Hack the Smear

The Masters of Solitude

2011-08-23T10:38:00.000-05:00

"What happens to a man when
He spills his heart on a page
And he watches words flow away
Then his feelings lay on a page alone.
There, waiting for someone who cares to read them,
To open their eyes to see them,
To see if they can make his thoughts their own."

"The way we see the world is changing. The way we see ourselves is also changing." (q, h/t) Most of us are used to seeing ourselves as isolated, solitary beings. I may be able to physically push you, but we don't generally believe that I can intrude upon the essence of you. However, as the data continues to paint a picture of mind's effect upon perceivable matter, will we be able to hold on to that perception of solitude? As we see how the mind manifests itself in what we experience as reality, will we also be forced to question the nature of other individuals? How can our minds affect reality without also affecting the other individuals who inhabit that reality?

"Distributed cognition is a branch of cognitive science that proposes that human knowledge and cognition are not confined to the individual. Instead, it is distributed by placing memories, facts, or knowledge on the objects, individuals, and tools in our environment." (q)

I am interested in a similar idea - that of a distributed self. The idea being that the memories, facts and knowledge held by other individuals all contribute to one particular individual's actions and sense of self. This would be true for each 'self', and such an idea, when pushed to its logical conclusion, would suggest that each of us are, at least in part, manifestations of a collective consciousness, extended mind, or some other unified whole. And of course, in keeping with the data that give rise to these thoughts and that speak of nonlocal relationships between mind and matter, such influences upon an individual's actions and sense of self would be of a similar nature, meaning that they occur in the absence of verbal or other local feedback from the other individuals. I would also suggest that such changes in one's own sense of self are noticeable to an individual who is using an appropriately developed introspective ability.

The idea of a collective consciousness (or unconscious) is not new to science. Science has even found an experimental illustration that resembles the idea of a collective/hive mind. Take a look at The Jelly Bean Experiment. (h/t) Picture each person who participated in this experiment as a node in an interconnected web where the connections between them are information related to the guessing experiment. Not explicit I-told-you-what-I-guessed connections, but exclusionary forces say that Person A's guess determines Person B's guess in a non-local way that is governed by the observations and consequences of the group's collective behavior. And each individual's action strengthens the output of the collective.

Here is another analogous image that corresponds quite well to the distributed self model that's slowly building itself in my mind. Picture one 'self' on each side of the pegboard. An 'action' on one side of the pegboard shows up as a change in the pegs on the other side of the board. Is the individual 'self' simply the configuration of the pegs on each side of the board, or is it the configuration of the pegs plus something else? That's an open question for me, as far as this particular analogy goes, though I'd like to think that it is a question that can be answered once we better understand the recursive nature of memory within the stream of consciousness.

Closer to the Edge

2011-08-22T14:25:00.000-05:00

"Can you imagine a time when the truth ran free
The birth of a song and the death of a dream"

Sleep Journal
June 26th, 2011

Woke up at about 4:30 AM, very abruptly, after approximately 5 – 5 ½ hours of sleep. Had not set alarm.

Had the residual image of my dream still in my head. Of course it was more than an image... In fact, there was an auditory component (as if one were hearing the sentence spoken), a visual component (as if one were seeing the sentence written on paper), and a meaning component (one's understanding of what the sentence actually meant.) For a short period, just after waking up, the three had a sense of unity – meaning, they felt the same, they felt as if they had the same meaning.

Only upon further waking did something (memory?) kick in which allowed the three elements to be parsed apart, which allowed for the recognition that in fact they weren't saying the same thing at all. The auditory element was roughly “The paycheck isn't coming back good.” The visual element was a sentence beginning with the word “It.” The meaning of both of these (which felt the same) was that my reference checks from previous employers were not coming back favorable.

The sense of unity these elements possessed was clearly not based on memory. But a sense of unity they had, and an unimpeachable one at that. Meaning, without memory to illuminate the subtle distinctions between the three elements of the seemingly-coherent experience, it might easily have been acted upon.

While waiting for memory to kick in – a process that always takes some time when I have been abruptly awakened, and a process of which I am aware – I desperately wanted to know the origin of that element of the dream. Was it a sign, or some indication of a subtle awareness on my part that there was (or was likely to be) a problem with one or more of my references? I remember waiting and waiting for memory to kick in, and when it finally showed up – which is to say, when the contents of episodic memory were finally available for conscious analysis – there was a distinct awareness of that information merging into the stream of consciousness. As if it were simply arriving late to the party, but mingling perfectly well with the throng once there.

After – not simultaneous with – the arrival of memory to the stream came the ability to imagine. To project and anticipate and visual completely hypothetical outcomes.

So distinct were these elements in there arrival to the stream of consciousness that it was as if I were seeing the 'waking up' of certain brain areas, or the removal of whatever obstacles had prevented them from feeding information into the dream state. What was clear was that I could not activate them immediately by will alone. I could query, but the response took time to arrive. For a time I simply had no access to the contents of episodic memory.

(end entry)

"Yet the human spirit is restless and nature forever compliant, willing to answer as yet undreamed questions, capable of opening up vast new vistas, revealing still undisclosed parts of her being."

Time Pressure

2011-08-18T18:39:00.000-05:00

The future speaks to us in the language of the past. And no two people hear it the same.

Many years ago I participated in an ESP experiment. I use the vague term 'ESP' deliberately at this point because my experience during the experiment allowed me to examine competing ideas about what 'extrasensory' meant. I've previously written about this experiment, and briefly touched on the two competing hypothetical explanations: 1) Telepathy - I had some kind of 'access' to my partner's mind and/or the contents therein. 2) Futuresense - Identifying those images/ideas in my stream of consciousness that correlated strongly to my future subjective experience.

Here is what I wrote in my previous post... "The most vivid image that I 'received' was actually an image that my friend had drawn during the 'sending' phase of the experiment. After the judging and feedback portions of the experiment were complete, I had the opportunity to see these drawings and discuss the session with my friend. Naturally I had a strong reaction to that image when I saw the drawing of it, as it was the image I had 'received' during the experiment. Had I gotten that image telepathically from my friend? If so, why hadn't I gotten the actual target image telepathically? Or had I been drawing on my startled reaction to the image when I was casting about for information during the 'receiving' portion of my session? If so, why hadn't I pulled the target image, which I subsequently saw and knew to be the correct image? (And so on.)" In assessing my subjective experience during the testing phase and the feedback phase of the experiment, I came to prefer the futuresense explanation. (And it's actually a lot simpler than telepathy.)

I'm not going to pretend that I subsequently worked out a complete (positive) definition of psi/ESP. (And to be clear, I'm referring to what is commonly perceived to be a receptive faculty, as opposed to an influencing agent, although at some level this distinction may vanish.) In fact, I only mention this at all because I got suckered into watching Beyond Belief last night. What started me thinking was the reading that took place about 39 and a half minutes (hulu time) into the program. Bits of the reading were interspersed with feedback, including a relevant picture of David (the reporter's) mother. With my futuresense hypothesis in mind, I couldn't help but think that the psychic (Rebecca) had awesome future feedback to draw upon during the reading. Not only were relevant images and details given to the psychic immediately during the reading, but they were also broadcast on network television to a huge audience. [ASIDE: The huge audience is relevant when one wants to consider multiple observer hypotheses. And I'm of the opinion that you have to consider the effects of each observer, including the skeptical ones.] Contrast this to the type of feedback that the tarot card reader and palm reader received at around 18 minutes. For the purposes of this program, comparing the feedback that was given in Rebecca's success and in the skeptic's failure is like comparing apples to... well, rocks. But if psi/ESP is in some way a sensitivity to the 'flavor' of the future, then the proper way to test that is to give all psychics an equal amount (and quality) of feedback, regardless of whether they hit or miss.

Of course a proper skeptic would immediately point to the Sylvia Browne incident at 29:50, wherein Sylvia's reading to the couple was (painfully) incorrect. Surely the media coverage of that was comparable to Rebecca's feedback, right...? Hey, I don't have all the answers.

But I am very interested in developing a positive definition of psi/ESP, and I have to wonder... Is there an architecture in the brain that might be sensitive to influence from the (subjective) future? (For clarification, I'm not referring to an architecture in the sense of, say, the amygdala, but more along the lines of the microtubule.) From analyzing the subjective experience of psi/ESP, I would think that such an architecture would have to pervade the same regions of the brain that contain memory, as information acquired via psi/ESP appears to often (if not always) come as the activation of existing knowledge structures (memories). This may also explain why two people never have the same 'psychic' experience with respect to a given event; they are operating with a different set of knowledge structures and interconnectivity among the structures.

Is there a way to distinguish between the activation of this architecture in response to pressure from the future, as opposed to the influence of the past? I wouldn't necessarily expect to see an architecture that is dedicated to - will only respond to - influence from the future, but I would expect there to be a way to differentiate the influences of past and future within an overall pattern of signalling.

How does this hypothetical architecture change as one becomes more 'sensitive' to the influence of the future? I'm drawing primarily on my own subjective experience (again) in suggesting that, over a period of time, and with practice, some relationship between signals from the past and the future is/can be modified. This results in what is effectively a 'signal boost' for information/influence from the future. It also fits the pervasive meme that one can learn how to become psychic, and can develop ESP abilities with practice.

Overall, in watching the program last night (and again this morning for the purposes of obtaining names and time markers), I saw such a confusion of information and methodology that it doesn't surprise me that skeptics find it impenetrable and want to chuck it all out the window. But perhaps the better approach is simply to search for the commonalities of experience amidst the chaos of expression. Is sensitivity to elements one's own subjective future one such commonality?

I realize that I'm not saying anything particularly new with this post. But every once in a while you just have to stir the pot. Bonus points if you boosted a signal to get here. ;)

Building A Better Skeptic

2011-05-14T14:53:00.000-05:00

(No offense to anyone who might resemble to Dr. Skepteasmo. ;)

Pathfinder

2011-01-26T22:58:00.000-06:00

"Spacetime is being very naughty right now."

" So if we accept that these psi phenomena are real, how then can we explain them without throwing out our entire understanding of time and physics?" - Melissa Burkley, Psychology Today [Popular idea, but at least this time it was stated as a question. (sigh)]

Given that Daryl Bem's article "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect" has been discussed in blogs and the popular press for over three months now, my response is a bit delayed. But I promise that it will contain none of that ever-present blah blah blah (old, boring, tired) debating about the reality of ESP. ;)

My response to Bem's article was more in line with Burkley's question: "If we suspend our beliefs about time and accept that the brain is capable of reaching into the future, the next question becomes 'how does it do this?'" The question in my notes was... What, if any, is/are the neurological, neurochemical, and/or neuroelectrical correlates of the salience of information that has significance in the future? (Note that I didn't say 'information from the future', for good reason.)

If you remember this modest post, you'll understand what I'm getting at with that question and where I hope researchers like Bem will go next. Which brings me to...

Suggestion 1: I would like to see a database of psychological and neurological characteristics for high-performing (and no-effect) subjects. Bem had some psychological data in his results (e.g., stimulus-seeking) but there is room for a much more comprehensive workup involving more-detailed psychological profiles. I would also like to see EEG responses at various points during this testing paradigm. (And, of course, appropriate control data.) With the collection and comparison of appropriate EEG data, it might be possible to isolate an element of the response that indicates the 'path' from the future. Further testing could then see if this element of the EEG response alone could predict a successful trial. [Note: I picked EEG data largely because I am already familiar with EEG and ERP testing paradigms and data collection. And, one might expect to see clean/robust differences in EEG data if differences in 'stimulus-seeking' are involved.]

Suggestion 2: Train subjects with the goal of improving their performance. Ideally, these would be the same subjects from which you have created the aforementioned database, as it would also be interesting to know if/how the aforementioned EEG markers covaried as the brain adapted to using this 'source' of information.

Suggestion 3: Something in Bem's results made me wonder if there wasn't something within the timing of the response to the stimuli which could illuminate the 'path' that this information took. No solid ideas yet, I can't quite shake the notion that there's something there...

Daryl, this post is for you, because I admire the clean and elegant design of your experiments, and I hope you'll follow them up with additional research.

Time Travelers Never Die

2010-07-10T11:48:00.004-05:00

I been hit with the future but I don't walk with a limp. (I'm alright.)

"For it is true that we often discover meanings and reasons for things many years after they mattered quite so much to us."

(This one's for the Doctor Who ringtone.)

Some time ago I mentioned that I wanted to talk about information from the future. I've held off on that because the ideas in my head haven't solidified into a coherent picture yet. But what the hell... This post has marinated long enough. Let's cook it up and serve it to the unsuspecting masses. :)

I've tried (in this blog) to create a picture of time that has our conscious experience arising from a struggle between information/influence from the (subjective) past and information/influence from the (subjective) future. I don't know quite how to conceptualize this information/influence... Some have call it a 'wave' (in the quantum sense), and that seems as good a picture as any, for the moment.

In working to create this picture of time and its relationship to experience, I occasionally indulge in bizarre thought experiments like the one that prompted my earlier mention of information from the future...

Thought Experiment: Assume that there is an influence traveling 'back in time' from the subjective future. (This is not an unreasonable assumption; the idea has been out there for a while.) Further assume that consciousness as we experience it is somehow critically tied to that biochemical mass we call the brain. (Not an unreasonable assumption, but certainly not a given either.) Assume that the brain would retain its capacity to produce exactly the same experience of consciousness after a period of cryonic suspension. (I doubt that this is possible, as I believe that a critical portion of our conscious experience arises from a non-local 'entanglement' (if you will) with other minds.)

With all these assumptions in place, it stands to reason that a person who has successfully extended his lifespan via cryonic suspension would also have extended the potential for information from his subjective future to influence him now. What would this person have access to, and how would it affect his behavior in the present? If one can reasonably assume that he would use (though perhaps not consciously) information from the future to enhance his own survival, what would you expect to see him doing now? (Hmmm...)

Thinking about the influence of the future brings up other interesting questions as well...

Is time an illusion? How do we experience this influence/information from the future? Is our perception of 'free will' nothing more than an incomplete awareness of the continually shifting balance between the information/influence of the past and that of the future?

What property of the substrate of consciousness creates/enables our awareness of the passage of time? (You want to say 'Memory, duh!', but why should there not also be a corresponding neural/neurochemical structure to harness and/or 'display' information from the future?) Without this property/structure, how would we know about time? What would we know about time? Is our particular kind of temporal perception really nothing more than a reverberation property within the mechanism/substrate of consciousness?

And that's not even the best part...

Now come questions like: How can we deliberately capitalize on our ability to access information from the future? Is our lifespan of moments of conscious experience simply one giant bi-directional temporal computation, such that events in our past can be perceived as having been 'caused' by events (or needs) in our future? Is it possible to willfully use the 'future' in the present to achieve a specific outcome now? In my head, I refer to this as 'borrowing against future entropy', though physicists might have a beef with the way I'm using the word 'entropy'.

I've mentioned things like this before, and I'm slowing solidifying an ontology for... (pick one)

trans-temporal
extra-temporal
bi-directional temporal

... ways of describing and discussing conscious experience and the computations that give rise to it. Who knows what kind of questions such a perspective might answer...

(Crazy thought experiments welcome!)

(P.S. Sorry, 50 - I had to do that.)

The Science of the Craft

2010-07-05T11:40:00.001-05:00

"The study of magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft... This is not to say that we understand magic, in the sense that physicists understand why subatomic particles do whatever it is that they do. Or perhaps they don't understand that yet. I can never remember."

"Anyone with a spark of the research spirit does not need to be exhorted to chase for all he is worth a really promising clue when one is found, dropping for the time being other activities and interests as far as practicable."

"To see what no one has seen before, look where no one has looked before."

(Because your response disappoints, on several levels.)

When I was a bit younger, in a used bookstore I came across a book on spells. Since I was investigating the effects of mind upon matter, I could not resist having a look. I came across a spell for attracting money (or some such), and I can remember thinking "I understand why that works." All the extra 'fluff' - the specific-colored candle (or whatever), etc. - fell away and it was clear how saying/doing whatever the spell 'required' simply created (and released) a specific set of visualizations/expectations/emotions about future outcomes. The 'fluff' is just a reinforcing support structure that works/helps because it taps an associated knowledge structure. (Yes, it works because you believe it works.)

Sounds like a load of 'useless crap' to many scientists. But why?

1) Perspective - It is difficult/unacceptable for the scientific method to make use 'data' that is only accessible from a subjective perspective. What goes on in my head is only really accessible to me. I can tell you about it, but you have no means of verifying anything I've said, other than to attempt to replicate it in your own mind. "To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning." (q)

2) Evidence - What constitutes 'acceptable evidence' of certain phenomena is, by current scientific definitions, evidence that can be procured under circumstances that specifically discount any collective effect of mind. For example: what can be produced in an environment where one is alone is required to be exactly the same as what can be produced in a room full of skeptical observers. Only then is the phenomenon deemed to be a 'true' phenomenon.

