A Response to Josh's Screen Argument

This article is in response to Josh Willms' "screen argument".

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This is a rather impressive photo of a waterspout.  In the same vein as Josh's investigation into the colours green and red, I ask "Does the waterspout exist?"

Note that in this case I am not speaking about a category associated with the waterspout, I'm not asking whether wetness exists, or twistiness, or white.

Josh's approach to thinking about green and red was relentlessly reductive.  We experience red and green in the image of an apple, but where is the image or at least the experience of the image?  Eventually he gets to the point where he is looking very closely at the brain and sees … neurons, nothing but neurons.

We could do the same thing with the waterspout.  If we get closer and closer to the waterspout (assuming that we don't mind getting wet and we are immune to being tossed about by it), it will eventually disappear and we might see nothing more than water molecules banging together.  Is a waterspout more than the water molecules?

Well, yes, of course it is.  Despite its name, a waterspout is largely an air-based phenomenon - it's a tornado-like event above water, so we are just seeing water pulled up into the air and tossed around.  But even if we accept that, is a waterspout more than the air and water molecules banging together?

Again, yes, it is.  The waterspout is a located process.

By this I mean that we are not so much observing a thing that exists but rather we are observing a thing that is happening.  And in order for it to happen, just where it is happening, there are factors that have to be conducive to a waterspout - a body of warm water, an air mass and (in order for this to be an observed process so that it becomes an experience) an observer.

I think that this is a major issue in Josh's thinking.  He's looking for a thing when he should, at the very least, be accepting the possibility that what he is looking at (consciousness) is more of a process than a thing.

There are factors that are conducive to (and I would go so far as to suggest necessary as a prerequisite to) consciousness happening - like the presence of lots and lots of neurons and sensory input, but consciousness exists in neither the neurons nor the sensory input.

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Another problem with the example given by Josh is associated with looking at an apple.

The implication is that a detailed, faithful image of the apple is generated in the brain, similar to the image above as displayed on a screen.  Then Josh asks, "where is this image?"

The problem is that Josh is begging the question here.  I believe that by assuming that there is an image of the sort that we believe that we experience (which is essentially indistinguishable from saying simply "of the sort that we experience"), Josh is heading off in the wrong direction.

There is plenty of research that indicates that we don't generate and then maintain images directly from our sensory input - at least not comprehensive and faithful images.  We don't have the ability to take in as much information as exists in our standard interface with the world.  For example, if I stop and look around me, I will see dozens of artefacts which are in my field of view.  Then when I go back to typing, the artefacts are still there in my peripheral vision, but I am not strictly looking at them with enough focus to paint in the details - my brain is doing the hard work via imagination and memory to put items in locations which make sense to me.

What seems to happen (and perhaps I might be wrong in this) is that the brain has a bunch of labels and applies them to those things within my field of vision - cup, bottle of water, mouse, screen, roll of tape, aircon controller, plastic bag, cables, piece of paper, pad of post-it notes, receipt, calling card, keyboard, hands, roll of paper.  Each of those, if I think about them triggers a memory such that I don't even have to consciously look at the item.  But if I don't think about them, they simply don't exist - like the fork, the battery, the pair of scissors and the two jars that I didn't "see" until I stopped and looked around more carefully to see what I missed.

These items also exist in a context, so I have a method by which I can place them in my reconstruction of what I "see".  (So the cup is to the left and just behind the post-it notes and between them is the pair of previously invisible scissors.)

I think the same happens even with things we are looking directly at.  Melvin will break the view of the apple up into labels, "apple", "red skin", "green leaf", "moderate size", "generally unblemished" and this will allow him to regenerate the image if he is required to recall it later.  But it is the "regeneration" of the image that he is experiencing, not the image itself.

And furthermore, I am pretty sure that neuroscience has shown that the parts of the brain that are brought to bear in imagining tasks are the same as used in image processing based on sensory input.  So my argument would be that when looking at an apple Melvin is not experiencing an image per se but is experiencing the process of generating an image.  As soon as he stops generating the image, it's gone - there's no created image that an external observer could extract from his brain.

