The World Itself by Ulf Danielsson

A book review by Michael Messina

When I spoke to Christer Sturmark last fall about his book To Light the Flame of Reason, I asked him for a reading recommendation (the opportunity to speak with someone who is both an author and a publisher is rare indeed).  He suggested a then forthcoming book written by a Swedish physicist, Ulf Danielsson entitled The World Itself.  The book was published in February 2023 and I read it as soon as I finished another book I’ll write about soon.

The title of the book is very clearly it’s subject — few and far between are pages that don’t mention “the world itself.”  The book is about reality.  It’s about how our models of the world reflect our perceptions of the world versus the reality of the world itself.  Do the laws of nature constrain nature, or do they simply describe our model?  

Galileo wrote that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics so mathematical literacy is essential for an understanding of the world itself.  But is it?  In the introduction Carlos Fiolhais, Professor of Physics at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, writes:  “Danielsson leaves us a very important message in his book: Please do not mistake the world, which is real, with our descriptions of the world, which are only human attempts to represent it, and which, as the whole history of science has taught us, can be improved.”

Right out of the gate, in the first sentence of Chapter 1, Danielsson writes:

“I HAVE A SECRET TO TELL YOU: Living beings are not machines, there is no mathematics outside of our heads, the world exists and it is not a simulation, computers cannot think, your consciousness is not an illusion, and your will is not free.”  

Danielsson writes that what we call laws of nature are simply our way of summarizing our knowledge of the universe which is what it is!  

In the computer age in which we now live, most, if not all, of us have entertained the idea of translating everything we are, including our thoughts, into a series of ones and zeros which could then be loaded into a computer with the result being eternal life.  “The only problem is that it’s not true.”  Such misunderstandings are based on a dualistic view of existence which is a holdover of a worldview that is fundamentally religious.  Cartesian dualism makes a distinction between body and soul, where the body consists of perishable matter, while the soul is spiritual and eternal.  Danielsson does not believe that the self can be separated from its material basis, whether in the form of an immortal soul or information. “Both cases are wishful thinking and fairy tales.”

Chapter two is entitled Living Beings are not Machines.  It begins with a brief recap of a discussion between Danielsson and Richard Dawkins.  Dawkins said he believes that physics is the senior science. That biology deals with the complex, while physics takes care of the profound.  Danielsson noted that since the discovery of DNA and the letters of the genetic code, we know that all life on this planet is connected.  “Through the billions of years, evolution has changed what is told but not the language itself.  To illustrate the remarkable role that genes play in the living world, Richard Dawkins invented a striking metaphor in the form of the selfish gene…to show was how genes form the very heart of evolution.”  Nevertheless, it’s still not really clear what a gene is. “Just as an organism is only a way for a gene to express itself, perhaps the same can be said about its physical manifestation in the form of a DNA molecule. When we search for the core itself, we find that genes are nothing but intangible information.”  

“The discovery of evolution and the genetic code suggests that the very essence of life is pure information, sequences of letters that describe how to put together an organism in the form of an animal or a plant whose sole purpose is to make more copies of itself.”  If and when the code is fully understood could exact copies of each of us be made.  Not a chance, says Danielsson.  “Not only is the information pointless if you do not know how to read it but there are many indications that DNA does not actually contain all the information. The cell must also know when it is time to use the information in a piece of DNA to build the proteins it encodes. This information is not necessarily stored in the sequence itself.”  The difference between created machines and evolved organisms is not fully defined.  “Evolution shows how life is pragmatic and focused on results, in stark contrast to physics, which still celebrates simplicity and beauty…This also applies to the subjective inner self, which can be assumed to be represented in other forms of life, as well.”

