"What I do is me. For this I came."
Well, I'm catching a break on rent next month, so for now there is coffee. :) (And apparently I have no shame about asking for money to continue this experiment in 'science as performance art'.)
Where were we?
Ah, teleportation. And this would probably be a good time to further explain why I'm skeptical about Observable Teleporation ever being achievable on human beings. Naturally, I have a story for this.
One night, many years ago, I was alone in a lab at work. Suddenly I became disoriented and slightly nauseated. The most accurate way to describe the feeling is that it was as though the entire universe had shifted and left me behind. Swearing up and down that I would never eat Swedish meatballs again, I was able to collect myself and make it through the rest of my shift. The next day I learned that my grandmother, who had been in a coma for several months, had died at the same time as I was contemplating the wrath of the Swedish meatballs.
One experience proves nothing, of course, but I subsequently had other experiences of a similar nature. They were enough to make me curious about what kind of fundamental connected-ness we might have to each other. Which brings us back to teleportation...
What would happen if a person were to be 'destroyed' in a manner consistent with Observable Teleporation, and then not 'recreated' until the classical signal (which tells what type of measurement to make of the entangled system) arrives and is put to use? What state, if any, would that person exist in? What would happen if the classical signal were never utilized and the teleported person were never 'recreated'? Would existence in the entangled 'information only' state (however temporary) represent a disturbance or disruption in our connected-ness, noticeable to 'sensitives' in a manner similar to what they notice upon the death of person?
Let's just say that I don't want to be among the first to test this idea...
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Relative Entropy
"Workin' on a mystery,
Goin' wherever it leads"
[ASIDE: This may come to naught, but I get something from forcing myself to try and explain what I'm thinking, especially if I am hung up on a particular idea. I'm also violating my unwritten 'one post a day' rule, but I'm trying to capture these thoughts while they are still semi-coherent. Bear with me...]
We'll pretend for the moment that I didn't just google the phrase 'relative entropy' and discover that it refers to something that I'm fairly sure I don't understand. :)
Today I had a moment of clarity (yes, 'clarity' is relative) while reading Teleportation:The Impossible Leap, by David Darling (2005). In the chapter called 'Dataverse', Darling gives a clear and coherent description of Shannon entropy, as well as a description of thermodynamic entropy, and he relates the two to each other. Somewhere in this description, I get sidetracked by the following line of thought...
Darling uses the analogy of a jar of black and white marbles. When all the white marbles are at the bottom of the jar and all the black marbles are at the top of the jar, the jar is in a state of low entropy. When the marbles appear to be randomly mixed, it has a larger value of entropy. So far I am board with this, until I start to wonder...
What happens if we use a jar of red and green marbles instead? And what happens if the person who is looking at the jar of marbles is color-blind? To that person, there is no discernible difference between the 'ordered' state of marbles (where all red are on the top and all green are on the bottom) and the 'chaotic' state of marbles (where red and green marbles are randomly mixed together). (If you want to nitpick about the red/green colorblind analogy, look here for additional examples of how the amount of information available changes depending on the tools one has for accessing it.) "Compared with low entropy states, high-entropy states contain very little information." At this point there is a demonstrable difference in the amount of information available, depending on the perceptual limitations of the person who is looking at the marbles.
"A highly chaotic state, which is far more likely to occur than an orderly one, corresponds to a large value of entropy." What defines 'chaos', as opposed to 'order'? There is 'order' if I am able to identify a pattern within the information. The ease with which I can identify the pattern(s) within any given set of information can vary, can change over time, and appears to be dependent on my existing knowledge structures. If I have a well-developed filter for processing a specific type of information, then that particular data set appears more 'ordered' to me than it does to someone who has no experience with that type of data.
Hmm... Time to cross-check our sources. ;) "Entropy is the number of different microstates that correspond to the same macrostate." I guess the egg illustration didn't make it into the online edition of this article, but the analogy was basically 'There are more ways for an egg to be broken than for it to be unbroken, therefore the state of 'broken-ness' has a higher entropy and the system will favor a transition from unbroken to broken over a transition from broken to unbroken.' I'm very tempted to point out that broken/unbroken is a completely arbitrary way to divide a set of perceptual experiences. It may be a highly logical way to classify eggs, because of the utility of the egg differs when it is broken as opposed to unbroken, but the classification is still a purely arbitrary cognitive tool. I have managed to bring this argument back to object classifications and boundaries, which are my pet hypotheses right now for how we will identify dynamics to explain classical physics in 5-dimensions. :) What I really need now is a good analogy to drive home this point... (thinking) (thinking)
Some things you just can't do without coffee.
