Книжное обозрение – ‘Tеория ничего’ написано Рассел К. Стандиш

(Потому что наши русские читатели очень важны, мы сейчас в поисках профессионального переводчика. Мы приносим свои извинения, что на данный момент, мы можем лишь предоставить текст на английском языке.)

Theories of Everything. That is what world class scientists today consider to be the hallmark of the tenacious mind battles of which the hopped result is to elicit an understanding of what makes atoms, molecules, brains, and the whole of living complexities of life tick.

As if not enough turmoil was cluttering the ocean in which these theories are bathing in, a select group of physicists, cognitive and computer scientists are already beginning to wonder if this “path of least resistance” towards reductionism, that is, towards explaining the emergent structures of matter like DNA, organisms, minds, psychology, consciousness, by analyzing the structure and mechanistic behavior of the most simple constituents from which they emerge, is the right way to go if we want access deep down the rabbit hole.

Quantum Physics’ Standard Model (Bruce A. Schumm’s book, Deep Down Things, is a great, for the layman, introduction to this subject) gives a very good explanation about the behavior and structure of subatomic particles, while String Theory (check Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe for more), the model which tries to explain all the constituents of matter as interactions between tiny vibrating strings of energy, promises to advance even further towards detailing the phenomena and organization of even the smallest components from which all physical objects emerge from.

But is this enough? Does knowing all the voltages and intensities that express the electrical states of your computer suffice for you to understand how it works as a whole? Could you ever comprehend how a computer program works only by analyzing its machine code language consisting of blithely long strings of 0’s and 1’s. A handful of scientists doubt this is the right path towards understanding all there is.

If we want to answer the most fastidious questions that bedeviled human minds from the beginning of their existence we sure as hell wouldn’t want to mistake the crumbs for the whole bread. Ensemble Theories of Everything promise to stop the bungled attempts at explaining how reality works as a whole made by Reductionist Theories of Everything that try to usurp answers to the above questions, answers that they were never even designed to possibly be able to contrive in the first place.

Similarly to how computer programmers make sense of software by using high level programming languages, the same way we should draw inferences about the nature of reality by using the meta-levels of understanding, which the Ensemble Theories of Everything purportedly provide.

Even though not as long as Daivd Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality, Russell K. Standish’s book provides a very passable text that sprouts a myriad of new ideas designed to bring together a whole new ensemble theory. The book tries to answer the ins and outs of why anything bothers to exist at all, and, even from the beginning, draws the sardonic conclusion that the whole of what there is around us, the set of all the universes that make up the Multiverse, contains no information at all, and is in fact Nothing; it is just from the inside, as mere descriptions – bits of strings – that we are, that there seems, from our point of view, to be something.

Chapter 1 lays the basic concepts giving a aerial view of the landscape which is to be analyzed step by step in the upcoming pages.

Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment, The Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of Quantum Mechanics, and The Quantum Theory of Immortality are all given a perceptive introduction. The primary deduction after reading the text?

From all the putative alternative worlds dispersed in the Multiverse, a select number of those, specifically the ones in which we find ourselves, will always contain a version of us that is bound to continuity of life, consequently, our only conscious experience will be of those worlds (universes) in which we will continue experiencing it; the grounds for Quantum Immortality have been laid.

Reading about the whole lexicon of emergence, reductionism, semantic and syntactic language, chaos, entropy, and not the least, the notion of complexity, all found in Chapter 2, is a compliance you’ll have to grant in order to fully understand what Russell’s ensemble theory has to say about how information, that is, “data with meaning“, is able to emerge from the meaningless data spread all over the Multiverse; the less descriptions that map onto the meaning of a data packet, the more complex that data packet is, that is to say the more information it carries.

If you’re not the exception to the rule, you probably are part of the set of normal people with mundane lives, you’ve probably never won the lottery, you probably don’t own a Ferrari, probably have a normal wife or girlfriend, and probably, if you don’t suffer from any megalomania, you feel as if there’s nothing special about your experiences compared to the experiences of other people.

But could this be all? Why not alternative life histories? Don’t despair my friend. What you experience is only a part of the vastness (possible infinity) of alternative worlds of which you don’t have access to. All of the anachronistic happenings that you’ve felt you were never aggrieved the experiencing of (winning the lottery, having Miss Universe as a girlfriend), or the ominous ones that you’ve dreamed to prevent or forestall (cancer, a slow and painful death, etc) are all given a fair chance.

What your conscious experience will be is just a set of bit-strings (i.e. events, happenings), with a pattern of regularity specific of those universes that permit life to evolve, drawn randomly from the Multiverse. Chapter 3 goes to depth in presenting the implications of Russell’s theory to the above statements, and also presents other ensembles envisioned by world class scientists.

The real crazy part of the book starts with Chapter 4. Occam’s Razor, the theory that says the more complex a theory is, the greater the likelihood it will be falsified by data, gives us a premise to funnel ourselves on the right path of finding the correct ensemble theory of everything.

If our experience is just a random set of bit-strings drawn from the Multiverse, where does all the regularity come from? Why does our future always relate to our past? Why don’t we see a white rabbit suddenly fly through the walls of our room right now? This so called “White Rabbit Problem” has concocted some possible answers to this questions. The most salient one is that we humans came to be observers through a long process of evolution. Even though there are quantum fluctuations developing at micro-scales of measurement, evolution has not endowed our senses to observe those noises, instead it enriched our brains with cognitive tools sensible only to patterns of events vital for our survival. In the set of universes we live, complex events like white rabbits flying through walls are very improbable, only if because complex organisms that fly through walls need to come to exist only through a long process of evolution, that is, if they are ever going to possibly be able to evolve the capability to fly through walls.

