Dialogos of Eide

The Incandescent Sun

2012-05-24T15:27:00.001-07:00

This video takes SDO images and applies additional processing to enhance the structures visible. While there is no scientific value to this processing, it does result in a beautiful, new way of looking at the sun. The original frames are in the 171 Angstrom wavelength of extreme ultraviolet. This wavelength shows plasma in the solar atmosphere, called the corona, that is around 600,000 Kelvin. The loops represent plasma held in place by magnetic fields. They are concentrated in "active regions" where the magnetic fields are the strongest. These active regions usually appear in visible light as sunspots. The events in this video represent 24 hours of activity on September 25, 2011.

This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a010900/a010990/index.html

BroadBand Technology

2012-05-24T08:29:00.001-07:00

Broadband research is a McGill area of expertise. Meet researchers such as David Plant, Tho Le-Ngoc, and Mark Coates who are on the cutting edge of machine to machine communication, high-speed internet technologies, and wireless communications.

Hypercomputation

2012-05-23T07:44:00.001-07:00

Hypercomputation or super-Turing computation refers to models of computation that go beyond, or are incomparable to, Turing computability. This includes various hypothetical methods for the computation of non-Turing-computable functions, following super-recursive algorithms (see also supertask). The term "super-Turing computation" appeared in a 1995 Science paper by Hava Siegelmann. The term "hypercomputation" was introduced in 1999 by Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot.^[1]

The terms are not quite synonymous: "super-Turing computation" usually implies that the proposed model is supposed to be physically realizable, while "hypercomputation" does not.

Technical arguments against the physical realizability of hypercomputations have been presented.

History

A computational model going beyond Turing machines was introduced by Alan Turing in his 1938 PhD dissertation Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals.^[2] This paper investigated mathematical systems in which an oracle was available, which could compute a single arbitrary (non-recursive) function from naturals to naturals. He used this device to prove that even in those more powerful systems, undecidability is still present. Turing's oracle machines are strictly mathematical abstractions, and are not physically realizable.^[3]

Hypercomputation and the Church–Turing thesis

The Church–Turing thesis states that any function that is algorithmically computable can be computed by a Turing machine. Hypercomputers compute functions that a Turing machine cannot, hence, not computable in the Church-Turing sense.
An example of a problem a Turing machine cannot solve is the halting problem. A Turing machine cannot decide if an arbitrary program halts or runs forever. Some proposed hypercomputers can simulate the program for an infinite number of steps and tell the user whether or not the program halted.

