The Scientific Jigsaw Puzzle

Recommended Pre-Reading:

What is Science?

I have always loved a good jigsaw puzzle. There is something deeply satisfying about taking a pile of colored cardboard scraps and turning it little by little into a predetermined picture. Every piece fit into its place and every edge matched up is a small joy. Losing yourself in the exercise is a wonderful experience, whether alone or collaborating with family or friends. In my time in academia, I have found that science is a lot like a jigsaw puzzle, with reality as its picture.

I have been a teaching assistant for college physics for two and a half years. I usually try to explain the models directly as they are, and stay away from analogies. There comes a point where most metaphors break down, and you have to say, “it’s kind of like that, but really not.” The example that makes me cringe the most is the bowling ball on a trampoline analogy of general relativity. It does have similar behavior to gravity, but only by accident. But once in a while there is a metaphor that works so perfectly that even I am satisfied, and the scientific jigsaw puzzle is one of them.

Each scientific discipline is a different section of the puzzle. The pieces that look like life, we call biology. The pieces that look like rocks, we call geology. The pieces that have space on them, we call astronomy. And so on. Teams of scientists around the world collaborate, each working in their own section or subsection. Every so often, the edge of one section is found to fit perfectly against another, to much celebration. Atomic theory connects chemistry to quantum physics. Evolution is the central hub of biology, but also links psychology to the rest of the puzzle. In the past 300 years, the puzzle has been taking shape into a vast, beautiful, solidly connected picture.

Sometimes a piece looks like it fits, but the edges don’t quite match up, or there is the tiniest bit of space between the tab and the slot. When this happens, other pieces won’t connect where they are supposed to, so we have to look down the line until we find where we made our mistake. There are even now some places where the pieces do not seem to fit. The centers of black holes, and the instant of the big bang, to name a few. These are places where quantum physics—the physics of the very small—and general relativity—the physics of the very massive—collide.

There are no edges; every section either connects to another or has a frontier where new pieces are being added every day. There are even whole sections waiting to be started. For instance, we know astrobiology—the science of alien life—will connect to astronomy, planetary science, chemistry, and evolutionary biology, but we don’t have any pieces to try to fit.

Some people, claiming to be scientists, have a picture in mind already when they approach the puzzle, and try to force the pieces to make that picture. They use the pieces to make a mosaic instead of trying to solve the puzzle. This is called "pseudoscience." Sometimes the difference is obvious, but sometimes it can be difficult even for those who spend their time immersed in the mental world of science to tell at first glance. But there is a family of methods for determining how well the pieces fit together: statistics. Subjecting ideas to rigorous mathematical fires of probability is kind of like holding two pieces up to the light to see if any shines through. Under this scrutiny, the pseudoscience falls apart, and it is up to the future wholeness of the picture to sort the correct ideas from the mere good ones.

And what a picture it is! It's a picture of the vastness of space and the beginning of time, of stars and galaxies, of matter and light, of life and humanity and curiosity. And the beauty of the picture revealed makes us all the more eager to finish the holes and expand the edges, searching for new mysteries waiting to be discovered.

Being In a Place

Every so often, I find myself feeling down, wondering where the magic that bound me to stories has gone, or forgetting about it completely. I get so caught up in analyzing, picking apart storywriting techniques, that I forget the most important reason stories are so powerful.

Stories transport you to another place, another time, another life. The lessons you learn, the experience you gain, the questions you mull over in your mind, all come from seeing through another person’s eyes, feeling their body, breathing the same air. You learn because they learn. You see because they see. You understand because they understand. This is the difference between a story and an essay. In other words, a story draws people into it when it feels real. If a book pulls this off really well, I find myself with the same uncertainty about the future as in real life, feeling that the rest of the book is not decided yet, and any of a few outcomes are equally possible. This illusion of reality is the hidden source of magic that gives stories such draw and keeps readers engrossed in them for hours at a time.

The big question is how we can give stories this power of illusion. I think the answer is not to force it, but allow it to come to you. I have heard writers speak of the creative process as listening while the stories come to them, as if already existing in the ether. It is as if the writer is not creating them, but only solidifying them onto the page. In fact, I have this experience myself every now and then. It is not random, but happens when you are in a certain frame of mind. For me, this is most often when I am doing a repetitive task that does not require mental activity, like walking. With practice, writers can get themselves into this frame of mind more easily.

