It's Systemic, Stupid

Tonight, we're going to talk about my arch-nemesis, David Hume. Yeah, I know he's been dead for a couple centuries. Doesn't matter. You don't have to be alive to be my arch-nemesis! I'm very open-minded.

'sides, if he were alive, I'd probably poke him in the eye with a hot french fry. Such is the fate that awaits my enemies!

So Hume was a jackass and started this big ruckus about how causality isn't actually a thing, it's just "conjunction," which basically means that while event A comes before event B, in such a way that we perceive A to cause B, it doesn't. It just happens that, every time so far that we've observed A, we then observe B. The human mind draws a correlation that isn't really there.

Obviously, I call shenanigans... which, I think, is starting to become a theme of this blog, funnily enough. I apparently enjoy calling shenanigans.

So anyway. Hume's most infamous example is that of two billiard balls, one of which strikes another. Kinetic energy, physics, all that jazz comes into play, but you cannot point to anything contained within ball A - or even ball B, or anything at all, really - that is the causality. It's just not there. There is no thing in A that makes it a causal thing.

Which is, admittedly, an interesting observation. But I don't like where Hume takes it - that causality isn't real - because that just seems bonkers.

I have tried several times, over the past few years, to debunk this particular interpretation of the world. Only one of my professors has ever given me anything close to a satisfactory answer, and that relied on the PSR - the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Which basically said that we've gathered enough empirical evidence for causality to say that causality is a thing.

Hume's response to that, of course, is that that's bogus - we can't base belief in causality on causality! It's circular logic. Which is a position I totally agree with. You cannot rely on the PSR to find causality for you. You've got to do it another way.

The answer, I believe, is twofold: one part relies on metaphysics, and the other on changing our perception of what it means for a thing to be causal.

Metaphysics, per Kant, is defined as synthetic a priori. Synthetic, because the predicate is not contained in the subject; a priori, because you don't need empirical evidence to prove that the statement is true. Metaphysics is a problematic thing in philosophy-land, because there are cogent arguments that it's not even a thing that exists. Building our story of causality off of such shaky foundations isn't very cool, but I'm down with metaphysics, so long as we're not talking noumenal worlds and whatnot.

Stuff like math is in the domain of metaphysics. 5 + 7 = 12; twelve is not in the subject, and you don't need to have seen the solution to know what it is (that is, if I threw a math problem at you that you hadn't solved before, you could solve it, because of the principles of mathematics; the subject doesn't contain the predicate). Of course, one could argue that mathematics is just a bunch of tautologies in pretty packaging (and thus analytic, not synthetic)... but I digress.

So anyway. Metaphysics is one angle, because metaphysical statements are meaningful statements (not tautologous) and don't require empirical evidence. If we can make a definition of causality that is metaphysical, we've solved our problem.

But Hume raises a good point, in that objects themselves don't have causal power. I'm down with that, but we need to explain how causality can arise, then, if not from objects.

Thus we bring forth one of the most powerful concepts ever devised: systems.

Any statement regarding causality will only make sense in regards to a given system. For instance, in the real world, crashing two hydrogen atoms together releases a boatload of energy and produces a helium atom. Fusion is a causal process.

Systems have two primary components: objects that dwell within them, and rules that govern how those objects behave and interact. We do not, for instance, crash two hydrogen atoms together and get a banana. We get a helium atom and a bucket of energy. The universe - the system this event is happening in - has rules for what happens when you perform a particular action.

The best analogy I can conceive of is that of a massive program. The universe is this monstrous construct, filled to the brim with objects of ridiculous variety and capability. The interactions of those objects are governed by a series of relatively simple rules, given the complexity available to the objects in-system. The universe is "aware" of the states of each object within it; it can - and does - track all of this information seamlessly and flawlessly.

Causality is part of the ruleset the universe works with. It is as much a facet of our existence as gravity or electromagnetism. Just as the universe ensures that the gravity rule is applied to all relevant objects and their interactions, so, too, does it ensure that causality is applied.

Because, really, all causality is, is this: okay, event A happened. What happens next? The universe draws information from the objects involved in the event, performs whatever calculations need performing, then sends this information back, and the objects are modified accordingly.

If you were able to be aware of all the factors involved in a given event, aware of all the variables, and aware of the precise ways in which those variables and factors influenced the end result, you would be able to perfectly predict the outcome, with no need for knowing what it would actually be. Chaos theory and uncertainty principle and such aside, if you had omniscence regarding all factors in an event, you would know - without a shadow of a doubt - what the outcome would be.

Why? Because all causality is is the application of the universe's rules to a situation. If a billiard ball strikes another, the other must move, due to transfer of energy, kinetics, gravity, etc etc, all those wonderful billions of various factors - both huge and tiny - that play into it. The universe says so. And if you understood all of the factors involved, you can predict with absolute perfect certainty what the next link in the causal chain will look like.

With causality, it's not enough to just look at one object, or even two, or three. You have to understand the system this event is happening in, understand all the variables involved, understand that the universe isn't just a backdrop, but an active participant in everything that occurs.

One day, I am going to for-serious prove this, rather than just rant and rave about how wrong Hume is, and it'll be awesome.

Xenobiology: No, Seriously, It's Not The Same

So I was watching Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman last night, and they were talking about like alien life and all that fun jazz, something about "shadow biosphere" consisting of local flora and fauna with fundamental genetic differences, creating life in the lab, etc etc.

