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A question for tomorrow

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David Eric Smith

Re: A Question For Tomorrow

Hi Marcus et al.

On Apr 30, 2019, at 10:41 PM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric writes:

< The important consequence of this understanding is that we have mathematical formalizations of the concept of state and of observable, and they are two different kinds of concept. It is precisely that both can be defined, that the theory needs both to function in its complete form, and that the definitions are different, that expands our understanding of concepts of state and observable. >

It seems to me that it is kicking the can down the road. It enables communication but it is not clear it drives toward a resolution of what is going on. I have heard other (computational) physicists claim that "all physics is local", which may or may not be true depending on what the calculator chooses to believe. It seems to keep the two concepts clear one cannot make that commitment.

I am not sure this is right, or that we can know whether locality is a problem until the quantum gravity situation is sorted out.

Here I have to be careful, because I don’t work in this area professionally. Let me try a little, and stop when I know I can’t keep up with the topic. What I mean is this:

1. For now, classical gravity is all we have, which means that in our physics locations exist as definite indices, and on top of those we can write down a quantum theory in which states are defined in terms of those indices. Short of black hole unitarity problems, there isn’t any specific failure of that quantum theory that tells us what if anything would need to be changed.

2. In such a quantum theory, state vectors evolve under some Hamiltonian, and the Hamiltonian is written only in terms of local interactions in the spatial index. When I say something like “physics evolves locally”, that is all and everything I mean. We haven’t had to give any of that up, as far as I know.

3. There certainly can be superposition state vectors, with spin correlations that it has become popular to refer to as “entangled” since the quantum computing parlance took over the field. (I have nursed some vague discomfort that it is a double entendre with illegitimate romantic liaisons that is responsible for the popularity of that terminology; nobody would have got so excited over “correlated-spin superpositions”, which was the older language for the same thing). In those state vectors (say for an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pair allowed to evolve so the carriers of the spin are separated by a large distance), there can be zero values for some observables, such as “up-New-York-and-down-Los-Angeles”, or “left-New-York-and-right-Los-Angeles”, even though there are marginals “(up-New-York)-or-without-respect-to-(down-Los-Angeles)” etc.

4. The values of those microscopic observables can evolve jointly with values of more complicated large-actor observables that we describe as apparatus measuring spins etc., and the branches of the large-actor state vector can evolve to have no coherence; but that evolution is still all under the same local Hamiltonian.

5. A decoherent-histories formulation (Hartle, Gell-Mann for current versions, https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.04126 is an index) seems to be fine with giving a descriptive language for, and to some extent tools to compute, which kinds of joint large-actor states exist as alternative histories. There will, in general, not be a unique basis in which such decoherent-histories can be shown to exist. Weinberg objects to this as a problem with DH renderings of quantum mechanics in the last section of Ch.3 of his textbook Lectures on Quantum Mechanics https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/lectures-on-quantum-mechanics/F739B9577D2473995024FA5E9ABA9B6C. I don’t see from what direction, however, other than comfort, one can argue that that objection has any weight.. Decoherent histories are defined; there may be more than one basis in which such histories split into branches (an up-down comparison branch or a left-right comparison branch for measurers set up in New York and LA), and that description is incompatible with referring to “a measurer” in NY or LA who is a projection of macro-variables in branches of two different and incompatible DH bases. There is no instantaneous dynamics that “creates” these correlations at the time of the measurement, the presence or absence of correlations was generated as a feature of the state vector, locally, when the EPR pair was produced, and they evolved locally with consequences for the possible correlations among macro-actors since. I guess whether this bothers you depends on whether you view the phases over which one averages to compute the coherence or decoherence as “properties” somehow of degrees of freedom at distinct locations. It is not clear to me that the math assigns them in that way, or that one is thus warranted to think of them that way. As quantum computers get clean enough to start to become large, it would be nice to start simulating “universe-in-a-box” decoherent histories states, so we can start to develop some familiarity and comfort with the very large numbers of branches that quantum systems can realize. Quantum computers already keep all these superposed branches in play; to make an internal decoherent-histories example would prune to a small subset of them, though still large relative to our classical habits of thinking. I think the exercises with superposed SQUID rings etc., from decades ago, already get at the main point, and have long advertised themselves as macroscopic Schroedinger’s cats that are in superposed states, so there isn’t necessarily new conceptual ground to be broken here. But quantum computers potentially allow a lot more design invention, and thus more fun examples.

6. I expect all this is going to be in the news fairly regularly now, as QC engineering builds up, so there won’t be any special event that is “the” time to talk about it. It came across my radar through other considerations a couple of months ago, because there were some “Wigner’s Friend” experiments done and published somehow recently, which claimed to get at Nick’s concerns with “I can’t know and not know” something. Many MANY writers of non-formal language (meaning, the physicists who publish the papers) LOVE to write in a way that uses exactly Nick’s formulation and posts it as a problem or paradox. But I don’t think that means we have to write that way. There is a nice blog post by Scott Aaronson https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3975 that shows where such languages make specific errors of attributing meaning to common-language words, when there is no referent for that meaning in the actual mathematical description. To Scott’s points, I would add that there is a further error (or at least gap): the authors of the Wigner’s Friend papers are using three correlated microscopic spins as models for a state and someone who “knows” something about it (the Friend role). I would argue that it doesn’t become the correct model until one is allowing one of the members in the correlated superposed state to become a large actor, because the state vector contributions from large actors are different from those of micro-spins with respect to decoherence. That is the thing I think a coming-generation quantum computer might allow someone to program. Aaronson’s analysis will still be exactly right, but there will be more detail that can be added to it to reflect the different roles of small and large subsystem contributions.

