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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Ed: I don't think that "Shannon-Weaver" means the same thing in the different fields that claim to use it.
One can make this comment about any concept within any field of study.
Many so-called conceptual advancements are imports / exports from one field to another. Interpretations are often perceived as innovations. Among experts in the same field there are invariably differing interpretations.
Literalism and formalisms might be signs of blindered disciplinary viewpoints.
Of course, ultimate reality is as described by the natural sciences . . . is “material."
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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one can accurately know what something thinks by what they say they think per SPECIFIC issues.
It is interesting that first-person subjective experience may be conveyed from one person to another when it has to do with SPECIFIC issues. Perhaps objective processing is involved. There is a lot of wiggle-room in philosophical terrain.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Literalism and formalisms might be signs of blindered disciplinary viewpoints.
might also be signs of precise language used to hone insight...
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Well, yes, Ed. That's the perception, and it's a useful one. I'm sure you also know that a consensus is a kind of guideline. For the most part, it's the best that's available.
I am truly happy. You are so very careful about what you write and what you commit to. Respect.
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WBraun
climber
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Modern gross materialistic st00pid science
As long as modern science has NO ultimate answers they are happy ......
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 8, 2019 - 08:47am PT
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At times Rovelli sounds like someone who took too much acid. But intriguing nevertheless...
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• Extract from Carlo Rovelli’s new book: On the elastic concept of time
What do we know about time? Language tells us that it “passes”, it moves like a great river, inexorably dragging us with it, and, in the end, washes us up on its shore while it continues, unstoppable. Time flows. It moves ever forwards.
Or does it?
Poets also tell us that time stumbles or creeps or slows or even, at times, seems to stop. They tell us that the past might be inescapable, immanent in objects or people or landscapes. When Juliet is waiting for Romeo, time passes sluggishly: she longs for Phaethon to take the reins of the Sun’s chariot, since he would whip up the horses and “bring in cloudy night immediately”. When we wake from a vivid dream we are dimly aware that the sense of time we have just experienced is illusory.
Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who wants to make the uninitiated grasp the excitement of his field. His book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, with its concise, sparkling essays on subjects such as black holes and quanta, has sold 1.3m copies worldwide. Now comes The Order of Time, a dizzying, poetic work in which I found myself abandoning everything I thought I knew about time – certainly the idea that it “flows”, and even that it exists at all, in any profound sense.
We meet outside the church of San Petronio in Bologna, where Rovelli studied. (“I like to say that, just like Copernicus, I was an undergraduate at Bologna and a graduate at Padua,” he jokes.) A cheery, compact fellow in his early 60s, Rovelli is in nostalgic mood. He lives in Marseille, where, since 2010, he has run the quantum gravity group at the Centre de physique théorique. Before that, he was in the US, at the University of Pittsburgh, for a decade.
He rarely visits Bologna, and he has been catching up with old friends. We wander towards the university area. Piazza Verdi is flocked with a lively crowd of students. There are flags and graffiti and banners, too – anti-fascist slogans, something in support of the Kurds, a sign enjoining passers-by not to forget Giulio Regeni, the Cambridge PhD student killed in Egypt in 2016.
“In my day it was barricades and police,” he says. He was a passionate student activist, back then. What did he and his pals want? “Small things! We wanted a world without boundaries, without state, without war, without religion, without family, without school, without private property.”
He was, he says now, too radical, and it was hard, trying to share possessions, trying to live without jealousy. And then there was the LSD. He took it a few times. And it turned out to be the seed of his interest in physics generally, and in the question of time specifically.
“It was an extraordinarily strong experience that touched me also intellectually,” he remembers. “Among the strange phenomena was the sense of time stopping. Things were happening in my mind but the clock was not going ahead; the flow of time was not passing any more. It was a total subversion of the structure of reality. He had hallucinations of misshapen objects, of bright and dazzling colours – but also recalls thinking during the experience, actually asking himself what was going on.
How do I know that the usual perception is right, and this is wrong?
“And I thought: ‘Well, it’s a chemical that is changing things in my brain. But how do I know that the usual perception is right, and this is wrong? If these two ways of perceiving are so different, what does it mean that one is the correct one?’” The way he talks about LSD is, in fact, quite similar to his description of reading Einstein as a student, on a sun-baked Calabrian beach, and looking up from his book imagining the world not as it appeared to him every day, but as the wild and undulating spacetime that the great physicist described.
