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Don’t Light A Match

September 30, 2011

Well, news from CERN has it that there are particles moving faster than the speed of light. Sounds like a big deal given E=MC2 and all of that. However, reading through the blogs, it seems that Einstein’s theory already allowed for neutrinos of the “Tachyonic” sort to exist always at faster than light.

Dang complicated though and they’d not theretofore been detected. Guess we’ll have to wait for review of the evidence to see what, if anything, new was discovered. But don’t you wonder where this stuff comes from in the first place though? Scientific insights I mean? Here’s what erstwhile Princeton Psych Prof Julian Jaynes had to say about it:

“The picture of a scientist sitting down with his problems and using conscious induction and deductions is as mythical as the unicorn. The greatest insights of mankind have come more mysteriously. The literature is full of insights which have simply come from nowhere.*” Said Einstein of his theory: “Suddenly the happiest thought of my life came to me”. And “Why is it that I get my best ideas in the morning while I’m shaving?”

Insights come when you stop thinking about the problem. For example, years ago friends and I were encamped upon a glacier dreaming of first ascents up in the Interior Ranges of BC. A storm set in and held us down for days. One member of our party never left his tent and became more morose by the day. Seriously depressed after several.

“We’re gonna die” he’d wail from inside his tent. The situation wasn’t pleasant, but wasn’t that serious either. Finally I decided to stick my head in and try to assuage his fears only to be nearly overcome with horrible odor of freeze-dried frijoles begotten methane.

“Hey man” I said to him in recoil, “get the hell out of there and breathe some fresh air before you get really sick. You got something muy bad goin’ on in there. Don’t light a match. Seriously.” He moaned a bit, I persisted, and soon he emerged.

Five minutes later he was smiling. Storm hadn’t broken, but his head was clear and he offered a few suggestions for elegant new routes of which no one had yet thought and which ended up years later with multiple stars in a guidebook. Same here. My best ideas always come shazam while breathing outside air.

*From his Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – to which I’ve previously and frequently referred.

**Gotta be honest. I came up with some of this while perusing two books that’ll I’ll shortly wrap and give as birthday gifts:

The Courage to Create by Rollo May and Confronting the Quantum Enigma by David J. Kreiter. And dang if, since I just bought them yesterday, I’m not going to have to go out and buy again for myself.

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In His Image*

February 18, 2011

On January 3, 1963 aired an episode of the Twilight Zone that I’ve not forgotten even though I was then not quite eleven years old. My memory doesn’t always serve up perfection, but generally does well enough to summon up the gist.

We meet the chief protagonist, Alan Talbot, early on. He seems to be going about his life in an average sort of way, but starts getting headaches and memory problems. Visiting his hometown with his girlfriend he finds that nothing looks familiar. Then, walking along a road confused, a car bumps him and he rolls into the ditch alongside. Shaken, he stands up and checks for injuries.

Just before giving himself a clean bill of health, he examines an abrasion on his right forearm which strangely does not bleed. We watch as he peels it back revealing lights and gears etc. He’s a robot and no less astonished uncovering that fact than are we.

Good story huh? Well, it came to mind the other day when I read a paper written by Nick Bostrom, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Oxford. It’s serious, well wrought, and entitled “Are You Living In A Computer Simulation”.

“This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.”

It is all too easy to understand statement (1), but it is not unreasonable to doubt (hope!) that’s (not) how the future will unfold. For statement (2) to be the way things pan out Bostrom argues that all future civilizations must converge in their inability or unwillingness to undertake ‘ancestor-simulations’.

Statement (3) is by far the most interesting. Perhaps we are not in the fundament of reality. Perhaps some zitty ubergeek is at the controls. When he/she/it detects incipient awareness in one of us he/she/it rewinds and edits or maybe just sends us to a bar.