Anyway, I will repeat that I have to be careful here. Penrose is smarter than I am, and he works in this area, and Smolin is smarter and works in this area. In the end one has to take appeals to authority seriously. But if I compare Smolin’s popular prose to Aaronson’s, I find them completely different. Smolin I do not trust to give the reader the best critical understanding; Aaronson I do (though he is usually in a hurry, which leads to limits). He also has a book out, Quantum Computing Since Democritus, which somebody has lent to me and of which I have read a little bit. He is consistently good in this way, though he is a logician, and that creates in me all the disquiet of logician’s proofs that are non-constructive. But that is a different topic.

Don’t know if this is helpful or not. I probably don’t know enough to write anything beyond the above on this topic, and will just listen from here out, and accept if it turns out part of what I said here is wrong.

Eric

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David Eric Smith

Re: A Question For Tomorrow

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

On May 1, 2019, at 12:58 AM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

Marcus wrote:

> < Why do people seek this (as Eric puts it) emotional comfort with their ways of knowing? >
>
> Either spacetime works in a surprising way and commonsense intuition is just wrong -- to cling to a familiar way of knowing amounts to taking the blue pill -- settling for crude satisficing heuristics to muddle through as a bag-of-water in what appears to be a 3D space. Or we are totally driven and our experiments are fate. In one case humans can't engage their special-purpose DSPs (so to speak) and fast thinking is useless -- we aren't equipped to function efficiently in that alien world. In the latter case, it just doesn't matter what we calculate. I think the potential for cognitive dissonance here is pretty clear.

I would love to take this question into a developmental timescale, but it will he hopeless to ever get it past IRBs. The only way we will learn is when companies that already view children’s attention as a natural resource to be consumed do it anyway, and afterward we run a post-mortem on the consequences.

I can do a great job visualizing 2-spheres when I need to reason or prove something expressed in terms of them. I can do it with eyes closed, without going to fetch a material 2-sphere. But probably the only reason I developed a brain that can do this, is that I spent all those developmental years with my eyes open in a world that had material 2-spheres to experience.

I can’t similarly visualize 3-spheres, or other higher n-spheres.

Is that frontier a reflection of inherent limits in what my brain an do, which evolved together with the limits of vertebrate eyes to provide its training sets? Or would a child, immersed in a visual world with real renderings of n-spheres, learn to visualize them as I an do for n=2. After all, I can’t “see” the 2-sphere. I use time together with my flat visual field to do an active construction. Are there ways to render higher-dimensional spheres that employ time, perspective, scale, shear distortion, or whatever other aspects of flow, to encode dimensions of space that are not literal in the 2-d projection? And could my brain then learn to process them as equivalent dimensions? (Of course not MY brain; some other brain that worked in the first place, and then did so through its infancy and childhood.). What would be the limits? Eventually, overloading other sensory modalities to carry dimensional information must lead to confounds from their carrying information about what they literally are. (There’s a material application for Nick’s worry about metaphor, a kind of data-compression and confound problem.).

I like the visualization version of this question, because we can do a lot with it already and it is familiar, so not hard to imagine extrapolating. But having said that about visualization, why not say it about quantum superposition dynamics or decoherent histories?

Eric

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David Eric Smith

Re: A Question For Tomorrow

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

> On May 1, 2019, at 2:33 AM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> I was just throwing out two, the wormhole idea of Maldacena & Susskind and super-determinism described by Hooft. They seem very different to me, and could imply two very different universes. That QM works for either doesn't help explain how one or the other or neither is the true explanation.

Alright, so I surrender. I can’t keep up with this. Susskind is God-the-Father, and Maldacena is God-the-Son and God-the-Holy-Spirit (and probably several other incarnations of God), of a field I got kicked out of because I couldn’t follow what the hell was going on in it. Although to watch Joe Polchinski or Eva Silverstein rein Lenny in is reassuring — he knows he is both smarter and bolder than most, and can use it to get away with things. There are only limited superheroes who can call him on it. Maldacena, however, I don’t think plays those games so much.

The appeal to authority has a place. One can be a guest in another’s house, as long as one knows one’s limitations and how to behave.

Eric

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David Eric Smith

Re: A Question For Tomorrow

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Hi Nick, in turn,

On May 1, 2019, at 5:15 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

I knew I would get my ears boxed for this:

Not boxed; just conversed with.

I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience that we would never know. That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.

Others have met you at the high level of your response, so I will now confess that I was making a small logical point. In the first place, “things beyond experience that we could never know” IS a tautology, right.

I think, since those two terms are defined in terms of one another, this is safely a tautology, as you say. (Or, I think that for now, because I don’t see problems with it from any other directions against which I would check it.)

So, that expression is merely to say that there are things we may never know. Ok. That’s fine. But when you go on to say that nature is determined by unknowable causes that’s an oxymoron. To the extent that anything is caused, by whatever means, it reveals its causes in its behavior. To the extent that events are random, no cause is revealed and no cause exists.

These claims are so loose, and the categories that appear in them so broad, that whole universes of difference can live within which instance of the category one chooses to invoke. The laws of classical mechanics describe one instance, the laws of quantum mechanics another. The above assertion doesn’t address the conclusions on which they explicitly disagree.

Here is an example. I may be able, by cross-linking lots of kinds and instances of “behavior” as you call it, to assert that there are configurations of cause, and I may be able to say what spaces of possibility they inhabit. Those are the roles that state vectors play in mechanics (classical or quantum). Indeed, it is to summarize just such an enterprise that I say physics justifies the formalization of a notion of state.

What my physics did was construct the whole space of possible state vectors, and explain the role any particular one of them would play as cause. It did not choose for me, which particular state in the space of the possible describes a particular instance, and it could not do so, having set up the whole space as the realm of possibilities.

From only the above, by what logic would you insist that _which_ of the states we are in is something you would have access to? I haven’t said that anything about our big system of deductions and comparisons and Occam’s-Razor compactions of the theory gave us that. It happens that in physics, that is the role filled by a theory of observables, measurement, and related concepts. To report what they can about which state pertains in a particular instance. The classical mechanics version of those concepts is one in which they are sufficient to identify the state. The quantum mechanics version of the concepts is one in which they are not.

