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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Jun 28, 2018 - 06:09am PT
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So I read that Deutsch article twice and I still can't figure out what he's proposing. He seems to think that the formalization of mathematics as pursued by Hilbert et. al. is wrong because somehow it makes proving independent of physical processes in ways that it shouldn't be, but I can't imagine how that means mathematics should change. Does he think there is something inherently incorrect about pursuing mathematics axiomatically (an idea introduced by Euclid, not Hilbert)? What is he proposing as an alternative? Does he think some particular result (e.g. the Church-Turing thesis) is wrong, in some mathematical sense? I just don't get it.
And when he says things like All those different computations embodied in physical processes are expressible in terms of a single finite set of elementary physical operations. They share a single, uniform, physical distinction between finite and infinite operations, and they can all be programmed to be performed on a single physical object: a universal computer, a universal quantum computer to be exact. And that’s an object that can perform every computation that every other physically possible object can perform he sounds a bit like the smoking duck to me.
Edit to add: OK, I went and looked up his original paper, where things are a lot clearer :
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Deutsch_quantum_theory.pdf
Edit to add a second time: there's even a sort of arrogant "ha-ha" joke at the end. I guess if your article's good enough, you can get away with that.
From what I have said, programs exist that would (in order of increasing difficulty) test the Bell inequality, test the linearity of quantum dynamics, and test the Everett interpretation. I leave it to the reader to write them.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jun 28, 2018 - 08:40am PT
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I'm out too, at least for a while, MB1. I must say that you DO have me intrigued now about what a model would look like that involved only some of what we empiricists assume to be true about evolution but that includes some "intentional" something or other behind the scenes. I mean, it doesn't take much thinking to realize how messy this could get. Here would be some of my questions. For simplicity, I'll refer to the intentional something or other as a "guiding hand".
Why would evolutionary change be limited to within-species but still, otherwise work the way it does? What is so special about species? Was each species created separately by the guiding hand? And if that is the case, why can we group species into hierarchical categories based on morphology and genes?
What happened to all of the species that went extinct? Is the guiding hand responsible for each extinction?
Why don't we see new species just pop up here and there. I wonder what it would like if we could "catch" it in the act?
If whales truly didn't evolve from a land mammal, why do we see the apparent intermediate fossils that we DO see (not to mention in locations that fit the narrative). You've been emphasizing what's missing in the fossil record, but it makes what we DO see in the fossil record as even more puzzling, IMO.
Hopefully, we can discuss this in person soon. I mean, it's clear that you are no dummy, so you must have some thoughts on these questions.
Cheers!
Edit: Some info on whale fossil record.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 28, 2018 - 08:46am PT
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my undergraduate career at UCB was an example of over-ambitious class loads and levels. For example, I took a Complex Analysis course (text: Ahlfors) instead of the one geared for science majors (being UCB, the class was comprised mostly of math graduate students who had insufficient training in that topic, I was a sophomore or junior, the professor who taught it had some vague recollection of what a Fourier series was), I at least realized I wouldn't survive and dropped.
But I did exhibit some good judgement in my senior year in not taking Jackson's graduate E&M course. He was rolling out the second edition of his book and the class was very competitive, and made even more so in that the primary goal seemed to be to find all the errors in the new edition. UCB was on a trimester system, which tended to be brutally efficient in finishing off students who faltered even a bit. And then there was the weekly homework assignment of 10 problems out of the text.
(On the other hand, I did take Gene Cummins' quantum mechanics class, which I improved my performance as the year rolled on.)
I did not escape, however, taking the Electrodynamics class at Columbia the following year taught by Jerry Finkelstein, but in two semesters. Even still, it was a grind. I remember the open note test where the last problem he had solved in the last lecture before the test appeared, verbatim, on the test. I'm not sure what fraction of the class recognized that... I didn't and spent the time grinding through.
The video yanqui linked to above is a pretty good summary. At Columbia at that time, it was very easy to drop out of the graduate physics program and get a job in the financial district. Many did and were rewarded, though the physicists were blamed for "derivatives," and Buffet proclaimed: “beware of geeks bearing formulas”. A graduate student colleague and friend, John Breit, finished his PhD in theory and went on to a storied career in finance.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jun 28, 2018 - 12:05pm PT
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ED: "I took a Complex Analysis course (text: Ahlfors)"
Chuckle. Me too, with no previous knowledge of the subject. A shock to the system but fascinating enough to became my area.
MB1: "metaphysical facts" . . . Oxymoron perhaps?
polyadic predicate logic with identity . . . 'At least five things are green' (?) Prof.MB1? Is this what you are getting at?
(I've been toying with Generalized Tannery's Theorem in the form f(k,n)= k/n, 1 ≤ k ≤ n. Let n → ∞. Limf(k,n)=0 or 1 ?)
WisM has become very educational recently. Thanks to all.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 28, 2018 - 12:23pm PT
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Interesting stuff, thanks.
edit:
Bessel functions? My education dredges up that they may have something to do with heat transfer in solids.
Much like this thread.