3) Correlations - Scientists are taught to look for correlations. They are also taught that correlation does not equal causation. What they are not taught is to look inside for correlations - to dissect and examine their own mental processes. The assumption is that there is no need to do this - that 'science' stands beyond/above the (non-local) influence of mind.

With the above limitations on what is acceptable 'science', it is no wonder that religious/magical belief systems persist. If data persists, then the search for explanations (and the attempts to harness this knowledge) will also persist, even if it is not/cannot be called 'science'.

4) Replication - Replication of something that requires a specific type of subjective awareness can be achieved, but it involves teaching a naive subject. Then, of course, you have only your word and the word of your pupil. (See #1.) This might be worth something if you had a pupil with the appropriate background, reputation, and integrity... But most people still will not believe a thing like that until they have experienced it themselves. However, narratives like that produced by William H. Keith can be powerful stimuli for people to start/continue their own explorations. "I was well aware that my senses could deceive, that my will to believe could play tricks on my mind, that what I seemed to be experiencing - my subjective reality - might well be different from things as they really were."

5) Falsification - "No amount of experimentation can prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." (That's Einstein, not Keith.) Yes, we're still looking for that magical experiment that could prove this picture of reality to be wrong. (With a less-pedantic approach to things, you could be useful there. Skippy's best (though perhaps unintentional) contribution was simply asking the question 'Where does the entropy go?')

No doubt submitting this idea to peer-review in a journal would point out all these things, and more. But these are big enough problems to overcome, and we are already well-aware of them. If you can contribute nothing more than yet another 'burden of proof' argument, then you really don't bring anything to the table that wasn't already there and you should probably move on/back to some 'real' science. Best,

N

The Art of Scientific Investigation

2010-07-02T19:57:00.003-05:00

(This blog post is a spontaneous act of creation - because creating is fun, and wordplay while creating is double (entendre) the fun. ;)

"Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation
Get on with the fascination,
the real relation, the underlying theme."

"What is more important - knowing, or being known for knowing?"

"It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit."

And from The Art of Scientific Investigation, by W.I.B. Beveridge (revised edition - 1957)...

"It is the duty of every scientist to give generously whatever advice and ideas he can and usually formal acknowledgement should not be demanded for such help."

"The chief incentives of research are to satisfy curiosity, to satisfy the creative instinct, the desire to know whether one's conjecture has led to new knowledge and the desire for the feeling of importance by gaining recognition."

You'd get the impression from some scientists that that last bit is their top incentive. And perhaps it is a powerful motivator to do research and to put great effort into explaining that research... But I would argue that the first three 'incentives' are in a different (and, IMHO, a far more rewarding and productive) class than the last one.

"If it becomes a standard procedure to use somebody else's work without mentioning it's not our own, in the end nobody will see the point of creating anything themselves." (q) So not true. People create because there is joy in the creative process. People create because there is satisfaction in knowing that you were the first to do a thing, and that others liked it well enough to use it. Or that what you did was better than whatever else was available, or whatever the other person could have created themselves. And in the end, only those who are willing to create matter anyway - they are the only ones who really challenge you/us to be better.

I'm not saying that recognition doesn't matter... I'm only saying that obsessing over recognition detracts from fully engaging in the process/joy of discovery/creation. Best,

N

(h/t WB, for our conversation about this most-excellent book)

Expecting Synchronicity

2010-06-24T19:54:00.003-05:00

"For a true magician there is no very clear line between what lies inside the mind and what lies outside it. If you desire something, it will become substance. If you despise it, you will see it destroyed. A master magician is not much different from a child or a madman in that respect. It takes a very clear head and a very strong will to operate once you are in that place. And you will find out very quickly whether or not you have that clarity and strength."

"When we do magic, we do not wish and we do not pray. We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change to the world."

(I know, I'm on vacation... What can I say? When the spirit moves you, you gotta go with the flow. ;)

Just a quick post to say 'hi' to a new 5-dimensional friend. Welcome to the super-elite club!

Of course welcoming you to the super-elite club also means that I'm going to talk about your interpretation of the 5th dimension. As your interpretation bears a striking resemblance to my own, I'm just going to insert a key quote from your article before we move on to the part wherein we fight - er, politely disagree.

"Any situation that you have not yourself observed actually exists as a collection of possible outcomes in the Fourier realm... These things are undetermined , and until you experience them, there are many possible outcomes for each. The many possible outcomes of your future are what make up the fifth dimension." (my emphasis)

Well said. But now your article swings into something called Spiritual Mind Treatment (?), and you equate the Fourier realm with God. I'm not sure why. Don't get me wrong... I don't believe that I have complete conscious control over my trajectory through this realm, but my versions of the Higher Power(s) (that explain why I don't have complete control) are the Power of the Collective (the effects of other observers) and the Power of the Future (retrocausal influence of information/events in the subjective future). (FWIW, here's my two cents on free will.)

You state: "I don't believe we can control or manipulate the Fourier realm." At all? I would urge you to re-examine that belief in light of a range of data about human experience. Review psi experiments, the Global Consciousness Project, magick, or even a modest book on prayer called The Isaiah Effect, which deals with specific techniques for praying 'successfully'. Even your own descriptions of 'expecting' synchronicity bear closer examination. Just what is 'expectation', why is it critical, and are you really monitoring how your expectations are constantly changing?

"For me, prayer is a dance with physics, a give and take that allows me to guide my car with certainty to an 'as yet unknown' parking spot, appropriate for me." For me, it's no longer necessary to call this practice 'prayer'. 'Letting go and letting God' has another name - one that's well-known in the psi literature: 'release of effort'. Similar 'release' practices are discussed in magickal literature. Calling it 'God' at this stage of the game just seems to confuse things.

I enjoyed your article, and I hope that you, as a physicist, will find your way to taking that next step towards ownership of this natural aspect of the human condition. Namaste.

When the Sleeper Wakes

2010-05-30T06:59:00.002-05:00

"We have a rule... we never free a mind once it reaches a certain age. It's dangerous, and the mind has trouble letting go."

"It is not good to overwhelm another person with argument even when he is wrong and you are right. Yet it is also not right to give up easily, saying 'I am wrong,' when you have every reason to believe you are right. The best way is to drop the argument naturally, without pressing the other person or falsely admitting that you are wrong. If you don't listen to his arguments and don't let them bother you, he will do the same and not become angry. This is something to watch carefully."

"Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds: do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good inflammable stuff, it will catch fire."

(For T, who keeps trying to understand this all because it's me who's doing it.)

Had a wonderful conversation yesterday about consciousness, the nature of reality, and modeling experience in 5 dimensions. By 'wonderful conversation' I don't mean that I 'won the day', but rather that it was gratifying to engage someone who was willing to challenge his (fairly well-entrenched) ideas about the universe. Mind you, this person watched The Primacy of Consciousness talk that I mentioned earlier, and concluded "I've decided that I believe in an objective reality." Okay.

How interesting to come upon you now reading Reading the Enemy's Mind, which is a substantial tome about the Stargate remote viewing project. The seeds of many previous conversations are germinating, perhaps, eh?

The major challenge for this person (and, I assume, for a great many others) is reconciling these ideas with the Bible. [Editorial Aside: You cannot productively engage a person of religious faith about things which appear to challenge that faith unless you are familiar with the faith and its doctrines.] Fortunately for this conversation, abilities like this are discussed in the Bible, so we are not sidetracked by disputing the reality of the abilities (according to the Bible), and are free to move onto the implications of such abilities. What do these things tell us about the nature of God, the nature of time, the nature of the universe?, etc. Though irrationality (in the form of accepting the Bible as primary/absolute truth) was present, the conversation was ultimately more productive than what one could have with a die-hard skeptic, whose irrationality is failing to see the implications of the records of these abilities that have existed throughout human history. Neither party has (presumably) had direct experience with such phenomena, but based on a few words in an old book, one of them is willing to engage the idea, while the other clings to dogma of a different kind...

I decided long ago that, for my own sanity, this would have to be a Johnny-Appleseed endeavor. Plant a seed if the ground appears fertile, foster it if the opportunity presents itself, but move on if nothing appears to be growing. Sometimes something does take hold, and blossoms when you least expect it.

The Primacy of Consciousness

2010-05-16T09:01:00.002-05:00

"Among scientists are collectors, classifiers, and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics."

With the current level of chatter on paradigm shifts, artificial brains/AI, etc. being what it is, it seems like a good time to throw this excellent talk into the mix. It was originally given at a Physics of Consciousness conference in 2004. (How did I miss that one?) It's worth watching in its entirety; don't cut corners and watch the edited versions. ;).

Go on and watch it. I'll update this post with discussion points later.

Catching the Light

2010-04-24T10:43:00.001-05:00

"If you are a physicist, you won't find it unusual to be confronted with a problem much too difficult for you to solve..."

"For the rest of my life I will reflect on what light is!"

(This one's for PR and BJ.)

Some time ago I mentioned that I wanted to post all the questions that I had accumulated during the process of trying to explain certain experiences. But in the end there were really only a few questions that stood out. To me, they represent the crux of understanding the connection between mind and matter, and how mind emerges from matter and/or matter emerges from mind, as well as explaining the experiences that prompted my query in the first place. These questions reflect our/my current state of knowledge about the correlates of consciousness; the most substantial correlates that we've currently identified are specific energy dynamics within the brain, therefore it makes sense (to me) to focus on units of energy and their behavior. Most of my other (physics-related) questions can (currently) be subsumed under one of these over-arching themes.

What is the relationship between entanglement and the Pauli exclusion principle? (I'm currently trying to make sense of this, this and this, among other things, like boson-fermion correspondence.)

What enforces the dynamics underlying the Pauli exclusion principle, and what, if any, relationship does this have to certain dynamics of conscious experience that appear to forcibly exclude specific states?

Here's a special question for the psi-entists... Why is there still a time-dependent element in certain interactions that we like to label 'non-local'? Our understanding of entanglement is presented largely as 'spooky action at a (spatial) distance' in (essentially) zero time. But unless I've missed something, the unification of space and time suggests that entanglement should also occur across a temporal distance in (essentially) zero space. What would that look like? How would it show up in conscious experience?...

DISCLAIMER: Occasionally I'm tempted by the idea of information as a primary unit, and certainly information-transfer dynamics are a large part of what I look at, but I have a hard time ignoring the idea of a substrate upon which information is stored/transmitted.

ADDITIONAL DISCLAIMER: As much as I'd sometimes like to throw up my hands and give in to some kind of mystical proclamation that 'everything is light expressing itself', I'm not ready to do that either. I think that there are very real dynamics that can tell us important things about exactly how we are connected to each other, and how to use those dynamics in beneficial ways. I think that those dynamics are worth exploring. In detail.

Back From the Future

2010-03-16T08:32:00.000-05:00

"Half my life I sacrificed
But I only came to party tonight."

"The idea was that ripples of the measurements carried out in the future could beat back to the present and combine with effects from the past, like waves combining and peaking below a boat, setting it rocking on the rough sea."

Those of you playing along at home might want to take a look at the April 2010 issue of Discover magazine. It highlights the work that Jeff Tollaksen and Yakir Aharonov have done on isolating/quantifying the effects of information from the future on the present.

If the arrow of time "may be not just an illusion but a lie," is it really so hard to believe that a mind, properly trained, can recognize subtle differences in its own states that reflect/reveal the influence of the future? Retrocausation is not a new idea (Aharonov himself has been 'pushing it for four decades'), and neither is the idea that a mind, adept at pattern recognition, might see (and exploit) the same types of correlations between past and future within itself. "This isn't airy-fairy philosophy - these are real experiments" applies to psi research as well as quantum physics.

"It is upsetting philosophically... All these experiments change the way that I relate to time, the way I experience myself." Amen, brother.

But Tollaksen manages to keep free will alive in the process - "You simply have to put it down to random error in your apparatus." "The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake." - Aharonov. I've got to think a bit more about that one...

Time Enough At Last

2010-02-20T08:39:00.000-06:00

This is either the start of something big, or the end of something beautiful.

Having lost my protected status as 'society's asset', I'm beginning to look for a home for this research. There just isn't time enough right now to do all the things that need doing (like reading somebody's new book on time). Ironically, this search has forced me to confront the fact that theoretical modeling is neither my forte, nor a great source of enjoyment for me. (It is, however, what scientists are supposed to do after they run their experiments. Test and refine.) Me? I tend to get too hung up on what doesn't work, rather than celebrate what does work.

What I am really good at (and what I actually enjoy) is teaching/training. I've done it in a variety of settings and subject areas, so I know that it's not so much the topic as it is the process. (And not everyone has the special kind of patience needed to deal with wayward students. ;) So I'm looking to land somewhere that can provide excellent teaching/training opportunities.

The other thing I'm good at is asking questions. For some time now, I've wanted to collect and post all the questions I've come up with along the way. Had I 350 years, I might have a shot at answering them all, but more than likely the answers are obvious to someone who has a different background. And now that blogger has enabled jump breaks, I can post all the questions in this blog, and update the list on a regular basis. Look for that post to appear soon.

[Confidential Aside: Don't get too excited; you still haven't accounted for a critical aspect of the actual experience. But I will try to celebrate a minute or two of vindication for/with you. ;) ]

Flashforward (Pt III)

2010-02-10T20:21:00.002-06:00

It's not about watching the egg unbreak itself. It's about erasing/overriding the memory of having seen the egg break in order to observe the egg in another (unbroken) state.

(This one's for P, who broke her leg today.)

Over the years I have told you many stories. And I've waited and waited for somebody to get it. Because when it finally clicks, you'll realize that the applications go way beyond what I could tell you six posts into this story.

We have repeatedly discussed memory as the anchor of a particular outcome/observation - the thing which enables consistency in/of experience. I've discussed the idea of undoing an outcome that you don't like. I've vigorously tested these ideas, and am now waiting for someone else to do the same. Occasionally I grow impatient because I see possibilities that I need help in testing and exploring. For example...

Imagine a future where first responders to an serious injury are able to administer drugs that block the patient's encoding of the permanent/traumatic memory the incident. (Not necessarily that drug, but you get the picture.) Of course, blocking the patient's memories is not enough to ensure s/he is not seriously injured, but the patient's memory is the most likely (and probably the strongest) anchor to the injured state/outcome. First responders would also be trained in the kind of progressive information acquisition and framework selection that facilitates state selection, thereby giving them the best chance to choose the best possible outcome. They can also employ a deliberately-fuzzy encoding of their own observations - one that is more easily overridden if it presents information that conflicts with a desired outcome.

I've talked about the medical applications of this theory before, and I hope you'll think about this post the next time a skeptic whines about how 'prayer' has never helped an amputee regrow a limb. While I certainly don't claim that that is possible, I'll take any edge I can get on reducing the probability of a serious injury/illness. And I happen to think that the best time to exercise that edge is in the first observations relating to the injured state.

Flashforward (Pt II)

2010-02-08T10:16:00.004-06:00

"Every group of observers establishes a kind of local reality. It cannot deviate too far from consensus, from what the muses have ruled must be."

I'll subtitle this segment of futuristic flash-forwarding AI and Other Uberobservers. Among the many things I am not an expert in is artificial intelligence (AI), so take this post for what it is - an interesting speculation on what constitutes an observer.

There are currently 541 papers on the philosophy of artificial intelligence in the online repository of papers on consciousness. I have read exactly none of them. But a year or so ago, as I was writing about origins from a 5-dimensional perspective, a nagging thought took root and has stayed with me every since. Consider the following...

For example... At what point is the substrate of our consciousness advanced enough to act as an agent in the selection of outcomes? I am reminded of a study on baby chicks and other animals that were able to influence a random number generator so that target systems behaved in a way that benefited the animals. This suggests that even a human infant's consciousness may play some role in the selection of states. Could a fetus similarly impact a randomly-controlled system, provided it were able to interact with such a system? At what age could a fetus begin to exert an independent effect upon such a system?

Along the same lines, one might ask any number of questions about the optimal conditions of consciousness (COC) from which a noticeable influence upon random system might be obtained. Answering any of these questions requires, of course, that the question of multiple observers be settled definitively. (For what it's worth, and though it may leave me vulnerable to charges of ignoring a competing hypothesis, I believe, for various reasons, that the final model must be one that describes and accounts for multiple-observer interactions.) If our experience of this universe is a culmination of the effects of multiple observers, then our individual ability to choose outcomes may be severely limited at points of suboptimal COC.

Now take that same line of questioning and carry it to the other extreme... At what point does something that has access to the same observations that we do, and which has the ability to reason become an 'observer' in the sense that its effects on outcome selection must be accounted for? What attributes does an AI have to possess before it becomes a competing observer?