Now the discussion which followed your post was so far above my head, that I wasn’t sure the extent to which it addressed the following: To what extent do you-all think the vagaries of quantum phenomena are properly generalized to the macro level?

I think I would try to avoid “vagaries”, and would be wary of conversations in which I didn’t know how to put some other better word in its place. I don’t mean this as a criticism at all; only a statement that some things I know I have to put off to another day, or do jointly with somebody else. That’s life.

Quantum states can be superpositions. For such states, it is, by a well-understood construction, meaningless to speak of their “having” any definite value for certain kinds of observables (which depend on what case we are talking about, but for which there is no difficulty of being specific). Heisenberg uncertainty is a special instance of this relation as well, for which a superposition with respect to one observable happens to coincide with a specific value of a different one. The name is unfortunate. An infinitely extended radio wave can have an arbitrarily well-defined wavelength, and correspondingly can have exactly no specific location associated with it. It is not that we can’t “know” the position that the “wave really has”, it is that the syntactically acceptable construct “position of the wave” doesn’t actually refer to anything in the real world. Such is the hazard of trying to get from syntax to meaning; colorless green dreams sleep furiously. I assume this is why the project of Montague Grammar was never tenable, though the exercise and its failure were useful and informative.

But this is also why, when you say “I was trying to make a logical point”, I see the difference of philosophers from physicists. Logic seems to me like a syntactic exercise. (But I am not a logician, so what I said could have been offensively ignorant.). We build logics for semantic motivations, and try to use them to systematize thinking. But the hold they have on the world is mediated by the semantics of the referents for their tokens. Physicists, I would say, should share the trait that they generally expect those referents to turn over routinely.

I hear a lot of talk among social scientists to the effect that now that we have quantum theory, we can’t do psychology, which talk I take to be obscurantist blather.

I agree. See the earlier post about Smolin versus Aaronson. Some people use common language to show you how smart they are; others use it to give you a tool to become smarter yourself. We do the best we can to identify who is who, in areas we can’t referee on our own.

Eric

Do I need to be pistol-whipped on that point, too?

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 2:22 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

> I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience that we would never know. That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.

I think this requires care. Never wanting to defend the positions of people I don’t know in a conversation I wasn’t in, it would be helpful to know what topic the conversation was about, in the terms the participants applied to it.

Since physics has existed as a mathematical science (let’s say, since Newton?), it has employed a notation of “state” of a system.

Also since that time, it has employed a notion of the “observable properties” (shortened to just “observables”) somehow associated with the system’s states.

In classical physics, the concept of state was identical to that of a collection of values assigned to some sufficiently complete set of observables, and which observables made up the set could be chosen without regard to which particular state they were characterizing.

aka in common language, anything inherent in the concept of a state was just the value of an observable, meaning something knowable by somebody who bothered to measure it.

In quantum mechanics, physics still has notions of states and observables.

Now, however, the notion of state is _not_ coextensive with a set of values assigned to a complete (but not over-complete) set of observables, which one could declare in advance without regard to which state is being characterized.

To my view, the least important consequence of this change is that the state may not be knowable by us, even in principle, though that is the case. (To many others, this is its most important consequence. But the reason I shake that red cape before a herd of bulls is so that I can say…)

The important consequence of this understanding is that we have mathematical formalizations of the concept of state and of observable, and they are two different kinds of concept. It is precisely that both can be defined, that the theory needs both to function in its complete form, and that the definitions are different, that expands our understanding of concepts of state and observable. A state still does the main things states have always done in quantitative physical theories, and in the sense that they characterize our “attainable knowledge”, observables do what they have always done. Before, the two jobs had been coextensive; now they are not.

I assume Shakespeare wrote the “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” line about the same phenomenon as the thing that makes the Copernical revolution a revolution: people fight to give up importance they believed they had, or control they believed they had. Once the fight is in the culture, there may not be that emotional motive in all the combatants; they may believe they have a logical problem with the revolution. But how can there be a logical problem with the Copernican revolution? It is a statement about the alignments of beliefs and facts. Likewise the concepts of state and observable in quantum mechanics.

It feels like a Copernican revolution to me, every time physics shows that new operational understandings are required, and tries to give us new language habits in which to coordinate our minds (singly or jointly) around them, to pose the question how this was known all along in our folk language and thus can be logically analyzed with its categories. There is only very limited reason for our folk language to furnish “a description” of the nature of the world. It is a collection of symbols that are part of “the system of us”, which when exchanged or imagined mediate coordination of our states of mind (and yes, I know this term can be objected to from some behaviorist points of view, but it seems to require much less flexibility to use provisionally than the state of a quantum system, even though it is also much less well-understood at present). If a collection of robot vacuum cleaners exchange little pulse sequences of infrared light to coordinate, so they don’t re-vacuum the same spot, we might anticipate that there is a limited implicit representation of the furniture of the room and its occupants in the pulse sequences, but we would not expect them to furnish a description of the robots’ engineering, or the physical world, or much else. Human language is somewhat richer than that, but it seems to me the default assumption should be that its interpretation suffers the same fundamental hazard. Signals exchanged as part of a system should not be expected to furnish a valid empirical description _of_ the system.

Common language is fraught with that hazard in unknown degrees and dimensions; technical language can also be fraught, but we try to build in debuggers to be better at finding the errors or gaps and doing a better-than-random job of fixing them.

The fluidity and flexibility with which the mind can take on new habits of language use, and the only-partial degree to which that cognitive capability is coupled to emotional comfort or discomfort in different habits, seems important to me in trying to understand how people argue about science.

Eric

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Frank Wimberly-2

Re: A Question For Tomorrow

The essay by Hywel, which he called "Neutrinos for my Friends" doesn't discuss the aspects of gravity that we had touched upon such as "how does it act across space?" (I think I read that John Baez had reached a point where he was discouraged about loop quantum gravity) So I won't bother to share it on Google Drive unless there is interest in it for other purposes.

