The Not-So-Grand Destiny of Robots

It finally happened. A robot car killed a pedestrian. A woman crossing the street was killed by a self-driving car. It seems rather amazing that such a thing didn't happen earlier with a self driving car. That's because robots don't understand a single thing.

You may have heard of “machine learning.” But there is absolutely no such thing as machine understanding. There is not a robot or computer in the world that understands anything. Understanding is something that goes on in a mind. Robots and computers don't have minds.

You may get a clearer idea of how things are for a self-driving car if you consider that such a car has not the slightest grasp of such concepts as what a human being is, what life is, or what death is. If you walk in front of some self-driving car, to that car you are merely a group of pixels to be avoided. To the self-driving car, you are only slightly different from stop signs or electrical poles. The software of the self-driving car probably has some priority system whereby it assigns a higher value to avoiding collisions with mobile objects than stationary objects. But the car has not the slightest understanding of why it is bad to run over pedestrians. 

 

Let us look into what happens when computers and robots compute. The following equation covers most of the types of computation that occur.

digital inputs + processing = digital outputs or modification of digital data

There are various types of variations of this equation. One is simply:

no inputs + processing = digital outputs or modification of digital data

Another variation is the following:

digital inputs + processing + retrieval of other digital inputs = digital outputs or modification of digital data

By digital inputs or digital outputs I mean anything at all that can be represented digitally, by a sequence of binary numbers. Here are some of the things that we know can be represented digitally, and which modern computers do use as digital inputs or digital outputs:

Any number

Any set of characters or words

Images

Sound recordings

Videos

Databases

Any text can be digitally represented by means of things such as the ASCII system that allows you to represent particular characters as particular numbers. While we don't normally think of an image as digital, it can be represented digitally as a series of pixels or picture elements. For example, a photograph might consist of 1 million pixels, which each can be represented by a number representing a particular shade of color. So the image can be digitally represented by a million such numbers. A video or real-time camera input can also be representing digitally, since the video can be represented as a series of images, each of which can be digitally represented.

Is the output of a self-driving car a digital output? It is. The car simply computes 5 digital quantities:

• how much to turn the steering wheel to the left;
• how much to turn the steering wheel to the right;
• how much to accelerate;
• how much to brake;
• which of three positions the transmission should be in (drive, park or reverse)

After a digital-to-analog conversion, these digital quantities are applied to the car's controls.

But there are some things that we can never hope to produce as digital outputs. The first is real conceptual understanding. By understanding I don't mean “how-to” type understanding, but the high-level conscious understanding of some abstract truth or concept. We can imagine no possible way to produce a digital output that would equal a real conceptual understanding of something.

But, you may ask, doesn't that smart computer Watson already understand something – the game of chess? No, it doesn't. Watson merely can produce a digital output corresponding to a good move to make as the next move in a chess game. Watson has zero conceptual understanding of the game of chess itself, and has zero understanding of the abstract concept of a game. The only way you can understand the abstract concept of a game (or the abstract concept of leisure) is if you have been a human being (or something like a human), and played a game yourself.

A digital output must always boil down to a series of 1's and 0's. Can we imagine a series of 1's and 0's that would equal a real understanding of an abstract concept such as health, matter, life or world peace? No, we cannot. Understanding is not a digital output.

So none of our computers and none of our robots understand anything. A programmer may say, “My program understands the difference between new customers and old customers,” but that's just a kind of loose way to talk. What the programmer really means is that the logic in his program can distinguish between two different things. That's not the same thing as actual understanding. Here “distinguish” simply means “behave differently based on different situations or inputs.”

Basically all of the computers and robots existing today are digital. No one has ever built a computer or robot that operates like the human brain operates.

There is also an extremely strong case for believing that it will never work to try to give a computer or robot understanding by

creating a computer or robot based on the human brain. The case is based on reasons for doubting that the human brain is actually the source of the human mind.

