The Evolution of Novelty in an Open Universe: Requiem for Laplace's Demon

Steven Peck

To join the church. I’ve also blogged about the future robot mission to to Wyoming and several other things. And the future for me is where I actually like to dwell. I had two students publish bioethics papers with me. This last semester. One on the implications and ethics of pregnancy on Mars. And the other, and these were published in mainstream academic bioethics journals. And the other one, the implications of new neuroimaging techniques that are spying into the visual cortex. Text and actually reconstructing pictures from thoughts. And there’s a group of people called Locked In Syndrome that are fully conscious, but they have no access to the outside world. They can’t even blink or move their eyes. And it’s a rather recent discovery. And this student explored how that could be used as a communication device for people in locked ins uh so you know, think of trees for yes and think of cars for no and they picture that and it becomes a way to communicate w with people. That have absolutely no access to the outside world. So, future technology is something that really interests me a lot.

Steven Peck

Oops, I’m pushing the wrong button here. Okay, not as much as bees, though. Bees are the second most beautiful creature on the planet. The first most beautiful creature on the planet are ants. And if you’ve ever seen an ant under a microscope, you know that they are just jewels. Gorgeous. I love everything about it. But bees are almost that way. And I want to start with a story about bees.

Steven Peck

This is my daughter. She’s like George’s daughter, now on a mission in Berlin. And she’s standing. She’s standing under a bald-faced wasp nest. And she’s standing there to prove a point that I thought was true. I engaged in some experiments here. No, but I I’d actually experimented on myself, but I thought she made a better picture. When I was uh working in Africa on Tetsifly work, I discovered that I could stand underneath these beehives up in the acacia trees, and they never bothered me. And I thought, well, that makes good evolutionary sense. If you have a better sense of who to attack and drive off, you’re going to not expend as much energy. and be able to function better. That’s the name of the game in evolution, is efficiency and in trying to survive. And if you spend all your time chasing off things that you don’t need to chase off, you’re wasting a lot of time. And so this led me to this brilliant idea. I know cis is true of wasps. I know cis was truth of a lot of pymenopters. And so I had this brilliant idea.

Steven Peck

I thought. You know what? I’m dying to keep a beehive in my urban backyard, and my neighbors wouldn’t like it. But I thought, what if I put it in the window well of our basement? This is brilliant. You’ll see that this is actually a cautionary tale in the end. But I thought that bees would wake up in the morning. And they’d look out, and all they’d see was aluminum grating. And so I thought, this will work. The guard bees will look out, they’ll see, what a safe universe. I can’t even see anything approaching at all. I did it. This is me putting the beehive. There’s my daughter that gets experimented on with insects quite a lot. And so I put it down there, and it worked brilliantly. I mean, brilliantly to the point that we have a grate here we put on top of it so kids don’t fall in there. But mid summer when the beehive was really large, probably nearly 30,000 bees, you could stand on that grate and they’d come Pouring out to go foraging and they’d come back in and they wouldn’t bother you. The guard bees were looking out. Yeah, nothing’s here. We’re good. We’re good. If you looked out the window, though, they’d really get disturbed. So we had to be a little bit careful.

Steven Peck

Now, towards the end of summer, So they began to get on ring and I’m not sure why. And my wife was getting stung. And she’s not really allergic, but a little bit allergic. Her arm will swell up. larger than most people. And she she’d gotten stung twice and she said, This is a failed experiment. And I I had the attitude we needed more data, but she was she was seeing this as As evidence that this wasn’t quite working the way it should have. So it’s early fall, we’re going to harvest the honey.

Steven Peck

I donned my outfit here, went in there, was opening the the hive, and a bee crawled inside my face mask. And I found that really bothersome. And I, so I got, I climbed out of the window well and I ran across the yard, maybe about 40 yards away, and I took my hat hat off to let the bee out and pretty much this is what happened. I I hadn’t learned anything from Yogi Bear, you know, who takes the honey and the bees all follow in a cloud. I guess that’s true of uh Also, Winnie the Pooh. But they hit me hard. I got 50 stings on the top of my head. And so I was, you know, as a professional entomologist, I knew exactly what to do in that situation, and it’s run around in a circle waving your hands. And I did that for a while. It wasn’t very effective, so I bolted into the garage. Got rid of the bees on me, and my wife had been stung on the arm, and her arm was starting to swell. And just two days before, she had gotten an EpiPen from the doctor for just such an emergency. And she looks at me and says, Should I get the EpiPen? Should I stab my arm? And I walked into the kitchen and I smiled and said, I feel really funny and wow. I am not allergic to bees, but I think 50 stings on the top of the head overwhelmed my immune system and I went into anaphylactic shock. And they called 911, the fire department, the ambulance came, the ambulance took me to the hospital. But she hit me with the EpiPen, and the doctor said she saved my life. I was really sort of going down at that point. And then they gave me another one at the hospital, and they watched me for a while. I still really wanted to keep bees, but that was kind of like the guillotine shop for this endeavor.

