Quantum Introduction The Quantum Casino Quantum Entanglement Quantum Decoherence Quantum Reality It's A Small World
The Cosmic Universe The Anthropic Principle The Arrow of Time The Mathematical Universe Is the Universe a Computer? The Big Brother Universe
- Return to Home -
The Arrow of Time
We are all aware of an intuitive "flow" of time from past to future. Not only do we feel this flow of time, but we also see it manifested in the behaviour of objects which change over time. Many objects seem to behave differently in the forward time direction when compared to the backward time direction. For example, we don't see a spilt glass of water jumping up and going back into the glass, we don't see a broken egg reforming itself. These effects all add to the impression that there is some sort of "forward direction" in the time dimension. This directionality is called the Arrow of Time.
However, this "arrow of time" is something of a mystery to physicists because, at the microscopic level, all fundamental physical processes appear to be time-reversible (we'll consider this later). Also, as shown on the Cosmic Universe page, results such as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation suggest a spacetime structure in which all of time is laid-out in a "block universe", i.e., there is no actual "flow" of time, no movement of a "now" point.
So on this page we will investigate the cause of this mysterious "Arrow of Time".
Entropy
Entropy can be considered the amount of disorder in a system. For example, a car that has rusted could be said to have a greater entropy value than a new car: bits of the car may have fallen off, the paint may be flaking. Basically, the molecules of the car have become more disordered over time: entropy has increased.
As has just been just discussed, all microscopic processes appear to be time-reversible. The question of why we see an "arrow of time" in macroscopic processes has therefore presented physics with a long-standing conundrum. For this reason, much attention has focussed on the fact that the entropy of a closed system increases with time, i.e., a system will gradually become more disordered with time. Eventually the system (gas in a closed container, for example) will reach a state when all its molecules are completely randomly orientated. This state is called thermal equilibrium. The rule that entropy increases with time is called the second law of thermodynamics.
The reason for this increase in entropy can be seen from a purely probabilistic argument: a system will have many more possible disordered states than ordered states, so a system which changes state randomly will most likely move to a more disordered state. It's really just a matter of likelihood. For this reason, the second "law" of thermodynamics is not really a "law" at all, certainly not an unbreakable law on the same basis as other physical laws - it is a statistical principle. In fact, it might be possible for a room full of randomly-distributed particles to re-order itself quite by chance so that all the particles end up in one corner of the room - it would just be incredibly unlikely!
While the second "law" of thermodynamics is "just" a statistical principle, it is a mightily powerful statistical principle! This is because the basis of the second law - that "disorder will increase" - seems so obvious, and seems to appeal to a fundamental, platonic principle of mathematics. For this reason, the second law manages to appear even more fundamental and unbreakable than the other physical laws, some of which (for example, the amount of electric charge on an electron) seem rather arbitrary in comparison. This fundamental strength of the second law is described well by the astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington:
"If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can offer you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
- Sir Arthur Eddington
One of the most inexplicable features of the early universe is that it had an incredibly low value of entropy. This value of entropy was so low that even now - 13 billion years later - we still find ourselves living in a world of relatively low entropy. As a result, many of the objects we surround ourselves with have low entropy: new cars, and perfect unbroken eggs in egg cups. And these objects are basically falling apart around us as they inevitably move to higher entropy states: cars rust, eggs fall on the floor and break. Hence, the increase in entropy in our ordered world is one reason why we detect an apparent "arrow of time".
But change of entropy is fundamentally time-symmetrical!!
However, this is a good time to clear-up a very widely-held misconception about the change of entropy: that change of entropy is in some way fundamentally time-asymmetric, that entropy change behaves fundamentally differently in the forward time direction to the backward time direction. This is absolutely not the case. In the general case, entropy increases in the backward time direction in just the same way as it increases in the forward time direction: change of entropy is symmetrical with time. (However, a very small minority of physicists might still believe change of entropy is time-asymmetric - see my comments at the bottom of this discussion with the notoriously tetchy physicist Luboš Motl here).
The probabilistic basis of the second law of thermodynamics simply says that a system will have many more possible disordered states than ordered states, so a system which changes state randomly will most likely move to a more disordered state. This seems very clear and obvious - such a simple statement is never going to be the cause of something so mysterious as fundamental time-asymmetry. Indeed, this change to a more disordered state is just as applicable in the reverse time direction as in the forward time direction: it's just a change of state, independent of time.
But what about the second law of thermodynamics which states that "entropy increases with time"? This seems to imply a fundamental time-asymmetry to entropy. But we have to realise that the second law only applies to special-case systems: objects with low entropy, the sort of objects we generally encounter in everyday life (rusting cars, etc.). In fact, if we consider general-case objects (i.e., objects in thermal equilibrium), objects which have never been arranged into any sort of order, then their entropy is at a maximum already so their entropy can only decrease with time - completely at odds with the second law!
This generally-held misconception that change of entropy is fundamentally time-asymmetrical is revealed by the Loschmidt paradox. The Loschmidt paradox considers the apparently fundamental time-asymmetry of entropy implied by the second law and states that this is at odds with the known time symmetry of fundamental processes. It is only when we realise that the second law is frequently badly stated and hence contains unstated assumptions (which have been just considered) that the Loschmidt paradox is resolved. (Wikipedia describes this resolution of the paradox, showing how one of the key assumptions of Boltzmann's version of the second law of thermodynamics was flawed - see here).
But if change of entropy is time-symmetric, why do we see the entropy of the universe as only increasing? Roger Penrose considers this question in his book The Road to Reality. Penrose considers what we might expect to happen if we trace the entropy of the universe back in time from the state it is in now. If change of entropy is really time-symmetrical, then we should expect to see entropy increasing as we trace the universe into the past, just as we will see entropy increasing into the future. But we know, in fact, that the universe had a lower entropy in the past: i.e., the entropy of the universe actually reduces in the past. So where does this asymmetry come from?
As Roger Penrose goes on to reveal, the time-asymmetry of change of entropy within the universe is explained by the extraordinarily low entropy of the universe at its origin:
Basically, the low-entropy past of the universe "fixes" the experiment. If we want to get a symmetrical answer then we have to be careful to conduct a symmetrical experiment. Rather than starting with a special-case low entropy universe, we have to imagine a universe which started in thermal equilibrium and has reached its current state unaided, purely by chance:
After that low-entropy point is reached, we then see entropy starting to increase according to the second law. But the key thing is that if we trace the entropy of the universe back in time past the low-entropy point we now see that symmetry that Roger Penrose sought. Hence, change of entropy is fundamentally symmetrical.
In fact, throughout this discussion on the arrow of time we will find that the arrow of time is caused by the time-symmetric second law of thermodynamics, together with the very special, low-entropy initial conditions of the universe.
(This discussion on time-symmetric entropy change is based on an example by J. Richard Gott in his book Time Travel in Einstein's Universe in which the role of the universe is played by an ice cube - see here. The ice cube example is considered in detail in Chapter 6 of Brian Greene's book The Fabric of the Cosmos.)
Causality
We all have a very strong feeling of a directionality of time, which has a flow in a forwards direction. As Michael Lockwood says in his book The Labyrinth of Time: "We regard the forward direction in time, in stark contrast to the backward direction, as the direction in which causality is permitted to operate. Causes, we assume, can precede their effects, but cannot follow them."
But we have just seen how physical processes appear to be time-symmetrical, with no distinction between the forward and backward directions. So where does that leave causality? As Michael Lockwood again says about the passage of time: "We find no hint of this in the formalism of Newtonian physics. Not only is there no explicit reference to a passage or flow of time; there is not even any reference to cause and effect. Indeed, there is not even any directionality".
"But", you might protest, "surely causality works in only one direction: forwards in time? I kick a football - the football doesn't kick me." Well, let's consider the example immediately below of forward causality. We see a snooker cue coming in from the left, hitting the white ball, which then causes the white ball to hit the red ball:
However, if you shoot a movie of that sequence, and then play it backwards, it still makes perfect physical sense. As you can see below, we then have the red ball coming in from the right, hitting the white ball, which then causes the white ball to hit the cue backwards. So, because of the symmetry of the laws of physics, this process of causality - which we thought only applied to the forward direction of time - in fact applies equally to the backward direction of time as well:
The reason why we don't see causality happening in the backward direction is purely because of a bias in our psychological systems: something about the complexity of our psychological system (our brains!) causes our thought processes to work only in the forward direction of time (this will be considered below). The great advantage of recording the sequence on a movie and then playing the movie backwards (to reveal the time symmetry of causality) is that a movie camera works in a much more simple fashion than our brains and thus has no such psychological bias in the forward direction: it works in exactly the same way forward as backward.
So if causality is time-symmetrical, we could in fact think of our current situations are being caused by time-reversed future events as much as by past events! For example, as I sit here by my desk in work this morning, I could consider my position as being caused by me being in my apartment this evening, and driving my car from there backward in time, backward down the road the work, to put me in work this morning! It's a bit brain-bending, but it's equally valid as saying "I got up this morning, and drove forwards to work". It seems strange, but that's only because of our psychological bias. The movie of my complete day at work would tell the correct (time-reversible) story.
The Quantum Mechanical Arrow of Time
As has just been explained, almost all known physical principles (from Newtonian mechanics through to Einstein's relativity) have a completely symmetric treatment of past and future. Nowhere in any of these equations is there anything which distinguishes a forward direction of time from a backward direction of time. The exception to this rule appears to be quantum mechanics. On the page on The Quantum Casino it was explained how, when we make a measurement of a quantum observable, there is a "collapse of the wavefunction" in which a probability wave collapses to generate a single observed value from a range of possible values. This process appears to work in the forward time direction only, i.e., it is irreversible.
An explanation for this apparent "collapse of the wavefunction" is presented in detail on the page on Quantum Decoherence, so I don't want to repeat it here. Suffice to say that the coherent phase relationships of the interference terms are destroyed when a particle interacts with the environment. The dissipation of these terms into the wider environment can be interpreted in terms of increasing entropy (again, see the section on "Decoherence and Entropy" on the Quantum Decoherence page for full details). Quantum decoherence can then be understood as a thermodynamic process: after decoherence, the process is said to be thermodynamically irreversible.
Continuing our snooker analogy, the "collapse of the wavefunction" is like a snooker break-off shot. Imagine each ball represents an interference term of the quantum state. Before the shot, (before we make a quantum observation), we see low entropy - everything is nicely ordered. All the interference terms are coherent, and capable of producing interference patterns.
After the shot, the system of balls represents a system with greatly-increased entropy (disorder). This is what happens when we make a quantum observation: interference terms dissipate into the "heat bath" environment, and all coherence is lost in the confused mess. The situation is now one of thermal irreversibility: it is extremely unlikely the original ordered situation could re-form itself. We therefore only see the collapse of the wavefunction operating the forward time direction (for the same reason we don't see broken eggs mending themselves).
So once again the underlying physical principles appear to be time symmetric, with no fundamental preference for either the forward or backward time direction. The apparent arrow of time produced by the "collapse of the wavefunction" is once again shown to be a result of increasing entropy. As Andreas Albrecht explains in his arXiv paper astro-ph/0210527 (when considering decoherence in the double-slit experiment): "A double-slit electron striking a photographic plate is only a good quantum measurement to the extent that the photographic plate is well constructed, and has a very low probability of re-emitting the electron in the coherent 'double slit' state. Good photographic plates are possible because of the thermodynamic arrow of time: the electron striking the plate puts the internal degrees of freedom of the plate into a higher entropy state, which is essentially impossible to reverse. Furthermore, different electron positions on the plate become entangled with different states of the internal degrees of freedom, so there is essentially no interference between positions of the electron. From this point of view, the quantum mechanical arrow of time is none other than the thermodynamic arrow of time."
Why can't we remember the future?
If physical processes all appear to be time-reversible at a fundamental level, we might ask the question "Why can't we remember the future?" After all, we can remember the past, and physics seems to make no distinction between past, present, and future. So why don't we already have prior knowledge of what is going to happen in the future?
In order to answer this question, we shall consider the reasoning of James Hartle which is based around the radiative arrow of time:
The Radiative Arrow of Time
In his arXiv paper "The Physics of Now" (gr-qc/0403001), James Hartle makes the point that the reason we can't remember the future is because we have not yet received any information about future events. This thinking is based on the idea of a "light cone", the shape of which is defined by the speed of light:
At first glance, this might seem a very straightforward explanation of why we are unable to remember the future: it takes time for a light ray (photons) carrying information to reach us from a distant event. Basically, in the future we will have more information about distant events than we have at present. It is hard to imagine a situation in which light behaves differently - it would appear that light will always take time to travel from a point A to a point B:
This principle - that light will always take time, travelling forwards in time between two points - is called the radiative arrow of time (also known as the electromagnetic arrow of time). But this apparently clear-cut principle is not as clear-cut as it first appears. It turns out that the "world line" of the photon is the same for a photon travelling forwards in time from point A to B as it is for a photon travelling backward in time from point B to point A:
The world line of a photon (position of the photon at any given point in time) is the same for a photon going forwards in time from point A to point B as it is for a photon going backward in time from point B to point A.
In fact, if we temporarily forget about the little arrows on the world lines (which indicate "cause" and "effect") then we see that the world lines of both the forward and backward photons are precisely identical:
With the little arrows removed from the world lines, the paths of the photons going backward and forward in time are shown to be identical.
This principle is clearly illustrated by a Feynman diagram of particle interactions which can be rotated at will, showing particle interactions work exactly the same backward in time as forward in time:
It makes no sense to talk about the entropy of a single photon (entropy is a statistical property of a large group of particles), so a single photon has no arrow of time. However, we do not receive our information about distant events in the form of single photons. Rather, it appears we receive information in the form of light rays which are composed of billions of photons (bosons are quite happy to congregate in the same state, and gather together in a cooperative fashion to create light rays - see the It's a Small World page). For this reason, studies of the radiative arrow of time have concentrated on studying the Maxwell electromagnetic field equations which treats light as a field with a wave nature (rather than considering the path of individual particles).
It is often quoted that Maxwell's electromagnetic field equations are time-reversible and so allow for advanced (backward-in-time) waves as well as retarded (forward-in-time) waves (see here). However, in practice it is much easier to produce a retarded wave than an advanced wave, and this reveals the limitations of Maxwell's equations as a full description of the behaviour of light. We need to combine Maxwell's equations with something else in order to derive a radiative arrow of time.