The claim that the human mind is produced by the human brain is something scientists have never established. Such a claim is merely a speech custom of scientists, an unproven dogma. There are some very good reasons for doubting this claim, which scientists offer as a simplistic explanation because they lack the imagination to ponder more profound possibilities. Below are a few (but by no means all) of the many reasons for doubting the “brains produce minds” claim:

• the fact that there are many dramatic cases in the medical literature of people who had more or less normal minds even though large fractions of the brain (or most of their brains) were destroyed due to injury or disease, including super-dramatic cases of people with good minds but less than 15 percent of their brains;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could be producing consciousness, thought, understanding or abstract ideas (mental things that are very hard or impossible to explain as coming from physical things);
• the fact that there is no plausible account to be told of how brains could possibly be storing memories that last for fifty years, given the high protein turnover in synapses, where the average protein only lasts a few weeks;
• the fact that there is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, given the lack of any coordinate system or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found;
• the fact that there is no understanding whatsoever of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states;
• the fact that for more than 40 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences occurring after their hearts stopped and their brains were inactive, during times when they had no brain waves, and they should have had no consciousness at all, with many of the medical details they reported during such experiences being independently verified (as described here).

All of these reasons (and quite a few others I have not listed) strongly suggest that the human mind comes from something other than the human brain. Rather than being a bottom-up phenomenon bubbling up from tiny little neuron events, our minds may come to us through a top-down process, arising from some mysterious cosmic reality that we don't understand – perhaps something along the lines suggested here and here.

What is the robotic relevance of the evidence strongly suggesting that our minds do not come from brains? Such evidence strongly suggests that all future attempts to build brilliant robots by imitating the architecture of the brain will fail. If we're not getting our minds from brains, there is no reason at all to think that robots or computers will ever get real conceptual understanding because robot designers or computer designers will one day use some architecture based on the human brain.

If that is so, we need not fear at all that robots or computers will ever take over the world, because they will always lack the understanding to do such a thing.  The destiny of robots will not be the grand destiny of taking over as masters of the planet, but the much more modest destiny of serving as our slaves, servants and toys.

Postscript: For a collection of posts presenting in detail many aspects of the case for thinking that minds do not come from brains, see this site. 

Hits and Misses of the Physicist Bloggers

For decades the late Stephen Hawking was the center of a kind of giant hype machine that portrayed him as the greatest living scientific genius. This hype was unwarranted for a scientist who never even won a Nobel Prize. Showing admirable persistence and diligence despite his severe handicaps, Hawking made some interesting contributions to the study of black holes. But his thoughts about topics outside of his specialty were often not very wise.

An example of his dubious thinking was his “No Boundary Proposal” about the Big Bang, that the Big Bang was not a boundary in space or time. The problem with this proposal is that it is the exact opposite of what nature tells us about the beginning. Everything we have learned about the Big Bang suggests it is as clear a boundary as you can imagine, a sudden beginning of time and space.

Hawking also repeatedly warned that machines might take over the world (a fear that is unwarranted for the reasons  discussed here).  He repeatedly urged that we need to leave planet Earth (not as good an idea as staying here and making sure that our planet stays in good health). He repeatedly sung the praises of M-theory, a wildly speculative theory for which no evidence has ever appeared. He also declared falsely and unwisely that “philosophy is dead.”

Physicist blogger Ethan Siegel (whose specialty is cosmology) has a post entitled “The 4 Scientific Lessons Stephen Hawking Never Learned.” He lists one of these lessons as “Be humble about your own speculative, unproven ideas.” He states the following:

This is a pitfall that has afflicted many of the greatest minds throughout scientific history: to fall in love with their own fringe scientific ideas so thoroughly that you tout them with the certainty normally reserved for verified, validated, robust theories. Hawking's no-boundary proposal is speculative and unproven, yet Hawking will often (including in A Brief History Of Time) speak about it with the same certainty he'd speak about black holes....Unproven ideas should never be a substitute for legitimate facts, yet Hawking, in every book he ever wrote, never tells you when he strays from the confirmed-and-validated into this speculative realm, particularly where his own ideas are concerned.

