Can we get Something out of Nothing?

I have realised that I have held two confused beliefs in this blog.

1) That you cannot get something out of nothing.

2) That the apparent world “just is”, which has been tied into accepting emergent properties.

When we bake a cake the resulting cake IS magic. It cannot be explained in terms of the ingredients. If you saw and tasted cake mix and was told that after cooking it would be very tasty you would not believe it. A “cake” is a magical emergent property.

Thus it is easy to see that actually all entities are magical emergent properties and cannot be reduced to their components – while at the same time being composed only of their components. They are as the ancient philosophers called them “illusions” which arise and decay into the Void. The idea that they somehow are “made” of their components, while true, doesn’t actually tell us much about them.

In chemistry a knowledge of the atoms will enable us to classify things. To know a substances period and group will enable us to predict with some certainty what the emergent properties of that element will be… but this is where is gets really subtle and I find myself remarkably going back through the opening philosophical investigations that I made as a teenager… everything really is coming together and “my muse” has been a deviation from a much bigger process…

The issue I see now in hindsight was “where does form come from?”. My conclusions as a teenager were not so absurd after all, although trying to navigate this sea as a novice is a profoundly difficult process.

To have experiences we have a brain. The processes in that brain correspond (are isomorphic) with our experiences. It is not unreasonable to see the connection BUT there is a problem. Such a theorem is unpredicative (this I have discovered is THE word for the SRH). This means that the theorem is creating definitions based upon those definitions. For some reason almost everyone - from school biology syllabus to MIT lecturers - misses this … to say that the processes in the brain are isomorphic with our mental activity iff it implies (=>) that our thinking and understanding are isomorphic with the brain, then => that the brain’s machinery is required to understand the brain’s machinery … the problem in the theory being the implication that it is really the “brain’s machinery” understanding what the brain’s machinery is. Ontologically our mental activity can’t be the result of the brain’s machinery since it is that mental activity that is apprehending the concept of the “brain’s machinery”.

Somehow, despite all appearances, such brain science hasn’t actually said anything new and constructive! This way by chasing ones own tail madness lies. This is why after years of struggling with this - stalking my own shadow - I broke through and realised that “things just are” you can’t atomise our experiences and “mental” processes – they are axioms that we normatively begin with. If we try to underpin them with scientific knowledge we run into problems because science requires these normative constructions even just to get started! This has been said many times in this blog before but I’m getting a new language for, and familiarity with, these concepts. If religions have a problem with science I suggest it is this; God is the ancient term that reminds Man to keep his place. When Science encroaches on the territory of God it is because Science starts to try to under pin its own construction – it starts to make unpredicative statement – in the words of Latiffe in the MIT lectures “when you start to talk about yourself you start to talk nonsense.”

The research into emergent properties I feel also may also be heading into a labyrinth of mirrors. If you could ever construct an emergent property in terms of its components then it wouldn’t be an emergent property anymore. It is has become an axiom. And how does this happen? The lecturer in the MIT lectures (referenced in this blog) seems to think that a: record washed up on a alien shore’ is too improbably to be an accident and the order and symmetry of the record will suggest to the aliens that this is somehow constructed and has some meaning. This seems a sensible proposition… BUT I was reminded of my thoughts as a teenager… this depends upon the brain’s machinery! We construct our world in edges, lines, sequences, space, time etc because we have the brain to do this. This is very Kantian but I’m not saying these are transcendental in any real fixed way. The point is simply to realise – as the Eastern religions do – that we see things depending not only on the “things” but also on “ourselves” as well. Experience occurs in the dialectic between subject and object. To say ‘aliens on a distant shore’ is to actually avoid the issue of what “we” bring to the table. When “we” are factored into suddenly nothing becomes stable – there is no absolute resting place from where we might move the Earth. This is very difficult to approach and thankfully I had the opportunity to do it in comfort and security of my parent home – like Descartes in his meditation stove. But thankfully there is nothing “absolutely” unstable about it either :-) It simply smashes any grasping we might have had for a fixed objective truth – something which is nice when it protects us from our fears, but would be very nasty if our fears became fixed objective truths! Things still “just are” and always will be.

After saying all that it is still an intriguing thought that there is some objective way to describe and record the “things” in the world. That the information in the record on the beach might have some eternal meaning that will survive the human race, Earth and the Solar system. The problem I feel, like the splattered paint in the last blog, is that it all depends on some normative axiomatic starting point which is just an emergent property of the world. You can’t fix it for all time because as Buddha reminds us all existence is conditioned and as conditions change the existences in the “universe” change also…

and my problem with that (when I first read Buddhism) was that such a statement in unpredicative because if everything is conditioned and changes then so does the Universe … but Buddha is not talking in simple terms – yes there is no fixed bounded Universe, nor even a fixed doctrine of dependent origination. The Enlightenment really is an acceptance and freedom of all possible illusory emergent properties.