Steven Peck

I really think, though, that bees illustrate something that I want to bring out. And I want to talk about bees. I want to talk about. The creative nature of the universe. And this has implications for technology, it has implications for the way life has evolved on Earth. And there’s some cutting-edge Biology that’s taking place now, that’s tying together things like quantum events happening at very small biological scales that allow true randomness to bubble up into the universe. So I’m going to argue that the universe is open. That we don’t live in a deterministic block universe. And I’m going to define that in just a minute a little bit better so we get an idea of what I mean by that. And that the creation is actually ongoing, it’s continuing. And here’s the radical claim: it always will. If you’ve read my book, A Short Stay in Hell, you know I have worries about eternity and its possible boringness. Nothing scares me more than the idea that eternity is just more and more and more the same, like watching endless Gilligan Islands reruns. You know, I knew that was going to happen. I knew that was going to happen. Aha, there’s Gilligan again in trouble. I don’t like that, and maybe this is coming out of my bias, but I think there are reasons to think that that isn’t the case.

Steven Peck

So, I’m going to outline nine concepts. I’m going to talk about science, why science matters, why it’s so important for understanding the universe. I’m going to talk about reductionism and determinism, their role in science. I’m going to talk about Chaos and randomness and emergence and evolution and niche theory and ecology, and what they imply for this idea of an open universe.

Steven Peck

Science is the best way to understand. Things we’ve ever invented as humans. It has tools like experimentation, observation, modeling and representation, data analysis, interpretation, but that’s not the end of it. These are the tools of science. In reality, science is a kind of ethic and kind of practice. And we know that science is important because it works. If you don’t believe that, next time you go to the hospital, Tell them you want the 1920s treatment. Okay? Just as an experiment on your commitment to science not being progressive and and uh important. Uh but but some of the things that make Science strong is its community, that there’s always people watching over your shoulder, that the data is transparent, that everything’s peer-reviewed. A lot of people try to imagine a conspiracy of scientists, and that really makes me laugh. We can’t even agree in a committee meeting on which kind of chalkboards to buy. Scientists are contrary by nature, they’re fractious and One of the ways you can get ahead as a scientist is to prove everybody else wrong. So, if you have a contrary view, that’s what’s going to get promoted. Science is in constant motion. Does it have biases? Of course. Does it have all the problems of humans? It does. But it has mechanisms in place to try to reduce those. Biases. Those biases are constantly being scrutinized and attacked. And so science becomes this very, very powerful way to observe the universe.

Steven Peck

One of the tools, so let’s talk about materialism and reductionism. What I mean by materialism is the idea that material objects in motion are the entire story. There are good reasons to act like that’s true, and we call that Methodological materialism. Methodological materialism is how science proceeds. We assume that there aren’t any extra forces around. We assume that that that there aren’t any elves or or uh running around. There may be elves, but they live in Greenland. Um but we but we assume this. And and people shouldn’t find this problematic because this is what we Want from our mechanics. If you take your car to a mechanic and You expect a story about pistons and belts and bolts and all this kind of things because she is a methodological materialist. If she said, you know, I think there’s supernatural forces at work in your car. I’ve had a car that that seemed the most likely explanation, but I probably wouldn’t take. Take my car to her again. But so we expect methodological materialism. That’s how science works. We expect that to work. Now, a lot of times though, scientists will assume, and this is an assumption, that this applies to The ontology of the universe. This is a bad assumption and it’s unwarranted. How would you ever prove that scientifically? It’s not a scientific claim, it’s an assumption.

Steven Peck

Okay, and reductionism. Reductionism has served us well in science. This is the idea that you reduce things to the smallest Parts that you can understand, and you try to take away variables that you don’t think matter. You try to get this, get a By understanding the parts, you get to the point where you can understand the whole. And that works well for a lot of things. Turns out it doesn’t work so well for things like ecology. You’re interested in the Story of the complexity. If you remove the complexity, you’re actually removing what the ecological system is. And this has proven true in systems biology and developmental biology. That the whole begins to matter. And reductionism is starting to fail us in some ways. And so we’re using techniques to try to overcome that. I do simulation modeling of ecological systems. The classic kinds of experiments. Informed ecology for years and years have trouble with the entire complexity. And so we’ve got these methods we’re trying out, but it’s difficult. So materialism, and let me talk about the roots of this a little bit.

