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Thomas
Trad climber
The Tilted World
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Topic Author's Original Post - Aug 8, 2007 - 11:42pm PT
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What do you folks think of Dr. John Hagelin?
I recently came across a video on a dude's My Space page where he is relating the Unified Field Theory and its equation (I was not aware that scientists had arrived at a single equation yet--wasn't that supposed to be published on T-shirts?) to consciousness. He states: "The unified field is consciousness...Consciousness is the unified field...there is no other consciousness than the unified field."
Much of the physics that he describes appears to be legit, but some of the connections that he makes seem kind of far out. Any comments?
Just curious. I had never even heard of the guy until about 30 minutes ago.
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=613593
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Dude ran for President.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 12, 2007 - 05:18pm PT
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JS Hagelin had published legitimate physics through the 90's. He is a smart cookie who has become more and more involved understanding "conciousness."
He has a professional understanding of quantum mechanics (QM). Unfortunately the existence of "conciousness" has no simple explanation and probably not a consequence of the correctness of the physical theory of QM. The philosophical foundations of QM are notoriously difficult. Since it is the basis of the most accurate physical theory we have (Quantum Electro-Dymanics (QED), there is little doubt among physicists as to whether or not the theory is correct, it is.
Bohr's "Copenhagen" interpretation is the most widely discussed "foundation" of QM. But Pauli worried in letters to Heisenberg that there needed to some alternative explanations, they didn't come up with anything. There is a "many world's" view point, and other strange interpretations (see Bohm's book on QM), and reformulations (like using path integrals).
You can look at Wiki, which is pretty good description
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretation_of_quantum_mechanics
Many, probably most, physicists don't need to have an interpretation.... some actually think there might be something interesting there... put what ever that is, it is probably not physics.
If you ask me, I think it is easy to get too wrapped up in the whole issue. The use of QM to explain everything mystical is incorrect though. While it is "spooky" to use the characterization of Einstein (but not with the TM Herbert hand wobble), it works... at least in terms of explaining physical phenomena.
It's not the only place there is strange stuff going on... where does inertia come from?
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Aug 12, 2007 - 05:47pm PT
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Another question what do you fizzysist guys think of Oleg D. Jefimenko?
What about Carver Mead? Collective Electrodynamics
Roger Pendrose? The Road to Reality (now there's a book with a pompous sub title," A complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe" does seem to be a rather complete math book though) I can only soak it up in small doses but it does seem to be an understandable book so far.
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jstan
climber
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Aug 12, 2007 - 06:17pm PT
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Speaking only as a bystander:
It is Roger Penrose. QM is enough of a problem by itself. Good to be precise whenever nature allows us to be so.
When a grad student the only QM philosophy we heard was. "Shut up and compute." Unsatisfying but one sometimes must be practical. Fascinating, now that QM underpinnings have begun to be bandied about so widely, I have read highly placed challenges to the belief that the Copenhagen school argued for practicality as stated above. Frankly, I wouldn't know. I had zero idea where I was at the time, which I took as a good sign. It meant I was in fact getting someplace.
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Thomas
Trad climber
The Tilted World
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 12, 2007 - 08:34pm PT
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Thanks for taking the time to reply, Ed. Your insight is always appreciated.
jstan, what and where did you study? I can definitely relate to the "shut up and compute" order, even though it was usually in my geophysics class.
Cheers to all--enjoy the Perseids tonight!
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 12, 2007 - 09:50pm PT
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Roger Penrose is a first class mathematician and a physicist... but I think that a theory of consciousness will not be as clean as some fundamental theories in physics... conciousness emerges from the collective behaviour of groups of cells through an evolutionary process... and evolutionary developments are seldom clean designs.
Carver Mead - not sure why a different approach to QED is necessary, but who knows how it might be used... the Hamiltonian formulation of classical mechanics was essentially a curiosity when it was first developed, but provided essential insight when Quantum Mechanics needed it... also General Relativity... and the beautiful insight of Noether's theorem... all this to say that it is sometimes difficult to have historic perspective too soon.
Don't have any experience with Jefimenko... Heaviside gravity has testable consequences... which I'm not sure require the theory. On the other hand, I'm sure Jefimenko's formulation is consistent with observations, but once again, it seems somewhat irrelevant at the moment.
In some book or another Feynman writes down the formula for the universe:
⇑U = 0
Feynman goes on to say that all we need to figure out is U.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Aug 12, 2007 - 10:23pm PT
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Thanks!
