Defining God

Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance, in an essay entitled "Does the Universe Need God?", highlights a definition of God and picks at it:

[T]he God hypothesis seems simple and precise – an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being. (There are other definitions, but they are usually comparably terse.)

In the comments, I suggest an alternative definition, and restate (with edits and some expansion) here:

Definitionally, a definition of God as "an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being" while traditional (was it Aquinas that made it a standard?), isn't a very good operational definition of how we separate religious and non-religious thinking. It is a poor fit to polythesism, animism, or many Eastern religious concepts like Tao and Kharma.

More useful as an operational definition of that which is divine would be "some being or power that acts with moral purpose or an agenda for human events, in the lives of humans, that is not human, a human creation, or an ordinary animal." One can worry the "ordinary" part of animal a bit, but the notion is to exclude the moral acts of gorillas and dolphins and dogs and cats and the like, without necessarily ruling out the like of angels, demons, jinn, ghosts, Gaia, and so on. Charlotte of Charlotte's Web is perhaps a gray area in this definition -- she being no ordinary spider.

Under this operational definition, the deist conception of a Newtonian clockmaker God, reimagined as something setting the Big Bang in motion and fixing the laws of nature, without more, would not constitute God, even if it were done by some gray haired titan surrounded by an Army of angels. This operational definition also excludes a truly pure version of a scorekeeper God, one who rewards and punishes us solely in the afterlife, but unlike the Abrahamic Gods, does not tell anyone what the rules by which God keeps score happen to be.

On the other hand, it would include the Star Wars saga's mitcholorians, or some supernatural ancient astronauts who brought humanity to a next stage of consciousness and influenced our evolution, even if these being themselves have an evolutionary history of their own (a la Arthus C. Clark's "2001"). It also permits gods of less than infinite power who are not "omnipotent" or "omniscient" (such as the Greek pantheon, and even the Judeo-Christian God in Genesis who sometimes lacks knowledge of what the humans are up to until he pays attention and discovers their acts), cruel gods who are not "omnibenevolent" (e.g. Satan or the Zoroastrian force of evil), or divine forces who seek balance rather than good (e.g. Taoist conceptions of the divine), or minor divinities like fairies, who may be neither actively good nor bad, but simply like to screw with us to see what happens (a bit like the relationship of scientists and lab rats from the rat's persecptive).

Gods that people care about, fear, love and worship, the kind that act with moral purpose or an agenda for human events of their own, might very well be entirely separate and unrelated to gods that establish laws of the universe. They also give a very real meaning to the notion of playing God, either by changing the ammoral course of nature, or by intervening in human affairs of people in general from some position of power with some sort of agenda in ways that change their lives.

Under this conception of God, we can reason directly that none of the known inviolate laws of nature have any apparent moral purpose or agenda for human events, at least on their face. They may, as an anthropomorphic principle does, include a purpose that makes it possible for human beings to exist, but the have no preference for good or evil or anything else we do in human affairs; they are nihilist.

Thus, for this conception of the divine, we must assume that God is a "god of the gaps" who is very shy and acts only through an exquisitely balanced manipulation of random quantum events, and that such a god would be particularly invisible in quantum events measured in laboratories or observations of distant stars, because in such events outcomes have no moral purpose or agenda for human events for God to implement. This kind of divinity looks more like a morally purposive fate ("cruel fate"), like kharma, like a luck in a sense that has favorites rather than being truly random.

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Cosmological Numerology

A study released late in 2010, revealed that the estimate of the share of matter in the universe that is ordinary matter, as opposed to dark matter, was low by a factor of three, because the proportion of ordinary matter relative to dark matter in ellipical galaxies was underestimated. The estimated total amount of matter in the universe is unchanged, because that comes from mass measurements based on the lensing effect of entire galaxies on light that measures total mass rather than from estimates of the total number of individual stars and planets in galaxies multiplied by the estimated mass of each one.

The old estimate was that the universe was 4.6% ordinary matter, 23% dark matter, and the remainder "dark energy." Those are pretty weird numbers and no one has ventured a credible guess about how that came to be.

The new estimate comes up with some numbers that are quite different: 13.8% ordinary matter and 13.8% dark matter. Thus, the amount of ordinary matter and dark matter are almost exactly equal - a remarkable coincidence that wouldn't be hard to infer from a scenario in which energy from the big bang condenses into matter (called baryogenesis and leptogenesis) by a process by which half of matter created is in the ordinary sector, and half is in the "dark" sector, for example, from particles predicted to exist by supersymmetry. We already know, for example, that to the extent permitted by available mass-energy, the weak forces W boson has an equal chance of transforming into any available possible output fermions.

Another of the great unanswered questions of physics is "why is ordinary matter almost entirely made up of matter, rather than anti-matter?" A potential answer could be that almost all of the anti-matter, which we would otherwise expect to make up 50% of the mass in the universe, somehow turned into dark matter.

The fact that the weak force interacts with particles that have left partity, but not right parity, ignoring half of all the particles of matter in the universe, provides another 50-50 division of the matter in the universe that might drive a process that creates 50% ordinary matter and 50% dark matter in the universe.