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This is all complicated, a little, by "attentional circuitry" in the brain.  Most people who looked at the image of the waterspout above will not have noticed that the person who took the photo was standing on a balcony with a metal fence around it to the left, nor that there is set of stairs heading down to the right towards the beach, nor that what looks like red chair is close to a brick wall that surrounds the remainder of the balcony.  Most would probably have noticed the impressive lensing effect on the sun, the plume to the left of the waterspout, the twisted clouds, the palm tree, the beach, the jetty and the fact that waterspout is happening in a bay (due to the landmasses to the left and right).

The Fire Triangle (or Triangle of Humanity)

The following is adapted from comments made on Josh the Searcher’s blog, in response to articles touching on the abortion issue.

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Abortion is a difficult topic.  It is much polarised, in part because it evokes strong emotional responses, in part because many of those arguing against the pro-choice stance do so because of theological notions and in part because there is still some confusion and uncertainty as to the precise meaning of “human”.

I should clarify up-front that while I am intellectually pro-choice, I would not be happy with having a (potential) child of my own aborted.  You could say that I am pro-choice in principle but pro-life in practice.

On a practical level, there is something that I find particularly unconvincing in the abortion debate, that being the idea that there is any benefit to be gained by involving yourself, and your personal ideology, in another person’s decision regarding such  issue as emotive as abortion.  I doubt that many people faced with the heart-wrenching decision to terminate a pregnancy take that decision lightly.  Those who do take such a decision lightly are highly unlikely to care one iota what you, or anybody else thinks about it.  They are also unlikely to be suitable parents to an unwanted child.

For me the important discussion when it comes to abortion revolves around three aspects:

·         is it ever ok to kill a living thing, be it “human”, “potential human” or any other living thing?

·         when does transition between “potential human” and “human” take place?

·         how should we go about developing social policy on an issue like this?

Is it ever ok to kill a living thing?

This is a tricky ethical question.  The obvious answer is “yes”, because if we never kill a living thing then we will die, in effect killing ourselves.  Our bodies are constantly killing bacteria, with antibacterial agents in saliva and white blood cells (these also destroy fungi, parasites, viruses, tumours and tiny submarines in science fiction movies).

As we move up in physical scale, begin to consider species that are more like humans and apply “cuteness” as a factor, the answer becomes less obvious.  It’s apparently less ok to kill a cute kitten than it is to kill a rat: the idea that a kitten drowned in the recent flood in New York is more affecting than the idea that a young rat died.  There’s a good reason that the World Wildlife Fund has a panda as its emblem instead of, say, a cockroach.  We’re happy to eat dolphin if it’s a type of fish, but less so if it’s a mammal (I’ve eaten dolphin, it’s quite nice) – unless we are Japanese or Faroese and not worried about consuming high levels of mercury.

Since humans are up towards the carnivorous end of the omnivore category (particularly if the endurance running hypothesis is true), killing larger animals is part of our natural heritage.  So, I’d argue that it is ok.

If we restrict our considerations to humans, it’s still a bit tricky.  There are still many exceptions to the “do not kill” rule.  Killing in the line of duty is ok, as a soldier or law enforcement agent.  Killing in self-defence is ok.  Killing as justice is sometimes ok. Note that not all countries have the death penalty – those that do are places like China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the United States, Yemen, North Korea, Somalia, (North) Sudan, Bangladesh, Vietnam and South Sudan.  (The death penalty nations are listed in decreasing order of executions for 2011, so long as they executed 5 or more.  If you include those who executed fewer or have the death penalty on the books but didn’t get around to executing anyone in 2011 you add such notables as Afghanistan, the Palestine Authority, Belarus, Botswana, Mongolia, Cuba and Syria).

Fortunately none of these are among the most modern and developed nations so we can hope that this list becomes shorter as more and more nations are encouraged to modernise.

Anyway, without a very good reason, killing a human is generally not considered to be ok.  Hopefully this is not a particularly contentious claim for most readers.  We turn now to the question of what it is to be human.

When does the transition between “potential human” and “human” take place?

One way of thinking about the question of what makes you human is in terms similar to that of the fire triangle.  A fire requires fuel, oxygen and heat and all three are required to support continued combustion.