Steven Peck

The idea of materialism is really kind of a Newtonian Idea. There was a view through the 18th century and on that the universe was a great clockwork, that everything was matter in motion and machines. And a mathematician named Laplace Came up with this description. He called it his, we call it Laplace’s demon. He just wrote about this demon that has this amazing power that it knows where. Every particle in the universe is, what its motion is, and its spin, the whole complete story. And Laplace’s demon then According to Laplace, can then extrapolate the entire history of the universe forward and the entire history of the universe back. Okay, this is Laplace’s demon. If you had all knowledge about every particle in motion, then you could do this. So everything’s determined. Matter is a lot like billiard balls bumping into each other. Whoops, I’m I’m sitting here pressing the button. That’s actually Swamp Thing and his girlfriend, uh Abby Archer, in a in an altered state. If you haven’t been reading Swamp Thing, you’re you’ve disappointed me. So, matter in motion, this is the Laplacian view of things. And this has informed much of the 20th century science.

Steven Peck

They argue for this thing called a block universe, and the block universe. Universe, you can, this is a picture. We had the Big Bang, the dark ages, no light, light develops, matter starts to form, and to the point where we are now. Okay, the idea of the block universe, and this is argued for by By people that are very, very bright, like Einstein. The block universe means that At the time of the Big Bang, everything follows from there. Everything is determined. There is no slop in the system. And so. When the Big Bang went off, it was inevitable that I’d be waving my hand like this right now, and you’d be sitting there watching me wave my hand like this. That was set. Everything that happened after that in the Big Bang That was an unavoidable movement because the universe is a block. And this is kind of the way that people like Augustine and others viewed God’s perception of The universe. That we live in this block universe, and God kind of sits above time like we are from this perspective. And that everything that unfolds, therefore, will unfold. And there’s no stopping that. Everything’s determined. This model of the universe is being subverted by biology. Biology turns out to be a place where that kind of determinism doesn’t hold. And we know that. One of the real pushes. In the last 20 years only, essentially much of the 21st century, has been the realization of how deeply quantum events, which we know Play into this randomness in some very different and special ways, bubbles up through biology. And I’m going to tell you about that.

Steven Peck

To do that, I need to talk about three things: chaos, randomness, and third thing, emergence. This is what’s going to get us to where we can. Talk about a universe that isn’t a block universe, that the future is not determined, and wildness ensues. So, chaos. What is chaos specifically? I spent about five Years of my graduate studies with a group studying chaos. Chaos is a mathematical concept. It was a weather modeler using different. Differential equations was upset one day because none of his models were working. They were being affected completely by rounding error. And others had noticed this. But Lorenz, he’s the one that sort of came up with this, really paid attention to it. And this field of chaos studies. came about. It’s a feature of nonlinear dynamics, and nonlinear dynamics is a branch of mathematics that studies chaos, how it how it How it unfolds. And it’s important to this story. It’s important to this story of how we break the deterministic mold. It’s essentially a mixing. process with extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. What you see here is a strange attractor.

Steven Peck

This is another hallmark of chaos that that the process If you look at it in time, you see it wandering all over the place around these attractors. This is a simple chaotic system. This is from Population Biology and Insects. And I started this model at point zero zero zero zero zero one difference. So there’s the same parameters, but Really small difference. And you can see that the two models hold together for a long time. They’re matching each other. This is completely, again, deterministic. And all of a sudden, about here, they start to break apart. Once they start to break apart, well, the whole time they’re actually breaking apart, but it’s happening more slowly. It’s not making a significant difference here, but all of a sudden this exponential growth, and all of a sudden, when you get out here, these two processes look. Completely independent. If you did a phase map of this, you would find that the strange attractors were the same. But you get some really big differences. What this means is that tiny differences in the universe in a chaotic nonlinear system Can bubble up into some new and surprising ways. Here’s an example from my life.

Steven Peck

This is when on my honeymoon we were in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. And it affected everything about my subsequent life. But actually, the decision. To take the road hinged on a decision of whether to stop at the Burger King for lunch that day. And if we, you know, you played Mario Kart and you have that ghost. Cart that gets to show you what happened. I’d love to see the ghost cart of us stopping at Burger King just to see how different my life would be if it unfolded. But we didn’t, we kept going and boom, middle of the day, near Bend, Oregon, we had a head-on collision with a drunk driver and we honeymooned in the hospital for 10 days. It was actually more miserable than my smile would suggest. But that’s chaos. That’s chaos in motion. This tiny sensitivity, that tiny decision changed everything about my life. Everything. I don’t know what my Mario Kart life would look like if we turned into the Burger King, but I know it would be different. And I suspect you have all had those moments. You have all had a moment in your life where you turned left instead of right, where you introduced to somebody or not. All these kinds of things affect. And that’s that’s The hallmark of chaos.

