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Judgment Day

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

I don’t find thought experiments about the nature of God very interesting—but throw in time travel and I perk up a bit.

Mike Lebossiere poses the following puzzle:

Sally is working on a time travel project and during one experiment, her own smartphone appears in the lab. Startled, she checks her pocket and finds that her phone is there. Yet it also appears to be on the table. Picking it up, she finds that video has been recorded on it. Much to her horror and dismay, it seems to be a video of her saying that she has killed her husband for having an affair with her friend, only to find out after that she was wrong.  In the video, she can she the body of what seems to be her dead husband. The video closes with her future self saying that she is sending back the phone to tell her past self to not kill her husband; future Sally then shoots herself in the head as the phone is being sent into the past.

Being something of a skeptic, Sally checks the phones carefully and finds that (aside from some blood on the future phone that matches her husband’s blood type) the two are identical. This convinces Sally and she does not kill her husband.

Now, let God be brought into the picture, at least hypothetically. If one prefers to leave God out of this game, then an omniscient observer who judges people for their deeds and misdeeds can be used in His place.

In this scenario, what would God actually “see” and how would He judge?

On one hand, the future Sally did kill her husband and send the phone back. After all, without those events, then the phone would not have the video recorded on it and would not have been sent back. As such, God would judge that Sally was guilty of suicide and murder, hence worthy of divine punishment. Also, both Sally and her husband would be dead and thus would have gone off to the relevant afterlife (assuming there is such a thing).

On the other hand, the time traveling phone prevented Sally from killing her husband and committing suicide. Thus, Sally would not be judged for these deeds. Also, neither Sally nor her husband would be dead. In effect, that future event never will be, although it must have been (otherwise there would be no phone).

[…]

One classic view of God and time is that God perceives all of time “at once.’ To use an analogy, God’s perspective is like being able to see the entire filmstrip of a movie at once. The past, present and future are just positions on the strip relative to a specific film cell. Hence, He does not see any changes in the past-He merely sees as the events that did occur, shall occur and are occurring all “at once.”  So, God would “see” the phone appear from a future that never was to save Sally from committing a murder that never will be.

I think this just points out that the idea of time travel is logically incoherent. The whole idea of going back in time to “undo” an event that has occurred requires that the event both did happen and did not happen. That is a logical contradiction. The future event would have to have happened in order for it to be caused to not happen. Since the “undoing” event is in a cause effect relation with the undone event which must exist for the undoing event to occur we have backward causation going on.

And it is not obvious that backward causation is a coherent idea. It would seen that the outcome of an event must happen only after the event. Although quantum mechanics seems to allow for backward causation (if I understand it correctly) surely there is no experimental result that depends on that idea.

So what would God see? It is a widely accepted view that God is a rational being and thus can neither see nor coherently think contradictory states of affairs. If time travel is logically impossible then trying to imagine how an omniscient being would view it doesn’t help.

Of course, if Sally is the sort of person who would murder her spouse for infidelity then God may have all the justification God needs.

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Is the Future Over?

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

William Gibson thinks maybe so:

Say it’s midway through the final year of the first decade of the 21st Century. Say that, last week, two things happened: scientists in China announced successful quantum teleportation over a distance of ten miles, while other scientists, in Maryland, announced the creation of an artificial, self-replicating genome. In this particular version of the 21st Century, which happens to be the one you’re living in, neither of these stories attracted a very great deal of attention.

In quantum teleportation, no matter is transferred, but information may be conveyed across a distance, without resorting to a signal in any traditional sense. Still, it’s the word “teleportation”, used seriously, in a headline. My “no kidding” module was activated: “No kidding,” I said to myself, “teleportation.” A slight amazement.

The synthetic genome, arguably artificial life, was somehow less amazing. The sort of thing one feels might already have been achieved, somehow. Triggering the “Oh, yeah” module. “Artificial life? Oh, yeah.”

New devices are cool; new human possibilities with new meaning? Eh. Not so much.

