A question for tomorrow
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I agree that the concepts of intuition or muscle memory apply to however mysterious one finds any given phenomenon. But we don't need deep mysteries like nonlocal entanglement for that. We can merely compare someone who knows how to write an equation for ballistic trajectories versus someone who can catch a high fly. Knowing the spells is not the same as having a hands-on understanding. There's no surprise there.
But what's odd, to me, is that people think that either (or both, or the many) ways of knowing are somehow *more real* (or more basic, or closer, or whatever) than other ways of knowing. Why do people seek this (as Eric puts it) emotional comfort with their ways of knowing? On 4/30/19 2:40 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > Experiment seems to address but not resolve experience to me. How can this <https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.6136> be more than an wizard’s elaborate spell? Don’t basic questions like whether there is randomness in the universe matter? If not, what _/does/_ matter? Just knowing the spells? > > A not insignificant, but minor issue to me is the difference between fast and slow thinking. There’s a difference between a taxi driver taking me across London through dozens of small and large streets and me following GPS to do the same. The taxi driver can holistically see the route from hundreds of other possible routes. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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
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Re: A Question For Tomorrow
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< 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. Marcus ============================================================ 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 |
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You're trolling me, aren't you? 8^) I can't help myself, though.
It's not an exclusive or you've laid out. Some of us will have fast memory that works well in common sense space and time. Some of us will have DSPs that work well in other conceptions (I'm thinking of Hawking, here). Etc. And while it's plausible that we stumble on innovative models (ways to think) that no human or animal could ever have had the means for programming their DSP, *eventually* [†] some clique of the population will develop DSPs for that way of thinking. I'm blind to the stumbling block you see, I guess. [†] Assuming we don't kill ourselves, of course. On 4/30/19 3:58 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > 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. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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
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Re: A Question For Tomorrow
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There are more people that catch fly balls than develop theories of physical information. I don't believe a well-funded liberal culture will change that. Maybe in a hundred or a thousand years if we are a reconfigurable species, a large part of the population will spend their days experiencing and manipulating physical phenomenon as first class thing using an extended nervous system. But as it is, the inputs are from a narrow range of temperatures & pressures and a tiny window of electromagnetic radiation. And cognitively, the short term workspace of a human is small and slow compared to even a simple computer.
On 4/30/19, 5:08 PM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣" <[hidden email] on behalf of [hidden email]> wrote: You're trolling me, aren't you? 8^) I can't help myself, though. It's not an exclusive or you've laid out. Some of us will have fast memory that works well in common sense space and time. Some of us will have DSPs that work well in other conceptions (I'm thinking of Hawking, here). Etc. And while it's plausible that we stumble on innovative models (ways to think) that no human or animal could ever have had the means for programming their DSP, *eventually* [†] some clique of the population will develop DSPs for that way of thinking. I'm blind to the stumbling block you see, I guess. [†] Assuming we don't kill ourselves, of course. On 4/30/19 3:58 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > 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. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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 ============================================================ 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 |
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Yes, I understand your skepticism. I even share it. But nothing you've said validates the dichotomy you laid out before. The wizard's spell sense you get from entanglement across 3 meters of space is a reflection of how you (yes, and most of us) model the world. Even if it's only like 5/7e9 people that have any intuition of how the other model(s) work(s), it's still not zero. And I suspect it's more than 5.
A pedestrian example is in how/why/what the kids love about Instagram and hate about Facebook ... or can listen to that gawdawful music they listen to. They're developing intuitions us old farts will never have. What's to say it won't also happen with QM effects? E.g. we're already (fairly) comfortable with the way transistors work, even if most of the modeling language in which they're used is classical. The distinction between the circuits-level language of use versus the underlying quantum properties of materials level language of transistor construction (again riffing off Eric's point) isn't near as crisp as it once was. That optimism does rely on a progressive society, though ... which looks unlikely at this point. On 4/30/19 4:34 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > There are more people that catch fly balls than develop theories of physical information. I don't believe a well-funded liberal culture will change that. Maybe in a hundred or a thousand years if we are a reconfigurable species, a large part of the population will spend their days experiencing and manipulating physical phenomenon as first class thing using an extended nervous system. But as it is, the inputs are from a narrow range of temperatures & pressures and a tiny window of electromagnetic radiation. And cognitively, the short term workspace of a human is small and slow compared to even a simple computer. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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
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Re: A Question For Tomorrow
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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.