Steven Peck

This is my PhD advisor, Steve Elmer. He’s at Connect. I did my work at NC State. He’s now at Cornell. But he discovered something interesting about ecological systems. He looked at hundreds of time series from ecological series, and he found that the population dynamics of these Animals all were right next to chaos. There’s ways you can measure using Lyapunov exponents, if that means anything, whether a time series has a big chaotic component to it. And he measured hundreds of these time series. And he discovered that things evolve to be right next to chaos, not far away and not in. If you drop into chaos, Your extinction is assured, essentially. It goes to probability one. But in this getting as close. Evolutionarily, as you can to chaos, turned out to be a big deal because it means that the populations are trying to maximize their variation. And I’ll talk a little bit about why that really matters in evolution in just a second. But that’s part of chaos. Chaos is. Abundant in life. But it’s a mixer-upper. It’s still deterministic. Any chaotic system is a deterministic system. It’s playing Laplace’s demons game. This brings us to our next

Steven Peck

Topic, randomness. Now randomness is a little bit stranger. If we really did live in a billiard ball universe, it would be really hard to imagine how we’d how we’d get out of Anything. Everything, I’m not arguing that causes don’t, every effect doesn’t have a cause, but there are some effects that That the cause is truly random. And I’m talking about quantum events. And the quantum world has these weird properties: radioactive decay, light itself. Micro particles, subatomic particles, that was what I was looking for, can be in two places, two have been in two states at once. It’s really strange. But most of the time, it doesn’t affect. The macro world. What happens is, in the macro world, quantum, quantum, the second a quantum system is seen or observed, it collapses into a classical. System. Now, that seems weird. I mean, I say observation, but it really means something less than somebody has to look at it. I mean, it has to affect history. And the second it affects history, it collapses. Into a classical behavior. It becomes the billiard balls of Laplace’s demon. But when it collapses, where it collapses can be a truly random event. In fact, you can see random events. If any of you, whoops, whoops, if any of you have been struck by lightning, there is a random element to that. That you probably wanted to know that. So, I don’t know how big of a population we’ve got here that have been struck by lightning. I haven’t. And I’m kind of surprised.

Steven Peck

But you see how this bends around here? This is actually following. Tiny, tiny perturbations, so tiny that it’s actually at the molecular atomic scale. So there’s a probability distribution. I mean, there’s lots of electrons flowing here, but the actual path is a Affected by tiny events that are influenced by quantum events. Quantum decay, all kinds of light rays, all kinds of things are going on here that affect the quantum world. So if you’ve ever been struck by lightning, It really was a random event. Don’t take it personally. It wasn’t a sign from the heavens that you’re being bad. I don’t think.

Steven Peck

So, this is just a small example of how a quantum can bubble up, but we’re seeing it now in ways that matter. much more significantly in life itself. It turns out that life is influenced by quantum effects all over the place. There is a A claim a few years ago by some quantum biologists that a blade of grass was a quantum computer. And a whole bunch of people at MIT reading about quantum computers just laughed. You know, how hard it is. To maintain stability at the quantum level. But they started looking at it more closely and they became completely convinced. Things like enzymatic actions rely on quantum events. Quantum tunneling, proton tunneling between Michael tubules. It turns out that the quantum world is hitting biology in amazing ways. One of the big ones is in mutation. Mutation is random according to most mutations. Most mutations emerge randomly. The signature looks like this could be quantum events playing with that, and we certainly know that things around it are quantum events. The only reason I hesitate is that showing something’s quantum is really hard because when you start looking at it, the quantum stuff disappears. It’s the nature of the quantum world that if you observe it, it changes. The suspicion is there doesn’t seem to be any other mechanism for mutation, random events, and they are truly random. By everything we mean by that. We also see it in the way that development unfolds, the way that DNA uses and methylation patterns. So, what we’re seeing is in biology, randomness is all over the place. And the thing about this that it means is that it can bubble up. into macro. When a protein changes, if you get a mutation that changes the protein, what that means is that in a new context, that animal may survive At a differential rate than another animal, and you get evolution in action. So, so quantum events. Are kind of a big deal. So we’re seeing genuine randomness. Life is connecting to that randomness and it’s bubbling up into the macro world in exciting and major ways. One way is through.

Steven Peck

Emergent systems. Emergent systems are, I’ll just talk really briefly about this. Emergence is the idea that Lots of large number systems are created that are a unique thing. And that unique thing then influences the things underneath it. And there’s three basic types. I’m following Terrence Deacon here in this. There’s this kind of emergence. P1 emergence is kind of a low-level emergence.

Steven Peck

These are a bunch of brindled news or wildebeests out in the Serengeti. And when one sees a lion, it becomes really agitated. and starts looking at the lion. And all the willebees all around it start to notice that that one over there wow, some’s up over there and starts looking where that one is. And the entire herd is affected. By that one individual. The interesting thing is, though, is when that herd is affected, it sort of calms the original one. This level of disturbance kind of goes down because the one that originally saw the lion can now say, Yeah, but I’ve got two or three people in front of me, and there’s a little one there. Okay, I can relax. So you see that influence. Of emergence where the whole gets affected and then the whole affects the individual.

