( Fifteen minute read)

The last post this year, have a peaceful Christmas.

This post is a follow up to the post, ( What is life, What does it mean to be alive). It is also an attempt to argue for as many preposterous positions as possible in the shortest space of time possible.

That there are no options other than accepting that life is objectively meaningful or not meaningful at all.

Science requires proof, religious belief requires faith.

So let’s get God and Gods out of the way.

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If you believe in God, then the idea of God being bound by the laws of physics is nonsense, because God can do everything, even travel faster than light. If you don’t believe in God, then the question is equally nonsensical, because there isn’t a God and nothing can travel faster than light.

Perhaps the question is really one for agnostics, who don’t know whether there is a God.

The idea that God might be “bound” by the laws of physics – which also govern chemistry and biology might not be so far stretched that the James Webb telescope might discover him or her. Whether it does or does not, if it did discovered life on another planet and the human race realizes that its long loneliness in time and space may be over — the possibility we’re no longer alone in the universe is where scientific empiricism and religious faith intersect, with NO true answer?.

Could any answer help us prove whether or not God exists, not on your nanny.

If God wasn’t able to break the laws of physics, she or he arguably wouldn’t be as powerful as you’d expect a supreme being to be. But if he or she could, why haven’t we seen any evidence of the laws of physics ever being broken in the Universe?

If there is a God who created the entire universe and ALL of its laws of physics, does God follow God’s own laws? Or can God supersede his own laws, such as travelling faster than the speed of light and thus being able to be in two different places at the same time?

Let’s consider whether God can be in more than one place at the same time.

(According to quantum mechanics, particles are by definition in a mix of different states until you actually measure them.)

There is something faster than the speed of light after all: Quantum information.

This doesn’t prove or disprove God, but it can help us think of God in physical terms – maybe as a shower of entangled particles, transferring quantum information back and forth, and so occupying many places at the same time? Even many universes at the same time?

But is it true?

A few years ago, a group of physicists posited that particles called tachyons travelled above light speed. Fortunately, their existence as real particles is deemed highly unlikely. If they did exist, they would have an imaginary mass and the fabric of space and time would become distorted – leading to violations of causality (and possibly a headache for God).

(This in itself does not say anything at all about God. It merely reinforces the knowledge that light travels very fast indeed.)

We can calculate that light has travelled roughly 1.3 x 10 x 23 (1.3 times 10 to the power 23) km in the 13.8 billion years of the Universe’s existence. Or rather, the observable Universe’s existence.

The Universe is expanding at a rate of approximately 70km/s per Mpc (1 Mpc = 1 Megaparsec or roughly 30 billion billion kilometres), so current estimates suggest that the distance to the edge of the universe is 46 billion light years. As time goes on, the volume of space increases, and light has to travel for longer to reach us.

We cannot observe or see across the entirety of the Universe that has grown since the Big Bang because insufficient time has passed for light from the first fractions of a second to reach us. Some argue that we therefore cannot be sure whether the laws of physics could be broken in other cosmic regions – perhaps they are just local, accidental laws. And that leads us on to something even bigger than the Universe.

But if inflation could happen once, why not many times?

We know from experiments that quantum fluctuations can give rise to pairs of particles suddenly coming into existence, only to disappear moments later. And if such fluctuations can produce particles, why not entire atoms or universes? It’s been suggested that, during the period of chaotic inflation, not everything was happening at the same rate – quantum fluctuations in the expansion could have produced bubbles that blew up to become universes in their own right.

How come all the physical laws and parameters in the universe happen to have the values that allowed stars, planets and ultimately life to develop?

We shouldn’t be surprised to see biofriendly physical laws – they after all produced us, so what else would we see? Some theists, however, argue it points to the existence of a God creating favourable conditions.

But God isn’t a valid scientific explanation.

We can’t disprove the idea that a God may have created the multiverse.

No matter what is believable or not, things can appear from nowhere and disappear to nowhere.

If you find this hard to swallow, what follows will make you choke.

First there is panpsychism, the idea that “consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it.