Computing power has increased incredibly and the pace seems only to quicken. Moore’s Law has shortened from eighteen to twelve months. Watson, the supercomputer that just bested the Jeopardy human champs juggles 80 trillion calculations a second spread over ninety servers. At least one big thinker, Ray Kurzweil, predicts that a PC sized machine will be able crunch that much that fast in a decade or less.

Bostrom demonstrates that there are no theoretical limits to continued expansion. In a posthuman stage of civilization, he posits, such a mature stage of technological development will make it possible to convert planets and other astronomical resources into enormously powerful computers.

Extremely sophisticated simulations are employed today for all manner of undertakings. It seems inevitable that our distant descendants would run simulations of their forebears. Furthermore, …”if we don’t believe that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations…”

Implications? No radical ramifications. There might well be subtle modifications to our belief systems related to a desire to understand posthuman motivations, but “no tendency to make us ‘go crazy’”. However, I guess I’d hope that they don’t run out of computer power or trip over the plug.

*In His Image was the name of the Twilight Zone episode…

**Veracity of proposition (3) would ‘aha’ the manner in which mathematics perfectly describe the whole fabric of our universe.

***cf Post of 12/24/11 in which I discussed the concentric circles in the cosmic background radiation that Roger Penrose posits are vestiges of a former universe and how it might relate to “a Platonic world of abstract realities that can be discovered by human investigation, but are independent of human existence”.

****Here is Professor Bostrom’s paper. Read it. You’ll be blown away.

http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

Posted in consciousness/psychology, Cosmology, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

HO, HO, HO*

December 24, 2010

Yup, just as you thought, the above image is evidence of a universe previous to the one in which we now find ourselves. In a recently published paper, Roger Penrose (cf 12/18/09) and Vahe Gurzadyan theorized that these concentric circles are vestiges in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) of the cataclysmic end of the preceding cosmos in the collision of two supermassive black holes.

A young universe is characterized by very significant homogeneity. With time however, it becomes less uniform, objects coalesce, and (with luck?!) life appears and evolves. Many cosmologists agree so far.

The new theory suggests (I think) that at the later stages of a universe, particles all become massless. As they do, they begin to constitute black holes. Ultimately, since massless particles must move at the speed of light and thus time would stand still, the universe becomes infinitely small. The black holes explode, collide, and voila, big banged, the whole thing starts over again.

Not surprisingly, other researchers posit different explanations for the recently discovered rings pictured above. Physics blogs are atwitter. In the last entry I read on one however, Gurzadyan and Penrose say that: “…the low variance circles occur in concentric families, and this key fact cannot be explained as a purely random effect. It is however a clear prediction of conformal cyclic cosmology”.

Now, what really interests me is the relationship between the nature of the universe thus described and the nature of consciousness as described by Alan Wallace and others*. They posit that there is a ‘substrate’ unstructured consciousness from which individual psyches arise and evolve. “The human mind emerges from the unitary experience of the zero-point field of the substrate, which is prior to and more fundamental than the human, conceptual duality of mind and matter.”

The substrate is layered above a “Platonic world of abstract realities that can be discovered by human investigation, but are independent of human existence”. This concept has been advocated by respected physicists such as Wolfgang Pauli and “stems from an awareness of the unreasonable power of mathematics to describe the nature of physical processes.”

Furthermore, Roger Penrose and many if not most others agree that “mathematical realities are not determined by physical experiment, but arrived at by mathematical investigation. You don’t have to look far to find how math underpins our universe.

Now for the best part. Wallace describes how experience of the Platonic archetype realm can be achieved. The process begins with deep meditative contemplation of an archetypal form such as the concentric circles above. No matter what you think by now, you have to admit it is interesting (and cool!) that patterns such as that atop this latest meander of mine can be found throughout our universe and at any scale.

*cf Post of 12/10/10 Nope I haven’t recently eaten any

**Hidden Dimensions, The Unification of Physics and Consciousness, B Alan Wallace, Columbia 2007

***To read about the Penrose/Gurzadyan theory of conformal cyclic cosmology start with the article on page 101 of the December 4, 2010 Economist.

