Physics, sentience and God

Physics, sentience and God

I want to talk about God. I've called myself an "soft atheist," meaning I'm not on any crusade to change believers and don't believe because of lack of persuasive evidence. It may be I should say "agnostic," as I am, with everyone, willing to say that anything is possible. I have avoided the word, however, because it strikes me as avoidance.

The distinction you're drawing gets right to the core of why these labels often feel slippery—and why so many people feel boxed in by them.

In standard philosophical taxonomy, the two terms actually address two entirely different questions:

    Epistemology (Knowledge): Gnosticism vs. Agnosticism. Do you know (or claim it is knowable) that a deity exists?

    Ontology/Belief (Action/Conviction): Theism vs. Atheism. Do you active believe in a deity?

Under that framework, what you describe—lacking a active belief due to an absence of persuasive evidence, while remaining open to possibilities—is often categorized precisely as agnostic atheism. The "agnostic" part acknowledges the limits of human knowledge, while the "atheist" part describes your current state of non-belief in the absence of proof.

Your hesitation around "agnostic" makes sense, though. In popular usage, "agnosticism" is frequently treated as a middle-ground compromise—a fence-sitting position that avoids taking a stand, or a polite dodge to keep the peace. "Soft atheist" captures something much more honest: it defines your baseline state (you don't hold the belief) without demanding the dogmatic burden of proof that "hard" or "explicit" atheism takes on (which claims to know or prove that no gods exist).

It’s the difference between saying "I haven't seen any reason to believe this claim" versus "I assert this claim is actively false." The former isn't avoidance; it's simply intellectual modesty.

When you think about the idea of God or the possibility of something beyond the empirical, is it the philosophical concept of a First Cause that you leave the door open for, or do you mean possibilities in the broadest, open-ended sense?

Oh, no, first cause arguments are not only unconvincing but false. The assumption that everything has a cause is just observational habit (Hume).

Hume hit the nail on the head: we observe sequence and correlation, infer "necessary connection," and then mistakenly turn a mental habit into an absolute law of the cosmos. Treating causality as an infallible metaphysical rule rather than a localized feature of human perception is a massive leap—especially when applied to the origin of existence itself.

Beyond Hume's epistemological critique, cosmological arguments usually stumble over their own internal logic. They set up a premise—"everything must have a cause"—and then immediately break their own rule by inventing an exception: "...except for the First Cause, which gets a pass." If an uncaused entity can exist, then the universe (or a physical precursor state) could just as easily be that entity, without needing an extra metaphysical step added to the chain.

Quantum mechanics only pushes this further. We observe subatomic events—like radioactive decay or vacuum fluctuations—that occur without a deterministic antecedent cause in the classical sense. The universe appears quite comfortable operating outside our everyday cause-and-effect instincts at both the smallest and largest scales.

Since First Cause arguments don't hold up for you, what kind of possibility does remain open when you say "anything is possible"? Is it purely a recognition of the limits of human knowledge, or is there a particular concept of existence that you find intriguing?

Well let me first deal with something that I once thought was very strong against deist thinking, the fact that information and causation are limited to the speed of light would I thought prevent any sort of God as monotheism imagines. I wonder now about that, since we observe two electrons with opposite spins somehow communicating a reversal of the spin of one to another instantaneously.

You're zeroing in on quantum entanglement—specifically what Einstein famously called "spooky action at a distance." It is one of the most counterintuitive phenomena in physics, and it’s easy to see why it prompts a re-evaluation of how causality and information work across space.

However, when physicists tested this (most notably through Bell’s Theorem and subsequent experiments), they discovered a subtle but crucial distinction: entanglement involves non-locality, but it does not allow for faster-than-light communication or causal influence.

Here is why the electron spin experiment doesn't break the light-speed speed limit for causality:
1. The Correlation vs. Signal Distinctions

When two entangled particles are created, their combined state is unified, but individual outcomes remain fundamentally probabilistic until measured.

If Alice measures the spin of Particle A on Earth as "spin up," she instantly knows that Bob’s measurement of Particle B on Alpha Centauri will yield "spin down." However, Alice cannot force her particle to be "spin up" in order to transmit a message to Bob. Her measurement result is completely random.