Even particles are never compelled to do anything, but are rather disposed, from their own nature, to respond rationally to their experience. That the universe is conscious and is acting towards a purpose of realising the full potential of its consciousness.

The radicalism of this “teleological cosmopsychism” is made clear by its implication that “during the first split second of time, the universe fine-tuned itself in order to allow for the emergence of life billions of years in the future”. To do this, “the universe must in some sense have been aware of this future possibility”.

That the universe itself has a built-in purpose, the disappointingly vague goal of which is “rational matter achieving a higher realisation of its nature.

The laws of physics are just right for conscious life to evolve that it can’t have been an accident.

It is hard to see why the universe’s purpose should give our lives one. Indeed, to believe one plays an infinitesimally small part in the unfolding of a cosmic master plan makes each human life look insignificant.

The basic question about our place in the Universe is one that may be answered by scientific investigations.

What are the next steps to finding life elsewhere?

Today’s telescopes can look at many stars and tell if they have one or more orbiting planets. Even more, they can determine if the planets are the right distance away from the star to have liquid water, the key ingredient to life as we know it.

NEXT:

We live in a time of political fury and hardening cultural divides. But if there is one thing on which virtually everyone is agreed, it is that the news and information we receive is biased. Much of the outrage that floods social media, occasionally leaking into opinion columns and broadcast interviews, is not simply a reaction to events themselves, but to the way in which they are reported and framed that are the problem.

This mentality now with the help of technological advances in communication spans the entire political spectrum and pervades societies around the world twisting our basic understanding of reality to our own ends.

This is not as simple as distrust.

The appearance of digital platforms, smartphones and the ubiquitous surveillance have enable to usher in a new public mood that is instinctively suspicious of anyone claiming to describe reality in a fair and objective fashion. Which will end in a Trumpian refusal to accept any mainstream or official account of the world with people become increasingly dependent on their own experiences and their own beliefs about how the world really works.

The crisis of democracy and of truth are one and the same:

Individuals are increasingly suspicious of the “official” stories they are being told, and expect to witness things for themselves.

How exactly do we distinguish this critical mentality from that of the conspiracy theorist, who is convinced that they alone have seen through the official version of events? Or to turn the question around, how might it be possible to recognise the most flagrant cases of bias in the behaviour of reporters and experts, but nevertheless to accept that what they say is often a reasonable depiction of the world?

It is tempting to blame the internet, populists or foreign trolls for flooding our otherwise rational society with lies.

But this underestimates the scale of the technological and philosophical transformations that are under way. The single biggest change in our public sphere is that we now have an unimaginable excess of news and content, where once we had scarcity. The explosion of information available to us is making it harder, not easier, to achieve consensus on truth.

As the quantity of information increases, the need to pick out bite-size pieces of content rises accordingly.

In this radically sceptical age, questions of where to look, what to focus on and who to trust are ones that we increasingly seek to answer for ourselves, without the help of intermediaries. This is a liberation of sorts, but it is also at the heart of our deteriorating confidence in public institutions.

There is now a self-sustaining information ecosystem becoming a serious public health problem across the world, aided by the online circulation of conspiracy theories and pseudo-science. However the panic surrounding echo chambers and so-called filter bubbles is largely groundless.

What, then, has to changed?

The key thing is that the elites of government and the media have lost their monopoly over the provision of information, but retain their prominence in the public eye.

And digital platforms now provide a public space to identify and rake over the flaws, biases and falsehoods of mainstream institutions.

The result is an increasingly sceptical citizenry, each seeking to manage their media diet, checking up on individual journalists in order to resist the pernicious influence of the establishment.

The problem we face is not, then, that certain people are oblivious to the “mainstream media”, or are victims of fake news, but that we are all seeking to see through the veneer of facts and information provided to us by public institutions.

Facts and official reports are no longer the end of the story.

The truth is now threatened by a radically different system, which is transforming the nature of empirical evidence and memory. One term for this is “big data”, which highlights the exponential growth in the quantity of data that societies create, thanks to digital technologies.

The reason there is so much data today is that more and more of our social lives are mediated digitally. Internet browsers, smartphones, social media platforms, smart cards and every other smart interface record every move we make. Whether or not we are conscious of it, we are constantly leaving traces of our activities, no matter how trivial.

