by Scott Adams
God’s Consciousness
“What makes things do what they do?” he asked. “What makes dogs bark, cats purr, plants grow?”
“Before today I would have said evolution makes everything do what it does. Now I don’t know what to think.”
“Evolution isn’t a cause of anything; it’s an observation, a way of putting things in categories. Evolution says nothing about causes.”
“Evolution seems like a cause to me,” I argued. “If it weren’t for evolution I’d be a single-celled creature in the bottom of some swamp.”
“But what makes evolution happen?” he asked. “Where did all the energy come from and how did it become so organized?”
It was a good question. “I’ve always wondered how something like a zebra gets created by a bunch of molecules bouncing around the universe. It seems to me that over time the universe should become more screwed up and random, not organized enough to create zebras and light rail systems and chocolate-chip cookies. I mean, if you put a banana in a box and shook it for a trillion years, would the atoms ever assemble themselves into a television set or a squirrel? I guess it’s possible if you have enough boxes and bananas, but I have a hard time understanding it.”
“Do you have any trouble understanding that a human embryo can only grow into a human adult and never into an apple tree or a pigeon?” he asked.
“I understand that. Humans have different DNA than apple trees or pigeons. But with my banana in the box example, there’s no blueprint telling the molecules how to become something else. If the banana particles somehow stick together to become a flashlight or a fur hat, it’s a case of amazing luck, not a plan.”
“So you believe that DNA is fundamentally different from luck?”
“They’re opposites,” I said. “DNA is like a specific plan. Probability means anything can happen.”
The old man looked at me in that way that said I would soon doubt what I was saying. He didn’t disappoint. As usual, he began with a question.
“If the universe were to start over from scratch, and all the conditions that created life were to happen again, would life spring up?”
“Sure,” I said, feeling confident again. “If all the things that caused life the first time around were to happen again, the result should be the same. I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“Let’s rewind our imaginary universe fifteen billion years, to long before the time life first appeared. If that universe’s origin were identical to our own, would it unfold to become exactly like the world we live in now, including this conversation?”
“I guess so. If it starts out the same and nothing changes it along the way, it should turn out the same.” My confidence was evaporating again.
“That’s right. Our existence was programmed into the universe from the beginning, guaranteed by the power of probability. The time and place of our existence were flexible, but the outcome was assured because sooner or later life would happen. We would be sitting in these rocking chairs, or ones just like them, having this conversation. You believe that DNA and probability are opposites. But both make specific things happen. DNA runs on a tighter schedule than probability, but in the long run—the extreme long run—probability is just as fixed and certain in its outcome. Probability forces the coin toss to be exactly fifty-fifty at some point, assuming you keep flipping forever. Likewise,
probability forced us to exist exactly as we are. Only the timing was in question.”
“I have to think about that. It sounds logical but it’s weird,” I said.
“Think about this,” he continued. “As we speak, engineers are building the Internet to link every part of the world in much the same way as a fetus develops a central nervous system. Virtually no one questions the desirability of the Internet. It seems that humans are born with the instinct to create it and embrace it. The instinct of beavers is to build dams; the instinct of humans is to build communication systems.”
“I don’t think instinct is making us build the Internet. I think people are trying to make money off it. It’s just capitalism,” I replied.
“Capitalism is only part of it,” he countered. “In the 1990s investors threw money at any Internet company that asked for it. Economics went out the window. Rationality can’t explain our obsession with the Internet. The need to build the Internet comes from something inside us, something programmed, something we can’t resist.”
He was right about the Internet being somewhat irrational. I wasn’t going to win that debate and this was not a place to jump in. He had a lot more to say.
“Humanity is developing a sort of global eyesight as millions of video cameras on satellites, desktops, and street corners are connected to the Internet. In your lifetime it will be possible to see almost anything on the planet from any computer. And society’s intelligence is merging over the Internet, creating, in effect, a global mind that can do vastly more than any individual mind. Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all. A decision can be made by the collective mind of humanity and instantly communicated to the body of society.
“In the distant future, humans will learn to control the weather, to manipulate DNA, and to build whole new worlds out of raw matter. There is no logical limit to how much our collective power will grow. A billion years from now, if a visitor from another dimension observed humanity, he might perceive it to be one large entity with a consciousness and purpose, and not a collection of relatively uninteresting individuals.”
“Are you saying we’re evolving into God?”
“I’m saying we’re the building blocks of God, in the early stages of reassembling.”
“I think I’d know it if we were part of an omnipotent being,” I said.
“Would you? Your skin cells are not aware that they are part of a human being. Skin cells are not equipped for that knowledge. They are equipped to do what they do and nothing more. Likewise, if we humans—and all the plants and animals and dirt and rocks—were components of God, would we have the capacity to know it?”