Chapter 3 is entitled The Universe is not Mathematics.  Because everything we find in the interior of matter in the form of particle physics can be successfully incorporated into a mathematics the temptation is to see mathematics as something existing independently.  The philosophical terms for this concept is Platonism — matter is governed by mathematical laws that lie outside of the material universe.  This is entirely consistent with, and almost assumes, a religious worldview in which God, as the great mathematician, instituted the laws.  Danielsson writes: “Belief in the Platonic form of mathematics can thus be likened to a belief in God. Rational arguments against such beliefs are not always effective.”  Danielsson argues that a much more reasonable assumption would be that there is no mathematics—not in the true sense of the word. Mathematics arises only in the brain of someone who tries to understand what is going on.  

And, what applies to mathematics also applies to what we call natural laws.  The laws of nature, like mathematics, belong to our description of the world and are not at all something that needs to have any existence independent of us. The universe is not governed by what we call the laws of nature; rather, the laws of nature are constructed by us to understand the universe.  As an example, Danielsson uses the image of an apple falling from a tree.  Newton told us that the force of gravity was responsible, but Einstein told us that what we perceive as gravity is the result of the coverture of space-time.  “Nature does not need physics or mathematics to calculate how an apple falls. The apple just falls, while our description of what happens develops and improves over time…The mathematics we use to model the world in the form of natural laws does not exist in the world itself. The laws of nature manifest themselves and are identical with physical patterns in our brains that reflect phenomena that we observe in the world around us.”

Chapter 4 is entitled There is a Difference Between Model and Reality.  In this chapter, Danielsson discusses philosophical concepts such as metaphysical realism (there is a world outside our consciousness that is completely independent of our ideas and preconceived notions. There is one and only one way in which the world really is), attitude relativism (there is no objective reality, only arbitrary constructions that are influenced by culture), and internal realism (there is an objective world, but the way you can make it comprehensible is not unique).  “The advantage of internal realism is that it differentiates between the real, existing world and how it is described. The goal of science is to offer efficient and reliable models that can be used to make useful predictions about the world itself.”  Other terms introduced are: ontology (about what really exists) and epistemology (about what we can really know — and is a much closer to what science is really about).  Danielsson wrote:

The point is that science, when seen only as a system based on mathematical logic, has no meaning. What researchers like myself do in our theories is to manipulate symbols according to formal rules. It is only when these symbols are connected to the real world, or, more precisely, the aspects that we select and abstract, that meaning is generated. The problem is that there are crucial steps, which are mistakenly considered trivial and deliberately ignored. Between the high-flying ideas and the messy natural world, which is what science is all about, lies the embodied consciousness of the researcher himself. There is no objective, external, and independent connection between the abstract world of mathematics and logic and the universe. The connection is always made in a brain of flesh and blood.

Chapter 5 is entitled “Computers Are Not Conscious.”  In this chapter Danielson explains why, no matter how sophisticated they become, will never rival the human mind.  The first example pointed to are the computers that play chess which humans are no long able to defeat.  Next, I learned about the Chinese game of Go, that makes chess look like a game of Parcheesi.  A computer was programmed to play Go.  Rather than tell you what happened, which is fascinating, I’ll let you discover it for yourself when you buy the book.  Should we consider the possibility that we, ourselves, are simply a program running on a computer as in the movie Matrix?  Although you can probably guess Danielsson’s answer by now, I’ll let you read it for yourself.

Chapter 6 is entitled, Not Everything Can Be Computed.  Danielsson cites theoretical biologist Robert Rosen‘s book Life Itself.  Danielsson wrote:  “Rosen described how living organisms have an ability to take into account the future, to predict what will happen, and to act accordingly. It was in this that the secret of life was hiding.”  

Danielsson tells the story of a group of colleagues who would meet once a week.  It was traditional that one member of the group would propose a math problem for the others to solve.  One day Douglas Hofstadter was visiting the university and was asked to join the party at which he was asked to propose a problem.  He wrote on the blackboard:  (A/B+C) + (B/C+A) + (C/A+B) = 4.  The challenge was to solve for A,B, & C, where each were positive integers.  Before you beat your head against the wall trying to solve it, I’ll just say that you’ll find the answers in the book.  If I counted correctly, A has 80 or 81 integers, as does B & C.  

