Night Thoughts
(This is an advance excerpt from an unpublished new work “Living with Uncertainty: facing your fears, letting go, looking death in the eye — and the good life”.)
At the risk of being a Luddite, I had resisted the incursion of modern technology into the act of writing. If paper and pen were good enough for Hemmingway, they were good enough for me. Rather than pound away at my ancient IBM electric typewriter I would pay a professional word processor to transform my atrocious handwriting into a beautiful looking, professional manuscript. It didn’t matter that for many years my typist would be earning more money per hour from my writings than I was.
I took pride in being the last hold out. It seemed that everyone I knew — my family, my friends, my patients, my agent — was pressuring me to go on the internet. Didn’t I realize how much simpler, more efficient, and interesting life would be if I had access to the browser, to email, to texting, to Netflix, to YouTube and to the ad infinitum apps waiting to cater to my every need?
The tipping point came unexpectedly several years ago when my oldest son (Tom), was visiting me in New York. Accompanying him in a shiny leather traveling case was his trusty iPad 2. Everywhere Tom went, the iPad 2 went. I had seen a dying Steve Jobs, striding across a giant stage as he proudly unveiled, in all its splendors, Apple’s latest creation; the iPad 2, and I could not help but admire his unconquerable passion. Sensing my interest, Tom propped the iPad 2 up on its stand and effortlessly turned it on.
“I’ll show you how it works”
It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. When asked for the name of an author or book that I was interested in, I immediately replied”: Rogers Penrose’s lecture on Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics. (In his eighties, Penrose was my favorite cosmologist. I had read most of his books, and had been patiently awaiting this latest opus which he had been working on for the past ten years).
In a matter of seconds, Tom had gone from the browser to YouTube, and to a lecture hall where Roger Penrose, in all his glory, in high definition and living color, was lecturing on Part I of Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics. You might say I was hooked at that moment, (but in a good way). Not one person in a thousand, or so I told myself, would use the internet (in the years to come) as I did; to view hundreds and hundreds of videotaped lectures by world class thinkers on the cutting edge of the mind — body problem; to be able to zoom in on famous MIT mathematicians discoursing on their latest discoveries; to read in it’s entirety Richard Feynman;s magnificient acceptance speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize in physics for his contribution to the discovery of quantum electrodynamics (QED)); to gain access to the PDF of innumerable classic papers by ground-breaking scientists.
This was an embarrassment of intellectual riches that seemed almost magical in its button-pressing immediacy. But then I remembered that I had been paving the way, doing my homework for the past forty years. I knew exactly what it was that I wanted. I knew the names of the authors, the titles of the books I was interested in. I had thousands and thousands of precise references circulating in my mind. I had only to press a few buttons and a torrent of information would come rushing in. The only thing that was magical about the internet was the speed with which information was transferred. The real magic I would realize was not in the internet but in my mind. The internet was stupid in the same way that a computer was stupid. It could function with wondrous algorithmic speed but it had no understanding, no awareness, of what it was doing. It was indifferent as to whether it provided the dumbest of answers or the most sophisticated piece of privileged information.
It was immediately obvious that there was no subtext to the mighty search engine of the internet. You could no more second guess Siri than you could a computer. It was futile to read between the lines. You could not ask — what does this mean? — in the way that you would ask a person. Part of the sense that you are talking to a human being, and not a computer, is the realization that the person you are talking to is simultaneously thinking about what has just been said, (or thought or experienced). In other words, a person always meta-thinks. A computer never does.
But here is a question (inspired by a Google Tech Talk on the internet):
“Does intelligence require understanding — so long as I can successfully predict?”The answer, from the psychodynamic perspective, is an unambiguous yes. Human intelligence, that is, requires awareness. Unlike a machine, it does not just mechanically register data — it experiences and dynamically interacts with whatever it senses and perceives. The product of that complicated interaction is what we call knowledge. The trouble with a computer algorithm, howsoever powerful, is that it can not self-correct, can not respond to new stimuli with anywhere near the stunning comprehensive efficiency of a human being.