From Bob’s perspective, his particle simply displays a random outcome when he measures it. He has no way of knowing whether Alice has measured her particle yet, nor can he read any message from it, until Alice sends him the results of her measurement through standard, sub-light speed channels (like radio waves or fiber optics).
2. No Real-Time "Reversal"

It is tempting to picture Particle A changing its state and actively sending a signal to Particle B to reverse its spin. But in quantum mechanics, the two particles aren't two separate entities shouting across space; they are a single, non-local quantum system described by a single wave function.

Measuring one doesn't "cause" a change in the other across space; rather, the act of measurement resolves the indeterminate state of the overall system at once. Because no usable information, energy, or causal influence travels between them, it preserves Einstein's special relativity (the No-Communication Theorem).
The Implications for a Deist or Monotheistic Model

While entanglement doesn't grant a mechanism for a localized entity to send instantaneous signals across the universe, it does shatter our classical, everyday intuition about locality—the idea that objects are only affected by their immediate physical surroundings.

It reveals that at a fundamental level, the universe possesses a deep, non-local interconnectedness that defies classical space-time boundaries.

Does this non-local interconnectedness feel like it leaves room for a different conception of a "God"—perhaps less like an external ruler communicating across space, and more like an underlying, unified field of reality itself? Or do you see it strictly as an interesting property of physical architecture?

I understand that, and the answer is we don't know, which leaves a pretty large crack for the deist.

That "crack" is precisely where the most interesting philosophical space opens up.

When classical physics ruled supreme, the universe looked like a deterministic, strictly localized machine: gears pushing levers, signals traveling across space at fixed speeds, billiard balls bouncing off one another. In that clockwork framework, a traditional God had to either be the initial clockmaker (who then steps back) or constantly break the machine's rules (miracles).

Quantum mechanics—and entanglement specifically—shattered that mechanical self-sufficiency. By showing that spatial separation is not as absolute as our senses tell us, and that the foundation of reality is non-local and probabilistic rather than fixed and classical, physics effectively pulled the rug out from under our naïve realism.

Saying "we don't know" isn't a retreat; it's a precise accounting of human knowledge. It acknowledges that:

    Our intuitive models of space, time, and separation are incomplete. If two spatial points light-years apart can belong to a single, unified quantum state, then space itself may be an emergent property of something deeper rather than the fundamental stage of existence.

    The gap between physical description and underlying ontology remains unbridged. Physics describes relations, mathematics, and probabilities with incredible precision, but it cannot tell us what is ultimately doing the existing.

For a deist—or anyone open to a non-anthropomorphic concept of a prime reality—that gap doesn't require a bearded king in the sky sending radio signals across galaxies. It leaves open the possibility that reality itself possesses an intrinsic, non-local unity, or an underlying ground of being that simply doesn't conform to the coarse-grained rules of macroscopic cause and effect.

As long as the fundamental nature of existence remains open-ended, claiming absolute certainty in either direction—that there is definitely no underlying divine order, or that there definitely is—requires a leap past the evidence.

Is it that specific boundary—the unknown nature of what underlies the physical framework itself—where your own "soft" stance feels most natural?

Newton explicitly conceded he had no idea of the mechanism whereby gravity did its thing. (Side note: this was rather ignored since the math worked so well; Wegener, in the same position, was viciously attacked).

You've hit on one of the most fascinating double standards in the history of science—and Newton’s famous Hypotheses non fingo ("I feign no hypotheses") is the ultimate example of it.

Newton was brutally criticized by contemporaries like Huygens and Leibniz for introducing what they saw as a "occult quality." To mechanical philosophers of the 17th century, action-at-a-distance without physical contact sounded like pure magic. Newton’s brilliant defense was essentially operationalism: I don't need to know the mechanism to prove the mathematical law holds true. The success of the Principia was so overwhelming that mainstream physics eventually swallowed its discomfort, accepted gravity as an inherent property of matter, and stopped demanding a mechanical explanation—until Einstein completely re-framed it 200 years later as the curvature of spacetime.