James Hartle attempts to use Maxwell's equations to deduce the radiative arrow of time in Appendix A of his aforementioned arXiv paper gr-qc/0403001, "The Cosmological Origin of Time's Arrow". His approach (based on principles described in H. Dieter Zeh's book The Physical Basis for the Direction of Time) combines the time-symmetric Maxwell's equations with the time-asymmetric boundary conditions of the universe as a whole (he considers the asymmetrical total amount of electromagnetic radiation). The approach suggests that because there were no free electromagnetic fields at the start of the universe, but there are fields in the future, those fields must all be caused by retarded waves that have their sources in the past. However, I don't see how the radiative arrow of time can depend on the total of electromagnetic fields in the universe in this way. There's no equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics (increasing entropy) for electromagnetic fields. The total of electromagnetic field in an isolated system does not tend to increase (as is the case with entropy). The radiative arrow of time must surely depend on the increasing sum total of entropy in the universe, not the total of electromagnetic field. Surely the radiative arrow of time must have the same cause as the thermodynamic arrow of time.
At the beginning of the last century, Walter Ritz proposed that only retarded (forward-in-time) waves were physically possible (i.e., the process was fundamentally time-asymmetric). In 1908 and 1909 he had a famous argument with Einstein over this matter, as Einstein believed the process was fundamentally symmetric and could be explained by thermodynamic arguments (see here). It turns out that it is easier to create a light ray in the forward time direction as the behaviour of the billions of photons as they are produced (by an ordered source such as a light bulb) and scattered (when they reach a target) can be understood in turns of increasing entropy: "This arrow has been reversed in carefully-worked experiments which have created convergent waves, so this arrow probably follows from the thermodynamic arrow in that meeting the conditions to produce a convergent wave requires more order than the conditions for a radiative wave. Put differently, the probability for initial conditions that produce a convergent wave is much lower than the probability for initial conditions that produce a radiative wave. In fact, normally a radiative wave increases entropy, while a convergent wave decreases it." (see the Wikipedia article on the Arrow of Time). Hence, the reason we do not see convergent, advanced waves can be explained in terms of entropy.
When I turn on an electric light, for example, the photons leave the bulb in a relatively ordered form. The photons then radiate away from the bulb, redistributing themselves around the room (i.e., a radiative wave), creating a state of greater disorder - increased entropy. As Andreas Albrecht explains in his arXiv paper astro-ph/0210527: "The complete absence of the time-reverse of radiation absorption is understood to be one feature of the thermodynamic arrow of time in our world. A hillside absorbing an evening news broadcast is entering a higher entropy state, and the entropy would have to decrease for any of the troublesome time-reversed cases to take place. So in the end, the radiation arrow of time is none other than the thermodynamic arrow of time."
Could it be possible to remember the future?
If we consider the hypothetical situation in which we have found a way to circumvent the limitations imposed by the radiative arrow of time, it is interesting to ask if it could ever be possible to remember the future. And, if so, what would our "memories" by like?
In this respect, the Scottish philosopher Donald Mackay suggested an interesting "thought experiment". Mackay wondered if it could ever be possible to predict how someone will behave in the future, and, if so, what would be the consequences for human free will. If we had complete knowledge of the current state of a person's brain, would we be able to accurately predict a person's actions in the short-term future? Basically, if we are able to predict how a person will behave - and the decisions they will make - in the future then human free will is shown to be a fallacy, an illusion.
However, Mackay suggested that it would be impossible to predict a person's future decisions if that predicted future was made known to the person. This is because the person could then choose to act in a different way from how you have told him he will behave. This is described by John D. Barrow in his book Impossibility: "Consider a person who is asked to choose between soup or salad for lunch. If we introduce a brain scientist who not only knows the complete state of this person's brain, but that of the entire universe as well at present, we could ask whether this scientist can infallibly announce what the choice of lunch will be. The answer is 'No'. The subject can always be stubborn, and adopt a strategy that says 'If you say that I will choose soup, then I will choose salad, and vice versa'. Under these conditions it is logically impossible for the scientist to predict infallibly what the person will choose if the scientist makes his prediction known."
So if a person gains access to knowledge about his future behaviour, it would appear that it becomes impossible to predict that future. But this knowledge about future behaviour is precisely what a person will gain if he is able to remember the future. So if a person is able to remember the future, he could then choose to act in a different way to how his memory of the future tells him he will act! There would appear to be a logical inconsistency here: if a person is able to remember the future, then those memories of the future instantly become unreliable. Therefore, it would appear to be impossible to "remember the future".
As an example, here's how Dilbert might behave if he could remember the future:
This logical inconsistency prohibiting you from remembering the future (based on Mackay's reasoning) arises because the following two statements cannot both be true:
1. You can receive - or "remember" - information about events in the future.
2. You have "free will" in determining your future actions, i.e., you have complete choice in selecting your future actions from a range of possibilities.
However, it might be possible to remember the future (the first of those two statements being true) if the second statement is, in fact, false. Maybe you have no freedom of choice in choosing your future actions - maybe "free will" is just an illusion. Indeed, if all of spacetime is laid-out as an unchanging four-dimensional "block universe" then your future actions are just as determined - just as "set in stone" - as your past actions.
Block Time
For more information about this, see this Scientific American article by Paul Davies.
As Michael Lockwood says in his book The Labyrinth of Time: "To take the spacetime view seriously is indeed to regard everything that ever exists, or ever happens, at any time or place, as being just as real as the contents of the here and now. And this rules out any conception of free will that pictures human agents, through their choices, as selectively conferring actuality on what are initially only potentialities."
So now let's proceed on the basis that our sense of free will is just an illusion, and the future is fixed - a scenario which contains no logical inconsistencies and thus allows us (at least in theory) to "remember the future". We can then ask what form these "memories of the future" might take.
In our everyday experience, our memories of the past seem set in stone, but we have no recollection of the future. It is this distinction, this lack of recollection of the future, that gives us an impression of free will: the past is set in stone, but the future is undecided and we have yet to choose which path it takes. However, in a block universe the future is just as set in stone as the past, and our memories of the future would take exactly the same nature as our memories of the past: an unchanging future, set in stone.
In our everyday experience, we can remember the past (memories which appear fixed - like photos in frames), but not the future. Hence we get the impression of free will: the future is apparently undetermined - we feel free to select our future actions from a range of possibilities.
The fact that we can remember the past - yet have no recollection of the future - is the reason why we feel the "flow" of time: we get a false impression that the "unreal" future has become the "real" past.
If we were able to remember the future, we would find our memories of the future are also unalterable, just like our memories of the past. Our notion of free will would then be revealed as just an illusion.
You might think that would be rather unsettling, knowing that you are constrained to follow only one particular path of action, and have no choice in the matter. You might imagine that you would feel manipulated and controlled in your future actions - a rather scary feeling. However, I would imagine that the fact that you now have memories of both the past and future would mean that you would no longer feel a "flow" of time: we would feel perfectly balanced between "past" and "future", with no "motion" involved. Maybe that would be less scary?
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Somehow it seems that we should be able to "remember the future" as an act of out will, or choice in the present. I see remembering the future as imagining it. The whole "secret" thing or law of attraction. What do I want to "be my life?", experiencing what I want by "remembering" it. Somehow imagination and memory seem intertwined. I just tend to believe that freewill and the future already existing could be compatible. As a Christian, I believe that God already knows the future, therefore knows everything we will do in our lifetimes. For us to visualize a desire as actual, could that be using our memory in reverse? I don't know if you can make any sense of this, but maybe it will stimulate your thinking. I would be curious to hear your response. I guess I'll have to revisit this sight to see if anyone has commented. - Francine, 17th February 2008
Hi Francine, thanks for your comment. Donald Mackay (who I mentioned in the text) was also a Christian and proposed his theory to prove that there was such a thing as free will (see http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/Philosophy/PSCF12-99Feucht.html , though my version is perhaps clearer). Basically, as I described above, Mackay suggested that it would be impossible to predict a person's future decisions if that predicted future was made known to the person. However, as I described, I think there's a flaw in Mackay's argument in that he assumes the person would have freedom to take various future paths - something perhaps not possible in a block universe. This is covered very well in John D. Barrow's book "Impossibility" which I can recommend to you.
Here's another extract from "Impossibility" which you might find interesting: "Is it possible to pray for the past to be changed? Few Christian theologians would support this idea if the past was known to the person praying; but what if an event has occured about which the outcome is still unknown to you? Or what about an outcome, like an examination result, that has already been decided, but which has yet to be announced? In his book on miracles, C.S. Lewis, an influential popular writer on theological questions, sided with the idea tha it was rational to pray for events whose outcome had already been decided, because from a God's-eye perspective your future intercession could be an ingredient in the global events which may affect the outcome of the event being prayed for. Lewis was adopting what physicists call the 'block universe' picture of spacetime, in which the entire spacetime alread exists as a complete entity. He conceived of the whole of space and time as viewed externally by God, and so all prayers were known by God before they were made. This would permit free will to be retained together with a doctrine of God's omniscience. God's foreknowledge does not predestine our actions. Rather it is our actions that determine God's foreknowledge. We introduce these interesting theological questions to show that the questions of changing the past and making sense of the resulting coherence of the universe are not questions that lie solely in the realm of physics." - Andrew Thomas, 17th February 2008
This is a brilliant article- mind boggling
I definately believe that by praying we can ask God to change the past if that result is unkown to us. But am confused as to why this would only be possible if we dont know the outcome.
Any thoughts ?
Dr Walia - hardeep walia, 18th February 2008
Hardeep, the question of "why this would only be possible if we dont know the outcome" - I can see a kind of logic behind this conclusion in that if we knew the outcome already, and then that outcome changed, we would have an inconsistency in the system: an event which both occurred and didn't occur. At least if we didn't know the outcome then we wouldn't have that logical inconsistency in our heads. But could it be said that the other outcome happened, even though we were not aware of it? Basically, if we are not aware of the event, does it actually happen, does it have reality? That then introduces ideas of the observer somehow "creating reality" by their observation - ideas from quantum mechanics. Yeah, "mind-boggling", as you say! - Andrew Thomas, 18th February 2008
Hello, I love the way things are explained on this website. I would like to state that I had found a way to disprove time prior to reading any philosophical/theoretical/mathematic findings outside of my own, aside from a small article written by a friend of mine about writings from a philosopher by the name of Plato regarding reality. My goal now is to apply my findings with all applicable findings relating to reality and the function of the universe. This website has giving me so much that I want to thank you for your assistance. THANK YOU! My first mark is, without a doubt, an explanation as to how we are unable to remember what we call the future. - Kevin, 8th April 2008
Thanks, Kevin. Good luck with your theory of time. Be sure to post back here when you finish. - Andrew Thomas, 8th April 2008
Thanks for the great insight and many questions and paradoxes raised here. I am not a very bright fellow, but I have always had the strange sense that all of history which includes my memories are being constantly rewritten so to speak. Our memory of time, space and reality could be changing constantly at the quantum level. What seems like fixed and solid memories may really have changed many times over in the past few seconds. It would explain a lot of things if this is the case. Parallel universes could be constantly forming and collapsing all the time. We may be praying for things that we think are future but are really neither past or future, but from God's perspective there is no "Arrow of Time."---just the eternal now.The cause and effect of all things could be operating completely outside our concept of time moving forward. It would explain Jesus comment,"With God all things are possible!" - Rodney, 29th April 2008
Nice comment Rodney - Michael, 2nd May 2008
I've been listening to CDs of Vishal Mangalwadi's 2007 lectures at the U of Minnessota: "Must The Sun Set On The West". He says that God is outside of the universe he created, so he is not bound by the logic, for instance, or time, space, and energy, as we know it. That's why we need to "see what is there" rather than figuring it out in our minds, and why we cannot "know" the future unless he tells us. - Addamstaft, 9th June 2008
About Temporal Communication. I believe this may be how I have seen the future before.
I know, crazy.. right? Well I have an IQ of 130, have not been abducted by aliens, and am not considered weird by my fellow man..haha
I had a dream that I hit my bosses truck with my car on the driver side back. Then I woke up and in the morning and my bosses son told me he hit my car with my bosses truck in the drivers side back. The damage looked just like the dream. It is statistically impossible that this was a coincidence--especially because I have had this type of thing about 6 times on big stuff and hundreds of times on small stuff. (it was reversed but that happens in dreams). It was so astonishing I didnt even get mad my car was hit.
I theorized that I was actually in touch with the John of my future. Up until now I have ever heard anyone mention that this is how the future is seen by some people in some cases. Its like I pick up stray thoughts from the future me every now and then.
Another time a friend told me someone robbed his house. I went home and I thought real hard for a minute to intentionally "see" who did it. The name I came up with was a person who was never known as a thief and I hadnt seen him in maybe a year. I didnt say anything.
Well, 2 weeks later my friend told me that guy did it. I turned white. I dont think I saw him rob the house--I recalled the future conversation of being told he did it. I dont actually know if he did it... I just know he thinks the guy did it.
The other possibility is God allows us to know things. As a christian I know he can do this--I just dont know if thats the case here.
Either way--it proves the future already exists. There simply is no other explanation. I know its easy for people who havnt had these experiences to say Im misreading this--but I'm perceptive enough to know its real.
The real question you ask is could I have changed the future? Well, the missing component in people's search for the answer is God. If there is someone Outside Time who is in control --all the problems go away. In other word--if we do see the future..we see it for a reason. So whether we see it to confirm there is a God--or to prevent us from flipping out when something bad happens--or to actually prevent something for some unknown purpose...its up to God who knows all possible outcomes.
Anyway..very cool website my friend. - John R, 5th July 2008
That's a coincidence, because I had a dream last week about perfect surfing waves outside my flat (I'm a keen surfer, and we hardly ever get perfect waves here). And the next evening we had perfect waves just like in my dream! It really was a bit weird. I do suspect dreams tap into the enormous potential of the unconscious human mind in a way which we don't yet understand. Your experiences seem to bear that out. - Andrew Thomas, 5th July 2008
"The other possibility is God allows us to know things. As a christian I know he can do this--I just dont know if thats the case here. "
- Andrew, 14th September 2008
Without bringing religion into it, every scientist should know about the very strong evidence that already exists for precognition, in dreams or otherwise, including many carefully controlled experiments. See for example Dean Radin's books "Entangled Minds" and "Conscious Universe" (both with many good references) or any of several peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of the Parapsychological Assn, and the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. We *can* indeed "remember the future", but it is difficult exactly because of the increasing entropy argument given above. - Richard Shoup, 15th September 2008
Thanks very much for those references, Richard. - Andrew Thomas, 15th September 2008
Very interesting page … so we could have the basis to explain “Déjà vu” as well as “Human Intuition” : both phenomena could be interpreted as a malfunctioning (maybe intentionally left) in the process which prevents us to remember the future. - Gabriel, 29th September 2008
That's a good point, Gabriel. Yes, I suppose déjà vu could be thought of as "remembering the future" as you feel that your current situation is already in your memory. This implies that there was a point in the past when you could have "remembered the future". - Andrew Thomas, 29th September 2008
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This Chandra X-ray photograph shows Cassiopeia A (Cas A, for short), the youngest supernova remnant in the Milky Way. Credit: NASA/CXC/MIT/UMass Amherst/M.D.Stage et al.