Here Siegel is right on the mark. One of the greatest problems of modern scientific literature is that writers mix up speculations and established facts, packaging the whole mixture as “science.” And so many a dubious proposition and many a doubtful theory is sold to the public as “science,” as if such things were well-established. Such failure to distinguish between fact and theory goes on constantly in the literature of biology, psychology, physics, and cosmology. When people start a sentence with “Science says,” half of the time they will refer us to something that has not actually been established by observations or experiments. 

 

Unfortunately, Siegel himself is often guilty of exactly this problem of falling in love with his own shaky scientific ideas so thoroughly “that you tout them with the certainty normally reserved for verified, validated, robust theories.” We see this repeatedly in his columns when he refers to the extremely speculative and very much unverified theory of cosmic inflation as if it were empirically established science, which it certainly is not. We also see this repeatedly when Siegel refers to the speculative theory of dark matter as if it were empirically established, which it is not. No one has ever directly observed any dark matter. In the same column that Siegel is criticizing Hawking for speculative excess, he refers to “everything we've learned since 1979 about the conditions that set up the Big Bang.” Nothing of the sort has actually been learned, and we know nothing whatsoever about any conditions that set up the origin of the universe.

Not only do we have no observations about anything occurring any time close to the Big Bang, but we have no observations (and will never be able to have any observations) of anything that occurred in the first 300,000 years of the universe's history. Scientists tell us that it was only at about 300,000 years after the Big Bang that there occurred what is called the Recombination Era, in which atoms first formed. During the first 300,000 years, particles were so densely packed that all light coming from those years must have been hopelessly scattered. As a scientific site tell us:

Because of the presence of the free electrons, photons were scattered around in all directions and could not travel far before changing their direction. Therefore the universe was "opaque".

We therefore will never be able to get any observations about anything that happened during the universe's first 300,000 years. The light from those years was hopelessly jumbled and scrambled by the density of the matter, as strongly as if you put your Microsoft Word document through a computer program that might thoroughly scramble its characters 100,000 times. As we will never be able to make observations of the universe's state in the first 300,000 years, all claims about the exact state at the Big Bang (or before it) will never be claims backed up by observations.

A physicist blogger with a large following is Lubos Motl, who has been blogging many times a month since 2004 at his site "The Reference Frame."  Motl's blog is a strange collection of physics, politics, and climate commentary, with many of his opinions being very dubious (but presented with a large amount of literary skill and style). Very strangely Motl is for supersymmetry (a theory for which there is no evidence), but opposed to standard ideas on global warming (for which there is a great deal of evidence). This is simply an example of how the assertions of a modern scientist may be very largely dependent on the scientist's personal tastes. On the plus side, I may note that Motl is a good person to have around when physicists start spouting nonsense about parallel universes, because he has shown his skill at debunking such speculations.

Another physicist blogger with some interesting content is Sabine Hossenfelder, who blogs at this site. In contrast to Motl, she has repeatedly criticized the theory of supersymmetry, a speculative physics theory. That seems appropriate, since all signs are that supersymmetry has been a great big waste of time. Thousands of scientific papers have been written advancing this ornate speculative theory for which no evidence has been gathered.

But Hossenfelder has repeatedly advanced a dubious account as to why physicists advanced the supersymmetry theory. She has often claimed that the theory was advanced because physicists find that supersymmetry is “prettier” or “more beautiful.” Referring to the supersymmetry theory in a recent post, she says,  “I explained many times previously why the conclusions based on naturalness were not predictions, but merely pleas for the laws of nature to be pretty.”

But it's not correct that the supersymmetry theory was advanced because physicists had some great longing for a beautiful or pretty theory. The supersymmetry theory (a very cluttered affair not at all beautiful) was advanced to explain away a particular case of fine-tuning in the laws of physics.

