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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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I'm recordingTimeless but haven't seen 12 Monkeys on TV, but saw the movie, I will now!
You will like Frequency on TV, http://www.cwtv.com/shows/frequency/
Like Timeless if you change one thing in the past it changes the future!
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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A few themes on this thread:
The ordinary world is not what it appears to be.
There are ways to move your mind into different modes of perception.
The ordinary world can seem extraordinary.
(reprise)
The Gostak and the Doshes (1930)
Miles J. Breuer, M.D.
In this classic science fiction story, a mathematical physicist convinces his friend to try to travel into another dimension by merely altering the way he thinks about things.
In many mathematical SF stories, the math does nothing more than serve as a vaguely believable explanation for otherwise fantastical elements. However, I think that in this story it serves one other important purpose. It is also part of an analogy at the end which helps us to understand how the same mathematical object (a conic surface) can look very different depending on how you look at it. In this sense, it adds to the social commentary in a much deeper and more important way that just explaining how he got to the other universe...it allows us to see that it was not another universe at all but only the same one seen differently.
http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf690
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Stanislaw Lem had a theory about the paradoxes of fictional time travel.
EVEN THOUGH a circular causal structure may signalize a frivolous type of content, this does not mean that it is necessarily reduced to the construction of comic antinomies for the sake of pure entertainment. The causal circle may be employed not as the goal of the story, but as a means of visualizing certain theses, e.g. from the philosophy of history. Slonimaki's story of the Time Torpedo3 belongs here. It is a bedetristic assertion of the "ergoness" or ergodicity of history: monkeying with events which have had sad consequences does not bring about any improvement of history; instead of one group of disasters and wars there simply comes about another, in no way better set.
A diametrically opposed hypothesis, on the other hand, is incorporated into Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" (1952). In an excellently written short episode, a participant in a "safari for tyrannosaurs" tramples a butterfly and a couple of flowers, and by that microscopic act causes such perturbances of causal chains involving millions of years, that upon his return the English language has a different orthography and a different candidate not-- liberal but rather a kind of dictator-- has won in the presidential election. It is only a pity that Bradbury feels obliged to set in motion complicated and unconvincing explanations to account for the fact that hunting for reptiles, which indeed fall from shots, disturbs nothing in the causal chains, whereas the trampling of a tiny flower does (when a tyrannosaur drops to the ground, the quantity of ruined flowers must be greater than when the safari participant descends from a safety zone to the ground). "A Sound of Thunder" exemplifies an "anti-ergodic" hypothesis of history, as opposed to Slonimski's story. In a way, however, the two are reconcilable: History can as a whole be "ergodic" if not very responsive to local disturbances, and at the same time such exceptional hypersensitive points in the causal chains can exist, the vehement disturbance of which produces more intensive results. In personal affairs such a "hyperallergic point" would be, for example, a situation in which a car attempts to pass a truck at the same time that a second car is approaching from the opposite direction.
This appeared in a magazine some time back.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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The Sound of Thunder was a pretty good movie I thought. And, yes, the Butterfly Effect was in full swing. Lem argued that that effect wasn't necessarily universal. Some time ago I mentioned the rise of Hitler and that even if Hitler had been assassinated early in his career the social atmosphere would have produced another monster equally bad.
There might be a "dampening" process that would ameliorate substantial changes over a period of time, much like the butterfly effect might not exist to any noticeable degree in parts of a dynamical system. Certainly in the vicinity of an attracting fixed point only slight variations might occur.
Yes, no way to predict. We must be very, very careful in our time travel adventures.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Oct 10, 2016 - 03:27pm PT
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Ever since our founder, JL, presented the bait about a mysterious Metamind project I have attempted to track this effort to its source. Unsuccessfully it would appear. There is a commercial learning project, a business, having that moniker, but it does not seem to fit the description.
Here is a Radin line of inquiry:
http://noetic.org/research/projects/markov-chain
But this doesn't seem quite right either. You would think that an effort to recruit 3,000 participants, with little or no written material, would find its way onto the internet in some fashion.
This is a deep issue and we need the Wizard to toss out a few more clues.
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Oct 10, 2016 - 04:15pm PT
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Oct 10, 2016 - 08:54pm PT
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And try to get a plumber on the weekend.
I owe The Wizard five dollars.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Oct 10, 2016 - 10:18pm PT
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The Wizard has a mind of his own. It's just that he can't decide what it is.
Neither can we.
But one day . . .
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WBraun
climber
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Oct 11, 2016 - 07:49am PT
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The "mind" is Universal.
Every living entity is part parcel of that complete whole "mind".
Every living entity has all the qualities of that complete whole but not the quantity.
According to the living entities developed consciousness determines how much of the quantity of the whole mind it can understand.
That consciousness will also determine the development of its material body/s .....