When you do this, you may find that your characters are doing things that are not directly relevant to the story. For instance, if they are on a camping trip, you may find yourself describing the details about how the viewpoint character builds the fire, with the kindling in the middle and larger sticks in a teepee structure around it. You’ll find yourself describing how the earth feels beneath their feet, how the meat sizzles and smells good as it cooks. You’ll find yourself writing a conversation about this or that, like real people would have around a campfire. In other words, it will feel like a real night out. Just let it happen.

Cosmoids In Our Image

Recommended Pre-Reading:

Cosmoid: A Definition

Last week, I defined the word, “cosmoid” to mean the entire picture of a person’s understanding of reality. Cosmoids include worldviews, paradigms, beliefs, and conceptualizations of truth, knowledge, and understanding. Each of us has our own cosmoid, and no two people’s are alike. For some of us, our cosmoids are open to some types of change or expansion; for others, not so much. Regardless, we all believe our cosmoid is closer to reality than it really is. After all, if we knew of anything closer, then it would by definition be our new cosmoid.

Defining cosmoids opens up all kinds of rich and deep topics to explore. Today I am going to focus on a flaw most of us, if not all, have in our cosmoids: we construct our internal world to look like us. There are three ways we do this: with our bodily form, with our behavior, and with our perceptions.

To see this, we do not have to look far. Our stories, our poetry, our mythology, and our art are positively full of instances when we ascribe human characteristics to animals, trees, the sun, the moon, the Earth, the wind, the water, the sky, and even the fabric of reality itself. We have tales of goblins, ghosts, orcs, trolls, elves, fairies, demons, golems, and all manner of creatures that look like humans.

Even in science fiction, which is supposed to be more realistic than other fantasy, we find aliens with two arms, two legs, two eyes and ears, and an upright walk, just like humans. Star Trek in particular is famous for this. In the Next Generation (spoilers) episode “The Chase,” the writers try to explain away this oddity by having the characters discover that the first humanoid race billions of years ago planted DNA all over the galaxy, seeding the planets so that human-like form would one day evolve—as if the random changes of base pairs and natural selection over eons of random climates could be seeded! (end spoilers)

In fact, it is not only with aliens that we implicitly associate intelligence with the human face, but intelligence in general. Artificial intelligence, gods, spiritual creatures, you name it, we imagine them all with human faces.

Sometimes it is not the human form that we impose upon the world, but human behavior. We might think of great oaks standing guard, rivers dancing, the wind running, and the sun smiling. Scientists even find themselves explaining models to people using human terms, like particles “wanting” to move toward each other or genes puzzling over how to get themselves reproduced. Being aware of this, I try hard to avoid using anthropomorphic language when I explain scientific concepts unless I am actually talking about humans.

These two ways we project ourselves into our cosmoids are fairly clear once we see them pointed out, but he third is the more subtle, and to me, by far the most intriguing. We impose our perceptions onto reality. We are all familiar with the scene of a child afraid of the darkness in her bedroom. In fact, most of us remember what that felt like when we were in the child’s place, and we still feel it now and again. As children, we fear the dark because we cannot see into it. Because it is murky and mysterious in our perception, we begin to believe that reality itself is in a state of quasi-existence, where anything we fear might become real.

It is by this sense of quasi-existence that we believe all kinds of strange things, from superstitions to conspiracy theories. It might be true, we are afraid it is true, we believe it is true. Other things we believe because we want them to be true. This is how we can have concepts like magic and feel like they mean something. A month ago I came to the conclusion that magic is an effect without any mechanism linking it to its cause, or even with no cause at all. This cannot happen in a real universe, but to someone whose cosmoid allows things to exist in a quasi-real state between perception and reality, magic makes sense.

There are even things we believe without knowing, because we just don’t think about it. Take color, for example. Why do we say that oak leaves are green in the spring, and that they turn red and yellow in the fall? It is not because of some innate property of “greenness” or “redness” that the leaves have; rather it is because the leaves reflect specific combinations of wavelengths of light, some of which make it into our eyes, where it is translated into electrical signals, which travel up our optic nerves into our brain, where our consciousness interprets the signals as colors. Yet though there are many intermediate steps between leaves and the color green, we still call leaves green.