Frank

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Wed, May 1, 2019, 11:55 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Nick, in turn,

On May 1, 2019, at 5:15 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

I knew I would get my ears boxed for this:

Not boxed; just conversed with.

I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience that we would never know. That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.

Others have met you at the high level of your response, so I will now confess that I was making a small logical point. In the first place, “things beyond experience that we could never know” IS a tautology, right.

I think, since those two terms are defined in terms of one another, this is safely a tautology, as you say. (Or, I think that for now, because I don’t see problems with it from any other directions against which I would check it.)

So, that expression is merely to say that there are things we may never know. Ok. That’s fine. But when you go on to say that nature is determined by unknowable causes that’s an oxymoron. To the extent that anything is caused, by whatever means, it reveals its causes in its behavior. To the extent that events are random, no cause is revealed and no cause exists.

These claims are so loose, and the categories that appear in them so broad, that whole universes of difference can live within which instance of the category one chooses to invoke. The laws of classical mechanics describe one instance, the laws of quantum mechanics another. The above assertion doesn’t address the conclusions on which they explicitly disagree.

Here is an example. I may be able, by cross-linking lots of kinds and instances of “behavior” as you call it, to assert that there are configurations of cause, and I may be able to say what spaces of possibility they inhabit. Those are the roles that state vectors play in mechanics (classical or quantum). Indeed, it is to summarize just such an enterprise that I say physics justifies the formalization of a notion of state.

What my physics did was construct the whole space of possible state vectors, and explain the role any particular one of them would play as cause. It did not choose for me, which particular state in the space of the possible describes a particular instance, and it could not do so, having set up the whole space as the realm of possibilities.

From only the above, by what logic would you insist that _which_ of the states we are in is something you would have access to? I haven’t said that anything about our big system of deductions and comparisons and Occam’s-Razor compactions of the theory gave us that. It happens that in physics, that is the role filled by a theory of observables, measurement, and related concepts. To report what they can about which state pertains in a particular instance. The classical mechanics version of those concepts is one in which they are sufficient to identify the state. The quantum mechanics version of the concepts is one in which they are not.

Now the discussion which followed your post was so far above my head, that I wasn’t sure the extent to which it addressed the following: To what extent do you-all think the vagaries of quantum phenomena are properly generalized to the macro level?

I think I would try to avoid “vagaries”, and would be wary of conversations in which I didn’t know how to put some other better word in its place. I don’t mean this as a criticism at all; only a statement that some things I know I have to put off to another day, or do jointly with somebody else. That’s life.

Quantum states can be superpositions. For such states, it is, by a well-understood construction, meaningless to speak of their “having” any definite value for certain kinds of observables (which depend on what case we are talking about, but for which there is no difficulty of being specific). Heisenberg uncertainty is a special instance of this relation as well, for which a superposition with respect to one observable happens to coincide with a specific value of a different one. The name is unfortunate. An infinitely extended radio wave can have an arbitrarily well-defined wavelength, and correspondingly can have exactly no specific location associated with it. It is not that we can’t “know” the position that the “wave really has”, it is that the syntactically acceptable construct “position of the wave” doesn’t actually refer to anything in the real world. Such is the hazard of trying to get from syntax to meaning; colorless green dreams sleep furiously. I assume this is why the project of Montague Grammar was never tenable, though the exercise and its failure were useful and informative.

But this is also why, when you say “I was trying to make a logical point”, I see the difference of philosophers from physicists. Logic seems to me like a syntactic exercise. (But I am not a logician, so what I said could have been offensively ignorant.). We build logics for semantic motivations, and try to use them to systematize thinking. But the hold they have on the world is mediated by the semantics of the referents for their tokens. Physicists, I would say, should share the trait that they generally expect those referents to turn over routinely.

I hear a lot of talk among social scientists to the effect that now that we have quantum theory, we can’t do psychology, which talk I take to be obscurantist blather.

I agree. See the earlier post about Smolin versus Aaronson. Some people use common language to show you how smart they are; others use it to give you a tool to become smarter yourself. We do the best we can to identify who is who, in areas we can’t referee on our own.

Eric

Do I need to be pistol-whipped on that point, too?

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 2:22 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

> I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience that we would never know. That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.

I think this requires care. Never wanting to defend the positions of people I don’t know in a conversation I wasn’t in, it would be helpful to know what topic the conversation was about, in the terms the participants applied to it.

Since physics has existed as a mathematical science (let’s say, since Newton?), it has employed a notation of “state” of a system.

Also since that time, it has employed a notion of the “observable properties” (shortened to just “observables”) somehow associated with the system’s states.

In classical physics, the concept of state was identical to that of a collection of values assigned to some sufficiently complete set of observables, and which observables made up the set could be chosen without regard to which particular state they were characterizing.

aka in common language, anything inherent in the concept of a state was just the value of an observable, meaning something knowable by somebody who bothered to measure it.

In quantum mechanics, physics still has notions of states and observables.

Now, however, the notion of state is _not_ coextensive with a set of values assigned to a complete (but not over-complete) set of observables, which one could declare in advance without regard to which state is being characterized.

To my view, the least important consequence of this change is that the state may not be knowable by us, even in principle, though that is the case. (To many others, this is its most important consequence. But the reason I shake that red cape before a herd of bulls is so that I can say…)

The important consequence of this understanding is that we have mathematical formalizations of the concept of state and of observable, and they are two different kinds of concept. It is precisely that both can be defined, that the theory needs both to function in its complete form, and that the definitions are different, that expands our understanding of concepts of state and observable. A state still does the main things states have always done in quantitative physical theories, and in the sense that they characterize our “attainable knowledge”, observables do what they have always done. Before, the two jobs had been coextensive; now they are not.

I assume Shakespeare wrote the “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” line about the same phenomenon as the thing that makes the Copernical revolution a revolution: people fight to give up importance they believed they had, or control they believed they had. Once the fight is in the culture, there may not be that emotional motive in all the combatants; they may believe they have a logical problem with the revolution. But how can there be a logical problem with the Copernican revolution? It is a statement about the alignments of beliefs and facts. Likewise the concepts of state and observable in quantum mechanics.