Steven Peck

The second is bees, and this is the most amazing level of, well, it’s not most amazing because I’ll hit the most amazing one in just a second. We see is no, there is no one in control. The queen’s not issuing orders. Okay, we need some nursery workers, we need some foragers, you, you, you there. No. Every bee makes its own decision. And every bee looks around, sees what needs to be done, and then does it. So it emerges from its pupil case, it looks around, looks like we need more honeycomb. I’m on it, goes over, makes new honeycomb. Or, I need to help take care of the queen, goes and does that. The bee’s life progresses eventually making their way to be a forager, but it’s making decisions. I use that word really intentionally. That’s making decisions about what needs to be done by observing the hive. And we see this hive behavior then. In biology, we refer to a beehive as a superorganism. We see the beehive acting in certain ways. As a unit, as kind of almost an organism, with all the bees participating. And then the condition of the hive itself then affects the bees and what they do and how they proceed. So that’s a high-level Emergence. There’s much more organization, it’s much more tightly bound to the direction things are going to go.

Steven Peck

And then the last one that nobody’s quite figured out is consciousness. The fact that experience happens in the brain is. Is really weird. There’s nothing that really science has been able to say about it. And that’s not that I sh I’m not arguing that science should quit looking, but it’s a hard problem. A philosopher named Frank Jackson. Does this argument with the neurobiologist Mary? She’s a future neurobiologist. She understands. Everything there is about processing the color red. From the time the light wave hits the retina to the way it propagates down the optic nerve. through the visual cortex, how it propagates from there. She we’re going to stipulate she understands every single thing. There’s nothing she doesn’t understand. But then Jackson makes this kind of gotcha moment and says, but she’s colorblind. And he asks the question, so they fix it, and for the first time in her life, she understands everything there is to know about Brain processing of the color red. She sees the color red and he asks, Does she learn anything? And it’s a strange argument to say she would have said, Oh, yeah, just like I thought it would look. Yeah, that did my brain. Stuff here, these charts, they told me that’s what it would look like. Experience is something so unique and so different that we really don’t have a very good account of it. And it’s generally agreed that this is the hard problem. And so I’m not going to really talk about that much. But all these things, so we have a source of randomness. We have a source of things being mixed up with non-linear dynamics, things that create that mix up, and then we see emergent behavior. And so, what we’ve set up here. is an escape from the blocked universe.

Steven Peck

So evolution depends on three things: variation, inheritance, and differential reproduction. And any system that you have these three things is going to evolve, whether it’s computer, digital organisms, chemicals in a soup, anything that has these three attributes will evolve. And that’s what we mean by evolution. And evolution is the mechanism by how change occurs through life on Earth. And we know this. There are abundant, abundant evidences. To plow through those really quick. This is the precursor to the hippo and the whale that is an aquatic kind of ratty thing. I hope that was scientific enough. But we have a good account of the evolution of whales. Every single drawing here Every every whoops every every single one of these drawings are from a fossil rec that they found. And what we see is, and they’re found at earlier and earlier and earlier strata in the Earth’s Geology. So we have a good account of this. We have good evidence that evolution Takes place on the earth, and these are just some more pictures of wells, well-like things, precursors.

Steven Peck

Evolution, to me, should be very, very interesting to Mormons. I can’t Think of a group that should be more interested in evolution in every way because that is the way the universe unfolds. Novelty. Novelty, evolution is how novelty occurs in the universe. And we look at the world, we’re struck by things. We’ve got a big universe, as George mentioned, our scriptures. Itself talk about other worlds. And that last picture I just flew by, you probably should not fly by the Hubble deep field because every single dot in this picture is a galaxy. And it’s a pinhead. Of our sky. Every single dot there is a galaxy. That blows my mind.

Steven Peck

So we see evidence of evolution in geology, embryology. I dare any of you to pick out a human from a fish embryo at a Certain stage, it’s almost impossible. We had gill slits, we have a tail. We see it in our DNA. Our DNA is structured. In the same way, it is on all life. And we can tell how closely related we are by looking at the DNA. Recently, they found a finger of a new human species that we don’t know anything about. It wasn’t Neanderthal, it wasn’t Homo sapiens. We see evidence of lots and lots of transition. Everybody asked me about transition fossils, and so I always throw up these. The biggest supply of transition fossils that we have comes from this species. And BYU just got a display of four replica hominids. It’s really neat. And these live on Earth. It’s amazing. This is a forensic reconstruction of a Homo erectus. You know, like in shows where they try to find out who these bones are. Belong to, and they stick pins in and then reconstruct the flesh. This is probably what this particular skeleton guy looked like. We know it was male, we know we don’t know the skin tone, the hair color actually. Actually, but this is probably a pretty good guess of the of the physical features of of this person. That’s the the A skull. That’s not that the skull, but it’s it’s a it’s a Homo erectus skull. I was pleased to find out that I am a much higher percentage Neanderthal than most of you. 93%, more than 93%, only 7% of the 23 million. Me, customers had more Neanderthal game. I bragged about this on Facebook for weeks. It’s so happy. It’s kind of inspired a love of genealogy for me to find my Neanderthal ancestors.