To an old 'lectrician that wants to really understand what he's been working with all these years, Mead on a gut level makes sense. (till he gets into the vector notation and looses me) But, I don't really have the theoretical background to know if he's bark'in up the wrong tree.
I dont realy think QED has all that much relivance in the discussion of conciousness other than maybe provoking some novel approaches in biology, Strovener, "The Quantum Brain" etc.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Aug 13, 2018 - 08:32pm PT
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wie interessant
Heisser and Patil used the device to bend and twist hundreds of spaghetti sticks, and recorded the entire fragmentation process with a camera, at up to a million frames per second. In the end, they found that by first twisting the spaghetti at almost 360 degrees, then slowly bringing the two clamps together to bend it, the stick snapped exactly in two. The findings were consistent across two types of spaghetti: Barilla No. 5 and Barilla No. 7, which have slightly different diameters.
One million frames per second - could have even captured The Airplane doing
3/5's of a Mile in 10 Seconds
Do you suppose someone counted them?
As the frame rate increases, more and more of all human (and supra- and sub-human) experience can be recorded on film. As it approaches infinity? Only time will tell.
Don't forget your ©
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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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Aug 13, 2018 - 08:47pm PT
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While the spaghetti focus seems pretty whimsical, it would seem to be an important result that in hindsight is intuitive, and would have applications in structural design to have systems that break and fail in controlled ways to preserve life and property.
edit: I just set off my own b.s. meter... I have no experience-based idea whether this would have interesting structural applications (unless there are structural materials that have properties like spaghetti, which would seem to be a bad idea?)
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nafod
Boulder climber
State college
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Aug 14, 2018 - 05:01am PT
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If you’re looking for interesting puzzles, no need to tackle the meaning of the universe. Spaghetti will do.
I had a masters student base his thesis on stitch ripping devices, aka, screamers. We did experimental tests for rate dependence (none) along with hot, cold, wet, etc. Some funky things go on in friction systems. The shorty screamer concept came out of the work too.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 14, 2018 - 07:31am PT
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Crackling Dynamics in the Mechanical Response of Knitted Fabrics
Samuel Poincloux, Mokhtar Adda-Bedia, and Frédéric Lechenault
Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 058002 – Published 30 July 2018
Crackling noise, which occurs in a wide range of situations, is characterized by discrete events of various sizes, often correlated in the form of avalanches. We report experimental evidence that the mechanical response of a knitted fabric displays such broadly distributed events both in the force signal and in the deformation field, with statistics analogous to that of earthquakes or soft amorphous materials. A knit consists of a regular network of frictional contacts, linked by the elasticity of the yarn. When deformed, the fabric displays spatially extended avalanchelike yielding events resulting from collective interyarn contact slips. We measure the size distribution of these avalanches, at the stitch level from the analysis of nonelastic displacement fields and externally from force fluctuations. The two measurements yield consistent power law distributions reminiscent of those found in other avalanching systems. Our study shows that a knitted fabric is not only a thread-based metamaterial with highly sought after mechanical properties, but also an original, model system, with topologically protected structural order, where an intermittent, scale-invariant response emerges from minimal ingredients, and thus a significant landmark in the study of out-of-equilibrium universality.
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 14, 2018 - 07:49am PT
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mathematics offers ZERO access to vast realms of human experience
Yes, as mathematics is impersonal.
Life itself is full of dynamic variegatedness, and dynamic personality .....
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 14, 2018 - 08:10am PT
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The point being, pure math can be used as a language to describe the physical world,
The description is NOT the reality itself.
Largo has been continually making that point in the mind thread all while you people constantly keep trying to make descriptions a reality itself.
This IS why the gross materialists live in illusion and in a dream ......
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 14, 2018 - 09:00am PT
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Largo has been continually making that point...
using language to describe his experience, the description, he would argue, is not the experience.
Perhaps he is only describing his own experience, others might have different experiences.
To me, there is no division between "language" and "mathematics," they are both symbolic systems of stating propositions regarding our experience of the world, both external and internal.
You could throw music in there too, and art, and all symbolic forms.
These forms are not the what they depict, that is a trite realization you might have had when you were in middle school.
What is more interesting to me is that using this symbolic system so much can be truly understood about the world.