We think that things we feel and perceive must be objective. Things like peace, love, pain, honor, worthiness, etc. We assume that because we sense these things, they must be a part of the external universe, when really they only exist as interpretations in our minds. A thing is not beautiful in itself, but only as each person sees it. As they say, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Even if a painting touches the hearts of every human who sees it, to an alien from a planet unlike ours it might look like the most formless of postmodern art.

Humanized cosmoids make for powerful poetry and wonderful fantasy. You want a magical object? Make it a crystal, which looks different colors when viewed from different angles, when light passes through it, etc. If it is strange and enchanting to us, it is our instinct to think it must be strange and enchanting to the universe too. Try to imagine Narnia without talking animals or tree spirits or wicked witches. It simply wouldn’t be Narnia. There is just something about imagining the world has a heart, or Time has a beard, that makes us warm and happy all over.

The more we come to understand the world, the real world, for what it is, the more we realize we are not the center, and it is not about us. For some people, such an idea is too horrible to imagine. But there is something about thinking and considering, about being honest with yourself and your beliefs, that is liberating. There is a relief and peace that comes with following reason and evidence wherever it leads, even through the seemingly dark and scary places. And when we do, our cosmoid reshapes itself to be more like the cosmos.

Cosmoid: A Definition

Cosmoid: The sum total of a person’s perceptions and subconscious beliefs of reality; the whole of what a person sees and thinks reality to be.

For the past several years, I have been intrigued by how people see the world. From the radical zealot to the enlightenment thinker to the toddler whose mind cannot comprehend basic mechanical motions, the world of the mind fascinates me. But wanting to talk about this subject I ran into a barrier, one common to so many people when philosophizing: the English language is missing a word.

There are a few words that come close to what I mean. Worldview, for instance. But “worldview” implies that you know you are looking at the world from a certain perspective. You can easily flit in and out of worldviews, never changing anything you actually believe about reality. The concept I want to describe is more rigid and encompassing than this.

Some people use the terms “subjective reality” or “subjective truth” (or to be even more confusing, drop the modifier, “subjective”!), but this seems sloppy to me, as “reality” and “truth” are objective by definition. Rather, what I want to talk about is the world as it appears to be real and true to people, a subjectivity that appears to the person experiencing it to be indistinguishable from objectivity, and I want the word for it to not be easily confused with something else.

Cosmology is another word that comes close to what I want, but does not quite make it. A cosmology is a set of beliefs about the nature of the world, but it tends to mean the big things, like the size and shape of the universe. Cosmology is also the name of the field of science that studies the size, age, structure, origin, and fate of the universe, so it can also be confusing if used when speaking of someone’s understanding of reality.

The cosmos is defined as the objective sum total of reality. This is the kind of thing I mean. But rather than actual reality, I want to speak of the structure of it that people build up in their minds. A small, personal mimicry of the cosmos; a cosmoid.

Everyone has their own cosmoid, and every cosmoid is a little different. For example, over Christmas break I was shocked to find that no one in my family knew what antimatter was. What was perfectly mundane and ordinary for me, having lived and breathed physics for the last six or seven years, was completely alien to them. It was not part of their cosmoids.

Understanding cosmoids can help tremendously with writing characters. A cast of characters who each have different beliefs and different understanding of the world opens up the doors to all kinds of themes and intrigue to explore. It can also help you relate to other people with views different from your own. I think “cosmoid” will be a very useful word, and it will open the door to many discussions that I have wanted to write for some time.

Reading Order

You might not think about it very often, but people have different ideas of the order books in a series should be read or movies should be watched. You probably go into a library after hearing that something is good, and look for “book 1.” But there are different ways of determining which book is “book 1,” and here at A Scientist’s Fiction we are generally unsatisfied with letting someone else do our thinking for us, so let’s dive into the mess.

I assume most people go by publication order when deciding what order to read something. They would watch Star Wars in the order 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3. To me, reading books in the order they released is usually the obvious choice.