Hypercomputer proposals

A Turing machine that can complete infinitely many steps. Simply being able to run for an unbounded number of steps does not suffice. One mathematical model is the Zeno machine (inspired by Zeno's paradox). The Zeno machine performs its first computation step in (say) 1 minute, the second step in ½ minute, the third step in ¼ minute, etc. By summing 1+½+¼+... (a geometric series) we see that the machine performs infinitely many steps in a total of 2 minutes. However, some^[who?] people claim that, following the reasoning from Zeno's paradox, Zeno machines are not just physically impossible, but logically impossible.^[4]
Turing's original oracle machines, defined by Turing in 1939.
In mid 1960s, E Mark Gold and Hilary Putnam independently proposed models of inductive inference (the "limiting recursive functionals"^[5] and "trial-and-error predicates",^[6] respectively). These models enable some nonrecursive sets of numbers or languages (including all recursively enumerable sets of languages) to be "learned in the limit"; whereas, by definition, only recursive sets of numbers or languages could be identified by a Turing machine. While the machine will stabilize to the correct answer on any learnable set in some finite time, it can only identify it as correct if it is recursive; otherwise, the correctness is established only by running the machine forever and noting that it never revises its answer. Putnam identified this new interpretation as the class of "empirical" predicates, stating: "if we always 'posit' that the most recently generated answer is correct, we will make a finite number of mistakes, but we will eventually get the correct answer. (Note, however, that even if we have gotten to the correct answer (the end of the finite sequence) we are never sure that we have the correct answer.)"^[6] L. K. Schubert's 1974 paper "Iterated Limiting Recursion and the Program Minimization Problem" ^[7] studied the effects of iterating the limiting procedure; this allows any arithmetic predicate to be computed. Schubert wrote, "Intuitively, iterated limiting identification might be regarded as higher-order inductive inference performed collectively by an ever-growing community of lower order inductive inference machines."
A real computer (a sort of idealized analog computer) can perform hypercomputation^[8] if physics admits general real variables (not just computable reals), and these are in some way "harnessable" for computation. This might require quite bizarre laws of physics (for example, a measurable physical constant with an oracular value, such as Chaitin's constant), and would at minimum require the ability to measure a real-valued physical value to arbitrary precision despite thermal noise and quantum effects.
A proposed technique known as fair nondeterminism or unbounded nondeterminism may allow the computation of noncomputable functions.^[9] There is dispute in the literature over whether this technique is coherent, and whether it actually allows noncomputable functions to be "computed".
It seems natural that the possibility of time travel (existence of closed timelike curves (CTCs)) makes hypercomputation possible by itself. However, this is not so since a CTC does not provide (by itself) the unbounded amount of storage that an infinite computation would require. Nevertheless, there are spacetimes in which the CTC region can be used for relativistic hypercomputation.^[10] Access to a CTC may allow the rapid solution to PSPACE-complete problems, a complexity class which while Turing-decidable is generally considered computationally intractable.^[11]^[12]
According to a 1992 paper,^[13] a computer operating in a Malament-Hogarth spacetime or in orbit around a rotating black hole^[14] could theoretically perform non-Turing computations.^[15]^[16]
In 1994, Hava Siegelmann proved that her new (1991) computational model, the Artificial Recurrent Neural Network (ARNN), could perform hypercomputation (using infinite precision real weights for the synapses). It is based on evolving an artificial neural network through a discrete, infinite succession of states.^[17]
The infinite time Turing machine is a generalization of the Zeno machine, that can perform infinitely long computations whose steps are enumerated by potentially transfinite ordinal numbers. It models an otherwise-ordinary Turing machine for which non-halting computations are completed by entering a special state reserved for reaching a limit ordinal and to which the results of the preceding infinite computation are available.^[18]
Jan van Leeuwen and Jiří Wiedermann wrote a 2000 paper^[19] suggesting that the Internet should be modeled as a nonuniform computing system equipped with an advice function representing the ability of computers to be upgraded.
A symbol sequence is computable in the limit if there is a finite, possibly non-halting program on a universal Turing machine that incrementally outputs every symbol of the sequence. This includes the dyadic expansion of π and of every other computable real, but still excludes all noncomputable reals. Traditional Turing machines cannot edit their previous outputs; generalized Turing machines, as defined by Jürgen Schmidhuber, can. He defines the constructively describable symbol sequences as those that have a finite, non-halting program running on a generalized Turing machine, such that any output symbol eventually converges, that is, it does not change any more after some finite initial time interval. Due to limitations first exhibited by Kurt Gödel (1931), it may be impossible to predict the convergence time itself by a halting program, otherwise the halting problem could be solved. Schmidhuber (^[20]^[21]) uses this approach to define the set of formally describable or constructively computable universes or constructive theories of everything. Generalized Turing machines can solve the halting problem by evaluating a Specker sequence.
A quantum mechanical system which somehow uses an infinite superposition of states to compute a non-computable function.^[22] This is not possible using the standard qubit-model quantum computer, because it is proven that a regular quantum computer is PSPACE-reducible (a quantum computer running in polynomial time can be simulated by a classical computer running in polynomial space).^[23]
In 1970, E.S. Santos defined a class of fuzzy logic-based "fuzzy algorithms" and "fuzzy Turing machines".^[24] Subsequently, L. Biacino and G. Gerla showed that such a definition would allow the computation of nonrecursive languages; they suggested an alternative set of definitions without this difficulty.^[25] Jiří Wiedermann analyzed the capabilities of Santos' original proposal in 2004.^[26]
Dmytro Taranovsky has proposed a finitistic model of traditionally non-finitistic branches of analysis, built around a Turing machine equipped with a rapidly increasing function as its oracle. By this and more complicated models he was able to give an interpretation of second-order arithmetic.^[27]

Analysis of capabilities

Many hypercomputation proposals amount to alternative ways to read an oracle or advice function embedded into an otherwise classical machine. Others allow access to some higher level of the arithmetic hierarchy. For example, supertasking Turing machines, under the usual assumptions, would be able to compute any predicate in the truth-table degree containing or . Limiting-recursion, by contrast, can compute any predicate or function in the corresponding Turing degree, which is known to be . Gold further showed that limiting partial recursion would allow the computation of precisely the predicates.