On 4/30/19, 6:02 PM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣" <[hidden email] on behalf of [hidden email]> wrote: Yes, I understand your skepticism. I even share it. But nothing you've said validates the dichotomy you laid out before. The wizard's spell sense you get from entanglement across 3 meters of space is a reflection of how you (yes, and most of us) model the world. Even if it's only like 5/7e9 people that have any intuition of how the other model(s) work(s), it's still not zero. And I suspect it's more than 5. A pedestrian example is in how/why/what the kids love about Instagram and hate about Facebook ... or can listen to that gawdawful music they listen to. They're developing intuitions us old farts will never have. What's to say it won't also happen with QM effects? E.g. we're already (fairly) comfortable with the way transistors work, even if most of the modeling language in which they're used is classical. The distinction between the circuits-level language of use versus the underlying quantum properties of materials level language of transistor construction (again riffing off Eric's point) isn't near as crisp as it once was. That optimism does rely on a progressive society, though ... which looks unlikely at this point. On 4/30/19 4:34 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > There are more people that catch fly balls than develop theories of physical information. I don't believe a well-funded liberal culture will change that. Maybe in a hundred or a thousand years if we are a reconfigurable species, a large part of the population will spend their days experiencing and manipulating physical phenomenon as first class thing using an extended nervous system. But as it is, the inputs are from a narrow range of temperatures & pressures and a tiny window of electromagnetic radiation. And cognitively, the short term workspace of a human is small and slow compared to even a simple computer. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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 ============================================================ 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 |
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Tell me if I am wrong. When we read Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity by John Baez I had the impression that wormholes were mathematical fictions. Is hyperdeterminism some form of the idea that if you knew the position and momentum of every particle in the universe you could calculate the trajectory thereof for all time. 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 Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:33 PM 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. ============================================================ 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 |
Re: A Question For Tomorrow
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An invocation of superdeterminism would be in a double slit experiment that the particles are imagined to be synchronized in a deterministic fashion with the measurements (whether human or machine) who had to measure exactly when they did.
An inevitable consequence 13 billion years later. The randomness of a radioactive decay or a pseudo-number random number generator is all the same sort of thing. Want a different universe? Change your random seed and replay.. From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> Tell me if I am wrong. When we read Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity by John Baez I had the impression that wormholes were mathematical fictions. Is hyperdeterminism some form of the idea that if you knew the position and momentum of every
particle in the universe you could calculate the trajectory thereof for all time.
Frank ----------------------------------- On Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:33 PM Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ 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 |
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In reply to this post by David Eric Smith
Hi, Eric, and interlocutors, I knew I would get my ears boxed for this: 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. 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----- > 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 ============================================================ 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 ============================================================ 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 |
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Nick, If Hywel is correct we know a great deal about how gravity "behaves" but not what causes it. No one has ever observed a graviton, he said. Frank The quote marks are because we know how objects behave in a gravitational field. ----------------------------------- 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 Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 9:15 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ 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 |
Re: A Question For Tomorrow
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In reply to this post by Nick Thompson
Nick writes: “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.” The apparently random cause could have been mixed-in long ago, far out of scope from a contemporary experiment. So to understand the behavior, you’d have to go back in time and follow everything (sub-atomically) that followed. It doesn’t
mean there is no cause, just that it is meaningless in practice to talk about it – it is too far away. Marcus ============================================================ 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 |
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In reply to this post by Nick Thompson
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 ============================================================ 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 |
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In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2
Frank, But when we do find out what gravity is, it will be from the study of the things it causes; and if it caused nothing, we would find out nothing, right? Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly Nick, If Hywel is correct we know a great deal about how gravity "behaves" but not what causes it. No one has ever observed a graviton, he said. Frank The quote marks are because we know how objects behave in a gravitational field. ----------------------------------- On Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 9:15 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ 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 |
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In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels
Marcus, Is this the butterfly-flap argument in another form? Ok, I am improvising here: Let us say that a group of tourists goes to camp under Standing Rock, a geological formation known for its apparent precariousness. Unbeknownst to the campers and the park rangers, erosion due to a rainstorm the previous night had undermined the foundation of the rock, leaving as precarious as it looked. During the night, a mouse walked out on the rock, and leaning over to peer at the sleeping campers below, tipped over the rock, crushing the tourists. (We Santa Feans are given to ghoulish tourist stories.) Brought to trial, the mouse’s lawyer claimed that the mouse’s responsible, while not zero, was so small with respect to the other causal forces involved as to be negligible. The mouse was acquitted. Moral: Some causes are so small as to not be worth talking about. I think this is a crappy argument, but I had fun writing it. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels Nick writes: “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.” The apparently random cause could have been mixed-in long ago, far out of scope from a contemporary experiment. So to understand the behavior, you’d have to go back in time and follow everything (sub-atomically) that followed. It doesn’t mean there is no cause, just that it is meaningless in practice to talk about it – it is too far away. Marcus ============================================================ 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 |
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In reply to this post by Steve Smith
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". 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?