Reality, to quote the title of one of his books, is not what it seems.
He gave his conservative, Veronese parents a bit of a fright, he says. His father, now in his 90s, was surprised when young Carlo’s lecturers said he was actually doing all right, despite the long hair and radical politics and the occasional brush with the police. It was after the optimistic sense of student revolution in Italy came to an abrupt end with the kidnapping and murder of the former prime minister, Aldo Moro, in 1978 that Rovelli began to take physics seriously. But his route to his big academic career was circuitous and unconventional. “Nowadays everyone is worried because there is no work. When I was young, the problem was how to avoid work. I did not want to become part of the ‘productive system’,” he says.
Academia, then, seemed like a way of avoiding the world of a conventional job, and for some years he followed his curiosity without a sense of careerist ambition. He went to Trento in northern Italy to join a research group he was interested in, sleeping in his car for a few months (“I’d get a shower in the department to be decent”). He went to London, because he was interested in the work of Chris Isham, and then to the US, to be near physicists such as Abhay Ashtekar and Lee Smolin. “My first paper was horrendously late compared to what a young person would have to do now. And this was a privilege – I knew more things, there was more time.”
The popular books, too, have come relatively late, after his academic study of quantum gravity, published in 2004. If Seven Brief Lessons was a lucid primer, The Order of Time takes things further; it deals with “what I really do in science, what I really think in depth, what is important for me”.
Rovelli’s work as a physicist, in crude terms, occupies the large space left by Einstein on the one hand, and the development of quantum theory on the other. If the theory of general relativity describes a world of curved spacetime where everything is continuous, quantum theory describes a world in which discrete quantities of energy interact. In Rovelli’s words, “quantum mechanics cannot deal with the curvature of spacetime, and general relativity cannot account for quanta”.
Both theories are successful; but their apparent incompatibility is an open problem, and one of the current tasks of theoretical physics is to attempt to construct a conceptual framework in which they both work. Rovelli’s field of loop theory, or loop quantum gravity, offers a possible answer to the problem, in which spacetime itself is understood to be granular, a fine structure woven from loops.
String theory offers another, different route towards solving the problem. When I ask him what he thinks about the possibility that his loop quantum gravity work may be wrong, he gently explains that being wrong isn’t the point; being part of the conversation is the point. And anyway, “If you ask who had the longest and most striking list of results it’s Einstein without any doubt. But if you ask who is the scientist who made most mistakes, it’s still Einstein.”
How does time fit in to his work? Time, Einstein long ago showed, is relative – time passes more slowly for an object moving faster than another object, for example. In this relative world, an absolute “now” is more or less meaningless. Time, then, is not some separate quality that impassively flows around us. Time is, in Rovelli’s words, “part of a complicated geometry woven together with the geometry of space”.
For Rovelli, there is more: according to his theorising, time itself disappears at the most fundamental level. His theories ask us to accept the notion that time is merely a function of our “blurred” human perception. We see the world only through a glass, darkly; we are watching Plato’s shadow-play in the cave. According to Rovelli, our undeniable experience of time is inextricably linked to the way heat behaves. In The Order of Time, he asks why can we know only the past, and not the future? The key, he suggests, is the one-directional flow of heat from warmer objects to colder ones. An ice cube dropped into a hot cup of coffee cools the coffee. But the process is not reversible: it is a one-way street, as demonstrated by the second law of thermodynamics.
Time is also, as we experience it, a one-way street. He explains it in relation to the concept of entropy – the measure of the disordering of things. Entropy was lower in the past. Entropy is higher in the future – there is more disorder, there are more possibilities. The pack of cards of the future is shuffled and uncertain, unlike the ordered and neatly arranged pack of cards of the past. But entropy, heat, past and future are qualities that belong not to the fundamental grammar of the world but to our superficial observation of it. “If I observe the microscopic state of things,” writes Rovelli, “then the difference between past and future vanishes … in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’.”
To understand this properly, I can suggest only that you read Rovelli’s books, and pass swiftly over this approximation by someone who gave up school physics lessons joyfully at the first possible opportunity. However, it turns out that I am precisely Rovelli’s perfect reader, or one of them, and he looks quite delighted when I check my newly acquired understanding of the concept of entropy with him. (“You passed the exam,” he says.)
“I try to write at several levels,” he explains. “I think about the person who not only doesn’t know anything about physics but is also not interested. So I think I am talking to my grandmother, who was a housekeeper. I also think some young students of physics are reading it, and I also think some of my colleagues are reading it. So I try to talk at different levels, but I keep the person who knows nothing in my mind.”