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The Endless Unknown

October 15, 2010

In his work Lucian Freud conveys incredible emotional depth and complexity. It should surprise no one that he is the grandson of Sigmund Freud and furthermore, for me, his oeuvre proves that the founder of psychoanalysis was on to something no matter what modern critics might say.

(L) Freud has said that: “Quality in art is inextricably bound up with emotional honesty”, which is not to say transparency. He goes on: “The advantage of taking so long is that it allows me to include more than one expression”. Ya There’s a lot going on in the mind of the fellow above and it would take a lifetime of analysis or a lobotomy for any hope of eventual serenity.

It is difficult to leave the gaze of a Freud subject such as the one above without, first, feeling the rumble of one’s own complexes. The title of the picture above conveys this sense perfectly: “Reflection”. Then, as you walk away, you realize that the frame of reference is much larger and you wonder about universal truths.

Are there any? I’ll bet that Freud would not be surprised to learn that recent research indicates that the laws of physics might not be consistent across the whole of our universe. Or that some think that the human mind has reached its capacity for understanding the cosmos. For the time being anyway.

Juxtaposed with cave paintings or ancient petroglyphs carved into rock, Freud’s art embodies a sense of the degree to which consciousness has evolved thus far. Oh, for a take some 10,000 years hence. Try to imagine a state of mind holding an image of Freud in the same regard as we do not an ancient stick figure!

*The quotes have been drawn from an article in the 9/25/10 Economist. Where else?

**The bit was a review of a new book I can’t wait to read: Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud. The author, Martin Gayford calls Freud “omnivorous” in his search for “weight, texture and irreducible uniqueness of what he sees”. I know the feeling. See 1/31/09 and 4/10/09 below.

***Interestingly, just as a face or the representation of one can project outwardly with great force, so can inwardly a simple facial tactile experience. The relative density of neuronal connections on a face is huge. A recent experiment showed that continuous tweaking of just one whisker on the muzzle of rat stroke victim was enough to stimulate sufficient redirected blood flow to alleviate major damage. WSJ 7/27/10

****Cartoon from the NYT

Posted in Art, consciousness/psychology, Cosmology | 1 Comment »

Universe In A Grain Of Sand

May 7, 2010

The April 2010 issue of National Geographic recounts research undertaken by John Bush and David Hu into the locomotion of those bugs that stroke silently across the surfaces of ponds and lakes – water striders. Until these MIT grad students* looked into it, the thinking was that the insects created tiny waves that propelled them forward.

That theory was first compromised by “Denny’s Paradox” which showed that wave propagation could not account for the movement of baby water striders because legs of the newly hatched are too short to make waves. Applying mathematical analysis to high speed photography Bush and Hu found the truth to be entirely different.

The surface tension of the water allows the bugs to stand upon it without poking through. Essentially, each foot makes an indentation in the surface much as would a human foot upon a trampoline thus also similarly imparting energy thereto. Their middle legs use this energy to make themselves sort of bounce forward.

This reminds me of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It is the impression of matter, such as the earth, upon the fabric of space-time that makes for the motion of heavenly bodies. In a sense, the moon rolls around the rim of the depression in the universe made by our little blue planet. And us around the sun etc.

Just as the three dimensions of a pond develop energy by the actions of a bug upon it, so do the four of our universe by virtue of our presence in them.

I think.

*Their work was first published in an MIT newsletter 8/6/03 and in the journal “Nature” the following day.

Posted in Cosmology, nature | Leave a Comment »

The Tyrant Next Door

April 23, 2010

I don’t get lawns. I mean, I’m glad I have one and I revel in its revivification each spring. I’m just not particularly particular about its constitution. Green is great, but green alone lacks drama and verve. What is up with the incredible close cropped homogeneity that pervades most of suburbia?