It feels like a Copernican revolution to me, every time physics shows that new operational understandings are required, and tries to give us new language habits in which to coordinate our minds (singly or jointly) around them, to pose the question how this was known all along in our folk language and thus can be logically analyzed with its categories. There is only very limited reason for our folk language to furnish “a description” of the nature of the world. It is a collection of symbols that are part of “the system of us”, which when exchanged or imagined mediate coordination of our states of mind (and yes, I know this term can be objected to from some behaviorist points of view, but it seems to require much less flexibility to use provisionally than the state of a quantum system, even though it is also much less well-understood at present). If a collection of robot vacuum cleaners exchange little pulse sequences of infrared light to coordinate, so they don’t re-vacuum the same spot, we might anticipate that there is a limited implicit representation of the furniture of the room and its occupants in the pulse sequences, but we would not expect them to furnish a description of the robots’ engineering, or the physical world, or much else. Human language is somewhat richer than that, but it seems to me the default assumption should be that its interpretation suffers the same fundamental hazard. Signals exchanged as part of a system should not be expected to furnish a valid empirical description _of_ the system.

Common language is fraught with that hazard in unknown degrees and dimensions; technical language can also be fraught, but we try to build in debuggers to be better at finding the errors or gaps and doing a better-than-random job of fixing them.

The fluidity and flexibility with which the mind can take on new habits of language use, and the only-partial degree to which that cognitive capability is coupled to emotional comfort or discomfort in different habits, seems important to me in trying to understand how people argue about science.

Eric

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David Eric Smith

Re: A Question For Tomorrow

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Okay, one last, and then I die, having created as much chaos in the world as it was my place to create.

On May 1, 2019, at 8:09 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

The Schrodinger's cat can be both dead and un-dead, but I cannot know a thing and not know it, except by equivocating on the meaning of "know”.

Careful here. You used the word “be” — are you sure you know what that was supposed to stand for?

You used the word “I” when you spoke of knowing a thing and not knowing it — are you sure you know what that “I” stands for? Meaning, are you sure you know what kinds of “I” are capable of existing in this physical universe? This was the Wigner’s Friend conversation for which Aaronson’s blog is good to clear the fog: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3975

I am not recommending _equivocation_ on the meaning of “know”. I understand that any sentence can be unraveled, and the whole edifice of conversation destroyed, by constantly objecting “what is ‘is’?”, “what is ‘what’?” etc. People who want to be annoying do that, and I can’t (or won’t) deal with them. What I am proposing is that, in some cases, we suddenly realize we can put some definite better thing in place of the usage habit we had heretofore. Then the project of realizing that we didn’t know the constraints on good usage of a term is not meant to unravel conversation, but to incrementally raise it. We continue to use all the rest provisionally, understanding that it is all fragile, but moving on until we find the next place we an make a concrete change for the better.

I don't think quantum theory applies to logic in the familiar world. Or does it? Am I wrong to be bloody minded about people who bring "lessons from quantum theory" into day-to-day macro-world scientific arguments?

Presumably all these languages are coarse-grained. Whether one or another rule applies (even if it was shown to apply somewhere) will depend on whether the tokens that require it are retained under the coarse-graining, or are replaced by other aggregate tokens to which the same rules do not apply. Case by case.

Moriturus te saluto

Eric

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 10:10 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Nick -

That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.

Did you just exclude the law of the excluded middle? How very human of you!

"How do we explain consciousness?" in any way that is not inane.
(Geez, was that a quadruple negative?)
And a 4 dimensional version of same?

- Steve

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: A Question For Tomorrow

In reply to this post by David Eric Smith

Eric writes:

< 4. The values of those microscopic observables can evolve jointly with values of more complicated large-actor observables that we describe as apparatus measuring spins etc., and the branches of the large-actor state vector can evolve to have no coherence; but that evolution is still all under the same local Hamiltonian. >

< There is no instantaneous dynamics that “creates” these correlations at the time of the measurement, the presence or absence of correlations was generated as a feature of the state vector, locally, when the EPR pair was produced, and they evolved locally with consequences for the possible correlations among macro-actors since. I guess whether this bothers you depends on whether you view the phases over which one averages to compute the coherence or decoherence as “properties” somehow of degrees of freedom at distinct locations. >

Being a gearhead, I look at from the perspective of a distributed computing problem. Classical supercomputers are limited in their effective size by the speed of light. If it takes longer to share a computation result than to do it locally, then there’s no point in scaling out. Here we have new rules where the local Hamiltonian can be copied elsewhere without a cost. It’s like having an infinite dimensional communication fabric. (Assuming it was possible to engineer a system where one could isolate or outrun entanglement with the environment and assuming that measurement could be deferred until the desired evolution had completed.)

Marcus

David Eric Smith

Re: A Question For Tomorrow

On May 2, 2019, at 8:21 AM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric writes:

< 4. The values of those microscopic observables can evolve jointly with values of more complicated large-actor observables that we describe as apparatus measuring spins etc., and the branches of the large-actor state vector can evolve to have no coherence; but that evolution is still all under the same local Hamiltonian. >

< There is no instantaneous dynamics that “creates” these correlations at the time of the measurement, the presence or absence of correlations was generated as a feature of the state vector, locally, when the EPR pair was produced, and they evolved locally with consequences for the possible correlations among macro-actors since. I guess whether this bothers you depends on whether you view the phases over which one averages to compute the coherence or decoherence as “properties” somehow of degrees of freedom at distinct locations. >

Being a gearhead, I look at from the perspective of a distributed computing problem. Classical supercomputers are limited in their effective size by the speed of light. If it takes longer to share a computation result than to do it locally, then there’s no point in scaling out. Here we have new rules where the local Hamiltonian can be copied elsewhere without a cost. It’s like having an infinite dimensional communication fabric. (Assuming it was possible to engineer a system where one could isolate or outrun entanglement with the environment and assuming that measurement could be deferred until the desired evolution had completed.)