And I agree with H that probability and statistics are where one should be, not E&M from J.
second edit:
also useful in finance
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 28, 2018 - 01:37pm PT
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... who haven’t realized that while truth can be absolutely necessary and transcendent, all knowledge (even of such truths) is generated, computed, by physical processes, and the scope and limitations of such knowledge are conditioned by Nature’s contingent laws."
"Knowing" in this sense is nothing more than describing (since we can't explain) a physical system. And since a physical system can be posited strictly in quantitative terms, knowledge, untimately, IS a quantification - according to this belief.
You don't think a quantifier came up with this silly metric, do you LOL. Sort of like fluffing your own gizmo.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 28, 2018 - 07:09pm PT
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eeyonkee: Why would evolutionary change be limited to within-species but still, otherwise work the way it does?
You’re married to the theory, and it limits what you can see. In this sentence you entertain the thought that so-called “evolutionary change” is not what you thought it is, but that it works. You could be more open to another idea if you were to let go (or not hold on so tightly) to a theory that another has shot more than a few holes through. To see more openly, you could simply put the theory on the side as you know it and revisit what it is that you’re trying to see or explain. If you think you’re trying to explain the theory with amendments and more data, then I suggest that you are trying to *prove* the theory, which is not how science gets done properly. If you could hold aside your devotion to the theory, then you might be able to truly investigate another possible explanation. Or, even further afield philosophically, you could revisit what it is that you think you think you need to explain. (That would clear the playing field for a fresh start.) Kuhn, in his book regarding the nature of scientific revolutions, suggests that almost no one stops what they are doing to look again at what they think they are explaining.
Hey, Ed, your stories remind me of graduate school and my work in investments. I can remember getting problem sets over the weekend, getting together with other students trying to solve 3 measly problems, and most often never coming up with solutions unless we tracked down other students who took the course the previous years. As for friends who went to Wall Street to model market noise for program trading, some did well—not for actually modeling market noise and chaos, but because they swam well socially in the waters with some other really bright people in the firms. It’s an industry that appreciates smart and articulate people. I miss a few really great people at Cantor Fitzgerald who went down in the twin towers. (On the other hand, I met some real jerks who thought they were God’s Gift to the planet earth.)
Be well.
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Spider Savage
Mountain climber
The shaggy fringe of Los Angeles
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Jun 28, 2018 - 07:22pm PT
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Love all the discussion about laws, natural laws.
I noticed today that all the laws laid down by all the forms of government are written for people who can't recognize "natual" laws.
In a utopian paradise sentient beings would be highly aware and simply recognize natural laws as a part of the fabric of being in the universe.
It is a natural law to treat others with kindness and respect. To not throw trash. To live in balance AND to work to provide abundance but without waste.
It would require a world of highly literate and honest people. I think it could happen, but maybe not by tomorrow morning.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 28, 2018 - 07:38pm PT
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In a utopian paradise sentient beings would be highly aware and simply recognize natural laws as a part of the fabric of being in the universe.
And how would this apply to dogs on leash laws?
I do live in a utopian paradise and am aware etc., but there are signs in the paradise which many of us do not recognize as part of the fabric of the universe.
FWIW: My dog is on the leash. Except when she isn't.
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Spider Savage
Mountain climber
The shaggy fringe of Los Angeles
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Jun 28, 2018 - 07:54pm PT
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In my utopian paradise, dogs also obey natural laws, have a vocabulary of at least 15,000 words, and don't subjugate themselves to humans but live freely and cooperatively.
Any other questions?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 28, 2018 - 08:34pm PT
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Sort of like fluffing your own gizmo.
you seem to fluff your gizmo around here quite a bit...
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 29, 2018 - 06:42am PT
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Any other questions?
No. We have an accord. Homie says, "ERRRRooooff." Only a fractiont of her vocabulary.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jun 29, 2018 - 07:04am PT
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re: "information"
So it turns out it was Stewart Russell (who wrote one of the most classic textbooks on AI), not Deutsch or Tegmark, who gave Harris a good definition of "information" that I remembered.
https://youtu.be/Ih_SPciek9k?t=6m30s
Hope this helps.
The rest of the hour is damn good too, covering a lot of cool stuff.
...
PS
Some of the first things an electrical engineering major learns at college is how to quantify information (data; 16 bits, 157 Mbytes), how to transmit and receive it (in varying degrees of accuracy), and how noise in a communications system (even just one bit, a singular 1 or 0) can cause it to crash.
Many if not most electrical engineers could be called information processing engineers or communications engineers just as easily or just as fairly.
Having an electrical engineering degree or EE education is nice to have. Highly recommended. It brings with it lots of perks (eg. re how-to in countless situations) over the course of a life.
Information or data in the climbing world is frequently called "beta". That block at OZ in Tuolumne at the start of Pitch 2 is either "this way" or "that way" (Stewart Russell). Who's got the beta for X? Who's got the beta (the data or information) "to narrow down the ways this could be" (Russell) on the possibility map in the climber's mind? lol
Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now has a chapter that covers Entro(py), Evo(lution) and Info(mation) that's pretty good at describing our existing situation.
