Stephen Hawking, Information and the Nature of Mankind

Stephen Hawking, Information and the Nature of Mankind
by Glenn R. Morton Jan 31, 2020

Today Gordon Simons sent me a link to an article in a Catholic Magazine from the UK about two Christian physicists discussing Hawking. it is entitled " How Stephen Hawking's work creates new opportunities for understanding God". Given that Hawking was an atheist of some renown it made me curious. I didn't find too much in the article except for this description of Hawking's model, which I knew about but thought of a different way of looking at it. They say:

"In Hawking’s model of the universe, the universe makes itself by exploiting the uncertainty of the quantum field and the possibility of there being many, many universes. There is a beginning to the universe, he says, but a beginning does not need a temporal cause or external action. God is not required, so the theistic argument fails.

What are we to make of this? Can the universe really make itself?
https://www.thetablet.co.uk/features/2/17469/how-stephen-hawking-s-work-creates-new-opportunities-for-understanding-god

Well, I have seen other 'creation of the universe' theories from physicists which start from the vacuum. Edward Tryon proposed as much

"If it is true that our universe has a zero net value for all conserved quantities, then it may simply be a fluctuation of the vacuum, the answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time." Edward P. Tryon, "Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?" Nature, 246(1973):396- 397, reprinted in John Leslie, ed., Modern Cosmology & Philosophy, (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998), p. 224

“In his paper Tryon argued that even if most of the universes are tiny, observers can only evolve in a large universe and therefore we should not be surprised that we live in one. But this falls short of resolving the difficulty, because our universe is much larger than necessary for the evolution of life"
“A more fundamental problem is that Tryon's scenario does not really explain the origin of the universe. A quantum fluctuation of the vacuum assumes that there was a vacuum of some pre-existing space. And we now know that "vacuum" is very different from "nothing." Vacuum, or empty space, has energy and tension, it can bend and warp, so it is unquestionably something. As Alan Guth wrote, "In this context, a proposal that the universe was created from empty space is no more fundamental than a proposal that the universe was spawned by a piece of rubber. It might be true, but one would still want to ask where the piece of rubber came from."
“The picture of quantum tunneling from nothing has none of these problems. The universe is tiny right after tunneling, but it is filled with a false vacuum and immediately starts to inflate. In a fraction of a second, it blows up to a gigantic size.”
“Prior to the tunneling, no space or time exists, so the question of what happened before is meaningless. Nothing-a state with no matter, no space, and no time-appears to be the only satisfactory starting point for the creation.” Alex Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), p 185-186

But there is a problem with Vilenkin's idea and it involves information. For background:

"The origins of the quantum information revolution are to be found in the pioneering work of Rolf Landauer, a physicist who became an IBM Fellow in 1969 and who, until his death in 1999, worked at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, near New York City. 'Back in the 1960s, when I was still in school,' Deutsch said, 'Landauer was telling everyone that computation is physics and that you can't understand the limits of computation without saying what the physical implementation [i.e. type of hardware] is. He was a lone voice in the wilderness. No one really understood what he was talking about—and certainly not why.'
"The prevailing view at the time was that computation was ultimately an abstract process that had more to do with the world o f mathematical ideals than with the physics of machines. But Landauer's view began to take hold when he, and subsequently his IBM colleague Charles Bennett, discovered a crucial link between physics and computation, which we'll explore in the next chapter." Julian Brown Minds, Machines and the Multiverse, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 21

Landauer's importance came from the connection of information and the second law of entropy. I believe Szilard was the first to discover this but Landauer made it popular. Of Szilard, it was written:

"Szilard published in 1929 a very remarkable paper on the problem of Maxwell's demon, and discovered for the first time the connection between information and entropy. This was really pioneer work, and the importance of this paper was overlooked until recent developments of the theory brought it back into the foreground." Leon Brillouin, Science and Information Theory, (New York: Academic Press, Inc, 1956), p. 176

Rolf Landauer's Physics Today article entitled, "Information is Physical" says:

"Must information be discarded in computation, communication and the measurement process? The question has physical importance because discarding a bit of information requires energy dissipation of order kT." Rolf Landauer, "Information is Physical," Physics Today, May 1991, p. 24

One more item on information before asking the question which must be asked. I wrote this in 1999 in answer to a question about a book that had been recommended to me. It contains the reality of how information exists. It is always encoded by some scheme involving matter:

>Did you "enjoy" the Overman tape? What about the information argument?