Danielsson wrote:  “If [theoretical biologist Robert Rosen] is right, it is enough to look at biological organisms to find examples where this kind of incalculable mathematics that we have discussed is relevant. But an important question remains. How can it be possible for something completely new to sneak into a mechanistic world where everything that happens can be reduced to atoms and voids?”  

In this chapter there is an excellent explanation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which one often hears christians throwing around in debates with scientists.  In a several page section, Danielsson explains that entropy can only increase over time. The greater the entropy, the messier it is.  Nothing improves with time.  This is the most basic law of nature, but  how could the cosmos have begun in a state of order and progressed to more order rather than disorder.  Danielsson explains it better than anything else I’ve read. 

Chapter 7 is entitled, Man is not Unique.  Danielsson writes that instead of looking for what separates us from other beings on Earth, it may be more enlightening to focus on what we have in common and thus deepen our understanding of ourselves.  “It is clear that our biological nature is central to our view of the universe. Our consciousness is in our bodies, and the world we experience through our senses is created by our using organic systems that have evolved over millions of years. We are part of a living continuum that stretches back to the very simplest organisms. All of this is crucial to our understanding of the physical world—the only world that exists.”  

Danielsson suggests that we get to know an octopus which he says have intelligence comparable to that of cats.  As evolutionists, we know that we have common ancestors with every other living thing on our planet.  Evolution found two completely different ways to solve the problem of how to make matter think.  For one thing, we think mainly with our brain while an octopus thinks with its entire body.  Danielsson wrote:

In addition, an octopus not only thinks with its body; it also uses its body to express its innermost thoughts in a colorful way. (Although octopuses have long been thought to be color-blind and it is not known exactly how or if they can interpret these complex signals.) *** Other animals, whether octopuses, mussels, or bats, have a disposition that is completely different in design. All their models are realistic images of the world, true in their own way, and necessary for their survival.  

And while we’re at it, what about plants?  

Plants are physical systems that process a large amount of information in order to survive and grow. Root tips find their way through the soil to maximize the uptake of nutrients, and the fused networks in the ground under a forest have a complexity that surpasses the brain of an animal. Try to imagine an answer to the question ‘What is it like to be a forest?’  

The final sentence of this chapter is:  “[R]ather than trying to define what is exclusively human and what makes us unique compared to other species, there is more to learn, I believe, by identifying what we have in common with those other species—even bats.”

Everything in the book leads to the final chapter entitled Does Free Will Exist.  While Danielsson gave us the answer in Chapter 1, it would be unfair of me to deprive you of the opportunity to read his reasoning for yourself.

Throughout the book, Danielsson cites and quotes many scholars and authors.  Many were familiar to me, as I’m sure they will be to you.  A list of names would be too lengthy here, but I’ll mention a few.  Above, I mentioned the interview with Richard Dawkins which you can watch at https://youtu.be/UWgb5azXZTA.  Danielson discusses Noam Chomsky who sees the relationship between language and reality precisely the way Danielsson has criticized.  A friend of mine mentioned Max Tegmark’s review.  Immediately after talking about Chomsky, Danielsson wrote:  “The physicist is content with the fact that mathematics works and delivers at most rather sweeping statements about how surprisingly efficient it is. If the physicist is pressured, especially a theoretical physicist, there is a risk that he or she will take a position similar to Max Tegmark’s, and identify mathematics with the world itself.”  In the section of the book entitled recommended reading, Danielsson wrote:  “Our Mathematical Universe (Tegmark 2014) is in many ways a counterpoint to The World Itself. I have no objections to the strictly scientific content of Tegmark’s book, but the existential conclusions are foreign to me.”

I highly recommend this book.