The “triangle of humanity” would be:

·         human DNA

·         independent actualised potential

·         experience

Without all three of these elements, you aren't fully human. A zygote in a petri dish may have the DNA required to become a human, but it has no actualised potential because the petri dish will not support further development. And a zygote, not having a brain, won't accumulate experiences.

A side argument is that just as an acorn is not an oak tree, a zygote is not a human.  I’m not sure that this is a valid argument per se, given that it seems to be based on semantics (and a misunderstanding, an acorn is equivalent to an embryo rather than to a zygote).  Given the opportunity, an acorn will become shoot which will, in turn, become an oak tree just as a frog’s egg will become a tadpole which will, in turn, become a frog and a (human) zygote will become a human.  It is true enough that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to visually distinguish the human zygote from a chimpanzee zygote and that this difficulty remains until a relatively short time before birth.  It is true that a human embryo looks like a fish for a while and a canine embryo looks like a proto-human for a while.

Nevertheless, a human zygote fulfils one of the requirements for being human in a way that a chimpanzee does not.  (As another aside, taking us almost into another room, the chimpanzee almost fulfils the requirements of being a human by means of DNA, falling short by less than 5%.  Not being a geneticist, I am not completely sure why there seem to be two figures floating around “we share 99% of our genes” and “the difference between the human and chimpanzee genome is about 4%”.  I do note that there is a difference between our genes and our genome and that there are also alleles which are variants of genes.  It could be that the chimpanzee has all the basic parts that we have, so the genes are largely the same, but the chimpanzee plays with a different set of alleles which means the genome exhibits a greater variance from human than the selection of genes does.  I’m not sure how one should interpret another apparent fact, that the variation between genes of a human and the genes of a chimpanzee is ten times that of the variation between genes of individual humans.)

Common to a zygote, a morula (strictly speaking a zygote is a single cell), a blastocyst, and an embryo (for a human, the embryo becomes a foetus at 10 weeks) is the lack of a functional brain. 

If one uses the “triangle of humanity” concept, until the brain develops beyond a certain stage a foetus could be said to not be fully human, because it's unable to accumulate any experience of any kind. Also, while the foetus is entirely dependent on the mother for survival (up until about 20 weeks) it has no independent actualised potential.

Therefore, I would say that you could argue that terminating an embryo or a foetus could be justified up until somewhere between 7 and 14 weeks, 16 weeks at most. It's a bit fuzzy because of how the brain develops.  Development of the brain really kicks off in the embryo at about 7 weeks. The foetus starts breathing practice at about 14 weeks and at about 16 weeks it starts manipulating its environment (like pulling on the umbilical cord).

Sometime in that period of time, a normal foetus reaches a level of development which is consistent with being human under the “triangle of humanity” concept.

Note that miscarriage can happen up until about 20 weeks, but that's basically a legal definition.  A "miscarriage" after that time is called a stillbirth. The youngest surviving premature birth was at 21 weeks.  Advances in medical science may allow us to save some prematurely delivered infants at closer to 20 weeks, but not much earlier than that because a foetus is simply not sufficiently well developed by that time.

In the absence of extreme circumstances, I do not support the idea of the form of late-term abortion which is, really, an induced premature delivery followed by killing of the infant.  (Normalising early abortion, and those who seek one, will go some way to reducing the number of late term abortions.)

None of these arguments about when an embryo or a foetus becomes human such that abortion is no longer justified (except in extremis) has any bearing if your argument against abortion is theological in nature.  If your god says “Thou shalt not abort, at all, ever” then you should not abort.  However, if your god is a bit vague about it saying “Thou shalt not kill, but there are plenty of exceptions and I cause spontaneous abortions at a much higher rate than humans cause abortions and I am a paragon of goodness, so read between the lines”, then you have a bit of wriggle room.  In either case, this is your god speaking to you.  In order for your god’s view on abortion to have any influence over another person you have to first prove that your god exists, which unfortunately you are unlikely to be able to do, and then prove that your god’s injunctions apply to people who are not his followers.  I’ve no real problem with anyone refusing to carry out an abortion on the grounds of their personal convictions.  But these are personal convictions and I cannot see why one’s personal convictions should be applied to another person who has their own personal convictions.