Here is how the wikipedia.org article on supersymmetry explains it:

In the Standard Model, the electroweak scale receives enormous Planck-scale quantum corrections. The observed hierarchy between the electroweak scale and the Planck scale must be achieved with extraordinary fine tuning. In a supersymmetric theory, on the other hand, Planck-scale quantum corrections cancel between partners and superpartners (owing to a minus sign associated with fermionic loops). The hierarchy between the electroweak scale and the Planck scale is achieved in a natural manner, without miraculous fine-tuning.

So the real reason the supersymmetry theory was advanced was to try to avoid a case of “miraculous fine-tuning.” This is a much different reason than creating a theory in hopes of making the laws of nature “be pretty.”

No evidence has shown up for the supersymmetry theory. So scientists are stuck with this case of “miraculous fine-tuning” they had hoped to avoid. In a previous post, Hossenfelder compared this particular case of fine-tuning to finding a cube balanced on one of it edges. She says she doesn't believe that “finetuned parameter values require additional explanation.” In that post she seems to speak as if she thinks people should not pay much attention to cases in physics where we find a cosmic balance so delicate that it's like a cube balanced on one of its edges. I disagree, and think that such cases (which must have an explanation other than chance) are weighty cosmic clues we should pay very much attention to.

Postscript: In a recent interview in Scientific American, cosmologist Martin Rees says that the cosmic inflation theory (not to be confused with the more general Big Bang theory) is a "good bet."  But we should call things a "good bet" only when we have some probabilistic basis for believing in their likelihood. For example, if you hear a 60-year-old suddenly died in his home, it would be a good bet that he died of a heart problem, because that's the most common cause of sudden deaths in the elderly. But there is no probabilistic basis whatsoever for calling cosmic inflation (a brief burst of exponential expansion of the universe) something likely to have occurred. For such a thing to occur (ending up with a universe like ours) requires so many special conditions and so much fine-tuning that it is wrong to be calling such a theory  "a good bet." The theory is better described as a "popular story."

At her blog Sabine Hossenfelder puts the cosmic inflation theory into context:

Theoretical physicists have proposed some thousand ideas for what might have happened in the early universe. There are big bangs and big bounces and brane collisions and string cosmologies and loop cosmologies and all kinds of weird fields that might or might not have done this or that. All of this is pure speculation, none of it is supported by evidence.  

Expedition: A Science Fiction Story

“I authorize an expedition to the supply center,” said Frank. “Karen and Tom will be the expedition participants.”

“Can I go too?” said little Steve. “I've never even been outside our building, least not that I can remember. I'm old enough to go.”

“Going on an expedition outside our building is nothing to be taken lightly,” said Frank. “If you don't suit up right, and make all the preparations just right, you may find yourself cooked like a hot dog in the microwave. It's an oven outside this building. Are you ready to face that kind of danger, little boy?”

“You bet I am!” said Steve.

“Okay, we'll I guess you're finally old enough for something like this,” said Frank. “I guess we can use that expedition suit that your sister first used several years ago. Let me brief you on all the steps you need to execute the expedition successfully.”

Frank retrieved what looked like a space suit.

“This is your expedition suit,” said Frank. “It will keep you from dying from all that heat outside.”

“I'll put it on,” said Steve.

“No, that's not the first step,” said Frank. “First, you strip off your clothes and apply cooling gel all over your body. The cooling gel and the expedition suit work together to stop you from being cooked to death.”

After applying the blue cooling gel all over his body, Steve put on the expedition suit. It fit reasonably well.

“So you think you're ready to go outside?” asked Frank.

“Sure, I'm ready,” said Steve.

“No, you're not ready!” said Frank. “You haven't put on your backpack cooling device. Without that, you'll cook to death out there.”