Yes, this seems exactly right. I feel like we have all become accustomed to thinking only in relatively small numbers. Quantum computers are going to require that we start learning to think in terms of really really large numbers (your ‘infinite dimensional communication fabric”). I have a somewhat pleasant anticipation of what it will feel like to start developing an intuition for that space, though sadly I am old enough, and far enough behind, that most of that experience will forever be out of my reach.

Eric

gepr

Imposter complex (was: A Question For Tomorrow)

In reply to this post by David Eric Smith

On 5/1/19 10:55 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> I agree. See the earlier post about Smolin versus Aaronson. Some people use common language to show you how smart they are; others use it to give you a tool to become smarter yourself. We do the best we can to identify who is who, in areas we can’t referee on our own.

My schizotypy kicked in when I read this last night. First, I reacted like a choir member. "Yes! Amen!" Then I thought, "Oh sh¡t. Maybe I'm the former. What am I doing with my life?" Then I thought, "Nah. Eric's just wrong. The dichotomy is false. Everyone engages in a little of both from context to context." But then I thought, "Hey, this sounds like the problems I had when I was hired into a dot-com after Swarm Corp failed."

Taking a mid- to high-level technical position after your company fails can be difficult. I was hired as part "information architect" and part "engineering manager", neither of which I felt good at, or even really understood what those words meant. The person who hired me said I was suffering from "imposter complex", which when I just now googled it, seems to be better termed "imposter syndrome". I still don't know if that was true, then, or is even true now. After I get a pint in me, I invoke Dunning-Kruger and believe my doubts are evidence that I'm competent enough to avoid over-estimating my competence.

But I don't have a similar trick to reflectively police my own rhetoric and distinguish when I've been talking to "show how smart I am" versus talking to contribute to the competence of everyone involved. I used to keep a diary (well, a "journal" because men aren't supposed to keep diaries). And it was relatively obvious re-reading what I'd wrote where I'd been childish or self-centered in an entry versus thoughtful and productive. Even if I still kept a journal, though, such discrimination was only in hind-sight. It would be good to have Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) style discriminators that could be applied in real-time.

Anyone have any suggestions?

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Imposter complex (was: A Question For Tomorrow)

Glen writes:

< The person who hired me said I was suffering from "imposter complex", which when I just now googled it, seems to be better termed "imposter syndrome". >

Isn't it possible this person was suffering from Inflated Self-esteem Syndrome? At our house, there is a constant competition to imagine the worst-case scenarios rather than interesting opportunities. My expertise in that area doesn't focus so much on health issues, but on potential sequences of negative events that are inevitable attractors. To counter the other, I'm in the habit of attaching `syndrome' to every possible condition -- empty stomach syndrome, neurotransmitter depletion syndrome, achy knee syndrome, and so on. It usually is not appreciated.

Marcus

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Nick Thompson

Re: Imposter complex (was: A Question For Tomorrow)

In reply to this post by gepr

Glen,

Here's a test. After one makes a contribution, do other people make contributions? The poster's motives don't really make a difference, if the post moves the discussion forward.

Also, does posting move the POSTER'S thinking forward. If being "the smartest person in in the room" from time to time helps you (one) to get one's thoughts together and move forward, then go for it!

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen?C
Sent: Thursday, May 02, 2019 8:56 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: [FRIAM] Imposter complex (was: A Question For Tomorrow)

On 5/1/19 10:55 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> I agree. See the earlier post about Smolin versus Aaronson. Some people use common language to show you how smart they are; others use it to give you a tool to become smarter yourself. We do the best we can to identify who is who, in areas we can’t referee on our own.

My schizotypy kicked in when I read this last night. First, I reacted like a choir member. "Yes! Amen!" Then I thought, "Oh sh¡t. Maybe I'm the former. What am I doing with my life?" Then I thought, "Nah. Eric's just wrong. The dichotomy is false. Everyone engages in a little of both from context to context." But then I thought, "Hey, this sounds like the problems I had when I was hired into a dot-com after Swarm Corp failed."

Taking a mid- to high-level technical position after your company fails can be difficult. I was hired as part "information architect" and part "engineering manager", neither of which I felt good at, or even really understood what those words meant. The person who hired me said I was suffering from "imposter complex", which when I just now googled it, seems to be better termed "imposter syndrome". I still don't know if that was true, then, or is even true now. After I get a pint in me, I invoke Dunning-Kruger and believe my doubts are evidence that I'm competent enough to avoid over-estimating my competence.

But I don't have a similar trick to reflectively police my own rhetoric and distinguish when I've been talking to "show how smart I am" versus talking to contribute to the competence of everyone involved. I used to keep a diary (well, a "journal" because men aren't supposed to keep diaries). And it was relatively obvious re-reading what I'd wrote where I'd been childish or self-centered in an entry versus thoughtful and productive. Even if I still kept a journal, though, such discrimination was only in hind-sight. It would be good to have Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) style discriminators that could be applied in real-time.

Anyone have any suggestions?

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Imposter complex (was: A Question For Tomorrow)

I thought of this remark from Temple Grandin, “What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool? You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing, and not getting anything done.” Well, that’s probably wrong for several reasons, but the objective of communication isn’t just to continue talking.

On 5/2/19, 9:37 AM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen,

Here's a test. After one makes a contribution, do other people make contributions? The poster's motives don't really make a difference, if the post moves the discussion forward.

Also, does posting move the POSTER'S thinking forward. If being "the smartest person in in the room" from time to time helps you (one) to get one's thoughts together and move forward, then go for it!