Steven Peck

One more piece, and then I’ll make the claim that we live in a universe, and that’s ecology. Ecologies are rich and diverse, and we’ve discovered. That’s a lot of ecological systems occur through niche construction. Niche construction is the idea that life changes its niche and that produces more, allows more. Productivity, this is a Pleistocene beaver. Before there were beavers, streams just ran from the mountains. For millions of years, streams just ran down the mountains. All of a sudden, beavers appear. And what happens is when beavers appear, they were a ground-nesting blind. Squirrel once. They started to use their nest-making abilities to make their houses and to build dams, and they created ponds that provided a space and a substrate for further evolution. And this is exactly. How it works in technology. This is exactly how it works in nature. That when a new space opens in a niche, the beavers created niches for lily pads, deers, moose, cattails, lots of things. Suddenly, Brook trout, all these kinds of things start appearing on the scene in response to the niche. And I can see my red light has gone on.

Steven Peck

Okay. Quick. Okay, okay. Okay. So this is Abby Archer’s been made organic again instead of being a demon. Laplace has lost his place. We have mechanisms that create that allowance. Allow randomness to bubble into the universe in big ways. That means that the universe is wide open. And so, Plato’s Timaeus, if you read a cheap version, I mean, not in cost, but

Steven Peck

We’ve all through the Middle Ages had this idea that there was a type of everything. There was an ideal form of giraffes and an ideal form, and life is headed for that. This turns out not to be the way evolutionary biologists see it. Everything’s contingent and accident. There’s no reason for a giraffe. There’s no, evolution wasn’t heading towards these at any point. They emerged in newness. This novelty is unique. And this is an argument for why ecologies matter, why we need to preserve these. This act of creation took deep time. We have a much, much richer theology about deep time because we see it all around us. And as George argued, This idea that comes out of sort of medieval Christianity of great chains of being and a block universe that God sees the end from the beginning does not appear to be right. The universe is open. What unfolds is new. New niches are created. Therefore, new things can and in technology, the the creation of the the microchip suddenly creates the ability for Things. And we don’t know what’s going to happen.

Steven Peck

On Star Trek, I was watching with my son last night. The technology was an advanced form that Captain Kirk could sign. you know, he’s signing orders and she brings him a piece of big block thing and he signs it. You know, not thinking about the internet or exchanges and things. We can’t imagine what new things are coming in an open universe. That’s a marvelous thing. And it goes the other way as well.

Steven Peck

This is Jacob Boomi that Talked about this state of chaos that existed. And he argued that God came from this. To talk about the evolution of gods, that there was this ground state. It means that in our theology where we have embodiment of matter makes a big difference. The embodiment of having heavenly parents who are embodied means something really kind of cool. It means that God has purposes, has teleological parts. What I mean by that is Is biological purposes. A hand is for grasping, eyes are foreseeing. Now, I’m not saying these are the same purposes that God’s parts But it does mean that God has teleological parts created through a developmental process and is organic in a sense. It means that God has a biology. Because we don’t believe that That God has a body implies that there are laws and forces and attributes of that body that actually mean something Has happened to bring it about. And that’s kind of a radical claim, but I believe that’s the Mormon claim. I believe that the Mormon claim is that God has a body. And that the future is open, and I hope that’s true of the eternities. I don’t want a short stay in hell, I want an adventure. I want newness. I want challenges. I want to see the universe unfold in exciting new ways for ever. And there’s no reason to think it won’t. We don’t live in a block universe, we’re not locked into being stuck. Thank you. I’ll take questions.

Speaker 3

So, we do have a few minutes for questions. Please come up to the mic so that we can get it for the recording.

Speaker 4

Hi, I’m Randall Paul. Really enjoyed it today. Oh, picture. Is there, in the openness, in an ethical teleological sense, Why should we trust that things will go well? Doesn’t openness allow us to end up effectively With Descartes’ evil demon, you know, and more demons, and I mean, an eternity of surprising hellishness.