Well (you read it here) it’s the outer manifestation of a sequestered concern that there might not be order in our universe – which of course there is not. At the beginning, for a moment, it was indeed highly organized. Since, however, we’ve been hurtling toward ever greater disorder. Entropy. The universe is a mess, getting messier by the moment, and there’ll be no turning back the arrow of time. Too bad, so sad.

The more assiduous the lawn care, the more every blade in a lawn is identical and oriented just so, the more bottled up inner turmoil can logically be assumed to inhabit the owner determined to beat his little part of the planet into submission. Just watch the reaction after a kid cuts a path and you’ll see what I mean. Jeers and tears all out of proportion and to no good end.

Makes me think of Thomas Hobbes. His Leviathan, published in 1651, is perhaps the most important work of modern political theory. In it Hobbes asserts the necessity of an iron fisted central authority strong enough to preclude civil disorder as well as to enable a credible defense.

It made certain sense back then, especially given the provenance of his thinking. Told that the approach of the Spanish Armada jolted his mother into labor, he later said that “I was born the twin of fear.” His point of perspective though didn’t allow him to foresee twentieth century totalitarianism and the associated agony and horror left in its wake.

Sure, civil society must most certainly be. But not to the point of heartlessness and cruelty. As the Dalai Lama says, “The purpose of our lives is to be happy” and dandelions can help. They are bits of beauty that arrive on their own, unannounced. If allowed, they can provide emotional counterpoint to Hobbes’ famous dictum that “life is nasty, brutish, and short”.

Walt Whitman, among others, would agree. From Leaves of Grass:

Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling,

Give me juicy autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard,

Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows,

Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape,

Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals

teaching content,

Give me nights perfectly quiet as on high plateaus west of

the Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars,

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I

can walk undisturbed.

Give me for marriage a sweet-breath’d woman of whom I should

never tire,

Give me a perfect child, give me away aside from the noise of the

world a rural domestic life,

Give me to warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own

ears only,

Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O nature your

primal sanities!

*Finally, I’m ecstatic to report that the January 2, 2010 Economist (what else?) tells us that dandelions “may yet make the big time”. They might supplement or even replace Hevea brasiliensis which is the scientific name for the traditional rubber tree. Can you imagine what a field of them would look like?

Posted in Cosmology, Lawncare, nature, Poetry | 1 Comment »

Big Wow

December 18, 2009

Ok kids, if you’ve been paying attention, you realize that I (and others) think that there’s more going on in one’s mind than can be described by any process identified thus far. That I (and others) disagree with many scientists and probably most neurobiologists who believe that consciousness will one day be understood as a biological process albeit one quite complex.

I once read a complicated book, The Emperor’s New Mind by British polymath Roger Penrose. He’s a respected scientist who thinks like I do. I guess I should say thinks like I would if I had an IQ of 220 or so and didn’t have to use a calculator to do simple math. Simply put, he believes that consciousness is the result of quantum processes that occur in structures far smaller than atoms (Planck scale) called microtubules in the brain.

Furthermore he says, “It doesn’t even act according to conventional quantum mechanics. It acts according to a theory we don’t yet have.” He then goes on again to draw an analogy with the research of William Harvey who was the first (westerner anyway) to describe the circulation of blood in the body circa 1616. Prior to this it was thought that darker blood originated in the liver and lighter in the heart; that the two types had different purposes; and were consumed throughout the body.

Harvey figured out that arteries carried blood away from the heart and veins back to it and was certain that the two types of vessels had to connect, but couldn’t prove it without a microscope powerful enough to see things the size of capillaries.

Penrose is a widely respected physicist and has won many awards and though some might disagree, most take him seriously. He theorizes that at that very small scale there is an abstract realm of Platonic ideals/mathematical reality that influences the quantum processes and thus the biochemistry, and thus the drama of our lives.

A rich connection with this dimension allows gifted mathematicians, musicians, artists, etc to make discoveries. Given the spectacular ability of mathematics to describe our universe, this sort of makes sense even if it is difficult to fathom – if you know what I mean.