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 29, 2018 - 07:16am PT
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MikeL -- You are married to the theory, and it limits what you can see.
100% spot on ......
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 29, 2018 - 07:37am PT
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Theory is theory and never "As it is".
Thus you are married to how you think it is.
You are not the complete absolute and thus you will always be incomplete ......
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 29, 2018 - 10:33am PT
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...which is not how science gets done properly.
How does science "get done properly?"
Although Kuhn had an interesting view of it, it is hardly authoritative, and his program can be misconstrued as a defining the process of doing science. I think it is better read as an interpretation of how science gets done by humans, and firmly roots scientific progress in the messiness of human activity.
Written in 1962 but based on his critical reading of historic science, and trying to figure out why "old science" (e.g. Aristotelian physics) seems so wonky that it is hard to imagine the putative greatest minds of the times could have gotten it so wrong.
Choosing to use science's account of what the "revolutions" were (after all, the word itself originates from Copernicus' description of the solar system) is a bit fraught, but not a bad place to get agreement from the scientists themselves. But physicists are bad historians, and the nature of their work would suggest that they aren't very good sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists or any other discipline dealing with people (my old boss once observed, regarding some sticky management problem, "we didn't go to graduate school to study people").
I read the book first in 1975 for a philosophy class I was taking at UCB. Interestingly, I had stumbled into a "scientific revolution" in 1973-1974 working at LBL (we didn't have N's then, apparently) with the Goldhaber-Trilling group. Since I was totally uncommitted to any particle theory it was an interesting first serious experience in science, and the various human elements of interactions among physicists were evident.
From the point of view of a personal stake, that set of observations led to multiple Nobel prizes, the first pair Richter and Ting only two years after the remarkable "discovery" and then in 1995 to Perl. The theorists got in on the act too, Glashow in 1979 (shared with Salam and Weinberg). But it can be argued that this one discovery changed and set the direction of particle physics, leading to all the work that has since been recognized by the Nobel committee in that field.
However, the opportunity for Kuhn and others to observe a "scientific revolution" in progress seemed to have been lost. Which is a pity. That opportunity was for those philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, etc. to view that process unrefracted by the physicists' narrative, upon which so much had depended in Kuhn's and others' musings on the process of doing science.
Of the ephemera of that time, Jackson's cartoon sums up the state of affairs in the spring of 1975, roughly 5 months after the discovery's announcement in the Physical Review Letters:
yes, this is the same Jackson that yanqui evoked up thread. There is a very subtle dig in the cartoon that few get...
I think that that cartoon summarizes the main features of the scientific process, and one that is largely missed by philosophical considerations, including Kuhn's, and unappreciated by physicists themselves.
First, that "experimental fact" has priority over "theoretical speculation." Since we have not explored all of the possible "experimental facts" there are many surprises waiting, that is the promise of the empirical process and my major criticism of Largo and mb1, that they are ready, based on their own reasoning alone (including the appropriation of individual reasoning of others), to claim the "impossibility" of understanding (say of "mind"). We cannot, ab initio rule out the possibility of what is. You are certainly entitle to your opinions, belief in which is not sufficient to make them true. And it makes all of our theories provisional.
Second, that it is a largely human process that sets the pace of discovery.
The experiment that lead to this discovery was initiated to do something completely different, the accelerator was "bootlegged" the effort was a physics backwater at its beginnings. But Richter was interested in pursuing an idea, and that turned out to provide a very unexpected result.
Across the country, the main competitor, at a time when it wasn't obvious that there was any competition, was pursuing a set of experiments following up on an experiment that his mentor had done poorly and interpreted incorrectly, as we now see in retrospect, hindsight being 20-20 as they say.
Others with "data in the can" missed the discovery and realized once they looked to refute the discovery the clear signal hiding just off the range of their plots.
It took about a year for the experimental results to be understood sufficiently clearly to have a physical picture of what was going on. After that year, the change to particle physics had been complete, the titles of the articles in Physical Review D (the particle physics volume) and the section of Physical Review Letters devoted to particle physics completely changed.
Even the primary discovers bantered back and forth regarding who was right and who wrong... (Sam Ting gave Burt Richter a pair of underware at the 1975 Photon-Lepton conference held at SLAC lettered on the butt with "J 3.1," Richter quipped that the "1" was positioned in a most uncomfortable location).
There is a lot to contemplate regarding scientific process, I find the opinions of many of the participants to this thread to be woefully uninformed though they have conviction.
And as far as I know, no one has made a compelling 15 minute TED talk about this, termed the "November revolution," and posted it to YouTube for your edification.
In the modern era, that could be interpreted as my providing y'all with something that didn't happen... yet there it was for all you armchair philosophy-of-science types to see, and you missed it. Like Jackson's cartoon, a bit of experience can outweigh a mountain of speculation.
As a process we move forward with our rational explanations that are consistent with observations and measurements. Sometimes one precedes the other, and vice-versa. It is a grand adventure into an unlimited frontier.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jun 29, 2018 - 11:14am PT
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^^^ Brilliant summary. Thanks.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 29, 2018 - 11:39am PT
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Said well.
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