The ratio of the total amount of matter in the universe to the total amount of dark energy in the universe is also an interesting number. Within the margin of accuracy of the measurement that ratio is "e", the exponential constant, which is often rounded to 2.78. I'm not aware of any specific theory in physics that predicts that ratio, but the equations of physics are awash with dimensionless fundamental constants like "e" and the expansion of the universe with which dark energy is associated is an exponential expansion process, so the ratio wouldn't be a terribly surprising one to fall out of the relevant equations.

Is this scientific proof? No. It is pure speculation of a basically numerological nature about the way that a theory that does have real meaning could produce numbers like these. But, it is an interesting observation, nonetheless, about a question, "why do we have the percentages of matter, dark matter and dark energy in the universe that we observe?", which could be relevant to answering those questions. In the ordinary case, science looks for relationships in emperical data first, and then comes up with hypothetical theories that could explain what could be causing those relationships. This kinds of observations advance that cause.

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Fungi Are Gender Benders

One of the most fascinating discoveries that I made as a 9th grader sitting in the high school greenhouse taking biology at Talawanda High School was that there are some kinds of living things that have reproductive cycles far more complicated than that of simply dividing cloning cells, two gender system vertebrates, and multi-stage life cycle creatures like frogs (who early on look like fish called tadpoles) and butterflies (if you mother didn't tell you about the butterfly life cycle, you must have been an exceptionally beautiful and graceful child).

A received an echo of that moment again reading "The Host" by Stephenie Meyer, a little while ago, that has a story within a story sketch about an alien life form with a more complicated than two gender reproductive system.

Among the only reproductive concepts that have rivalled this revelation since then, most of which I have encountered first in science fiction, are the notion that viruses can change genomes, the discovery that some kinds of vertebrates can have virgin births in certain circumstances, the discovery that one can have mixed paternity twins (or even more amazingly mixed DNA individuals), the discovery that we are probably part Neanderthal, and the notion that ancient DNA might be used to create living versions of extinct creatures a la Jurassic Park: Japan has set out to resurrect the Mammoth by 2015.

Then, I came across a post at Replicated Typo today that recalled that moment for me. You see, some of the most complex reproductive systems of any living things are fungi.

Their reproductive mechanisms is rather unexpectedly complex, in that the normal conventions of sex do not apply. Not all fungi reproduce sexually, and many are isogamous, meaning that their gametes look the same and differ only in certain alleles in certain areas called mating-type regions. Some fungi only have two mating types, which would give the illusion of being like animal genders. However, others, like Schizophyllum commune, have over ten thousand (although these interact in an odd way, such that they’re only productive if the mating regions are highly compatible (Uyenoyama 2005)).

Some fungi are homothallic, meaning that self-mating and reproduction is possible. This means that a spore has within it two dissimilar nuclei, ready to mate – the button mushroom apparently does this (yes, the kind you buy in a supermarket.) Heterothallic fungi, on the other hand, merely needs to find another fungi that isn’t the same mating type – which is pretty easy, if there are hundreds of options. Other types of fungi can’t reproduce together, but can vegetatively blend together to share resources, interestingly enough. Think of mind-melding, like Spock. Alternatively, think of mycelia fusing together to share resources.

In short, the system is ridiculously confusing, and not at all like the simple bipolar genders of, say, humans (if we take the canonical view of human gender, meaning only two.) I’m still trying to find adequate research on the origins of this sort of system. Understandably, it’s difficult. Mycologists agree:

“The molecular genetical studies of the past ten years have revealed a genetic fluidity in fungi that could never have been imagined. Transposons and other mobile elements can switch the mating types of fungi and cause chromosonal rearrangements. Deletions of mitochondrial genes can accumulate as either symptomless plasmids or as disruptive elements leading to cellular senescence…[in summary,] many aspects of the genetic fluidity of fungi remain to be resolved, and probably many more remain to be discovered.” (Deacon, 1997: pg. 157)

There is a linguistic angle in the original post on gender agreement in language, but quite frankly, it doesn't interest me. But, amazing complex versions of sex do. What benefit do mushrooms receive from their more elaborate forms of reproduction? Are there downsides to it? How does it work? What are the general patterns of the diversity in reproductive arrangement in fungi?

I'm already familiar to some extent with fungi weirdness. In some ways they are more like animals (e.g. they don't generally produce their own food through photosynthesis). In other ways they are more like plants (e.g. they are generally sessile). Some fungi produces remarkable neurological responses. Fungi colonies have also proven to be far more elaborate multi-species ecosystems than most people had realized with lots of undiscovered complexity. But, complex reproductive mechanisms adds a whole new dimension to the brew. And, in an age where we may be nearing the "end of science" in physics and inorganic chemistry, seriously unexplored territory in biology is the place to learn new things whose utility was not previously recognized. Also, because researching fungi involves far less expensive laboratory equipment and conditions and staffing requirements than many other areas of science, while having an unusually large share of unanswered questions, it presents that possibility of pretty small scale scientific pioneers out of anywhere discovering cool new things.