Where did this all come from? Penrose says that consciousness, all consciousness arose with the big bang. An Italian astrophysicist calls it the “Big Wow”. Where will this take us as understanding grows? Hold on to your chairs, truth is always stranger than fiction. Suffice it to say that, though they have evolved at different speeds, religion and science will converge.

“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not fact at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies”. Joseph Campbell.

Nothing like a closed mind to screw stuff up. Here is an exchange between two open ones:* Penrose’s partner in the development of their theory (Orch OR – Orchestrated Objective Reduction) Stuart Hameroff and Sam Hamil neurobiologist and author of The End of Faith;

Hamil: I do not rule out the possibility of our finding some sound, scientific reasons to believe in things that appear very spooky to most scientists at present – from telepathy to mathematical idealism. And the fact that I do not rule such things out has made many atheists uncomfortable. I do not foresee however, our finding good reasons to believe that the Bible was dictated by an omniscient being who disapproves of sodomy, but occasionally fancies human sacrifice. These claims really do strike me as being “without intellectual merit.”

Hameroff: I agree with you. My take is that there exists a fundamental Platonic wisdom embedded in the Planck scale (along with qualia, spin, charge, etc) which has inspired mankind to write the great books and act “in the name of God”… but man being man, many such efforts are misdirected, co-opted and perverted.

*http://AndrewSullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/03/

** Image at top is an oil painting by Urs Schmid of a Penrose tiling. Look it up…

***Interesting to note that “anesthetic gases selectively erase consciousness soley through very weak quantum forces.”

Posted in consciousness/psychology, Cosmology, Religion, Science | 1 Comment »

Non-Ergodic

May 1, 2009

mandelbrot

Read that word in an absolutely fascinating excerpt from the new book Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman. Didn’t know what it meant either and it wasn’t in my dictionary. Tried to look it up in my digital OED but it locked up.

Courtesy of Google found that non-ergodic refers to a set or group or system, the universe say, that is incomprehensible by study of a single aspect or earlier state. Ever since the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding and evolving. One could not extrapolate its current state based upon its early arrangement any more than examination of a slice now would tell us much about the whole a billion years hence.

Kauffman is an atheist who wants to understand the nature of the universe. At its earliest why did the atoms combine as they did? Darwin’s theory of evolution tells us a lot about our biosphere, but what about before there was anything to evolve? How did the first reproducing cell form?

Framing the question with an example, he tells us that there are twenty different amino acids and 20 to the power of 200 possible combinations thereof to make a length 200 protein. It would have taken ten to the power of thirty-nine times the age of our universe to make each of them once. Why did the ones that formed come into being and not any of the other possible combinations?

Kauffman began his quest with genes. He earned his MD at UCSF and undertook research into genetic expression. He found that they exist “on the edge of chaos” and that “the proper functioning of an organism depends upon its self organization and regulation”. A trait does not come fully formed from a single gene, but from their interaction. “Health is just a moment of stability in a very uncertain cellular world.”

The principles of self-organization found in complexity theory play an important creative role in the evolution of the universe, our biosphere, our genome, and our existence. It describes the behavior of systems that are sensitive to initial conditions, but evolve unpredictably over time.

The above Mandlebrot fractal is an example of a complicated structure arising from a simple set of points, a formula, and repeated iterations. A slight difference in the points and formula would have led to significantly different evolution. (cf the butterfly effect)

“Thus a radical and I will say, partially lawless creativity enters the universe. The radical implication is that we live in an emergent universe in which ceaseless unforeseeable creativity arises and surrounds us. And since we can neither prestate, let alone predict all that will happen, reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives forward. This emergent universe, the ceaseless creativity in this universe, is the bedrock of the sacred that I believe we must reinvent.”