"I Am a Strange Loop." A Book Review

By Michael Messina

I recently read Douglass Hofstadter’s I am a Strange Loop.  You may recall that Hofstadter translated and co-wrote Christer Sturmark’s To Light the Flame of Reason (a book that everyone living in these early decades of the 21st century should read).  While the Hofstadter’s book in some places is difficult to to read, especially when esoteric concepts of higher — and I mean sky high — math is being considered, it is thought provoking and fascinating.  At the end, everything came together and I was very happy I had struggled through it.   This book seems to zig and zag between unrelated topics, but in the end, things come together in a way that makes a heretofore difficult or unknown subject understandable.  If you want to watch an amusing, but extremely informative lecture, go to https://youtu.be/n8m7lFQ3njk

I am a Strange Loop is about how the brain works to produce consciousness — what is commonly referred to as the “I” or “soul” — not to be confused with the religious meaning of soul.  Are Humans the only animals who have a sense of “I”?  What about our cousins chimpanzees, gorillas, etc?  What about whales and dolphins?  What about horses and cows and pigs?  Okay, those animals may have a sense of “I” to a greater or lessor degree.  What about a mosquito or house fly?   Back to humans — does a human have a soul when sperm and egg to develop?  Does a new born have a soul?  Is the soul of a 10-year-old the same as someone like Chopin or Einstein, or for that matter the child’s parents or grandparents?  Keep in mind that in this context soul means an awareness of oneself.  There is obviously a sliding scale.  Early in his childhood, by chance while learning to play Chopin, Hofstadter read essays, printed inside his music books, by an early 20th century author — James Huneker — and based on, or inspired by those essays, Hofstadter came up with a numerical scale of “degrees of souledness” running from 0 to 100 which he called, “just for the fun of it,” hunekers. 

Hofstadter’s parents were professors at Stanford, so little Doug was able to hang around the laboratory, playing with TV cameras and monitors.  He became fascinated by pointing the camera at the monitor and studying the feedback loops.  By the way, if you want to see, or actually not see, an interesting feedback loop, look at a box of Morten Salt, the box has a picture of a little girl carrying a box of salt which presumably has a picture of a little girl carrying a box of salt ad infinitum.  Well, not exactly ad infinitum:  “The girl’s arm is covering up the critical spot where the regress would occur. If you were to ask the girl to (please) hand you her salt box so that you could actually see the infinite regress on its label, you would wind up disappointed, for the label on that box would show her holding a yet smaller box with her arm once again blocking the regress.”    

Speaking of how little Doug spent his childhood, I was taken by this story:  When he was 14-years-old, he read a book by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman — Gödel’s Proof.  As it happened, Ernest Nagel and Doug’s father were friends and, by and by, Doug and Nagel’s two sons became close friends.  “Sandy was just my age, and we were both exploring mathematics with a kind of wild intoxication that only teenagers know.”  I can only wish I had become wildly intoxicated with mathematics when I was 14.  

In any event that story starts a several-chapters-long discussion of Bertrand Russell’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s  Principia Mathematica and how Kurt Gödel discovered something unexpected in the work.  I won’t attempt to relate the substance of these chapters — I feel proud that I was able to read them and understand a snippet here and there.  Sometimes, however, I read something that just made my head spin:

 “Gödel envisioned a set of whole numbers that would organically grow out of each other …
For instance, if you made theorem Z out of theorems X and Y by using typographical rule R5, and if you made the number z out of numbers x and y using computational rule r5, then everything would match up. That is to say, if x were the number corresponding to theorem X and y were the number corresponding to theorem Υ, then z would “miraculously” turn out to be the number corresponding to theorem Z. ***  The main thing to remember is that Gödel devised a very clever number-description trick — a recipe for making a very huge number g out of a less huge number k  — in order to get a formula of PM to make a claim about its own Gödel number’s non-primness (which means that the formula is actually making a claim of its own non-theoremhood).”  