This question forces me to examine what I believe it means to be an observer, and what I believe about the importance/function of the substrate that connects us to other observers.

Would an AI need only to interact with us, using the same observations, in order to be an 'observer of influence' (OI)? Or would it also need to have the same substrate that we do as a base for its calculations? Is being an OI a function of what one can do 'mentally' with the observations/data one collects, or is it a function of some type of non-local connection we share to each other and/or some fundamental state of reality that I half-jokingly call The Smear? Or would it necessitate elements of both? This is not an appeal to dualism, but rather an attempt to understand the connection between substrate and the functional, predictable aspects of 5-dimensional navigation and multiple-observer interactions.

Let's presume we could determine an AI's status as an OI in much the same way as the baby chicks were tested for their ability to influence a randomly-controlled outcome. If strong AI is the name given to AI that strives to mimic such critical aspects of human-ness as consciousness, self-awareness, and sentience, then perhaps the strongest AI would be one that would directly compete with us in determining outcome states. Would a strong AI with the characteristics listed above be an OI by virtue of possessing those functions, or would it need to be based on a substrate that allowed for certain types of quantum interactions? (Yes, I said the 'Q' word. Hey, if you are willing to acknowledge that the warm, wet environment of plants can take advantage of quantum physics, then you really can't argue with the idea that quantum processes may play a fundamental role in consciousness.)

It's also worth asking another question... Given that most of us are mostly ignorant about any effects of other observers upon us, would we even recognize an uberobserver among us?

This definitely requires more thought...

Flashforward (Pt I)

2010-01-20T06:23:00.004-06:00

"Infinite are the arguments of mages."

We are, as a people, quite obsessed with what will happen to us after death. Many, if not most, of us need to believe that we are certain about what will happen to us when we die. Whether the 'afterlife' is a non-corporeal paradise called Heaven, or a futuristic utopia here on Earth, we seem desperate to want to ensure our continued survival in it.

Survival for the pragmatic atheist means technology that extends or revives one's life in the face of death. Two increasingly-popular approaches to death nullification are cryonics and the idea that one's consciousness could be uploaded to a computer. Ironically, embracing these technologies doesn't always come with a corresponding interest in studying consciousness to make sure that nothing would be missing when one's mind is uploaded to computer, or revived from cryogenic stasis. (sigh)

From a 5-dimensional viewpoint, I see several obstacles to successfully preserving/continuing the 'self' in these ways. These obstacles aren't necessarily consistent with each other, but in light of the model that's developing, I feel there is some potential benefit in attempting to work through them.

The first obstacle involves the very idea of 'self'. We have a very strong, persistent, subjective feeling of being an independent and self-contained 'self'. I'm not talking about a sense of identity that is defined by socially-contingent labels, but rather a sense of being separate from that which is around us. This sense of self exhibits a strong continuity that 1) defies physical damage or illness, and 2) (usually) reconciles contradictory information and personal actions in a way that doesn't damage itself. (If you are tempted to argue that the sense of self is an unimportant epiphenomenon, then I have to wonder what it is that you are arguing for preserving.)

If the sense of self is an epiphenomenon, then are we sure that we understand the primary phenomenon that gives rise to it? We don't (generally) feel as if any portion of our expression of self arises as a result of any non-local connection to others. We tend to assume that the locally-isolated brain is solely responsible for our feelings and actions as a 'self'. But what if our expression of self were entirely (or even partially) a function of our non-local connection to others? If I, as an isolated observer, can choose/create which outcome I experience, then is it not possible that I in some sense am a product/expression of similar choices made by others? What if the very heart of multiple-observer interactions tells us that we are creating each other in the same way that we 'create' our experience of coincidences? And the critical question for technological-survivalists... If this were true, what would happen to my 'self' when it is displaced in time to a point in the future where no one who knew me exists?

The thing that bugs me about the arguments for cryonics is that they tout the fact that "dynamic brain activity can be lost and regained without loss of personal identity." (q) (My emphasis.) However this argument doesn't recognize its own limitation... To date, we have only ever succeeded in reinserting a person back into the information/observer grid that contained enough information about the person to enable such a comparison. Without such a network of other observers who have information about me - who are perhaps creating their consistent experience of me - will the 'who' that wakes up in 200 years be the same? If the surviving/revived consciousness has a sense of self, who would know (and how) that it was exhibiting the same personality for the same reasons as it did before?

(I have previously expressed skepticism about technology that would interrupt our connection to this admittedly poorly-defined grid. When I begin to think about longer intervals of time, I am confronted with the idea that the information contained within the grid might change significantly or, if no information is lost, that its availability/accessibility has been altered in some way. Yeah, I know - that's too vague to be useful at this point.)

That a sense of self can arise from the appropriate re-electrolyzation of a brain is not the argument I'm attempting to have here. And I can't say what, if not the brain, is the substrate of consciousness, or how another observer would hold the information that enables them to influence my expression of self. I suspect much of the problem in defining/identifying these things has to do with our limiting perception of time. Time - specifically, accessing information from the future - is the next stop on this flash forward vision of technological survival.

And time is the one thing that I don't have more of right now, so I'll sign off.

Yours truly,

Rational, With Different Data

The Substrate of Coincidence

2010-01-11T05:36:00.003-06:00

"One cannot take truth by force, but perhaps indirectly, through phenomena, sign, and symbol we may approach her."

"In any case, jumping from one theory to another is an important part of the art of doing physics."

Yesterday I posed the questions - "And if a coincidence is not meaningful, why does it appear? Why should I experience any greater frequency of 'coincidences' than anyone else?" Today I'm going to add the question - What has changed about me that has caused/supported my ability to experience a higher frequency of 'coincidences' now than I did previously?

Confession time: I still foster/entertain competing models. I've previously mentioned that if external knowledge (knowledge about what is 'out there') does not represent something permanent/absolute, then it might ultimately prove to be problematic to create a model based on that knowledge. So I have two models right now that compete with each other to 'claim' new pieces of evidence/experience. The first model is brain-based, and reflects everything I've learned about contemporary neuroscience. The second model allows conscious experience to develop from/be anchored to something other than the brain. The nature of the thing that is 'other than the brain' changes to accomodate new information.

As I am essentially mapping my conscious experience into these models, it's possible that the second model would be of little use to anyone other than myself. The first model is what would generate excitement. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the brain is a perfectly adequate substrate for consciousness, although it remains to be seen how a materialistic model involving the brain would reconcile with the non-materialistic implications of the 5-dimensional model.

So what then is the substrate for experiencing coincidence? What triggers memories and fuses information together in a way that signals something important, and perhaps reflects information from the (subjective) future? Is there a wiring pattern within my brain that has changed over time to facilitate this type of experience? A chemical balance (or imbalance) that facilitates this type of perception?

The process of fusing all the clues together is messy. And it doesn't pay to go too long without reminding yourself of the big picture. A strictly subjective, introspective analysis of experience yields important pieces of information that demand explanation, but you must pay equal attention to the clues that have nothing to do with coincidence perception if you want to find a comprehensive model. For example, there is a period of a few seconds after I wake up in the morning where I have a sense of identity and I can recognize the familiarity of locational cues, but wherein I am unable to recall the day of the week or the date. This information invariably takes a few extra seconds to 'kick in'. Why should that happen? What do we know about the brain that supports an explanation for that experience? And why would a model of consciousness tethered to something other than the brain support such a phenomenon?

But I digress... Introspective analysis is wonderful if you want a model that works for you. Arguably, all that really matters is that you have a model that enables you to function as effectively as possible. However, science demands something that transfers beyond the experience of a single individual. And so begins the struggle to incorporate subjective experience into a larger model.

Assuming for a moment that the ability to experience 'coincidence' parallels other human abilities in that its expression can be plotted along a continuum, we can ask the question - What would that continuum look like? Rather than attempt to collapse the continuum of expression down to a simple dichotomy (such as skeptics/believers, crazy/sane), why not embrace a bit more of the collective human experience? Perhaps the continuum looks something like this...

(reading Low Expression --> High Expression)

Normal --> Highly lucky/unlucky --> Pathology/Inability to function

Let's assume that there is an optimal expression of 'experiencing coincidence'. Let's call it 'Magickal' just to mess with our physicist friends, and differentiate it from simple 'luck' by an element of control that can be exerted over the experiencing of coincidences. What can we learn about that category from the data available from the other categories on the continuum?

Baseline data --> Psychological data --> Psychological/Neurological data

What types of psycho/neuropathologies most closely correspond to an over-expression of 'experiencing coincidence'? Note that we're not asking about hallucinations. We're asking about two things that may contribute to pathology/inability to function with respect to experiencing coincidences. The first is simply the frequency of the experienced coincidences. The second - and possible the true source of the inability to function in society - is the beliefs that are held about the experienced coincidences. It's possible that a high frequency of experienced coincidences is tied to and/or fed by incorrect beliefs based on the experience of those coincidences. If given a better belief structure, would the experience of coincidence cease to result in a pathological condition? Or is the frequency of the experienced coincidences itself the crippling element? It's hard for me to know to what degree modern psychological treatments even attempt to separate the two.

Once we have identified the most appropriate pathologies for study, we can also ask - What can we discover about the underlying substrate of coincidence from neurochemical attempts to treat these pathologies?

We are far from a comprehensive understanding of the brain, and there are always the nagging placebo/nocebo effects demanding an explanation within a comprehensive model. The purpose of this post isn't to attempt to comprehensively answer any of these questions. Rather, this post is supposed to make you think about what I'm thinking about. :)

[Interesting Aside: In March you should see three articles targeting quantum paradigms of psychopathology being published in the online journal Neuroquantology. Could be interesting...]

From 'Meaningless' to 'Meaningful'

2010-01-10T05:02:00.005-06:00

"A love relationship takes on an added dimension." - yesterday's fortune cookie

"I almost always think things will turn out well, and even when they break I am confident that I can fix them." - Michael Shermer, Scientific American, January 2010.

My life is riddled with coincidences. (They seemed to have increased in frequency as I have moved further into a 5-dimensional mode of being.) However, not all of these coincidences are equally meaningful to me. What determines whether a coincidence is meaningful or not? And if a coincidence is not meaningful, why does it appear? Why should I experience any greater frequency of 'coincidences' than anyone else?

Let's start with the first question, as it's easier to answer. The two quotes above represent two coincidences that I experienced yesterday. (Which one do you think I'm going to attribute more meaning to, and why?) First, it is necessary to establish why these things represent coincidences.

Coincidence: "A striking occurrence of two or more events at one time apparently by mere chance." The primary defining element of a coincidence has to do with time - the proximity of the two events in time. Time is also the most objective element of a coincidence. You and I can agree that these events coincided in time, even though we can disagree as to the explanation of why they coincided and the meaning (if any) of the coincidence.

So let's establish why the Shermer quote is a coincidence. Yesterday, in my head, among other things, I was crafting a follow-up blog post (for a different blog) on Idealism vs. Pragmatism. I had intended to express the conflict that I personally feel between wanting to see/believe the best about a situation (Idealism), and knowing the realistic limits of a situation (Pragmatism). Specifically, I had crafted a sentence about how Idealism can lead you to try to fix what was broken. Yesterday I also took the time to trawl through a collection of low-frequency update internet sites, including the Scientific American site. And, of course, I had to read Shermer's column. This month it's called "Kool-Aid Psychology: Realism versus Optimism", and he leads in with the following "I am, by nature, an optimist. I almost always think things will turn out well, and even when they break I am confident that I can fix them." (My emphasis.)

How meaningful is this coincidence? Not very. I already know that Shermer and I agree on quite a bit more than you'd think. (The major disagreement being, of course, on the reality/nature of ESP/psi and what it represents.) So while the coincidence was enough to make me raise an eyebrow, it's not meaningful enough to cause me to change any of my previously planned actions. And by 'meaningful' I mean that 1) it didn't give me any/enough information that I didn't already have, 2) it didn't cause me to give additional thought to any aspect of a situation, and 3) it didn't resolve any underlying uncertainty that I had about anything.

Now the fortune cookie... Yes, I read the fortunes in fortune cookies. I eat Chinese food about twice a month, if that, so I don't read a lot of fortune cookies, but I do enjoy the fortune as an opportunity for unexpected information or insight to present itself. And when my fortune cookie mentions "an added dimension," and in light of the specific situation I was thinking about at the time...

That's the kind of coincidence that's just loaded with meaning. Yes, the meaningfulness of that coincidence is entirely subjective - that is, it's entirely specific to me. No, I don't interpret it as anything other than the workings of my mind reflected back to me via the selection of a highly-improbable outcome. Like the man said, "The cookie is in no position to know that." It's not a magical cookie, and it's not any kind of supernatural communication from the Beyond. It's just my mind, working things out: talking to itself, if you will.

People have called this type of thing 'communication with your Higher Self'. I prefer to think of it as a type of calculation that the mind is able to engage in - drawing information from the past and the future, condensing it, and reflecting it back via the process of outcome selection. This presumes, of course, that the mind/consciousness has an influence on the process of outcome selection, but then that is the premise of these blogs. It also presumes that information from the future can influence this process.

The process of blogging this idea has, itself, been riddled with coincidences. Books, articles, songs and images would present themselves at just the right moment in time to be used to convey a critical concept or idea. Often I was not even aware of their full impact/meaning until after I had posted. I attribute this to nothing more 'mystical' than being willing and able to access information from the future and trust the answer that showed up, usually in the form of an improbable coincidence. I realize that this sounds highly 'mystical' to a great many of you, and that it bespeaks a much different picture of reality than materialism presents, but it's a non-supernatural picture of reality nonetheless.

Of course the test of this picture of reality is in the practical consequences of accepting it. So sayeth my inner pragmatist. And the aforementioned consequences are still under investigation...

Time Looks Like... The String Section

2009-11-13T09:21:00.002-06:00

"The imagination must be allowed to express itself freely, otherwise it will die."

Nice! And challenging to answer.

I can try to do this with an analogy... I see a moment of conscious experience in much the same way we experience a moment in a symphony. There are many instruments that are playing (or not) at any given moment, and with varying degrees of loudness. And most of us don't stop to parse the whole moment into its component parts.

The violins are almost always playing, and it's fairly easy to detect their influence. To me, they are like the 'past', or the influence of memory upon an individual moment of conscious experience. The violas are much fewer in number relative to the violins, and to me they represent the influence of short-term and working memory - information that is not as firmly anchored as that which resides in long-term memory. Their contribution is generally much harder to detect or parse from the whole. The cellos represent the near-future - that is, the future for which critical events have already been set in motion. Occasionally someone writes a short cello solo, or silences the other instruments to the point where the cello is noticeable. The basses represent the far future. They are generally fewer in number, and their presence in the whole moment is usually more difficult to detect without training.

While each of the four string instruments has a different range of resonance, they all share the property of being a stringed instrument. (I.e., It's all time in some sense - change from one moment to the next.) One could also argue that an individual orchestra (brain/consciousness) can be organized (wired) with a different, though mostly overlapping, set of instruments from any other orchestra. But the strings are still the foundation of any orchestra.

While listening to a symphony, it's possible to momentarily lose track of the whole sound as you choose to isolate and pay attention to the sound of one particular instrument. But all the other sounds are still there. You recognize the sound of a particular instrument because of your previous exposure to that instrument. (I played the cello for four years.) It's easier to isolate and hear/see the influence of that instrument with practice.

In this sense, time to me is like a specific series of notes within a whole moment. Some of the notes may come of the cello, but most of the notes I'm conscious of probably come from the violin. This is quite a subjective, self-absorbed way of looking at time, because I'm parsing the composition of my orchestra, rather than assuming that we are all listening to the same orchestra. So how do I visualize the objective timeline of consensus reality - that thing that moves from the Big Bang through the Middle Ages and into the future?

When I'm thinking in 5 dimensions, I usually don't. I see those events/ideas primarily (though not entirely) as moments in my symphony that reflect influences from my subjective past/future. If an idea or event is something that I have been exposed to many times, then the moment reflects a strong influence from the past (violins). But it may reflect my subjective past in a variety of ways. (Think range of notes, and don't forget that there are other instruments playing as well.)

Sounds like an incredibly self-absorbed perspective, doesn't it? I haven't expanded this analogy to the point where I can explain how I see multiple-observer effects yet. But I'm sure some part of my brain will keep plugging away at it. Thanks - this was fun! :)

The Nature of Probability

2009-10-16T09:15:00.003-05:00

"To throw the dice is to face that which is given by the gods, by powers higher than human. It is to face reality at its most mysterious, like standing unflinching before the thunderstorm."

"Yet the human spirit is restless and nature forever compliant, willing to answer as yet undreamed questions, capable of opening up vast new vistas, revealing still undisclosed parts of her being."

(This one's for the newbie, because I think you are in danger of 'getting it'. ;)

"Probability is a way of expressing knowledge or belief that an event will occur or has occurred...