“So, you’re saying God blew himself to bits—I guess that was the Big Bang—and now he’s piecing himself back together?” I asked.
“He is discovering the answer to his only question.”
“Does God have consciousness yet? Does he know he’s reassembling himself?”
“He does. Otherwise you could not have asked the question, and I could not have answered.”
Physics of God-Dust
“If the universe is nothing but dust and probability, how does anything happen?” I asked. “How do you explain gravity and motion? Why doesn’t everything stay exactly where it is?”
“I can answer those questions by answering other questions first,” he said.
“Okay. Whatever works.”
“Science is based on assumptions. Scientists assume that electricity will behave the same tomorrow as today. They assume that the laws of physics that apply on Earth will apply on other planets. Usually the assumptions are right, or close enough to be useful.
“But sometimes assumptions lead us down the wrong path. For example, we assume time is continuous—meaning that between any two moments of time, no matter how brief, is more time. But if that’s true, then a minute would last forever because it would contain an infinite number of smaller time slices, and infinity means you never run out.”
“That’s an old mind trick I learned about in school,” I said. “I think it’s called Zeno’s Paradox, after some old Greek guy who thought it up first.”
“And what is the solution?” he asked.
“The solution is that each of the infinite slices of time are infinitely small, so the math works out. You can have continuous time without a minute lasting an eternity.”
“Yes, the math does work out. And minutes don’t seem to take forever, so we assume Zeno’s Paradox is not really a paradox at all. Unfortunately, the solution is wrong. Infinity is a useful tool for math, but it is only a c
oncept. It is not a feature of our physical reality.”
“I thought the universe was infinitely large,” I replied.
“Most scientists agree that the universe is big, but finite.”
“That doesn’t make sense. What if I took a rocket to the edge of the universe, then I kept going. Couldn’t I keep going forever? Where would I be if not in the universe?”
“You are always part of the universe, by definition. So when your rocket goes beyond the current boundary, the boundary moves with you. You become the outer edge for that direction. But the universe is still a specific size, not infinite.”
“Okay, the universe itself might be finite, but all the stuff around it, the nothingness, that’s infinite, right?” I asked.
“It is meaningless to say you have an infinite supply of nothing.”
“Yeah, I guess so. But let’s get back to the subject,” I said. “How do you explain Zeno’s Paradox?”
“Imagine that everything in existence disappears and then reappears. How much time expires while everything is gone?”
“How should I know? You’re the one making up the example. How much?”
“No time passes. It can’t because time is a human concept of how things change compared to other things. If everything in the universe disappears, nothing exists to change compared to other things, so there is no time.”
“What if everything disappears except for me and my wristwatch?” I asked.
“Then you would experience the passing of time in relation to yourself and to your watch. And when the rest of the universe reappeared you could check on how much time had passed according to your watch. But the people in the rest of the universe would have experienced no time while they were gone. To them, you instantly aged. Their time and your time were not the same because you experienced change and they did not. There is no universal time clock; time differs for every observer.”
“Okay, I think I get that. But how is any of this going to answer my original question about gravity and what makes things move?”
“Have you ever seen a graph of something called a probability distribution?” he asked.
“Yes. It has a bunch of dots on it. The places with the most dots are where there’s the greatest probability,” I said, pleased to remember something from my statistics classes.
“The universe looks a lot like a probability graph. The heaviest concentrations of dots are the galaxies and planets, where the force of gravity seems the strongest. But gravity is not a tugging force. Gravity is the result of probability.”
“You lost me.”
“Reality has a pulse, a rhythm, for lack of better words. God’s dust disappears on one beat and reappears on the next in a new position based on probability. If a bit of God-dust disappears near a large mass, say a planet, then probability will cause it to pop back into existence nearer to the planet on the next beat. Probability is highest when you are near massive objects. Or to put it another way, mass is the physical expression of probability.”
“I think I understand that, sort of,” I lied.
“If you observed God-dust that was near the Earth it would look like it was being sucked toward the planet. But there is no movement across space in the sense that we understand it. The dust is continuously disappearing in one place and appearing in another, with each new location being nearer the Earth.”
“I prefer the current theory of gravity,” I said. “Newton and Einstein had it pretty much figured out. The math works with their theories. I’m not so sure about yours.”
“The normal formulas for gravity work fine with my description of reality,” he replied. “All I’ve done is add another level of understanding. Newton and Einstein gave us formulas for gravity, but neither man answered the question of why objects seem attracted to each other.”
“Einstein did explain it,” I said. “Remember, we talked about that? He said space was warped by matter, so what looks like gravity is just objects following the path of warped space.”