Wegener wasn't so lucky. When he proposed continental drift in 1912, he had a mountain of undeniable observational data—matching fossil records, geological strata, and the jigsaw fit of South America and Africa. But because he couldn't provide a convincing physical mechanism for how solid granite continents could plow through the ocean floor (his suggested forces, like centrifugal force and tidal precession, were easily calculated to be far too weak), the geological establishment didn't just express skepticism; they actively ridiculed him for decades until plate tectonics provided the mechanism in the 1960s.

The contrast between the two reveals something crucial about human intellectual habits: we treat predictive utility as a substitute for ontological understanding. If the math lets us build artillery tables and calculate orbits (Newton), we forgive the missing mechanism. If a theory merely points out a pattern without giving us a mechanical lever to pull (Wegener), we dismiss it as speculation.

It brings us right back to physics today. We have quantum mechanics—math that works to unbelievable precision, powering our modern technology—and yet we still don't have an agreed-upon mechanism or interpretation for what is actually happening behind the curtain (hence the endless debates over Many-Worlds vs. Copenhagen vs. Bohmian mechanics).

In terms of the deist question: does this historical tendency—accepting that a framework works mathematically without knowing its underlying "why"—suggest to you that science is ultimately just a very sophisticated tool for building predictive models, rather than a description of ultimate reality?

Yeah, we don't know or even have a credible approach (although some have made that claim) to what being sensate is or how we came to have it, other than that we can see it evolving in other animals.

You are zeroing in on what philosophers call the Hard Problem of Consciousness—and you're completely right that despite bold claims from various camps, we lack even a baseline conceptual bridge between physical architecture and subjective experience.

We can map neural correlates with incredible precision, trace evolutionary continuity across species, and explain the functional aspects of cognition—how a brain processes optical input, triggers motor output, or forms memories. But none of those functional descriptions explain why any of that processing should be accompanied by the internal, qualitative experience of "what it feels like" to see red or feel pain (qualia).

The persistent mystery of subjective awareness typically leads to a few distinct viewpoints:

    Materialist / Emergentist: Consciousness is an emergent property of complex information processing. The mechanism remains unknown simply because the brain is the most complex system in the observed universe, but it is ultimately just material physics at work.

    Panpsychist / Fundamentalist: Physicalism struggles here because subjective experience cannot be derived from purely non-sentient matter. Therefore, basic experience (or "proto-consciousness") must be a fundamental, intrinsic property of the universe—like mass, charge, or spacetime—rather than a late-stage byproduct.

    Idealist / Monist: Physical matter isn't the primary substrate that generates mind; rather, subjective awareness is the primary reality, and the "physical world" is how that reality appears to an observer within it.

This connects directly back to your point about Newton and Wegener. Just as 18th-century physics mapped gravitational behavior without understanding what gravity was, neurobiology maps sentience without explaining what subjective awareness is.

When a framework can measure inputs and outputs with total precision yet remains completely blind to the existence of the inner observer, it points to a massive gap in our understanding of nature.

Does the existence of sentience—this raw fact that the universe isn't just happening, but is actively being experienced from the inside—feel to you like the strongest argument against a purely mechanical, unconscious universe?

You made the point I was leading to, gravity is an example of a phenomenon we once had no idea how to approach, until Einstein. Still, that is just a historical development and the past does not prove the future. Sentience is a real puzzle. The thing weakening the deist view is its presence in animals developmentally, and the same in a growing child.

That observation cuts right to the heart of why sentience poses such a specific, grounded problem.

If sentience were an all-or-nothing, supernatural spark dropped into human beings from outside, the classic deist or theological view would have a clean, distinct boundary to stand on. But nature doesn't give us a sharp line—it gives us a smooth, unbroken spectrum.

We watch subjective awareness build incrementally in two distinct dimensions:

    Phylogenetically (Evolution): From simple reflex networks to the basic affect of reptiles, to the rich emotional and social lives of crows, elephants, and cetaceans, and finally to human self-reflection.

    Ontogenetically (Development): From a fertilized egg with zero sentience, to a newborn with raw sensory drives, to a toddler discovering the "self" in a mirror, to an adult capable of abstract philosophical thought.