Alvin Toffler warned us about Future Shock, but is this Future Fatigue? For the past decade or so, the only critics of science fiction I pay any attention to, all three of them, have been slyly declaring that the Future is over. I wouldn’t blame anyone for assuming that this is akin to the declaration that history was over, and just as silly. But really I think they’re talking about the capital-F Future, which in my lifetime has been a cult, if not a religion. People my age are products of the culture of the capital-F Future. The younger you are, the less you are a product of that. If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.

The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely…more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.

The future used to be a place of radically new promises and perils, game changers made possible by science. But he welcomes this new realism.

This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else’s past, every present someone else’s future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now.

As he points out (and he should know), science fiction is more about present hopes and fears that it is about the future.

If you are a William Gibson fan, his comments on his own writing career and his forthcoming new book are quite interesting.

If Pattern Recognition was about the immediate psychic aftermath of 9-11, and Spook Country about the deep end of the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq, I could say that Zero History is about the global financial crisis as some sort of nodal event, but that must be true of any 2010 novel with ambitions on the 2010 zeitgeist. But all three of these novels are also about that dawning recognition that the future, be it capital-T Tomorrow or just tomorrow, Friday, just means more stuff, however peculiar and unexpected. A new quotidian. Somebody’s future, somebody else’s past.

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Artificial Life

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

An article in a recent issue of Science reported that Craig Venter (the leader of one team of researchers that successfully mapped the human genome) has made a synthetic cell by inserting a fabricated genome into a bacterium. The press has been reporting this as the first successful attempt to create artificial life. But the paper has created a good deal of controversy, not only regarding the ethical issues, but whether this is really artificial life or not.

Sune Holm has an excellent summary of the debate:

In an interview with the BBC Nobel Prize-winning biologist Paul Nurse points out that not just the genome but the entire cell would have to be synthesized for it to be properly artificial. What Venter has produced is the first living cell which is entirely controlled by synthesized DNA, not artificial life.

George Church, geneticist at Harvard Medical School, doesn’t think that Venter has really created new life either. Commenting in Nature, Church says that the bacterium made by Venter “is not changed from the wild state in any fundamental sense. Printing out a copy of an ancient text isn’t the same as understanding the language.”

Also commenting in Nature, Jim Collins, professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, points out that “The microorganism reported by the Venter team is synthetic in the sense that its DNA is synthesized, not in that a new life form has been created. Its genome is a stitched-together copy of the DNA of an organism that exists in nature, with a few small tweaks thrown in.

Holm argues that all of these skeptical comments assume a particular conception of what artificial life should be:

These comments seem to me to suggest the following requirement: In order to create an artificial organism one must build it in a way analogous to the way we build other complex artifacts such as watches and washing machines. This involves making the different parts that compose the machine and put them together according to a design plan. Furthermore, it is by being able to create artificial life in this sense that we satisfy the necessary condition for understanding life expressed in Feynman’s dictum, “What I cannot create I do not understand,” so often referred to in synthetic biology. If some day we become able to design and build a living thing from scratch by fabricating all its parts out of nonliving matter and assemble them according to a plan of our own design, then we may be said to understand life.

Holm suggests that some of the ethical worries many people have regarding this technology is the result, not of potential harmful effects, but of our uncertainty about how to classify such “organisms” and our inability to know what is “right or wrong with respect to these entities.”

The products of synthetic biology are typically presented in terms of rather vague but highly connotative hybrid notions such as “living machine” and “synthetic organism.” Dealing with ethical concerns arising from synthetic biology research it is important that we don’t neglect the need to investigate how to conceptualize the products we expect synthetic biology to result in. This task will involve investigation of our notions of organism, machine, artifact, and life. Venter’s achievement has made the need for philosophical exploration of these categories even more pressing.

Holm may be right that “ontological uncertainty” breeds ethical uncertainty. But this is uncertainty we will have to live with. I doubt that any of these new entities will fall neatly into the ontological categories we have available today. The question of whether they are “really artificial” or not may have no answer. And we may have to invent new categories to make sense of scientific innovation.

So it is probably best, at this point, not to get too hung up on definitions, which will likely be quite fluid.

 

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