Steven Peck

Yeah, yeah. No, um, this is a riskier view. As Mormons we talk about a war in heaven. And if it was a genuine war, there’s always a possibility it could have been lost. If what we see is we have to trust God enough that He knows the universe well enough. Just like we do with our kids in our backyard. We know that well enough to avoid the dangers. Of course, you know, sometimes a loving father will stick his daughter under a wasp nest. But yeah, that is a risk. And that’s something to think about. And that actually needs some work. This implication has. Implications that I think are worth discussing and talking about and working out in more detail. Because that’s right, that was one of Bruce Armakonki’s arguments: that if there was something God didn’t know, Then you might get surprised one day and go, boom, and all of a sudden the heavens unfold. Hey, everybody, we’re stopping here. Just read a new book on things, and we’re going to have to back up. Yeah, that’s and we spend a lot of time in earth life talking about faith and hope and The question is why? And I think the reason is, or is in part because those are attributes we’ll also need in the eternities. That faith and hope aren’t just a A thing for here, that we learn to trust each other, we learn to build communities, we learn to love And I think that that’s the biggest sense, the ability to love, to do more for those around us. And we have these rich scriptures from Joseph Smith saying God found himself standing in a group of Of entities and said, I’ll make these my rulers. The sense of community runs deep both in Mormonism and in Mormon theology, and I think we underappreciate what that implies. For our eternity. So, faith, hope, charity, these three, I kind of think they’re going to keep going. These are attributes we need, and we’d need them in that case. We won’t need it if it’s a block universe, if it’s endless. Gilgans, I keep being really facetious and I apologize if I’m offending people, but um if it’s endless Gilgin Island reruns, then yeah, we don’t need faith or hope. We know that ginger is going to save the professor from eating a poisonous plant. You know, it’s there. But in an open universe. An open universe implies risk and it implies failure and it implies lots of things that are dangerous. So, yeah, great question. Thank you.

Speaker 5

Well, thank you very much. So I just have a couple questions about the interplay between truly random events on a quantum level. I mean there was a very a theory that was gaining some traction a while back about consciousness that came out of Tucson an anesthesiologist and philosopher down there came up with this idea called orchestrated objective reduction, with the microtubules in the long axons of the neurons actually collapsing in different quantum states and producing consciousness. A lot of people have called that into question with the temperatures in the brain not being amenable to those kinds of react those kinds of phenomena. And I think that When we start talking about, when we start looking to quantum events to explain the unexplained, I think that we run into the danger of that being a very small gap, but it’s still a God of the gaps argument. Yeah, and I talk about that.

Steven Peck

That’s great. In my book, Evolving Faith, I actually have a section on consciousness. And yeah, that’s been pretty thoroughly. That was actually first put forward by Roger Penrose. And that’s been thoroughly refuted. The temperatures aren’t right. And there’s still, I mean. The fact that we see really clear quantum signatures in photosynthesis and in enzyme things gives us a hint. There are no knockdown arguments right now that quantum In fact, in my new book, I point out this is a dangerous claim. We aren’t there yet, and we shouldn’t make the claim that quantum Connected to consciousness. We just don’t know. There are some really recent hints about how quantum acts in the presence of the brain produces this great magnetic field. We buy into that when we do EKGs. And we do see quantum events, quantum tunneling in certain structures, not the microtubules. but in the way that enzymes are sending chemical signals that may unite it. But this is really preliminary and I don’t buy it yet. I really think we should stick to the science when we talk about that. You know, there’s the claim: hey, consciousness is a mystery. And quantum mechanics is a mystery. Maybe they’re the same mystery. And I think we need to be careful with that. And because they do become god of the gaps arguments, which have not fared well. Um but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some really strange quantum events. I mean the fact that we haven’t untangled con consciousness and don’t have a very good account suggests that there’s something really weird and people buy into things like um panpsychism or quantum mechanics or the you know that it’s an algorithm. Those kinds of things are they all they all come out wanting in some way. But yeah, good question. So yeah, no, I disagree that. I mean, I agree that the microtubules are out. That was refuted. So good call.

Speaker 3

So one of the themes that often comes up in transhumanism is the idea that humanity starts to sort of take control of evolution, right? And start to direct evolution. That we could potentially upload ourselves into some digital substrate or some non-biological substrate. And I wonder what your thoughts are about the idea of sort of Future humanity that has a biological history, but not a present biology.