Seen this way, consciousness provides a far more inclusive view of what is happening than algorithmic information retrieved from the past. There is instantaneous feedback of mistakes it realizes have just been made. There is recognition of arresting novel stimuli or insight that can enhance or build upon what is already known.
By comparison, a computer has only frozen information that is not experienced or dynamically embedded but is transported whole cloth from the programmer (the true possessor of intelligence) to a machine. Lacking mobility, adaptiveness, reactivity, — it can not be considered intelligent. By contrast consciousness is animated understanding. It is not inanimate, stored information or frozen rules. It can change when change is required. Finally, consciousness allows present knowledge to instantaneously integrate past knowledge with the demands of an intrinsically, unknowable future. Consciousness brings in the factor of time. It allows us to deal with contingency (hallmark of intelligence). It allows us to deal with an almost infinite number of possible contingencies on the spot — not one or several or even a finite set in a circumstantial arbitrary toy world as determined by a programmer.
To paraphrase William James consciousness means we have a dog in the fight. Or in the words of Charles Darwin, there is a biological value at stake — an opposed to a what-me-worry computer (As Brian Christian has noted, the more a human being would actually begin to think and respond like a computer, the more he or she would appear to be a sociopath).
Such thoughts long percolating in my mind, were now reignited by dynamic, up close videos of established geniuses — whose work until now — I had known only through books. Until now, I could engage in imaginary dialogues or audacious debates with my heroes only in my mind. But now I could put a face and a persona to each of my illustrious correspondents. Now I could enter a cyber world that was far more powerful than my imaginary one. Thought experiments that had entertained me as a child could now be revisited. I had long wondered (and still do) how the universe as a measured thing could be infinite if, as they say, it is constantly growing? How could time as a measured thing be infinite, if as is obvious, it is constantly getting older?
As a child I thought I could finally understand how no number could ever be considered infinite. I imagined a blackboard with x — the last supposedly infinite number — written upon it. And then, triumphantly, I would imagine writing + 1 beneath it — my childish proof that x could not possibly logically exist. Afterwards, as I would continue to think about it, I would extend my proof to time. How could there be a time that was infinite? How could it be true, as many cosmologists, are now speculating that time could be timeless? That there may never have been a time when there was no time? That there was always time? Imagine, I would think, that suddenly the entire universe, and time with it, would suddenly stop or freeze (as they do in the cinema). Estimate, to the best of science’s ability, how old the universe was at that moment. Now unfreeze the universe, and time with it, as they might do (at least in a sci-fi movie) and count one second and then add it to the recent estimated time of the universe. Do the same thing for the estimated measurement of the universe — freeze and unfreeze it, calculate the imagined rate of expansion during one second (or one hour, one day, one year) — and then add it to your previous estimate.
Isn’t it, I concluded, a category error on the one hand, to define infinity as something that could never come to an end, that has no boundaries, no limit and then claim — because one can imagine never coming to an end of space or the beginning of time — that space and time are therefore infinite? Because isn’t it equally possible that one can imagine coming to the end of time and space? How is saying time and space are infinite any different from saying that, because you can never reach the end of counting, there is, somewhere unimaginably out of reach, an infinite number? Isn’t that confusing process — a process that doesn’t end such as counting numbers, travelling as far and as fast as we can to the outer reaches of deep space, peering as far back as we can see into the unfathomable origins of our universe — with something that has come to an end, that has a discernable boundary: i.e. that is a measured quantity? Isn’t this a contemporary rebirth of Zeno’s classic paradox — how can motion be possible if in order to traverse any distance you must first traverse an infinite series of increasingly smaller steps: i.e., to travel a foot, you must first reach the halfway point (1/2 ft.); and then the next half way point (1/4 ft.); and the next (1/8 ft.) and the next (1/16 ft.) ad infinitum? And isn’t the answer (after a lot of logical analysis) simply this — that just because you can impose an endless process (infinitely halving distances) on a known quantity (e.g. 1 foot) — doesn’t mean that process and quantity are one and the same?