The word probability does not have a consistent direct definition. In fact, there are two broad categories of probability interpretations, whose adherents possess different (and sometimes conflicting) views about the fundamental nature of probability:

Frequentists talk about probabilities only when dealing with experiments that are random and well-defined. The probability of a random event denotes the relative frequency of occurrence of an experiment's outcome, when repeating the experiment. Frequentists consider probability to be the relative frequency "in the long run" of outcomes.[1]

Bayesians, however, assign probabilities to any statement whatsoever, even when no random process is involved. Probability, for a Bayesian, is a way to represent an individual's degree of belief in a statement, given the evidence." (q)

I would submit that there is a third category of probability interpretation. Like Bayesian probability, it deals with the subjective aspect of knowledge, and it updates as the relative 'force' of a particular piece of knowledge or observation changes in the cognitive space.

But this third category of probability interpretation is entirely concerned with predicting state selection. (By the time I'm done with this post I'll have a catchy name for it.) Not traditional state selection though, which is still presumed to reflect a collapse of the wave function in an objective reality. This third category of probability (subjective state selection probability?) is not concerned with using subjective knowledge to measure the potential for a particular decision or action, but rather with using subjective elements of conscious experience to predict future elements of that same cognitive space. To emphasize how such a definition of probability would be superior to other definitions in predicting outcomes, it becomes necessary to compare them in a common context - hence my emphasis on situations involving 'randomness'.

When faced with a coin flip, classical probability will attempt to predict the outcome of the flip (heads or tails), using only information about any potential bias the coin may have. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what Bayesians would be attempting to do in this situation. Quantify how they should update their beliefs regarding the bias of the coin?

Those of us using cognitive differential probability will attempt to quantify aspects of our cognition with respect to the as-yet-unobserved outcome in an attempt to predict and/or modify the biases governing the selection of the outcome state. Here's where things get different.

Cognitive differential probability (are we liking that name?) recognizes that different amounts of knowledge about the coin, as well as different attachments to the outcome of the coin flip and other elements of anticipation regarding the outcome of the coin flip, constitute biases in the process of selecting the final state of the flipped coin. Early on in the game I talked about the differences in these knowledge structures. The biases we're talking about change with each additional observation, but they also change in response to various elements of pure cognition. (I know - you either believe it's possible, or you don't.)

I think Bayesian's recognize the constantly-updating weight of subjective beliefs, but I don't think they are using it to predict outcomes in this way. Nor do I think that they model 'beliefs' as comprehensively as I propose to model cognitive space. So where does this leave us?

Once I can figure out how to model degree of overlap in the various elements of cognitive space/representation, modified bi-directionally across time, with suitable boundary conditions to prevent infinite regression yet still accurately predict outcome selection... Once I can do that for a single observer, I'll be back to haunt you. ;)

I Have A Dream

2009-10-11T13:23:00.002-05:00

"But for about 20 years now, a controversial area of scientific research has sought to determine whether a supernatural power, invoked through prayer and working alongside doctors, can cure illness... The research involves intercessory prayer, or people interceding on someone else's behalf..." - Can Prayer Help Heal?, Wisconsin State Journal, October 11, 2009.

I have a dream... that one day we will accept effects like this without resorting to God as a default cause. We will accept that 'prayers' are simply thoughts that anticipate future outcomes in a variety of ways, and we will understand outcome selection as a collective effort. "It's not about us controlling God"... but it is about us controlling the process of state selection.

I have a dream... that one day no one will dream of thinking that 'prayer' can replace modern medicine. I don't think that God is behind these effects, but I also don't think that you have enough control to trust the outcome of someone else's life to your thoughts.

I have a dream... that one day we will study these effects without thinking that the only purpose of such results is to prove or disprove the existence of God. I have a dream... that one day the skeptics will realize that it is neither necessary nor correct to accept randomness as the fundamental state of the universe. A dislike for religious explanations as the alternative to randomness should not push us into prematurely accepting that perceived randomness is not connected to thought.

I have a dream... that one day you will see what is right in front of you. You will understand how patients who have been told that they are being prayed for will develop different expectations about their outcomes. We will understand how to give patients information in a way that maximizes their ability to push themselves towards the outcome that they desire. And we will understand their right to choose whether or not we intercede in how we weave our thoughts around their problem.

I have a dream... that one day statements like this - "I think God and God alone chooses whether you have a miracle." - will be obsolete, not only because we will understand the effects of 'prayer' as something other than the intervention of a divine being, but also because once such things are understood, they will no longer be considered 'miracles'. One day God will no longer be the default explanation for all 'coincidental' or inconvenient occurrences.

I have a dream... that you will one day have the same epiphany that I had while counting bacteria in a microbiology lab. If my thoughts can determine whether I will find these bacteria alive or dead, then this entire endeavor is pointless and there is a "bigger problem" that I should be working on.

I have a dream... that one day we will find a meaning behind such a system, because I don't like the idea that life/conscious experience can be this capricious without a reason.

I have a dream... that someday one of you will want to talk with me about this idea, and together we will be able to expand this research.

Measuring the Immeasurable

2009-10-03T18:04:00.002-05:00

"Essential science and common sense keep coming back to data, fact and observation."

The fact that I can't lay my hands on this paper immediately now offends my hacker sensibilities. Grrr. (That paper would be Radin, D, & Atwater, F.H., Exploratory Evidence for Correlations Between Entrained Mental Coherence and Random Physical Systems, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol 23 (3), 2009, for the google search engines. ;)

And yet because I can't lay my hand on it, I can speculate about what the author actually did. (This is a fun game that all grad students should learn to play. Read only the abstract and flesh out what you think the paper should contain. Then go back and compare your notes to the actual paper. Worship anyone who exceeds your expectations.)

I'm temporarily suppressing my 'goody, goody gumdrops!' reaction to the topic in favor of my more prosaic 'please tell me you're going to discuss competing explanations of the phenomenon' reaction. If I were really, really in a good universe, the data collection and distribution processes would have been designed with various competing ideas about Observer Theories and multiple-observer dynamics in mind. (Yours truly is really looking forward to the day when we can stop 'proving' that there is an effect, and focus on using experimental data to tear apart competing theories.)

So here are the questions and ideas that came to mind when I read this abstract/blogpost.

Who were the subjects?

In an ideal study, they would be trained meditators who had been evaluated and matched on self-assessed descriptions of their meditative experiences, and various psychological parameters such as absorption. This helps ensure that any effects obtained are not the result of a single 'strongest' observer. Ideally such subjects could also be pretested to determine their individual ability to affect an RNG in the desired state of consciousness.

Depending on the nature of the research questions being asked, the groups of subjects would also vary in size, to attempt to correlate magnitude of effect with number of 'coherent' observers. The magnitude of effect achieved by trained meditators might also be compared to that achieved by untrained subjects with similar psychological parameters. (Previous studies suggests a straightforward prediction of 'more coherent observers = greater deviation from pure randomness'.)

What was done to eliminate/minimize an experimenter effect?

Let me try to be as clear as possible while not writing a separate treatise on the topic. At some point it's going to become necessary to establish that any observed deviation from randomness is not due to a time-displaced effect generated by the one observer who views all the critical data in a form most-suited for discriminating between outcome options - the experimenter. This is a minor point if you are trying to prove that there is an effect, but a relatively major one if you are trying to establish the source of the effect. (Click here for a discussion on taking the next step with observer theories. Awesome reference list for those who scroll all the way to the bottom of that page.)

Similar arguments could be made for various other ways of appropriately isolating the results/observations, but this can quickly get out of hand. It'll probably only be useful when the task is no longer to 'prove' the effect, but to model the data according to a specific theory/set of theories.

What does this mean - "An exploratory hypothesis predicted that fluctuations in entrained mental coherence associated with the workshop activities would modulate the random data recorded during the workshops." ? (My emphasis.)

I'm not that familiar with binaural-beat rhythms or the specific effects that they have on consciousness/brain waves/neurochemicals/etc. (Note to self: Read that paper.) I suspect that the author is using 'fluctuations' to refer to the difference between the 'coherent' and the (presumably) noncoherent times during the trial period, rather than to differences within the period of exposure to the binaural-beat rhythms itself. Although now I'm beginning to wonder how precisely the latter could be modelled...

What justifies this time frame? "Coherence was entrained by having groups listen to a prescribed series of binaural-beat rhythms during a 6-day workshop." (My emphasis, again.)

Is it necessary to use 6 days of data because the subjects were unfamiliar with the technique prior to the workshop? Was the same amount of data collected on all six days? If so, are there any differences in the data from 'coherent' periods in days 1 and 2, and the same periods in days 5 and 6?

"Random data were continually collected from these RNGs during 14 workshops." That's 84 days of data for each of 3 RNGs, and another 56 days of data for the control period. (Respectful pause for the enormity of the data set.) Now I wonder how robust any individual set of data would have been...

I'm beginning to suspect that this experiment took advantage of an existing program in order to collect data. Therefore, all the parameters that one might like to control or manipulate were not necessarily available for such control. (I could be wrong. You should, of course, read the actual paper.)

What, exactly, is being correlated, and why? "This was predicted to result in positive correlations between random data streams collected from one workshop to the next."

It sounds like data streams from the 'coherent' periods were correlated to each other, across workshops...

Now, I'm no expert on analyzing enormous sets of random numbers. I couldn't give you the algorithm for determining that one set of numbers is less 'random' than another, although it might be fun to see if I could derive one. But it seems like there is only one thing to compare...

So, is the degree of randomness being compared? And if so, why isn't the degree of randomness in the set of numbers from the 'coherent' period being compared to the degree of randomness in the set of numbers from the control period? I understand comparing data within device, within group, and within workshop. And I understand comparing 'coherent' periods to control periods. What I don't understand is what could be compared across workshop but within 'coherent' data? Especially if subjects were not matched on any critical parameters.

From the next sentence - "Results showed that during the workshops the overall correlation was positive, as predicted (p = .008); during control periods the same RNGs produced chance results (p = .74). " - it sounds like the correlation was between the time period (coherent/noncoherent) and the degree of randomness. Presumably, a lower degree of randomness was seen in the data during the 'coherent' times than was seen during the noncoherent times. (Now I also want to know the raw magnitude of the difference in degree of randomness.)

So what, if anything, was compared across workshop but within 'coherent' periods? Direction of deviation from random center point? Magnitude of deviation from randomness? Temporal location of deviations from randomness relative to 'coherence' activity?

I are confused. Even the espresso-laced truffles aren't enough to break the mental deadlock on this. If this becomes clearer to me at any point, I'll post an update.

[Aside: If you are a certain author of this paper, that was probably more than you ever wanted to hear from any single reader. Consider it payback for taunting me with the paper but not giving me the actual paper. ;) ]

Update 10/29/09 : I finally got my hack on and scored a copy of this article. (It's been a busy few weeks.) I didn't realize the extent to which this study would emphasize the "felt sense when individual thoughts and actions seem to merge into a single group thought or action." I can't speculate as to why the individuals' "subjective shift" towards the "same wavelength" might be an important element in the success of a collective effort to affect 'randomness'. Nor am I entirely sure why this cohesiveness is necessary, or qualitatively different than all participants simply focusing on the same outcome. According to the Global Consciousness Project, the simultaneous focused attention of large groups can produce similar effects. (And the thought of a "group mind" scares me a little bit.)

As anticipated, the subjects were participants in a workshop designed for other purposes.

As for my botched attempt to understand the data analysis... I had an entirely different picture of what the data stream from the RNGs would look like. In actuality, the data stream consisted on 0s and 1s. The authors predicted that these data streams "should have been modulated by mind in approximately the same way." This could mean one of two things - either the actual values produced by each RNG were the same (all 0s), or the change from one data point to the next was equally present (or not) in each data stream. (Ex: With starting values of 0,0,1, the next set of bits are 1,1,0. Each bit changed from its previous value.) At this point my understanding of the data analysis breaks down. Again. I understand the math, but not the rationale for choosing this method. I refer you to the original paper. Again.

There is one other issue that puzzles me - the belief of the authors that the physical proximity of the RNG machines to the subjects was somehow important to the results. "Data generated by the same RNGs run at distant locations... did not" show the same correlations that were evident in the close-proximity RNGs. In fact, from my perspective, there is no reason to expect such a difference, unless the information, feedback, or expectations were different between the close and the distant RNGs.

Though no attempt at discrimination was made between theories about the effects, the author did acknowledge the potential for experimenter effects. Given the authors' access to the data and expectations about the data, especially relative to those of the subjects (who were largely ignorant of the RNGs and the data that was being collected), I would argue that perhaps a good portion, if not all of the effect, was an experimenter effect. The fact that RNGs were placed at a distance for the test site, as well as in close proximity to the subjects, indicates that one or more of the authors may have had expectations of seeing a difference in the data based on physical distance. At this point, the test is to see if the experimenter can replicate the experiment but produce data that indicates positive correlations in the distant RNGs as well as the close RNGs, by will alone.

Tricky business, but I have a sneaking suspicion that a better understand of these effects will only come if we are much more precise in identifying who has the most information about the experiment, and his/her motivations and expectations for the experiment/outcome. (Yeah, I'm still looking for that poster I promised you earlier. ) For all we know at this point, my observation of this paper had a significant effect on the outcome. We would test that idea by providing the data/results to all interested parties simultaneously, and then destroying them to prevent future observations that might influence the outcome. This is the antithesis of academic publishing, but it's critical for testing/eliminating certain elements of 'retroactive-PK'.

If you haven't quit reading this post yet, then extra points for you, but really - what's wrong with you?! ;)

In Search of Time

2009-06-17T15:44:00.000-05:00

"Is time nothing more than change? Or is time more fundamental - is it the mysterious entity that makes change possible, a kind of foundation on which the universe is built? Or is it just the opposite: as much as we like to speak of the 'river of time', could the river be dry, its flow an illusion? (And how can it flow if it is meaningless to speak about the rate at which it flows?)" - Dan Falk, In Search of Time (2008), p. 273.

Reading this book (which I really enjoyed) brought to mind our friend Simon the physicist and the nature of time in his hypothetical universe. So as to not admit such tendencies in myself on the record, we'll also introduce the fact that Simon the physicist likes to drive fast. He also likes to be the first one to respond to the green light after being stopped at an intersection. It's a weird compulsion that he has and we're not sure where it comes from. But he's very good at being the first one to hit the gas once a traffic light turns green. He's so good at this that he has sometimes wondered why he is so much faster than everyone else at responding to the green light...

I won't force Simon the physicist to take responsibility for the thoughts that follow, as they come from a distinctly-nonphysicist perspective. And I will credit Falk for putting together so many engaging ideas in such close proximity in his book, many of which prompted long chains of interesting thoughts. What follows is one of them, and may be total crap, but I sure had fun piecing it together.

Perhaps the biggest 'stop and think' idea I ran into while reading this book was the idea that "light, too, can affect time. Light carries energy, and Einstein had shown that mass and energy are equivalent - so light should also be able to warp space and time." (p. 181) Being conditioned to view our perception of light (and time and space) as functions of neural activity, my thoughts jumped to the path that a photon triggers once it hits the retina. Around this same time I was also reminded (by I remember not what) of the idea that processing speed may play a role in cognitive differences.

If neural signalling is ultimately the result of a transfer of energy, then the initial energy of the stimulus (photons) is quickly diminished or amplified by the unique dynamics of an individual's neural pathways - beginning as soon as the photon hits the first layer of cells in the retina. It follows then (without too much difficulty) that individual differences in neural/neurochemical dynamics affect how quickly something is perceived and/or reacted to. Neural density, differences in neural pathway configuration, and differing concentrations of neurochemicals may all impact the speed at which the original signal (photon) registers in conscious awareness. (This presumes that much of the early processing of the signal is not available to our conscious awareness: a view which is widely accepted and supported.)

So the question becomes... If our rate of perception is variable (even in the slightest degree), then can we not also reasonably say that time (or the rate at which we perceive change) moves at a different rate for each observer? And if time moves at a relative rate for each observer, then how/where can we say that time is an absolute feature of the universe?

But "clearly time appears to exist" (q) saith the physicist. Yes, but does it move at the same speed for everyone? And if it doesn't, then how do you and I reach an agreement that we both saw the same green light and I just smoked your [deleted]? What is present that underlies that observation? Do I functionally exist ahead of you in time if I can process and react to stimuli faster than you?

At this point the web of thoughts became tangled as I tried to connect special relativity to a model of multiple-observer dynamics. Trust me, you don't want me to go there. But do ponder that last question the next time you get smoked at an intersection. :)

And yes, I realize that I'm using a model/description that assumes an arrow of time in order to talk about how time doesn't exist in an absolute sense. It's interesting to think about how the effects of the reverse arrow of time might manifest themselves in that same model, but that's a topic for another post.