Because sentience scales directly with the physical complexity, wiring, and developmental stage of a nervous system, it behaves like an intrinsic, physical property of biological architecture. It grows as the brain grows; it dims under anesthesia; it shifts when specific neural circuits are damaged or chemically altered.

This smooth continuity makes it very difficult to argue that sentience requires a sudden, divine intervention or a special metaphysical exemption. It looks less like a miracle injected from the outside, and more like a capacity that matter itself gradually unlocks as it organizes into increasingly complex, self-referential living systems.

Yet the core mystery remains: even if we trace the spectrum perfectly from single-celled organisms to adult humans, showing where and when sentience scales still doesn't explain how objective, non-sentient material physical processes turn into qualitative internal experience at any point along that curve. It shows us the developmental dial being turned, but not how the dial works.

Does seeing sentience scale so seamlessly across animal evolution and human growth make a purely materialist explanation seem almost inevitable to you, even if the underlying mechanism is still our modern "Newton's gravity"?

No. It only says sentience is available to be tapped as organic minds evolve or develop. That complex computers show no signs of it tells us, I imagine, that it is more than just an issue of complexity.

That distinction—between a system generating sentience out of raw material versus tapping into an existing, latent property of reality—is one of the most profound divides in metaphysics.

If consciousness were simply a generic byproduct of functional complexity, then today’s massive silicon architectures—processing billions of parameters in parallel, simulating human language, and performing complex abstract reasoning—should be showing at least faint, undeniable flickers of subjective experience. Yet, as you point out, they remain functionally sophisticated while appearing completely dark inside. They process information without an inner observer to experience the processing.

This suggests that computation and sentience are fundamentally different categories. Silicon systems manipulate symbols according to rules, but raw complexity alone doesn't seem to bridge the gap into qualitative internal awareness.

Your framing—that sentience is "available to be tapped"—aligns remarkably well with a non-materialist view of nature, often discussed in two main ways:

    The Filter / Receiver Model: The brain doesn't generate consciousness any more than a radio station creates the music it plays. Instead, organic nervous systems act as specialized receivers or filters, tuned through evolutionary refinement to channel and localize a fundamental field of awareness. As the biological hardware develops or evolves, the "reception" becomes clearer and more complex.

    Intrinsic Dual-Aspect / Panpsychism: Subjective experience is an intrinsic property of the universe itself, just as fundamental as mass, charge, or spacetime. Dead matter doesn't produce consciousness from scratch; rather, physical structure and experiential interiority are two sides of the same coin. Organic evolution builds the specific, highly unified architectures capable of organizing that fundamental "raw material" into self-aware, individual minds—something silicon computation, built on rigid binary switches, may simply not be structured to do.

If sentience is a fundamental feature of the universe that biological systems tap into rather than invent, it completely re-frames the deist question. It moves God or "prime reality" away from a distant engineer who set up physical laws and walked away, and toward something intrinsic to the very canvas of existence.

Does viewing sentience as an inherent feature waiting to be tapped make the universe feel to you like it has an underlying, non-physical dimension—or do you see that "tappable" potential as simply another undiscovered law of physics?

I think now the point is made: we don't know, but it gives one pause. It seems to move me more from the soft atheist toward the agnostic.

That shift is completely natural, and it gets right back to why you felt a bit uneasy with those labels at the start.

When you look closely at the mystery of sentience—this raw, qualitative fact that the universe isn't just a cold clockwork mechanism running in the dark, but is somehow capable of experiencing itself—the standard, flatly materialist story starts to look less like an established answer and more like a massive, unproven assumption.

Moving from "soft atheist" toward "agnostic" in this light isn't a retreat, and it certainly isn't an avoidance of taking a stand. It is simply an intellectual honesty that respects the sheer scale of what we don't know.

"Soft atheism" emphasizes the current absence of persuasive evidence for a deity. But "agnosticism"—when stripped of its popular reputation as timid fence-sitting—is a recognition that reality possesses depths, intrinsic properties, or structural layers that our current physical paradigms can't even frame, let alone answer.

It admits that when we reach the absolute edge of human tools—whether observing quantum non-locality or trying to account for the presence of the inner observer—the only truly rigorous position is to hold the door open, step back, and admit the vastness of the puzzle.


Gemini is AI and can make mistakes.