Evolving Potential

"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

"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

"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

"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)

"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

"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

"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...