Consciousness and the universe

The New York Times occasionally rises above its grave and methodical reporting of politics, world events, sports, and business affairs.  It does so, certainly, in its extensive coverage of the arts, but also -- less frequently but at times more dramatically -- in its essays on science.

In today's issue, an essay entitled "Our Existentially Lucky Numbers" tackles the basic question: Why is there Anything?

The essay is too brief and superficial to really delve into the subject -- and who would read it if it delved more deeply? -- but it raises the issue for us to ponder.  Everything about our  Universe seems designed to permit the existence of Us.  The Human Race.  The writer speaks specifically about the value of "alpha," an electromagnetic constant whose value is given as 0.0072973525698.  A number that sounds totally random, but one which, if it were even the slightest bit higher or lower, would have allowed no stars to have ever been formed.  Or us to have lived to worry about it.

There are other such constants.

Most explanations -- aside from "that's just the way it is" -- are variations of an Anthropic Principle, a conclusion that our existence itself in some way explains the nature of the universe.

"Intelligent design" nowadays has a bad ring to it, as a counter-"theory" to that of evolution.  But the Anthropic Principle, in many of its forms, suggests some form of "design" for the universe.  Not a divine guidance of evolution, step by step, shaping life as we know it on Earth, but as a setting of the original parameters of the Universe at the time of the Big Bang.  Because none of us -- and I include you and me -- can follow all the scientific nuances of the discussion, we are left free to pontificate on the meaning of it all in whatever ways might satisfy our own predispositions.

Wikipedia summarizes from a book by Paul Davies to present seven different responses to the question of "Why is there Anything," or, more specifically, why do the constants in our Universe happen to be those very specific and unique constants that make it possible for us to be here asking the question:

1. The absurd universe: Our universe just happens to be the way it is.
2. The unique universe: There is a deep underlying unity in physics which necessitates the Universe being the way it is. Some Theory of Everything will explain why the various features of the Universe must have exactly the values that we see.
3. The multiverse: Multiple universes exist, having all possible combinations of characteristics, and we inevitably find ourselves within a universe that allows us to exist.
4. Intelligent Design: A creator designed the Universe with the purpose of supporting complexity and the emergence of intelligence.
5. The life principle: There is an underlying principle that constrains the Universe to evolve towards life and mind.
6. The self-explaining universe: A closed explanatory or causal loop: "perhaps only universes with a capacity for consciousness can exist." This is Wheeler's Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP).
7. The fake universe: We live inside a virtual reality simulation.

No. 1 is the unimaginative answer, and that embraced joyfully by writer Doug Adams.  No. 7 is a delightful answer that I have discussed in prior posts.  The others seem to be to be various forms of "intelligent design," the "Designer" being a more or less conscious "person" depending on which choice one considers. 

My problem with intelligent design, from a scientific viewpoint, has always involved scientific elegance.  If the purpose of the Universe is to provide life to humans on Earth (or even to humans on Earth plus other beings on other worlds), the Universe as we know it seems to be overkill.  It's as though I built a single-family house and had several square miles of building materials left over, sitting around useless.  If our existence is the only reason for the Universe, a Ptolemaic universe with Earth at the center and a few crystalline spheres surrounding us would make more sense.

On the other hand, I realize, if I had the power to create Earth and all its accessories, presumably I could throw off a few billion galaxies while so doing, just to keep Earthlings puzzled and pre-occupied, with not much additional effort.

The nice thing about the issues raised by the Anthropic Principle is that we can speculate endlessly.  I don't foresee any final conclusions being drawn in the next few centuries.

In Xanadu

Dalrymple back at Cambridge

Imagine being an undergraduate and deciding that your summer vacation would be more fun if you retraced the route Marco Polo followed in 1271, from Jerusalem to the Chinese Emperor's summer palace at Shang-tu (Coleridge's "Xanadu"), a bit north of Peking (Beijing).  I've traveled a fair bit in my life, but reading about such an adventure at any age leaves me seething with jealousy.

But that's what William Dalrymple did, at the age of 22 while still a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, back in 1986.  Traveling by bus, minibus, hitchhiking, walking -- through Syria, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and all across China.  He did the final leg into Beijing in a first class train coach, having been caught traveling once too often into sensitive areas of China forbidden to foreigners.  In 1989, he published his account of the trip, In Xanadu.

Dalrymple tackles his trip with all the impetuosity and fearlessness of extreme youth, accompanied by his two female friends -- the first, Laura, a "fearless traveler" whom he met at a party in England, who was able to accompany him only as far as Lahore; the second, Lou, a former girlfriend, who joined him in Lahore and completed the expedition with him.

The travelers departed from Marco Polo's route at only one point -- Afghanistan in 1986, as now, was patently unsafe for casual travel.  They detoured through southern Iran and the wild and wooly Pakistan province of Baluchistan.  Once they reached Lahore, Pakistan in the 1980s was still safe for travel and enjoyable -- a condition that today we can only envy.  I seriously considered joining a hiking expedition in Gilgit and Hunza, near the Chinese border about the same time that Dalrymple was passing through.  I seriously regret now that I didn't seize the opportunity.