So I'll end this post by transcribing some of the notes I jotted on a piece of paper. Perhaps in the morning, I'll see this argument in a different light. Or perhaps someday I'll be able to link the idea of relative entropy with the thermodynamics of neural information processing. This notion of relative entropy should be supported by corresponding differences in the energy expended in cognitive processing...
Transcribed from notes:
Goin' wherever it leads"
[ASIDE: This may come to naught, but I get something from forcing myself to try and explain what I'm thinking, especially if I am hung up on a particular idea. I'm also violating my unwritten 'one post a day' rule, but I'm trying to capture these thoughts while they are still semi-coherent. Bear with me...]
We'll pretend for the moment that I didn't just google the phrase 'relative entropy' and discover that it refers to something that I'm fairly sure I don't understand. :)
Today I had a moment of clarity (yes, 'clarity' is relative) while reading Teleportation:The Impossible Leap, by David Darling (2005). In the chapter called 'Dataverse', Darling gives a clear and coherent description of Shannon entropy, as well as a description of thermodynamic entropy, and he relates the two to each other. Somewhere in this description, I get sidetracked by the following line of thought...
Darling uses the analogy of a jar of black and white marbles. When all the white marbles are at the bottom of the jar and all the black marbles are at the top of the jar, the jar is in a state of low entropy. When the marbles appear to be randomly mixed, it has a larger value of entropy. So far I am board with this, until I start to wonder...
What happens if we use a jar of red and green marbles instead? And what happens if the person who is looking at the jar of marbles is color-blind? To that person, there is no discernible difference between the 'ordered' state of marbles (where all red are on the top and all green are on the bottom) and the 'chaotic' state of marbles (where red and green marbles are randomly mixed together). (If you want to nitpick about the red/green colorblind analogy, look here for additional examples of how the amount of information available changes depending on the tools one has for accessing it.) "Compared with low entropy states, high-entropy states contain very little information." At this point there is a demonstrable difference in the amount of information available, depending on the perceptual limitations of the person who is looking at the marbles.
"A highly chaotic state, which is far more likely to occur than an orderly one, corresponds to a large value of entropy." What defines 'chaos', as opposed to 'order'? There is 'order' if I am able to identify a pattern within the information. The ease with which I can identify the pattern(s) within any given set of information can vary, can change over time, and appears to be dependent on my existing knowledge structures. If I have a well-developed filter for processing a specific type of information, then that particular data set appears more 'ordered' to me than it does to someone who has no experience with that type of data.
Hmm... Time to cross-check our sources. ;) "Entropy is the number of different microstates that correspond to the same macrostate." I guess the egg illustration didn't make it into the online edition of this article, but the analogy was basically 'There are more ways for an egg to be broken than for it to be unbroken, therefore the state of 'broken-ness' has a higher entropy and the system will favor a transition from unbroken to broken over a transition from broken to unbroken.' I'm very tempted to point out that broken/unbroken is a completely arbitrary way to divide a set of perceptual experiences. It may be a highly logical way to classify eggs, because of the utility of the egg differs when it is broken as opposed to unbroken, but the classification is still a purely arbitrary cognitive tool. I have managed to bring this argument back to object classifications and boundaries, which are my pet hypotheses right now for how we will identify dynamics to explain classical physics in 5-dimensions. :) What I really need now is a good analogy to drive home this point... (thinking) (thinking)
Some things you just can't do without coffee.
So I'll end this post by transcribing some of the notes I jotted on a piece of paper. Perhaps in the morning, I'll see this argument in a different light. Or perhaps someday I'll be able to link the idea of relative entropy with the thermodynamics of neural information processing. This notion of relative entropy should be supported by corresponding differences in the energy expended in cognitive processing...
Transcribed from notes:
- Can entropy be defined by object relationships, classifications or categories?
- Do relationship(s) to existing knowledge determine whether a state is perceived to have 'low' or 'high' entropy?
- One's ability to extract of identify information is based on existing knowledge structures and paradigm recognition patterns.
- The same state can give different amounts of information depending on the predispositions or perspectives of the person accessing it. Does that change its entropy value?
- Is entropy relative? Is entropy a measure of mis/match to existing knowledge? Can entropy be mitigated or altered by using different sets of pattern classifications?
The Impossible Leap (Pt I)
"Where am I to go now that I've gone too far?"
Perhaps it was the fact that the rising cost of everything is cutting into my coffee money... :(
Perhaps it was my fortuitous encounter with this book...