His biggest fans are the blank slates, like me, and his colleagues at universities – he gets most criticism from people in the middle, “those who know a bit of physics”. He is also pretty down on school physics. (“Calculating the speed at which a ball drops – who cares? In another life, I’d like to write a school physics book,” he says.) And he thinks the division of the world into the “two cultures” of natural sciences and human sciences is “stupid. It’s like taking England and dividing the kids into groups, and you tell one group about music, and one group about literature, and the one who gets music is not allowed to read novels and the one who does literature is not allowed to listen to music.”
In the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’
The joy of his writing is its broad cultural compass. Historicism gives an initial hand-hold on the material. (He teaches a course on history of science, where he likes to bring science and humanities students together.) And then there’s the fact that alongside Einstein, Ludwig Boltzmann and Roger Penrose appear figures such as Proust, Dante, Beethoven, and, especially, Horace – each chapter begins with an epigraph from the Roman poet – as if to ground us in human sentiment and emotion before departing for the vertiginous world of black holes and spinfoam and clouds of probabilities.
“He has a side that is intimate, lyrical and extremely intense; and he is the great singer of the passing of time,” Rovelli says. “There’s a feeling of nostalgia – it’s not anguish, it’s not sorrow – it’s a feeling of ‘Let’s live life intensely’. A good friend of mine, Ernesto, who died quite young, gave me a little book of Horace, and I have carried it around with me all my life.”
Rovelli’s view is that there is no contradiction between a vision of the universe that makes human life seem small and irrelevant, and our everyday sorrows and joys. Or indeed between “cold science” and our inner, spiritual lives. “We are part of nature, and so joy and sorrow are aspects of nature itself – nature is much richer than just sets of atoms,” he tells me. There’s a moment in Seven Lessons when he compares physics and poetry: both try to describe the unseen. It might be added that physics, when departing from its native language of mathematical equations, relies strongly on metaphor and analogy. Rovelli has a gift for memorable comparisons. He tells us, for example, when explaining that the smooth “flow” of time is an illusion, that “The events of the world do not form an orderly queue like the English, they crowd around chaotically like the Italians.” The concept of time, he says, “has lost layers one after another, piece by piece”. We are left with “an empty windswept landscape almost devoid of all trace of temporality … a world stripped to its essence, glittering with an arid and troubling beauty”.
More than anything else I’ve ever read, Rovelli reminds me of Lucretius, the first-century BCE Roman author of the epic-length poem, On the Nature of Things. Perhaps not so odd, since Rovelli is a fan. Lucretius correctly hypothesised the existence of atoms, a theory that would remain unproven until Einstein demonstrated it in 1905, and even as late as the 1890s was being written off as absurd.
What Rovelli shares with Lucretius is not only a brilliance of language, but also a sense of humankind’s place in nature – at once a part of the fabric of the universe, and in a particular position to marvel at its great beauty. It’s a rationalist view: one that holds that by better understanding the universe, by discarding false beliefs and superstition, one might be able to enjoy a kind of serenity. Though Rovelli the man also acknowledges that the stuff of humanity is love, and fear, and desire, and passion: all made meaningful by our brief lives; our tiny span of allotted time.
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WBraun
climber
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We are NOT part parcel of Nature.
Nature is material.
The gross materialists foolishly believe they are the coat that covers their real selves.
All their research is foolishly focused on the coat which is discarded ultimately.
We are pure part parcel spiritual entities of God.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Nice post, John. From Wiki:
"But then a mechanism is needed which explains how the familiar notion of time eventually emerges from the timeless structure to become such an important ingredient of the macroscopic world we live in as well as of our conscious experience. "
And there's the rub . . .
Lynds says there are no specific values of time, like t=3. Time is fluid and cannot be parsed.
Will we understand time before understanding consciousness? Or will one imply the other? Mysteries far more challenging than whether a climb is 12c or 13a.
https://fqxi.org/community/articles/display/235
"Carroll himself has thought about whether time in physics is fundamental or a property that emerges from some deeper aspects of reality. This can be thought of in the same way that temperature emerges from the motion of multiple particles collected together. The faster that particles in a gas move on average, the hotter the temperature of the gas will be; however, it does not make sense to talk about the temperature of a single particle. Temperature is an emergent phenomenon in physics, and time may be too."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 8, 2019 - 07:29pm PT
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"A biological phenomenon" each of these examples are, and were subsequently investigated by objective and quantitative methods, there is nothing that prevents consciousness being studied in the same manner, and perhaps be explained as the others have been, in terms of an objective, quantitative scientific theory.