My primary reason for reading the book was to hear of Dalrymple's travels north of the Sino-Pakistani border -- into Xinjiang, with its Uigher population, and its city of Kashgar where I will be spending several days in three weeks.  Dalrymple, like other authors such as Colin Thubron twenty years later, found Kashgar disappointing.  Holed up in the former British consulate, which by 1986 had been been demoted to use as a primitive hostel, he found little about 1986 Kashgar that was romantic:

A gloomy dust haze hangs over the town like a shroud.  The old city walls have been pulled down and only fragments remain.  Large open streets have been punched through the bazaars, with separate lanes for cars, buses, bicycles, and pedestrians.  There are no cars yet in Kashgar; there is a five-year waiting list for bicycles, and few of the buses are ever in working order.  ...  {T]he Chinese want to give the impression that Kashgar is looking forward to the next century.  For this reason, the streets are now lined with charmless totalitarian buildings and in the centre of the  principal boulevard stands an outsized statute of Mao, hand raised in benediction towards the empty expanses of People's Park.

Mao no doubt is gone, thirty years later.  And Dalrymple himself soon discovered traditional Uighur life continuing in makeshift bazaars squeezed into the blank spaces between the sterile boulevards imposed by the Han Chinese authorities. 

But I believe it was Thubron who noted the increasing Chinese tendency to eradicate most of the ethnic particularities of Chinese cities, but to save and "sanitize" a sectors of those cities for tourist consumption.  Thus, I may discover that Kashgar offers a Disneyfied area of "Uighurland" for my enjoyment -- in the same way as Samarkand and Tashkent had been tidied up and prettified -- now seemingly almost Californian cities with radically renovated monuments -- when I visited Uzbekistan two years ago. 

Although to Dalrymple, traveling Marco Polo's Silk Road seemed to take forever, he necessarily skims over much of the route.  He and his companion were ill, or they were traveling by night, or they were totally focused on dealing with odd locals and bureaucratic functionaries, or they simply had to move all too quickly through an area that they themselves would loved to have investigated more thoroughly.  Dalrymple is very much a travel writer in the British tradition of Robert Byron (whose reconstruction of  nonsensical dialogues with locals he loves to emulate) and Patrick Leigh Fermor -- a traveler who is also an amateur art history connoisseur.  He spends many pages describing mosques, palaces and other monuments in detail.  He states openly that he is happy to be able to pontificate without fear of contradiction about architecture that professional art historians haven't yet had a chance to dissect authoritatively.  The reader may or may not appreciate his detailed discussions.

More popular with "Lonely Planet" type readers may be his ruminations over the hardships of traveling on the cheap -- of which there were many, and frequent -- and his willingness to ignore "forbidden" areas or activities, and continue blithely onward until nabbed.  And even then his frequent ability to talk his way out of trouble.  Sometimes they were saved just by luck, as when an Iranian police officer was about to arrest Dalrymple and Laura as spies, but then discovered Dalrymple's university library card:

"What is this?" he said.  He looked at the card.  Then he looked up.
"You are at Cambridge?"
"Yes."
"Cambridge University?"
"Cambridge University."
His expression changed.
"Oh.  Agah," he said.  "By the great Ali!  This is the most famous university in the world."
He examined the card.
"Ah, my heart!  Look at this card.  Expiry date June eighty-seven.  Borrowing October eighty-six.  Five vols.  Oh, Agah.  For me these are magic words."
"For me too."
"Agah.  I am your servant."
I sat up.
"Do you mean that?"
"Agah.  You are a scholar.  I am at your service."
He did mean it.

In a foreword to the 2014 edition, Dalrymple cringes a bit at his youth, naiveté, tendency to stereotype others, and Anglocentricity:  "a person I now feel mildly disapproving of: like some smugly self-important but charming nephew who you can't quite disown, but feel like giving a good tight slap to ..."  Well, sure, but we're all young once, and Dalrymple went on to become a highly respected travel writer and historian.  His 1989 book is informative and amusing and a product of its era -- only thirty years ago, but "a world that has in many ways already disappeared." 

I read the book primarily to learn Dalrymple's observations of Kashgar and of the Uighur people.  I'm a little disappointed at the observations (offered both by Dalrymple, and by Colin Thubron in his more recent Shadow of the Silk Road) of Chinese attempts to weaken Uighur culture and impose Han ideals of tidiness and order on ancient Kashgar.  But every traveler sees the sights before him differently, depending on his own background and interests. 

I look forward to drawing my own conclusions three weeks from now.

Mission aborted

So, last Wednesday I decided it was time to stress my body in preparation for my trek next month in the Chinese Pamirs.  No more lollygagging around the fells of Cumbria, calling it "climbing.".  No more daily four-mile walks at sea level, and calling that a "work-out."

It had been four years since I climbed to Camp Muir on Mount Rainier.  A climb from Paradise at 5,400 feet to Camp Muir at 10,000 feet.  Could I still do it?  I was certain I could.