The Illusion of Knowledge

2009-03-10T14:31:00.000-05:00

"You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be: it's their mistake, not my failing."

I have no illusions about the state of my knowledge of physics. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of others. Like my friend, who emailed me today with the following question - "Can you explain this to me?"

Umm...

My fault to be sure, for having mentioned quantum physics in conjunction with what I was working on, to the chagrin of actual physicists everywhere. But I love a challenge, and I'm feeling feisty. (Just yesterday I learned how to read a basic space-time diagram of particle interactions. Not to be confused with a Feynman diagram, apparently, though I'm not entirely sure why.) Relatively speaking, I've got a better chance of being able to explain this article than most people, so why not...

Naturally, the preferred method for explaining such things is to refer the questioner to someone who has already explained it better than you could. (Preferably with pictures.) But where's the fun in that?

The first thing to do is to understand Hardy's paradox. In the absence of an article from our usual source - the almighty Wikipedia - we are forced to stray into press releases and blog postings to get our bearings. Hardy's paradox comes from a thought experiment that applies the fundamental tenet of quantum theory - an unobserved particle existing in a superposition of all possible positions - to a particle-antiparticle collision. Hardy reasoned that the attempts to create such a collision (see picture) might result in the particle and antiparticle disturbing each other without actually annihilating each other (as they are required to do by definition) due to their respective half-in half-out quantum states of being. (Curious minds stop to ponder what 'disturb but not annihilate' looks like...)

Hardy's design was previously thought to be untestable, as attempting to measure this 'disturbance' was itself a disturbance. That is, until the advent of interaction-free measurement or weak measurement, which itself violates a basic tenet of quantum physics - that the measurement of quantum systems (systems in a superposition of possible states) fundamentally alters those systems causing them to collapse "back to some kind of normality" (a single state). This kind of 'weak' measurement utilizes a measurement interval which is smaller than the inherent level of uncertainty about the properties of the particle. This means that you don't really know what you've got for any single measurement, but in theory you are able to deduce things from the average of such measurements repeated many times.

Your article reports on a modified test of Hardy's paradox, which used photons instead of particles and antiparticles. (Photons are their own antiparticles.) The claim is that physicists were able measure the system without really measuring it, and can therefore draw conclusions about the real (quantum) state of reality. Actually, this same experiment has been done twice by different groups/labs using the same techniques. And the weirdness is that they found regions which had fewer than zero particles in them. "Fewer than zero particles being present usually means that you have antiparticles instead." But photons are their own antiparticle, so what's going on? The analogy is made to Hardy's improbable hypothetical outcome of particle and antiparticles which disturb but fail to annihilate one another. But other than a shared sense of weirdness - "It looks impossible. But then I realised it was the only way to see it. It's beautiful." (here) - I'm not sure how the analogy applies.

Mind you, I don't have the source articles, so there's a good chance I'm missing something. But as far as I can tell, the point is basically that "there is a way to carry out experiments on the counter-intuitive predictions of quantum theory without destroying all the interesting results" and that "there are extraordinary things within ordinary quantum mechanics."

(That was actually fun! Bring it on!)

Now if you were asking if I can explain what it means, or how it fits with my idea... (sigh)

The Age of Entanglement

2009-03-06T19:51:00.000-06:00

I am but a tool of the Wikiether. (That will be in a science fiction book one day. Watch for it. ;)

It takes a lot for me to fire up the computer on a Friday night, especially when I had other plans.

Don't get excited. This is probably complete and utter crap. But when something clicks (or appears to click), you listen. And then you write it down.

It has occurred to me that eventually observations of entangled behavior would have to be accounted for by the 5-dimensional model. (I'm skipping words as I type. This is not a good sign.) Tonight it occurred to me that the answer might really be simple after all.

What if observed entanglement behavior is nothing more than a reflection of the transfer or replication of the bias for state selection from the representation of one object to the representation of another?

This idea would have to be supported by massive parallels between the neurophysics of knowledge representation and the known observations of entanglement creation and destruction. We established in our last post that the creation of entanglement is a bizarre process, one which is apparently not as cut-and-dry as I previously believed it to be. When I search for information on the destruction of entanglement, I am delighted to find that there is data on this phenomenon. 'Entanglement Sudden Death' or ESD "can arise when two sources of environmental 'noise' act to disrupt an entangled state. Each source would individually induce a more gradual asymptotic decay, but in tandem they can trigger ESD." (here)

Several minutes elapse while I pursue the 2007 Almeida et al source article. (Via.) And therein I meet the concept of decoherence (again). "[Q]uantum decoherence is the mechanism by which quantum systems interact with their environments to exhibit probabilistically additive behavior... [and] gives the appearance of wave function collapse." (W) (Things click. I feel slightly wiser.) So decoherence is how we avoid the need for an actual wave function collapse, yes? More study is required on my part, I know, but for now it is enough to know that decoherence is a 'theoretical concept' and Almeida's attributed explanation for ESD - "The presence of decoherence in communication channels and computing devices, which stems from the unavoidable interaction between these systems and the environment, degrades the entanglement when the particles propagate or the computation evolves. Decoherence leads to local dynamics, associated with single-particle dissipation, diffusion, and decay, as well as to global dynamics, which may provoke the disappearance of entanglement at a finite time."

The question remains - Can the observed dynamics of entanglement and decoherence be mapped on to the dynamics of knowledge representation? Especially those dynamics which deal with the creation of associations and overlapping representations? This would require a detailed examination of the neural substrates of associative memory, though perhaps on a level that is not currently possible.

Now that I'm rolling on this line of thought... The stability of entanglement (or not) would be a reflection of the stability of the expectation/bias that the two entangled particles would behave as such. The cumulative state of the information about such an entanglement would be spread across multiple observers, and the displayed behavior between the particles would change in response to the shifting bias for state selection (of a particular observation) as anchored by the relevant set of observers.

What would falsify this idea? (The question you should always ask, even if you don't have a ready answer...) Hell if I know, as I barely have even the framework of this idea, let alone the data to support it. But I bet I'm going to lose sleep thinking about it... Damn.

(I warned you that this wasn't going to be pretty. ;)

Like A Circus

2009-03-05T18:15:00.000-06:00

"I write as a mathematician uses a sheet of paper for doing calculations: because I think better that way."

(Alright, the feedback on this is killing me. Relax.)

The habits of 16 years die hard. The mind asks a question. The question does not go away. If the question does go away, another takes its place. (sigh)

Not too long after the Really Big Idea decided that NOW - right as I was about to become Dr. N, with a career trajectory that went nowhere near physics - was a good time to emerge, I read a book on entanglement. (At this point I was still optimistic that the answer to creating a 5-dimensional model was simple, and that all I had to do was find it.) I won't mention which book, because after finishing it I still didn't understand what entanglement was. I was mildly aggravated that someone could write an entire book on entanglement and still not give a satisfactory explanation of what it was.

'Satisfactory' meaning that I now knew what creates entanglement, as well as how entanglement is destroyed, if/how multiple entanglements are sustained, etc. etc. Since reading that book, it seems to me as though the 'E' word is increasing in popularity, and has become a default explanation for many things. I might go so far as to say that 'entanglement' seems to be the new 'quantum'...

I didn't pay much attention to entanglement while I was developing ideas about the nature of a conscious interface with the 'smear', because I couldn't see a direct link between it and the dynamics of 5-dimensional navigation. (State exclusion seemed to be a more relevant principle.) Which is not to say that there isn't one, simply that I haven't seen one yet and have therefore simply added entanglement to the long list of things that will eventually require explanation. Even certain scientists, whose books we will not name, have said "Particles that are quantum entangled do not imply that signals pass between them. Entanglement means that separated systems are correlated. Psi, on the other hand, seems to involve information transfer, like signal passing." So what does entanglement mean for a 5-dimensional model?

Let's not start with something like this - "let's assume that our bodies, minds, and brains are entangled in a holistic universe." Let's not start with this because there is a process by which particles become entangled. Or at least there was the last time I checked... "When pairs of particles are generated by the decay of other particles, naturally or through induced collision, these pairs may be termed 'entangled', in that such pairs often necessarily have linked and opposite qualities, i.e. of spin or charge." (W)

Which begs the following questions... 1) Do these particles remain entangled forever? 2) What would destroy the entanglement between these two particles? 3) Can a single particle sustain multiple entanglements created at different times with several other particles? (Are particles polygamous or monogamous?) and 4) What about particle threesomes, where a third particle joins a pre-existing entanglement? How has this new addition changed the entanglement relationship between the original two particles? (Why do all these questions bring to mind sexual relationships?) And what's up with this - "The doubly mysterious part of entanglement swapping is that the entangling photons never interact; in normal entanglement, particles must interact and then separate before demonstrating correlative behavior."? I'm getting confused. Are we expanding the ways in which particles can become entangled?

And if one particle is continuously becoming newly-entangled, while retaining all of its previous entanglements unaltered, then is a particle simply the sum total of all of its previous partners? (This opens a new set of questions about the qualitative differences between a particle with few versus many entanglements...) If one particle is continuously becoming newly-entangled, and this causes its previous entanglement obligations to be destroyed or modified in some way, then attempting to use entanglement as an explanation for anything becomes exceedingly difficult, as there is no telling when that entanglement might be/has been destroyed. (Someone out there probably knows which option is correct, and it would be ever so helpful if you would just drop a comment with your explanation. I have the feeling that I'm spinning wheels that don't need to be spun...)

My interest in entanglement is renewed when I read papers like this, which uses entanglement to explain memory (for reasons I'm missing), or articles like this, which talks about the history of the idea of entanglement more so than the properties and limits of entanglement. My interest is further stoked by the notion that entropy provides a measure of entanglement, and a 'connection between quantum information theory and thermodynamics' - a concept which I don't completely understand, but which I nevertheless now fantasize might be the missing link in this 5-dimensional model.

My questions are like a program that is always running in the background, consuming whatever spare resources can be found. They're not going away anytime soon. I know, I know - I should go study physics.

Until that happens though, you'll have the pleasure of listening to a cognitive psychologist butcher, twist, and mangle all of your cherished physics concepts. And it's not going to be pretty. If you're not tired of it already, you'll get there. I promise. :)

Journal Club #7

2009-03-01T16:57:00.000-06:00

"So, if we watch a recording of a soccer match played a long time ago, the outcome is undetermined, not just if we are watching the match for the first time and never read about the outcome, but perhaps also if we've seen the match before and forgot about the outcome." - S. Mitra, from arxiv version of an essay called Changing the Past by Forgetting submitted to FQXi The Nature of Time essay contest.

Alas, not the winning entry, or I would have been kicking myself... But Mitra did win the February arxiv.org quant-ph article-for-discussion contest that goes on in my head. (Congratulations.)

It was tough decision this month. Diosi's paper, titled Does wave function collapse cause gravity?, was a strong second, and lost out only due to the gaping coffee and math deficits in my tiny sector of the multiverse. (Sorry.) Inhabitants of other sectors of the multiverse are highly encouraged to read this paper, as wave function collapse (which establishes the definite state of an object - one might even say it is the state that corresponds to an object bearing a distinct identity) is linked to gravity, which I have previously speculated might have something to do with the neurophysics of economically seaming the represenations of distinct objects together.

But back to Mitra's essay...

You got me with the first line - "As pointed out by David Deutsch, it is possible to experimentally disprove all collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics if one could make measurements in a reversible way." An idea previously discussed by this author as well. But not something about which you can simply declare "Oh, I did that" and expect to be believed. ;)

What gets me about this paper is that the erasure of memory is discussed as a 'unitary operator that disentangles the observer from the spin.' Come again? Are we talking about a complete, or a partial, disentanglement? Heck, why are we jumping straight to entanglement/disentanglement analogies for memory/forgetting in the first place? I've been really careful to avoid leaping to entanglement as an explanation for anything other than observable entanglement behavior between two particles.

The author's use of a 'machine observer' provides an opening to discuss ideal memory erasure, which is presumably not a condition that can be easily found in human observers. My predisposition is to map 'forgetting' from our existing understanding of neurochemical and/or neuroelectrical dynamics in the human observer, and see how that maps onto reports of a changed past. That work could be extended into blocking memory encoding to prevent a permanent 'entanglement' with a particular outcome state. But I digress...

If I'm reading the paper correctly, the author suggests the use of memory resetting to a backup (prior) state as an escape from a forthcoming disaster. "The observer facing disaster can thus be almost sure to escape the disaster by doing a memory resetting." Interesting... I've escaped the 'disaster' of not finding the items I was looking for while shopping by 'forgetting' that I had just witnessed the absence of the desired item. Although I've never really thought of it as 'forgetting', but rather as a 'shifting of attention' until that observation was no longer in short-term memory.

It also follows then that we would want to be careful about what type of observations we make, as they may prove to be 'unforgettable', thereby "trapp[ing] us in the wrong sector of the multiverse." Sometimes a lack of information is a good thing - think of it as 'degrees of freedom' in your ability to select an outcome state. ;)

One final note - all of the essays on The Nature of Time can be viewed here, along with the number of popular votes they received. I'd like to meet the person who actually read all of those essays before voting. I'm just saying - that's a lot of essays...

We Are Not Alone

2009-02-26T06:36:00.000-06:00

"The path of unification that science must follow is the path that physics and nature leads us down, not the path that some scientists decide that nature must logically follow, no matter how 'beautiful' or aesthetically pleasing those theories might be." - J.E. Beichler, JSE, 21, p. 541 (2007).

After saving the world, this seems a bit anticlimactic. ;) But if you are going to scent the hounds...

I've mentioned before that there were other 5-dimensional models. Physicists know what I'm talking about when I mention the Kaluza-Klien theory. (Google for wikipedia entry; link won't post correctly.) James Beichler is another physicist who is proposing a 5-dimensional model. Given the circles he moves in, you would think we would have talked, but no. A new theory of psi based on a fifth dimension? (What a shocking idea. ;)

I've read some of Beichler's work before finding this 2007 JSE article. It always seemed to me to be lacking a description of the experience of a fifth dimension. Not to belabor a point, but if you can describe your experience in each of the other four dimensions, then you should be able to do the same in a proposed fifth dimension. That point aside, this paper suggests that an additional dimension (a dimension of space) solves certain physics problems. I would suggest that you consult your physicist friends for their interpretations of the proofs presented in this paper. (Not because I think the proofs are accurate or inaccurate, but because I'm not really in a position to know either way.) I'm reading the paper because my curiosity knows no reasonable limits. I'll also attempt to parse and absorb the 6 pages of unbroken text on Beichler's 5-dimensional theory of psi. After I find some coffee.

[Note to self: Never blog before coffee.]

Childhood's End

2009-02-21T17:18:00.000-06:00

"Imagine, if you will, that the world's destruction is at stake and the only way to save it is for you to write a one-pager that convinces a jury that your old cherished view is mistaken or at least seriously incomplete. The more inadequate the jury thinks your old cherished view is, the greater the chances that the world is saved. The catch is that the jury consists of earlier stages of yourself (such as yourself such as you were one year ago)." (lol - Good one!)

Ladies of the jury,

The purpose of this statement is to argue for the rejection of the currently-proposed idea of modeling experience in 5 dimensions. For the purposes of this statement, the 5-dimensional 'model' (such as it is) refers to the idea described by this author, and to no other attempts to describe the universe in 5+ dimensions.

We will not begin by arguing about the nature of our experiences. If you are younger versions of me, then your experiences will drive you to look for an explanation, and I must only convince you that this particular explanation is ill-advised. This is not difficult for me to do, as I can see that my role in advancing this particular idea has reached its limit.

It isn't hard to see why this proposal should be rejected. The nature of what this author is proposing involves re-contextualizing the laws of nature and physics as we know them. Of all the arrogance! And this from someone who is too cowardly and ill-equipped to succeed at doing it!

Ladies of the jury, you are me, and we weren't always such a coward. You, Me(2000), wanted to pursue this idea's predecessor as a dissertation, but you couldn't assemble the cross-disciplinary team of advisors to do it. You never doubted your ability to do the work, including the math and the modeling that you now avoid. But then, you had a much smaller idea.

And now look at us. Look at what I have become, for the flaws of this idea come from me, and I am your future. I have judged my opinion of my experiences to be more valid than the judgments that would be placed upon it by others. This idea is nothing but a stubborn, egotistical refusal to accept a definition of myself as flawed. And yet that egotism hasn't gone far enough. This explanation, this idea, in its current state, is undeveloped. It is not been carried forward, as science demands, to make testable predictions about the laws of physics as we currently know them. What self-respecting scientist clings to an idea that she has little or no hope and/or intention of making anything more of?