Nevertheless, I had to admit, the more I delved into it, that world class cosmologists such as Roger Penrose and Sean Carroll seemed ready to consider the possibility that the universe was infinite and that time runs backwards forever. But I wondered, could there ever be any experimental evidence that infinity — other than an imagined process such as counting to eternity — actually existed? How could one ever determine that they had reached the end of space or the beginning of time? How could they be sure that there was nothing beyond or before? Were cosmologists who conjectured about infinity simply referring to conclusions drawn from well- tested mathematical theories or were they contemplating some unprecedented experimental set-up?
The question — how can you be sure? — would never leave me. I could see why speculative cosmologists have been accused of being covertly religious. Much as I admired the confidence of Roger Penrose I wondered how even he could differentiate between times when something makes no sense — Schrodinger’s cat being alive and dead at the same time — because the underlying theory is defective and those times when the deficiency is in our current understanding (“the fault dear Brutus lies not in our stars but in ourselves”): i.e. the answer is there, but is not available until the future, even for the greatest of contemporary minds such as Penrose.
The history of physics I reminded myself was strewn with one theory after another being rejected by the reigning consensus only to be subsequently vindicated: most famously (in 1919) Einstein’s prediction that a light ray passing through the sun’s gravitational field during an eclipse would be measurably deflected (because of the curvature of space as predicted by general relativity). Even the best minds in the world could be wrong. Doesn’t 99% of much of what everyone believes depend on just a handful of experts? I have no understanding of how Hubble can look back billions of years in time, but I have no doubt the elite corp of engineers and astrophysicists who designed and built Hubble do. The same, of course, applies to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which has recently discovered the Higgs boson, the legendary missing cornerstone of the standard model of particle physics. How many of us actually sifted through the oceans of data required to nail down the Higgs? Perhaps a few thousand out of the over seven billion people on the planet. Yet how many of us would question the result?
I have already mentioned how much I am impressed by the extraordinary polymathic creative genius of Roger Penrose. He is an example of someone who can see the world in an entirely new way and is unafraid to butt heads when the prevailing opinion runs against him. That said, I could not believe that even Penrose could be safe from doubt. Isn’t it possible that he finds quantum mechanics so fundamentally self- contradicting is — not because it is so radically incomplete — but because the ultimate theory to which he aspires is simply a task for the future? In other words, can’t a fundamental theory appear to be nonsense (even to someone such as Roger Penrose) and yet turn out to be profoundly true? Does a pillar of contemporary physics have to satisfy our (current) philosophical common sense?
For me, the answer had to be an unambiguous no. Since I was a child I had lived with doubt and as I got older I would try to temper my doubts, to turn my compulsive questioning into well-reasoned, skeptical thinking. I could never be sure whether I was achieving my goal — living with uncertainty — or merely philosophically sprucing up my perennial doubts. So the more I watched him, the more I had to marvel at Penrose’s perpetual air of untroubled skepticism. He was undisturbed by the enormous difficulty of communicating incredibly abstract ideas to a largely general (meaning unknown) audience with a level of understanding substantially different than yours. At the very least, it seemed, you would have to find a viable bridge between your level of understanding and a stranger’s. Specifically, you have to answer: what is it I know that he or she doesn’t know that is essential to their understanding? What am I taking for granted in my understanding that is crucial for their understanding? What explanatory methods can I employ — that might facilitate their understanding? And finally, is there something in my style of presentation interfering with, or failing to stimulate their interest?
Few if any of even the best populizers of contemporary cosmology addressed these questions but Roger Penrose, as in just about everything else, was sui generis. In his monumental book, The Road to Reality, he seemingly addressed every major category he could think of. There was something for the reader erudite enough to understand every single equation he would often pepper his books with; there were sections for the mathematically illiterate reader who would run for the hills at the first sight of a single equation. There was something for the reader who was conversant with at least some of the burning theoretical issues of the day. And there was a section for the unlettered but curious lay reader ready to take on board the legendary Roger Penrose. All were welcome. I placed myself somewhere smack in the middle of level two reader but I loved the freedom to at least peek at the levels above and below me and the opportunity to reflect on the diverse philosophical and psychological mind sets of these other readers.
GERALD ALPER
AUTHOR
GOD AND THERAPY
WHAT WE BELIEVE
WHEN NO ONE IS WATCHING