Perhaps, while thinking about all the coffee I was missing out on, I remembered all the crap I took about teleportation from the guy who used to give me coffee... (long story)
Anyway, I'm halfway through the book, and I got to thinking (which is harder to do when one has no coffee.) The word 'teleportation' conjures up images of scientists in a lab using a standard entanglement paradigm to teleport a particle from Point A to Point B. According to popular wisdom, this paradigm will eventually allow larger and larger objects to be teleported, up to and including human beings. For what we are about to discuss, let's call this Observable Teleportation (OT), meaning that the process is independent of the effects of any observers who happen to be watching it.
Because I am skeptical about how consciousness would survive this process given our limited understanding of what exactly consciousness is, I'm not optimistic about this process being successful for human teleportation. But perhaps human teleportation of a sort is already possible, to a certain degree. We'll call this type of teleportation Seamless-Transition Teleportation (STT), or, if you want something flashier - Walking Between the Worlds. ;)
We'll define STT as an observer whose continuous conscious experience produces an observable discontinuity in the environment. A change in environment is experienced, to the degree that the observer specifies, and in the absence of local 4-dimensional causes. The change may be very minor - for example, the presence of something that wasn't there before. Although I've done this type of thing many times, I've never thought of this at 'teleportation' before, until I realized that the discontinuity was the critical factor.
In my experience, this type of 'teleportation' is easier when one does not have to contend with other observers who will simultaneously experience the discontinuity. The need to deal with any effects from multiple observers of the same event would give rise to entirely different protocols for achieving teleportation, hence the distinction between OT and STT.
In theory, it should be possible to extend STT to higher and higher levels of discontinuity, until one reaches the practical limits of what the mechanisms of a stable (read: recognizably sane) human consciousness will tolerate. (Perhaps it might even be possible to achieve a complete discontinuity in surroundings, such as one might experience in conventional OT between distant locations.) I'm sure that there are practical limits to how often one can create these kinds of discontinuities (or UNDOings, as I have previously called them), as well as how much discontinuity one can create within a given span of time.
But perhaps those practical limits can be expanded by cognitive training paradigms or neurochemical assistance...
Then I could have coffee all the time. ;)
Perhaps it was the fact that the rising cost of everything is cutting into my coffee money... :(
Perhaps it was my fortuitous encounter with this book...
Perhaps, while thinking about all the coffee I was missing out on, I remembered all the crap I took about teleportation from the guy who used to give me coffee... (long story)
Anyway, I'm halfway through the book, and I got to thinking (which is harder to do when one has no coffee.) The word 'teleportation' conjures up images of scientists in a lab using a standard entanglement paradigm to teleport a particle from Point A to Point B. According to popular wisdom, this paradigm will eventually allow larger and larger objects to be teleported, up to and including human beings. For what we are about to discuss, let's call this Observable Teleportation (OT), meaning that the process is independent of the effects of any observers who happen to be watching it.
Because I am skeptical about how consciousness would survive this process given our limited understanding of what exactly consciousness is, I'm not optimistic about this process being successful for human teleportation. But perhaps human teleportation of a sort is already possible, to a certain degree. We'll call this type of teleportation Seamless-Transition Teleportation (STT), or, if you want something flashier - Walking Between the Worlds. ;)
We'll define STT as an observer whose continuous conscious experience produces an observable discontinuity in the environment. A change in environment is experienced, to the degree that the observer specifies, and in the absence of local 4-dimensional causes. The change may be very minor - for example, the presence of something that wasn't there before. Although I've done this type of thing many times, I've never thought of this at 'teleportation' before, until I realized that the discontinuity was the critical factor.
In my experience, this type of 'teleportation' is easier when one does not have to contend with other observers who will simultaneously experience the discontinuity. The need to deal with any effects from multiple observers of the same event would give rise to entirely different protocols for achieving teleportation, hence the distinction between OT and STT.
In theory, it should be possible to extend STT to higher and higher levels of discontinuity, until one reaches the practical limits of what the mechanisms of a stable (read: recognizably sane) human consciousness will tolerate. (Perhaps it might even be possible to achieve a complete discontinuity in surroundings, such as one might experience in conventional OT between distant locations.) I'm sure that there are practical limits to how often one can create these kinds of discontinuities (or UNDOings, as I have previously called them), as well as how much discontinuity one can create within a given span of time.
But perhaps those practical limits can be expanded by cognitive training paradigms or neurochemical assistance...
Then I could have coffee all the time. ;)
Saturday, August 2, 2008
The Arrow of Time
"Research is what I do when I don't know what to do."
I like sleep. I like it for all those moments when you are somewhere between asleep and awake, and for all the snippets of dreams that you can recall if you wake up at just the right moment.
