Conversation With Richard - Does Matter Equal Existence?

Here is Richard's reply to my piece on the Big Bang experiments:

Hi there Peter,

I have finally found time amidst the hustle and bustle of this busy time of year to reply to your message. Firstly, your first paragraph, it brings me to draw up the question, 'If matter behaves predictably, then why do surprises exist?.. Does this mean it happens outside of our knowledge, or does it happen through another means in something science will never find?' If either is the case, then the scientists are trying to find the answers in the wrong areas, which I suppose agrees with the points you were making towards the end of your message.

I heard about the Large Hadron Collider and was following the news of it's results very closely, until I heard it may not be fired up again for months maybe. How dissappointing. I hope they find some answers when it is next fired up, or maybe the leak it had wasn't an accident, maybe we aren't meant to find any answers to matter and the dark matter yet. I do however hope we do find answers that will build knowledge.

I have another point in difference to your point involving matter. I read that you thought "matter=existence". However, I tend not to agree with this, and take the road of a dualist. From my experience of life, life isn't just about substance, you have to experience it subjectively too. So in short, the mind is just as important as materialism, and together they both equal existence.

I guess in relation to dark matter a million different responses on what it is could make sense. However if it makes up 70% of the universe's energy, surely it could be said that it could be controlling what happens as we know it without realising? If this is the case, life is a constant struggle, and we will never be in control.


I shall leave my response here, and look forward to your response as always,

Richard Debnam

Tags: conversation Big Bang matter existence predictable science Large Hadron Collider dualist control dark matter

Conversation With Richard - Big Bang Or Big Whimper?

Hi Richard

I hope you got my email with a piece from Reuters on Dark Matter. I cannot reproduce it here because of copyright restrictions. Nor can I provide a reference to it because pieces by Reuters' journalists only survive a few days and are then removed as yesterday's news. I do find journalists are exceptionally good at reporting on this particular subject and I recommend Reuters as a source of news for anyone. I have it fed to my email box several times a day, all for free.

Dark Matter and things to do with the Big Bang are very much in the news this week, in any case, with the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN on Wednesday. and to celebrate Radio 4 is having a Big Bang Day. This, at least, means that a lot more people are better informed about the state of our scientific knowledge at the present time. I am, therefore, going to take the opportunity to review what I think the state of play is at the present time.

Science, in its various forms, begins from the proposition that the cosmos is made out of substance which, nowadays, is commonly referred to as matter. By very careful observation and experimentation it has been established that matter behaves in quite specific ways, never randomly or unpredictably. The job of all scientists is to detail exactly how this process operates. In order to do this the scientific community put forward various theories to explain a particular part of the story of matter and then set about testing their theory to see how robust it really is. If they find there are problems with a particular theory they will refine it or replace it with a better one. Their belief is that, even though scientific knowledge is changing, it is always moving forward as each new theory is improved upon. The totality of knowledge about matter is growing.

There are, of course, many gaps in the scientist's knowledge. The discovery of Dark Matter is a very good example. Not many years ago the scientific community came to the conclusion that there was another form of matter, as yet unrecognised. This version of matter was invisible and could only be discerned by its gravitational effect, hence the name Dark Matter. It is believed to account for something around 80% of the matter in the universe. Incredibly, we know very little about either it, or it's associated Dark Energy. I have dug out a Reuters piece from 07 Sep 2006, just 2 years ago, reporting on the CERN LHC. The quotes are from Brian Cox of Manchester University:

"We don't know what 95 percent of the universe is made of - which is a bit embarrassing for a subject that claims to be fundamental... There is Dark Matter. It is all over the place but we have no idea what it is."

"There is also something called Dark Energy, and that is an even bigger question. It makes up about 70 percent of the energy in the universe but again we have absolutely no idea what it is."

Now, if that were the end of the story, we could leave the scientists to get on with their quest and wish them good luck. However, in spite of their self-declared ignorance, they claim that what they are doing is the answer to all knowledge, that there is nothing else in the universe except matter or matter like derivatives and that their quest is, in fact, a theory of everything.