Frank showed how to set up the backpack cooling device. He had Karen, Tom, and Steve test the radios of the expedition suits. The radios would allow them to talk to each other over the noise of the backpack cooling unit.

“So it looks like you're all suited up,” said Frank. “So are you ready to go out the building?”

“Sure,” said Steve.

“No, you are not!” said Frank. “You didn't make a weather check for dust storms. If one of those things hit while you're outside, it could kill you.” 

After the weather check, and after Karen, Tom and Steve were all suited up, they exited the building. They set out toward their destination a mile away. 

Steve was delighted by all the sights around him. It was a bleak landscape, but for a little boy who could never recall being outside of the building where he lived, everything he saw around him was a source of wonder.

“You ever get into trouble on a trip like this?' asked Steve.

“Sometimes,” said Tom. “If your expedition suit starts malfunctioning, it can be scary. You may get a sudden dust storm. If you see one of those, then you have to turn around and go back.”

After a mile of walking, they reached the supply center, and went inside.

“Okay, you can take off the helmet of your suit,” said Tom. It was nice and cool inside the supply center. After gathering their supplies, Tom asked Steve what they should do before going outside again.

“I guess we just have to put on our suit helmets again,” said Steve.

“No, it's more complicated than that,” explained Tom. “The cooling gel we put all over our skin got used up during our 1-mile walk over. So we have to take off our expedition suits, and reapply some fresh new cooling gel before we go outside again.”

They all took off their suits, reapplied the cooling gel, and put their expedition suits back on. Before exiting the supply center, Tom had a question for Steve.

“So can we go outside now?” asked Tom.

“Sure,” said Steve.

“No, we haven't done our suit checks yet!” said Tom. “Remember, I told you before: every time before exiting a building, you check all of the indicator lights on your expedition suit to make sure it is functioning perfectly.”

After making the suit checks, Tom asked Steve one more question.

“So now are we ready to go outside?” asked Tom.

“I guess so,” said Steve.

“No,” said Tom. “We didn't make a weather check for approaching dust storms.”

“But we already did that when we set out,” said Steve.

“I know,” said Tom. “But you've got to make the weather check for dust storms both when you set out, and when you start to come back from your destination.”

After the weather check was made, Tom, Karen, and Steve exited the supply center, and began the one-mile trip back to the building where they lived. The trip back was uneventful. After returning to Frank, they took off their expedition suits, and cleaned off the remainder of the sticky cooling gel on their skin.

“Congratulations, kiddo,” said Frank to Steve. “Now that you've made your first expedition outside, I guess we won't think of you as such a little kid any more.”

“All that hassle, just to get some food at the grocery store,” said Tom with a sigh.

The four of them were living in Phoenix, Arizona in the southwestern United States in the year 2160. Once populated by more than a million people, the heat-scorched city now had a population of only 4,300, and all of them dressed up like astronauts when they dared to travel outside.

Paradoxes That Puncture Professorial Pretensions

Many of our professors are very pretentious people who claim to have an understanding of many deep questions of time, space, life, matter and energy. But there are quite a few paradoxes suggesting that such academic figures may know very much less than they claim to know. Below is a list of some of these paradoxes.

The Faint Young Sun Paradox. It is believed that life appeared more than three billion years ago, in an event that would have required liquid water on the surface. However, models of the sun's evolution indicate that the heat output of the sun should have been much lower billions of years ago. Based on such models, it seems that it should only have been about about two billion years ago that the Earth started getting enough heat for liquid water to exist on its surface.

The Fermi Paradox. Our galaxy contains many billions of planets. In billions of solar systems there should be a situation where a planet roughly the size of the Earth exists at a suitable distance from the closest sun, resulting in a surface that is neither too hot nor too cold for life to appear. But despite all these opportunities for life to appear, decades of searches for radio signals from extraterrestrials have produced no successes. The Fermi Paradox can be succinctly stated by asking: where is everybody?