But some people want to read stories in the order their events take place, chronological order. For example, they would say you should start The Chronicles of Narnia with The Magician’s Nephew, and go 6, 1, 5, 2, 3, 4, 7. Or for Star Wars, they would go 1, 2, 3, Rogue One, 4, 5, 6, 7.

You could lose friends over this.

When chronological order and publication order disagree, I am usually in favor of publication order. But not always. So do I have two incompatible preferences that I switch between, or is there is another, as yet unstated option? The answer, partly, is a third option:

The order that makes the best of what you love most. Most of the time, books are written, including prequels and side stories, assuming that the readers know everything that has been written before. This is why I most often agree with publication order. Sometimes, though, neither gives the writing the best possible treatment. With the original Star Wars series, the best way is the Machete order, proposed by Rod Hilton on his blog five years ago. He says you should watch the films in the order 4, 5, 2, 3, 6 (and then the others, if you are really interested). This gives you two movies of Luke, two movies of Anakin, and one where they have their showdown.

Still, this only applies if you want to read every book or watch every movie and episode in the series. If it is long and somewhat disconnected, like Discworld or Star Trek (or Star Wars in the near future), then you might want to get straight to the best parts, and ignore the fluff and side stories.

In addition, different people get the most out of different things. For example, you may love character interactions, but if you are a longtime reader of A Scientist’s Fiction you know I love to be blind-sided by an earth-shattering plot twist. As you can see, the details can get really complicated.

Despite all this, I still believe there is a formula. I am of the philosophical persuasion that there is always a formula for everything, though I won’t take a tangent into the justification here. I cannot give you the equation for the formula of reading order, but I can tell you that it incorporates both the preferences of the individual readers and their external circumstances. Find out what you love about stories and check your time constraints, and base your reading order off of that. And when you introduce someone you know to the series, pay attention to their preferences when suggesting where they should begin. It all gets back to the golden rule, do unto others what you would have them do to you, and that includes getting to know them and what they are interested in, not assuming they are just like you. And if your friend does not see the same way as you, accept that it is okay to disagree.


On a different note, I want to give myself a pat on the back for releasing an ASF discussion on each of the five Fridays this month! It has been over a year and a half since the only other time I have done this. I don’t think it was a coincidence that I did it right after NaNoWriMo. Here is to keeping the momentum going!

Strange Cosm: A Short Story

Strange Cosm

By Christian David Horst

This story may have been subconsciously inspired by the webcomic BlankIt.