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This Chandra X-ray photograph shows Cassiopeia A (Cas A, for short), the youngest supernova remnant in the Milky Way. Credit: NASA/CXC/MIT/UMass Amherst/M.D.Stage et al.
Mugshots of some of the two dozen supernova explosions captured by NASA's Swift satellite. Credit: NASA
If the notion of dark energy sounds improbable, get ready for an even more outlandish suggestion.
Earth may be trapped in an abnormal bubble of space-time that is particularly void of matter. Scientists say this condition could account for the apparent acceleration of the universe's expansion, for which dark energy currently is the leading explanation.
Dark energy is the name given to the hypothetical force that could be drawing all the stuff in the universe outward at an ever-increasing rate. Current thinking is that 74 percent of the universe could be made up of this exotic dark energy, with another 21 percent being dark matter, and normal matter comprising the remaining 5 percent.
Until now, there has been no good way to choose between dark energy or the void explanation, but a new study outlines a potential test of the bubble scenario.
If we were in an unusually sparse area of the universe, then things could look farther away than they really are and there would be no need to rely on dark energy as an explanation for certain astronomical observations.
"If we lived in a very large under-density, then the space-time itself wouldn't be accelerating," said researcher Timothy Clifton of Oxford University in England. "It would just be that the observations, if interpreted in the usual way, would look like they were."
Scientists first detected the acceleration by noting that distant supernovae seemed to be moving away from us faster than they should be. One type of supernova (called Type Ia) is a useful distance indicator, because the explosions always have the same intrinsic brightness. Since light gets dimmer the farther it travels, that means that when the supernovae appear faint to us, they are far away, and when they appear bright, they are closer in.
But if we happened to be in a portion of the universe with less matter in it than normal, then the space-time around us would be different than it is outside, because matter warps space-time. Light travelling from supernovae outside our bubble would appear dimmer, because the light would diverge more than we would expect once it got inside our void.
One problem with the void idea, though, is that it negates a principle that has reined in astronomy for more than 450 years: namely, that our place in the universe isn't special. When Nicholas Copernicus argued that it made much more sense for the Earth to be revolving around the sun than vice versa, it revolutionized science. Since then, most theories have to pass the Copernican test. If they require our planet to be unique, or our position to be exalted, the ideas often seem unlikely.
"This idea that we live in a void would really be a statement that we live in a special place," Clifton told SPACE.com. "The regular cosmological model is based on the idea that where we live is a typical place in the universe. This would be a contradiction to the Copernican principle."
Clifton, along with Oxford researchers Pedro G. Ferreira and Kate Land, say that in coming years we may be able to distinguish between dark energy and the void. They point to the upcoming Joint Dark Energy Mission, planned by NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy to launch in 2014 or 2015. The satellite aims to measure the expansion of the universe precisely by observing about 2,300 supernovae.
The scientists suggest that by looking at a large number of supernovae in a certain region of the universe, they should be able to tell whether the objects are really accelerating away, or if their light is merely being distorted in a void.
The new study will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
* Top 10 Strangest Things in Space
////////////////////////The immortal Game was a chess game played on 21 June 1851 by Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky. The very bold sacrifices made by Anderssen to finally secure victory have made it one of the most famous chess games of all time. Anderssen gave up both rooks and then his queen, checkmating his opponent with his three remaining minor pieces. It has been called an achievement "perhaps unparalleled in chess literature."[1]
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Quantum Introduction The Quantum Casino Quantum Entanglement Quantum Decoherence Quantum Reality It's A Small World
The Cosmic Universe The Anthropic Principle The Arrow of Time The Mathematical Universe Is the Universe a Computer? The Big Brother Universe
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The Arrow of Time
We are all aware of an intuitive "flow" of time from past to future. Not only do we feel this flow of time, but we also see it manifested in the behaviour of objects which change over time. Many objects seem to behave differently in the forward time direction when compared to the backward time direction. For example, we don't see a spilt glass of water jumping up and going back into the glass, we don't see a broken egg reforming itself. These effects all add to the impression that there is some sort of "forward direction" in the time dimension. This directionality is called the Arrow of Time.
However, this "arrow of time" is something of a mystery to physicists because, at the microscopic level, all fundamental physical processes appear to be time-reversible (we'll consider this later). Also, as shown on the Cosmic Universe page, results such as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation suggest a spacetime structure in which all of time is laid-out in a "block universe", i.e., there is no actual "flow" of time, no movement of a "now" point.
So on this page we will investigate the cause of this mysterious "Arrow of Time".
Entropy
Entropy can be considered the amount of disorder in a system. For example, a car that has rusted could be said to have a greater entropy value than a new car: bits of the car may have fallen off, the paint may be flaking. Basically, the molecules of the car have become more disordered over time: entropy has increased.
As has just been just discussed, all microscopic processes appear to be time-reversible. The question of why we see an "arrow of time" in macroscopic processes has therefore presented physics with a long-standing conundrum. For this reason, much attention has focussed on the fact that the entropy of a closed system increases with time, i.e., a system will gradually become more disordered with time. Eventually the system (gas in a closed container, for example) will reach a state when all its molecules are completely randomly orientated. This state is called thermal equilibrium. The rule that entropy increases with time is called the second law of thermodynamics.
The reason for this increase in entropy can be seen from a purely probabilistic argument: a system will have many more possible disordered states than ordered states, so a system which changes state randomly will most likely move to a more disordered state. It's really just a matter of likelihood. For this reason, the second "law" of thermodynamics is not really a "law" at all, certainly not an unbreakable law on the same basis as other physical laws - it is a statistical principle. In fact, it might be possible for a room full of randomly-distributed particles to re-order itself quite by chance so that all the particles end up in one corner of the room - it would just be incredibly unlikely!
While the second "law" of thermodynamics is "just" a statistical principle, it is a mightily powerful statistical principle! This is because the basis of the second law - that "disorder will increase" - seems so obvious, and seems to appeal to a fundamental, platonic principle of mathematics. For this reason, the second law manages to appear even more fundamental and unbreakable than the other physical laws, some of which (for example, the amount of electric charge on an electron) seem rather arbitrary in comparison. This fundamental strength of the second law is described well by the astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington:
"If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can offer you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
- Sir Arthur Eddington
One of the most inexplicable features of the early universe is that it had an incredibly low value of entropy. This value of entropy was so low that even now - 13 billion years later - we still find ourselves living in a world of relatively low entropy. As a result, many of the objects we surround ourselves with have low entropy: new cars, and perfect unbroken eggs in egg cups. And these objects are basically falling apart around us as they inevitably move to higher entropy states: cars rust, eggs fall on the floor and break. Hence, the increase in entropy in our ordered world is one reason why we detect an apparent "arrow of time".
But change of entropy is fundamentally time-symmetrical!!
However, this is a good time to clear-up a very widely-held misconception about the change of entropy: that change of entropy is in some way fundamentally time-asymmetric, that entropy change behaves fundamentally differently in the forward time direction to the backward time direction. This is absolutely not the case. In the general case, entropy increases in the backward time direction in just the same way as it increases in the forward time direction: change of entropy is symmetrical with time. (However, a very small minority of physicists might still believe change of entropy is time-asymmetric - see my comments at the bottom of this discussion with the notoriously tetchy physicist Luboš Motl here).
The probabilistic basis of the second law of thermodynamics simply says that a system will have many more possible disordered states than ordered states, so a system which changes state randomly will most likely move to a more disordered state. This seems very clear and obvious - such a simple statement is never going to be the cause of something so mysterious as fundamental time-asymmetry. Indeed, this change to a more disordered state is just as applicable in the reverse time direction as in the forward time direction: it's just a change of state, independent of time.
But what about the second law of thermodynamics which states that "entropy increases with time"? This seems to imply a fundamental time-asymmetry to entropy. But we have to realise that the second law only applies to special-case systems: objects with low entropy, the sort of objects we generally encounter in everyday life (rusting cars, etc.). In fact, if we consider general-case objects (i.e., objects in thermal equilibrium), objects which have never been arranged into any sort of order, then their entropy is at a maximum already so their entropy can only decrease with time - completely at odds with the second law!
This generally-held misconception that change of entropy is fundamentally time-asymmetrical is revealed by the Loschmidt paradox. The Loschmidt paradox considers the apparently fundamental time-asymmetry of entropy implied by the second law and states that this is at odds with the known time symmetry of fundamental processes. It is only when we realise that the second law is frequently badly stated and hence contains unstated assumptions (which have been just considered) that the Loschmidt paradox is resolved. (Wikipedia describes this resolution of the paradox, showing how one of the key assumptions of Boltzmann's version of the second law of thermodynamics was flawed - see here).
But if change of entropy is time-symmetric, why do we see the entropy of the universe as only increasing? Roger Penrose considers this question in his book The Road to Reality. Penrose considers what we might expect to happen if we trace the entropy of the universe back in time from the state it is in now. If change of entropy is really time-symmetrical, then we should expect to see entropy increasing as we trace the universe into the past, just as we will see entropy increasing into the future. But we know, in fact, that the universe had a lower entropy in the past: i.e., the entropy of the universe actually reduces in the past. So where does this asymmetry come from?
As Roger Penrose goes on to reveal, the time-asymmetry of change of entropy within the universe is explained by the extraordinarily low entropy of the universe at its origin:
Basically, the low-entropy past of the universe "fixes" the experiment. If we want to get a symmetrical answer then we have to be careful to conduct a symmetrical experiment. Rather than starting with a special-case low entropy universe, we have to imagine a universe which started in thermal equilibrium and has reached its current state unaided, purely by chance:
After that low-entropy point is reached, we then see entropy starting to increase according to the second law. But the key thing is that if we trace the entropy of the universe back in time past the low-entropy point we now see that symmetry that Roger Penrose sought. Hence, change of entropy is fundamentally symmetrical.
In fact, throughout this discussion on the arrow of time we will find that the arrow of time is caused by the time-symmetric second law of thermodynamics, together with the very special, low-entropy initial conditions of the universe.
(This discussion on time-symmetric entropy change is based on an example by J. Richard Gott in his book Time Travel in Einstein's Universe in which the role of the universe is played by an ice cube - see here. The ice cube example is considered in detail in Chapter 6 of Brian Greene's book The Fabric of the Cosmos.)
Causality
We all have a very strong feeling of a directionality of time, which has a flow in a forwards direction. As Michael Lockwood says in his book The Labyrinth of Time: "We regard the forward direction in time, in stark contrast to the backward direction, as the direction in which causality is permitted to operate. Causes, we assume, can precede their effects, but cannot follow them."
But we have just seen how physical processes appear to be time-symmetrical, with no distinction between the forward and backward directions. So where does that leave causality? As Michael Lockwood again says about the passage of time: "We find no hint of this in the formalism of Newtonian physics. Not only is there no explicit reference to a passage or flow of time; there is not even any reference to cause and effect. Indeed, there is not even any directionality".
"But", you might protest, "surely causality works in only one direction: forwards in time? I kick a football - the football doesn't kick me." Well, let's consider the example immediately below of forward causality. We see a snooker cue coming in from the left, hitting the white ball, which then causes the white ball to hit the red ball:
However, if you shoot a movie of that sequence, and then play it backwards, it still makes perfect physical sense. As you can see below, we then have the red ball coming in from the right, hitting the white ball, which then causes the white ball to hit the cue backwards. So, because of the symmetry of the laws of physics, this process of causality - which we thought only applied to the forward direction of time - in fact applies equally to the backward direction of time as well:
The reason why we don't see causality happening in the backward direction is purely because of a bias in our psychological systems: something about the complexity of our psychological system (our brains!) causes our thought processes to work only in the forward direction of time (this will be considered below). The great advantage of recording the sequence on a movie and then playing the movie backwards (to reveal the time symmetry of causality) is that a movie camera works in a much more simple fashion than our brains and thus has no such psychological bias in the forward direction: it works in exactly the same way forward as backward.
So if causality is time-symmetrical, we could in fact think of our current situations are being caused by time-reversed future events as much as by past events! For example, as I sit here by my desk in work this morning, I could consider my position as being caused by me being in my apartment this evening, and driving my car from there backward in time, backward down the road the work, to put me in work this morning! It's a bit brain-bending, but it's equally valid as saying "I got up this morning, and drove forwards to work". It seems strange, but that's only because of our psychological bias. The movie of my complete day at work would tell the correct (time-reversible) story.
The Quantum Mechanical Arrow of Time
As has just been explained, almost all known physical principles (from Newtonian mechanics through to Einstein's relativity) have a completely symmetric treatment of past and future. Nowhere in any of these equations is there anything which distinguishes a forward direction of time from a backward direction of time. The exception to this rule appears to be quantum mechanics. On the page on The Quantum Casino it was explained how, when we make a measurement of a quantum observable, there is a "collapse of the wavefunction" in which a probability wave collapses to generate a single observed value from a range of possible values. This process appears to work in the forward time direction only, i.e., it is irreversible.
An explanation for this apparent "collapse of the wavefunction" is presented in detail on the page on Quantum Decoherence, so I don't want to repeat it here. Suffice to say that the coherent phase relationships of the interference terms are destroyed when a particle interacts with the environment. The dissipation of these terms into the wider environment can be interpreted in terms of increasing entropy (again, see the section on "Decoherence and Entropy" on the Quantum Decoherence page for full details). Quantum decoherence can then be understood as a thermodynamic process: after decoherence, the process is said to be thermodynamically irreversible.
Continuing our snooker analogy, the "collapse of the wavefunction" is like a snooker break-off shot. Imagine each ball represents an interference term of the quantum state. Before the shot, (before we make a quantum observation), we see low entropy - everything is nicely ordered. All the interference terms are coherent, and capable of producing interference patterns.
After the shot, the system of balls represents a system with greatly-increased entropy (disorder). This is what happens when we make a quantum observation: interference terms dissipate into the "heat bath" environment, and all coherence is lost in the confused mess. The situation is now one of thermal irreversibility: it is extremely unlikely the original ordered situation could re-form itself. We therefore only see the collapse of the wavefunction operating the forward time direction (for the same reason we don't see broken eggs mending themselves).