Adopting a “triangle of humanity” concept could also have application in later life.

Many people, me included, consider that continued animation of their body beyond the effective death of their brain does not constitute a continuation of their self in any meaningful way.  By “effective” death of the brain I mean either literal brain death (as in total and irreversible lack of higher level neural activity) or the dissolution of self that neurological degeneration brings.  I certainly don’t have any wish whatsoever for my body to be kept alive beyond the time when the sense of being me is manifesting in it.  If I’ve lost my experiences and the ability to develop new experiences, or my actualised potential is gone (for example if disconnecting me from a machine will lead to my death), then please let me go.

How should we go about developing social policy on issues like abortion and euthanasia?

I need to make perfectly clear that by euthanasia, I really mean assisted suicide of a person who is suffering physically or disintegrating intellectually.  I’m only talking about voluntary euthanasia.  I’m not recommending that we start killing old people because they are inconvenient but rather suggesting that if someone has written a living will which includes an instruction to let them die with dignity, then their wishes should be respected.  Involuntary euthanasia of a human is murder.  I recognise that there is a grey area for people who have disintegrated intellectually and are thus unable to request euthanasia but are also unable to express an unwillingness to die.

My opinion expressed above, that I’d prefer not to have my body kept alive once the experience of being in it is no longer generated (or if I am totally dependent on machinery to continue breathing), relates only to me.  I’m not advocating that the bodies of other people, once their intellect is extinguished or their ability to survive unassisted is gone, should necessarily be treated the way I’d prefer mine to be treated.

When I pondered the issues of abortion and euthanasia, it struck me that these are not just ethical or moral issues, but also very emotive issues.  I have had the emotional aspect of certain decisions and considerations highlighted to me, while being criticised for appearing too Darwinian (for example in relation to an early draft of Morality Behind the Wheel, which I subsequently edited).

I don’t think that I was totally ignoring emotional dimensions – what I think I was doing was not letting them dominate the entire consideration.

It is true that emotion is involved when humans make decisions and we should certainly not ignore their influence.

However, the importance of emotion in decision making applies to decisions made by individual humans.  The fact that we, as individuals, are swayed by emotion does not mean that we, as a society, should be swayed by emotion – and certainly not by the emotions of a noisy minority.

If you yourself are unwillingly pregnant, then as an individual you should certainly engage your emotions when deciding whether to terminate the pregnancy.  You need to be aware of both the fact that your emotions will affect the decision you make and the fact that the decision you make (or don’t make) will affect your emotional state in the future.

However, if you are responsible for drafting legislation as to whether an option to safely terminate pregnancies should be available, you should not be engaging your personal emotions or indulging your personal convictions.  If a totally rational, non-emotive discussion of the issue of abortion arrives at a conclusion that it is so harmful that it should be banned, then ban it.  But if your argument is based on little more than the fact that, if you were pregnant, you yourself would not want to go through with an abortion or your personal theology tells you that you are not to abort your child, then you do not have grounds to ban the availability of safe abortions to others.

The same applies to questions of euthanasia and, perhaps less controversially, the recognition of same-sex civil union (and marriage – but only if a church is happy with conducting a same-sex marriage.  Don’t go forcing a reluctant church which has a theological objection to the whole homosexual thing to carry out gay weddings simply because you personally think they are a good idea).

You might be opposed to the idea of euthanasia and gay weddings, but no-one is suggesting that you should be euthanized against your will.  Not even the most fervent supporter of same-sex union plans to force you to become gay and get married, or even to attend a gay wedding. 

I personally think that Turkish vomit is disgusting (some people humorously and incorrectly refer to it as “Turkish delight”) but I accept that, bizarre as it sounds, some people actually like eating it.  Certainly, until someone can produce a rational, evidence-based argument showing that eating Turkish vomit represents a significant risk to society, I have no grounds for seeking a comprehensive ban of what I consider to be an affront to all that is pure, wholesome and good.

Of course some people disagree, and not only about Turkish vomit.  They might argue that of course you should agitate for your personal views to be reflected in society because that’s how democracy works.

This is a particularly naïve view of democracy.  It’s also a dangerous view.

