Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

The Schrodinger's cat can be both dead and un-dead, but I cannot know a thing and not know it, except by equivocating on the meaning of "know". I don't think quantum theory applies to logic in the familiar world. Or does it? Am I wrong to be bloody minded about people who bring "lessons from

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Marcus, Is this the butterfly-flap argument in another form? Ok, I am improvising here: Let us say that a group of tourists goes to camp under Standing Rock, a geological formation known for its apparent precariousness. Unbeknownst to the campers and the park rangers, erosion due

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Frank, But when we do find out what gravity is, it will be from the study of the things it causes; and if it caused nothing, we would find out nothing, right? Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Nick - > That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron. Did you just exclude the law of the excluded middle?  How very human of you! > > "How do we explain consciousness?" in any way that is not inane. (Geez, was > that a quadruple negative?) And a 4 dimensional version of same?   - Steve ===

Re: [FRIAM] More on levels of sequence organization

Cool! “For synthetic biology, iteratively querying a model of the mutational fitness landscape could help efficiently guide the introduction of mutations to enhance protein function (Romero & Arnold, 2009), inform protein design using a combination of activating mutants (Hu et al., 2018), and m

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Nick writes: “But when you go on to say that nature is determined by unknowable causes that’s an oxymoron. To the extent that anything is caused, by whatever means, it reveals its causes in its behavior. To the extent that events are random, no cause is revealed and no cause exists.” The ap

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Nick, If Hywel is correct we know a great deal about how gravity "behaves" but not what causes it. No one has ever observed a graviton, he said. Frank The quote marks are because we know how objects behave in a gravitational field. --- Frank Wimberly My memoir:

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Hi, Eric, and interlocutors, I knew I would get my ears boxed for this: I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience that we would never know. That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.

[FRIAM] More on levels of sequence organization

This just turned up on hacker news: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/622803v1 [...] To this end we use unsupervised learning to train a deep contextual > language model on 86 billion amino acids across 250 million sequences > spanning evolutionary diversity. The resulting model maps raw

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

An invocation of superdeterminism would be in a double slit experiment that the particles are imagined to be synchronized in a deterministic fashion with the measurements (whether human or machine) who had to measure exactly when they did. An inevitable consequence 13 billion years later. The

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Tell me if I am wrong. When we read Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity by John Baez I had the impression that wormholes were mathematical fictions. Is hyperdeterminism some form of the idea that if you knew the position and momentum of every particle in the universe you could calculate the trajectory

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

I was just throwing out two, the wormhole idea of Maldacena & Susskind and super-determinism described by Hooft.They seem very different to me, and could imply two very different universes. That QM works for either doesn't help explain how one or the other or neither is the true explanatio

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Yes, I understand your skepticism. I even share it. But nothing you've said validates the dichotomy you laid out before. The wizard's spell sense you get from entanglement across 3 meters of space is a reflection of how you (yes, and most of us) model the world. Even if it's only like 5/7e9 peop

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

There are more people that catch fly balls than develop theories of physical information. I don't believe a well-funded liberal culture will change that. Maybe in a hundred or a thousand years if we are a reconfigurable species, a large part of the population will spend their days experienci

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

You're trolling me, aren't you? 8^) I can't help myself, though. It's not an exclusive or you've laid out. Some of us will have fast memory that works well in common sense space and time. Some of us will have DSPs that work well in other conceptions (I'm thinking of Hawking, here). Etc. And whi

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

< Why do people seek this (as Eric puts it) emotional comfort with their ways of knowing? > Either spacetime works in a surprising way and commonsense intuition is just wrong -- to cling to a familiar way of knowing amounts to taking the blue pill -- settling for crude satisficing heuristics to

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

I agree that the concepts of intuition or muscle memory apply to however mysterious one finds any given phenomenon. But we don't need deep mysteries like nonlocal entanglement for that. We can merely compare someone who knows how to write an equation for ballistic trajectories versus someone who

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Glen writes: < I don't know. Eric's pointing out (I think) both the bootstrapping concept (writing a compiler in the language it compiles) *and* the ontological status of levels in, eg, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Things like state space reconstruction and the holographic principle seem

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

I don't know. Eric's pointing out (I think) both the bootstrapping concept (writing a compiler in the language it compiles) *and* the ontological status of levels in, eg, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Things like state space reconstruction and the holographic principle seem to flow directly

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Eric writes: < The important consequence of this understanding is that we have mathematical formalizations of the concept of state and of observable, and they are two different kinds of concept. It is precisely that both can be defined, that the theory needs both to function in its complete fo

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

> I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were > wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience > that we would never know. That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron. I think this requires care. Never wanting to defend the positions of pe

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Glen, You are right, here. We could conduct this conversation just as well if not better over the question of how the organism develops from the zygote. Still, I think it's useful to have the conversation about the "-Isms" every once in a while, because we are committed to them in ways we d

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

I struggled to find the proper branch of the thread-tree to place this post. But I decided to do it, here, because your invocation of "organism" confirms my bias. The inclusion of "consciousness" is a red herring, I think. And the expansion to "relations between entities", including "triads" i