So once again the underlying physical principles appear to be time symmetric, with no fundamental preference for either the forward or backward time direction. The apparent arrow of time produced by the "collapse of the wavefunction" is once again shown to be a result of increasing entropy. As Andreas Albrecht explains in his arXiv paper astro-ph/0210527 (when considering decoherence in the double-slit experiment): "A double-slit electron striking a photographic plate is only a good quantum measurement to the extent that the photographic plate is well constructed, and has a very low probability of re-emitting the electron in the coherent 'double slit' state. Good photographic plates are possible because of the thermodynamic arrow of time: the electron striking the plate puts the internal degrees of freedom of the plate into a higher entropy state, which is essentially impossible to reverse. Furthermore, different electron positions on the plate become entangled with different states of the internal degrees of freedom, so there is essentially no interference between positions of the electron. From this point of view, the quantum mechanical arrow of time is none other than the thermodynamic arrow of time."
Why can't we remember the future?
If physical processes all appear to be time-reversible at a fundamental level, we might ask the question "Why can't we remember the future?" After all, we can remember the past, and physics seems to make no distinction between past, present, and future. So why don't we already have prior knowledge of what is going to happen in the future?
In order to answer this question, we shall consider the reasoning of James Hartle which is based around the radiative arrow of time:
The Radiative Arrow of Time
In his arXiv paper "The Physics of Now" (gr-qc/0403001), James Hartle makes the point that the reason we can't remember the future is because we have not yet received any information about future events. This thinking is based on the idea of a "light cone", the shape of which is defined by the speed of light:
At first glance, this might seem a very straightforward explanation of why we are unable to remember the future: it takes time for a light ray (photons) carrying information to reach us from a distant event. Basically, in the future we will have more information about distant events than we have at present. It is hard to imagine a situation in which light behaves differently - it would appear that light will always take time to travel from a point A to a point B:
This principle - that light will always take time, travelling forwards in time between two points - is called the radiative arrow of time (also known as the electromagnetic arrow of time). But this apparently clear-cut principle is not as clear-cut as it first appears. It turns out that the "world line" of the photon is the same for a photon travelling forwards in time from point A to B as it is for a photon travelling backward in time from point B to point A:
The world line of a photon (position of the photon at any given point in time) is the same for a photon going forwards in time from point A to point B as it is for a photon going backward in time from point B to point A.
In fact, if we temporarily forget about the little arrows on the world lines (which indicate "cause" and "effect") then we see that the world lines of both the forward and backward photons are precisely identical:
With the little arrows removed from the world lines, the paths of the photons going backward and forward in time are shown to be identical.
This principle is clearly illustrated by a Feynman diagram of particle interactions which can be rotated at will, showing particle interactions work exactly the same backward in time as forward in time:
It makes no sense to talk about the entropy of a single photon (entropy is a statistical property of a large group of particles), so a single photon has no arrow of time. However, we do not receive our information about distant events in the form of single photons. Rather, it appears we receive information in the form of light rays which are composed of billions of photons (bosons are quite happy to congregate in the same state, and gather together in a cooperative fashion to create light rays - see the It's a Small World page). For this reason, studies of the radiative arrow of time have concentrated on studying the Maxwell electromagnetic field equations which treats light as a field with a wave nature (rather than considering the path of individual particles).
It is often quoted that Maxwell's electromagnetic field equations are time-reversible and so allow for advanced (backward-in-time) waves as well as retarded (forward-in-time) waves (see here). However, in practice it is much easier to produce a retarded wave than an advanced wave, and this reveals the limitations of Maxwell's equations as a full description of the behaviour of light. We need to combine Maxwell's equations with something else in order to derive a radiative arrow of time.
James Hartle attempts to use Maxwell's equations to deduce the radiative arrow of time in Appendix A of his aforementioned arXiv paper gr-qc/0403001, "The Cosmological Origin of Time's Arrow". His approach (based on principles described in H. Dieter Zeh's book The Physical Basis for the Direction of Time) combines the time-symmetric Maxwell's equations with the time-asymmetric boundary conditions of the universe as a whole (he considers the asymmetrical total amount of electromagnetic radiation). The approach suggests that because there were no free electromagnetic fields at the start of the universe, but there are fields in the future, those fields must all be caused by retarded waves that have their sources in the past. However, I don't see how the radiative arrow of time can depend on the total of electromagnetic fields in the universe in this way. There's no equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics (increasing entropy) for electromagnetic fields. The total of electromagnetic field in an isolated system does not tend to increase (as is the case with entropy). The radiative arrow of time must surely depend on the increasing sum total of entropy in the universe, not the total of electromagnetic field. Surely the radiative arrow of time must have the same cause as the thermodynamic arrow of time.
At the beginning of the last century, Walter Ritz proposed that only retarded (forward-in-time) waves were physically possible (i.e., the process was fundamentally time-asymmetric). In 1908 and 1909 he had a famous argument with Einstein over this matter, as Einstein believed the process was fundamentally symmetric and could be explained by thermodynamic arguments (see here). It turns out that it is easier to create a light ray in the forward time direction as the behaviour of the billions of photons as they are produced (by an ordered source such as a light bulb) and scattered (when they reach a target) can be understood in turns of increasing entropy: "This arrow has been reversed in carefully-worked experiments which have created convergent waves, so this arrow probably follows from the thermodynamic arrow in that meeting the conditions to produce a convergent wave requires more order than the conditions for a radiative wave. Put differently, the probability for initial conditions that produce a convergent wave is much lower than the probability for initial conditions that produce a radiative wave. In fact, normally a radiative wave increases entropy, while a convergent wave decreases it." (see the Wikipedia article on the Arrow of Time). Hence, the reason we do not see convergent, advanced waves can be explained in terms of entropy.
When I turn on an electric light, for example, the photons leave the bulb in a relatively ordered form. The photons then radiate away from the bulb, redistributing themselves around the room (i.e., a radiative wave), creating a state of greater disorder - increased entropy. As Andreas Albrecht explains in his arXiv paper astro-ph/0210527: "The complete absence of the time-reverse of radiation absorption is understood to be one feature of the thermodynamic arrow of time in our world. A hillside absorbing an evening news broadcast is entering a higher entropy state, and the entropy would have to decrease for any of the troublesome time-reversed cases to take place. So in the end, the radiation arrow of time is none other than the thermodynamic arrow of time."
Could it be possible to remember the future?
If we consider the hypothetical situation in which we have found a way to circumvent the limitations imposed by the radiative arrow of time, it is interesting to ask if it could ever be possible to remember the future. And, if so, what would our "memories" by like?
In this respect, the Scottish philosopher Donald Mackay suggested an interesting "thought experiment". Mackay wondered if it could ever be possible to predict how someone will behave in the future, and, if so, what would be the consequences for human free will. If we had complete knowledge of the current state of a person's brain, would we be able to accurately predict a person's actions in the short-term future? Basically, if we are able to predict how a person will behave - and the decisions they will make - in the future then human free will is shown to be a fallacy, an illusion.
However, Mackay suggested that it would be impossible to predict a person's future decisions if that predicted future was made known to the person. This is because the person could then choose to act in a different way from how you have told him he will behave. This is described by John D. Barrow in his book Impossibility: "Consider a person who is asked to choose between soup or salad for lunch. If we introduce a brain scientist who not only knows the complete state of this person's brain, but that of the entire universe as well at present, we could ask whether this scientist can infallibly announce what the choice of lunch will be. The answer is 'No'. The subject can always be stubborn, and adopt a strategy that says 'If you say that I will choose soup, then I will choose salad, and vice versa'. Under these conditions it is logically impossible for the scientist to predict infallibly what the person will choose if the scientist makes his prediction known."
So if a person gains access to knowledge about his future behaviour, it would appear that it becomes impossible to predict that future. But this knowledge about future behaviour is precisely what a person will gain if he is able to remember the future. So if a person is able to remember the future, he could then choose to act in a different way to how his memory of the future tells him he will act! There would appear to be a logical inconsistency here: if a person is able to remember the future, then those memories of the future instantly become unreliable. Therefore, it would appear to be impossible to "remember the future".
As an example, here's how Dilbert might behave if he could remember the future:
This logical inconsistency prohibiting you from remembering the future (based on Mackay's reasoning) arises because the following two statements cannot both be true:
1. You can receive - or "remember" - information about events in the future.
2. You have "free will" in determining your future actions, i.e., you have complete choice in selecting your future actions from a range of possibilities.
However, it might be possible to remember the future (the first of those two statements being true) if the second statement is, in fact, false. Maybe you have no freedom of choice in choosing your future actions - maybe "free will" is just an illusion. Indeed, if all of spacetime is laid-out as an unchanging four-dimensional "block universe" then your future actions are just as determined - just as "set in stone" - as your past actions.
Block Time
For more information about this, see this Scientific American article by Paul Davies.
As Michael Lockwood says in his book The Labyrinth of Time: "To take the spacetime view seriously is indeed to regard everything that ever exists, or ever happens, at any time or place, as being just as real as the contents of the here and now. And this rules out any conception of free will that pictures human agents, through their choices, as selectively conferring actuality on what are initially only potentialities."
So now let's proceed on the basis that our sense of free will is just an illusion, and the future is fixed - a scenario which contains no logical inconsistencies and thus allows us (at least in theory) to "remember the future". We can then ask what form these "memories of the future" might take.
In our everyday experience, our memories of the past seem set in stone, but we have no recollection of the future. It is this distinction, this lack of recollection of the future, that gives us an impression of free will: the past is set in stone, but the future is undecided and we have yet to choose which path it takes. However, in a block universe the future is just as set in stone as the past, and our memories of the future would take exactly the same nature as our memories of the past: an unchanging future, set in stone.
In our everyday experience, we can remember the past (memories which appear fixed - like photos in frames), but not the future. Hence we get the impression of free will: the future is apparently undetermined - we feel free to select our future actions from a range of possibilities.
The fact that we can remember the past - yet have no recollection of the future - is the reason why we feel the "flow" of time: we get a false impression that the "unreal" future has become the "real" past.
If we were able to remember the future, we would find our memories of the future are also unalterable, just like our memories of the past. Our notion of free will would then be revealed as just an illusion.
You might think that would be rather unsettling, knowing that you are constrained to follow only one particular path of action, and have no choice in the matter. You might imagine that you would feel manipulated and controlled in your future actions - a rather scary feeling. However, I would imagine that the fact that you now have memories of both the past and future would mean that you would no longer feel a "flow" of time: we would feel perfectly balanced between "past" and "future", with no "motion" involved. Maybe that would be less scary?
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Somehow it seems that we should be able to "remember the future" as an act of out will, or choice in the present. I see remembering the future as imagining it. The whole "secret" thing or law of attraction. What do I want to "be my life?", experiencing what I want by "remembering" it. Somehow imagination and memory seem intertwined. I just tend to believe that freewill and the future already existing could be compatible. As a Christian, I believe that God already knows the future, therefore knows everything we will do in our lifetimes. For us to visualize a desire as actual, could that be using our memory in reverse? I don't know if you can make any sense of this, but maybe it will stimulate your thinking. I would be curious to hear your response. I guess I'll have to revisit this sight to see if anyone has commented. - Francine, 17th February 2008
Hi Francine, thanks for your comment. Donald Mackay (who I mentioned in the text) was also a Christian and proposed his theory to prove that there was such a thing as free will (see http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/Philosophy/PSCF12-99Feucht.html , though my version is perhaps clearer). Basically, as I described above, Mackay suggested that it would be impossible to predict a person's future decisions if that predicted future was made known to the person. However, as I described, I think there's a flaw in Mackay's argument in that he assumes the person would have freedom to take various future paths - something perhaps not possible in a block universe. This is covered very well in John D. Barrow's book "Impossibility" which I can recommend to you.
Here's another extract from "Impossibility" which you might find interesting: "Is it possible to pray for the past to be changed? Few Christian theologians would support this idea if the past was known to the person praying; but what if an event has occured about which the outcome is still unknown to you? Or what about an outcome, like an examination result, that has already been decided, but which has yet to be announced? In his book on miracles, C.S. Lewis, an influential popular writer on theological questions, sided with the idea tha it was rational to pray for events whose outcome had already been decided, because from a God's-eye perspective your future intercession could be an ingredient in the global events which may affect the outcome of the event being prayed for. Lewis was adopting what physicists call the 'block universe' picture of spacetime, in which the entire spacetime alread exists as a complete entity. He conceived of the whole of space and time as viewed externally by God, and so all prayers were known by God before they were made. This would permit free will to be retained together with a doctrine of God's omniscience. God's foreknowledge does not predestine our actions. Rather it is our actions that determine God's foreknowledge. We introduce these interesting theological questions to show that the questions of changing the past and making sense of the resulting coherence of the universe are not questions that lie solely in the realm of physics." - Andrew Thomas, 17th February 2008
This is a brilliant article- mind boggling
I definately believe that by praying we can ask God to change the past if that result is unkown to us. But am confused as to why this would only be possible if we dont know the outcome.
Any thoughts ?
Dr Walia - hardeep walia, 18th February 2008
Hardeep, the question of "why this would only be possible if we dont know the outcome" - I can see a kind of logic behind this conclusion in that if we knew the outcome already, and then that outcome changed, we would have an inconsistency in the system: an event which both occurred and didn't occur. At least if we didn't know the outcome then we wouldn't have that logical inconsistency in our heads. But could it be said that the other outcome happened, even though we were not aware of it? Basically, if we are not aware of the event, does it actually happen, does it have reality? That then introduces ideas of the observer somehow "creating reality" by their observation - ideas from quantum mechanics. Yeah, "mind-boggling", as you say! - Andrew Thomas, 18th February 2008
Hello, I love the way things are explained on this website. I would like to state that I had found a way to disprove time prior to reading any philosophical/theoretical/mathematic findings outside of my own, aside from a small article written by a friend of mine about writings from a philosopher by the name of Plato regarding reality. My goal now is to apply my findings with all applicable findings relating to reality and the function of the universe. This website has giving me so much that I want to thank you for your assistance. THANK YOU! My first mark is, without a doubt, an explanation as to how we are unable to remember what we call the future. - Kevin, 8th April 2008
Thanks, Kevin. Good luck with your theory of time. Be sure to post back here when you finish. - Andrew Thomas, 8th April 2008
Thanks for the great insight and many questions and paradoxes raised here. I am not a very bright fellow, but I have always had the strange sense that all of history which includes my memories are being constantly rewritten so to speak. Our memory of time, space and reality could be changing constantly at the quantum level. What seems like fixed and solid memories may really have changed many times over in the past few seconds. It would explain a lot of things if this is the case. Parallel universes could be constantly forming and collapsing all the time. We may be praying for things that we think are future but are really neither past or future, but from God's perspective there is no "Arrow of Time."---just the eternal now.The cause and effect of all things could be operating completely outside our concept of time moving forward. It would explain Jesus comment,"With God all things are possible!" - Rodney
Nice comment Rodney - Michael, 2nd May 2008
I've been listening to CDs of Vishal Mangalwadi's 2007 lectures at the U of Minnessota: "Must The Sun Set On The West". He says that God is outside of the universe he created, so he is not bound by the logic, for instance, or time, space, and energy, as we know it. That's why we need to "see what is there" rather than figuring it out in our minds, and why we cannot "know" the future unless he tells us. - Addamstaft, 9th June 2008
About Temporal Communication. I believe this may be how I have seen the future before.