But it is not the escalating quantity of data that constitutes the radical change.

Something altogether new has occurred that distinguishes today’s society from previous epochs.

In the past, recording devices were principally trained upon events that were already acknowledged as important.

Things no longer need to be judged “important” to be captured.

Consciously, we photograph events and record experiences regardless of their importance. Unconsciously, we leave a trace of our behaviour every time we swipe a smart card, address Amazon’s Alexa or touch our phone.

For the first time in human history, recording now happens by default, and the question of significance is addressed separately.

This shift has prompted an unrealistic set of expectations regarding possibilities for human knowledge.

When everything is being recorded, our knowledge of the world no longer needs to be mediated by professionals, experts, institutions and theories. Data can simply “speak for itself”. This is a fantasy of a truth unpolluted by any deliberate human intervention – the ultimate in scientific objectivity.

From this perspective, every controversy can in principle be settled thanks to the vast trove of data – CCTV, records of digital activity and so on – now available to us. Reality in its totality is being recorded, and reporters and officials look dismally compromised by comparison.

It is often a single image that seems to capture the truth of an event, only now there are cameras everywhere.

No matter how many times it is disproven, the notion that “the camera doesn’t lie” has a peculiar hold over our imaginations. In a society of blanket CCTV and smartphones, there are more cameras than people, and the torrent of data adds to the sense that the truth is somewhere amid the deluge, ignored by mainstream accounts.

The central demand of this newly sceptical public is “so show me”.

The rise of blanket surveillance technologies has paradoxical effects, raising expectations for objective knowledge to unrealistic levels, and then provoking fury when those in the public eye do not meet them.

Surely, in this age of mass data capture, the truth will become undeniable.

On the other hand, as the quantity of data becomes overwhelming – greater than human intelligence can comprehend – our ability to agree on the nature of reality seems to be declining. Once everything is, in principle, recordable, disputes heat up regarding what counts as significant in the first place.

What we are discovering is that, once the limitations on data capture are removed, there are escalating opportunities for conflict over the nature of reality.

Remember AI does not exist in a vacuum, its employment can and is discriminating against communities, powered by vast amounts of energy,  producing CO2 emissions.

Lastly the Advertising Industry.

These day it seems that it has free rain to claim anything.

Like them or loathe them, advertisements are everywhere and they’re worsening not just the climate crisis, and ecological damage by promoting sustainability in consumption and inequality. Presenting a fake, idealised world that papers over an often brutal reality.

But advertising in one sense is even more dangerous, because it is so pervasive, sophisticated in its techniques and harder to see through. When hundreds of millions of people have desires for more and more stuff and for more and more services and experiences, that really adds up and puts a strain on the Earth.

The toll of disasters propelled by climate change in 2023 can be tallied with numbers — thousands of people dead, millions of others who lost jobs, homes and hope, and tens of billions of dollars sheared off economies. But numbers can’t reflect the way climate change is experienced — the intensity, the insecurity and the inequality that people on Earth are now living.

In every place that climate change makes its mark, inequality is made worse.

How are we going to protect the truth:

It goes without saying that spiritual beliefs will protect themselves. Lies, propaganda and fake news however is the challenge for our age.

Working out who to trust and who not to believe has been a facet of human life since our ancestors began living in complex societies. Politics has always bred those who will mislead to get ahead.

With news sources splintering and falsehoods spreading widely online, can anything be done?

Check Google.

Welcome to the world of “alternative facts”. It is a bewildering maze of claim and counterclaim, where hoaxes spread with frightening speed on social media and spark angry backlashes from people who take what they read at face value.

It is an environment where the mainstream media is accused of peddling “fake news” by the most powerful man in the world.

Voters are seemingly misled by the very politicians they elected and even scientific research – long considered a reliable basis for decisions – is dismissed as having little value.

Without a common starting point – a set of facts that people with otherwise different viewpoints can agree on – it will be hard to address any of the problems that the world now faces. The threat posed by the spread of misinformation should not be underestimated.