Most people understand conventional physics, put crudely how things we can see work. They can extrapolate from that some idea of how the totality of the universe might work in a similar way. However, alongside all of that there has been developing what is called particle physics, which is the science of the small, very, very small. Although sub atomic physics has been around for about a century it is still a huge puzzle to scientists. Initially, it was believed that there were only a few bits inside the atom. Indeed, the very word atom means an indivisible unit. I think the present count is something like 8 but don't quote me - they may have found some more by the time you read this! The frustrating thing is that as well as finding particle physics just gets more and more complicated, there is a serious problem about linking it in with conventional physics. Unfortunately, the maths just does not add up. Here we go again, I hear you say. So, we have hypothetical Dark Matter and hypothetical particle matter and the only way to make sense of the 2 is to posit another missing bit, known as the Higgs boson particle. The problem is about making sense of mass and the Higgs boson would endow the necessary mass. The trouble is, so far, no one has been able to isolate it. Enter LHC. The prize which the scientific community is hoping to win, as I say, is a theory of everything. They wish to join together the science of the large with the science of the small. LHC will examine the basic structure of the universe and, hopefully, explain how the Big Bang happened and what happened then and then, and then.

I wonder what fate lies in store for my now quite famous quip about astro physics:

"In the beginning was nothing - and then it exploded!"

There are 2 ways of looking at this. The scientific way is to say that matter is all we have and it has to explain everything. If we get bits of it wrong, so what. The quest goes on. All that proves is that we are struggling. The project is still worth while. Crucially, everything is made out of particles.

The other way is to say, yes, understanding matter is worth while but where is the evidence that there is nothing more to it than that? We think in material terms most of the time. Matter=facts. Matter=existence. Matter=real. I am not sure that we can even think of existence without thinking matter. And this is becoming so invasive now that even the likes of feelings are considered to be materially produced. And what of God? I wonder how many people today believe that man created God in his own image and not the other way round. But even so the idea is very material like. God does seem very much like a Dark Person.

We have some knowledge of substance and how it works, but this is very limited. We are getting close to being able to make scientific comments on the moment the Big Bang occurred. Where does this take us? In my view, not very far at all. Science, at the moment, has its hands full trying to understand the process tracing back to the Big Bang. But there must have been something there waiting to go Bang. Where did it come from? And if that traces back to another Bang, or a thousand Bangs... What if the universe is one of many contained within many... where does that leave us?

The answer, I would suggest, is the same as it has always been. Science is not erroding philosophy because science cannot answer philosophical questions. It can only answer scientific questions. The details will change but that fact will not. How do I know this? Because science, patently, is dealing with process - how things work - not where they came from. Follow every scientific process to its logical conclusion and you will find yourself in an infinite regress. Science is not an explanation - it is a method. To be honest, it amazes me that so many people have trouble with this concept. Perhaps my mind is more logical than most. The difference between how matter works and where it came from seem so obviously different to me. Let's try approaching it scientifically. Imagine we have a little package, pre-universe, which is about to explode, and bear in mind, this actually happened, how did it come to be there, just waiting to explode? Let's suppose you say to me "It grew, by a scientific process". We then go through the same process again and we get back to the package that grew into the one that eventually exploded. How did that come to be there?

That is an infinite regress and it is why science cannot explain everything.

I will leave for another time what can explain everything and, indeed, the other points made in your reply. I think we have plenty to consider already!

Peter Rayner

Tags: conversation Big Bang Reuters Dark Matter Large Hadron Collider CERN scientific knowledge Dark Energy theory of everything Higgs boson particles existence God

Conversation With Richard - Why? Why? Why?

As predicted, Richard has replied to my last post to him, the one entitled "It's Science Jim But Not As We Know It". He takes exception to the idea that science is always wrong and argues that it does answer some "Why?" questions very well. He makes a plea for patience in judging science.

On the problem of time and space he points out that everything has an opposite.

Hi Peter,

I've just jogged my memory into the flow of where our discussion was going, and I feel back on track again.

Firstly, I need some help if possible, wherever I look for a reliable cosmological resource on dark matter, it ceases to exist, as I'm not totally sure what it represents, and I remain intrigued into what it is. However, continuing on, I don't fully agree Science is ultimately wrong. Instead, isn't it true of the answers we are trying to find now? Our discussion's ideal aim is to try and find answers to philosophical questions we propose, but I find there are different types of "why" questions, one of them, Science does find an answer to.