The “Mind from Matter” Paradox. It is typically believed that the human mind results from arrangements of matter in a brain. But mind and matter are two totally different types of things. We can imagine without a paradox mental things producing mental outputs, and physical things producing physical outputs. But it seems paradoxical that a material thing could ever produce a mental output.

The “Winding Problem” Paradox. A large fraction of the universe's galaxies are beautiful spiral galaxies. Spiral galaxies rotate, taking about 200 million years to make a full rotation. But stars in the outer parts of a spiral galaxy should take much longer to rotate than stars closer to the center of a galaxy (just as planets in the outer solar system have much longer years than planets in the inner solar system). This differential rotation should spoil the spiral shape of a galaxy after after 500 million years. But such galaxies have apparently managed to keep these spiral shapes for many billions of years.

The “Protein Origin” Paradox. In a cell proteins are produced by little structures called ribosomes. But ribosomes are themselves made up largely of proteins. So if proteins are built by ribosomes which themselves require proteins, how could proteins ever have originated?

A ribosome, with its proteins shown in green

The Matter/Antimatter Asymmetry Paradox. The prevailing Big Bang theory of the universe's origin maintains that in its first minutes the universe consisted of highly energetic particles of energy (photons) packed together at a very high density. Whenever two very energetic photons collide, they produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter. The Big Bang therefore should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. But in our universe we see abundant amounts of matter, but no naturally existing antimatter.  

The Short Lifetime of Synapse Proteins Paradox. The leading theory of memory storage maintains that memories are stored in synapses in the brain. However, it is known that the proteins that make up synapses have short lifetimes, having an average lifetime of no more than a few weeks. How could synapses be storing memories that can last for 50 years when all the matter inside synapses is being rapidly replaced, with such rapid turnover?

The Paradox of High Mental Function in Highly Damaged Brains. Our professors assert that our minds are produced purely by our brains. But it sometimes happens that humans have normal or almost normal mental functioning even though they have lost very much or most of their brains due to disease. See here for some examples.

The “You Need a Language to Establish a Language” Paradox. If the first language were ever to get established among humans, there would have to have been some process by which a complicated set of rules got promulgated and established among a group of people. But (as discussed here) it seems that no such rules could ever have been established and promulgated unless a language already existed.

The “Inferiority of Primitive Speech” Paradox. Before any language was spoken, humans would have lacked the vocal adaptions needed to speak in an intelligible manner. Before such adaptions existed, hand gestures would have been a greatly superior way of communicating. But why then could spoken speech ever have originated, and been used instead of a hand-gesture language? See here for more on this paradox.

Levinthal's Paradox. The proteins inside our bodies have complex three dimensional shapes. But in a DNA molecule that specifies the makeup of a protein, there is only a specification of the sequence of amino acids that make up the protein. Does a chain of amino acids somehow discover its three dimensional shape through some type of trial and error, settling on some shape with the lowest energy requirements? Not according to Levinthal's paradox, which points out that finding such an answer through trial and error would take many years – actually a length of time longer than the age of the universe. Instead a newly synthesized protein finds its characteristic 3D shape within a few minutes. The wikipedia article on this paradox inaccurately tells us that "the solution to this paradox has been established by computational approaches to protein structure prediction." This is not at all correct -- even using databases and high-speed computers, scientists can't accurately predict the 3D shapes of complex proteins (and cells don't have such databases and computers). 

The C-Value Paradox. There is no relation between the complexity of an organism and the size of its genome. Organisms much simpler than humans may have genomes larger than the human genome. For example, some amphibians and flowering plants have genomes 100 times larger than humans. Such a fact is completely at odds with the idea that the genome or DNA of an organism is some kind of blueprint for the organism.

The Natural Selection Paradox. Attempting to account for biological innovations, biologists offer as an explanation natural selection. But natural selection, which requires the existence of life, cannot account for one gigantic example of biological innovation: the origin of life itself. In fact, it seems that natural selection cannot in general explain any complex biological innovation, for the reason that such an innovation will not produce any survival benefit or reproduction benefit until it has already appeared.