More deeply, and more to the point of the linguistics post cited, how does being forced to look at issues of gender in a far more generalized and complex way than we are now aware that human neurodiversity involves in sometimes rare permutations (male, female; gay, bi, straight; butch-femme; cis and trans gender; dimensions of gender; archaic human-modern human hybrids, etc.) enlighten our thinking about the combinations and interactions encountered by humans.

The details of how fungi do it in interesting systems will have to wait for future posts. But, I wanted to note some access points to start looking into again before the thought left me.

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Tevatron will shut down in September

Now that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a bigger particle accelerator in Europe, has come online, the justification for existence of Fermilab's Tevatron, which has been operating since 1983, is gone. This is a very long run for a scientific experiment in quantum physics, whose Standard Model was just starting to reach its current form at the time.

Tevatron has been instrumental in pinning down empirically the properties of the heavier particles in the Standard Model, in validating the Standard Model's accuracy, in ruling out a huge swath of beyond the Standard Model physics, and establishing the unexpected new physics of charge-parity violation in quantum physics. It has failed, however, for want of sufficient power, to locate or rule out with great scientific confidence, the existence of a Higgs boson (although it has provided suggestive hints), to locate or rule out the existence of new particles beyond the Standard Model, and has not established definitively (perhaps because there is nothing to find) any non-CP violation beyond the Standard Model physics or evidence establishing or ruling out Supersymmetry which is the core prediction of String Theory. The creativity of theoretical physicists has, alas, considerably outrun the capacity of experimental physicists to constrain their speculations.

The scientists at Tevatron have been pushing the limits of what can be discovered with an experiment that sized (cleverly and valiantly, it should be noted) for years. LHC should be able to easily examine high energy physics conditions that Tevatron has been using long data runs and brilliant experimental designs to probe for a decade or more, with sheer brute force, in a year or two.

Experimental high energy physics is mostly about probing very low frequency random events whose frequency is a function of the total amount of energy devoted to the experiment, and the more power you have, the easier it is to get data samples large enough to reach statistically significant conclusions about these very low frequency random events and formulate them as physical laws and scientific constants. There are some minor feature of Tevatron that make it more suited than LHC to explore certain kinds of phenomena, but we've already tried out all of Tevatron's best tricks, so the universe of science that Tevatron can do that LHC can't do passably well that hasn't been done already is pretty trivial. It is the moral equivalent of a strong telescope that has scoured the skies for everything there is to be seen when a much bigger one comes along.

The knives are out for federal budget cuts, and Tevatron isn't cheap, even to run once you've built the thing. The September shutdown date coincides with the federal government fiscal year. This means fewer jobs for a lot of exquisitely but narrowly qualified U.S. scientists and technicians, but since LHC publishes its results for free or something close to free, the American public will still get the benefit of its discoveries in almost real time, and of course, many American scientists do work at LHC.

Tevatron may be the penultimate high energy physics experiment. If LHC fails to discover any new beyond the Standard Model physics, or if its results lead to the formulation of a "Grand Unified Theory" that seems to provide a complete explanation of everything but gravity (something the LHC is ill suited to provide data upon) or at least provides strong empirical support for a theory that implies that there is no good reason to expect no discoveries at higher energies, then there is a very good chance that nobody will have the will to spend enough money to make a bigger successor to the LHC. Unless LHC has left us with some real tantilizing reason to think that there are more discoveries to be made with just a little more power by 2030 or 2040, we may lose the will to continue this brute force approach to experimental physics and the era of high energy physics will end.

This isn't just going to happen decades in the future either. Before either of my kids takes their first physics course in high school or college, the LHC will have pretty definitively determined that there is a Higgs boson where the Standard Model predicts it should be, or there isn't. If it finds one, and then finds no new physics after that, the inclination to call the Standard Model a done deal that can't be fit into some more grand plan as theoretical physics have dreamed of is going to be quite intense.

If the LHC doesn't find a Higgs boson in the next few years, the theoretical physicists across the world are going to have scratch their heads, throw out 90% of the theoretical papers that have been written in the last thirty years, and figure out what they've been doing wrong all of this time. This may call for new experiments, but may lead to the conclusion that we've been doing the wrong kind of experiments to find what we are really looking for with them, making LHC style big science less attractive.

Of course, if the LHC finds a Higgs boson, and then a dark matter candidate particle, and then indications of large numbers of new supersymmetric particles, or finds that a growing body of evidence shows that one of the Standard Model's lesser known component laws is incorrect (all the best known well as well established in a very wide range of circumstances), then the LHC may be swiftly followed by something bigger and better. We will learn that it is not the end of history, at least as far as fundamental physics goes, scientists everywhere will rejoice, and science fiction writers will imagine discoveries of currently impossible things without the least bit of guilt.

But, while we don't know which of these scenarios will come to pass, the laws of nature are already in place, so this outcome is largely a matter of destiny and fate at this point.

From here.

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