Functionalism, the theory which states that the human mind represents the arrangement and overall functionality of its constituent parts, makes us reach an obvious conclusion: If we build a similar arrangement of elements with a similar functionality – as in your brain – there will be no difference between the two systemic complexes. LITERALLY. That is to say, for example if we scan your brain and body right now with an imaginary futuristic scanner, destroy you, and simultaneously regenerate your brain (and body) both in New York and London, you’re certainly not going to experience death, but you’re just as likely to experience suddenly finding yourself in London or new New York. In half of the worlds you’re going to experience London, in the other half you’re going to enjoy a nice ferry ride on the Jamaica Bay. It’s all a matter of contingency.

In the same chapter we’ll find out about the even more buoyant theory of computation, making itself most known through the Strong AI thesis, which states that every kind of consciousness can be simulated on a Turing Machine. This gives us a new perspective on how immortality can come to be reality. What if in a few tens of years we’ll be able to transfer our minds in what is to be the future of the Internet? What if?

The Self Sampling Assumption (SSA): Every observer should reason as if they were a random sample drawn from the set of all observers. Imagine you had two black boxes and there was no way of taking a look inside them to see what they contain. One of them has 10 balls numbered from 1 to 10 and the other has 10000 balls numbered from 1 to 10000, but you have no clue about which one is which. Suppose you are allowed to insert only one hand and extract a single ball from any box you like. If the ball you extract has printed the number 6 upon it, what should we infer from this? The answer is that, with a very high probability, the box from which you extracted the ball is the one containing the 10 balls.

The self sampling assumption applied to the above mental exercise may not say much, but imagine this: Instead of the extraction of the balls from one of the two boxes, imagine yourself as being “extracted” from the Multiverse (check Bernard Carr Universe or Multiverse for more) – i.e. having a conscious experience in one of those worlds. What conclusion should this conscious observer (in this case you) reasonably draw? “The Doomsday Argument“, thoroughly analyzed in chapter 5, tells us that the conscious observer should expect to find itself in the time interval where the majority of conscious observers are alive (why? because you’re a random sample), near the peak population, therefore we should expect a dramatic downfall of the population size in the near future. All this, and why ants aren’t conscious you can find more information about in the remainder of the chapter.

Chapter 6 deals with the implications that The Theory of Evolution by means of Natural Selection has on Russell’s ensemble theory. In reality, as a omniscient supervenient being might observe, all lineages from all the universes similar to ours are to be found in a distinct set of worlds in which they go on living. There are worlds where dinosaurs keep on living, and worlds in which Homo Erectus, therefore us, may have never evolved. It is just from the inside, that there seems to be species which go extinct.

Chapter 7 is where Russell derives the postulates of Quantum Mechanics from the basic principles introduced in the prior chapters. This is a passable text only for the mathematically inclined. In the Appendix you will find the introductory mathematical terms so you can come to grips with what the author is trying to demonstrate here.

There you are on the bed of the hospital ready to give your consent to be killed by the doctors that gave you no other chance to get rid of the horrible pain and decrepitude you will be bound to forever if you don’t accept euthanasia, so they say. But if functionalism is true, and if from all the worlds in the Multiverse there are some select few of those universes where you survive, there comes the obvious conclusion that you will experience the happenings from those worlds. As Russell Standish puts it, “Quantum Immortality (QI): It’s more of a sentence than a gift“. Maybe, Russell says, this scary inference will be a good plea against adopting the path of which the perils of euthanasia’s choice might guarantee. Chapter 8 also presents the counterarguments against Quantum Immortality.

If Quantum Immortality is true and you can experience only your own survival then imagine this: You buy a lottery ticket; after that you create a room with a sufficient number of guns guns pointed at your head (for added redundancy – i.e. a big number guarantees your death if they fire at the same time). The triggering system is connected to a sufficiently secure data channel that will guarantee the security of the connection (i can’t imagine a 100% secure network but for the present matter we’ll accept this premise) through which it will receive the lottery numbers. The guns will be programmed to fire at your head at the same time if the lottery numbers do not match the ticket you played.

As you can experience only your survival that means you will experience winning the lottery (experience the worlds where the numbers match). That is to say, you’ll experience the select few worlds in which you go on living. In the remaining vastness of universes you’ll die and cause a lot of pain to your relatives who have access only to the majority of worlds where you are dead (SciTechExplained.com does not assume any responsibility for the above claims and most of all does not recommend anyone to do such an experiment – it’s just theoretical mumbling with lots of counterarguments against it – read chapter 8 of the book for more).

Chapter 9 and 10 goes about detailing the implications that The Theory of Nothing has on Consciousness, Free Will and The Nature of Reality. “Free Will is the ability of a conscious being to do something irrational“. Quantum Randomness is the primary reason why we have Free Will, Russell argues, though i can’t find any good reason of why that would be true at all. For a more in-depth treatise of the problem of free will check Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves.

Russell has done a tremendous job. The book is very passable, though sometimes you’ll have to re-read certain sections of it to fully understand it. The only other popular science treatise about similar subjects is David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality, so the set of ensemble theories of everything books contains a very sparse number of elements. Therefore, if you’re really a polymath wannabe, interesting in understanding all about how everything comes to exist, then this is a recommended read.