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There's nothing that prevents studying the BRAIN in this manner as I did for years with neurofeedback, EEGs, Qeegs etc. But we always thought were were studying or measuring the electrical correlates of mind, rather than mind itself. And when we say the correlates ARE mind, no one has made any progress making sense of what that means. IME, using physical metaphors (digestion, etc) is a misstep. It's a dead end.
But what about this whopper:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spin-swapping-particles-could-be-quantum-cheshire-cats/
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Has Rovelli come up with any theory of time that allows for testable hypotheses, the way Einstein did for spacetime curvature?
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Hard to prove a negative.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Searle
"Unified subjective conscious field?"
Tempted to ask
What is ""
However, that means that the conscious intention-in-action has to be a biochemical phenomenon. There is no way it is going to produce the secretion of acetylcholine unless it is itself realized in a biological structure. One in the same event, my conscious intention-in-action has a level of description where it is qualitative, subjective, and part of a unified subjective conscious field, and another level of description where it is a neurobiological process realized in the brain.
BTW just how many neurotransmitters have been identified to date?
Lookitup you say
OK
You can do the same :)
In response to a threshold action potential or graded electrical potential, a neurotransmitter is released at the presynaptic terminal. Low level "baseline" release also occurs without electrical stimulation. The released neurotransmitter may then move across the synapse to be detected by and bind with receptors in the postsynaptic neuron. Binding of neurotransmitters may influence the postsynaptic neuron in either an inhibitory or excitatory way. This neuron may be connected to many more neurons, and if the total of excitatory influences are greater than those of inhibitory influences, the neuron will also "fire". Ultimately it will create a new action potential at its axon hillock to release neurotransmitters and pass on the information to yet another neighboring neuron.[6]
Can we get more detailed explanation of the unified field ala neural trans?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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From Rovelli's book: “Among the strange phenomena [using LSD] was the sense of time stopping."
And opium, too.
. . . being wrong isn’t the point; being part of the conversation is the point.
Every practiced, devoted academic should be well aware of this notion. I agree with Rovelli that one can have very interesting conversations about any facet of reality with people who are experts and people who are naive. It's the novices in a field who are so very trying (in both ways).
Italians have such a great sense of the moods of life. They live in and relish them. As Americans, we seem to believe that moods are faults.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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That neurotransmitter activity isn't consciousness ITSELF.
It is a level of description of part of what goes on as a necessary part of biological consciousness.
What if we were asking, "What is City?"
Largo's EEGs would be one level of description. That information would be what you would get if you were high above the City with a microphone. The sound you recorded would tell you a little about the location, intensity and rhythm of the activity below. The neurotransmitter level would be more like going down to street level and recording people talking to each other.
Neither type of measurement is going to be definitive if you are trying to figure out the structure and functioning of the City, as in where the banks, libraries, restaurants, homes, etc., are located and what roles they play in the life of the City.
Assuming that you don't know the language of the people whose sounds you are listening to.
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WBraun
climber
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using LSD was the sense of time stopping
It's a hallucination as Time is never ever stopped for Time itself is eternal.
The cheap lazy gross materialists will always look for a lazy way out that is always ultimately useless
because they themselves are hallucinating in the inferior material manifestation.
All while spouting pseudoscience and spiritual nonsense masqueraded as advance knowledge created in their fertile runaway mental speculating minds.
biological consciousness
There is NO such thing as consciousness itself IS NOT material as when consciousness is confined within a biological machine it falsely mistakes itself to be that machine ....
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 9, 2019 - 01:05pm PT
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Largo's EEGs would be one level of description. That information would be what you would get if you were high above the City with a microphone. The sound you recorded would tell you a little about the location, intensity and rhythm of the activity below. The neurotransmitter level would be more like going down to street level and recording people talking to each other.
That was never our take on it, though I can see how a person would think as much.