After the chapters on mathematics, a seemingly different concept was introduced. Imagine a teleporter such as the one on Star Trek.  Suppose you volunteered to be teleported to another planet.  The only catch was that — yes you would arrive on the other planet but you would also remain intact here on planet earth.  Which “you” would be “you.”  If only one, than which one, and if both, than how would you know who was who?  Would the two “yous” be the same person, or would you be the the same and different at the same time.  The reason a 10-year-old has less of a “I” than the 50-year-old is because the older individual has more experiences which have developed into the 50-year-old.  So I’m not quite the same person I was yesterday and even more different than I was two days ago, etc.  I can’t remember who said that you can never step into the same river twice — or even once.   Hofstadter quotes  “Reasons and Persons by the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit.”  In Parfit’s story, the individual who remains on earth is called into the director’s and told there is a problem.  The teleporter worked fine except it damaged the cardiac system of the scanned individual who could expect to die within a day or two of cardiac failure.  The two individuals talk, and the one on earth is told not to worry,  the scanned person loves their wife and children, he’ll finish the book being written, etc., etc.

Can we really be transported to other worlds and other times?  Hofstadter thinks yes, and to show how easy it is, he offers the following:

“The mere act of reading a novel while relaxing in an armchair by the window in one’s living room is an example par excellence of this phenomenon.

When we read a Jane Austen novel, what we look at is just a myriad of black smudges arranged neatly in lines on a set of white rectangles, and yet what we feel we are “seeing” … is a mansion in the English countryside, a team of horses pulling a carriage down a country lane, an elegantly clad lady and gentleman sitting side by side in the carriage exchanging pleasantries when they espy a poor old woman emerging from her humble cottage along the roadside… We are so taken in by what we “see” that in some important and serious sense we don’t notice the room we are sitting in, the trees visible through its window, nor even the black smudges speckled all over the white rectangles in our hands (even though, paradoxically, we are depending on those smudges to bring us the visual images I just described). If you don’t believe me, consider what you have just been doing in the last thirty seconds: processing black smudges speckled on white rectangles and yet “seeing” someone reading a Jane Austen novel in an armchair in a living room, and in addition, seeing the mansion, the country road, the carriage, the elegant couple, and the old woman… Black curlicues on a white background, when suitably arranged, transport us in milliseconds to arbitrarily distant, long-gone, or even never-existent venues and epochs.”

The point of all of this is to insist on the idea that we can be in several places at one time, simultaneously entertaining several points of view at one time. You just did it! You are sitting somewhere reading this book, yet a moment ago you were also in a living-room armchair reading a Jane  Austen novel, and you were also simultaneously in a carriage going down a country lane. At least three points of view coexisted simultaneously inside your cranium. Which one of those viewers was “real”? Which one was “really you”? Need these questions be answered? Can they be answered?”

Hofstadter argues that a little bit of each of us lives, to a greater or lessor extent in many people.  He distinguishes his thesis from other views such as panpsychism. 

“The viewpoint of this book lies somewhere between these two extremes, picturing individuals not as point like infinite-decimal serial numbers but as fairly localized, blurry zones scattered here and there along the line. While some of these zones overlap considerably, most of them overlap little or none at all. After all, two smudges of width one inch apiece located a hundred miles apart will obviously have zero overlap. But two  smudges of width one inch whose centers are only a half inch apart will have a great deal of overlap. There will not be an unbridgeable existential gap between two such people. Each of them is instead spread out into the other one, and each of them lives partially in the other.

***

In the wake of a human being’s death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of all those who were dearest to them. And when those people in turn pass on, the afterglow becomes extremely faint. And when that outer layer in turn passes into oblivion, then the afterglow is feebler still, and after a while there is nothing left.

***

Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain and who are gathered to remember and reactivate the spirit of the departed, a collective corona that still glows. This is what human love means. The word “love” cannot, thus, be separated from the word “I”; the more deeply rooted the symbol for someone inside you, the greater the love, the brighter the light that remains behind.”

At the end of the book, it all comes together.  Hofstadter’s closing thoughts are:

“In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but that are as real as any genuine marble when we’re not looking for them. Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems — vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.