Imagine that your society decided that if a sufficient proportion of the population don’t want something then it will be banned.  They count up those in favour of safe abortions being available, those against the idea of abortion and those who don’t really care one way or the other.  Those against abortion prevail and abortion is banned.  Sounds good, right?

Say then that, after a heavy advertising campaign, Jehovah’s Witnesses obtain a majority and the issue of blood transfusions arises.  Do you really want their personal theological convictions to hold sway over you when about one in three people need a blood transfusion at some point in their life?  How about an unholy alliance between fundamentalist Pauline Christians and Muslims who demand that women not be allowed to be educated, to work or to go about in public without a veil?  Or a majority of atheists who don’t like going to church themselves and therefore instigate a ban on churches altogether? Or drivers combine in their dislike of electric cars to drive them (quietly) off the roads?

What else could we ban?  How about Persian cats, little yappy dogs, salads, expatriates, anyone under five who can ski, the pierced belly-button/muffin-top combo, misuse of the word “like”, comb-overs, Boston MA, Tampa FL, hot-dog “sausages” and old people driving while wearing a hat.  (By the way, I actually like salad.)

I doubt that any of us are particularly keen on having our freedoms curtailed by a majority of others.  If you think that way, then you should logically extend the same courtesy to others and not try to impose your preferences on them, even if those preferences are in the majority.

Personally, I think you should agree with me, but I’m not going to force you to.

The Lightness of Fine-Tuning - Part 2

In Part 1, I talked briefly about the fact that light travels as fast as it possibly can, and c is therefore the fastest anything can travel.  I also introduced the concept of the laser, a law abiding, speedy rider (“laser”) cruising along a freeway which has a speed limit of c.  I pointed out that we might notice that the speed of a “laser” is c but that this was related to the speed limit, rather than being a characteristic of the laser per se, and that similarly the speed of light isn’t related to light per se.

Before we get into it – a caution for people studying relativity formally: please use the derivation methodologies recommended by your teacher or lecturer.  I don’t believe that what follows is wrong, but it’s not entirely standard.

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In this part, I want to illuminate an interesting thing you can do with relativity.  It involves some mathematics, but I’ll try to keep it simple.

Relativity sounds scary, but it doesn’t have to be, or at least not until you get into General Relativity!  First of all, Einstein didn’t invent it from scratch, a version of relativity was formulated by Galileo Galilei in the early 1600s.  Today we normally refer to it as “Newtonian relativity”, or “Newtonian mechanics” and most people would be familiar with a version of it from High School:

x' = x - vt

This is the equation you use when working out the answer to the clichéd question about two trains that leave different cities and crash a certain amount of time later.  While the question is a bit silly, the equation is excellent and it works fine when used properly.

However, the equation comes with some assumptions which most people aren’t aware of.

Imagine that you are watching a train depart towards Manchester from London (don’t ask me why anyone would want to go to Manchester – it’s just a hypothetical scenario).  Imagine further that the track is completely straight and the Earth (or at least England) is flat and that you have a very powerful telescope.  Finally, imagine that as the rear end of the train passes you at a cruising speed of precisely v = 100 km/hr, you zero two clocks (one that you keep, while the other is held by your evil twin on the train).  Precisely one hour later (t = 1hr), there is an explosion.  You happened to be looking through your powerful telescope at the time and know that it was Manchester that blew up.

How far from Manchester was the train at that time?

The picture below illustrates the situation:

Assume that we know that the distance from London to Manchester is x = 300 km.

Therefore when Manchester met its end, the distance between the train and the explosion was:

x' = x – vt = 300km – 100km/hr x 1hr = 200km

Pretty simple, huh?

Now, let’s change the scenario only very slightly.  We’ll let Manchester survive (I know that some of you might be disappointed, but there must be at least one nice person from Manchester …) 

Now you don’t know exactly where the explosion happened but, using smoke and mirrors, we can work out that it was triggered at the same time as you zeroed both clocks.  Now, I didn’t mention it before, but your clock (and that of your evil twin) is extremely accurate.  We could use the clock to work out where the explosion happened by noting down the precise moment when you see the explosion – there’s a bit of a delay because the photons from the explosion don’t reach you instantly.  Let’s say that your evil twin also notes the exact moment that the first photons from the explosion pass.