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen?C

Sent: Thursday, May 02, 2019 8:56 AM

To: [hidden email]

Subject: [FRIAM] Imposter complex (was: A Question For Tomorrow)

On 5/1/19 10:55 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:

> I agree. See the earlier post about Smolin versus Aaronson. Some people use common language to show you how smart they are; others use it to give you a tool to become smarter yourself. We do the best we can to identify who is who, in areas we can’t referee on our own.

My schizotypy kicked in when I read this last night. First, I reacted like a choir member. "Yes! Amen!" Then I thought, "Oh sh¡t. Maybe I'm the former. What am I doing with my life?" Then I thought, "Nah. Eric's just wrong. The dichotomy is false. Everyone engages in a little of both from context to context." But then I thought, "Hey, this sounds like the problems I had when I was hired into a dot-com after Swarm Corp failed."

Taking a mid- to high-level technical position after your company fails can be difficult. I was hired as part "information architect" and part "engineering manager", neither of which I felt good at, or even really understood what those words meant. The person who hired me said I was suffering from "imposter complex", which when I just now googled it, seems to be better termed "imposter syndrome". I still don't know if that was true, then, or is even true now. After I get a pint in me, I invoke Dunning-Kruger and believe my doubts are evidence that I'm competent enough to avoid over-estimating my competence.

But I don't have a similar trick to reflectively police my own rhetoric and distinguish when I've been talking to "show how smart I am" versus talking to contribute to the competence of everyone involved. I used to keep a diary (well, a "journal" because men aren't supposed to keep diaries). And it was relatively obvious re-reading what I'd wrote where I'd been childish or self-centered in an entry versus thoughtful and productive. Even if I still kept a journal, though, such discrimination was only in hind-sight. It would be good to have Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) style discriminators that could be applied in real-time.

Anyone have any suggestions?

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gepr

Re: Imposter complex

On 5/2/19 8:30 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:> Glen writes:
> Isn't it possible this person was suffering from Inflated Self-esteem Syndrome?

Yes, he most certainly was accused of that by my peers, most of whom did not appreciate his optimism. But whatever his attributes, his claim was provocative and lead me to what I think are useful ways of thinking about my productivity. And to your later point, I've failed to give him feedback about how useful his claim was to me. So, he would not be able to judge *his* usefulness based on continued conversation (or posting, were it an e-forum). Re: X-syndrome. I've used something similar with Renee' and her sisters. It's called "White's Syndrome" because their surname is White. 8^)

On 5/2/19 8:37 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:> Glen,
> Here's a test. After one makes a contribution, do other people make contributions? [...]
> Also, does posting move the POSTER'S thinking forward. [...]

Thanks! An asynchronous forum like this list isn't really what I was asking about, though. It functions a bit like a diary in that I can go back and check to see if I was on topic, if my words had productive effect (likely not), etc. And as Marcus points out, there are too many diverse reasons why a post would not receive a response. Plus, everyone on this list is smarter than I am and I have no pretensions otherwise. But in meatspace conversations, many of the people I hang out with can be intimidated by jargonal language that I can *fake* familiarity with. (One bio-modeler even commented on how well I pronounce things like "mitochondrial damage" and such ... knowing that we're both just dorks struggling to extract requirements from biologists.) I compensate by, in real-time, telling them straight up that I don't really know what I'm talking about. But that doesn't work very well. They don't believe me. What works best is to "code switch" and try to get a cold read on their vocabulary, *then* restrict whatever I say to their vocabulary (and idioms). But that's difficult to maintain. It would be nice to have real-time, meatspace tricks to do that and other things I haven't thought of.

On 5/2/19 8:53 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Well, that’s probably wrong for several reasons, but the objective of communication isn’t just to continue talking.

Yes. I'm not an academic, scholar, or writer. But the conversations here and elsewhere, even if I don't participate, help organize my world-view into something useful.
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Nick Thompson

Re: A Question For Tomorrow

In reply to this post by David Eric Smith

Thanks, Eric, for taking my thoughts point-by-point.

I also want to re-introduce this

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3975

into the discussion. When I got done reading it, I figured my ox had been gored, but I wasn’t sure by what. I hope others can clarify.

One thing is clear: I ain’t the smartest person in THIS room. So, allow me to retreat to Peirce. It is Peirce’s view that what marks science as a faith that rigorous experience and honest conversation must lead to convergence and that ever scientists works to be the person who arrives first at the place that opinion, in the very long run, where science will converge. It seems to follow (for me) that this faith requires us either to understand one another or to trust one another. So, there are going to be occasions when I just have to trust, say, David Eric Smith, to tell me how things are, even if I don’t understand how he got that result.

I irrationally rebel against this conclusion. I treat it as a failure on my part when I give up hope of understanding something (like quantum mechanics) AND I treat it as a failure on my part when somebody gives up hope of understanding something that I am trying to explain. My instincts tell me that the loss of ANY person to a conversation is like a death and I will let Donne take it from there.

No thinker is an island, entire of itself,

Every thinker is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

If any thinker be washed away from this conversation,

Knowledge is the less, as well as if an entire department were

As well as if one’s favorite authority were.

Every participant’s failure to understand diminishes me,

Because I am involved in the conversation.

Yes, I know it’s stupid. I still believe it.

Nick

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, May 01, 2019 11:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Hi Nick, in turn,

On May 1, 2019, at 5:15 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

I knew I would get my ears boxed for this:

Not boxed; just conversed with.

I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience that we would never know. That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.

Others have met you at the high level of your response, so I will now confess that I was making a small logical point. In the first place, “things beyond experience that we could never know” IS a tautology, right.

So, that expression is merely to say that there are things we may never know. Ok. That’s fine. But when you go on to say that nature is determined by unknowable causes that’s an oxymoron. To the extent that anything is caused, by whatever means, it reveals its causes in its behavior. To the extent that events are random, no cause is revealed and no cause exists.

Now the discussion which followed your post was so far above my head, that I wasn’t sure the extent to which it addressed the following: To what extent do you-all think the vagaries of quantum phenomena are properly generalized to the macro level?