GRM:It wreaked, stunk etc. This is another example of why I have come so close to leaving Christianity over the past few years. We have a lawyer passing himself off talking about information theory (and I bet he can't do the simplest calculation. He said that Yockey's book was difficult to read--I work info theory in my job and Yockey's book is not difficult--it is easy). He said that information was neither energy nor matter--ridiculous. try to conceive of information which is NOT coded by matter. There is newsprint, there are electrons in a computer, there are magnetic polarity bits on a hard disk, there are knots in an Inca's rope, etc. Anywhere you put information it must be associated with matter. And information, for your information is energy. Information represents the amount of energy rescued from the 2nd law. I won't bore you with the equation unless you ask but believe me this fellow didn't know what he was talking about. And this constant tendency for Christians to listen to any non-expert as long as it agrees with their own view, is very depressing to me. It makes me wonder what I can trust when a Christian teaches me something. I am serious. I can't go listen to a preacher anymore without wondering how bad his facts are.

So, as we have seen Guth say that starting with the quantum vacuum is no different than starting the universe with a piece of rubber, Does Vilenkin's quantum tunnelling out of nothingness pass the ultimate test? No. To refresh one's memory Vilenken said:

"The picture of quantum tunneling from nothing has none of these problems. The universe is tiny right after tunneling, but it is filled with a false vacuum and immediately starts to inflate. In a fraction of a second, it blows up to a gigantic size.”

“Prior to the tunneling, no space or time exists, so the question of what happened before is meaningless. Nothing-a state with no matter, no space, and no time-appears to be the only satisfactory starting point for the creation.” Alex Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), p 185-186

Here is the problem. Quantum tunneling requires logic and math to pre-exist the event. Quantum tunneling must obey the rules of quantum mathematics--and if information must always be associated with the arrangement of material objects, how did the nothingness of Vilenkin's scenario encode the laws of quantum mechanics? Before the tunneling event there was no material stuff to hold the information contained in the math--unless one posits something existing prior to that, something that has the logic encoded in itself--say, God, Vilenkin can't say it is another universe from which we tunneled, because he has already committed to saying we tunneled from nothing, If it is from another universe one can quickly get into Aristotle's infinite regression of causation.. If it is God, He has a different way of encoding information, maybe without using matter.

This brings me to a wonderful quote from George Ellis who wrote a book on cosmology with Stephen Hawking. I say this because he is no slouch of a physicist. Ellis' view of the world is quite different from Hawking. But he discusses with a narrator the nature of man. What he says in two spots is well worth considering:

"You can explain all of the properties of the brain in terms of the physics of the molecules and neurons and all the rest of it but you can't explain all the ideas in there. It isn't even conceivable that you could do that"

"Narrator;So that phrase that Rosenberg where he says that the physical facts fix everything."

"It's not true. I think a very good place to start is a digital computers. a digital computer is at the bottom-most level is its electrons flowing through the gates in a particular in a particular way and that's what controls what happens at the screen. So there's the hardware sitting there it doesn't do a thing until you load it up the program. So the hardware per se does not determine what happens.. What determines is the program that you load in A computer program is an abstract entity, it's not a physical thing. The abstract logic then gets written into a high-level code, and then interpreters or compilers write it down into the low level- level languages. Exactly the same logic is present at every layer. and at the bottom level it gets turned into instructions at the gate. So what is the program? Its the equivalence class of all these representations. it's an abstract thing. does it have causal power. yes it causes things to happen. "

"Narrator: so you are saying an abstract logic..."

"Abstract logic has physical outcomes in the real world through being what is implemented in the computer. "

"So then of course the old philosophers of mind would say, 'so you're taking a dualist position, aren't you?. My answer is yes I am, a computer is a dualist machine, it is the hardware and the software. So I take the completely unpopular position, on the mind and the brain. I'm a dualist, there's the mind and the brain, and the mind inhabits the brain, or thoughts, Let's say thoughts inhabit the brain. and thoughts are not physical things, thoughts are abstract things which get represented in a physical way. And again, we do not understand how this happened. but the brain has a hierarchical structure, thoughts have a hierarchical structure, and in the computer you can see these different levels, you can understand them, and you have got these interpreters or compilers which do it. I think eventually when we understand the brain enough we will see exactly the same kind of structure happening in the brain." George Ellis University of Cape Town,, Meaning Seeking Beings, Curiosity Stream,

GRM: gap of a few minutes where they talk to other people, then Ellis comes back on:

"Abstract entities are driving the physics at the bottom level. Physics is not controlling what happen and from my viewpoint, existence isn't just physical existence there's the abstract existences So then you should ask me in philosophical terms, how do I justify the word existence, and I've got a very simple answer to that. I take the existence of physical entities as being real, so in other words, I've got in my hand a pair of spectacles, now how did that come into existence? Someone had the idea of a pair of spectacles and then created these by a machine and so on. If they hadn't had that idea tis wouldn't exist. So that idea has to be real too, even though it's not a physical entity."

"Narrator: so that realm of ideas that you are talking about you would say that came into existence on the big bang along with..."

"I wouldn't necessarily say it came into, I think it might, in some sense pre-exist the big bang." George Ellis University of Cape Town,, Meaning Seeking Beings, Curiosity Stream,