Now because the clock is so accurate (and you are both so quick-witted), there will be a difference between the time you note down and the time your evil twin notes down – because your twin is moving towards where the explosion happened. During that time, the train will have moved.  This is illustrated below:

Again, not overly difficult, is it?

Although, when you look closely at the picture and think about the situation, you might notice that the time at which the first photon reaches your evil twin, t', has to be less than the time it takes for the first photon to reach you, t.  Let’s say (to make things simple) that we are talking about slow photons where c = 800km/hr, that v = 600km/hr (it’s now a bullet train!) and also say also that you receive the first slow photon an hour after the explosion (t = 1hr) – when did that slow photon pass your evil twin?

We can work it out using a little equation.  If you are stationary, you can calculate that the explosion must have happened 800km away.  You watch our your evil twin moving away at 600km/hr.  Therefore the distance between you and your evil twin is:

vt = 600.t

and the distance between you and the slow photon is

x_G = 800-800.t

When these two values are the same, the slow photon is where your evil twin is.  Using some mathemagics, we could calculate that the actual moment at which the slow photon is where your evil twin is is after 34.28571 minutes have passed. Futhermore, we can work out that at this time your evil twin was 342.8571 km distant from you.

A problem arises, however, when your evil twin’s evil nature asserts itself.  Your evil twin claims to be stationary and that it is you who move!  While this seems like a ludicrous claim on your evil twin’s part, you’re an accommodating type so let’s look at the appropriate equations.

Now we are assuming that you are moving away from the explosion at 600km/hr so that the distance between you and the slow photon at the start was 200km. (We work this out from the fact that after an hour you have travelled 600km, and the fact that the slow photon has travelled 800km.  It takes an hour for the slow photon to catch up because it is travelling 200km/hr faster than you are.)

x_G' = 200-200.t

When this value is the same as the value vt = 600.t, your evil twin and the slow photon are in the same location.  Using mathemagics again, we work out that your evil twin and the slow photon were in the same location after 15 minutes.

Hang on!  There is a problem here!  Your evil twin's claim to be stationary results in an inconsistency in time!  While this seems bizarre, there are situations in which neither of you could know which one is in motion and which is stationary.  Let us stick with trains and see if we can sort this out.

Imagine that both you and your evil twin are in totally enclosed box carriages.  Once you are at a steady cruising speed, thanks to the wizardry of British Rail and the Irish Navigators, you cannot know whether you are in motion or stationary.  The same is the case for your evil twin.

All that either of you have for entertainment is an extremely accurate clock, a pad of paper, a pen and a klaxon.  During your journey (or non-journey, as the case may be), the klaxon goes off twice.  Interestingly, the first klaxon also resets each clock to zero so you don’t bother writing that time down (it’d just say “00:00:00.0000000000”).  The second klaxon doesn’t activate a reset so you both keenly write down the details.

After the journey (or non-journey) ends, you each have a time written down but no idea what it means.  Let me explain what just happened to you.

The klaxon was triggered by a proximity sensor, the first time when your box carriage and that of your evil twin passed each other.  The second was triggered when you were passed by a laser (the Law Abiding Speedy Rider, or “laser”, on a motorcycle, travelling at the legal speed limit, c).  The laser passed the evil twin first, and then, a short time later, passed you.  The situation is illustrated below:

This is basically the same situation as with the explosion at an unknown location, with the slow photons being replaced by a chap on a motorcycle and rather than seeing the explosion you have a proximity klaxon.  There’s just one bit of extra information you need.

The mad scientist running this experiment tells you that the legal speed limit on the Manchester-London Freeway is 800km/hr (for those leaving Manchester only) and that the speed at which you and your evil twin separated was 600km/hr – but refuses to say what your absolute speeds were, muttering something that sounds like “absolute speed relative to what?”