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Oct 11, 2016 - 08:32am PT
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Looks like we lost Ed (he's taking a hiatus from ST for a month apparently), I was going to ask him to opine on Carroll's idea (Carroll's a fellow physicist), fundamental to his philos of science book (The Big Picture) btw, that different levels of science require / invoke not only different vocabularies but moreover different ways of talking; and (b) Carroll's claims that each of these "ways of talking" have their place and that it's useful/helpful to wider understanding (not to mention less argument and less misunderstanding) both in and out of science and philos of science to be cognizant of this communications phenomenon and to try to hone one's skills in moving/negotiating between these different levels.
I'll try to remember to ask later.
eg areas... (1) choice (the power of choosing); decision-making (2) causality (causation) (3) freedoms (freedom of the will) in a mechanistic, rule-bound universe
I'm not a political junkie. But I am passionate about culture else civilization if not the humanities so this draws me to (pay attention to and to participate in) politics - national, eg, also world - to the extent I have the wherewithal.
I've said it before... I wish more science types (scientists, scienteers) would take part. But maybe it's simply a case of... you can't squeeze blood from a turnip?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Oct 11, 2016 - 02:47pm PT
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. . . it adds to the social commentary in a much deeper and more important way that just explaining how he got to the other universe...it allows us to see that it was not another universe at all but only the same one seen differently
This sounds similar to Mike's comments.
However, by "seeing" the universe differently can we shift far enough so that physical laws change? Maybe the perceptions of those laws would change and they would appear to be different.
It would seem the Wizard may have given up his efforts to thwart scientism. Too bad we won't get Dr Ed's commentaries on physics. I could attempt to throw a bit of mathematics into the discussions, but the physical world is easier to comprehend than abstract math concepts. And being old and retired I'm not up on those either.
I think this thread - mostly non-political - offers a nice counterbalance to climbing threads. Shame to see it wither.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Oct 11, 2016 - 03:27pm PT
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Shame to see it wither.
Or just Nature taking its course.
I suspect the thread may yet be watered by the blood of wizards.
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Oct 11, 2016 - 03:48pm PT
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After the garden of Eden, we headed downward bound!
Ecclesiastes 1:11 There is no remembrance of earlier things;
And also of the later things which will occur,
There will be for them no remembrance
Among those who will come later still.
But there will be an end of time as we know it...
Mark 13:32 But of that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. 33 “Take heed, keep on the alert; for you do not know when the appointed time will come.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Oct 11, 2016 - 04:33pm PT
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If it's true and time only moves forward, it makes memory and writing alternative instruments to that flow, ways of avoiding that passage. Such an idea only adds to the realization what a remarkable thing a consciousness that allows such an ability is. Besides mind we might also ask what is memory and what is the nature of a recorded thought? And how is it that the mind comes to violate the forward flow of time?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Oct 11, 2016 - 04:40pm PT
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What is memory, Paul?
Electronics and information science, via flip flops, for eg, show that memory is physically realizable. Correct?
Carroll addresses a chapter to this. He refers to it as record(s) and recording (eg, memory).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_(electronics);
With electronics, info science, control engineering and neuroscience as background, it is but a small step, in principle, to conceive of a network of neurons as a flip flop circuit.
Today in principle, tomorrow in a culture dish under a microscope?
....
The President in Conversation With MIT’s Joi Ito and WIRED’s Scott Dadich
"IT’S HARD TO think of a single technology that will shape our world more in the next 50 years than artificial intelligence."
https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-mit-joi-ito-interview/
"There’s a distinction, which is probably familiar to a lot of your readers, between generalized AI and specialized AI. In science fiction, what you hear about is generalized AI, right? Computers start getting smarter than we are and eventually conclude that we’re not all that useful, and then either they’re drugging us to keep us fat and happy or we’re in the Matrix. My impression, based on talking to my top science advisers, is that we’re still a reasonably long way away from that. It’s worth thinking about because it stretches our imaginations and gets us thinking about the issues of choice and free will..." -Obama
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Oct 11, 2016 - 07:46pm PT
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Paul: From Wiki
This last phenomenon, called the "psychological arrow of time", has deep connections with Maxwell's demon and the physics of information; In fact, it is easy to understand its link to the Second Law of Thermodynamics if one views memory as correlation between brain cells (or computer bits) and the outer world. Since the Second Law of Thermodynamics is equivalent to the growth with time of such correlations, then it states that memory is created as we move towards the future (rather than towards the past)
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Oct 11, 2016 - 07:59pm PT
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Since the Second Law of Thermodynamics is equivalent to the growth with time of such correlations, then it states that memory is created as we move towards the future (rather than towards the past)
Muscle memory, practice over time, equals movement without contemplation, just action!
AKA Wired!!
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