     They were. They did not awake in the traditional sense, nor as from a dream, nor a hallucination, nor any kind of slumber of any sort. They were simply there, two men between the ages of twenty and thirty coming to full awareness at the same time, with no memory of any existence prior to or outside of that moment, in that place—if a place it could be called, as there was nothing in any of the six directions but a smooth, monochromatic white. They could see each other, but the ground had no texture, the sky had no feature, and not even a horizon could be distinguished.
     Of the two men, one had a round face with eyebrows that seemed to jump off his face when he arched them. His clothes were semi-formal, but hung loosely, showing that he was comfortable and relaxed in them. On his wrist, he wore a bulky watch. The other was tall, had a square jaw and large, rectangular glasses. His mouth seemed stuck in a bewildered smile. He wore a sweatshirt and a brown scarf.
     “Who are you?” The tall man said.
     “I . . . don’t know.” The short man looked befuddled, but not the least bit frightened. “Who are you?”
     “Beats me. We’ve got to call each other something, though.” He pointed at the other man’s watch.      “You’re Wristwatch.” Then he looked down at the fabric hanging down his front. “And I’m Scarf.”
     “All right then, Scarf,” Wristwatch said, tapping his foot against the ground, “let’s try to figure it out.”
     “Figure what out?” Scarf said. He looked around. “Oh, that.”
     Wristwatch knelt down on the ground and placed his hand on it. “Decent friction. Grippy, but not sticky.” He tapped it with his knuckles. “Solid as rock.”
     “So what?” Scarf asked.
     “It means,” Wristwatch said, with a smirk, “that we’re definitely somewhere.”
     Scarf put his hands in his pockets and looked around. The lack of change in the view made him dizzy. “It sure doesn’t look like we are.”
     “It may look like we are in some kind of world between universes or something,” Wristwatch said,      “but we’re not.” He stomped his foot, and the ground clacked like marble. “This place has properties. That means it’s real. I mean, feel the air. A decent seventy Fahrenheit, if I might guess. And we’re breathing. That means the atmosphere must be a good fraction oxygen, and the rest non-toxic gases.”
     “That’s . . . interesting,” Scarf said.
     “Sure is. It means there has to be photosynthetic activity somewhere. Come on, let’s start walking and see if we can find anything.”
     “Which way?”
     Wristwatch looked around. “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter, as long as we keep going in a straight line.”
     Scarf started forward, but Wristwatch stopped him. “What’s up?” Scarf said.
     “We need a reference to make sure we aren’t walking in circles.”
     “Can’t we just keep going in the same direction?”
     “We could try, but humans are really bad at going straight without something far away as a reference, like a mountain, or stars in the sky.”
     Scarf looked up. “I guess you have a point there.” Wristwatch was silent, and Scarf looked down to find him eying the fabric tied around Scarf’s neck. “Oh no you don’t,” Scarf said, stepping back and holding his hands out defensively. “I’m named after this thing.”
     “What else are we going to use?” Wristwatch asked.
     Twenty minutes later, Scarf and Wristwatch marched forward, Wristwatch in his socks, holding one shoe in his hand. Every now and then they looked over their shoulders to make sure Wristwatch’s other shoe was directly behind them. It was little more than a dot by now, but since everything else was white, they could not miss it.
     “Hold up,” Scarf said, “I need to pee.”
     “Oh no,” Wristwatch exclaimed, “I forgot about bodily functions! How are we supposed to eat or drink in this place?”
     “Good question,” Scarf said, “but would you mind turning around?”
     “Oh yeah, sure.” Wristwatch turned his back, and the sound of zipping and then splattering liquid reached his ear. With a sudden inspiration, he said, “Does it flow?”
     “Uh, yeah.”
     “Which way?”
     “Uh, out, like it always does.”
     “No, I mean—forget it, are you done yet?”
     Scarf zipped up his pants. “Yeah. Hey, what are you doing?”
     Wristwatch scurried over and bent over the yellow-tinged pool. “Static,” he said. “As still as can be expected from a completely flat plane.”
     “So?”
     “Don’t you see?” Wristwatch stood up. “We thought we were on a flat plane. Now we have evidence supporting it.”
     “Uh, didn’t we already know that? What is the use of proving something you already know?”
     Wristwatch slapped his own face with the palm of his hand. He sighed, as if not sure how simple he had to go to explain. “Thinking and knowing are two different things. We thought we were in a flat plane, and now it has been confirmed. But we still don’t know it for sure, only that at this spot it is close enough to flat as to be indistinguishable from it.”
     “Dude, what does it matter?”
     “Ugh.” Wristwatch put his hand down and closed his eyes. “The more we know about this place, the better chance we have of surviving, escaping, adapting, etcetera. Make sense?”
     “Kind of, but wouldn’t it be better to learn about where to find food and water or something?”
     “Let me know when you have something to go on. Until then, I’m going to keep studying the finer details of the world in the hopes that something useful emerges.”
     They kept moving, walking for hours, nothing changing. “Something is wrong,” Wristwatch said.      “We’ve been here so long, and it’s still all the same. Nothing has happened to mark the passage of time. Even the light has remained constant.”
     “Yeah,” Scarf said, looking around his body. “And now that you mention it, we don’t have any shadows either.”
     Wristwatch stopped, standing straight, his eyebrows shooting up to the top of his forehead. “You’re right.” In addition to not casting shadows on the ground, they seemed to be illuminated equally from all sides. He could make darkened places by cupping his hands together over his face, but anything that was exposed to the whiteness was uniformly lit.
