The Law of Identity

How much faith do we place in the laws of logic when parsing through our perceptions of the world?  One of the foundational laws of logic is “The Law of Identity.”  This states, quite simply, that A = A.  In other words, a thing is what it is.  But is it?

Is the box on the left the same as the box on the right?  In a sense, yes, they are exact duplicates. But what is the role of cognition in determining equivalency? Is an appearance understood one way different than an appearance understood another way?

Let me look at the same question in a different context. Is it true that a keyboard in my office is the same as an identical keyboard beside it? As observed at a human spatial scale, the answer seems to be very clearly ‘yes.’  But what about sub-atomically? With the perpetual motion, interaction and indeterminacy of sub-atomic particles, it would seem the answer is quite clearly ‘no.’ The same paradox applies to a single keyboard when compared to itself from one moment to the next. Are they the same? Conditionally, yes. Are the different? Conditionally, yes.

Now back to the boxes.

Is this visual representation something “objective”? Do these boxes “exist” independent of an observer’s understanding? The transparent line boxes above are exact copies of each other, but if I think of them in the manner below (using grey to represent the “front” face of the box), a single image can be understood in different ways. The boxes below illustrate how the same box can be seen in different ways (using the 3-D representation below with the clear boxes above). Are the boxes the same if I understand them as different?

What do you think? Are the boxes equivalent? Does A = A regardless of what “A” means to me?

Soundless Falling Trees

It is a riddle we all know well: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

I admire the beauty of nature, but must remind myself, it is not nature’s inherent beauty that I am admiring any more than a deaf man can admire sound.  It is sensory perception.  It is cognitive processing.  It is human consciousness.

There is no sound without an ear and brain to receive and process the vibrations.  I see light, not because the form I observe is inherent to nature, but because the human eye and brain process certain frequencies of electromagnetic waves to “look” like what I see.  A deaf man doesn’t hear.  A blind man doesn’t see.  Electromagnetic waves outside of the frequencies we hear and see cannot be observed manually.  As Max Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental.  I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.  We cannot get behind consciousness.  Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

All of that is just to say: The “wonder of nature” is the wonder of consciousness.

The Illusion of Causality

What makes me “come back down” when I jump?  Answer: gravity.  Every elementary school student knows this.  But what if the earth was not rotating?  What if I was lighter than air?  What if the earth was the size of my back yard?  I would not come back down.  An obvious and perhaps pointless digression, all for the purpose of reminding me that there is never a single “cause” of anything.  Every single interaction in spacetime is effected by a causal chain that runs from the quantum scale to the cosmological scale.  Every time you ever hear an action (or reaction) attributed to single cause, you can rest assured that an infinite regression of causality and contingency has been left out of the explanation.  If the universe we observe is this seeming-infinite interconnected network “causal” interactions regressing back in time, why do we assume (or expect) we’ll find a single cause for time-space, or the existence of our universe at the beginning of it all?

Reality, As Painted By A Five Sense Palette

Are you familiar with NASA’s various Hubble Deep Field observations?  It seems to me an appropriate metaphor for human understanding.  The very short version is that over an extended period of time, NASA pointed the Hubble telescope at an apparently empty and infinitesimal portion of the night sky (below is the amount of sky observed by the eXtreme Deep Field observation):

Repeated exposures to the same area over many years allowed the trickle of photons to accumulate this stunning image:

Most of those glowing objects are distant galaxies.  I have read there are an estimated 5000+ galaxies of various ages in that image.  Some date back as far as we have ever observed, approximately 13+ billion years ago.  This is what was observed upon careful and extended observation of an area of space that appeared to be empty to the naked eye.

The naked eye provides a great deal of the information by which we construct our impression of three dimensional space.  As humans, we have little intuitive insight regarding what information we are not perceiving.  Sight – combined with the four other senses of touch, taste, hearing and smell – provide my human perception of reality.  They provide the data on which derivative tools like inductive and deductive reasoning can be employed.  The data provided by my senses is woefully incomplete, limited on two fronts: scope and scale.  The scope of my sensory sensitivity involves just a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum as sight and sound.  We know of animals that perceive various facets of reality that human senses cannot.  Walls and chairs and beds and grass and trees look like what I see, sound like what I hear, feel like what I touch.  But we know from the study of subatomic particles that an atom is well over 99% empty space.  Even time may be an illusion.  Our best cosmological theories require that 96% of the universe be made up of mysterious “dark matter” and “dark energy” that have never been directly observed.