Largo doesn't deny this, he loves to regale us with stories of his "inner adventures," and we love to be so entertained, but not many of us equate his stories with his experiences, those are his alone.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 14, 2018 - 09:05am PT
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How is it that one can say "I don't understand mathematics" and then say "it has nothing to do with art/literature/whatever"
Say you would like to go out and take an "Ansel Adams b/w image"
without understanding the physical medium that Adams used you would be hard pressed to stumble onto such an image. His mastery of the technical aspects of photography, and especially the emulsions used to create the negative, are a huge part of his art. Like many master artists, he makes it look easy, effortless, when it was anything but.
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Don Paul
Social climber
Washington DC
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Aug 14, 2018 - 09:47am PT
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One difference between language and math is that language IS the top level thinking process going on in your brain. Brain parts like amygdalas are just microprocessors in comparison, and there are many of them competing for attention.
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Jim Clipper
climber
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Aug 14, 2018 - 10:30am PT
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What is more interesting to me is that using this symbolic system so much can be truly understood about the world.
Eyebrow raised
Anyone see a resemblance to Honnold? (good at math, knows how to shut stuff down if it gets too hot, he gets teased enough though)
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Roger Breedlove
climber
Cleveland Heights, Ohio
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Aug 14, 2018 - 07:27pm PT
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Regarding language, art and meaning, I was transported into an unexpected realm when I learned calculus and probability and found myself understanding my father's sensibilities, personality, and profound insight into human existence. He was a mathematician. I can remember him saying, as he was working out some very human issue, "holding all else equal," a common place in both language and the derivative of a function.
I wouldn't be to quick to draw bright lines between math, chemistry, and the languages of science and the languages of human experience. They all describe in one fashion or another reality.
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 14, 2018 - 07:47pm PT
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They all describe in one fashion or another reality.
Description is still NOT reality.
Reality is "AS IT IS".
By the time you describe it it's NOT "AS It IS" anymore ......
You can describe carrying a bucket of water,
But it will never be carrying a bucket of water!
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Aug 14, 2018 - 07:53pm PT
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“There is no beginning, the beginning is only in your thought.”
“For instance, we need to look with our eyes to laugh,” he said, “because only when we look at things can we catch the funny edge of the world. On the other hand, when our eyes see, everything is so equal that nothing is funny.”
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 14, 2018 - 08:00pm PT
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Reality reveals itself to oneself when one dovetails their actions with reality itself.
The gross materialists say "There is no need for reality".
Thus reality will never reveal itself to them and thus the gross materialists will mental speculate what that "As it Is" actually is.
The gross materialists whole business is guessing, masqueraded as so-called science ....
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Aug 14, 2018 - 08:18pm PT
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You can describe carrying a bucket of water,
But it will never be carrying a bucket of water
However, your attempts at description may allow you to connect with someone else who has done something similar.
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 14, 2018 - 08:31pm PT
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all description falls short
and many introduce what is in fact not there...
Yes, just see, Xcon has intelligence and isn't trying to be "smart" .....
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 14, 2018 - 08:45pm PT
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DMT is trying to be smart ......
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Aug 14, 2018 - 09:06pm PT
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"The way I see it, you want to cling to your arguments, despite the fact that they bring nothing to you; you want to remain the same even at the cost of your well-being."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"I am talking about the fact that you're not complete. You have no peace."
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JLP
Social climber
The internet
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Aug 14, 2018 - 10:41pm PT
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Pi - it explains everything - or maybe QM does - or whatever. Seems like the less a person knows about math, modern physics, etc, the more they’re able to use it to explain things - that they also know very little about. Intellectual spaghetti - definitely.
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 15, 2018 - 06:56am PT
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These fools quickly lose sight of the fleeting reality since they don't even know what that reality is itself.
Then their minds start running amok, around in circles, spinning wheels .....
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Aug 15, 2018 - 10:26am PT
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From the AMS Notices in 2002, I think this pretty much describes what a mathematician is:
". . . . the maid of a famous mathematician, when asked what her employer did all day, reported that he wrote on pieces of paper, crumpled them up, and threw them into the wastebasket."
That about says it all.
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nafod
Boulder climber
State college
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Aug 15, 2018 - 11:19am PT
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These fools quickly lose sight of the fleeting reality since they don't even know what that reality is itself 2+2=4 everywhere in the universe
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Jim Clipper
climber
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Aug 15, 2018 - 11:31am PT
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WBraun is trying to be dumb.
Description is just as much a part of reality as anything else.
not trying, & not dumb
I can't speak for him absolutely though
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 15, 2018 - 12:16pm PT
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2+2=4 everywhere in the universe
On the absolute platform (2+2=1) (10x34=1) (35 divided by 4 = 1) and on and on.
The gross materialist mathematician does not have this realization ever .....