Model	Computable predicates	Notes	Refs
supertasking	tt()	dependent on outside observer	^[28]
limiting/trial-and-error			^[5]
iterated limiting (k times)			^[7]
Blum-Shub-Smale machine		incomparable with traditional computable real functions.	^[29]
Malament-Hogarth spacetime	HYP	Dependent on spacetime structure	^[30]
Analog recurrent neural network		f is an advice function giving connection weights; size is bounded by runtime	^[31]^[32]
Infinite time Turing machine			^[33]
Classical fuzzy Turing machine		For any computable t-norm	^[34]
Increasing function oracle		For the one-sequence model; are r.e.	^[27]

Taxonomy of "super-recursive" computation methodologies

Burgin has collected a list of what he calls "super-recursive algorithms" (from Burgin 2005: 132):

limiting recursive functions and limiting partial recursive functions (E. M. Gold^[5])
trial and error predicates (Hilary Putnam^[6])
inductive inference machines (Carl Herbert Smith)
inductive Turing machines (one of Burgin's own models)
limit Turing machines (another of Burgin's models)
trial-and-error machines (Ja. Hintikka and A. Mutanen ^[35])
general Turing machines (J. Schmidhuber^[21])
Internet machines (van Leeuwen, J. and Wiedermann, J.^[19])
evolutionary computers, which use DNA to produce the value of a function (Darko Roglic^[36])
fuzzy computation (Jiří Wiedermann^[26])
evolutionary Turing machines (Eugene Eberbach^[37])

In the same book, he presents also a list of "algorithmic schemes":

Turing machines with arbitrary oracles (Alan Turing)
Transrecursive operators (Borodyanskii and Burgin^[38])
machines that compute with real numbers (L. Blum, F. Cucker, M. Shub, and S. Smale)
neural networks based on real numbers (Hava Siegelmann)

Criticism

Martin Davis, in his writings on hypercomputation ^[39] ^[40] refers to this subject as "a myth" and offers counter-arguments to the physical realizability of hypercomputation. As for its theory, he argues against the claims that this is a new field founded in 1990s. This point of view relies on the history of computability theory (degrees of unsolvability, computability over functions, real numbers and ordinals), as also mentioned above.
Andrew Hodges wrote a critical commentary^[41] on Copeland and Proudfoot's article^[1].

