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

We live in a world that is, objectively, vastly different from what we think it is.  Here is an example of one of our most common biases.  It's called Pareidolia—the tendency to find meaning where there is none.   Top photo taken by the author on Easter Island, 21 October 2018.  Bottom photo is from NASA, 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.  It's just two percent of the total colony, yet it consumes a full 20% of the available energy supply.  This organ's operating system has been undergoing tuning and refinement 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.  If something doesn't 'make sense', the operating system does not just reject it.  It has been tuned to go to desperate, even ridiculous extremes to find any sort of match (to past experience) that it can.

We are hopelessly immersed in this operating system.  It is telling us, over and over, that the world works in a way that it can model (via mental pictures and/or narratives), at least well enough to reliably function.  Repeated successes inevitably prop up the illusion that everything has some order and self-consistency that careful evaluation and repetitive experience can take advantage of.  Even the random and unpredictable extremes can be factored into the model and reliably managed (think insurance policies). It's how we got where we are, dominating the ecosystem of this planet.

But when we move beyond survival and personal success within our community, and the community's success within the planet's ecosystems, the operating system loses its experiential edge and increasingly shows its weaknesses.  As the inputs become more abstract, the observations that can't be found to contribute to a useful model are much more likely to be simply rejected.  Such inputs are judged to be random noise until proven otherwise and must be filtered out to extract the useful signal.  Random noise is, of course, not well ordered and not self-consistent, and in almost every field of study that humans undertake from our own Genome to the make-up of the universe, that noise appears to be prodigious.

To wit, Exhibit B:

What the universe is made of according to the 'Standard Model of Cosmology':  Signal that we understand: 4.6%.  Noise (stuff we cannot explain): 95%.

A similar pie chart describing the Human Genome would show only 1-2% of our DNA as Protein Coding and conserved during reproduction (the actual Genes - the equivalent of the Atoms), 3-8% as functional "machinery" which is non-coding but is conserved during reproduction, and the rest gets biochemically transcribed, and yet contains no describable function beyond what is expected of the null hypothesis (the term science uses to say 'there is no known meaning or purpose applicable to any theory we currently have').

Science is all about using repeatable experiences to discover 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 more random noise—free-floating gas in empty space.  Only 7% of it is consolidated into galaxies, stars, planets, pie charts, 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 just a 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 4.6% 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.  Why the particles have those specific properties is not explained.  Furthermore, those properties only apply 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.  A simple personal example will serve as Exhibit D:  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.  The brain's sophisticated management system must leave science behind when there seems to be no model that applies.  How did my eight-year-old mind decide that my friend's overtly hostile act was not grounds for rejecting him as a friend?  It was a unique single event, beyond the realm of repeatable experience, and yet it required an immediate response.  Eye for an eye?  Should I punch him back?  Should I walk away?  As it happens, I did neither.  We were not verbally confronting each other or even having a significant conversation before the event, as I recall it, and what happened afterward seems to have been an effort to discount the event and restore normalcy.  Why?  In hindsight, I've learned that this friend was a serious troublemaker.  (One of his antics cost him his life at the tender age of twelve.)  But at that moment, the subtleties of body language seem to have held sway.  Those cues do not even reach the conscious portion of the operating system, yet they influence it profoundly.  Here we cross into the shady realm of 'instinct' and 'intuition' (hunches and gut feelings [literally]).  The desire for normalcy is one of our strong human biases, and it reveals a deep-seated emotional need for a well-ordered, self-consistent world, even when the evidence of experience points in a contrary direction.

Finally, it is astounding to realize that even in the domain of the purely abstract (mathematics and logic), there is no possibility of self-consistency.  One needs to go no further than the 'Liar Paradox' ("This sentence is false.") to see the problem.  This leads to the well-known Gödel's incompleteness theorems.  If you can't find solid ground here in the simple realm of numbers and reason, how in the world (literally) can you hope to find it anywhere else?  The Foundations of Mathematics (the link is to a Wikipedia article that I'm presenting as Exhibit E) has a long and storied history, but what was never taught to me in my entire science education and career is how the field went through a foundational crisis in the late 19th century that exposed such unresolvable paradoxes and eventually resulted in a 'Standard Model' for mathematics that doesn't pretend to be either complete, consistent, or decidable in all situations.  That Standard Model is called Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF), and it limits itself to doing calculations within its specified 'Domain of Discourse'.  Its axioms are set up so as to avoid Russel's Paradox, a conundrum that notes that the "set of all sets that do not contain themselves" is a fundamental contradiction.  Gödel's incompleteness theorems proved that any sufficiently strong mathematical system (model) has to either be inconsistent or incomplete.  ZF is not immune from that.  It can't prove its own consistency.  It is a 'work-around' that declares that not all groups of things can be considered 'sets'.  Instead, there are things that are just excluded (not deemed 'well-founded') or that (in other models) get called 'proper classes'.  There is a very real parallel here to the idea of 'Renormalization' in physics.  One of the axioms in ZF that I find especially bizarre is the Axiom of Infinity, which declares that there is a 'Completed Infinity'—a bulk thing that is called 'countable'.  Now, I'm not about to refute the value of the ZF model, but neither am I alone in questioning this particular axiom.  I was just in 8th grade when I had an epiphany that I understood the nature of infinity, and it hasn't troubled me since.  And it definitely is not countable in any practical real-world sense.  One of the positions taken by some modern mathematicians is that the field is no longer necessarily relevant to or rooted in physical reality.  Hmmm.  I put myself in a different camp, which Exhibit E (the Wikipedia article linked to above) calls 'rough and ready realism'.  It quotes Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman:

"People say to me, 'Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?' No, I'm not ... If it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it – that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers ... then that's the way it is. But either way there's Nature and she's going to come out the way She is. So therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn't predecide what it is we're looking for only to find out more about it."

And with that, I rest my case.  The world is awash in a sea of chaos.  We often go to extremes to protect ourselves from it, both physically, and psychologically.  But the reality is that shit happens; and most of it is not 'Renormalizable'.

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.  The 'religion' associated with science is, unfortunately, just as dogmatic as any other religion.  The place of science is not to discover some underlying absolute order, like a nice clean 'Theory of Everything', but to continue to systematically sort through the intrinsic noise of reality to find more hidden 'gems' of useful, standardizable, stuff.  I am confident that future scientists will have access to even more clear understanding of the human brain's biases and limitations and will thus be well-positioned to work at that exciting frontier where the well-ordered, self-consistent realm meets 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!