If for example, one was to ask, "Why does the Sun dissappear from our sky during the day?" One would simply answer, because the Earth is rotating on it's axis which creates daytime and nighttime. This is the type of "why" question Science can answer in today's scientific knowledge. On the other hand, if one was to ask, "Why do we have daytime and nighttime on Earth?" This is where Science cannot answer, and can either only trial and error until it answers the question properly, or it can just explain, "because it does". Then it begs the question, "Who started daytime and nighttime on Earth, to answer the question of why?" Therefore, Science can answer the "why" inside it's knowledge, but not outside of it. However, Science has proved it can answer the main "why" and "who" questions gradually and somewhat controversially, contradicting faith of strong religions. Therefore I find Science needs patience in order to find an answer, and the way round it, is not to expect an answer to questions we face now, but to patiently contribute and accept that our future ancestors may know the answer before us.

In answer to your point about "..applying finite space to infinity, or time with eternity." I have to say that without one, we cannot know what it's opposite means. For example, if we do not know what infinity means, but you know what finity means, then you can only know from learning about things which could apply to infinity. Which means in order to find a true answer to whether Space is finite or infinite, we have to look at both possibilities in order to not miss something which could lead to an ultimate answer, regardless of Earth and human time that we have created and abide by.

I see Science, truth and our life-reflective curiosity as a jacket that is unzipped. We all wear different jackets, due to our diverse interests. Some people couldn't care about if there are other dimensions to life, so their jacket is done up very quickly, but then there are others of us who want to know about the unknown, making our jackets a whole lot bigger. The more Science finds a true answer to what originally seemed an unanswerable question, the jacket zips up, and completes part of the gradual journey science is made for, to chase true answers to curious questions or challenges we propose, whether involving everyday life, an afterlife, a parallel life or any other possible different dimensions which occur from the human mind. Therefore once our jackets are zipped right up, we continue in our course of paradoxical Earth days of eat, drink, and sleep to keep us alive until our dying day. Some of us need to wait longer for our jackets to be zipped up, and the obvious need to abide by our materiality in everyday life at the same time as zipping up our jacket.

I look forward to your response as always,


Richard Debnam

Tags: conversation why science time space dark matter patience truth

An Afterlife? - Wave If You're There

Another one of my diversions. This one concerns some brief postings by Kim. You can read the full text here. Kim speculates about the idea that the Spirit uses waves to communicate. I picked up on her concern that there would need to be "a translating medium" and replied to her because this seemed so reminiscent of Descartes. It provides a summary of what Descartes thought and also what the central issues are in the philosophy of mind.

Kim's posts were made on 18 Jul 2008 at 08:36 and 08:43am. My post was made on 18 Jul 2008 at 04:13 pm:

Hi Kim. I am not surprised that you are struggling with your ideas but at least you can console yourself with the knowledge that you are in the greatest of company. I would like to pass on a few observations of your post in the hope of advancing your ideas which I do find intriguing. You may or may not be aware that you have expressed ideas which are very similar to those of the great philosopher, Rene Descartes, who also struggled with the same material.

Descartes, like you, argued that there is an essential self which is not material and which inhabits our bodies. Matter does not have this self awareness but it does have attributes and so can do things. This is not the same as having life. He believed that the self has no attributes, no physical characteristics because its essential quality is its own existence. To be alive is to able to say "I am me" and we can never say "I am you" even if you and I share similar qualities. We can never be another person. In contrast physical matter is defined by its attributes and abilities. Essentially, he described a "ghost in the machine".

Also, like you, Descartes believed that there had to be some kind of interface which allowed the mind and body to relate to each other and rather oddly he believed that this was located in the pineal gland. Although that is obviously not the case, it is intriguing that you share his worry!

I suppose the central issue is whether selfhood is really a physical thing all along and consciousness and self identity is just a manifestation, an illusion, if you will, which can wholly be explained by physical processes or whether ultimately it is not possible to provide an adequate explanation of life by re-arranging matter to form being. The scientific approach provides a very powerful case for matter being the answer to everything. Set against that is the fact that things we associate with being, such as the ability to have free choice and intentions do not easily fit into an entirely physical universe. How can the strict rules of matter allow us to make decisions? Would that not cash out as no more than a string of inevitable occurences entirely governed by the detailed actions and reactions of material processes? Also, how can matter, alone, account for why as well as how the universe came to be?

Just a few observations which I offer in the hopes of clarifying your thinking and encouraging further ideas. Good luck!

Peter Rayner

Kim replied that our brains are, in some respects, like computers and went off to do some thinking. I referred her to our series of posts, now re-produced in this blog.