References

^ ^a ^b Copeland and Proudfoot, Alan Turing's forgotten ideas in computer science. Scientific American, April 1999
^ Alan Turing, 1939, Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals Proceedings London Mathematical Society Volumes 2–45, Issue 1, pp. 161–228.[1]
^ "Let us suppose that we are supplied with some unspecified means of solving number-theoretic problems; a kind of oracle as it were. We shall not go any further into the nature of this oracle apart from saying that it cannot be a machine" (Undecidable p. 167, a reprint of Turing's paper Systems of Logic Based On Ordinals)
^ These models have been independently developed by many different authors, including Hermann Weyl (1927). Philosophie der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaft.; the model is discussed in Shagrir, O. (June 2004). "Super-tasks, accelerating Turing machines and uncomputability". Theor. Comput. Sci. 317, 1-3 317: 105–114. doi:10.1016/j.tcs.2003.12.007. and in Petrus H. Potgieter (July 2006). "Zeno machines and hypercomputation". Theoretical Computer Science 358 (1): 23–33. doi:10.1016/j.tcs.2005.11.040.
^ ^a ^b ^c E. M. Gold (1965). "Limiting Recursion". Journal of Symbolic Logic 30 (1): 28–48. doi:10.2307/2270580. JSTOR 2270580., E. Mark Gold (1967). "Language identification in the limit". Information and Control 10 (5): 447–474. doi:10.1016/S0019-9958(67)91165-5.
^ ^a ^b ^c Hilary Putnam (1965). "Trial and Error Predicates and the Solution to a Problem of Mostowksi". Journal of Symbolic Logic 30 (1): 49–57. doi:10.2307/2270581. JSTOR 2270581.
^ ^a ^b L. K. Schubert (July 1974). "Iterated Limiting Recursion and the Program Minimization Problem". Journal of the ACM 21 (3): 436–445. doi:10.1145/321832.321841.
^ Arnold Schönhage, "On the power of random access machines", in Proc. Intl. Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP), pages 520-529, 1979. Source of citation: Scott Aaronson, "NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality"[2] p. 12
^ Edith Spaan, Leen Torenvliet and Peter van Emde Boas (1989). "Nondeterminism, Fairness and a Fundamental Analogy". EATCS bulletin 37: 186–193.
^ Hajnal Andréka, István Németi and Gergely Székely, Closed Timelike Curves in Relativistic Computation, 2011.[3]
^ Todd A. Brun, Computers with closed timelike curves can solve hard problems, Found.Phys.Lett. 16 (2003) 245-253.[4]
^ S. Aaronson and J. Watrous. Closed Timelike Curves Make Quantum and Classical Computing Equivalent [5]
^ Hogarth, M., 1992, ‘Does General Relativity Allow an Observer to View an Eternity in a Finite Time?’, Foundations of Physics Letters, 5, 173–181.
^ István Neméti; Hajnal Andréka (2006). "Can General Relativistic Computers Break the Turing Barrier?". Logical Approaches to Computational Barriers, Second Conference on Computability in Europe, CiE 2006, Swansea, UK, June 30-July 5, 2006. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 3988. Springer. doi:10.1007/11780342.
^ Etesi, G., and Nemeti, I., 2002 'Non-Turing computations via Malament-Hogarth space-times', Int.J.Theor.Phys. 41 (2002) 341–370, Non-Turing Computations via Malament-Hogarth Space-Times:.
^ Earman, J. and Norton, J., 1993, ‘Forever is a Day: Supertasks in Pitowsky and Malament-Hogarth Spacetimes’, Philosophy of Science, 5, 22–42.
^ Verifying Properties of Neural Networks p.6
^ Joel David Hamkins and Andy Lewis, Infinite time Turing machines, Journal of Symbolic Logic, 65(2):567-604, 2000.[6]
^ ^a ^b Jan van Leeuwen; Jiří Wiedermann (September 2000). "On Algorithms and Interaction". MFCS '00: Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science. Springer-Verlag.
^ Jürgen Schmidhuber (2000). "Algorithmic Theories of Everything". Sections in: Hierarchies of generalized Kolmogorov complexities and nonenumerable universal measures computable in the limit. International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science ():587-612 (). Section 6 in: the Speed Prior: A New Simplicity Measure Yielding Near-Optimal Computable Predictions. in J. Kivinen and R. H. Sloan, editors, Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference on Computational Learning Theory (COLT ), Sydney, Australia, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, pages 216--228. Springer, . 13 (4): 1–5. arXiv:quant-ph/0011122.
^ ^a ^b J. Schmidhuber (2002). "Hierarchies of generalized Kolmogorov complexities and nonenumerable universal measures computable in the limit". International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science 13 (4): 587–612. doi:10.1142/S0129054102001291.
^ There have been some claims to this effect; see Tien Kieu (2003). "Quantum Algorithm for the Hilbert's Tenth Problem". Int. J. Theor. Phys. 42 (7): 1461–1478. arXiv:quant-ph/0110136. doi:10.1023/A:1025780028846.. & the ensuing literature. Errors have been pointed out in Kieu's approach by Warren D. Smith in Three counterexamples refuting Kieu’s plan for “quantum adiabatic hypercomputation”; and some uncomputable quantum mechanical tasks
^ Bernstein and Vazirani, Quantum complexity theory, SIAM Journal on Computing, 26(5):1411-1473, 1997. [7]
^ Santos, Eugene S. (1970). "Fuzzy Algorithms". Information and Control 17 (4): 326–339. doi:10.1016/S0019-9958(70)80032-8.
^ Biacino, L.; Gerla, G. (2002). "Fuzzy logic, continuity and effectiveness". Archive for Mathematical Logic 41 (7): 643–667. doi:10.1007/s001530100128. ISSN 0933-5846.
^ ^a ^b Wiedermann, Jiří (2004). "Characterizing the super-Turing computing power and efficiency of classical fuzzy Turing machines". Theor. Comput. Sci. 317 (1–3): 61–69. doi:10.1016/j.tcs.2003.12.004.
^ ^a ^b Dmytro Taranovsky (July 17, 2005). "Finitism and Hypercomputation". Retrieved Apr 26, 2011.
^ Petrus H. Potgieter (July 2006). "Zeno machines and hypercomputation". Theoretical Computer Science 358 (1): 23–33. doi:10.1016/j.tcs.2005.11.040.
^ Lenore Blum, Felipe Cucker, Michael Shub, and Stephen Smale. Complexity and Real Computation. ISBN 0-387-98281-7.
^ P. D. Welch (10-Sept-2006). The extent of computation in Malament-Hogarth spacetimes. arXiv:gr-qc/0609035.
^ Hava Siegelmann (April 1995). "Computation Beyond the Turing Limit". Science 268 (5210): 545–548. doi:10.1126/science.268.5210.545. PMID 17756722.
^ Hava Siegelmann; Eduardo Sontag (1994). "Analog Computation via Neural Networks". Theoretical Computer Science 131 (2): 331–360. doi:10.1016/0304-3975(94)90178-3.
^ Joel David Hamkins; Andy Lewis (2000). "Infinite Time Turing machines". Journal of Symbolic Logic 65 (2): 567=604.
^ Jiří Wiedermann (June 4, 2004). "Characterizing the super-Turing computing power and efficiency of classical fuzzy Turing machines". Theoretical Computer Science (Elsevier Science Publishers Ltd. Essex, UK) 317 (1–3).
^ Hintikka, Ja; Mutanen, A. (1998). "An Alternative Concept of Computability". Language, Truth, and Logic in Mathematics. Dordrecht. pp. 174–188.
^ Darko Roglic (24–Jul–2007). "The universal evolutionary computer based on super-recursive algorithms of evolvability". arXiv:0708.2686 [cs.NE].
^ Eugene Eberbach (2002). "On expressiveness of evolutionary computation: is EC algorithmic?". Computational Intelligence, WCCI 1: 564–569. doi:10.1109/CEC.2002.1006988.
^ Borodyanskii, Yu M; Burgin, M. S. (1994). "Operations and compositions in transrecursive operators". Cybernetics and Systems Analysis 30 (4): 473–478. doi:10.1007/BF02366556.
^ Davis, Martin, Why there is no such discipline as hypercomputation, Applied Mathematics and Computation, Volume 178, Issue 1, 1 July 2006, Pages 4–7, Special Issue on Hypercomputation
^ Davis, Martin (2004). "The Myth of Hypercomputation". Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker. Springer.
^ Andrew Hodges (retrieved 23 September 2011). "The Professors and the Brainstorms". The Alan Turing Home Page.

