The Delusion of a Well-Ordered, Self-Consistent Universe

Here it is: all the proof you could ever need for your favorite Confirmation Bias.  Top photo taken on Easter Island, 21 October 2018.  Bottom photo taken by the Viking 1 Orbiter, 25 July 1976.

The human mind is a marvelous thing. Thirty-seven trillion individual single-celled beings have gathered into a massive, complex colony, and assigned the task of executive management and decision making to a hodgepodge of specialized cells in a cobbled-together organ protected inside a bony case, and given all the energy resources it needs—a full 20% of the supply available to the colony as a whole.  This organ's operating system has been tuned for hundreds of millions of years.  It works spectacularly well to gather inputs (observations) and create models regarding what these inputs mean.  Over time, the production of these models got more and more efficient—astoundingly successful at filtering the input data to produce survival strategies—and the resultant species proliferated across the planet.

The key word in the paragraph above is 'models'.

The human brain's operating system is an extremely sophisticated and efficient filter, designed to identify existential threats to the colony, and opportunities as well, with an excellent track record of success using a strategy that assures that very few true instances of threat and opportunity are missed (very few false negatives), but at the expense of a huge number of false positives.  Exhibit A is the image at the top.

We are hopelessly immersed in this operating system.  It is telling us, over and over, via the models it creates, that the world (our environment) has useful predictability—an order and self-consistency that careful evaluation and repetitive experience can take advantage of.  It's how we got where we are, dominating the ecosystem of this planet.

But it is also utterly and hopelessly biased.  Inputs that do not contribute to the construction of a useful model are simply rejected.  Those inputs are judged to be the random noise that must be filtered out to extract the useful signal.  Those inputs are not well ordered, and not self-consistent, and in almost every endeavor that humans undertake, using this operating system of theirs to create models, that noise is prodigious.

To wit, Exhibit B:

What the universe is made of:  Signal that we understand: 4.6%.  Noise (stuff we cannot explain): 95%

Science is all about discovering the order and structure of the presumed self-consistent universe.  Exhibit B shows how much success this approach has had.  Everything that is understood falls in that tiny light-blue wedge labeled 'Atoms'.  All the rest, the stuff called 'Dark' stuff, is understood to exist, but we haven't yet figured out what it actually is.  Even within that 4.6% that we understand (that we can make useful predictive models about), 93% of that is just free-floating gas in empty space.  Only 7% of it is consolidated into galaxies, stars, planets, and living things.  In our own solar system, the sun contains 99.86% of all the mass, while the Earth contains just 0.0000000003% of the solar system's mass.  Life, of course, is a mere thin layer of 'slime' on and around the surface of our planet, and the human species makes up just 0.01% of the mass of living things.  Yet how much of our brain power is devoted to sorting out the complexities of living among our fellow humans?  How much of the machinery of scientific and technological model-building is devoted to things right here on this single planet?

We are making models of the stuff we know about; and it's patently obvious that they've been astoundingly successful.  As a key example, science has developed the 'Standard Model of Particle Physics' that explains how that 5% of the universe that is made up of Atoms and their constituents work and how they interact in simple, controlled situations.  That Standard Model has made extraordinarily accurate predictions, sometimes down to the tenth decimal place, that have proven to be correct, including predicting the existence of the Higgs Boson long before its 2012 'discovery'.  Yet I am now going to offer the Standard Model as my Exhibit C, in making my case for the power of Confirmation Bias and for our continuing delusion that the world is Self-Consistent.  At the heart of the formulation of the Standard Model, which is a lot of very difficult math, is a rather esoteric procedure given the name of Renormalization.  Renormalization has been key in unlocking the Standard Model's ability to make those highly accurate predictions.  But to do so, the 'raw math' had to be tweaked—adjusted to fit the observed properties of the particles it describes.  To reinforce that: The model becomes well-ordered and self-consistent only when the observed properties are forced into it, properties that are only applicable to our relatively quiescent corner of Space and Time where gravity can be effectively ignored (it's called 'Minkowski Space'), where the enormous seething activity found in the early universe has all but dissipated, and where the effects of the vacuum (the deep, enigmatic emptiness that our universe is apparently headed toward, and which seems to be related to that vast reservoir of Dark Energy) are also essentially neglected.  Bottom Line: Renormalization only works to reinforce what we experience 'locally'.  The big picture is left as a complete mystery.

Yet our real lives beyond the realm of science offer plenty of evidence that the universe is far from self-consistent, and seldom well-ordered.  We navigate interpersonal relations that can sometimes be utterly baffling.  A simple personal example:  My best friend, when I was in third grade, suddenly hauled off and sucker-punched me in the gut, as hard as he could.  He never explained it, never apologized, and yet we remained best friends.  We factor the 'noise' of random uncontrollable events into nearly every aspect of our lives.  That's what insurance policies are all about.

Life can sometimes be a mess.  Shit happens.

There is no 'Standard Model'.

This is not a call to reject science.  Far from it.  Science has an important job to do.  Its process—its ability to endlessly self-correct—is our best hope for a better life.  I am confident that future scientists will be well-positioned to work at the interface between the well-ordered, self-consistent realm and the realm of what I call 'Big P' Paradox.  It has always been at that interface where the 'fantastic' (the fantasies that science calls Hypotheses) becomes the future 'normal' every-day experience.  Let the work proceed!