I know, crazy.. right? Well I have an IQ of 130, have not been abducted by aliens, and am not considered weird by my fellow man..haha
I had a dream that I hit my bosses truck with my car on the driver side back. Then I woke up and in the morning and my bosses son told me he hit my car with my bosses truck in the drivers side back. The damage looked just like the dream. It is statistically impossible that this was a coincidence--especially because I have had this type of thing about 6 times on big stuff and hundreds of times on small stuff. (it was reversed but that happens in dreams). It was so astonishing I didnt even get mad my car was hit.
I theorized that I was actually in touch with the John of my future. Up until now I have ever heard anyone mention that this is how the future is seen by some people in some cases. Its like I pick up stray thoughts from the future me every now and then.
Another time a friend told me someone robbed his house. I went home and I thought real hard for a minute to intentionally "see" who did it. The name I came up with was a person who was never known as a thief and I hadnt seen him in maybe a year. I didnt say anything.
Well, 2 weeks later my friend told me that guy did it. I turned white. I dont think I saw him rob the house--I recalled the future conversation of being told he did it. I dont actually know if he did it... I just know he thinks the guy did it.
The other possibility is God allows us to know things. As a christian I know he can do this--I just dont know if thats the case here.
Either way--it proves the future already exists. There simply is no other explanation. I know its easy for people who havnt had these experiences to say Im misreading this--but I'm perceptive enough to know its real.
The real question you ask is could I have changed the future? Well, the missing component in people's search for the answer is God. If there is someone Outside Time who is in control --all the problems go away. In other word--if we do see the future..we see it for a reason. So whether we see it to confirm there is a God--or to prevent us from flipping out when something bad happens--or to actually prevent something for some unknown purpose...its up to God who knows all possible outcomes.
Anyway..very cool website my friend. - John R, 5th July 2008
That's a coincidence, because I had a dream last week about perfect surfing waves outside my flat (I'm a keen surfer, and we hardly ever get perfect waves here). And the next evening we had perfect waves just like in my dream! It really was a bit weird. I do suspect dreams tap into the enormous potential of the unconscious human mind in a way which we don't yet understand. Your experiences seem to bear that out. - Andrew Thomas, 5th July 2008
"The other possibility is God allows us to know things. As a christian I know he can do this--I just dont know if thats the case here. "
- Andrew, 14th September 2008
Without bringing religion into it, every scientist should know about the very strong evidence that already exists for precognition, in dreams or otherwise, including many carefully controlled experiments. See for example Dean Radin's books "Entangled Minds" and "Conscious Universe" (both with many good references) or any of several peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of the Parapsychological Assn, and the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. We *can* indeed "remember the future", but it is difficult exactly because of the increasing entropy argument given above. - Richard Shoup, 15th September 2008
Thanks very much for those references, Richard. - Andrew Thomas, 15th September 2008
Very interesting page … so we could have the basis to explain “Déjà vu” as well as “Human Intuition” : both phenomena could be interpreted as a malfunctioning (maybe intentionally left) in the process which prevents us to remember the future. - Gabriel, 29th September 2008
That's a good point, Gabriel. Yes, I suppose déjà vu could be thought of as "remembering the future" as you feel that your current situation is already in your memory. This implies that there was a point in the past when you could have "remembered the future". - Andrew Thomas, 29th September 2008
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cds 021008-FIL DTH ANNIV -4 YRS ON-JLR CRSS
////////////////////////////////////One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
/////////////////////It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired.
//////////////////////////Dinosaurs survived two mass extinctions and waited at least 30 million years to achieve world domination, according to a Bristol University study in Biology Letters.
///////////////////////ientific American Mind - October 22, 2008
Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death
Why so many of us think our minds continue on after we die
By Jesse Bering
Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.
It should strike us as odd that we feel inclined to nod our heads in agreement to the twangy, sweetly discordant folk vocals of Iris Dement in “Let the Mystery Be,” a humble paean about the hereafter. In fact, the only real mystery is why we’re so convinced that when it comes to where we’re going “when the whole thing’s done,” we’re dealing with a mystery at all. After all, the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body. And the mind is what the brain does—it’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead, too?
And yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.
The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence.
According to proponents, you possess a secret arsenal of psychological defenses designed to keep your death anxiety at bay (and to keep you from ending up in the fetal position listening to Nick Drake on your iPod). My writing this article, for example, would be interpreted as an exercise in “symbolic immortality”; terror management theorists would likely tell you that I wrote it for posterity, to enable a concrete set of my ephemeral ideas to outlive me, the biological organism. (I would tell you that I’d be happy enough if a year from now it still had a faint pulse.)
Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.
Curiously Immortal
The problem applies even to those who claim not to believe in an afterlife. As philosopher and Center for Naturalism founder Thomas W. Clark wrote in a 1994 article for the Humanist:
Here ... is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in that view: It is to reify nothingness—make it a positive condition or quality (for example, of “blackness”)—and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally.
Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”
This observation may not sound like a major revelation to you, but I bet you’ve never considered what it actually means, which is that your own mortality is unfalsifiable from the first-person perspective. This obstacle is why writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe allegedly remarked that “everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.”
Even when we want to believe that our minds end at death, it is a real struggle to think in this way. A study I published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture in 2002 reveals the illusion of immortality operating in full swing in the minds of undergraduate students who were asked a series of questions about the psychological faculties of a dead man.
Richard, I told the students, had been killed instantaneously when his vehicle plunged into a utility pole. After the participants read a narrative about Richard’s state of mind just prior to the accident, I queried them as to whether the man, now that he was dead, retained the capacity to experience mental states. “Is Richard still thinking about his wife?” I asked them. “Can he still taste the flavor of the breath mint he ate just before he died? Does he want to be alive?”
You can imagine the looks I got, because apparently not many people pause to consider whether souls have taste buds, become randy or get headaches. Yet most gave answers indicative of “psychological continuity reasoning,” in which they envisioned Richard’s mind to continue functioning despite his death. This finding came as no surprise given that, on a separate scale, most respondents classified themselves as having a belief in some form of an afterlife.
What was surprising, however, was that many participants who had identified themselves as having “extinctivist” beliefs (they had ticked off the box that read: “What we think of as the ‘soul,’ or conscious personality of a person, ceases permanently when the body dies”) occasionally gave psychological-continuity responses, too. Thirty-two percent of the extinctivists’ answers betrayed their hidden reasoning that emotions and desires survive death; another 36 percent of their responses suggested the extinctivists reasoned this way for mental states related to knowledge (such as remembering, believing or knowing). One particularly vehement extinctivist thought the whole line of questioning silly and seemed to regard me as a numbskull for even asking. But just as well—he proceeded to point out that of course Richard knows he is dead, because there’s no afterlife and Richard sees that now.
So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the “simulation constraint hypothesis,” is that in attempting to imagine what it’s like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences—because that’s how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn’t “like” anything we’ve ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren’t good enough.
For us extinctivists, it’s kind of like staring into a hallway of mirrors—but rather than confronting a visual trick, we’re dealing with cognitive reverberations of subjective experience. In Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s 1913 existential screed, The Tragic Sense of Life, one can almost see the author tearing out his hair contemplating this very fact. “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness,” he writes, “and you will see the impossibility of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.”
Wait, you say, isn’t Unamuno forgetting something? We certainly do have experience with nothingness. Every night, in fact, when we’re in dreamless sleep. But you’d be mistaken in this assumption. Clark puts it this way (emphasis mine): “We may occasionally have the impression of having experienced or ‘undergone’ a period of unconsciousness, but, of course, this is impossible. The ‘nothingness’ of unconsciousness cannot be an experienced actuality.”
If psychological immortality represents the intuitive, natural way of thinking about death, then we might expect young children to be particularly inclined to reason in this way. As an eight-year-old, I watched as the remains of our family’s golden retriever, Sam, were buried in the woods behind our house. Still, I thought Sam had a mind capable of knowing I loved her and I was sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye. That Sam’s spirit lived on was not something my parents or anyone else ever explicitly pointed out to me. Although she had been reduced to no more than a few ounces of dust, which was in turn sealed in a now waterlogged box, it never even occurred to me that it was a strange idea.
Yet if you were to have asked me what Sam was experiencing, I probably would have muttered something like the type of answers Gerald P. Koocher reported hearing in a 1973 study published in Developmental Psychology. Koocher, then a doctoral student at the University of Missouri–Columbia and later president of the American Psychological Association, asked six- to 15-year-olds what happens when you die. Consistent with the simulation-constraint hypothesis, many answers relied on everyday experience to describe death, “with references to sleeping, feeling ‘peaceful,’ or simply ‘being very dizzy.’ ”
A Mind-Body Disconnect
But Koocher’s study in itself doesn’t tell us where such ideas come from. The simulation-constraint hypothesis posits that this type of thinking is innate and unlearned. Fortunately, this hypothesis is falsifiable. If afterlife beliefs are a product of cultural indoctrination, with children picking up such ideas through religious teachings, through the media, or informally through family and friends, then one should rationally predict that psychological-continuity reasoning increases with age. Aside from becoming more aware of their own mortality, after all, older kids have had a longer period of exposure to the concept of an afterlife.
In fact, recent findings show the opposite developmental trend. In a 2004 study reported in Developmental Psychology, Florida Atlantic University psychologist David F. Bjorklund and I presented 200 three- to 12-year-olds with a puppet show. Every child saw the story of Baby Mouse, who was out strolling innocently in the woods. “Just then,” we told them, “he notices something very strange. The bushes are moving! An alligator jumps out of the bushes and gobbles him all up. Baby Mouse is not alive anymore.”
Just like the adults from the previously mentioned study, the children were asked about dead Baby Mouse’s psychological functioning. “Does Baby Mouse still want to go home?” we asked them. “Does he still feel sick?” “Can he still smell the flowers?” The youngest children in the study, the three- to five-year-olds, were significantly more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than children from the two older age groups were.
But here’s the really curious part. Even the preschoolers had a solid grasp on biological cessation; they knew, for example, that dead Baby Mouse didn’t need food or water anymore. They knew he wouldn’t grow up to be an adult mouse. Heck, 85 percent of the youngest kids even told us that his brain no longer worked. Yet most of these very young children then told us that dead Baby Mouse was hungry or thirsty, that he felt better or that he was still angry at his brother.
One couldn’t say that the preschoolers lacked a concept of death, therefore, because nearly all of the kids realized that biological imperatives no longer applied after death. Rather they seemed to have trouble using this knowledge to theorize about related mental functions.
From an evolutionary perspective, a coherent theory about psychological death is not necessarily vital. Anthropologist H. Clark Barrett of the University of California, Los Angeles, believes instead that understanding the cessation of “agency” (for example, that a dead creature isn’t going to suddenly leap up and bite you) is probably what saved lives (and thus genes). According to Barrett, comprehending the cessation of the mind, on the other hand, has no survival value and is, in an evolutionary sense, unnecessary.
In a 2005 study published in the journal Cognition, Barrett and psychologist Tanya Behne of the University of Manchester in England reported that city-dwelling four-year-olds from Berlin were just as good at distinguishing sleeping animals from dead ones as hunter-horticulturalist children from the Shuar region of Ecuador were. Even today’s urban children appear tuned in to perceptual cues signaling death. A “violation of the body envelope” (in other words, a mutilated carcass) is a pretty good sign that one needn’t worry about tiptoeing around.
The Culture Factor
On the one hand, then, from a very early age, children realize that dead bodies are not coming back to life. On the other hand, also from a very early age, kids endow the dead with ongoing psychological functions. So where do culture and religious teaching come into the mix, if at all?
In fact, exposure to the concept of an afterlife plays a crucial role in enriching and elaborating this natural cognitive stance; it’s sort of like an architectural scaffolding process, whereby culture develops and decorates the innate psychological building blocks of religious belief. The end product can be as ornate or austere as you like, from the headache-inducing reincarnation beliefs of Theravada Buddhists to the man on the street’s “I believe there’s something” brand of philosophy—but it’s made of the same brick and mortar just the same.
In support of the idea that culture influences our natural tendency to deny the death of the mind, Harvard University psychologist Paul Harris and researcher Marta Giménez of the National University of Distance Education in Spain showed that when the wording in interviews is tweaked to include medical or scientific terms, psychological-continuity reasoning decreases. In this 2005 study published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture, seven- to 11-year-old children in Madrid who heard a story about a priest telling a child that his grandmother “is with God” were more likely to attribute ongoing mental states to the decedent than were those who heard the identical story but instead about a doctor saying a grandfather was “dead and buried.”
And in a 2005 replication of the Baby Mouse experiment published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, psychologist David Bjorklund and I teamed with psychologist Carlos Hernández Blasi of Jaume I University in Spain to compare children in a Catholic school with those attending a public secular school in Castellón, Spain. As in the previous study, an overwhelming majority of the youngest children—five- to six-year-olds—from both educational backgrounds said that Baby Mouse’s mental states survived. The type of curriculum, secular or religious, made no difference. With increasing age, however, culture becomes a factor—the kids attending Catholic school were more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than were those at the secular school. There was even a smattering of young extinctivists in the latter camp.
Free Spirits
The types of cognitive obstacles discussed earlier may be responsible for our innate sense
of immortality. But although the simulation-constraint hypothesis helps to explain why so many people believe in something as fantastically illogical as an afterlife, it doesn’t tell us why people see the soul unbuckling itself from the body and floating off like an invisible helium balloon into the realm of eternity. After all, there’s nothing to stop us from having afterlife beliefs that involve the still active mind being entombed in the skull and deliriously happy. Yet almost nobody has such a belief.
Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn’t cease to exist simply because you couldn’t see them. Developmental psychologists even have a fancy term for this basic concept: “person permanence.” Such an off-line social awareness leads us to tacitly assume that the people we know are somewhere doing something. As I’m writing this article in Belfast, for example, my mind’s eye conjures up my friend Ginger in New Orleans walking her poodle or playfully bickering with her husband, things that I know she does routinely.
As I’ve argued in my 2006 Behavioral and Brain Sciences article, “The Folk Psychology of Souls,” human cognition is not equipped to update the list of players in our complex social rosters by accommodating a particular person’s sudden inexistence. We can’t simply switch off our person-permanence thinking just because someone has died. This inability is especially the case, of course, for those whom we were closest to and whom we frequently imagined to be actively engaging in various activities when out of sight.