     “Oh, oh!” Wristwatch shouted. He shook, so excited that he actually started jumping up and down. He stopped and threw his arms open. “We’re not on a planet, or a plane!” He grinned at Scarf, showing his teeth. “The perfect lighting, and the fact that we can’t see a horizon or any variation in shade. The geometry works out perfectly. We’re inside a uniformly glowing sphere!”
     Scarf’s eyes slowly tracked upward. Then, pointing, he said, “Then shouldn’t we see your shoes up there somewhere?” Wristwatch’s first shoe had gone out of sight a while ago, and they had dropped his other one so they could know they were still going straight.
     “It’s too big for that,” Wristwatch said. “We might have to walk for miles and miles in order for there to be enough curvature for us to notice the difference.” He grinned. “And we’d need a much bigger shoe.”
     “And how do you know it’s a sphere? Why not a cube or a cylinder or something?”
     “Well I don’t know exactly, but it has to be close to a sphere because of the uniform lighting. Everything exposed to the surface is equally bright. Because we live in three dimensions, the intensity falls off as the square of the distance, and that adds up equally in all directions from any point inside the sphere. It’s Newton’s Shell Theorem, except with luminosity instead of gravity.” He took a breath. “Either that, or someone programmed the lighting to center on us.”
     At this point, Scarf was scratching his head. “Yeah, sure.”
     Wristwatch sighed. “You know, the single most important thing for us right now is to figure out how to get out of here so we can stay alive, and one of the best things we can do to further that goal is a little cosmology.”
     Scarf’s mouth twitched. “I guess. It’s just way over my head.”
     “You might try learning some mathematics sometime. It’s useful stuff.” They started walking again. “I wonder if we’ll find we’re walking uphill, or if the gravity always points outward. Hopefully one of us will have to pee again soon, so we can see if there is a downhill yet.”
Scarf made a face.
     Wristwatch stopped, face aglow with a new idea. “What if it’s spinning?”
     “Oh, I know this one!” Scarf said. “The centrifugal force from something spinning is like gravity.”
     “Centripetal force,” Wristwatch said, digging in his pocket. “It’s the ground pushing on us to keep us moving in a circle. There’s not actually a force pushing us outward. But yeah, you’re basically right.” He found a quarter, and squatted down and placed the coin on its edge, holding it with a finger.      “Come to think of it, gravity isn’t actually a force either.” He flicked the coin, and they watched it spin.
     “What are we looking at?” Scarf asked.
     “If the place is rotating, the coin should fall over quickly,” Wristwatch replied, a note of disappointment creeping into his voice. The quarter continued to spin gracefully. “The coriolis effect should keep its rotational direction constant, or from our perspective tip it over in the direction the sphere is spinning.” The coin loudly finished its ring-down, settling to the ground. “It looks like it’s gravity after all. Oh well, we would have to have been perfectly on the rotational axis not to feel like we were on a hill anyway, and my guess is that the Copernican Principle applies here.”
     “What’s that?”
     “The idea that we find ourselves at a reasonably average place instead of somewhere special. It’s really just probability. Although,” he looked back at his last shoe, a mere speck in the distance. “We might as well try walking in a different direction, just in case.”
     Scarf pointed to the ground. “You quarter is American.”
     Wristwatch looked down, and his face lit up. “You’re right! Let’s check our pockets for other things. And our clothes too.” He twisted his neck and pulled his shirt collar around to read the tag. “Made in China. Figures.”
     “I found a wallet!” Scarf said. “And it has . . .” he fumbled it open, and his face fell. “No ID.”
     “What’s this?” Wristwatch said. He pulled his hand out of his pocket. In his palm was a compass. “Sweet!” He turned it, and the needle turned with the shell. Frowning, he gave it a twist, and the needle rotated a little more.
     “Doesn’t work?” Scarf asked.
     “Maybe, but I’m more willing to bet there’s just no magnetic field here. It’s too bad; we might have had a new way to keep going forward. As it is . . .” his gaze tracked down to Scarf’s feet.
     Hours later, the two of them found themselves in what appeared to be the exact same place as they started, minus their shoes. Any sign of what they had left behind was lost in the distance, and still their surroundings had no feature, no variation, just endless white.
     Wristwatch sat on the ground and heaved a sigh. “Let’s rest for a bit.”
     Scarf sat down nearby. Their feet were sore, and it felt good to be off them.
     Wristwatch lay on his back and groaned. “What is this place?” he said. “Why are we here? How do we know things as if we have past lives, but have no memory of those lives?”
     “Yeah, it’s pretty weird.”
     “And all the things we figured out—the temperature, the friction of the ground, the lack of magnetic field—no matter how much I think about it, nothing makes sense.
     “Maybe it’s a dream.” Scarf offered.
     “Pinch yourself. It’s real. And think of all the time between when we first ‘woke up’ to now. You can remember a full narrative. If we were dreaming, there would be gaps and contradictions, and things that change when we look away. This is too consistent.”
     “A story, maybe? Stories make sense where the characters look, but there comes a point when the writer says, ‘that’s enough,’ and there’s no more further detail.”
     “But we’re conscious,” Wristwatch said. “Consciousness is something we know is absolutely real. It can’t be imagined into existence in a made-up world.”
     “What about a simulation? That could have all the features of a story, but be more open-ended. And there might be a way to create consciousness in a simulated world.”
     “Maybe.” Wristwatch yawned.
     “We’ll have more time to think about it tomorrow,” Scarf said.
     “Yeah, I guess so.”
     They stopped talking, and soon their thoughts grew incoherent, as they drifted off toward sleep.