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 ============================================================ 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 ============================================================ 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 |
Re: A Question For Tomorrow
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Uncertainty means that every scenario must be considered. Surely you've had to run experiments where there was missing data (like a superposition state) and surely you've had to use p-values? Or are you saying there is a property of quantum systems beyond probability that seems irrelevant to you?
On 5/1/19, 12:09 AM, "Friam on behalf of Nick Thompson" <[hidden email] on behalf of [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". 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? 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 ============================================================ 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 ============================================================ 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 ============================================================ 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 |
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In reply to this post by gepr
Hi, again, Glen, This Article, published in the 70's, will show that my materialist affiliations go way back. Please let me know if the link doesn’t work. My children, who are now pushing sixty, admit that I have become a somewhat better cook. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- I struggled to find the proper branch of the thread-tree to place this post. But I decided to do it, here, because your invocation of "organism" confirms my bias. The inclusion of "consciousness" is a red herring, I think. And the expansion to "relations between entities", including "triads" is nice-to-have icing, but unnecessary[†]. The important part is, as Marcus pointed out with self-driving cars, and I tried to affirm, the glove *knows* hands just like a pattern recognizing AI knows the patterns it's been programmed to recognize. We've demonstrated that knowledge can be instantiated into objects/machines/animals/people. The term we use for that is "specific intelligence" these days, in order to distinguish those tasks/jobs that are straightforward to automate. Those difficult to automate jobs require general intelligence (GI). The attribute of our current examples of GIs (animals and maybe even plants) that we long settled on is "alive" and the common term for the machines that exhibit GI is "organism". So I struggle to find a unique question in this thread that does NOT boil down to "what is life?" What am I missing? Why are we talking about all these abstract things like "monism", "mind", "knowledge", "experience", "consciousness", and all that malarkey instead of the more biologically established things? How is this thread NOT about biology? [†] The common term "ecology" and the pairwise, triadic, ..., N-ary, relations it implies seems sufficient without diving into semiotic hermeneutics. On 4/27/19 11:10 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: > As we talk, here, I am beginning to wonder if the minimal conditions for a ‘knowing” require co=ordination between two organisms. ============================================================ 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 ============================================================ 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 |
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In reply to this post by Nick Thompson
We already know what it causes. The question is, how does it accomplish "action-at-a-distance"? There are explanations of other such phenomena. Particles sent back and forth, etc. Ask Hywel for details. Perhaps he left some notes. Or has an equivalent Oracle on the list. 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 Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 11:46 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ 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 |
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I did find notes from Hywel but they are too long to send to Friam. Perhaps they could be put on a server. I will see if they say enough about gravity to make that worthwhile. 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, 6:27 AM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ 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 |
Re: A Question For Tomorrow
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Frank writes: “The question is, how does it accomplish "action-at-a-distance"? There are explanations of other such phenomena. Particles sent back and forth, etc.” Particles travelling at 10,000 times the speed of light? https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.0614 Marcus ============================================================ 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 |
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