And so person permanence may be the final cognitive hurdle that gets in the way of our effectively realizing the dead as they truly are—infinitely in situ, inanimate carbon residue. Instead it’s much more “natural” to imagine them as existing in some vague, unobservable locale, very much living their dead lives.
Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "The End?"
//////////////////
/////////////////////It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired.
//////////////////////////Dinosaurs survived two mass extinctions and waited at least 30 million years to achieve world domination, according to a Bristol University study in Biology Letters.
///////////////////////ientific American Mind - October 22, 2008
Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death
Why so many of us think our minds continue on after we die
By Jesse Bering
Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.
It should strike us as odd that we feel inclined to nod our heads in agreement to the twangy, sweetly discordant folk vocals of Iris Dement in “Let the Mystery Be,” a humble paean about the hereafter. In fact, the only real mystery is why we’re so convinced that when it comes to where we’re going “when the whole thing’s done,” we’re dealing with a mystery at all. After all, the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body. And the mind is what the brain does—it’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead, too?
And yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.
The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence.
According to proponents, you possess a secret arsenal of psychological defenses designed to keep your death anxiety at bay (and to keep you from ending up in the fetal position listening to Nick Drake on your iPod). My writing this article, for example, would be interpreted as an exercise in “symbolic immortality”; terror management theorists would likely tell you that I wrote it for posterity, to enable a concrete set of my ephemeral ideas to outlive me, the biological organism. (I would tell you that I’d be happy enough if a year from now it still had a faint pulse.)
Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.
Curiously Immortal
The problem applies even to those who claim not to believe in an afterlife. As philosopher and Center for Naturalism founder Thomas W. Clark wrote in a 1994 article for the Humanist:
Here ... is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in that view: It is to reify nothingness—make it a positive condition or quality (for example, of “blackness”)—and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally.
Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”
This observation may not sound like a major revelation to you, but I bet you’ve never considered what it actually means, which is that your own mortality is unfalsifiable from the first-person perspective. This obstacle is why writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe allegedly remarked that “everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.”
Even when we want to believe that our minds end at death, it is a real struggle to think in this way. A study I published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture in 2002 reveals the illusion of immortality operating in full swing in the minds of undergraduate students who were asked a series of questions about the psychological faculties of a dead man.
Richard, I told the students, had been killed instantaneously when his vehicle plunged into a utility pole. After the participants read a narrative about Richard’s state of mind just prior to the accident, I queried them as to whether the man, now that he was dead, retained the capacity to experience mental states. “Is Richard still thinking about his wife?” I asked them. “Can he still taste the flavor of the breath mint he ate just before he died? Does he want to be alive?”
You can imagine the looks I got, because apparently not many people pause to consider whether souls have taste buds, become randy or get headaches. Yet most gave answers indicative of “psychological continuity reasoning,” in which they envisioned Richard’s mind to continue functioning despite his death. This finding came as no surprise given that, on a separate scale, most respondents classified themselves as having a belief in some form of an afterlife.
What was surprising, however, was that many participants who had identified themselves as having “extinctivist” beliefs (they had ticked off the box that read: “What we think of as the ‘soul,’ or conscious personality of a person, ceases permanently when the body dies”) occasionally gave psychological-continuity responses, too. Thirty-two percent of the extinctivists’ answers betrayed their hidden reasoning that emotions and desires survive death; another 36 percent of their responses suggested the extinctivists reasoned this way for mental states related to knowledge (such as remembering, believing or knowing). One particularly vehement extinctivist thought the whole line of questioning silly and seemed to regard me as a numbskull for even asking. But just as well—he proceeded to point out that of course Richard knows he is dead, because there’s no afterlife and Richard sees that now.
So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the “simulation constraint hypothesis,” is that in attempting to imagine what it’s like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences—because that’s how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn’t “like” anything we’ve ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren’t good enough.
For us extinctivists, it’s kind of like staring into a hallway of mirrors—but rather than confronting a visual trick, we’re dealing with cognitive reverberations of subjective experience. In Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s 1913 existential screed, The Tragic Sense of Life, one can almost see the author tearing out his hair contemplating this very fact. “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness,” he writes, “and you will see the impossibility of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.”
Wait, you say, isn’t Unamuno forgetting something? We certainly do have experience with nothingness. Every night, in fact, when we’re in dreamless sleep. But you’d be mistaken in this assumption. Clark puts it this way (emphasis mine): “We may occasionally have the impression of having experienced or ‘undergone’ a period of unconsciousness, but, of course, this is impossible. The ‘nothingness’ of unconsciousness cannot be an experienced actuality.”
If psychological immortality represents the intuitive, natural way of thinking about death, then we might expect young children to be particularly inclined to reason in this way. As an eight-year-old, I watched as the remains of our family’s golden retriever, Sam, were buried in the woods behind our house. Still, I thought Sam had a mind capable of knowing I loved her and I was sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye. That Sam’s spirit lived on was not something my parents or anyone else ever explicitly pointed out to me. Although she had been reduced to no more than a few ounces of dust, which was in turn sealed in a now waterlogged box, it never even occurred to me that it was a strange idea.
Yet if you were to have asked me what Sam was experiencing, I probably would have muttered something like the type of answers Gerald P. Koocher reported hearing in a 1973 study published in Developmental Psychology. Koocher, then a doctoral student at the University of Missouri–Columbia and later president of the American Psychological Association, asked six- to 15-year-olds what happens when you die. Consistent with the simulation-constraint hypothesis, many answers relied on everyday experience to describe death, “with references to sleeping, feeling ‘peaceful,’ or simply ‘being very dizzy.’ ”
A Mind-Body Disconnect
But Koocher’s study in itself doesn’t tell us where such ideas come from. The simulation-constraint hypothesis posits that this type of thinking is innate and unlearned. Fortunately, this hypothesis is falsifiable. If afterlife beliefs are a product of cultural indoctrination, with children picking up such ideas through religious teachings, through the media, or informally through family and friends, then one should rationally predict that psychological-continuity reasoning increases with age. Aside from becoming more aware of their own mortality, after all, older kids have had a longer period of exposure to the concept of an afterlife.
In fact, recent findings show the opposite developmental trend. In a 2004 study reported in Developmental Psychology, Florida Atlantic University psychologist David F. Bjorklund and I presented 200 three- to 12-year-olds with a puppet show. Every child saw the story of Baby Mouse, who was out strolling innocently in the woods. “Just then,” we told them, “he notices something very strange. The bushes are moving! An alligator jumps out of the bushes and gobbles him all up. Baby Mouse is not alive anymore.”
Just like the adults from the previously mentioned study, the children were asked about dead Baby Mouse’s psychological functioning. “Does Baby Mouse still want to go home?” we asked them. “Does he still feel sick?” “Can he still smell the flowers?” The youngest children in the study, the three- to five-year-olds, were significantly more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than children from the two older age groups were.
But here’s the really curious part. Even the preschoolers had a solid grasp on biological cessation; they knew, for example, that dead Baby Mouse didn’t need food or water anymore. They knew he wouldn’t grow up to be an adult mouse. Heck, 85 percent of the youngest kids even told us that his brain no longer worked. Yet most of these very young children then told us that dead Baby Mouse was hungry or thirsty, that he felt better or that he was still angry at his brother.
One couldn’t say that the preschoolers lacked a concept of death, therefore, because nearly all of the kids realized that biological imperatives no longer applied after death. Rather they seemed to have trouble using this knowledge to theorize about related mental functions.
From an evolutionary perspective, a coherent theory about psychological death is not necessarily vital. Anthropologist H. Clark Barrett of the University of California, Los Angeles, believes instead that understanding the cessation of “agency” (for example, that a dead creature isn’t going to suddenly leap up and bite you) is probably what saved lives (and thus genes). According to Barrett, comprehending the cessation of the mind, on the other hand, has no survival value and is, in an evolutionary sense, unnecessary.
In a 2005 study published in the journal Cognition, Barrett and psychologist Tanya Behne of the University of Manchester in England reported that city-dwelling four-year-olds from Berlin were just as good at distinguishing sleeping animals from dead ones as hunter-horticulturalist children from the Shuar region of Ecuador were. Even today’s urban children appear tuned in to perceptual cues signaling death. A “violation of the body envelope” (in other words, a mutilated carcass) is a pretty good sign that one needn’t worry about tiptoeing around.
The Culture Factor
On the one hand, then, from a very early age, children realize that dead bodies are not coming back to life. On the other hand, also from a very early age, kids endow the dead with ongoing psychological functions. So where do culture and religious teaching come into the mix, if at all?
In fact, exposure to the concept of an afterlife plays a crucial role in enriching and elaborating this natural cognitive stance; it’s sort of like an architectural scaffolding process, whereby culture develops and decorates the innate psychological building blocks of religious belief. The end product can be as ornate or austere as you like, from the headache-inducing reincarnation beliefs of Theravada Buddhists to the man on the street’s “I believe there’s something” brand of philosophy—but it’s made of the same brick and mortar just the same.
In support of the idea that culture influences our natural tendency to deny the death of the mind, Harvard University psychologist Paul Harris and researcher Marta Giménez of the National University of Distance Education in Spain showed that when the wording in interviews is tweaked to include medical or scientific terms, psychological-continuity reasoning decreases. In this 2005 study published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture, seven- to 11-year-old children in Madrid who heard a story about a priest telling a child that his grandmother “is with God” were more likely to attribute ongoing mental states to the decedent than were those who heard the identical story but instead about a doctor saying a grandfather was “dead and buried.”
And in a 2005 replication of the Baby Mouse experiment published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, psychologist David Bjorklund and I teamed with psychologist Carlos Hernández Blasi of Jaume I University in Spain to compare children in a Catholic school with those attending a public secular school in Castellón, Spain. As in the previous study, an overwhelming majority of the youngest children—five- to six-year-olds—from both educational backgrounds said that Baby Mouse’s mental states survived. The type of curriculum, secular or religious, made no difference. With increasing age, however, culture becomes a factor—the kids attending Catholic school were more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than were those at the secular school. There was even a smattering of young extinctivists in the latter camp.
Free Spirits
The types of cognitive obstacles discussed earlier may be responsible for our innate sense
of immortality. But although the simulation-constraint hypothesis helps to explain why so many people believe in something as fantastically illogical as an afterlife, it doesn’t tell us why people see the soul unbuckling itself from the body and floating off like an invisible helium balloon into the realm of eternity. After all, there’s nothing to stop us from having afterlife beliefs that involve the still active mind being entombed in the skull and deliriously happy. Yet almost nobody has such a belief.
Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn’t cease to exist simply because you couldn’t see them. Developmental psychologists even have a fancy term for this basic concept: “person permanence.” Such an off-line social awareness leads us to tacitly assume that the people we know are somewhere doing something. As I’m writing this article in Belfast, for example, my mind’s eye conjures up my friend Ginger in New Orleans walking her poodle or playfully bickering with her husband, things that I know she does routinely.
As I’ve argued in my 2006 Behavioral and Brain Sciences article, “The Folk Psychology of Souls,” human cognition is not equipped to update the list of players in our complex social rosters by accommodating a particular person’s sudden inexistence. We can’t simply switch off our person-permanence thinking just because someone has died. This inability is especially the case, of course, for those whom we were closest to and whom we frequently imagined to be actively engaging in various activities when out of sight.
And so person permanence may be the final cognitive hurdle that gets in the way of our effectively realizing the dead as they truly are—infinitely in situ, inanimate carbon residue. Instead it’s much more “natural” to imagine them as existing in some vague, unobservable locale, very much living their dead lives.
Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "The End?"
//////////////////
cds 021008-FIL DTH ANNIV -4 YRS ON-JLR CRSS
////////////////////////////////////One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
/////////////////////It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired.
//////////////////////////Dinosaurs survived two mass extinctions and waited at least 30 million years to achieve world domination, according to a Bristol University study in Biology Letters.
///////////////////////ientific American Mind - October 22, 2008
Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death
Why so many of us think our minds continue on after we die
By Jesse Bering
Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.
It should strike us as odd that we feel inclined to nod our heads in agreement to the twangy, sweetly discordant folk vocals of Iris Dement in “Let the Mystery Be,” a humble paean about the hereafter. In fact, the only real mystery is why we’re so convinced that when it comes to where we’re going “when the whole thing’s done,” we’re dealing with a mystery at all. After all, the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body. And the mind is what the brain does—it’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead, too?
And yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.
The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence.
According to proponents, you possess a secret arsenal of psychological defenses designed to keep your death anxiety at bay (and to keep you from ending up in the fetal position listening to Nick Drake on your iPod). My writing this article, for example, would be interpreted as an exercise in “symbolic immortality”; terror management theorists would likely tell you that I wrote it for posterity, to enable a concrete set of my ephemeral ideas to outlive me, the biological organism. (I would tell you that I’d be happy enough if a year from now it still had a faint pulse.)
Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.
Curiously Immortal
The problem applies even to those who claim not to believe in an afterlife. As philosopher and Center for Naturalism founder Thomas W. Clark wrote in a 1994 article for the Humanist:
Here ... is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in that view: It is to reify nothingness—make it a positive condition or quality (for example, of “blackness”)—and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally.
Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”
This observation may not sound like a major revelation to you, but I bet you’ve never considered what it actually means, which is that your own mortality is unfalsifiable from the first-person perspective. This obstacle is why writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe allegedly remarked that “everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.”
Even when we want to believe that our minds end at death, it is a real struggle to think in this way. A study I published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture in 2002 reveals the illusion of immortality operating in full swing in the minds of undergraduate students who were asked a series of questions about the psychological faculties of a dead man.
Richard, I told the students, had been killed instantaneously when his vehicle plunged into a utility pole. After the participants read a narrative about Richard’s state of mind just prior to the accident, I queried them as to whether the man, now that he was dead, retained the capacity to experience mental states. “Is Richard still thinking about his wife?” I asked them. “Can he still taste the flavor of the breath mint he ate just before he died? Does he want to be alive?”
You can imagine the looks I got, because apparently not many people pause to consider whether souls have taste buds, become randy or get headaches. Yet most gave answers indicative of “psychological continuity reasoning,” in which they envisioned Richard’s mind to continue functioning despite his death. This finding came as no surprise given that, on a separate scale, most respondents classified themselves as having a belief in some form of an afterlife.