Lewontin's Paradox. Only a certain number of random mutations will occur per 1,000 organisms. So Darwinism would seem to predict that genetic diversity should be proportional to the number of organisms in a population. So, for example, a species with billions of organisms (such as humans) should have many times more diversity in its gene pool than a species with only thousands of organisms (such as lions). But a recent study found this is not at all true, and that the degree of genetic diversity is pretty much the same for any species.  This discrepancy is known as Lewontin's paradox. 

The Paradox of Fast Retrieval of Old Memories. Accounting for short-term memory is relatively easy, since we can imagine that there is a kind of very small “scratch pad” storing things you learned in the last few minutes. A brain might be able to search that tiny little “scratch pad” very quickly. But how is it we are able to instantly remember information learned years ago, as contestants do so effectively on the TV show Jeopardy? If you have millions of items that you have learned, there would seem to be no way for you to instantly find an exact location in the brain where a memory was stored, nor would there be time within a few seconds to scan all of the items in your long-term memory to find a particular memory.

The Homochirality Paradox. Amino acids and sugars can exist in two forms: what are called left-handed forms and right-handed forms. The left-handed forms are kind of mirror images of the right-handed forms. In earthly life amino acids are all left-handed, and sugars needed for life are all right-handed. But when these chemicals are created through laboratory processes, they appear with left-handed versions and right-handed versions in equal numbers. The odds against life getting started with all amino acids left-handed and all sugars right-handed seem astronomical.

Paradoxes of the Origin of Sex. Sexual reproduction seems to offer no clear advantage over asexual reproduction. Also it is hard to imagine any progression that could have led to functional sexual organs that differ among males and females, as any change in the anatomy of one gender would be useless unless complemented with reciprocal changes in the other gender (with there being only an incredibly low chance of complementary random changes in both male and female occurring within a few generations).  For example, a mutation producing a little bit of a penis in an organism would not achieve fixation in the gene pool if it occurred when no organism in that species had any vagina; and vice versa.

The Cosmological Constant paradox. In outer space a vacuum is devoid of energy, as far as any astronaut is able to measure. But when quantum physicists add up the quantum contributions that should be made from what are called virtual particles, their calculations tell them that ordinary space should be very dense indeed – even denser than steel. This discrepancy between theory and observation is still unexplained.

The Double-Slit Paradox. The physical world outside of our bodies is supposed to be something existing independently of whether or not it is observed.. But one of the most famous experiments of modern physics suggests this may not be true. Experiments with passing light or electrons through a double slit consistently show an effect in which the outcome is completely different, depending on whether or not there is an observer.

Energy Conservation Paradoxes. It is supposedly a law of nature that mass-energy cannot be created or destroyed. This law is called the law of the conservation of mass-energy. But it seems that in the Big Bang, such a law must have been violated, with a huge amount of mass-energy suddenly coming into existence. Moreover, as the universe expands, more and more space comes into existence. We have been told many times that the expansion is not an expansion of matter within space, but an expansion of space itself. But every volume of space has its own tiny amount of energy, caused by a non-zero cosmological constant. This means that an expanding universe must constantly be leading to a creation of new space, and new mass-energy, with the total amount of mass-energy increasing every second. But how can this be, if there is a law saying mass-energy cannot be created or destroyed?

A web site discusses this issue:

What’s more, there is an energy associated with any given volume of the universe. If that volume increases, the inescapable conclusion is that this energy must increase as well. And yet physicists generally think that energy creation is forbidden. Baryshev quotes the British cosmologist, Ted Harrison, on this topic: “The conclusion, whether we like it or not, is obvious: energy in the universe is not conserved,” says Harrison. This is a problem that cosmologists are well aware of. And yet ask them about it and they shuffle their feet and stare at the ground.