Can mankind's 'biggest questions' ever be answered?
Since the fifties, some radical new ideas have appeared in physics. They haven't had much impact yet, but concepts like multiple universes, 'It From Bit', and the anthropic principle could transform how humans view reality.
New software has exposed endlessly inventive fractals, chaotic self-organizing systems, and fantastically tangled Calabi Yau manifolds no human could ever visualize. Gregory Chaitin has shown that math itself, the highest truth, is fundamentally random. It's always possible to think one step further.
The five biggest mysteries may be related:
1) The mystery of awareness
For many centuries, philosophers have failed to understand how brains generate feelings. Are they like ghosts, illusions, or fundamental elements of nature?
The biggest error is to think that awareness is one thing, when it is many things.
A massively parallel hierarchy, awareness is how the brain links millions of facts at once. Associations are filtered through accumulated experience. It takes all the mind's knowledge to understand one new fact.
Only a tiny portion of this chaotic process is remembered, preventing the brain from understanding itself.
The ultimate explanation will come after analyzing each brain component separately.
It's an elaborately arbitrary system: some brain parts even communicate by sending signals through the body. Memories can be stored in the environment, other individuals, or society itself. Learning to visualize others helped early primates to imagine themselves.
Books:
The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil
The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky
Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett
2) Is life after death impossible?
For the moment, the best policy is to act as if there's nothing (or less) after people die. Death is beyond experience, not a condition but an absence. It's meaningless to talk about what happens after.
The reality may not be quite that simple.
According to leading theories, minds are only patterns. They could be described as self-consistent numbers, or as strings of numbers generated by equations.
Numbers are eternal. Human lives are a negligible fraction of all possible lives.
Merely the pattern of molecules in a brain can create a perception. What if that identical pattern is replicated elsewhere? Human mind patterns are relatively simple: in an unbound universe, there could be an infinite number of identical or very similar copies of any human mind. Could awareness be shared across all realities, existing beyond space and time?
The physicist Hugh Everett implied so, and quantum interpretations suggest it's possible.
By definition, minds can't experience non-existence. When a mind dies, its awareness could 'switch over' to a universe in which it still exists, complete with its last memories before death.
Alternatively: wait long enough, and any human mind or mind fragment may be recreated in future software simulations, or by pure chance on other possible worlds.
In an endless universe, almost anything is possible, given enough patience. The devil is in the details.
Perhaps people could increase the chance they will be recreated in a manner of their preference by reorganizing their memories, by being as interesting as possible, by creating detailed diaries of their lives, by simplifying their personality according to useful universal rules, by imagining and creating simulated worlds, by investing in companies that will help develop the necessary technology, or by turning their memories into elaborate embodied codes that only selected target civilizations would want to recreate.
Reading:
The Physics of Immortality by Frank J. Tipler
The Simulation Argument (articles) by Nick Bostrom
3) Could anything vaguely like 'God' exist?
Based on the total lack of evidence, the atheists appear to be right, but the non-existence of 'God' hasn't been 100% proven yet.
Religions tell simple stories that people want to be true. That doesn't mean they have any connection to reality.
On the other hand, the universe may well be infinitely complex, with an uncountable number of possible minds. Any sufficiently complex system could automatically become aware. Most random superminds would be poorly organized, but they would have no trouble understanding such simple entities as ourselves.
It's always possible to imagine a still higher intelligence. The ultimate mind may not exist, or it may be a meaningless concept.
On this world at least, the amount of order and complexity appears to increase over time. There seems to be a trend toward ever more organization. Maybe all of reality can somehow become organized as well. That would violate entropy, but maybe infinite systems could eliminate chaos by forever rearranging infinite environments.
The above speculation may be nonsense and almost certainly is, but it can't be completely ruled out.
There could be a bias effect in reality: the sum total of everything that exists would not be meaningless, but represent some ultimate organizing principle. Our insignificant planet may already have been affected. There could even be evidence in history or in certain physical constants.
In the still unlikely event there is some kind of 'god'-like effect, this being would not necessarily be omnipotent or even particularly powerful. It might be very hard to detect.
Reading list:
Infinity and the Mind by Rudy Rucker
Cantor's Hotel (and other paradoxes about infinity)
4) Why does something exist instead of nothing?
A better question may be: why is logic consistent? Perhaps nothing really exists, at least not in the traditional manner. Any physical pattern could be described as pure information. It would never know the difference.
If logic is real, minds have to exist too.
But what mysterious force causes even this minimal level of truth?
Perhaps it's the 'bootstrap principle': equations 'create' universes, which create more equations within themselves.
References:
Metamagical Themas by Douglas R. Hofstadter
A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
The Game of Life (cellular automaton) by John Horton Conway
5) Why are we here (and not somewhere else)?
If existence is math, the meaning of existence may be statistics.
The observable universe is a tiny fraction of a boundless 'multiverse'.
Humans are highly atypical: we have among the simplest, smallest possible minds.
This anomaly deserves far more attention than it has received, as does the following puzzle: Our universe is absurdly, needlessly complex, but most of the complexity cancels out, so we don't really notice it.
A good example is the effort to calculate quark interactions. The most powerful supercomputers can't fully predict the behavior of a single neutrino for one nanosecond. Only close approximations are possible.
On a larger scale, reality is often described by simpler equations. Patterns like stars and galaxies repeat endlessly. Life may be an intermediate case.
Statistically, human-level minds are probably among the most common self-aware patterns. The purpose of human existence, if such a concept can have meaning, may be to become more improbable.
Book list:
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John D. Barrow, Frank J. Tipler
Permutation City (a novel) by Greg Egan
read more:
Infinite Thunder undeniably the best hard SF novel ever written
Buy the novel
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