Scale also plays a role.  Maybe an even bigger one (I will write much more on this at some later time).  The diameter of the physical universe is estimated to be over 90 billion light years.  Strikes me as akin to guessing how many marbles are in a bowl, but whatever.  Regardless, the human mind really cannot comprehend the size of the cosmos, nor the infinitesimalness of the quantum scale.  The orders of magnitude are cleverly demonstrated here.  They defy our comprehension.  So we tend to settle for causal coherence, even if it leads to faulty conclusions.  The human brain seems addicted to pattern and predictability, where complexity and chaos may more accurately describe the universe that we inhabit.  Many researchers have shown that the human mind tends to create order, coherence, causality, even where none exists.  It appears to be how we are wired.  And it seems we can’t help but think the “mind” exhibited at our own scale is unique, without properly accounting for evidence of intelligent behavior in clustered matter at orders of magnitude both smaller and larger than us.  There are almost as many bacteria in our body as there are cells with our own DNA.  Yet we seldom recognize these microscopic organisms as individuals, rather we recognize only the collective “me”?   A city exhibits the ordered pattern of an organism, but we view recognize only the individual “me”‘s not the city itself as a “mind.”  Might our particular scale be restricting our appreciation for “mind” at different dimensional scales?

It seems to me that the primary limitation, and one that cannot be avoided within human perception, is the particular nature of human perception.  We cannot know what we do not know.  As Erwin Schrodinger said, “The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it.”  What I perceive is just one way of experiencing the universe.  It is just one version of the universe, painted using my five sense perceptual palette.  I try to remind myself of that whenever I think I know more.

Challenging Creationism through Theology, not Science

A recent debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye on the veracity of Biblical creationism drew quite a bit of publicity.  Questions of Science vs Religion always seems to draw quite the impassioned crowd on both sides.  At this juncture of my life, I tend to view the ultimate nature of reality as largely unknowable, so I don’t get too caught up in questions of origin.  Known existence in the seeming-present is mysterious and enigmatic enough for me.  But in the past, my personal views were closely aligned with the creationist views of Ken Ham; I was raised with Biblical literalism as the default truth.

As such, I am sympathetic to the idea that an omnipotent God can do anything at all.  I am sympathetic to the idea that science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God.  So the skeptic in me actually sympathizes with many of Ken Ham’s arguments (though for vastly different reasons than he put forward).  But this little blog entry isn’t about the uncertainty inherent in all scientific discovery.  This commentary is about literal creationism, and why I think the argument against creationism is most striking to young-earth creationists when it is advanced through theology rather than cosmology and anthropology.

The arguments of science against the young-earth creationism are self-evident to those who don’t interpret the Bible literally, and irrelevant to those who do.  The intractability of Ken Ham’s views were best displayed by his assertion that “No one is ever going to convince me the Bible is not true.”  And, it seems, he meant “true” in the most literal sense.  When cosmological, anthropological, or archaeological “facts” seems to contradict the Bible, a believer in Biblical inerrancy can always rely upon the Wild Card of an omnipotent God to cure any apparent inconsistencies.  However, if the Bible is inerrant, there cannot be a single false account, so when two accounts contradict each other within the Bible – a Bible vs Bible conflict – it creates a far more troublesome dilemma for the believer of inerrancy than any scientific claim from an outside source.

To me, this is where the most convincing arguments against Ken Ham’s version of creationism can be made.  Rather than trying to prove that the science of the Bible is wrong, it is more impactful to use the Bible against itself to prove that it is not an inerrant historical account.  If the Bible is not inerrant, then the Genesis account of creation is closer to metaphor than Divine journalism.  Once that is established, the discussion of origins and evolution is more narrowly restricted to the specific merits of different theories, and the interpretation of whatever evidence is available at the time.

There are countless places in the Bible where one account directly contradicts another.

I have put together an essay on reasons why the Bible is not an inerrant document, and dozens of books have more closely examined the topic.  For a believer in Biblical inerrancy who is up for the challenge, I would suggest a close cross-examination of the gospels.  The four gospel accounts share many of the same stories, and there is no shortage of explicit discrepancy.  I count at least ten contradictions between Jesus’ final supper and his ascension.  They are documented in this post, which is a cut-down of the longer essay I linked to at the top of this paragraph.  As someone who once held a belief in Biblical inerrancy, I wish someone had pointed out these fairly glaring – and often explicit (not implicit) – contradictions when I was younger.

As someone who read the Bible regularly, it’s amazing to me that I did not notice the many contradictions.  How could I have missed them?  Countless studies have shown humans use remarkably selective observation when attending to a particular task.  The most glaringly obvious observations can escape us when they are outside our area of focus or belief.

The video below is a re-creation of one of the most famous studies on the subject.  It’s worth a minute of your time if you doubt the selective nature of human observation.