Posted on 07/05/2003 4:20:08 PM PDT by betty boop
Have I seen it?...When I first read of it in Scientific American (August 1987?) I wrote my own code to explore it. I found the exact area shown on the magazine's cover. I've read Mandelbrot's "popular" books.
Also Stephen Wolfram's sterile, self-aggrandizing, and narcissistic gigantic hunk of nothing.
--Boris
Please do so.
It would be illuminating.
--Boris
Here's an Aspect-like experiment: Violation of Bell's inequality under strict Einstein locality conditions. Baez sure seems to think that these experiments cause trouble with IAD:
"QM suggests that if say the measurement of the photon 1 x-spin happens first, then this measurement must instantaneously force photon 2 into a state of ill-defined y-spin, even though it is light years away from photon 1. How do we reconcile the fact that photon 2 "knows" that the x-spin of photon 1 has been measured, even though they are separated by light years of space and far too little time has passed for information to have travelled to it according to the rules of special relativity? There are basically two choices. You can accept the postulates of QM as a fact of life, in spite of its seemingly uncomfortable coexistence with special relativity, or you can postulate that QM is not complete, that there was more information available for the description of the two-particle system at the time it was created, carried away by both photons, and that you just didn't know it because QM does not properly account for it."
Do you agree with Baez that QM has a "seemingly uncomfortable coexistence with special relativity", ie. instantaneous action at a distance? If not, why not?
Uh, no. It was a joke that I thought would be illuminating. My point was that a theory can have all sorts of incredibly precise predictions yet be based on a totally bogus foundation as long as you generate enough rules.
A less facetious example would be fourier analysis of a given waveform. Now, I can say that the waveform is composed of an infinite set of sine waves with appropriate amplitudes and phases. I can set up filters that will apparently "extract" particular sine waves out of this set. I can do all sorts of wonderful computations and design circuits based on this, too. But is a waveform actually made of an infinite set of sine waves? Nope, it has a single value at a given point. In fact, when I thought I was extracting a particular sine wave by using a filter, I was actually only seeing the response of that filter to the waveform. In other words, the mathematical representation had nothing to do with what was going on physically.
Very interesting and something that I have questioned in the way of evolution. Why and how does life come together. There has been simple no success in animating life from inanimate matter. I do not believe that if you could build a cell molecule by molecule that it would be alive. I am relative certain that we are going to find out that quntum physics and sub atomic particles play a huge role in what we know call genetics. As my physics professor once said "Nothing is fundamental".
Regards,
Boiler Plate
I was anxious for that same thing once, too (when I held that nine all I could see was my mama's eyes). But I persevered. You are doing the same.
Why stop now?
Archive initiated.
That would be the mechanism of "free will" processing input and returning output. We can't see how it works because it's within the "black box" that is the human mind.
I knew you had posted this last night, but wanted to wait until I was mentally alert to begin looking over all your excellent research. As you know, it is very much the sort of thing which interests me!!!
I'll post back after reading through all the links.
The second link is busted. It should be: Grandpierre's first article in rtf
But if that doesn't work, here's an HTML version.
The last link is fine!
I checked the urls and they are identical. Jeepers...
Science? Well, I suppose there are those who call astrology, alchemy, and hololistic medicine science. To the sane, it is just so much more mystic nonsense, except that it exhibits a familiarity with some scientific terms and concepts and uses those to put over its irrational ideas.
For example:
The “important forms of consciousness” that Kefatos and Drãgãnescu want to take into consideration are, broadly speaking, the following:
(1) natural human consciousness (related to mind and life);
(2) artificial, supposedly human-like consciousness (to be eventually obtained if some structures of hardware develop quantum phenomena similar to those of the human mind); and
(3) Fundamental Consciousness of existence
Life is a self-sustained goal-oreinted process associated with an entity called an organism. The goal of the process is the success and continuation of the organism as an organism.
Consciousness is an aspect of life. Only living organisms are conscious. Every organism exhibits some kinds of "response" to external influences, for example, that a non-living entity does not. That reaction or "response," even in the simplest of creatures, is rudimentary consciousness, in the simplest creatures, called sentience.
Now Kefatos and Drãgãnescu evidently do not even have this simple understanding of the nature of consciousness, jumping immediately to the highest form of consciousness in human beings, that is, conceptual, or rational/volitional consciousness. This ignores the much simpler perceptual consciousness common to all higher organisms (animals, for example). Armed with this ignorance they make profound assertions about "forms" of consciousness, like, "supposedly human-like consciousness (to be eventually obtained if some structures of hardware develop quantum phenomena similar to those of the human mind ..."
Well, it might be more profitable to attempt producing "animal-like" conscious, before attempting something as profound as "human-like," but even if we let that go, the dazzling stupidity that could with a straight face say, "quantum phenomena similar to those of the human mind," is almost incredible. They seem to make the simplest of mistakes (and actually counter their own [ahem] thesis) that equates the brain and the mind. We can assure Mssrs. Kefatos and Drãgãnescu there are no "quatum phenomena" in the mind. (The are plenty in the brain, of course, but just as many in the nose and big toe, so that approach is not going to be very enlightening, we think.)
If we did not know better, we would probably assume the following came from the pen of Charles Dodgson, but alas, it is apparently meant seriously. Behold, no doubt among the impossible things the queen believes before breakfast is, "Fundamental Consciousness of existence
." It might help some if what is meant by "existence" were specifically stated, but since it is not, we must assume it means one of the following: all of material existence or all that exists in any mode, including consciousness, dreams, fictions, history, works of art, forums, etc. In either case, since consciousness is an aspect of a living organism, "existence" would, to be conscious, have to be a living organism. Since existence is an organism, everything existence does is to sustain itself as an organism. Therefore....
There cannot be a therefore to such absurdities.
It turns out this is not a, “new kind of science,” at all, but a very old one, that has come in many flavors over the years, but today has a common and familiar name. It's called junk science.
Hank
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