Generally, in June, you would hardly consider hiking from Paradise.  Often, at this time of year, you'd find ten feet of snow.  This is the year of global warming, however -- at least in the Northwest Corner.  Paradise is clear, dry, beautiful, and blooming with wild flowers.  Marmots are frolicking.  California tourists are rooting about.  Summer is here.

I packed my daypack, and grabbed (after waterproofing) some light leather boots that I hadn't worn for several years but that appeared in good shape.  I drove the three-hour drive from Seattle, arriving at Paradise at an embarrassingly late 10:30 a.m.  I should have started a couple of hours earlier.  But we were near the solstice, and I would have light until well past 9 p.m.  I wasn't worried.

To reach Camp Muir, one follows the Skyline Trail from Paradise, connecting near Panorama Point (6,800 feet) with the Pebble Creek Trail.  Once one reaches Pebble Creek, the trails cease.  You are on the Muir snowfields, which climb ever upward to Camp Muir.

I began cheerfully climbing in the bright June sunshine.  After about 45 minutes -- still hiking on the gravel Skyline Trail -- my foot caught slightly.  I looked down and noticed that the toe of my right boot was loose.  Uh oh.  I walked on carefully for a few more minutes.  Could I actually hike in snow with a flapping toe on my boot?  Then the lugged sole simply dropped off the boot.  After another couple of hundred yards, the sole on the left boot also fell off.

I was now walking on a light under-sole -- essentially hiking in ballet slippers.  And -- as I discovered as soon as I hit the first snow on the trail -- hiking in water absorbent ballet slippers.  More and more of the trail was becoming covered with snow, and my feet were quickly cold and wet.  Moreover, the trail was becoming steeper, and I was trying to negotiate it with no lugs on my soles to provide traction.

This wasn't going to work.  I made it to Panorama Point, enjoyed the scenery, and returned.  Prudence prevailed.

I've got other boots.  Ones I'm certain won't disintegrate.  I'm returning to Rainier this week.  I'd be willing to accept my endeavor's failure as the result of my own muscular weakness or injury, or because of my inability to handle high elevation. 

But not simply because of "equipment failure."   

English ramble

I returned Friday from my seven-day hike on England's Coast to Coast Path -- a route cobbled together from existing paths, bridle trails, country roads, and faintly discernible right-of-ways by hiker Alfred Wainwright in 1972. 

The path is still not officially recognized, apparently, by whomever recognizes paths.  Therefore, it is poorly (or not at all) marked as it passes through national parks, but is quite clearly marked elsewhere, in areas where the business brought in by hikers is happily welcomed. 

As mentioned in an earlier post, I completed only the western half of the total route, from St. Bees on the Irish Sea to Kirkby Stephen, just shy of the Pennine range and Yorkshire beyond.  My seven days could be broken into three distinct forms of terrain.

1.  Day 1, crossing the coastal plain.  A fairly flat hike, with a climb, not particularly necessary, over an odd, isolated peak named "Dent," thrown in for the sake of variety.

2.  Days 2-5, crossing the fells and dales of the Lake District, from Ennerdale Bridge to Shap.  Each day offered at least one ascent and descent -- varying in difficulty -- before reaching the night's lodging.  For a couple of stretches, alternative and more difficult routes were offered.  These I declined.  The fells are beautiful, lonely, and at times a bit foggy.  I ran into frequent groups of hikers -- many of them teenagers-- on only one stretch, on day 2, between Ennerdale Bridge and Rosthwaite.  This leg of the path lies in a popular area in the Lake District, and presents a number of hiking and backpacking opportunities into higher and more remote locations.  The dales, where I slept at night, were much-visited tourist areas.  Grasmere, the largest of these towns, is famous for its associations with the poet Wordsworth.

3.  Days 6 and 7, in historic Westmorland. These were relaxing days of hiking through rural England -- across meadows and over moorland, and along narrow country lanes -- beginning in Shap and ending in Kirkby Stephen.

Hiking in England today probably varies little from hiking in the same area sixty years ago, with the modern addition of GPS and wi-fi.  The people are friendly in the same way as English people appear friendly in old movies.  Everyone greets you as you pass.  Older folks are eager to tell you stories.  Teenagers smile, look you in the eye, and wave.  They even speak to you in complete sentences.  (!)  In fact -- I actually witnessed English teenagers cheerfully eating meals and walking with their families without looking sullen and without rolling their eyes!

Both the fells and the lowlands are home to far more sheep than humans.  The land is green beyond the imagination of today's Californians.  (A local told me with amusement how excited a group of Californians had been to witness rainfall.)  And yet, although weather forecasts before leaving home had been dire, in seven days of hiking I walked in significant rainfall for a total of only one hour on one day. Somehow, rural England maintains a welcome balance between the modern world and the values and landscapes of past generations.

It was a great walk, and I'm homesick for England already.  I may well go back another time and finish the eastern half of the walk through Yorkshire to the North Sea.  I certainly will go back and hike again somewhere in Britain. 
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Photographs of my hike, posted on Facebook, can be viewed at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10153419970764602.1073741880.761679601&type=1&l=bdee8c6e94.
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