Now, a few notes:

• I have – once again – made c equal to 800km/hr, this time without defying the laws of physics.  I did this deliberately because I want to prove that the speed of light is nothing special.  I could have said that the laser was riding a magical motorcycle which travelled at 299 792 458m/s but I didn’t.
• The mad scientist involved is right about absolute speeds.  We don’t know our absolute speed.  Relative to the Earth, I am stationary as I type this.  Sort of.  Some bits deep in the core of the Earth are moving and I am not stationary with respect to them.  But the Earth is not stationary with respect to the Sun, we orbit the Sun at just over 100,000km/hr and the whole solar system is moving at about 1.3 million km/hr relative to the cosmic microwave background.
• When your evil twin claims to be stationary, this affects all measurements of time and space made in the new “frame” that is thus created.  The claim might seem ridiculously arbitrary, but your claim to being stationary is arbitrary also.  Your claim is that because you are have no speed relative to some elements of a single planet that is tucked away on the fringes of an insignificant galaxy, then you are stationary – despite the fact that you are moving at more than a million km/hr relative to something that pervades the entire universe!  This is also a somewhat ridiculous claim.
• Because you cannot know which direction either of you are travelling, the relationship between the way you measure time and the way your evil twin measures time has to be reciprocal – according to each of you, the other utilises different, but consistent units of measurements.  This can be expressed as follows:

or

x_E / x_G = x’_G / x’_E

So, where was the laser when you and your evil twin passed each other, according to your evil twin (noting that your evil twin claims to be stationary)?

This is going to take some equations, so I will try to make it as painless as possible (I had a bit of a Freudian slip while typing that and initially wrote “painful” … oops!)

We are going to use the equation just above which, when rearranged, becomes:

x’_G = x’_E . x_E / x_G

Now, we have a range of equations from our illustration which I will show again because I put so much time into it:

And from these we can work out the following:

x’_E = x_E - vt_E

x_G = x’_G + vt’_G

Then there are a few equations, but rather than working through them laboriously, I’ll just show them in a little diagram, using colours and arrows which hopefully combine to make it all easier to understand.  Take as much time as you need, or as much as you can bear:

The final equation is, I promise you, one of the standard Special Relativity equations – known as the “Lorentz boost in the x-direction”.  To get the other important equation, the one for time, you can just divide it through by c:

But notice – we did this with a chap on a motorcycle was travelling at 800km/hr and while this is a terrifying speed for a motorcycle it is nevertheless well below the speed of light!  In other words, it’s not the speed of light per se that is what is important, since we can get these fundamental equations using a completely different interpretation of c.

Before we go, let’s make sure that this all works.  Plugging all the figures into the equation (isn't mathematics fun!) we go from:

15 minutes

to 

22.67787 minutes

Interestingly, when we do the same again, to work out what your evil twin will calculate as the time that we would calculate as when the laser passed - if we were stationary, we get: 

34.28571 minutes

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Hopefully there will be people who work out that there is something unsettlingly wrong about this.

The fact is that your evil twin on the train will not be in possession of a clock that is limited by the speed limit of the Manchester-London freeway, but if this were the case, then your twin’s clock would read 22.67787 minutes when the laser passed.  Time, remember, is part and parcel of that granularity thing, so it is tied to a real universal speed limit.

In other words, the “speed of time” which is also the speed of light and the “speed of information” is a fundamental characteristic which arises from the very nature of the universe (that is its granularity) and so it is not a separate characteristic that could be fiddled with by a creator.  Therefore, it is not a valid candidate for “Fine Tuning”.

If you remain concerned that my maths is questionable, you can either trust me when I promise that it’s all ok … or you can read the more complex version of the argument (which sadly fails to mention Manchester or the Law Abiding, Speedy Rider).

The Lightness of Fine-Tuning - Part 1

I’ve recently noticed efforts to tie a number of physical constants, including the speed of light, to the Fine-Tuning Argument.  From my perspective this is a disturbing, but still quite exciting development because many years ago I looked very closely at the speed of light and I saw absolutely nothing to suggest that the speed of light, or any of the other physical constants were fine-tuned (not then, not now). Finally, I get an opportunity to put that effort into use!

I don’t really want to bamboozle the casual reader, so I’ll be doing something a little unusual.