What was surprising, however, was that many participants who had identified themselves as having “extinctivist” beliefs (they had ticked off the box that read: “What we think of as the ‘soul,’ or conscious personality of a person, ceases permanently when the body dies”) occasionally gave psychological-continuity responses, too. Thirty-two percent of the extinctivists’ answers betrayed their hidden reasoning that emotions and desires survive death; another 36 percent of their responses suggested the extinctivists reasoned this way for mental states related to knowledge (such as remembering, believing or knowing). One particularly vehement extinctivist thought the whole line of questioning silly and seemed to regard me as a numbskull for even asking. But just as well—he proceeded to point out that of course Richard knows he is dead, because there’s no afterlife and Richard sees that now.
So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the “simulation constraint hypothesis,” is that in attempting to imagine what it’s like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences—because that’s how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn’t “like” anything we’ve ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren’t good enough.
For us extinctivists, it’s kind of like staring into a hallway of mirrors—but rather than confronting a visual trick, we’re dealing with cognitive reverberations of subjective experience. In Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s 1913 existential screed, The Tragic Sense of Life, one can almost see the author tearing out his hair contemplating this very fact. “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness,” he writes, “and you will see the impossibility of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.”
Wait, you say, isn’t Unamuno forgetting something? We certainly do have experience with nothingness. Every night, in fact, when we’re in dreamless sleep. But you’d be mistaken in this assumption. Clark puts it this way (emphasis mine): “We may occasionally have the impression of having experienced or ‘undergone’ a period of unconsciousness, but, of course, this is impossible. The ‘nothingness’ of unconsciousness cannot be an experienced actuality.”
If psychological immortality represents the intuitive, natural way of thinking about death, then we might expect young children to be particularly inclined to reason in this way. As an eight-year-old, I watched as the remains of our family’s golden retriever, Sam, were buried in the woods behind our house. Still, I thought Sam had a mind capable of knowing I loved her and I was sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye. That Sam’s spirit lived on was not something my parents or anyone else ever explicitly pointed out to me. Although she had been reduced to no more than a few ounces of dust, which was in turn sealed in a now waterlogged box, it never even occurred to me that it was a strange idea.
Yet if you were to have asked me what Sam was experiencing, I probably would have muttered something like the type of answers Gerald P. Koocher reported hearing in a 1973 study published in Developmental Psychology. Koocher, then a doctoral student at the University of Missouri–Columbia and later president of the American Psychological Association, asked six- to 15-year-olds what happens when you die. Consistent with the simulation-constraint hypothesis, many answers relied on everyday experience to describe death, “with references to sleeping, feeling ‘peaceful,’ or simply ‘being very dizzy.’ ”
A Mind-Body Disconnect
But Koocher’s study in itself doesn’t tell us where such ideas come from. The simulation-constraint hypothesis posits that this type of thinking is innate and unlearned. Fortunately, this hypothesis is falsifiable. If afterlife beliefs are a product of cultural indoctrination, with children picking up such ideas through religious teachings, through the media, or informally through family and friends, then one should rationally predict that psychological-continuity reasoning increases with age. Aside from becoming more aware of their own mortality, after all, older kids have had a longer period of exposure to the concept of an afterlife.
In fact, recent findings show the opposite developmental trend. In a 2004 study reported in Developmental Psychology, Florida Atlantic University psychologist David F. Bjorklund and I presented 200 three- to 12-year-olds with a puppet show. Every child saw the story of Baby Mouse, who was out strolling innocently in the woods. “Just then,” we told them, “he notices something very strange. The bushes are moving! An alligator jumps out of the bushes and gobbles him all up. Baby Mouse is not alive anymore.”
Just like the adults from the previously mentioned study, the children were asked about dead Baby Mouse’s psychological functioning. “Does Baby Mouse still want to go home?” we asked them. “Does he still feel sick?” “Can he still smell the flowers?” The youngest children in the study, the three- to five-year-olds, were significantly more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than children from the two older age groups were.
But here’s the really curious part. Even the preschoolers had a solid grasp on biological cessation; they knew, for example, that dead Baby Mouse didn’t need food or water anymore. They knew he wouldn’t grow up to be an adult mouse. Heck, 85 percent of the youngest kids even told us that his brain no longer worked. Yet most of these very young children then told us that dead Baby Mouse was hungry or thirsty, that he felt better or that he was still angry at his brother.
One couldn’t say that the preschoolers lacked a concept of death, therefore, because nearly all of the kids realized that biological imperatives no longer applied after death. Rather they seemed to have trouble using this knowledge to theorize about related mental functions.
From an evolutionary perspective, a coherent theory about psychological death is not necessarily vital. Anthropologist H. Clark Barrett of the University of California, Los Angeles, believes instead that understanding the cessation of “agency” (for example, that a dead creature isn’t going to suddenly leap up and bite you) is probably what saved lives (and thus genes). According to Barrett, comprehending the cessation of the mind, on the other hand, has no survival value and is, in an evolutionary sense, unnecessary.
In a 2005 study published in the journal Cognition, Barrett and psychologist Tanya Behne of the University of Manchester in England reported that city-dwelling four-year-olds from Berlin were just as good at distinguishing sleeping animals from dead ones as hunter-horticulturalist children from the Shuar region of Ecuador were. Even today’s urban children appear tuned in to perceptual cues signaling death. A “violation of the body envelope” (in other words, a mutilated carcass) is a pretty good sign that one needn’t worry about tiptoeing around.
The Culture Factor
On the one hand, then, from a very early age, children realize that dead bodies are not coming back to life. On the other hand, also from a very early age, kids endow the dead with ongoing psychological functions. So where do culture and religious teaching come into the mix, if at all?
In fact, exposure to the concept of an afterlife plays a crucial role in enriching and elaborating this natural cognitive stance; it’s sort of like an architectural scaffolding process, whereby culture develops and decorates the innate psychological building blocks of religious belief. The end product can be as ornate or austere as you like, from the headache-inducing reincarnation beliefs of Theravada Buddhists to the man on the street’s “I believe there’s something” brand of philosophy—but it’s made of the same brick and mortar just the same.
In support of the idea that culture influences our natural tendency to deny the death of the mind, Harvard University psychologist Paul Harris and researcher Marta Giménez of the National University of Distance Education in Spain showed that when the wording in interviews is tweaked to include medical or scientific terms, psychological-continuity reasoning decreases. In this 2005 study published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture, seven- to 11-year-old children in Madrid who heard a story about a priest telling a child that his grandmother “is with God” were more likely to attribute ongoing mental states to the decedent than were those who heard the identical story but instead about a doctor saying a grandfather was “dead and buried.”
And in a 2005 replication of the Baby Mouse experiment published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, psychologist David Bjorklund and I teamed with psychologist Carlos Hernández Blasi of Jaume I University in Spain to compare children in a Catholic school with those attending a public secular school in Castellón, Spain. As in the previous study, an overwhelming majority of the youngest children—five- to six-year-olds—from both educational backgrounds said that Baby Mouse’s mental states survived. The type of curriculum, secular or religious, made no difference. With increasing age, however, culture becomes a factor—the kids attending Catholic school were more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than were those at the secular school. There was even a smattering of young extinctivists in the latter camp.
Free Spirits
The types of cognitive obstacles discussed earlier may be responsible for our innate sense
of immortality. But although the simulation-constraint hypothesis helps to explain why so many people believe in something as fantastically illogical as an afterlife, it doesn’t tell us why people see the soul unbuckling itself from the body and floating off like an invisible helium balloon into the realm of eternity. After all, there’s nothing to stop us from having afterlife beliefs that involve the still active mind being entombed in the skull and deliriously happy. Yet almost nobody has such a belief.
Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn’t cease to exist simply because you couldn’t see them. Developmental psychologists even have a fancy term for this basic concept: “person permanence.” Such an off-line social awareness leads us to tacitly assume that the people we know are somewhere doing something. As I’m writing this article in Belfast, for example, my mind’s eye conjures up my friend Ginger in New Orleans walking her poodle or playfully bickering with her husband, things that I know she does routinely.
As I’ve argued in my 2006 Behavioral and Brain Sciences article, “The Folk Psychology of Souls,” human cognition is not equipped to update the list of players in our complex social rosters by accommodating a particular person’s sudden inexistence. We can’t simply switch off our person-permanence thinking just because someone has died. This inability is especially the case, of course, for those whom we were closest to and whom we frequently imagined to be actively engaging in various activities when out of sight.
And so person permanence may be the final cognitive hurdle that gets in the way of our effectively realizing the dead as they truly are—infinitely in situ, inanimate carbon residue. Instead it’s much more “natural” to imagine them as existing in some vague, unobservable locale, very much living their dead lives.
Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "The End?"
//////////////////
/////////////////////It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired.
//////////////////////////Dinosaurs survived two mass extinctions and waited at least 30 million years to achieve world domination, according to a Bristol University study in Biology Letters.
///////////////////////ientific American Mind - October 22, 2008
Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death
Why so many of us think our minds continue on after we die
By Jesse Bering
Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.
It should strike us as odd that we feel inclined to nod our heads in agreement to the twangy, sweetly discordant folk vocals of Iris Dement in “Let the Mystery Be,” a humble paean about the hereafter. In fact, the only real mystery is why we’re so convinced that when it comes to where we’re going “when the whole thing’s done,” we’re dealing with a mystery at all. After all, the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body. And the mind is what the brain does—it’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead, too?
And yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.
The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence.
According to proponents, you possess a secret arsenal of psychological defenses designed to keep your death anxiety at bay (and to keep you from ending up in the fetal position listening to Nick Drake on your iPod). My writing this article, for example, would be interpreted as an exercise in “symbolic immortality”; terror management theorists would likely tell you that I wrote it for posterity, to enable a concrete set of my ephemeral ideas to outlive me, the biological organism. (I would tell you that I’d be happy enough if a year from now it still had a faint pulse.)
Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.
Curiously Immortal
The problem applies even to those who claim not to believe in an afterlife. As philosopher and Center for Naturalism founder Thomas W. Clark wrote in a 1994 article for the Humanist:
Here ... is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in that view: It is to reify nothingness—make it a positive condition or quality (for example, of “blackness”)—and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally.
Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”
This observation may not sound like a major revelation to you, but I bet you’ve never considered what it actually means, which is that your own mortality is unfalsifiable from the first-person perspective. This obstacle is why writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe allegedly remarked that “everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.”
Even when we want to believe that our minds end at death, it is a real struggle to think in this way. A study I published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture in 2002 reveals the illusion of immortality operating in full swing in the minds of undergraduate students who were asked a series of questions about the psychological faculties of a dead man.
Richard, I told the students, had been killed instantaneously when his vehicle plunged into a utility pole. After the participants read a narrative about Richard’s state of mind just prior to the accident, I queried them as to whether the man, now that he was dead, retained the capacity to experience mental states. “Is Richard still thinking about his wife?” I asked them. “Can he still taste the flavor of the breath mint he ate just before he died? Does he want to be alive?”
You can imagine the looks I got, because apparently not many people pause to consider whether souls have taste buds, become randy or get headaches. Yet most gave answers indicative of “psychological continuity reasoning,” in which they envisioned Richard’s mind to continue functioning despite his death. This finding came as no surprise given that, on a separate scale, most respondents classified themselves as having a belief in some form of an afterlife.
What was surprising, however, was that many participants who had identified themselves as having “extinctivist” beliefs (they had ticked off the box that read: “What we think of as the ‘soul,’ or conscious personality of a person, ceases permanently when the body dies”) occasionally gave psychological-continuity responses, too. Thirty-two percent of the extinctivists’ answers betrayed their hidden reasoning that emotions and desires survive death; another 36 percent of their responses suggested the extinctivists reasoned this way for mental states related to knowledge (such as remembering, believing or knowing). One particularly vehement extinctivist thought the whole line of questioning silly and seemed to regard me as a numbskull for even asking. But just as well—he proceeded to point out that of course Richard knows he is dead, because there’s no afterlife and Richard sees that now.
So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the “simulation constraint hypothesis,” is that in attempting to imagine what it’s like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences—because that’s how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn’t “like” anything we’ve ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren’t good enough.
For us extinctivists, it’s kind of like staring into a hallway of mirrors—but rather than confronting a visual trick, we’re dealing with cognitive reverberations of subjective experience. In Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s 1913 existential screed, The Tragic Sense of Life, one can almost see the author tearing out his hair contemplating this very fact. “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness,” he writes, “and you will see the impossibility of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.”
Wait, you say, isn’t Unamuno forgetting something? We certainly do have experience with nothingness. Every night, in fact, when we’re in dreamless sleep. But you’d be mistaken in this assumption. Clark puts it this way (emphasis mine): “We may occasionally have the impression of having experienced or ‘undergone’ a period of unconsciousness, but, of course, this is impossible. The ‘nothingness’ of unconsciousness cannot be an experienced actuality.”
If psychological immortality represents the intuitive, natural way of thinking about death, then we might expect young children to be particularly inclined to reason in this way. As an eight-year-old, I watched as the remains of our family’s golden retriever, Sam, were buried in the woods behind our house. Still, I thought Sam had a mind capable of knowing I loved her and I was sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye. That Sam’s spirit lived on was not something my parents or anyone else ever explicitly pointed out to me. Although she had been reduced to no more than a few ounces of dust, which was in turn sealed in a now waterlogged box, it never even occurred to me that it was a strange idea.
Yet if you were to have asked me what Sam was experiencing, I probably would have muttered something like the type of answers Gerald P. Koocher reported hearing in a 1973 study published in Developmental Psychology. Koocher, then a doctoral student at the University of Missouri–Columbia and later president of the American Psychological Association, asked six- to 15-year-olds what happens when you die. Consistent with the simulation-constraint hypothesis, many answers relied on everyday experience to describe death, “with references to sleeping, feeling ‘peaceful,’ or simply ‘being very dizzy.’ ”
A Mind-Body Disconnect
But Koocher’s study in itself doesn’t tell us where such ideas come from. The simulation-constraint hypothesis posits that this type of thinking is innate and unlearned. Fortunately, this hypothesis is falsifiable. If afterlife beliefs are a product of cultural indoctrination, with children picking up such ideas through religious teachings, through the media, or informally through family and friends, then one should rationally predict that psychological-continuity reasoning increases with age. Aside from becoming more aware of their own mortality, after all, older kids have had a longer period of exposure to the concept of an afterlife.
In fact, recent findings show the opposite developmental trend. In a 2004 study reported in Developmental Psychology, Florida Atlantic University psychologist David F. Bjorklund and I presented 200 three- to 12-year-olds with a puppet show. Every child saw the story of Baby Mouse, who was out strolling innocently in the woods. “Just then,” we told them, “he notices something very strange. The bushes are moving! An alligator jumps out of the bushes and gobbles him all up. Baby Mouse is not alive anymore.”