Steven Peck

So, this is where I get just This is completely off the the science, and I’m in total fiction mode here, speculating. I’m suspicious about the download algorithm argument. And I’ll tell you why. Mostly because there’s nothing about me that has to go there. You could do that to me without me following. I mean, what gets transferred? What part of me, if I create like a digital me in every way. You know, I I simulate me perfectly in every way. You know, it’s we’ll say we’re simulating at the micro level. There’s no reason I would go in there because my body, I could still be standing here. And so that thing that gets created Even though it may act like me and do things, I’m really, and I think we’re going to hear more about this from our. Our other keynote, the main program here, we’ll have more on this. But I do simulation philosophy. And there’s a A clear distinction between a simulation and a presence. And so this is why I’m really skeptical of Nick Bostrom’s Claims. And I could do a whole thing on that, but so I won’t get into it. But a simulation is always less than, it’s always, it’s not an accurate instantiation. Because it takes the same level of information to create me as it did there. And I might need the whole universe. I could be schooled. See, this is the trouble with imagining the futures: I can’t. Because new stuff could come along. There could be magic jail. That we can stick into our head, and all of a sudden new neurons fall. And it’s a technology that’s unconceived at this point. In fact, most of the technologies we’re using were unconceived. I mean, even Picard asked Riker to deliver some data to him on a little pad. And I thought, why didn’t he just email it? So as Star Trek’s moved up, it’s It’s caught up a little, but still, unconceived alternatives, and this is a word that Stuart Kaufman uses a lot: unconceived alternatives, don’t appear until a new niche. Shows up and then it becomes conceivable. So I’m not saying that that won’t happen, but I’m a little skeptical about a digital Instantiation. Because it may turn out that we really do need quantum mechanics, may turn out that we really do need. But if I’m going to be downloaded, I want it to be me. I don’t want it to be a copy of me. I’ll feel robbed if you know, here’s me and a copy of me. Who’s me? And we both would agree that we’re the real one. We’d get into an argument. You know, who gets the house? But no, these are great questions, and they’re important questions. And I never want to proposed limits because everything we see suggests that in an open universe there’s going to be some real surprises that that flower forth that we didn’t expect or didn’t see coming and Boom, and that’s why I really liked these kind of technological and I’m sure my science fiction by the time It’ll be read like Star Trek. Ha ha ha. He didn’t even know about Magi Jail or beaming yourself into something that actually works. I can’t. It’s hard to imagine the unimaginable, actually.

Speaker 3

Last question. Yes.

Speaker 6

So let’s say there’s two types of determinism. One is more of the type you describe, um like knowing every single um like position and velocity of every quantum particle and knowing the entire universe. And the other is just knowing enough to predict all major human level events, like um knowing what’s going on inside of everyone’s brain, so you know um like all the major news that would happen and all the major decisions people would make. Do you think um the second type of determinism is p um possible um given I mean, given that the first type of term terminism could be not true, but nobody really cares about the position of particles randomly in the universe, but people care about what happens major world events.

Steven Peck

Right. No, no, that’s a great question. And it’s kind of Laplace’s demon’s kind of been replaced with this. Laplace demon light, you know, that that that doesn’t it it just manages to predict sort of what’s there. And certainly When I say the universe is open, I don’t mean to dismiss determinism. I mean, I don’t know if you guys watched the Mars landing. Where they shot the SUV and it has to come in at 20,000 miles an hour and blow up the parachute. There’s no way that was going to work. I just knew that’d be my own. Tinker toy stuff. But it did. Determinism is a powerful ally, and it can do a lot of work, and where it applies. That question’s a good one, but I’m a little bit suspicious too that even then that there are signatures of randomness. For example, if you get struck by lightning, that’s a good quantum Hit. That changes the future. So there are all these unpredictable elements, and we see it a lot in evolution. And people, I think. Worry a little bit about that because they want God to be able to predict the future. And so, if He sees all everybody’s thinking and processes, that will will will will he’ll still get a lot of things right. And so I don’t know. And and part of it, and this is why this is such a good question, is that part of it is we don’t have a very good map of Where quantum effects play out in individual lives, where this randomness appears in In evolutionary history, how far it bubbles up, you know, where does this randomness come? So, so I don’t know. I kind of imagine That these kind of events like trying to decide whether to go to the Burger King or not, that play into huge trajectories for my life may be more common than I think. And it may it may have come down to a flip of a of a of a bit whether we stop for for Burger King or not. And so there’s no real feel for how to tell where actual randomness is coming in. Now, if you get struck by lightning, that’s a pretty good case. But I think these kinds of events that rely on things like, so we don’t, we have no idea what human freedom is. No idea. And I don’t even think we can answer the question until we understand what consciousness is. I think that if there is freedom of choice, it has to be emburied in decisions made in the mind. And so we don’t know. But I’m curious as you. I don’t know what that map looks like, what actually plays out and doesn’t play out. So Oh, yeah.

Steven Peck

So all this, this book is actually about this. I cover chaos emergence in more detail. and and talk about randomness in a little more detail. This got just got published two days ago. So it’s new. Yeah, and there’s some for sale here. Yeah. On Kindle. Yeah, and you can get it on Kindle or Amazon or anywhere. So thank you. Thank you.