Some warn that “fake news” threatens the democratic process itself.

A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center towards the end of last year found that 64% of American adults said made-up news stories were causing confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events.

How we control the dissemination of things that seem to be untrue. We need a new way to decide what is trustworthy.

Take Wikipedia itself – which can be edited by anyone but uses teams of volunteer editors to weed out inaccuracies – is far from perfect.

These platforms and their like are simply in it for the money.

Last year, links to websites masquerading as reputable sources started appearing on social media sites like Facebook.

Stories about the Pope endorsing Donald Trump’s candidacy and Hillary Clinton being indicted for crimes related to her email scandal were shared widely despite being completely made up. The ability to share them widely on social media means a slice of the advertising revenue that comes from clicks.

Truth is no longer dictated by authorities, but is networked by peers. For every fact there is a counterfact. All those counterfacts and facts look identical online, which is confusing to most people.

Information spreads around the world in seconds, with the potential to reach billions of people. But it can also be dismissed with a flick of the finger. What we choose to engage with is self-reinforcing and we get shown more of the same. It results in an exaggerated “echo chamber” effect.

The challenge here is how to burst these bubbles.

One approach that has been tried is to challenge facts and claims when they appear on social media. Organisations like Full Fact, for example, look at persistent claims made by politicians or in the media, and try to correct them. (The BBC also has its own fact-checking unit, called Reality Check.)

This approach doesn’t work on social media because the audiences were largely disjointed.

Even when a correction reached a lot of people and a rumour reached a lot of people, they were usually not the same people. The problem is, corrections do not spread very well. This lack of overlap is a specific challenge when it comes to political issues.

On Facebook political bodies can put something out, pay for advertising, put it in front of millions of people, yet it is hard for those not being targeted to know they have done that. They can target people based on how old they are, where they live, what skin colour they have, what gender they are.

We shouldn’t think of social media as just peer-to-peer communication – it is also the most powerful advertising platform there has ever been. We have never had a time when it has been so easy to advertise to millions of people and not have the other millions of us notice.

Twitter and Facebook both insist they have strict rules on what can be advertised and particularly on political advertising. Regardless, the use of social media adverts in politics can have a major impact.

We need some transparency about who is using social media advertising when they are in election campaigns and referendum campaigns. We need watchdogs that will go around and say, ‘Hang on, this doesn’t stack up’ and ask for the record to be corrected.

We need Platforms to ensure that people have read content before sharing it to develop standards.

Google says it is working on ways to improve its algorithms so they take accuracy into account when displaying search results. “Judging which pages on the web best answer a query is a challenging problem and we don’t always get it right,”

The challenge is going to be writing tools that can check specific types of claims.

Built a fact-checker app that could sit in a browser and use Watson’s language skills to scan the page and give a percentage likelihood of whether it was true.

This idea of helping break through the isolated information bubbles that many of us now live in, comes up again and again.

By presenting people with accurate facts it should be possible to at least get a debate going.

There is a large proportion of the population living in what we would regard as an alternative reality.  By suggesting things to people that are outside their comfort zone but not so far outside they would never look at it you can keep people from self-radicalising in these bubbles.

There are understandable fears about powerful internet companies filtering what people see.

We should think about adding layers of credibility to sources. We need to tag and structure quality content in effective ways.

But what if people don’t agree with official sources of information at all?

This is a problem that governments around the world are facing as the public views what they tell them with increasing scepticism. There is an unwillingness to bend one’s mind around facts that don’t agree with one’s own viewpoint.

The first stage in that is crowdsourcing facts.  So before you have a debate, you come up with the commonly accepted facts that people can debate from.

Technology may help to solve this grand challenge of our age, but it is time for a little more self-awareness too.

In the end the world needs a new Independent Organisation to examine all technology against human values. Future war will be fought on Face recognition.

To certify and hold the original programs of all technology.

Have I been trained by robbery its manter when it comes to algorithms.

The whole goal of the transition is not to allow a handful of Westerners to peacefully go through life in a Tesla, a world in flames; it is to allow humanity – and the rest of biodiversity – to live decently.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com