At some point, for a project long forgotten, I became familiar with the Crick-Mitchison theory of REM sleep. The theory is so old (1983) that it's hard to find a coherent account of it on the internet. The idea is that dreams are a kind of purging of useless memories and/or memory connections, essentially a type of reverse-learning.
I remember this theory because I see can distinct patterns in the material that appears in my own dreams. I'm generalizing what follows from a small set of data (my own experiences) that has not been compared to other existing data sets of a similar nature (if any exist), but the ideas are interesting nonetheless... What I see is a certain class of partially-processed perceptions and thoughts - things that were tagged with X amount of attention at one time, but which, for one reason or another, were never fully processed or integrated with existing knowledge. It's as if the processing was unexpectedly interrupted - 'I'll think about it later. Right now, this new thing is more important.' I find in my dreams images, thoughts, and ideas that can be traced to a similar interrupted and never-completed chain of processing.
What makes the whole thing so fascinating (to me) is that these images and sounds and ideas are woven seamlessly together into a dream in what largely appears to be the same temporal order in which they were acquired. This may not seem all that stunning, until one thinks about the fact that not only is the dream-purge mechanism identifying these specific fragments of conscious experience which seem to have undergone a similar level of partial processing, but it is also utilizing or preserving the temporal order in which those thought events occurred... Now we're into a whole new set of questions.
How does memory code time? (Relational time, not rate of stimulus presentation.)
Why do dream -generation/purge mechanisms 'sort' the 'data' they are purging according to this relational temporal coding? Is it a way to be energy efficient? If so, according to what dynamics? Is it done to preserve or strengthen the remaining temporal relationships among preserved memories? If so, how do these dream mechanisms recognize that temporal ordering? How is it coded?
Will I ever get a chance to hole up in a library and try to research this problem more thoroughly? ;) (Sometimes I think this blog is simply going to be a collection of all the questions and ideas that I don't have the time to explore fully...)
Understanding how the brain preserves and codes temporal relationships may 1) yield additional understanding on relational spatial-relationship encoding, and 2) enable us to disrupt those mechanisms and study any effects they may have on a person's ability to navigate a trajectory through the multiverse. (Oh yeah, I'm going somewhere with all of this. ;)
I like sleep. I like it for all those moments when you are somewhere between asleep and awake, and for all the snippets of dreams that you can recall if you wake up at just the right moment.
At some point, for a project long forgotten, I became familiar with the Crick-Mitchison theory of REM sleep. The theory is so old (1983) that it's hard to find a coherent account of it on the internet. The idea is that dreams are a kind of purging of useless memories and/or memory connections, essentially a type of reverse-learning.
I remember this theory because I see can distinct patterns in the material that appears in my own dreams. I'm generalizing what follows from a small set of data (my own experiences) that has not been compared to other existing data sets of a similar nature (if any exist), but the ideas are interesting nonetheless... What I see is a certain class of partially-processed perceptions and thoughts - things that were tagged with X amount of attention at one time, but which, for one reason or another, were never fully processed or integrated with existing knowledge. It's as if the processing was unexpectedly interrupted - 'I'll think about it later. Right now, this new thing is more important.' I find in my dreams images, thoughts, and ideas that can be traced to a similar interrupted and never-completed chain of processing.
What makes the whole thing so fascinating (to me) is that these images and sounds and ideas are woven seamlessly together into a dream in what largely appears to be the same temporal order in which they were acquired. This may not seem all that stunning, until one thinks about the fact that not only is the dream-purge mechanism identifying these specific fragments of conscious experience which seem to have undergone a similar level of partial processing, but it is also utilizing or preserving the temporal order in which those thought events occurred... Now we're into a whole new set of questions.
How does memory code time? (Relational time, not rate of stimulus presentation.)
Why do dream -generation/purge mechanisms 'sort' the 'data' they are purging according to this relational temporal coding? Is it a way to be energy efficient? If so, according to what dynamics? Is it done to preserve or strengthen the remaining temporal relationships among preserved memories? If so, how do these dream mechanisms recognize that temporal ordering? How is it coded?
Will I ever get a chance to hole up in a library and try to research this problem more thoroughly? ;) (Sometimes I think this blog is simply going to be a collection of all the questions and ideas that I don't have the time to explore fully...)
Understanding how the brain preserves and codes temporal relationships may 1) yield additional understanding on relational spatial-relationship encoding, and 2) enable us to disrupt those mechanisms and study any effects they may have on a person's ability to navigate a trajectory through the multiverse. (Oh yeah, I'm going somewhere with all of this. ;)
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