Kim's post was made on 18 Jul 2008 at 04:28 pm. My reply was made on 18 Jul 2008 at 04:33 pm:

Hi Kim. You might like to look back over my discussions with Richard in which we discuss intentionality and how computers think with particular reference to John Searle's chinese room illustration.

Peter Rayner

Tags: afterlife Spirit translating medium Descartes philosophy of mind existence matter attributes self ghost in the machine pineal gland computers thinking

An Afterlife? - It's Science Jim But Not As We Know It

In this post I look at what science has to offer and where it falls down. I suggest that science is good at analyzing the known universe but fails when we ask it to explain anything beyond that. Our understanding of time and space suggest that they are paradoxes which we can't live with, scientifically, but can't live without, either. This suggests that we need to find something very big which is currently missing from our understanding. It would have to be non material to avoid an impasse. In order to identify it we may have to ask "why" rather than "how".

My post was made on 14 Jul 2008 at 04:25 pm:

Hi Richard. This is really getting tricky now so I think we need to just backtrack a little. You will be relieved to know that I do not believe there is an alternate universe out there inhabited by some geyser called God, although we could have a different conversation about string theory but not now, please, not now. I think we are both agreed that we have quite enough on our hands trying to make sense of the one world we do know. In trying to make sense of it we have identified what most people feel happy to call "matter" and we believe that matter behaves in predictable ways which we can discover by applying techniques which we call science. I have no problem with that. However, these intrepid scientists often claim that everything can be explained by science. I have a couple of problems with that.

Firstly, science is about process, by which I mean it attempts to make sense of matter, starting from how we find it behaves in our current environment. It projects forward and backwards but it never goes completely beyond that spectrum. The furthest back it goes is to around the Big Bang or thereabouts. In formulating its theories it posits various explanations which it then tests out with experiments. Eventually, these experiments hit upon problems which cannot be explained by the theories it is trying to prove and so another scientist has to posit a different theory which, therefore, requires a further set of experiments. This so called scientific revolution proceeds by a process of trial and error, with the ultimate aim of one day understanding everything there is to know about how matter works.

Therefore, at any one time, current scientific understanding is about to be superceded by the latest scientific revolution. In other words science is, by definition, always wrong. It is, simply, a part of the process of understanding matter and very imperfect at it. Only a few years ago our fearless scientists discovered a form of matter which it called "dark matter" and subsequent investigations revealed that it accounts for about 85% of the matter in the universe. Moreover, virtually nothing is known about it. Now, our understanding of matter is very limited and our understanding of dark matter even more limited so we can hardly look to science to give us anything approaching knowledge which will, in the foreseeable future, be adequate enough to explain even what is going on in the material universe, let alone anything further than that. Yet the scientists confidently tell us matter will explain everything!

But there is a further problem. As long as science confines itself to the process side of science, all is well. What happens when we try to take that process to its ultimate? We all rely on 2 very important concepts in our understanding of matter and they are "time" and "space". I have tried to think scientifically without applying these concepts but I can't. Even using Einstein's theory of relativity there does seem to me to be a fundamental problem. Both these ideas are about measurement, finite measurement. If we can measure time and space then we can, logically, project this measurement into infinity. Travel, if you will, beyond the edge of the universe. Project time back before the beginning of time. At this point both ideas become paradoxes. It does not make sense to juxtapose finite space with infinity or time with eternity.

I draw 2 conclusions from this. The first is that the current scientific language is fundamentally inadequate. It not only does not but cannot explain what it sets out to explain. Secondly, there is something missing which is so huge that it blows an almighty hole in our understanding of everything.

Arguing from ignorance is not something any of us like to do, but I think it is the position we are in. So, how far can we go? Well, my answer is that there must be something radically different which explains what is going on, not more of the same. An alternate universe inhabited by God would not cut it. That would be just another material universe and would, therefore, re-create the infinite regress we already have encountered. So, we are looking for something non material, in order to escape the problems of materialism.

We are, of course, surrounded by things which are non material, but we are also surrounded by people who want to make out that they are, in fact, material. As long as we base our thinking on the material, the logical impasse will persist.

As you say, some very different issues arise when we replace the "how" of science with, for example, "why" and it may be that we have to answer these non scientific questions in order to have a context for the mere process of science.

Peter Rayner

Tags: afterlife science God string theory process spectrum Big Bang scientific revolution matter dark matter time space paradox infinite regress why