The old man just looked at me.
“Okay,” I said. “I admit I don’t know what any of that means. It does sound like nonsense.”
“Einstein’s language about bent space and my description of God-dust are nothing more than mental models. If they help us deal wth our environment, they are useful. My description of gravity is easier to understand than Einstein’s model. In that sense, mine is better.”
I chuckled. I had never heard anyone compare himself to Einstein. I was impressed by his cockiness but not convinced. “You haven’t explained orbits. Under your theory, how could a moon orbit a planet and not be sucked into it? Your God-dust would pop into existence closer to the planet every time it appeared until it crashed into the surface.”
“You are ready for the second law of gravity.”
“I guess I am.”
“There is one other factor that influences the position of matter when it pops back into existence. That force is inertia, for lack of a better word. Although God-dust is unimaginably small, it has some probability of popping into existence exactly where another piece of God-dust exists. When that happens, one of the particles has to find a new location and alter its probability. To the observer, if one could see such tiny happenings, it looks like the particles collide and then change direction and speed. The new speed is determined by how far from its original spot the God-dust appears with each beat of the universe. If each new location is far from the old spot, we perceive the object to be moving fast.”
He continued. “So there is always a dual probability influencing each particle of God-dust. One probability makes all God-dust pop into existence nearer to other God– dust. The other probability is that the dust will appear along a straight line drawn from its past. All apparent motion in the universe is based on those competing probabilities.
“Earth’s moon, for example, has a certain probability of coming toward the Earth and a certain probability of moving in a straight line. The two probabilities are, by chance, in balance. If gravity were a tugging force, the way we normally think of it, there would be some sort of friction, slowing the moon and eventually dragging it to Earth. But since gravity is nothing more than probability, there is no friction or tugging. The moon can orbit almost indefinitely because its position is determined by probability, not by tugging or pushing.”
“What if all the dust that makes up the moon doesn’t reappear near its last position?” I asked. “You said it’s only a matter of probability where the dust reappears, so couldn’t the moon suddenly vanish if all its dust disappeared and then appeared on the other side of the solar system?”
“Yes, it could. But the probability of that is ridiculously small.”
“The trouble with your theory,” I said, “is that matter doesn’t pop in and out of existence. Scientists would have noticed that by now.”
“Actually, they have. Matter pops into and out of existence all the time. That’s what a quantum leap is. You’ve probably heard the term but didn’t know its origin.”
“I’ll be darned,” I said.
Free Will of a Penny
“Explain free will,” I said.
“Imagine a copper penny that is exactly like an ordinary penny except that for this discussion it has consciousness. It knows it is a coin and it knows that you sometimes flip it. And it knows that no external force dictates whether it comes up heads or tails on any individual flip.
“If the penny’s consciousness were like human consciousness, it would analyze the situation and conclude that it had free will. When it wanted to come up heads, and heads was the result, the penny would confirm its belief in its power to choose. When it came up tails instead, it would blame its own lack of commitment, or assume God had a hand in it.
“The imaginary coin would believe that things don’t just ‘happen’ without causes. If nothing external controlled the results of the flips, a reasonable penny would assume that the control came from its own will, influenced perhaps by God’s will,
assuming it were a religious penny.
“The penny’s belief in its own role would be wrong, but the penny’s belief in God’s role would be right. Probability—the essence of God’s power—dictates that the penny must sometimes come up tails even when the penny chooses to be heads.”
“But people aren’t pennies,” I said. “We have brains. And when our brains make choices, we move our arms and legs and mouths to make things happen. The penny has no way to turn its choices into reality, but we do.”
“We believe we do,” the old man said. “But we also believe in the scientific principle that any specific cause, no matter how complex, must have a specific effect. Therefore, we believe two realities that cannot both be true. If one is true, the other must be false.”
“I’m not following you,” I said.
“The brain is fundamentally a machine. It’s an organic machine with chemical and electrical properties. When an electrical signal is formed, it can only make one specific thing happen. It can’t choose to sometimes make you think of a cow and sometimes make you fall in love. That one specific electrical impulse, in the one specific place in your brain, can have one and only one result on your actions.”
“We’ve been through this. Maybe the brain is exempt from the normal rules because of free will or the soul. I know I can’t define those things, but you can’t rule them out.”
“Nothing in life can be ruled out. But the penny analogy is a simple explanation of free will that makes sense and has no undefined concepts.”
“Being simpler doesn’t make it right,” I pointed out. I needed to say something that sounded wise, for my own benefit.
“True, simplicity is not proof of truth. But since we can never understand true reality, if two models both explain the same facts, it is more rational to use the simpler one. It is a matter of convenience.”