When you become me, you will have gone just far enough and know just enough that you can feel accomplished and right. You will know what this idea represents, and you will feel superior for having had such a big idea. But you will also be angry. Angry that you can't ignore what this idea represents. Angry that the feeling that you should do something more won't go away. Angry that you know enough to know what is respectable to do and what isn't. Angry that the burden of doing something that you are not equipped to do gets placed on you. Angry at the assholes who make you afraid to ask for help. Angry that it's always about the 'show', and not the 'tell'. Angry at yourself that you haven't mastered your fear. And you will stop, somewhere between the feeling of accomplishment and the fear. You will decide that this place is just fine. And you will not push yourself to do what is necessary for science. You will tell yourself that it is too big of an undertaking, and you will let this absolve you of the need to press forward. That is perhaps where this idea is the most dangerous.

Ladies of the jury, I urge you to reject this idea when it comes upon you because it is an idea that you will cling to for all the wrong reasons. It has not been substantiated by the experience of others. It has not been successfully integrated with the mountains of evidence that suggest that the rules of a 4-dimensional world work just fine. It is a problem that you may not be sufficiently motivated to solve, for you will fear success at doing so more than you will fear failure, and it would cost you a lifetime either way. It will fulfill your basic psychological need for self-validation on several levels, but that won't make it worth anything to anyone else if it can't be properly developed into a predictive model that can be experimentally tested. As the 'author' of this idea, I haven't done that. I don't know if I can do it, or even if I want to do it. I simply want to be at peace with what I am and what I can do. And that isn't enough for you to accept this idea. You should strive for something better. This idea, in its current state, represents all the weakness of my ego, not the strength of science.

(You're right - that was helpful, and cathartic. ;)

13 Conversations About One Thing

2009-02-12T07:06:00.000-06:00

"Physics, in actuality, is a never-ending search made by human beings. Gods and angels do not come bearing perfectly formed theories to disembodied prophets who instantly write textbooks... Conversations are essential to science. But the off-the-cuff nature of conversation poses a difficulty. It is rare, even in these digital times, to have a complete transcript of every word spoken between two people on a given day, even if that conversation someday leads to a new understanding of the world."

It would be nice if this blog could become a permanent record of the evolution of an idea. Hell, it would be nice if actual conversation took place here. While I have yet to lose faith in science, I occasionally lose faith in scientists, especially self-proclaimed 'thoughtful' scientists. Faith is a limited resource, which can be replenished or depleted by observation. Never assume that you know how much of it there is when you begin, or that you can get it back once it's lost.

[Pause for not-so-random philosopher quote.]

"Who has not experienced meeting a person distinguished by prominence or fame or even by real qualities, or a person of whom one wants something: a good job, to be loved, to be admired? In any such circumstances many people tend to be at last mildly anxious, and often they 'prepare' themselves for the important meeting. They think of topics that might interest the other; they think in advance how they might begin the conversation; some even map out the whole conversation, as far as their own part is concerned. Or they may bolster themselves up by thinking about what they have: their past successes, their charming personality (or their intimidating personality if this role is more effective), their social position, their connections, their appearance and dress. In a word, they mentally balance their worth, and based on this evaluation, they display their wares in the ensuing conversation. The person who is good at this will indeed impress many people, although the created impression is only partly due to the individual's performance and largely due to the poverty of most people's judgment. If the performer is not so clever, however, the performance will appear wooden, contrived, boring and will not elicit much interest.

In contrast are those who approach a situation by preparing nothing in advance, not bolstering themselves up in any way. Instead, they respond spontaneously and productively; they forget about themselves, about the knowledge, the positions they have. Their egos do not stand in their way, and it is precisely for this reason that they can fully respond to the other person and that person's ideas. They give birth to new ideas, because they are not holding onto anything. ...they [know] that something new will be born if only they have the courage to let go and to respond. They come fully alive in the conversation, because they do not stifle themselves by anxious concern with what they have. Their own aliveness is infectious and often helps the other person to transcend his or her egocentricity. Thus the conversation ceases to be an exchange of commodities (information, knowledge, status) and becomes a dialogue in which it does not matter any more who is right. The duelists begin to dance together, and they part not with triumph or sorrow - which are equally sterile - but with joy."

These are the conversations that are worth having, and the ones that history should remember. But they are rare. And they almost never take place where or when you want them to.

Fortunately, for those of us who recognize that output reflects input, there is a wealth of interesting people and ideas scattered around the internet. A dialogue of sorts, perhaps, but one between you and the universe, driven entirely by your ability to ask questions and then go looking for the answers.

Journal Club #6

2009-02-01T16:18:00.000-06:00

"I don't want to be a pie. I don't like gravy."

Out of the 279 papers in the January 2009 quant-ph section of arxiv, three of them were downloaded onto my computer. The criteria for download being 1) I understand all the concepts/terms in the title, 2) I understand the first line of the abstract, and 3) I can see how it relates to my humble quest for 5-dimensional glory. It will become ridiculously apparent in just a few minutes why I don't attempt to discuss papers like this more often.

Of the three papers that I downloaded, the winner is a tasty morsel that grabbed me with the second line of its abstract - "The greater the information that is gained, the less reversible the measurement dynamics become." This sounds familiar, though I'm starting to forget exactly where I wrote about certain ideas... I'll repeat the gist of it. The more well-anchored an observation is in memory - that is, the more supporting and/or dependent observations that are also encoded in connection with an observation, and/or the more connections to previous memories that are generated with respect to a particular observation - the less-likely you are to be able to UNDO the observation.

With pen in hand, I delve into the introduction, hopelessly curious about the nature of the 'uncertainty' relation between reliability and reversibility that the authors will be deriving with respect to quantum measurements. "Can we find a useful role for the idea of dynamical reversibility in the context of quantum physics...?" The way I'm reading this, the question could be restated 'Can the presentation of a specific outcome state be undone, allowing the object to settle into the same quantum (smeared) state that it maintained prior to the measurement?' Presumably from there it could subsequently be observed in a different state.

It's immediately apparent in the following sentences that the aspect of information retention is causing a bit of a problem. "To measure is to create information; and information is a state - in a machine or an organism - which extends from a certain time into the future." This quotation is actually from Otto Frisch's 1965 paper "Take a Photon." (Brief pause while I google for a copy of this paper. Significant pause to appreciate the irony of finding, among the top google results, Raymer - one of the author's of the paper I'm currently reading - discussing rational atheism with John C. Garrison in online story posted today. Unable to find the Frisch article though.)

By page 3, the first few lines of the section titled 'Unitary Evolution', I'm lost. Measurement as a four-step process? What are 'kets' and 'qutrits'? Hey, isn't there a big game on that I could be watching?

I've now given up all hope of complete comprehension of this paper within a reasonable time frame, and am skimming the rest of it for key concepts that will enable me to have a punchy ending to this blog post. "A key element of our treatment is to consider... what constraints are placed on this reversibility by virtue of leaving a permanent trace (information) in the probe." If I were to argue that the only state of 'information' that matters is the state of the neurons post-observation related firing, then the question of reversibility becomes one of undoing or overriding the changes to the neurons as a result of observation-related firing. If we accept the experience of information becoming 'undone', then the most likely site for such an 'erasure' of information should be one that evidences the possibility of such modification. Such an erasure wouldn't be permanent, but would it be sufficient for experiencing inconsistent observations that suggest such an erasure? (Thusly do I retreat into the familiar to salve my wounded ego.)

"[T]he degree of reversibility decreases with each newly added observer k..." Ah, multiple observers! I understand this! But wait - why does the degree of reversibility decrease? Each observer is treated as "an additional probe oscillator coupled to the counter as in Figure 1." So, physical interaction with the system? Which leads me to wonder how exactly the authors are suggesting that the information from the system is dispersed across interactions with observers... I see shades of relative and cumulative entropy in this section.

"The very act of Bob deciding to remember permanently the result is sufficient to make the measurement irreversible... Furthermore, the greater the information that is gained by Bob... the less reversible the dynamics become." This is almost consistent with the concept of 'memory as an anchor.' "[O]ther observers necessarily change the state of the system, making it less amenable to reversal from Bob's viewpoint." This seems to be a definitive statement in support of the existence of multiple observers, whose existence and effects I have previously pondered.

Even though I'm missing out on a great deal of the detail/depth of this paper, I enjoyed being exposed to an attempt to model relationships that resemble (to me) the ones I have previously discussed. Perhaps you will see something in this paper that I missed.

(So, how was that for an attempt to leap interdisciplinary boundaries? ;)

Mindflex

2009-01-15T12:02:00.000-06:00

"Think It. Move It. Believe It."

Not quite 'hacking the smear', but amusing (and productive) nonetheless. Practice generating target brain states to control a floating ball in a new game called Mindflex, due to debut this fall from Mattel.

Video here.

Blog review here.

And when you're ready to graduate to actual hacking, try this or one of the other RNG applications by Psyleron. I trained with a heads/tails disk that spun in its own stand. This has got to be more fun than that. Eventually I'd like to see other applications of this technology, including extending the color-shifting lamp concept into a larger grid of available colors which could be manipulated to create a variety of patterns. Think Lite-Brite meets old-school screen saver. (Check out the first picture in this article.) It's the artwork of the future. ;)

Information and Representation

2009-01-15T06:22:00.000-06:00

"Ice, ice, baby
Too cold"

It's so cold outside that ice crystals are huddling together for warmth. I should be firmly entrenched under the covers right now, like a good Mid-Westerner, but I was bothered by the sloppiness at the end of my last post.

In struggling to learn the basics mechanics of information theory, I am consistently plagued my pre-existing education in cognition and neuroscience. While the entropy of a fair coin is defined as one bit, I know that there are at least six distinct ways to represent the final state of the coin.

If HEADS, then NOT TAILS.
If HEADS, then NOT (NOT HEADS).
If TAILS, then NOT HEADS.
If TAILS, then NOT (NOT TAILS).

The cognitive representation of each of the six states listed above is different. A different set of neurons is activated in each representation. If I'm arguing that the activation of mental representations contributes to the selection of the state of subsequent observations, then the differences in each of the representations that I just mentioned become critical.

Similarly, the activation of the mental representation 'HEADS' at 5 second intervals for 2 minutes would need to be treated differently than a single activation of 'HEADS', or the activation of 'HEADS' followed by the activation of 'NOT TAILS'.

Additionally, the neurons that are active in a particular representation continuously modify and are modified by the neurons that are subsequently activated and the neurons whose activation immediately preceded their own. (Hint: Pay attention to what you are thinking immediately before and immediately after you try to select an outcome state.) The accessibility of a particular representation is changing with each activation.

My working definition of 'cumulative entropy' tends to take into account such differences in representation, treated them as varying degrees of information. My vocabulary in attempting to communicate these ideas is probably imprecise, as I am trying to reconcile concepts from various disciplines, but I will try to clarify as misunderstandings arise. Apologies for the confusion.

Messages From Water

2009-01-14T17:12:00.000-06:00

"Water represents the interface between the 4th dimension in which we live and the 5th dimensional sphere of our soul." (Give me a moment to recover from finding that quote...)

I generally don't like the fact that water freezes and becomes ice. It has the nasty habit of doing so on roads that I have to drive on. I don't believe that ice would be any less dangerous to drive on if I had projected loving thoughts at the water while it was freezing. And that about sums up my interest to date in the water crystal formation studies of Dr. Masaru Emoto.

So I wasn't thinking too much about this recent replication of Emoto's work until I read this. And then I got to wondering about the exact nature of the differences in the water crystals after they had been treated... Where there physical differences in the structure of the crystals? Were those differences quantified/quantifiable? Do the treated water crystals exhibit a more highly-ordered state when compared to the untreated crystals?

To begin to get some answers, I had to go to this earlier replication of the same study. The results of the study deal primarily with subjective ratings of the aesthetic appeal of the crystals. "To assess the aesthetic appeal of these 40 crystals, a group of 100 volunteers were recruited over the Internet to blindly and independently rate each crystal, one at a time, on a scale from zero to six, where zero meant “not beautiful” and six meant “very beautiful.”... Beautiful crystals were defined as symmetric, aesthetically pleasing shapes." No objective measure of crystal structure was reported, however the presence of symmetry is a known contributor to judgments of beauty in other situations.

Now my question is... How does symmetry in the structure of a crystal relate to the energy needed to create the varying levels of crystal structure? (Is it easier or harder - in terms of energy - to create a symmetrical crystal? Is a more-symmetrical state more or less likely to occur naturally? Is there more or less information contained in a symmetrical crystal?) As I am still not a physicist, I resort to google searching for a quick and dirty explanation. "Factually, the correlation of entropy and symmetry in a qualitative manner was already hinted at by Schrödinger many years ago that negative entropy corresponds to asymmetry, broken symmetry, or less symmetry. However, it remains generally a tacit assumption that higher symmetry of a system implies less entropy." My source article goes on to explain "the symmetry increase leading to a macroscopically equilibrium state is obvious. [Obviously.] However, as will be pointed out, the corresponding effect of information loss (or entropy increase) is also obvious, such as the consequence in the formation of a perfect crystal. Here, information content and symmetry of different static structures are compared and their differences are considered." Sounds confusing but promising, yet a bit beyond the scope of this post...

The major questions that arise from the water crystal formation studies have to do with reconciling the differences in symmetry and entropy in the crystals with the processes were 'applied' to the crystals. I think we're all beyond the classic model of a physical force of some kind that is directed at the water, so I can safely ask this question... Are the observers who are directing intentions at the water and/or the observers of the crystals able to collectively select a more symmetrical state of the ice crystals? (While the 2006 replication briefly mentioned observer effects, it did so without mention of a mechanism for those effects.) I then also want to know if the more-symmetrical state has a higher or lower probability of occurring, relative to the 'not attractive' (and therefore, presumably, less symmetrical) crystal states? Can the relative probabilities be correlated somehow to the efforts of the relative observers?

An intentional selection of a specific state (whether it be ice crystals or any other system) is not possible without information about the system. I couldn't help but notice that information (photographs) about the target bottles of water was given to a much larger number of observers than the number who had information about the control bottles. I began to wonder about the total amount of information (and with it, the ability to influence the process of state selection) that existed with regards to those 'treated' bottles of water... While lost in earlier musings about the concept of relative entropy, I was quickly prompted to think about the related concepts of cumulative entropy (the sum of the information that exists about a system/state across multiple observers, moments in time, and degrees of knowledge) and distributed entropy (information about a system that is distributed among different observers). And I began to wonder... If the amount of information that is available about a system is related in some way to the amount of order in a system, then can varying the cumulative entropy of a system have an independent effect on the amount of observable order or disorder present? Can varying the nature of the information that is available about a system have an independent effect on the amount of observable order or disorder present?

I'm not suggesting that more information about the system means that more energy is locally available to physically affect the crystal formation. Rather, I suggest examining the process of state selection as a function of the amount and nature of the information that exists about the system.

City at the End of Time

2009-01-07T16:14:00.000-06:00

"They are fate-shifters, born with the ability to skip like stones across the surface of the fifth dimension, inhabiting alternate versions of themselves."

"Some call it luck, others fortune. We know it here as Chancing, which is great Will, consistently applied to random circumstance to guide favor..."

From City at the End of Time, by Greg Bear (2008).

And here I was thinking that I had a solid lock on my first science fiction novel. ;)

Now if we could just get a forward-thinking institute to host a conference on the fifth dimension... (cough) ... perhaps we could explore turning science fiction into science fact.

I have a sneaking suspicion that writing quality science fiction is actually a harder skill to master than doing quality science. Science fiction is notoriously forward-looking, while being grounded in concepts to which we can all relate. It reaches people who enjoy playing with ideas and thinking about things in different ways. You never know what a particular flight of imagination will touch off. (It was science fiction that put us onto state exclusion.) Someday I'd like to seriously try writing science fiction, just for the freedom of expression.

For the moment though, as I can now create a list of 'fiction with a 5th dimension', I shall do just that, keeping this post open for updates and/or reviews as I have time to add them. Your additions to the list are warmly solicited.

Fiction with a Fifth Dimension

Here, There, & Everywhere, by Chris Roberson (2005)
City at the End of Time, by Greg Bear (2008)

Do You See What I See?

2009-01-01T18:45:00.000-06:00

"The realization of this experiment opens interesting perspectives for controlling quantum systems. Instead of freezing their evolution, repeated measurements could provide information used to channel them towards tailored quantum states by active feed-back operations." - Bernu et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 101: 180402 (2008). (here)

Don't look now, but something got me thinking...

When last we discussed how I was going to take a wild stab at modeling physics to include 5 dimensions of experience, I was fixated on the quantum zeno effect, which is perhaps the most direct example of a physical system being impacted by measurement. (I am still absorbing information on QZE and the particular observations and problems that gave rise to the idea of quantum decoherence. This will take awhile.)