To see ourselves this way is probably not as comforting as believing in ineffable other-worldly wisps endowed with eternal existence, but it has its compensations. What one gives up on is a childlike sense that things are exactly as they appear, and that our solid-seeming, marble-like “I” is the realest thing in the world; what one acquires is an appreciation of how tenuous we are at our cores, and how wildly different we are from what we seem to be. As Kurt Gödel with his unexpected strange loops gave us a deeper and subtler vision of what it is to be human. And to my mind, the loss is worth the gain.”

At several points in the book I was reminded of Nick Chater’s The Mind is Flat.  Although I Am A Strange Loop is long and sometimes difficult, it is well worth the effort.  I highly recommend it.  

IAF Has a Registered Lobbyist

By Robert Cook

And that lobbyist would be me. I registered on the Iowa Legislature website about a month ago and I have been busy declaring for and against (mostly against) specific bills on behalf of Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers. This is a way for 401c3s (like IAF), businesses, political groups, and governmental agencies to express their approval, dissent, or neutrality to our legislators as they work on the bills that are before them. I signed up because I felt that IAF should have as much say in the process as The Family Leader and Iowa Baptists for Biblical Values.

Here is a link to my declarations list on Google Drive including all of the bills I have addressed as a lobbyist. Unfortunately it didn’t preserve the links to specific bills when I downloaded the page. If you want to read and learn more about a specific bill, you will need to click here and then search for the bill. (i.e. SF123, HF234). When I have time, I will go through them all and fix the links. Until then, you’ll have to use this workaround. Sorry about that,

Instead of reading the entire bill, I recommend scrolling down until you get the the section labeled “Description.” It is a simpler explanation that doesn’t include all of the legalistic details. It will still be hard to read but not as difficult as the actual bill.

It takes a lot of time to stay on top of all these bills and there is definitely a learning curve. (Pay no attention to HF 149. That was clearly done by an idiot who didn’t know what they were doing.)

Okay, fine. I’ll tell you about HF 149 and the lessons I learned from it about how to lobby. This Bill is about corporal punishment in schools. Current law prohibits intentional physical punishment of a student. At the same time it provides certain exceptions and legal protections for teachers and employees of pubic or accredited nonpublic schools. For example, if a student acts up in class and a teacher grabs them by the shoulders and marches them down to the Principle’s office, that teacher can’t be sued for beating the child or arrested for assault and battery.

This bill extends those exceptions and protections to school volunteers and charter school employees.

I totally misread this bill.

On my first read through, I was sure that HF 149 was meant to loosen restrictions on capitol punishment. School employees should not be encouraged to beat your kids. I clicked the box that said, “against.”

Then I read through it again, and it finally sunk in that it was way more ambiguous than I first thought. I clicked on the Lobbyist Declarations link down on the left side to see what other lobbyists thought about it. They were all “undecided.” All of them. And it was a long list.

Okay, so I can just change my declaration to “undecided” like all the rest. But that original “against” was still there like a flashing neon light of embarrassment. How about if I withdraw my declaration. Nope, still there.

Apparently, every declaration you make — including changes and withdrawals — are engraved in the fabric of the universe until the heat death of matter and energy for other lobbyists to laugh at.

I won’t make that mistake again. I’ll probably find some others, but not that one.

Lessons learned: 1) Always read each bill at least twice before making a declaration. 2) Always check the Lobbyist Declarations link to see what other lobbyists have done.

So many horrible bills have been filed in the Iowa Legislature and many of them are guaranteed to pass. Please check out as many of them as you can and don’t be shy about contacting your legislators and letting them know your opinions on these bills.

Reason on the Hill, Monday Feb. 13, 9 AM

Tomorrow is Reason on the Hill, our secular lobby day at the Capitol Building. Please join us if you can at 9 AM in the Rotunda. The more of us there are, the more effective it will be. We will host our outreach table in the morning until Noon and then break for lunch. After that, we will return to the Rotunda to speak with out legislators about specific bills that affect our community of nonbelievers and humanists.

Here are the links to the FaceBook Event and Google Calendar.

Click on either of those links and let us know you are coming. See you tomorrow. We don’t have many opportunities to speak to legislators face-to-face during the session. Let’s make the most of it and make a difference.