Bad Science Arguments

Note: this post no longer meets the standards of rationality on this blog. The arguments I present are flawed and lacking in detail, and my views on some of the topics have changed. I may revisit them in the future, and when I do, I will add links from here.

Science is the pinnacle of thought, plowing relentlessly into the unknown, conquering it and making it ours. Science has shown us great truths, that the universe is amazingly old, that all life is related, that the sun is a star of billions in the galaxy, and the Milky Way is one galaxy of billions in the universe, and countless more. Science is a monolith of thought, knowledge, and understanding. Yet despite this—or perhaps because of it—a few ideas have made into the mainstream consciousness of the scientifically-minded community that do not meet the rigorous standards of a scientific claim. In this discussion, I will go through a few of them, explaining the arguments, and then pointing out where they fail. We shall see that they all share a common problem.

Note: I am not talking about scientific ideas that are misunderstood. That is another discussion. This is about ideas that many scientists and science enthusiasts subscribe to, and perhaps should not.

The Doomsday Argument (updated discussion here)

By Indigodeep on Deviantart

The Doomsday Argument claims humanity is on the brink of extinction. It goes like this: suppose someone was randomly chosen from anywhere in human history. What time period would you expect that person to be from? We know from history that the human population grows exponentially, so the later in time we look, the more humans we see. That is, until we die out. It is an ever-more-strongly-rising peak, and then a near-immediate jump down to dwindling numbers, and then extinction. Therefore we would expect to find our randomly chosen human being to be found near the end of human civilization. But think, you yourself are a randomly chosen human being from all of human history, so you should expect to find yourself near the end of human history. Therefore, we must conclude that humanity is about to die out.

Because I want to believe humanity will flourish for the rest of the lifetime of the universe, I have a personal interest in debunking this argumet. Luckily, it is quite easy to do so. The Doomsday Argument assumes that you and I are randomly picked from all of human history. We are not, though, we are you and I. Pick a point in history between the dawn of agriculture and the end of time, and the Doomsday Argument will give the same result: humanity is about to end.

The Doomsday Argument also fails to consider any particular method for human extinction. It is not easy to wipe out an intelligent species, and the more we advance, the more scenarios we can avoid. We have space programs that can find and deflect asteroids that are on a collision course with Earth. Some disasters might wipe out a significant number of us, but we will be able to rebuild and return, advancing further than before. We can weather out nuclear winter in underground bunkers. We can adapt to global warming. There are still possibilities we cannot avoid, like the sun suddenly increasing its temperature or a nearby star going supernova, but we can catalog these possibilities, and it is reasonable to assume that none of them will happen within a few billion years. Despite the cynicism of the Doomsday Argument, it looks like humanity will be here for a long time.

The Simulation Hypothesis

It is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been put over your eyes to blind you
 from the truth.

Look at how computer technology is advancing. Twenty years ago, the internet barely existed, and now it is all but an extension of people’s brains. Science used to be done with a pencil and paper, and now it is done on supercomputers. In all likelihood, this trend will continue.