While reading this blogpost, my thoughts went to another article - one on non-local observation. In this experiment "[t]he experimenter asked each participant either to imagine that he or she could intuitively sense the presence of the photons in a specific area of the interferometer... or to withdraw that intuitive perception and allow the photons to pass through the same area unimpeded." (My emphasis.) In this experiment, the participants were not directly observing the laser/Michelson interferometer system. The hypothesis was that if "such [non-local] observation were possible, it would theoretically perturb the photon's quantum wave functions and change the pattern of light produced by the interferometer." A significant decrease in overall level of illumination was present in the non-local observation condition, as predicted by the behavior of the same system when the interference pattern has collapsed due to attempts to gain information about the path of the photon.

Is quantum decoherence compatible with non-local observation? Or would it make more sense to map observation effects (like QZE) onto certain cognitive parameters associated with observation? It's interesting to me that in Radin's study the "result was primarily due to nine sessions involving experienced meditators". This suggests that cognitive attributes of a particular observer are associated with the degree and nature of 'observation' that they can bring to bear on a system. This in turn reminded me of Schmidt's article, discussed lo these many months ago, which also suggests a continuum of observation based on factors such as the 'alertness' of the observer.

And I began to wonder... Where are the studies that map cognitive attributes such as absorption, and neurological properties such as visual cortex activation, onto effects of observation such as the QZE?

What If It's ALL Pattern?

2008-11-25T14:38:00.000-06:00

"Congratulations. You have swamped the probabilities of chance with your mind." - Ghost, by Alan Lightman (2008). (Yes, that Alan Lightman. A most enjoyable read!)

This is going to have to be quick, as yours truly is currently swamped with more mundane things to do.

There seems to be something in the air that makes people want to discuss patterns. I concede that our ultimate understanding of the universe may always include an element that is not understood. Call it 'noise', 'randomness', or whatever else you like.

I just think that it's possible to understand a whole lot more of that 'noise' in terms of a pattern or set of underlying causes. I don't hold this opinion because I can't stand the idea that some things are simply unexplainable; in fact, I tolerate that idea quite well. But, having seen the potential to crack one previously untouchable 'code' (that of the origins of dreams), I can't help but think that it might be possible to crack more of the 'code' of consciousness.

Cracking the code of conscious experience will involve a grand synthesis of many lines of research, including those on rarer types of conscious experience. I also see the multiple-observer question as a necessary line of inquiry for understanding the interplay of consciousness with the observable world. The code of a self-contained consciousness that is isolated from outside influences is (hypothetically) much easier to crack. But the code of a consciousness that is dependent in some way on other observers will likely be much more complicated.

This challenge merits only the following response - Bring it on! ;)

Journal Club #5

2008-11-15T16:27:00.000-06:00

"It is like hearing an echo from a long way off." - said of telepathy.

Venkatasubramanian, et al, Investigating paranormal phenomena: Functional brain imaging of telepathy, International Journal of Yoga, 2008 (here)

I'm all for studies which aim to link hard neurological data to psi activity. To date, there appear to be three other such studies which involve functional brain mapping techniques. Two of the three previous studies examined subjects with telepathic ability, whereas the third dealt with "distant intentionality." Only the study on distant intentionality (healing at a distance) used fMRI.

I'm commenting on this study because it indicates that the telepathic subject/receiver, who performed the telepathy task while being scanned, displayed activation in the parahippocampal gyrus when asked to engage in the task of 'receiving' the telepathically-transmitted image. The parahippocampal gyrus is typically associated with memory encoding and retrieval, which begs the question - why would an area of the brain whose primary function seems to be memory encoding and retrieval be implicated in telepathy?

Granted, the parahippocampal gyrus has been implicated in many things - from panic attacks to the perception of sarcasm. It's not an entirely implausible stretch to relate the need for perceiving social context when identifying sarcasm with the ability to 'detect' what another person is thinking. It can all be related to Theory of Mind. Telepathy just seems to bypass a few of the more conventional information-gathering steps.

So I'm uber-curious to know why the authors of this study think that the parahippocampal gyrus might have a legitimate connection to telepathy. The previous studies using SPECT, EEG, and MRI seem to claim only that a larger activation was seen in the right cerebral hemisphere. The telepathic subject's fMRI data was analyzed by comparing periods of 'activation' with periods of 'rest'. Periods of 'activation' represented active attempts to 'send' an image on the part of the sender/investigator and active attempts to 'receive' on the part of the subject. The images being 'sent' were abstract geometric figures of low complexity, hand-drawn by the investigator.

The control subject also displayed a differential activation in another area of the brain that is associated with Theory of Mind - the left inferior frontal gyrus. So what's going on here? The key to successful telepathy is in the degree of correspondence between the 'received' data and the original target. Emotional content (which implicates the hippocampus more directly) is non-existent in this particular task and in specific target material chosen for the task. (Right about now you should open the article and look and the two sets of 'received' images, if you haven't already done so. I confess that I am hard-pressed to call one drawing the result of telepathy when compared to the other.)

The discussion section of this article talks quite a bit about the role of the hippocampus in processing emotion, though it's hard to tell how this line of thinking corresponds to this particular study. The authors also digress to mentioning sensitivity to magnetic field energies though, again, the reasons for doing so in the context of this study are unclear. (But we're noting the relevant references for later.) The paragraph that links the parahippocampal gyrus with magnetic fields via their common association with schizophrenia and psychosis makes me cringe. The implication is that magnetic fields are the mechanism of telepathy and the parahippocampal gyrus is a 'hot' center for processing those signals, but the leaps in thinking to link these two ideas are extreme.

So what, if any, other plausible explanations exist for the why the parahippocampal gyrus might be implicated in this act of telepathy? (It really is a stretch to think that it has to be implicated in every act of telepathy.) Without a successful replication of this task using similar stimuli, it's impossible to conclude that this parahippocampal activation was not simply an anomaly that has no relevance to the task. All that being said, I mention this study because it brought to mind a theory about telepathy that I think has received far too little attention. Now that I think about, there are actually two theories that can come into play here...

The first theory (and you'll pardon me if I can't properly attribute it to a source) is that telepathy works by activating existing memory traces. That is, I perceived your message to me in terms of ideas, images, events, and emotions that I've already experienced. My challenge is then to correctly 'connect the dots' and decode the messages by correctly interpreting the relative strength of the memory activations. To be completely honest, I like this theory because it jibes with my own experiences and the anecdotal evidence I've collected from others. Remote viewers also discuss the difficultly they encounter in correctly interpreting their perceptions.

The second theory (again, I beg pardon for lack of attribution) is that instances of ESP such as are purported to have occurred in this task may actually be the result of the mind/brain accessing its own future observations. In other words, the telepathy was not mind-to-mind contact (in this case), but the brain accessing what it will see during the feedback stage of the experiment. The brain accessing future memory traces, if you will.

By implicating memory traces in the 'telepathic' act, via either of the two theories I just described, you have a much more plausible reason to suspect that the parahippocampal gyrus activation is a significant find.

Though I remain, as ever, an appropriately skeptical scientist who awaits the validation of replication with eager anticipation.

What Remains To Be Discovered

2008-09-18T17:06:00.000-05:00

"They both had serious reservations about the direction quantum physics was taking, but stepped out of the fray into another place altogether - the fifth dimension." - The Quantum Ten, by Sheilla Jones (2008). ;)

Per the nuggets of good advice that popped up today in the blogosphere, I create/blog about my current muddled state of thought.

"Consider how the problem will be solved..." Recapping: The big problem I have is this - What laws govern a system that produces all aspects of classical physics experience and the consistently observed exceptions to those laws? (Auxiliary problems abound.)

Unfortunately, all indicators right now are pointing to the need to study consciousness and the mechanisms that give rise to the various aspects of conscious experience. (I say 'unfortunately' because mentioning 'consciousness' is often enough to cut your audience by at least half.) But this is also a problematic perspective because, in order to produce something scientifically useful, you end up attempting to map elements of subjective mental experience onto external knowledge structures. 'Why is that problematic?', you ask.

Consider: If I want to say that the mechanisms involved in object classification might give rise to our experience of gravity, then with what structures do I identify those mechanisms? If gravity isn't an absolute external force, then how can I justify introducing neurons or neurochemistry into the model? When does external knowledge reflect something that is absolute? (Rabbit hole!)

What remains to be discovered is whether or not I can extricate myself from this predicament and preserve something that has validity beyond a subjective perspective...

A Wizard Should

2008-09-08T19:34:00.000-05:00

"Above all else, a Wizard knows himself - what drives him, and his weaknesses, for without this knowledge, he is not a Wizard at all."

You didn't really think that I just read books on physics, did you? ;)

Contributed by Katlyn Breene to Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard (2004)...

A Wizard Should...

Be a constant student of life.
See the Divine in Nature and Nature in the Divine.
Not say a word and be clearly heard.
Lead without force and teach without pride.
Take the most mundane things and surrounding, sense their inner magick, and be able to open that window for others.
Stare into the dark infinity of the night sky and feel it as an awesome source.
Love the beauty of paradox and always be able to see the cosmic humor in the darkest times.
Be a shapeshifter to blend in or be invisible if needed... and make those around feel safe, and heard.
Maintain his calm center and clear mind when all around him is chaos.
Open his inner eyes and really see.
Say 'I don't know...' and realize that is great wisdom, that is okay.
Have compassion for all beings, and know when to be a healer and when to be a witness.
Know that the secrets of magick are bestowed upon the open-hearted.
Speak to the Gods and know he is heard.
Cast a sphere of protection and light.
Make up his own mind, walk his own path, and never follow another blindly.
Know the courage and power of nonviolence and the swift strength of a keen mind.
Conjure a tale or myth that the moment requires to be understood. ;)
Know the plants and creatures of the wild enough call them friends and allies.
See the God and Goddess within all and everyone.
Have a spirit that glows in the dark.

That's good advice regardless of how you feel about magick.

The Impossible Leap (Pt II)

2008-08-20T06:06:00.001-05:00

"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...

Relative Entropy

2008-08-05T19:53:00.000-05:00

"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:

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)

2008-08-05T15:15:00.000-05:00

"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. ;)

The Arrow of Time

2008-08-02T20:01:00.000-05:00

"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. ;)

Quantum Mechanics and Experience

2008-07-14T15:48:00.000-05:00

"You get curious about something and you mess around. That's what science is in the beginning, you mess around."

The other day I dug out my copy of Quantum Mechanics and Experience. Just for fun. ;)

(Between you and me, I've never made it all the way through that book. I get to the point where I have too many questions, and then I have to stop and go find answers. Ex: matrix mechanics - can they do X, Y, and Z things that I want them to do?)

On my first attempt to read it (years ago), the analogies were pretty useful - color (black, white) and hardness (hard, soft). Today, the analogies were a little distracting, as I am currently struggling to connect all of these things, and I suspect that there is something that is being overlooked in the nature of the actual properties that can be measured under this paradigm.

Not too far into the book (pages 3-4) though, I realize that the description of the sequence of measurements (color, hard, color) and its outcome sounds vaguely familiar... (pizza, something else, pizza). There's a link here - I just know it! (Where 'I just know it' means 'I'm going to keep pursuing this line of thought until I satisfy myself as to the non/existence of said link.')

My other big question of the day stems from this - "[W]e are unable to move the statistics of color disruption even so much as one millionth of one percentage point away from fifty-fifty, in either direction, no matter what we try." Why?

Seriously, I want to know why. Do we know why? What do we speculate is the reason why? (Where 'we' means 'you guys'. ;)

To me this suggests 'forces' at work that create/need/default to an equilibrium state. What kind of 'forces'? And the bigger question... an equilibrium of what? Why should so many ostensibly different properties end up in an equilibrium of their respective potential states, unless there is something that they all have in common?

Hmm... getting through this book may take awhile.

Seeing the Light

2008-06-30T15:26:00.000-05:00

"I will take charge of my life. I will drift no more. I will still be true to science, but I will be true to my new light also. I will be a sceptic about everything but one thing, which does not admit of scepticism (once one has clearly seen it), namely that it does indeed matter to be as quickened a spirit as possible, and to live for the quickening of the spirit everywhere."

I don't break cover and advertise my strange thoughts all that often. (Really.) But, while you may think that the biggest problem I have is the lack of a comprehensive model, I still think that the biggest problem I have is replication. As in, if I am the only one who can see things in accordance with a 5-dimensional model, then I think the word for that is 'delusion'. ;)

As I said, I don't break cover often, but when I do, it's usually with someone with whom I have had enough conversation/interaction to be reasonably certain that they

1) are psychologically stable.
2) have enough integrity to look at new ideas and themselves openly and critically.
3) have an interest in things aren't explained by today's standards of materialist reductionism.
4) have found the right combination of searching and skeptical.

Then, if the conversation is headed in the right direction, a certain meme may get planted. ;)

Planted the meme again yesterday. I'm still 'best-guessing' at the conditions under which the meme will thrive, so there's no guarantee that it will take hold. Perhaps a 5-dimensional model simply doesn't represent enough of value to the average person, and therefore it will not be something that will ever be adopted on a large scale. The average person seems to be mostly content with his knowledge of a world governed by classical physics and a God who fills in the gaps. (sigh)

In the meantime, I continue to work on the model, simply because it's the most fascinating puzzle I've ever found.

Evolving Potential

2008-06-16T02:00:00.000-05:00

"By our best enemies we do not want to be spared, nor by those either whom we love from the very heart. So let me tell you the truth!"

Plucked from the blogosphere - "You cannot 'choose which world to end up in'." (sigh)

(Pardon me while I get this out of my system.)

"Every new theory of physics must capture the successful predictions of the old theory it displaced..." We agree upon this point. Help the process, or get out of the way. I don't have a 'new theory of physics'; I have a set of observations, some research, and some ideas. I predict that I will not have a 'new theory of physics' anytime soon.

"You will never catch a glimpse of another world out of the corner of your eye." You missed the point entirely. We know that consciousness is incapable of capturing more than a single outcome state at a time. (We don't know why that is, nor do we know what needs to occur in order to replicate that state in something to which we wish to give consciousness.) But the fact that consciousness can only capture a single state does not preclude a model where the auxiliary mechanisms of consciousness (those 'higher' processes involved in reflection, imagining, and planning) have some role in the selection of future states of consciousness. (We'll save retrocausation for another time.)

If consciousness can be said to have/be a trajectory through the smeared state of options, then the mechanisms that determine that trajectory must be accounted for. This is what we're working on, using what is, in my opinion, the data that is most relevant at this point in the game. It's possible that the entire endeavor is misguided and will come to naught. But then, if I believed that, I probably would have given this up long ago. ;)

"Since the beginning, not one unusual thing has ever happened, in this or any other world. They are all lawful." Okay, this is nothing other than an exercise in logic.

Statement: All observable events/phenomena are lawful. (All X are Y.)
Logically-compatible statement: If it is an observed event/phenomena, then it must be lawful.
Logically-compatible statement: If it is NOT lawful, then it CANNOT be an observed event/phenomena.

So if we have an observed event/phenomena that appears to contradict the laws (X and NOT Y), then our original statement only holds true if we 1) dispute X, or 2) dispute NOT Y. Your garden-variety physicist will choose Option 1, claiming that the observation was a product of fraud, hallucination, or stupidity, because the laws say it can't happen. Some of them will even get 'insulting' about the whole thing.

Choosing Option 2 does not mean that you embrace the idea of a lawless universe. No, choosing Option 2 means that you question the completeness of the existing laws. The funny thing is, if theoretical physicists weren't questioning the completeness of the existing laws, they'd be out of jobs. So questioning the completeness of existing laws is just taboo for certain physicists in certain areas. ;)

There are pros and cons for each option. Option 1 lets you lead a comfortable life with perhaps only a few anomalous experiences. Even these will cease to bother you once you've had a few drinks. After all, they violate the laws, so they didn't really happen. Option 2 is usually reserved for those who can't take Option 1 because of the overwhelming cognitive dissonance that would result. (Seriously, most people will take the easy road. If they look like they are taking the hard road, it's probably because they were drop-kicked onto it.) Interestingly enough, the thrill of discovery is only available by choosing Option 2. The drawback to Option 2 is that we do not have an unlimited capacity to question the constructs that we depend on to define and predict our existence. Choosing to suspend the dominant paradigm in one area may decrease the likelihood that you are able/willing to suspend it in other areas.

Either way, it's your choice. If you prefer Option 1, then nothing I'm doing should interest you. But if you are willing to consider Option 2, then you may have potential. ;)

BTW, props for quoting Egan, but I've got a better one...

"And the truth is, I'm glad to fail: defiantly, blasphemously, self-righteously fucking joyful - as if my failure implied some kind of reprieve for all the discredited 'reasonable' explanations that I thought I'd stopped clinging to long ago." (In other words... Thank god I have Option 1! Option 2 is just too damn hard!)

Escaping From Time

2008-06-03T02:00:00.000-05:00

"The other inmates stand in a long straight line, flanked by guards, and I am dragged past them. I do not respect them, because they will not run - will not try to escape."