In all these discussions, though, these folk seem to continue to make ridiculously huge assumptions. Like the idea that because we're based on four particular nucleotides (five, really, but that's not the point yet), that all life is going to be based on those nucleotides.

...lolwut?

Amino acids are almost assuredly wide and varied in number; the possible combinations that could be used in genetics is probably ridiculously staggering. Not only that! - but we can clearly see that there are alternatives to our standard nucleotides, since freaking RNA uses a replacement for thymine (namely uracil). Why the hell would we assume that alien genetics would see the same freaking materials we use?

And our assumptions get worse! We assume all kinds of crazy things about DNA to be held true across all instances of life. Double-helix, four nucleotides, with sugar/phosphate stuff providing the ladder. But hey, chemically, elements in the same family (or column or whatever the hell) tend to have similar properties. Bonding issues with electron shells and whatnot aside, you could probably reasonably replace the phosphorous in DNA with, say, arsenic! Or antimony! Or bismuth! Or freaking nitrogen!

Put these two concepts together. Envision, if you can, alien genetic structures that have six nucleotides with sugar/antimony ladders for their "DNA." Increased numbers of nucleotides give rise to increased possible combinations, leading to greater potential genetic diversity. I don't know what the antimony instead of phosphate does, but I'm sure it has some effect (I'm not a geneticist, for serious, nor a chemist).

But the important thing is the idea that the number of nucleotides could be different, and even the specific nucleotides could vary. Our genetic language has ACGT and sometimes U; for an alien species, they could be doing CDIGHL and sometimes RT (just making up letters, here).

Even more important than the specifics of alien genetics is the idea that xenobiology has the potentially to be pants-crappingly more complicated than modern science seems willing to admit or discuss. We have to use life on earth as a starting point, because that's all we have, but when it comes down to it, there is no way to tell just how freaking different life elsewhere can or will be.

Even the idea that alien life will use a DNA-analogue seems presumptuous. Our understanding of life is such that amino acids and such seem to be a necessary component, but we have no basis for that assumption other than that amino acids are a sufficient but unnecessary component. The real winner is finding the necessary but insufficient component, the piece that is the same across all life, regardless of the components it is made from. I don't think we can do that yet, given our limited access to life as it exists in the universe, but that's what we need to be looking for.

...okay, so after a short look on Wikipedia, apparently there is a divison between astrobiology and xenobiology, namely that astrobiology is looking for earth-like life elsewhere, while xenobiology is the reasonable one that is all "no, seriously guys, it could be anything." But still, that just means that astrobiologists are silly. Looking for earth-like life - and finding it - would be cool, but the chances of that happening seem... pretty small, to me.

Antimatter Peek-a-boo

So I was at work the other day, contemplating some things I'd heard while watching that crazy-awesome science show with Morgan Freeman, and had a realization.

Big Bang, right? But theoretically, that event should've made an equal amount of matter and antimatter. We're all, "lolwut, where's teh antimatterz?", and the universe just kinda shrugs at us and says, "Figure it out, silly primates."

So we have this conundrum, which we gleefully ignore because we don't really have the tools yet to answer it.

Then we have the cosmological cons- I mean, dark matter/energy (did you see what I did there?). This stuff that is pushing the universe apart to counteract the power of gravity, with one little problem - we can't freakin' see it.

And so I say... oh really. Isn't that interesting?

Light, right? Photons and stuff. Electrons shifting through the various shells release very specific amounts of electromagnetic radiation, sometimes visible to us, in discrete energy amounts. Which could lead to a fun discussion of quantum mechanics, but not today. Okay, so electrons bouncing around causes light, which is visible to us. Yay.

Antimatter is, when it comes down to it, "just like matter," just with reversed polarity (somewhere, LeVar Burton screams for the pain to stop) - by which I mean, you've got a probability cloud of positrons orbiting around a nucleus of... antiprotons? Man, somebody's gotta come up with a better name. Right, so anyway, the stuff is basically the same, just with the signs reversed.

Except then we get into an interesting discussion regarding the interaction between matter and energy. E = MC^2, or so goes the simplified version of Einstein's most well-known theory. Energy and matter are interchangeable. Which would seem to indicate that, perhaps, just maybe, antimatter has its own thing going on - anti-energy.

But that's kind of tangential, and is getting a bit ahead of ourselves (that concept plays into how I envision an Alcubierre drive functioning, but I'll save that for later).

The important thing is antimatter chemical reactions and such. In normal matter, when electrons shift down-shell, they release energy, some of which we can see as light (which we discussed earlier). However, we have no idea (I don't think) of what happens when antimatter undergoes similar effects - do positrons shift up-shell when electrons would down-shift? Do they down-shift, too, but release anti-energy?

I propose that, regardless of what it's doing or how it's doing it, antimatter is effectively invisible to the human eye. By virtue of how light works, it seems sensible to me to say that such a thing as an anti-photon could exist, and that - if antimatter does, in fact, give off energy in any reasonable fashion - it would be such a particle/wave, and due to its very nature, humans would be unable to see it because the act of such vision would cause a matter/antimatter collision.

We haven't dealt with antimatter on a large enough scale to determine whether it has gravity or antigravity, but I would be willing to bet, at this point, that it probably has anti-gravitic properties (or at least appears to).

The point of this ridiculous diatribe in which I almost assuredly displayed an alarming misunderstanding of physics? I think that it would be reasonable to say that this dark matter/energy stuff physics is talking about nowadays is, in fact, all the antimatter that mysteriously went missing.

Yep. Seems pretty sensible to me.