Ask A Genius 1047: The Svein Olav Nyberg Session 2, the Other One and the Many
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/30
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Svein Olav Nyberg Session, so, he wanted to make it a thing to talk about the one and the many. We took this as, and I didn’t clarify, the separation between the individual and the collective in a social sense. So, he means the ancient problem of unity and diversity. The forms of Plato…
Rick Rosner: I’ve never read Plato. I’ve never taken any class in ancient philosophy, so my answer will be speculative. But you can’t have the one without the many, and you can’t have the individual existence of a particle without the rest of the universe as a framework in quantum mechanics. The universe defines itself by defining all its constituents over time via a bunch of exchanged particles.
You can’t have a simple unitary structure, say a simple universe with just one particle or three particles or 150 particles, because that little toy universe must be contained in a larger universe. An armature in a larger universe gives the information in the toy universe its existence. So, I think that in future science and maybe future philosophy, they’ll have to reckon with the fact that you can’t have small components without an overall structure that is wildly complicated, an immense self-consistent information processing system that is likely conscious.
In that, consciousness is a system of shared, commonly held information among a bunch of what we’re now calling modalities. You can only have the simplest thing with the most complicated thing to contain the simplest thing. So the one and the many are, in my mind, inextricable.
Is that a better answer? Does that more directly address the issue?
Jacobsen: What about the pre-Socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides, separating stability and unity, things like “being is one”? Heraclitus and Parmenides try to tackle the problem with ideas from Heraclitus, such as change and diversity, and Parmenides tries to tackle it with things like stability and unity.
Rosner: Those guys are all talking about these abstract things with no science to work from. Now we’ve got a ton of science to work from. And you can talk about things like chaos and order in terms of mathematically more or less defined things like entropy. So, you can talk about stability more clearly than the ancient Greeks did, but if you define stability in scientific concepts, then yes, you can talk about it.
I’m going to get myself lost. Who was it who wrote it? It was not Schrodinger; was it Schrodinger? No, it wasn’t Schrodinger; it was the other guy. An early 20th-century quantum physicist wrote What is Life?. Who wrote that book?
Jacobsen: Schrodinger?
Rosner: I’m thinking of who the other guy to come up with the framing, the mathematical framing of quantum mechanics.
Jacobsen: Erwin Schrödinger. Austrian-Irish physicist.
Rosner: So he tried to figure out what life was in physical and mathematical terms, and I don’t think he got that far, but I think his approach was the right one. When discussing things like stability, you have to talk about what that would look like mathematically. For instance, Einstein was very bothered by the implication of general relativity that there could be no structural stability in the universe. It’s the same; you can’t have a ball.
It’s a parabola. So you can’t have a universe hovering at a constant diameter. It’s either expanding where the kinetic energy of all the matter in the universe is greater than the common gravitational attraction, or it’s not. The universe starts contracting. So you can’t have that stability. So I’m a fan of these ancient Greek concepts, and you have to contextualize them in terms of what we know about the world, so when you’re talking about chaos and order. Substitute entropy for disorder and go from there. Is that a reasonable answer, or tap dancing around the answer?
Jacobsen:What about the philosophy of science, which talks about complex systems and fundamental parts, or metaphysics, which talks about the nature of objects, properties, and interrelationships?
Rosner: I think that since we have the money to peg all these. You need metaphysics, which comes from science. You can ask big philosophical and metaphysical questions, but those questions should be informed by what we think we know about the universe. It’s made of information; at least, some people will say that. We think we know that the universe formed with a big bang, though I’m afraid I have to disagree.
But if you go off the big bang, I think metaphysically, you can ask why. Science doesn’t answer that question. Science says, well, these must have been the initial conditions. The big bang exploded out of the forces, and the amount of matter was this. But you’re still a metaphysical question that still needs to be answered by science to ask why those were the initial conditions.
Why this amount of matter? Why do these physical constants and the same apply if you don’t particularly believe in the orthodox Big Bang Theory? Metaphysics should be rehabilitated in terms of what we know now that the ancient Greeks didn’t.
Which still doesn’t answer the question, but it frames the answer. So, everything that can exist, can exist according to the principles of existence stemming from your need for self-consistent, non-contradictory systems. Systems in which every component of the system agrees about the contents of the universe that they belong to, that the universe defines itself in a non-contradictory way and that there’s a set of all possible moments of all possible universes that we know from our existence that the principle of anything that’s not self-contradictory. That’s thoroughly not self-contradictory, can exist. That’s what you work from.
You can build a whole lot of philosophy from that. At some point, you can ask why it is existence pegged to non-contradiction, and it seems obvious. You can’t have a world with elements that exist and don’t exist except on the periphery of the known. You can have Schrodinger cat-like items that are indeterminate because you still need to define them. So, those things both exist and don’t exist. That’s a contradiction. You have things that.
It exists in a state that could exist or could not, a superimposed state of two possible states that are mutually exclusive. But since the element hasn’t been defined, it can be either of those states. That’s fine. You can’t have something. Some mega object that both exists and doesn’t exist. You can do it to some extent. But if you have too much of it, it eats the universe, and that universe can’t exist.
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