I hear a lot of talk among social scientists to the effect that now that we have quantum theory, we can’t do psychology, which talk I take to be obscurantist blather.

Eric

Do I need to be pistol-whipped on that point, too?

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 2:22 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

> I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience that we would never know. That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.

I think this requires care. Never wanting to defend the positions of people I don’t know in a conversation I wasn’t in, it would be helpful to know what topic the conversation was about, in the terms the participants applied to it.

Since physics has existed as a mathematical science (let’s say, since Newton?), it has employed a notation of “state” of a system.

Also since that time, it has employed a notion of the “observable properties” (shortened to just “observables”) somehow associated with the system’s states.

In classical physics, the concept of state was identical to that of a collection of values assigned to some sufficiently complete set of observables, and which observables made up the set could be chosen without regard to which particular state they were characterizing.

aka in common language, anything inherent in the concept of a state was just the value of an observable, meaning something knowable by somebody who bothered to measure it.

In quantum mechanics, physics still has notions of states and observables.

Now, however, the notion of state is _not_ coextensive with a set of values assigned to a complete (but not over-complete) set of observables, which one could declare in advance without regard to which state is being characterized.

To my view, the least important consequence of this change is that the state may not be knowable by us, even in principle, though that is the case. (To many others, this is its most important consequence. But the reason I shake that red cape before a herd of bulls is so that I can say…)

The important consequence of this understanding is that we have mathematical formalizations of the concept of state and of observable, and they are two different kinds of concept. It is precisely that both can be defined, that the theory needs both to function in its complete form, and that the definitions are different, that expands our understanding of concepts of state and observable. A state still does the main things states have always done in quantitative physical theories, and in the sense that they characterize our “attainable knowledge”, observables do what they have always done. Before, the two jobs had been coextensive; now they are not.

I assume Shakespeare wrote the “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” line about the same phenomenon as the thing that makes the Copernical revolution a revolution: people fight to give up importance they believed they had, or control they believed they had. Once the fight is in the culture, there may not be that emotional motive in all the combatants; they may believe they have a logical problem with the revolution. But how can there be a logical problem with the Copernican revolution? It is a statement about the alignments of beliefs and facts. Likewise the concepts of state and observable in quantum mechanics.

It feels like a Copernican revolution to me, every time physics shows that new operational understandings are required, and tries to give us new language habits in which to coordinate our minds (singly or jointly) around them, to pose the question how this was known all along in our folk language and thus can be logically analyzed with its categories. There is only very limited reason for our folk language to furnish “a description” of the nature of the world. It is a collection of symbols that are part of “the system of us”, which when exchanged or imagined mediate coordination of our states of mind (and yes, I know this term can be objected to from some behaviorist points of view, but it seems to require much less flexibility to use provisionally than the state of a quantum system, even though it is also much less well-understood at present). If a collection of robot vacuum cleaners exchange little pulse sequences of infrared light to coordinate, so they don’t re-vacuum the same spot, we might anticipate that there is a limited implicit representation of the furniture of the room and its occupants in the pulse sequences, but we would not expect them to furnish a description of the robots’ engineering, or the physical world, or much else. Human language is somewhat richer than that, but it seems to me the default assumption should be that its interpretation suffers the same fundamental hazard. Signals exchanged as part of a system should not be expected to furnish a valid empirical description _of_ the system.

Common language is fraught with that hazard in unknown degrees and dimensions; technical language can also be fraught, but we try to build in debuggers to be better at finding the errors or gaps and doing a better-than-random job of fixing them.

The fluidity and flexibility with which the mind can take on new habits of language use, and the only-partial degree to which that cognitive capability is coupled to emotional comfort or discomfort in different habits, seems important to me in trying to understand how people argue about science.

Eric

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gepr

Re: A Question For Tomorrow

In reply to this post by gepr

Ha! Reading and comprehension are 2 different things. I read a lot and understand almost nothing. So, there's that. But thanks for acknowledging whatever effort I do put in.

Let me try a more pragmatic rhetoric. Marcus' story about debugging a GGC is useful, here. I spend all day, every day, mapping whatever nonsense I (or my client's grad students) programmed into a simulation. The task of "verification", ensuring you programmed in what you intended to program in, is wrenchingly debilitating, I think. I don't know if you can replicate this "lived experience" elsewhere, with other tools/products. But I assume you can. I mentioned my friend and his foray into fermentation food/drink. One of the reasons fermenting bread was so interesting was because bread making is (apparently, I wouldn't really know) chock full of folk knowledge, with LESS science embedded than, say, beer fermenting. Of course, I'm talking about artisinal bread and artisanal beer, not the macro stuff like Wonder and Coors, where their maker experience is probably something like Unilever, with huge vats of various types of sauces, engineered to tight specifications. In any case, I long ago abandoned 5 gallon batches of beer because the turn-around time for making and drinking was too long. To get good at small batches, you need to iterate A LOT... and fast.

Cellular Automata are similar. Sure, there's a disconnect between the rules you program in and the pretty pictures you see in the output. But anyone who does it a lot, will develop this ENGINEER homunculus. The result is no less marvelous. But it's a different kind of marvelous, a manipulate-observe, manipulate-observe ... engineering marvelous ... and definitely *not* "emergent*, whatever that may mean.

On 5/4/19 12:07 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> You are a hero in the reading department. I don't think anybody on the list reads as much of what is sent him as do you. I am very grateful for it. The Alphabet Soup Model is for fun, so you can skip that. Or, it would take you 3 minutes of looking at the illustrations and grabbing the premise to get the meat out of it.
>
> I am still puzzled by your response concerning cellular automata. Maybe it's my response I am puzzled by. Or Lee's aphoristic analogy. It just seems to me any mystery of consciousness can wait until we have figured out how we feel about emergence in cellular automata. Does the fact that we feel we understand it affect the fact that we are amazed by it? Does the fact that we are amazed by it mean that we really don't understand it? Would we be less amazed by Stonehenge if we knew how it was constructed?
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