Our simulation capabilities are getting better and better. We are at the point where we can put a billion particles in a virtual box, shake it up, and watch them form into galaxies and galaxy clusters. The particles we use have the mass of a thousand suns, but if computation continues to get better, there may be no limit to the complexity of the simulations we can run. In fact, a billion years from now when we have mega-computers that surround entire stars, we may be able to simulate a universe the size of our own, with particle-perfect precision. Given the vast number of stars in the universe, there are bound to eventually be a staggering number of simulated universes, compared to our one real universe. With this information, we are infinitely more likely to find ourselves in one of the many virtual universes than in the one real universe.

Except there are a few major flaws in this argument. First, we are conscious creatures. Our consciousness resides in our brains, and brains are very different from computers. We do not yet have a science of consciousness, and have no idea if consciousness can be created by a computer algorithm.

Second, the same logic that tells us that we are probably in a simulation would tell us that the universe that simulates us is also probably a simulation, and the universe that simulates it is probably a simulation too. The argument looks at the complexity of our universe, and concludes that, since we can make universe-precise simulations in our universe, then our own universe is probably a simulation. In fact, the higher up we go, the more complex the universe we find ourselves in, the more likely it will be able to generate universe-precise simulations, and thus the more likely it is to be a simulation itself! It is an infinite regress, which blows up the further out we go. Any valid argument would have to result in the conclusion going the other way around, with simpler universes being more likely to be simulations than complex ones.

Some universe has to be the real thing. And until it has been demonstrated otherwise, I see no reason not to live as if the one we find ourselves in is it.

The Technological Singularity

Again consider how rapidly computation is progressing. Fifty years ago, the first people walked on the moon, using less computing power than a Texas Instruments calculator. Now, we have built programs that can beat humanity’s best chess and go players, and it is only a matter of time before a true Artificial Intelligence is born that can beat the best human at everything. Once this happens, it will upgrade itself, making it even better. Then it will upgrade itself again, and again, and again, and by the next day we will all be ruled by an all-powerful robot god. It is not a question of if, but when. And it is coming soon.

Except it’s a lot more complicated than that. Though human brains are often compared with computers, they really have very little in common. Computers may be able to do mathematical calculations far beyond the human capability to comprehend, but they do exactly what they are told, sometimes so exactly as to frustrate us to no end at their stupidity. For example, if we told an AI to “make paper clips,” and left the room, we might return to find it has turned the entire house into paper clips. And even if we can code some “common sense” into our AI, there are still things that humans will always be better at, like philosophy and the arts. Suggesting a computer that can outdo us at those things goes far into the realm of science fiction. The bottom line is, all it takes to avoid our AI worries is smart programming. We have to be responsible with what we create, no differently when we are talking about AI than any other technology.

There is also an implicit worry that a superintelligent Artificial Intelligence will become conscious, and want to wipe us out as evolutionary competitors. This is simply baseless worry, brought about by our human tendency to project our own perceptions and behaviors onto the universe. All life in nature, including us, evolved in competition with other life. That which was violent and destructive toward other life forms was more likely to survive. When we look back through our history and see the wars and the subjugation we wrought, it is because evolution favored those of our distant ancestors who had those things in their nature. AI is different; we decide its nature. So all we have to do to avoid our creation revolting against us is to program it with an unchangeable command to value above all else the freedom of human beings to pursue their own fulfillment.

The technological singularity is a much more nuanced than I have covered here, and it is interesting enough that I might write a whole other discussion about it sometime in the future.

Conclusion

All of these arguments have the same problem: they rely on the extrapolation of trends, and neglect to take into account any of the real factors that come into play. There is no immediate existential danger that we are not in the process of taking steps to prevent. We have no examples of perfect-precision simulated universes, nor any evidence that consciousness can exist within them. And we have no evidence of any computer having any intent at all, much less the intent to destroy us. These ideas are gold mines for science fiction; it is quite popular these days to have stories about AI gone amok or Earth being threatened by some catastrophe, and The Matrix did fairly well too. But science fiction is all they are.

For a final word, I want to point out that just because they are bad arguments does not mean they aren’t possible. It merely means it is not reasonable to take them as definite or inevitable at the present time. Science has such a good track record of providing solid, airtight arguments, that we run the danger of letting our guards down and simply accepting everything that comes from a scientific source. But it is important to remain agnostic when we do not have enough information to say one way or another, and we must take these ideas as warnings, so that we can look to the future with clarity and responsibility.