In this article (and the one that follows) I’ve tried to simplify the issues involved without misrepresenting the facts. I have also posted a more serious, methodical variation on the central argument, namely that Einstein’s Special Relativity equations can be derived from Newtonian (or Galilean) Relativity. I suggest reading the first two parts of this series and then, if your appetite is whetted, you can sink your teeth into something a little more complex.

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Josh Willms, in the Honest Search For Truth blog, said:

Keep in mind that we are considering the possibility of an outside intelligence making fundamental changes to the universe. We should not rule out this possibility from the get-go. An outside intelligence could alter the speed of light while holding distance and time constant, stretch space while holding the speed of light and time constant, or change the rate of passage of time while holding the speed of light and distance constant.

He concludes:

In short: The ratio of the speed of light to distance and time could be different. It is possible for the speed of light to be fine-tuned.

I must point out that Josh admits that his training is in biology, that he's not a physicist and that he might be wrong.  True to the name of his blog, he is searching for Truth wherever it lies, not confirmation of the first idea that he stumbles across!

For the lay reader, it's easy to get tripped up by relativity. I recall meeting with a Professor to discuss some of the finer points of Special Relativity and he admitted that even he found them a bit confusing at times. (And while it wasn't strictly his area of expertise, he did have to teach it as part of the university curriculum!)

As seems to be increasingly the case with proponents of Intelligent Design (for example, the Discovery Institute), science is being bent (and warped) to support arguments for a supernatural creator.  These ID theorists either deliberately misrepresent the facts (relying on the fact that their audience doesn't know enough about the subject to see the errors) or, and this is more likely, their desire to find evidence (and their faith) overwhelms their critical faculties.

As long as before the new millennium, I began to worry that ID theorists would move into other fields of science, that they would not be content with corrupting evolutionary biology or palaeontology.  Sadly, these concerns seem vindicated.

Anyway ... back to Josh’s comments.  Josh is not an ID theorist, but he’s discussing something that is core to those who are – “fine-tuning” as it pertains to cosmology and physics.  I left a response to the blog article from which I took the comments above, noting that the speed of light, c, is related to the granularity of the universe, a response that I’d like to expand on a little in this and a couple of future posts.

The universe is not infinitely divisible, neither in terms of space nor in terms of time or, in other words, there comes a point at which you will reach the smallest divisions of space and time.  “This small and no smaller.”

The smallest meaningful division of space is the Planck length and the smallest meaningful division of time is the Planck time.  (See also Why I Like Planck, written a long time later than this post.)

It might be possible to overstress the importance of Planck units but it would take some real effort to do so. Unlike the metre and the second, Planck length and Planck time are not arbitrarily defined by humans; they represent a reality of space and time at the deepest, most fundamental level.  For this reason, they are also referred to as “natural units”.

It is no co-incidence that the value of c is one Planck length per Planck time. 

It should be noted that the common name applied to c is historical – it is not merely the speed at which light happens to travel; it is the fastest speed at which anything can travel.

That is to say: light travels as fast as it possibly can and c happens to be the fastest anything can travel.

Now imagine a Law Abiding, Speedy Rider (“laser”) cruising along a freeway which has a speed limit of c.  We might notice that the speed of a “laser” is c. The value of c isn’t related to the speed of the “laser” per se, if the speed limit were 2.5c, then the “laser” would travel at that.

Similarly the speed of light isn’t related to light per se. If the universe permitted a higher speed, light would travel at it.  Of course that higher speed would then be “the speed of light”, but it would not be what we today call c.

But, and this is an important "but":

a higher speed in terms of natural units is simply not possible

Even if we changed the dimensions associated with the granularity of the universe, the speed of light would still be equal to the fastest speed possible in that newly recalibrated universe and that fastest speed possible would be equal to (the smallest division of space) / (the smallest division of time).

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In Part 2, I discuss an interesting thing you can do with relativity which might (or might not) throw some light on this issue.

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Note: The Professor I mentioned was struggling with the same issue that I was struggling with at the time, namely that the "priming notation" associated with Special Relativity is used inconsistently.  The majority of physicists working in the area will swear on all nine lives of their most beloved cat that the priming notation isn’t used inconsistently. Addressing this was the central thrust of the more methodical argument, but I've trimmed it back for the purposes of posting on this blog (which I did just before posting Part 2).