I like to entertain strange physics ideas all the time. (Seriously, I'm the unruly inmate that the physicist 'guards' don't like. ;)

Since my physics education has been fairly piecemeal, the pieces occasionally get put together in interesting ways. For example, the EPR paradox came up the other day. Having time on the brain, it occurred to me to wonder why the EPR paradox is even a paradox at all...

A and B are entangled (which means weirdly connected in an I-am-you and you-are-me kind of way) particles departing in opposite directions from the same source. When A is measured, B can always be found in the corresponding/complementary state, even though A has no local-causes way to communicate its state to B. (As if B would just obligingly accept such information and agree to be found in the corresponding state when its turn came to be measured.) Physicists are perplexed because they cannot explain how A and B can be connected in such a way as to allow them to 'know' which state the other is in. And certainly not how they could 'know' without the transmission of such information occurring at a faster-than-light speed. Yet A and B are always perfectly in sync.

This situation is perplexing when viewed with time moving in a single direction, but the confusion evaporates (for me, at least) when temporal symmetry is restored. I can see very well how B 'knows' what state A will be in if I visual time flowing backwards from the point of measurement to the point where A and B were created together, as well as forward. Time, or something that underlies it, would be flowing in both directions at once.

Whatever is carried/retained as time moves subjectively forward can presumably be carried/retained as time moves subjectively backward. I'm not going to go into speculation about what that might be because, frankly, I don't know how to do that with standard physics constructs. (Physicists 'guards' are welcome to jump in with helpful explanations as to why this can't be so, or throw up their hands in despair at the uber-obvious piece of the picture that I am probably missing. I got briefly sidetracked by the Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics, but that seems to reflect something a little bit different.)

This explanation for the EPR paradox makes sense to me because I think that we can access information that appears to be from our subjective future. (As in, the information correlates more heavily with what we experience in the subjective future than it does with what we experience in the subjective past. Think precognition.) This involves significantly rethinking our definition of, and relationship with, time, which is always a fun exercise. ;)

[Fair warning: I'm coming after entropy too. Just because I can. Just because it's fun.]

The Age of Chaos

2008-05-22T02:00:00.000-05:00

"Chaos in the world brings uneasiness, but it also allows the opportunity for creativity and growth."

Research this week has produced several interesting things, one of which is Hacking Matter, by Wil McCarthy (2003). (Hopefully it's clear why I found that title especially amusing. ;) 'So?', you say. 'Why is that interesting? It's a book that, presumably, you could have found five years ago.' I'm going to attempt an analogy to explain this, which you are free to trash if you think I've made some fundamental conceptual error...

Person A conducts research with a classical computer. He inputs keywords that allow the computer to search through its known, limited set of data for the items which best match the search. The search is constrained by 1) the set of data accessible to the computer, which is finite, 2) the accuracy of the tags assigned to the data by the persons who created the database, and 3) the degree to which Person A can use search keywords in accordance with the intentions of the designers of the database.

Person B conducts research using a hypothetical quantum computer. Her computer has access to every possible combination of matter, and its output, while still dependent on the input to the system, is not dependent upon the linear progression of earlier, known events. 'Wait!', you say. 'What about consistency and the arrow of time?' Shush, I'm getting there.

Let's say Person B receives as the output of her search the book Hacking Matter, which was published in 2003. How can her search not be constrained by what was happening in 2003? Here's where things get interesting... We live in a world that contains information that exceeds our personal capacity to know and store it by orders of magnitude. We live in the midst of what is, to our limited cognitive and perceptual capabilities, essentially chaos. This is what allows Person B to use her quantum computer effectively. The output of her search must be logically consistent with her state of knowledge of 2003, physics books, and other relevant output parameters (that's another post), but is otherwise free to vary in any way that best fulfills the input requirements. Since her state of knowledge of any of these parameters is likely to reflect only a small portion of what is available to be known, the range of output of her quantum computer can be exceedingly large, possibly infinite, without presenting any logical incongruities to her.

You may have known about Hacking Matter, but Person B did not, prior to receiving the output of her search. 'So what are you saying then, that she created Hacking Matter for the rest of us as the result of her search?' No. I'm only suggesting that there are as-yet-unclear dynamics which may explain both her subjective experience of the input/output relationship that resulted in Hacking Matter, and the fact that we now have a consensus state with respect to our knowledge about Hacking Matter...

Condensed Chaos

2008-04-16T19:16:00.001-05:00

"A mind went forth to form worlds: now order reigns where chaos once held sway."

I have a lot of thoughts on object boundaries that have accumulated on various bits of paper over the last week and a half. I should probably take a stab at forging them into something cohesive, lest they continue to plague me. :)

(By the way, when I say 'thoughts', I generally mean 'questions', so this may not appear to be accomplishing much, other than clearing my desk.)

Many of the topics covered at the conference triggered for me at least some association to the idea of object classification and object boundaries. (And, naturally, that which you are thinking about becomes a filter for all incoming information, so in the end this may prove to have been a vicious cycle of thoughts that leads nowhere.) Mysticism, per se, was not a huge topic at the conference, though various terms and ideas associated with it were discussed - ego dissolution, non-dual awareness, all-is-one, transcendence. Various states associated with psychedelic experience were also discussed. A key feature in most of these states is a radical alteration of how object boundaries are perceived. 'I am the plant/animal/universe.' Which leads me to wonder...

What are object boundaries? A purely cognitive construct with no corresponding counterpart in the neurological or neurochemical make-up of the brain? Doubtful. Where then are object boundaries located? What changes are triggered when I see a moth sitting on the tree bark, as opposed to just tree bark? The visual input has not changed. Higher order information must come into play, but how is it integrated with the visual input to form a unified experience of two objects where before only one was perceived?

Why do I bother to mention these things? Because it occurred to me at some point that the nature of the representation of object boundaries within the neural, neurochemical, or electrophysical architecture of the brain might allow for a degree of fluidity not unlike that seen in field dynamics. (No, I haven't mastered field dynamics. Don't get excited.) Object boundaries attached to a given field of input can fluctuate to accommodate or define different portions of the input. The limiting aspect in the shifting of object boundaries appears to be the speed at which attention can shift... In fact, are there reasons to believe that there is a dissociation between a change in perceived object boundaries and a change in attention? (No, I haven't mastered the attention literature. Or the object classification literature. Don't get excited.)

Is there a predictable manner in which perceived object boundaries can shift? A series of steps that cannot be circumvented, and which therefore might be a clue as to the dynamics of object perception and the physical correlates of object classification? Do these dynamics resemble field dynamics?

It also occurred to me at some other point to wonder what the relationship was between our perception of time, and our perception of changing object boundaries and/or changing relationships between object boundaries (motion)? Can these be dissociated in a meaningful way?

Alright, if you are still with me, rest assured that all this is not completely unrelated to hacking the smear. Our physicist friends will be the first to tell you that one cannot ignore time or gravity. And in order to violate a rule, one must understand where it comes from... ;)

A Separate Reality (Pt II)

2008-04-15T19:52:00.001-05:00

"We therefore communicate best when we exploit examples, analogies, and metaphors galore, when we use abstract generalilties, when we use very down-to-earth, concrete, and simple language, and when we talk directly about our own experiences."

I saw a picture similar to this one in a talk at the conference. If you look carefully, you see a moth sitting on the tree bark. (The other moth was actually more 'hidden' than this one, but I couldn't find that picture online.)

The picture prompted some thoughts, which culminated in this statement being written in my notebook...

When the boundaries between two objects are indistinguishable, such that you do not/cannot recognize that they are two separate objects, then gravity is not apparent and cannot be inferred. When the same structure is identified as two objects, then it becomes necessary to identify a force or forces that keeps them/holds them at the relevant proximity to one another.

The issue of object classifications and boundaries came back to me again and again at various points this past week and in various contexts. But perhaps none was so startling as this one... What would we know about gravity if perceived reality weren't divided into 'separate' objects?

Non-Dual Awareness

2008-04-14T01:03:00.001-05:00

"To be nobody but yourself in a world that is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being ever fights and never stop fighting."

Well, I'm still on conference time, so...

I wanted to blog a couple of times during the conference (mostly bitching about what you absolutely should not do when giving a talk), but I haven't yet reached the point where I feel compelled to travel with a technical appendage that would allow me to do that.

I have to say, it's like a drug... being able to soak up and untangle the workings of so many exceptional minds in real-time. I will probably be experiencing withdrawal this week... I did, however, get enough new material/ideas to keep me blogging for a little while longer. I even had a couple of moments when, through a misty haze, I could almost see the solution to a particular problem. (And yes, I know there are many problems. And no, there was no psychedelic usage involved in these insights. ;)

The weird thing about this past week was that I spent the better part of it in a state of dual awareness... (Non-dual awareness is a target state for enlightenment.)

Many times I found myself thinking - 'Oh my God, I know nothing!' Other times it was 'Geez, 75% percent of the people in this room know why that's wrong!'

I found myself thinking about the fact that I exist somewhere between the tenured professor, with the academic background and the scientific skills, and the person who just wants to talk about consciousness because it's 'so damn interesting!' (The fortunate (or unfortunate) thing is that consciousness is a topic that almost everyone thinks about. This means however, that there is a such a diverse range of language and schemes used to describe what people are trying to say (even among the scientists) that it is sometimes difficult to talk to people who do not share your perspective.)

I found myself at various times thinking of my role as a teacher, and at other times, as a student who has much to learn in many areas.

I found myself walking the borders between wanting to participate in the experience and wanting to objectively study it.

The week was full of these types of dual I-don't-know-where-I-belong moments. I should have kept a better list...

A Kind of Magic

2008-04-03T22:06:00.001-05:00

"The bell that rings inside your mind
Is challenging the doors of time."

Yesterday I amused myself (okay, distracted myself) by creating a story. In keeping with the scholarly (cough) purposes of this blog, I'll edit out all the juicy details about the protagonist - Simon, the physicist. And just so no one confuses this with a fully-formed theory about the way things really are, we'll say that Simon lived on Hypothetical World Gamma-12 (HWG-12).

Let's talk a little bit about physics on HWG-12...

Time on HWG-12 was defined by consistency, and deviations from it. To be more specific, time on this world had no direction on its own; rather, it was arbitrarily defined in units that reflected nothing other than the rate at which the field mechanics that gave rise to consciousness were able to process change. This made a kind of sense to Simon, who recognized that without consistency and change, what would we know about time?

Few knew this great secret about time - that its passage was entirely relative to the rate at which consciousness processed a change in state. You see, quantum physics on HWG-12 was much the same as it is on our world... The inhabitants of HWG-12, though only able to observe matter on their world in a single state, had, by experimenting with photons, deduced the existence of a greater state of matter, which they had dubbed 'the smear'.

As it turns out, the subjective passage of time on HWG-12 was nothing other than the bias that each instance of state selection introduced into the system that gave rise to consciousness.

(Consciousness on HWG-12 was recognized as a kind of interface with the smear, and once the inhabitants of HWG-12 came to peace with the idea that they were something less than the center of everything, they could more objectively examine the mechanisms that gave rise to their experiences of consciousness.)

This influence of one particular field configuration upon the others, this bias introduced by a single subjective moment in time, this differential that was perpetuated somehow and reflected back in other moments of consciousness, was not dependent upon time as subjectively experienced by the inhabitants of HWG-12. From their subjective perspective, time moved in a single direction. (Well, most of the time.)

(It's worth noting that this subjective experience of time's arrow did not mesh with what they had deduced about the mechanics of the smear.)

Yet occasionally this bias, which was modified with each instance of state selection, could also be deduced from subjective experience to be moving backward in time from the subjective future...

Which led to questions...

Why does the preponderance of experience reflect a single subjective arrow of time?

If time's arrow reflected nothing other than a bias in 'future' state selection, what, if any, other biases existed, and how could they be manipulated?

Simon was intrigued...

A Separate Reality (Pt I)

2008-03-16T12:33:00.000-05:00

"We are men and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds." ;)

I purchased this book (used) because the picture on the cover reminded me of a half-formulated thought that I have been carrying around - a thought about the nature of gravity.

To my dismay, the book contained no descriptions of a subjective experience of gravity being violated, which is really what I was hoping to find.

As I finished the book today, and as I can't seem to sleep right now, I thought I'd take some time to flesh that thought out just a bit more...

Gravity, as we all know, describes a relationship between two objects. Cognitive scientist that I am, I had to stop and wonder about the nature of object classification. That led me to wonder about what, if anything, we would know about gravity if we didn't or couldn't have distinct cognitive boundaries that separated one object from another. (Perhaps now you can begin to see my fascination with the book cover picture - each of the objects which appear to defy gravity can be classified/perceived as a single object: tree, man, mountain, etc.)

Furthermore, the gravitational force between two objects is determined by 1) the mass of each of the objects, and 2) the distance between the two objects. Why?

Is it possible that gravity is simply how we perceive the cognitive processes that are behind the association of one object's representation with that of another? Or the neurophysics that link one representation to another? In the brain, where does one representation end and another begin? How is that boundary defined (cognitively, and in the neural architecture), and wouldn't it be expedient if that boundary were as seamless as possible whenever possible? And, as it becomes necessary to allow for more information to be represented within the intervening space (greater distance) between two objects, should that not also be reflected in the neural architecture that contains the representations of those objects? How then would that be perceived and experienced in the relationship between the original two objects?

(Do you see where I'm going with this?)No doubt, this idea needs to be fleshed out quite a bit more before it produces anything testable, but we agreed that I was allowed to speculate. ;)

Last Man Standing

2008-03-14T09:46:00.001-05:00

"Come see a living, breathing spectacle
Only seen right here"

Tonight I'm going to a birthday party at a bowling alley. And while I am familiar with the game of bowling, it's fair to say that I bowl about once a year. I can probably break 100, but not 150.

And I'm wondering... What would it be like to bowl a game 5-dimensionally? How would that experience be different than that of a game bowled 4-dimensionally? What forces would I have to pay attention to and compensate for? What techniques best elicit repeated strikes in 5 dimensions?

Now that's some research I could get into... :)

But where on earth does one publish a paper on Bowling in the 5th Dimension?

Theory vs. Experiment vs. Experience

2008-03-10T18:54:00.001-05:00

"One either saw the facts and told them precisely as they existed, or one fled."

Here's the only thought I've had today that's worth sharing...

Modern physics evolved from the 4 dimensions that were defined by our experience. None of the additional dimensions that have hitherto been postulated by physicists in an attempt to explain certain observations have reflected anything that we experience.

If we are going to start adding dimensions, doesn't it make sense that they be dimensions in the same sense as the first four - dimensions that reflect experience? And if we are going to try to use those dimensions to solve physics problems, doesn't it make sense that we first have to understand what it's like to experience that dimension?

I'm just saying...

Being a Heretic is Hard Work

2008-03-07T10:33:00.002-06:00

"He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper."

Did I ever tell you that I almost went to law school? So deep was my love of logic and the power of argument, that I could've really enjoyed a career wielding those tools in defense of the those needing assistance. This is, of course, a very idealized picture of what a lawyer does, and I was fortunate enough to be able to disabuse myself of the notion that being a lawyer would have been that satisfying to me as a career.

Even though the prospect was scarier, and the path to success much less clear, I opted for graduate school instead. Law school offered the potential for scholarships; graduate school offered a struggle for acceptance in the programs of my choice, as I was ill-prepared to 'demonstrate' my commitment to this field of study. So why didn't I make the smart, responsible, logical decision, and attend law school?

If you've been paying attention, then you know the story about the questions that drove me to study the brain and cognition. My questions. My questions are what drive me still; not the questions that you tell me need to be answered.

No one sets out to be a heretic. They simply wake up one day and find that somewhere along the way they have crossed a line. The rational response to that is to simply keep one's mouth shut. I mean really, if your choices are to keep working on something that interests you, or to repeat the same arguments again and again and again for every person who wants to take their shot, what would you do?

So perhaps it is the part of me that loves logic and the power of argument that lets me surface every now and again to take on someone whose arrogance I find particularly annoying. ;) In the end though, I don't expect to do anything other than to continually work to refine my argument and measure it against the arguments of others. If you've got something useful to say, bring it on.

I've been very reluctant to reveal some of the ideas that I've entertained in an attempt to explain why the defaults of classical physics are what they are, given what we know about how they can be appear to be violated. (Nothing gets you a label faster than spouting half-formulated ideas in a domain outside your own. ;) Recently though I read a small book called Einstein's Dreams, by Alan Lightman (1993). (Brilliant book; I highly recommend it.) And I realized, I can do that. I can flesh out a speculation until it becomes unsatisfactory for whatever reason. It will be a speculation, and that is just fine. This is a work-in-progress, not a finished product. And if you witness all the errors I make in the process, that's just fine as well.

But you'll have to wait just a bit, as I have something more mainstream to finish up at the moment.