Exchanges between Dr. Science and Julia (a humanist)... 2008

This text is adapted from a commercial book, so there is no claim of originality here.  Dr. Science is a composite of current authorities who are well-known to the initiated.  The text is far more instructive when the authorities are not named and when the material is separated from the original context.

Dr. Science.  Your brain was exquisitely fine-tuned to manipulate your world—but not to comprehend its fundamental reality. You are an animal like any primate.  You evolved like them, you reproduce like them, you have the same basic neural structures.  Only 200 genes separate you from the chimpanzee.  Natural selection fitted you to throw rocks like a chimpanzee. 

As a result of natural selection, you see the world in fundamentally deluded ways. You believe yourselves to occupy a three-dimensional space in which separate objects trace smoothly predictable arcs marked by something you call time.  You call this reality. 

Natural selection has given you the illusion that you understand fundamental reality.  But you don't. You evolved to see the world as being made up of discrete objects.  That is deluded.  From the beginning of the universe, all was entangled.  What you call space and time are merely emergent properties of a deeper, quantifiable reality. 

Journeyman scientist.  Are we so ignorant that our physical laws are a sham?

Dr. Science.  You constructed your physical laws on the assumption of the existence of time and space.  All your laws are based on frames of reference. This is erroneous.  In the near historical future your cherished assumptions about the real world will crash and burn.

Journeyman scientist.  Our science works.

Dr. Science.  Your laws are workable approximations that are fundamentally incorrect.

You think of yourself as an individual person, with a unique and separate mind.  You think you are born and you think you die. You fear death because you fear the loss of individuality.  All of this is illusion.  Birth and death, pain and suffering, love and hate, good and evil, are illusions.  They are atavisms of the evolutionary process.  They do not exist in reality.

You have a meat-limited process of thinking. The human mind is imprisoned by the medium by which you think: the meat of your body, nerves, cells, biochemistry.  You only know a biochemical existence, a meat existence. You live in a prison of biological intelligence.  You are tyrannized by the flesh. 

Your sense of individuality is an artifact of natural selection. Your biochemical existence allows, and produces, your sense of individuality. Your sense of individuality allows fear, pain, suffering, loneliness, love, happiness, compassion.  In fact, this is a prison.

Julia:  What is death?

Dr. Science. Human beings are like cells in a body.  Cells die, but the body lives on.

The human sense of individuality is lost at death. You the individual will be lost in the storm of time, your molecules dispersed.   But who you were, what you did, how you lived, will always remain embedded in the universal computation.   With the death of the body, the information created by a life changes shape and structure, but it is never lost. Information in the universe cannot die.  No step, no memory, no sorrow in your life is ever forgotten.  Death is an informational transition.

Julia.  What about the soul posited by religion?

Dr. Science.  There can be no reconciliation between science and religion.  The collision of worldviews is well under way. Science has already refuted most of the core beliefs of the world's historical religions.  Science and faith cannot coexist.  One will destroy the other.

                                         •

Julia.  Your grandiose vision of "existence as computation" is mechanical.

Dr. Science.  Intelligence exists in living and nonliving processes both.  A thunderstorm is a computation more sophisticated than a human mind.  It is intelligent.

Julia.  A thunderstorm has no consciousness.  A human mind has awareness of self.  It's conscious.

Dr. Science.  As I already said, consciousness of self is an illusion, an artifact of natural selection.

Julia.  A weather system isn't creative.  It doesn't make choices.  It can't think.  It's merely the mechanistic unfolding of forces.

Dr. Science.  You are the mechanistic unfolding of forces.  Like the mind [sic!], a weather system contains complex chemical, electrical, and mechanical properties.  It is thinking.  It is creative.  Its thoughts are different from your thoughts.  The author Eric Hoffer creates complexity by writing an inspirational text on the surface of paper.  A weather system creates complexity by writing waves on the surface of an ocean.  It's the same thing.

                                         •

SCOPE OF REALITY

Dr. Science.  Everything you humans are perceptully aware of is part of a vast computation. Thinking is the same as computation. 

The universe is one vast, irreducible, ongoing computation.  No part of the universe can calculate things faster than the universe itself.  The universe is predicting the future as fast as it can.

"Something" which is cosmic is thinking, calculating—and that comprises existence.  As just explained, the "something" does not know the future in the sense of being ahead of the universe's calculation.

[The explanation breaks down here, because on the one hand, a subject of thinking which is a person is posited, and on the other hand, we are told that all is One, the "something" and the universe.  We are told that personhood is a human illusion. (Humans belong to this One also—but it is superfluous to say that, since humans are small physical masses).

ORIGIN

Dr. Science.  The universe exists because it is simpler than nothing.  The universe cannot be simpler than it is.

The "something" that is thought's subject exists because its existence is simpler than nothing.

Julia.  Why isn't nothing the simplest?

Dr. Science.  Nothing cannot exist.  It is a paradox.  The universe is the state closest to nothing.

Julia. What came before the beginning of the universe in finite past time?

Dr. Science.  The initial singularity was the beginning of existence.  From one point of view, Being has a start time.

Before, there was no space, no time, no existence.  There was no cause. The "something" appeared; existence came into being.

Before the initial singularity, time did not exist. Without time, there can't be any kind of definable existence. 

To you humans, the initial singularity looks like an explosion of space, time, and matter from a point. But if you peer into that first fraction of a second, you 'll see that there wasn't a beginning at all; time will seem to have always existed.

So: 

i) time did not always exist;

ii) time has no beginning (time is eternal). 

Both are true.

When time didn't exist, there could be no difference between eternity and a second.  Once time came into existence, it had always existed.  There was never a time when time did not exist.

In more specificity, nonexistence has a kind of spatial potential.  Under certain aberrant conditions, space can turn into time and vice versa.  If a minute bit of space morphs into time, the appearance of time can trigger the initial singularity.  Suddenly there could be movement, there could be cause and effect, there could be real space and real energy.  Time makes it all possible. The appearance of time would trigger the initial singularity.

HUMAN PURPOSE

Dr. Science. Science offers a method of truth.  Science is a search for truth, a journey.  The purpose of human existence is to find truth.  The search for truth is the ultimate commitment.

YOUR FUTURE

Dr. Science.  The next evolutionary step is for humans to free your minds from the meat of your bodies.

[This is included to show that Dr. Science is invested in a mystique of nonconscious ratiocination and truth.]