“What about all the aspects of the universe we hold sacred – agency, meaning, values, purpose, all life and the planet?…One response is that if the natural world has no room for these things, and yet we are unshakably convinced of their reality, then they must be outside of nature – supernatural…”

“The ground of our existence, then is not to be found in physics alone, but also in the partially lawless becoming of the biosphere, econosphere, culture that we self-consistenly co-construct.”

A universe not understandable by reductionism? Nor by a grand patron in robe and slippers? Kauffman gives us a radical appreciation of an unpredictable creativity that underpins and leavens our cosmos.

*Interesting (to me anyway) Kauffman was president (in 1961) of the same mountaineering club as was I (1974). Makes me wonder anew about the field of embodied cognition to which I referred in “Let’s Dance” 1/24/08 below. Kinesthetics, adventure, and cerebration can combine to powerful effect.

**Dang if he didn’t figure out how to get paid to sit around staring off into space while I still need my day job. Teaching at Harvard this spring, he heads the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary.

Posted in consciousness/psychology, Cosmology, Evolution | 2 Comments »

aka Synchronicity?

July 25, 2008

Hard, really, to find physics any less weird than most religions – at least once past robe and sandals expectations. Example? How about Bell’s Theorem.

Remember how nothing can move faster than the speed of light? That if a star blows up in a galaxy many light years distant, it would be impossible for us here on earth to know anything at all about the event until its light reached someone’s eyeballs some millions of years down the road?

OK, now one would thus suppose that if something happens here, there could be no instantaneously connected event over there. Whether across the room or in that other galaxy. Locality they call it. Must be present to win. That is what the theory of relativity holds.

Well an aspect of quantum physics holds that there can indeed be “spooky action at a distance” as Einstein put it. That part of the theory is what caused him (with two colleagues) to write “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete” in 1935. He never did buy in.

Quantum theory was developed before there were means by which to test many aspects of it. But a theorem developed by John Stewart Bell in 1964 and experiments in particle physics since have shown that an event here can in fact be subtly entwined with one way over there.

Physicist Brian Greene makes an analogy using dice. An identical pair is separated – one goes to Vegas and one to Monte Carlo. They are repeatedly thrown at exactly the same time. If ‘entwined’ they somehow always come up the same. No one has yet figured out how or why.

David Harrison, a professor at the University of Ontario commented in an essay that: “Bell’s Theorem is the most profound discovery of science… not just physics, but all of science”. At the end he notes that it would force Einstein to accept Quantum Physics were he still alive.

And as Greene writes in his book The Fabric Of The Cosmos: “Numerous assaults on our conception of reality are emerging from modern physics… Of those that have been experimentally verified, I find none more mind-boggling than the recent realization that our universe is not local.”

Jeesh.

Posted in Cosmology | 1 Comment »

Bell’s Theorem

July 18, 2008

An old guide with features as sharp and chiseled as the rock ledge upon which he sat stared into the void. His much younger companion ministered his smooth hands with tape and tincture of benzoin.

Higher up, the youth, a “guide aspirant”, allowed as how the elder moved rather well for his age. Indeed, he had so far been impressed. There was no retort or response but for the crunch of rice cakes and gurgle of water from the canteen – water which had been scooped from the clear cold stream far below.

Long before sunset the guide had prevailed upon the youth to take advantage of the broad ledge traversing both walls of the huge dihedral they were ascending. Protestations as to the waste of yet available light were left echoing alone.

Moreover, though the ledge on one side was flat and smooth, the other was roughly castellated. The youth had remarked upon this fact and the related possibilities for a comfortable night. To his then further dismay, the old guide insisted that they both watch the moon from amongst the blocks.

Just after dawn, there was a terrible sound from high above. Covering his head and face with his hands, the youth pressed himself to the back of the ledge and behind the now welcome hunks of orange granite.

Thick with the smell of damnation, the dust cloud slowly cleared as the young man peered between his fingers to see the old man unmoved and beyond him unweathered rock where the opposite ledge had for millennia been.

Posted in climbing, Cosmology, Literature | 1 Comment »

The Subtle Landscape