Sacred Baggage

Having finally finished my meander through MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe, I found myself enjoying it--mostly.  It was remarkably personal for a science-popularizing tome, as he talked openly about ex-wives and girlfriends, and his kid's enjoyment of Legos.  In that sense, I suppose, it was not a "serious" book.  Just a very human one.

And that worked for me.  Here's a science author who's just garrulous and a bit chatty, and who'll leaven his explications of mindspinning cosmology with an aside about the music he happens to be listening to as he's writing.

That it was Arvo Part's De Profundis didn't hurt.  Given that Part is also a favorite of mine, perhaps there's about Estonian sacred mystic music that evokes multiversal contemplation.

In Tegmark's book, I found it fascinating that he's almost--almost--stepping across the line into theology on several occasions.  Where he discusses the encounter of sentient beings with the deeper orders underlying the universe, and of a mathematical reality that both underlies reality and is ever beyond it, he's on the very cusp of being neoplatonic.  Am I reading Plotinus, or am I reading a 21st Century cosmologist?  It's hard to tell at times, and given how powerfully Christianity has historically resonated with both Plato and the neoplatonists, Tegmark's dabbling starts to get teasingly close to my own faith and multiverse writing.

There, though, Tegmark only almost--almost--touches the surface of faith.  Then he pulls away.  There are ways we understand the nature of being, he says, that are "baggage."  These are languages and forms that represent echoes of the reality we are encountering, but are laden with other understandings with no scientific basis.

He doesn't ever quite say: don't call this thing I'm describing "God."  He doesn't spend time chiding folks not to conflate their faith-language with the wild new possibilities of multiverse cosmologies.  Unlike deGrasse Tyson, Hawking, and other more vigorously atheistic physicists, that's not a fish Tegmark wants to fry.  It'd be too combative, too aggressive for his genial style.  That's not the journey he wants to take with his readers.

And yet, it's hard not to wonder if it might be more helpful to bring those forms of language along.  If you want people to embrace a new understanding of reality, and not to view it as a threat, it helps not to tear them from the language that they view as sacred.

Why not say, honestly, that the thing you've always declared as sacred and holy and wonderful may actually exist, in ways that are full of dizzying glory deeper than your wildest imagining.

Amazing, the things that a good bag can carry.

Gird Up Your Mind

I've been continuing my reading through Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe these last couple of weeks, picking it up here and there in the evenings as time permits.

It's a chatty and occasionally scattered book, as Tegmark folds himself and his cheery Scandinavian sensibility into his explication of both our time and space and the wild and impossible complexities of multiverse theories.  And really, it's "theories," as he plays his way through the range of different ways a multiverse could exist.

Tegmark presents four distinct theses, all of which are being explored and considered by modern physics.  There's the inflationary "Level One" multiverse, into which a functionally infinite number of universes like our own are expanding.  There's the "Level Two," which is like the "Level One," but includes universes with radically different physics than our own.  There's the "Level Three," in which quantum branching means that every moment creates from itself an infinity of different results, each of which then produces an infinity, and so on.  Then there's "Level Four," in which there exists a multiverse that exists as pure mathematics.  Meaning, it looks more than a little bit like the Platonic realm of forms.

Thousands of years, and we're back to Plato.

It's huge and heavy stuff, and its been slow going.  Tegmark's readable enough, chatty in a late-night-dorm-room sort of way.  He does tend to wander off into math-speak more than folks like Greene or Kaku, but hey, that's the title of the book.

What really slows me down a bit more as delve into this stuff is that it tends to stir futile attempts to imagine it.  I'm a visual creature.  As my mind tries to wrap itself around the impossible churning complexities of this amazing creation we inhabit, it heats up like a laptop running Battlefield 4 with all the stops pulled out.

In one of my last readings, for example, I tried to visualize what is actually happening with our 13.8 billion year old time and space.  When we look out into the depths of our expanding space, what we're doing is not just looking out.  We're looking back.  The further out we peer, the older the universe is.  That I get.  But spatially, we're also looking back at something that is very much smaller.  Those early proto-galaxies were closer together, so it's like we're peering outward and inward at the same time, our view distorted by inflation.

And then I try to visualize singularity falling away from us, or rather, us falling into it, seeing the expansion as an effect less like the universe is growing and more like we're getting smaller and smaller relative to it.

Then, as that dizzying reality comes into mind, realizing that all we can perceive is an infinitesimal point in the churn of the multiverse, taking up no more relative volume than it did when it was a singularity.  Once you layer Everettian Many Worlds quantum branching onto that, it becomes so immense that the mind cannot conceptually track it.  There's just too much there to grasp, more points of data than I have neurons to receive.

Which, frankly, is why I find multiversality to be the best framework from which to approach God's work.  It's just more than we can know, ever, period.

Just what one might expect from a God who arrives in whirlwinds.

The Perceptronium Paradox

Max Tegmark's latest book is up there on my need-to-read list, and for good reason.  He's the MIT cosmologist whose writing and thinking are front and center in the conversation about the multiverse.   He's a pleasant, thoughtful fellow, with a playful mind that seeks and explores.

He's also more than willing to take wild and speculative swings at things, which I can totally appreciate.  As he's made the rounds pitching his book on the fundamentally mathematical character of being, he's made some interesting statements, ones that seem less about physics, and more philosophical/theological.

Like, for instance, his musing about the possibility that the seeds of self-awareness are somehow woven into the structure of the universe.  Perhaps into a substance, he suggested.

"Perceptronium," he recently called it, the most fundamental unit of sentient matter, which must somehow be part of the mathematical structures of existence.

This is--um--interesting, in that it sounds a little too much like something out of a Marvel comic.  You know, like it's the stuff Professor X has more of in his bloodstream.

"Sorry...Scott...I....just tried to...read...Galactus.  My...cough...perceptronium reserves are...cough...dangerously depleted."

This is just Tegmark spitballing, of course, taking a wild swing at the peculiar nature of sentience.  And scientists are allowed to do that, now and again.  When it comes to sentience, the self-awareness of being, it's particularly important to swing wildly and often, because empirical science really struggles with it.

There's a deep paradox to our awareness, one that only deepens as we grow more and more engaged with the mechanics of our universe.

On the one hand, empirical science--tested, experimentally provable science--has so far been completely incapable of either creating or finding the ground for sentience.  The more we get into neural processes, the further we seem from grasping it.  What makes a self cohere as a self?  What gives us integrity as beings, and allows us to both recognize and differentiate ourselves?  The more science has chased this, the more it has become lost in mechanics.  Instead of finding the self, it has reduced awareness to unaware constituent processes.

On the other, hand, sentience is the one irrefutable truth of the Enlightenment, the conceptual ground on which everything stands.  Cogito ergo sum, as Descartes put it.  You cannot deny the existence of self awareness, because to do so is internally contradictory.  It is a truth that must exist, even in the statement of the question about knowledge and knowing.

And so there's this yearning frustration of science itself, our art of knowing.  There's a grasping after a state of being that is both fundamentally necessary and yet seemingly immune to the experimentation of scientific method.

If that grasping starts seeming a little less like science and more like storytelling and theology?

Fine with me.