Just like the adults from the previously mentioned study, the children were asked about dead Baby Mouse’s psychological functioning. “Does Baby Mouse still want to go home?” we asked them. “Does he still feel sick?” “Can he still smell the flowers?” The youngest children in the study, the three- to five-year-olds, were significantly more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than children from the two older age groups were.
But here’s the really curious part. Even the preschoolers had a solid grasp on biological cessation; they knew, for example, that dead Baby Mouse didn’t need food or water anymore. They knew he wouldn’t grow up to be an adult mouse. Heck, 85 percent of the youngest kids even told us that his brain no longer worked. Yet most of these very young children then told us that dead Baby Mouse was hungry or thirsty, that he felt better or that he was still angry at his brother.
One couldn’t say that the preschoolers lacked a concept of death, therefore, because nearly all of the kids realized that biological imperatives no longer applied after death. Rather they seemed to have trouble using this knowledge to theorize about related mental functions.
From an evolutionary perspective, a coherent theory about psychological death is not necessarily vital. Anthropologist H. Clark Barrett of the University of California, Los Angeles, believes instead that understanding the cessation of “agency” (for example, that a dead creature isn’t going to suddenly leap up and bite you) is probably what saved lives (and thus genes). According to Barrett, comprehending the cessation of the mind, on the other hand, has no survival value and is, in an evolutionary sense, unnecessary.
In a 2005 study published in the journal Cognition, Barrett and psychologist Tanya Behne of the University of Manchester in England reported that city-dwelling four-year-olds from Berlin were just as good at distinguishing sleeping animals from dead ones as hunter-horticulturalist children from the Shuar region of Ecuador were. Even today’s urban children appear tuned in to perceptual cues signaling death. A “violation of the body envelope” (in other words, a mutilated carcass) is a pretty good sign that one needn’t worry about tiptoeing around.
The Culture Factor
On the one hand, then, from a very early age, children realize that dead bodies are not coming back to life. On the other hand, also from a very early age, kids endow the dead with ongoing psychological functions. So where do culture and religious teaching come into the mix, if at all?
In fact, exposure to the concept of an afterlife plays a crucial role in enriching and elaborating this natural cognitive stance; it’s sort of like an architectural scaffolding process, whereby culture develops and decorates the innate psychological building blocks of religious belief. The end product can be as ornate or austere as you like, from the headache-inducing reincarnation beliefs of Theravada Buddhists to the man on the street’s “I believe there’s something” brand of philosophy—but it’s made of the same brick and mortar just the same.
In support of the idea that culture influences our natural tendency to deny the death of the mind, Harvard University psychologist Paul Harris and researcher Marta Giménez of the National University of Distance Education in Spain showed that when the wording in interviews is tweaked to include medical or scientific terms, psychological-continuity reasoning decreases. In this 2005 study published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture, seven- to 11-year-old children in Madrid who heard a story about a priest telling a child that his grandmother “is with God” were more likely to attribute ongoing mental states to the decedent than were those who heard the identical story but instead about a doctor saying a grandfather was “dead and buried.”
And in a 2005 replication of the Baby Mouse experiment published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, psychologist David Bjorklund and I teamed with psychologist Carlos Hernández Blasi of Jaume I University in Spain to compare children in a Catholic school with those attending a public secular school in Castellón, Spain. As in the previous study, an overwhelming majority of the youngest children—five- to six-year-olds—from both educational backgrounds said that Baby Mouse’s mental states survived. The type of curriculum, secular or religious, made no difference. With increasing age, however, culture becomes a factor—the kids attending Catholic school were more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than were those at the secular school. There was even a smattering of young extinctivists in the latter camp.
Free Spirits
The types of cognitive obstacles discussed earlier may be responsible for our innate sense
of immortality. But although the simulation-constraint hypothesis helps to explain why so many people believe in something as fantastically illogical as an afterlife, it doesn’t tell us why people see the soul unbuckling itself from the body and floating off like an invisible helium balloon into the realm of eternity. After all, there’s nothing to stop us from having afterlife beliefs that involve the still active mind being entombed in the skull and deliriously happy. Yet almost nobody has such a belief.
Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn’t cease to exist simply because you couldn’t see them. Developmental psychologists even have a fancy term for this basic concept: “person permanence.” Such an off-line social awareness leads us to tacitly assume that the people we know are somewhere doing something. As I’m writing this article in Belfast, for example, my mind’s eye conjures up my friend Ginger in New Orleans walking her poodle or playfully bickering with her husband, things that I know she does routinely.
As I’ve argued in my 2006 Behavioral and Brain Sciences article, “The Folk Psychology of Souls,” human cognition is not equipped to update the list of players in our complex social rosters by accommodating a particular person’s sudden inexistence. We can’t simply switch off our person-permanence thinking just because someone has died. This inability is especially the case, of course, for those whom we were closest to and whom we frequently imagined to be actively engaging in various activities when out of sight.
And so person permanence may be the final cognitive hurdle that gets in the way of our effectively realizing the dead as they truly are—infinitely in situ, inanimate carbon residue. Instead it’s much more “natural” to imagine them as existing in some vague, unobservable locale, very much living their dead lives.
Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "The End?"
//////////////////
Monday, 29 September 2008
CDS 290908-JLR CRSS-You're the Result of Yourself Pablo Neruda
////////////You're the Result of Yourself
Pablo Neruda
Don't blame anyone, never complain of anyone or anything
Because basically you have made of your life what you wanted.
Accept the difficulties of edifying yourself
And the worth of starting to correct your character.
/////////////////////
A stroke of genius
BILL NICHOLAS
19/09/2008 4:31:00 PM
Your brain – 700g of grey matter and just one per cent of your body weight – uses 20 per cent of the oxygen you breathe.
The brain is the last big frontier for medicine. It’s scary how little even brain surgeons know about it as anyone present after a brain operation can attest. Can you move your toes? What month is it? Touch your elbow – to see if any “deficits” have turned up.
The new thinking in neuroscience is “plasticity” – that the brain is more like a plant than a machine, that you can cut out diseased bits and it somehow maintains function by working around it.
Stroke is the second biggest killer behind heart disease. While the country’s 300 murders get all the publicity, the 60,000 stroke victims are struck down quietly and strokes are the biggest cause of disability. It hits mostly the over 55s with just 20 per cent of victims younger than that. It costs about $2.4 billion to help manage stroke survivors.
Although there have been significant advances in understanding brain function and brain diseases, little of this has translated into effective drugs for treating brain injury and diseases such as stroke.
Stroke is caused by a blood clot which cuts off the flow of blood into parts of the brain – there are no drugs and not a lot doctors can do about it.
Brain cells cut off from a healthy blood flow will quickly die and doctors have only about three hours to restore the circulation to prevent the damage that occurs. After this initial treatment, there are no drugs that can minimise the resulting brain damage or promote the repair of injured cells.
It is possible via intense training and rehabilitation to restore some lost functions so that neighbouring brain cells can pick up the work of the dead ones.
Restraining a good arm and getting the dud one to work again seems to be yielding good results, but for many, stroke leaves them with lifelong disabilities.
“Even though the brain has some capacity to revitalise itself, new approaches are needed to develop treatments that minimise the damage or prevent it from developing,” says Dr Håkan Muyderman, a Flinders Medical Centre researcher working on potential stroke treatments in the Centre for Neuroscience.
Unlike a heart which basically consists of one major cell type, the brain is a collection of billions of at least five completely different sorts of cells, all of which respond to injury in different ways.
Dr Muyderman is developing methods to deliver treatments to different types of brain cells, an approach that has not been possible before now.
“We are doing this by delivering a genetic treatment directly into selected cells to either repair or alter their function so they are no longer damaging to the brain,” Dr Muyderman says.
He outlined his research to a group of potential benefactors at one of the Inspirational Luncheons at SKYCITY Adelaide this week.
Such drug delivery technology would have endless applications – and not only to the 60,000 Australians hit by stroke every year, Dr Muyderman says.
If anybody would care to make a useful contribution to stroke treatment, Dr Muyderman’s group could use a well-qualified chemist ($100k) and some seed capital to finance the work of coming up with a product that could demonstrate the potential of the work so far.
Shortly after moving from Sweden to Australia and Flinders, Dr Muyderman received one of two highly-competitive and sought-after Mary Overton Neuroscience Fellowships. Not only has Flinders attracted his valuable expertise, but his wife recently took a teaching assignment at an Aboriginal settlement north of Ceduna.
Dr Muyderman’s talk was the last in this year’s series arranged by the Flinders Medical Centre Foundation, chaired by stockbroker Allan Young.
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Pablo Neruda
Don't blame anyone, never complain of anyone or anything
Because basically you have made of your life what you wanted.
Accept the difficulties of edifying yourself
And the worth of starting to correct your character.
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A stroke of genius
BILL NICHOLAS
19/09/2008 4:31:00 PM
Your brain – 700g of grey matter and just one per cent of your body weight – uses 20 per cent of the oxygen you breathe.
The brain is the last big frontier for medicine. It’s scary how little even brain surgeons know about it as anyone present after a brain operation can attest. Can you move your toes? What month is it? Touch your elbow – to see if any “deficits” have turned up.
The new thinking in neuroscience is “plasticity” – that the brain is more like a plant than a machine, that you can cut out diseased bits and it somehow maintains function by working around it.
Stroke is the second biggest killer behind heart disease. While the country’s 300 murders get all the publicity, the 60,000 stroke victims are struck down quietly and strokes are the biggest cause of disability. It hits mostly the over 55s with just 20 per cent of victims younger than that. It costs about $2.4 billion to help manage stroke survivors.
Although there have been significant advances in understanding brain function and brain diseases, little of this has translated into effective drugs for treating brain injury and diseases such as stroke.
Stroke is caused by a blood clot which cuts off the flow of blood into parts of the brain – there are no drugs and not a lot doctors can do about it.
Brain cells cut off from a healthy blood flow will quickly die and doctors have only about three hours to restore the circulation to prevent the damage that occurs. After this initial treatment, there are no drugs that can minimise the resulting brain damage or promote the repair of injured cells.
It is possible via intense training and rehabilitation to restore some lost functions so that neighbouring brain cells can pick up the work of the dead ones.
Restraining a good arm and getting the dud one to work again seems to be yielding good results, but for many, stroke leaves them with lifelong disabilities.
“Even though the brain has some capacity to revitalise itself, new approaches are needed to develop treatments that minimise the damage or prevent it from developing,” says Dr Håkan Muyderman, a Flinders Medical Centre researcher working on potential stroke treatments in the Centre for Neuroscience.
Unlike a heart which basically consists of one major cell type, the brain is a collection of billions of at least five completely different sorts of cells, all of which respond to injury in different ways.
Dr Muyderman is developing methods to deliver treatments to different types of brain cells, an approach that has not been possible before now.
“We are doing this by delivering a genetic treatment directly into selected cells to either repair or alter their function so they are no longer damaging to the brain,” Dr Muyderman says.
He outlined his research to a group of potential benefactors at one of the Inspirational Luncheons at SKYCITY Adelaide this week.
Such drug delivery technology would have endless applications – and not only to the 60,000 Australians hit by stroke every year, Dr Muyderman says.
If anybody would care to make a useful contribution to stroke treatment, Dr Muyderman’s group could use a well-qualified chemist ($100k) and some seed capital to finance the work of coming up with a product that could demonstrate the potential of the work so far.
Shortly after moving from Sweden to Australia and Flinders, Dr Muyderman received one of two highly-competitive and sought-after Mary Overton Neuroscience Fellowships. Not only has Flinders attracted his valuable expertise, but his wife recently took a teaching assignment at an Aboriginal settlement north of Ceduna.
Dr Muyderman’s talk was the last in this year’s series arranged by the Flinders Medical Centre Foundation, chaired by stockbroker Allan Young.
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Sunday, 28 September 2008
CDS -280908-JLR CRSS
///////////////////////Learning From Mistakes Only Works After Age 12, Study Suggests (September 27, 2008) -- Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds. Eight-year-olds learn primarily from positive feedback, whereas negative feedback scarcely causes any alarm bells to ring. Twelve-year-olds are better able to process negative feedback, and use it to learn from their mistakes. The switch in learning strategy can be seen in the brain areas responsible for cognitive control. ... > full story
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Young Mums Cot Death Risk Higher
28 August 2008
The Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths, (FSID), the UK’s leading cot death charity, welcomed today’s report from the Office of National Statistics (ONS), which shows a drop in cot deaths in 2006.
Although there was a marked reduction in deaths in the UK*, the report also reveals that the death rate was six times higher for babies of mums under 20 than older mothers**.This confirms the importance of FSID’s strategy, to target vulnerable young parents who are missing out on safe sleep advice, with devastating consequences.
////////////////////////////////////24 WEEKER SURVIVES IN KOL
//////////////////////////////////MTHR REC APHTHOUS ULCERS,CALCANEAL SPUR,CATARACTS
///////////////////////////////MELTDOWN AND BAILOUT
////////////////////////////////24 WKR-TAKE HOME SURVIVAL-5% IN IND
//////////////////////////////////SARBA BHOOK-SALPAHARI
/////////////////////////////////AGANTUK-1991
/////////////////////////////AHARER ETO BAHAR-ONLY IN BNGAL
/////////////////////////////////////SUN 9.5 CRORE MILES AWAY
MOON-5 LAC MILES AWAY
////////////////////////////////////////WANDER LUST
///////////////////////////////////////////NEMO=NO ONE
///////////////////////////////////////////
//////////////////////////
Young Mums Cot Death Risk Higher
28 August 2008
The Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths, (FSID), the UK’s leading cot death charity, welcomed today’s report from the Office of National Statistics (ONS), which shows a drop in cot deaths in 2006.
Although there was a marked reduction in deaths in the UK*, the report also reveals that the death rate was six times higher for babies of mums under 20 than older mothers**.This confirms the importance of FSID’s strategy, to target vulnerable young parents who are missing out on safe sleep advice, with devastating consequences.
////////////////////////////////////24 WEEKER SURVIVES IN KOL
//////////////////////////////////MTHR REC APHTHOUS ULCERS,CALCANEAL SPUR,CATARACTS
///////////////////////////////MELTDOWN AND BAILOUT
////////////////////////////////24 WKR-TAKE HOME SURVIVAL-5% IN IND
//////////////////////////////////SARBA BHOOK-SALPAHARI
/////////////////////////////////AGANTUK-1991
/////////////////////////////AHARER ETO BAHAR-ONLY IN BNGAL
/////////////////////////////////////SUN 9.5 CRORE MILES AWAY
MOON-5 LAC MILES AWAY
////////////////////////////////////////WANDER LUST
///////////////////////////////////////////NEMO=NO ONE
///////////////////////////////////////////
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