The problem with the above is that it might imply that the neurotransmitters are not just the seats of electrochemical activity, but that activity is human conversation with "talking" as we normally use and understand the words. It's just that the "talking" at that basic level is in a language different than English, so to speak, meaning somewhere along the line the objective, conversant neurons/activity gets translated or transposed into "experiential" or subjective language - like translating Greek or Chinese into English. The neurons do the real talking and "we" (again, our brains) merely learn a vocabulary to express what the brain is "producing." In this model, or any like it, conscious awareness is merely a receiver (also wholly brain) of what the brain is mechanically "doing" and creating. The brain, in essence, is just talking to itself in an ever increasing level of complexity, meaning people don't actually talk to each other, brains do. We've just described zombie talk. Once again, conscious awareness plays no role in the drama of dancing neurons. "We only think it does." This is the bit-torrent model of consciousness, which arises by way of bits or parts which "create" a uniform whole.
This is the rabbit hole we drop into when brain is posited as the linear-causal "creator" of mind. The other rabbit hole is when dualists posit mind as separate from brain.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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You are simply confused, JL, not in a rabbit hole. Read what you wrote again and see if you understand it.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 10, 2019 - 11:49am PT
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MH, you are talking in circles again. Look closely at what you actually said:
The neurotransmitter level would be more like going down to street level and recording people talking to each other.
"People talking" implies a conversation, with semantic content, ie meaning. What, specifically, is inherent or even imaginably a connection between neurons firing and people "talking" to each other. That the neurons RESPOND to each other merely shows a syntactic relationship, perhaps like the on and off switches in a computer. That is, anything that a computer can do is nothing more than a unique combination of some transistors turned on and some transistors turned off - or in this case, neurons either firing or not firing. ASure, what the neurons exchange might be remarkably complex, but there's nothing in the electrochemical activity that is anything more then syntax. If you think there is more, what is that belief based on?
Remember, you're using a bottom up, bit-torrent model to "create" mind, starting with dancing neurons, so you have to explain things accordingly. You can't appeal to consciousness itself and project qualities DOWN, since by your model, consciousness accrues as you work up the ladder from said neurons.
By any purely objective model, you'd have, in theory, to be able to detect consciousness by way of an objective machine that is NOT conscious, so mind would have to be detectable IN the neural activity. Of course a machine can never do this because it has no access to anything experiential. It can't find what, by design and function, it can't know, see or understand. Only a conscious person could look at dancing neurons and say, THAT is a precursor of mind. Of course this implies that there is MORE going on in the field of neurons than syntactic firing and "communicating," which is impossible in a physicalists model, which claims, by definition, that the whole is NEVER more than the sum of it's parts.
That's why emergence and physicalism are incompatible. What emerges?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 10, 2019 - 12:50pm PT
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we've been around this concept of emergence a lot...
in classical thermodynamics we classify matter in three states: solid, liquid, gas
the atoms are the same, solid water is ice, then water, then steam, but it's all H₂O
however, we do not have to invoke some strange process to explain how H₂O changes state as a function of pressure and temperature.
the states emerge from the interaction over many length scales and many atoms, the atoms don't know anything more or less, they certainly don't know they're in a solid, liquid or gas...
the idea of states of matter is quite utilitarian, and we use thermodynamics as a quantitative theory of how matter will react to changes of temperature and pressure (and other things like the chemical potential etc.) without having to resort to explaining the atom-by-atom interactions that collectively give rise to the state.
that is an example of emergence... it is entirely plausible that similar things happen with large collections of neurons (and other cells for that matter), so that the behavior of the collective can be quite surprising, based on the interactions of the individual agents.
this is what network theory has been about for quite some time now...
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 10, 2019 - 03:25pm PT
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You're making one classic mistake in your reasoning: Contrasting examples from the observable physical world with the experiential realm, assuming that physical processing - because they "create" surprising other physical effect - will necessarily create mind. Seeming that mind is unlike any other phenomenon in reality, is not such a process "strange" insofar as it has no other precedent in the known world? Chalmers said believing such a theory is not only strange, but "magic."
Kurzwiel is the guy pushing for network theory as an explanation of mind, with his whole brain awareness and so forth. This is a form of emergence, so the question for the physicalist becomes: What emerges, and is what emerges more than or different from brain? If they are the same, meaning identical, you're right back to all the dead ends of Identity Theory.
"
Read Kurzweil and you'll find comments like: "These (global activation) results provide compelling evidence that awareness is associated with global changes in the brain’s functional connectivity." Few would dispute this. But "associated with" is not the same as "creates." That's the magical leap no one can unpack with physical data.
It's a dead end, like trying to explain the origin of particles by way of particles. All that new stuff about retrocausality should be a heads up that a time bound, linear causal model will never get you to mind.
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