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Don Paul
Social climber
Washington DC
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Aug 15, 2018 - 12:59pm PT
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DMT a language like English is like a top level operating system for your brain. Although the computer analogy only goes so far. On the other hand most math needs to be written out on paper and is anything but intrinsic to brain function. For example if you want to learn a new language I recommend the pimsleur courses which have no written component. It's how you learned your first language as a baby.
Alex Honnald definitely has some relation to Mr Spock lol.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Aug 16, 2018 - 12:35am PT
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Yep. Largo would have you instead believe an omnipotent monolithic awareness is always on the prowl for new things to subjectively experience as opposed to the subconscious alerting the conscious mind that it might want to sit up and pay attention to something new...
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jstan
climber
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Aug 16, 2018 - 02:04am PT
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Two seconds is too long. A predator would be on you before you would gain first awareness. I could almost see a two second delay for memories to be called up to verify what the image was and the level of the threat. It may take a second or so to detect motion. We are incredibly good at detecting low frequency noise. Rastering of the eye may be involved in image differencing to allow this. What is the frequency of this rastering?
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Aug 16, 2018 - 03:55am PT
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2+2=1
Depends on what you're counting. If you're counting rotations of 120 degrees then 2+2=1 is true in terms of the final position of an object.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Aug 16, 2018 - 02:20pm PT
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From my link above:
"But something miraculous happens inside our brains to make us conscious and experience the world from a subjective perspective."
Thought this might please Largo.
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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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Aug 16, 2018 - 05:11pm PT
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Perhaps I'm a few thousand / tens of thousands of posts behind the Mind thread, but is consciousness and self-awareness truly that special from an abstract perspective?
I mean, if you have a system that can recognize objects and associate them with properties and methods... what makes awareness of self (i.e. the entity receiving input, associated with various properties of it, and having various methods/procedures it can perform) anything that is truly special or unique? Object-oriented software frequently makes use of the construct "self" to refer to properties and methods of itself.
So if you have a system that can learn to recognize various objects on the road such as cars, babies in a stroller, cats and dogs, bicycles, etc... how is it a conceptual leap forward for it to recognize when there is a mirror and that the object it is perceiving is itself?
It seems to me that, more than self-awareness, what is a conceptual leap forward is having non-deterministic "thoughts" or the ability to perform actions for any or no purpose, but probably based on loose association with perceptual inputs that might trigger objects stored in memory. Even this doesn't seem categorically special to me. I guess for me, the main unique thing of "intelligence" is having such a broad range of object and syntactical awareness that it can interact with us humans who have the hubris to think we are special and unique to have language and "thoughts", and perhaps when this is coupled with robotic forms that enable interaction with the world in arbitrary ways that mimic our human flesh.
We are getting pretty far along a spectrum on all counts, and the more I think about it, the less I think there will be a defining moment of when AI becomes "self aware" and we have a collective human "Oh sh!T" moment. It will just be the soft easing into a world more and more dominated by machines that are our superiors in every action and measurable thing we can conceive. And still we will make excuses for why we are better or superior, and there will be a struggle that mimics the master/slave dynamics that have recurred throughout history, and eventually we will lose control because we just aren't as capable as that which we are trying to enslave.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 16, 2018 - 09:05pm PT
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"...how is it a conceptual leap forward for it to recognize when there is a mirror and that the object it is perceiving is itself?"
it's already been done
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528785-900-robot-learns-to-recognise-itself-in-the-mirror/
warning, the following document mentions "Bayesian"
https://scazlab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Gold-CogSci-07.pdf
'...The experiments here illustrate that social understanding is not necessarily a prerequisite for mirror self recognition. This would tend to lend support to the arguments of Mitchell (1997) that kinesthetic-visual matching is on the whole a more coherent theory than social explanations of the mirror test. In other words, the mirror test may not be about “self-awareness” or “theory of mind” at all; it may merely be a test of an organism’s ability to adapt to new kinds of visual feedback...'
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep19908
Robots Learn to Recognize Individuals from Imitative Encounters with People and Avatars
Sofiane Boucenna, David Cohen, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Philippe Gaussier & Mohamed Chetouani
Sci. Rep. 6, 19908; doi: 10.1038/srep19908 (2016).
Abstract
Prior to language, human infants are prolific imitators. Developmental science grounds infant imitation in the neural coding of actions, and highlights the use of imitation for learning from and about people. Here, we used computational modeling and a robot implementation to explore the functional value of action imitation. We report 3 experiments using a mutual imitation task between robots, adults, typically developing children, and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. We show that a particular learning architecture - specifically one combining artificial neural nets for (i) extraction of visual features, (ii) the robot’s motor internal state, (iii) posture recognition, and (iv) novelty detection - is able to learn from an interactive experience involving mutual imitation. This mutual imitation experience allowed the robot to recognize the interactive agent in a subsequent encounter. These experiments using robots as tools for modeling human cognitive development, based on developmental theory, confirm the promise of developmental robotics. Additionally, findings illustrate how person recognition may emerge through imitative experience, intercorporeal mapping, and statistical learning.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 17, 2018 - 09:22am PT
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^^^ "If..."
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Don Paul
Social climber
Washington DC
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Aug 17, 2018 - 10:45am PT
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Dmt yes I can speak Spanish, and once you have a basic ability in a language, you think in that language. It would be much harder to translate all the time. How the brain builds this parallel system, particularly in older people, I don't know.
I just googled this and got all kinds of ads for language courses that promise this. For me, I learned by talking to people and there's no time to do anything else.
PS not really trying to argue about whether math is a language, it has some similarities and some differences with spoken languages, but I doubt it's processed by the brain similarly. Someone says they do linear algebra in their head. That's great - Im able to do basic addition in my head, but it's an inadequate system for everything a language can do.
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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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Aug 17, 2018 - 10:59am PT
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haha Ed, pithy post! I challenge anyone to come up with an idea, a concept, anything they can formulate, that cannot be recognized in terms of an object with properties and methods/actions.
My presupposition is that people who offer such things are merely hypothesizing a poorly defined thing for the sake of argumentation, and when any rigor or precision is applied to define or describe the thing, it instantly attains properties and potentially methods/actions.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 17, 2018 - 11:21am PT
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Someone says they do linear algebra in their head. That's great - Im able to do basic addition in my head, but it's an inadequate system for everything a language can do.
it is because your level of numeracy is still grade school, your level of literacy is quite a bit higher than that.
You can't condemn mathematics as inadequate when you lack the skills.
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Don Paul
Social climber
Washington DC
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Aug 17, 2018 - 11:24am PT
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Ed I know this is your personal thread but why is everything from you a personal attack?
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jstan
climber
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Aug 17, 2018 - 12:13pm PT
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Don:
IMO neither Ed nor yourself make personal attacks. There are a number of things I have not spent effort on since my schooling ended. That's just the way of it, I fear.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 17, 2018 - 12:58pm PT
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how would you characterize it, Don?
when the avatar sycorax posted, she was ruthless in her criticism of my (and others) writing, everything from poor grammar, misspelling, bad sentence structure, incoherent paragraphs, lazy use of popular tropes, flaccid prose, sophomoric poetry... (ellipses!)
every time I write something here I think that she's going to see it and call me out, that sort of thing is a powerful inducement to try to be better.
I could have taken it personally, it was meant personally, but her criticisms were spot on.
Suck it up, man.
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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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Aug 17, 2018 - 06:59pm PT
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I lack the erudition to cite well-worn avenues or published back-alleys on the topic of non-objectifiable ideas or concepts... I've found that the more expert I become on some topic the more I become aware of how much I don't know, and it seems logical the same holds true for the breadth of knowledge across different fields. But I do place some stock in my ability to solve practical problems without letting what I don't know get in the way ;)
A point on an infinite line... you have implicitly defined dimensionality (a line) at least, and that there is a point rather than a range of values. Here are some properties I can define that are objective:
vectorExists = TRUE
vectorDimension = 1
vectorValueIsDefined = {FALSE if no frame of reference defined, TRUE if a frame of reference is defined and a relative value supplied}
methods: one could define all sorts of mathematical operations treating the point as a real number that connotes the distance from an arbitrarily defined reference point with arbitrary units of distance. One could simply define that point as the origin (0) for lack of a pre-existing reference point.
Maybe there is a deeper metaphysical point I am missing, but I tend to focus on avenues of thought that help me solve problems or develop an understanding of something that works for me in this material world. I trust that my spirit already knows whatever it needs to know for whatever spiritual world that exists beyond what my material senses can perceive.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Aug 18, 2018 - 08:23pm PT
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"Science wants to know nothing of The Nothing."
Investigations best left to Largo, PSP, and MikeL.
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 18, 2018 - 10:44pm PT
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"Science wants to know nothing of The Nothing."
Modern science only cares about dead matter since they have zero clue what life actually is ....
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