External links

Digital Physics

2012-05-21T03:31:00.000-07:00

In physics and cosmology, digital physics is a collection of theoretical perspectives based on the premise that the universe is, at heart, describable by information, and is therefore computable. Therefore, the universe can be conceived as either the output of a computer program or as a vast, digital computation device (or, at least, mathematically isomorphic to such a device).

Digital physics is grounded in one or more of the following hypotheses; listed in order of increasing strength. The universe, or reality:

is essentially informational (although not every informational ontology needs to be digital);
is essentially computable;
can be described digitally;
is in essence digital;
is itself a computer;
is the output of a simulated reality exercise.

History

Every computer must be compatible with the principles of information theory, statistical thermodynamics, and quantum mechanics. A fundamental link among these fields was proposed by Edwin Jaynes in two seminal 1957 papers.^[1] Moreover, Jaynes elaborated an interpretation of probability theory as generalized Aristotelian logic, a view very convenient for linking fundamental physics with digital computers, because these are designed to implement the operations of classical logic and, equivalently, of Boolean algebra.^[2]
The hypothesis that the universe is a digital computer was pioneered by Konrad Zuse in his book Rechnender Raum (translated into English as Calculating Space). The term digital physics was first employed by Edward Fredkin, who later came to prefer the term digital philosophy.^[3] Others who have modeled the universe as a giant computer include Stephen Wolfram,^[4] Juergen Schmidhuber,^[5] and Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft.^[6] These authors hold that the apparently probabilistic nature of quantum physics is not necessarily incompatible with the notion of computability. Quantum versions of digital physics have recently been proposed by Seth Lloyd,^[7] David Deutsch, and Paola Zizzi.^[8]

Related ideas include Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker's binary theory of ur-alternatives, pancomputationalism, computational universe theory, John Archibald Wheeler's "It from bit", and Max Tegmark's ultimate ensemble.

Digital physics

Overview

Digital physics suggests that there exists, at least in principle, a program for a universal computer which computes the evolution of the universe. The computer could be, for example, a huge cellular automaton (Zuse 1967^[9]), or a universal Turing machine, as suggested by Schmidhuber (1997), who pointed out that there exists a very short program that can compute all possible computable universes in an asymptotically optimal way.

Some try to identify single physical particles with simple bits. For example, if one particle, such as an electron, is switching from one quantum state to another, it may be the same as if a bit is changed from one value (0, say) to the other (1). A single bit suffices to describe a single quantum switch of a given particle. As the universe appears to be composed of elementary particles whose behavior can be completely described by the quantum switches they undergo, that implies that the universe as a whole can be described by bits. Every state is information, and every change of state is a change in information (requiring the manipulation of one or more bits). Setting aside dark matter and dark energy, which are poorly understood at present, the known universe consists of about 10⁸⁰ protons and the same number of electrons. Hence, the universe could be simulated by a computer capable of storing and manipulating about 10⁹⁰ bits. If such a simulation is indeed the case, then hypercomputation would be impossible.

Loop quantum gravity could lend support to digital physics, in that it assumes space-time is quantized. Paola Zizzi has formulated a realization of this concept in what has come to be called "computational loop quantum gravity", or CLQG.^[10]^[11] Other theories that combine aspects of digital physics with loop quantum gravity are those of Marzuoli and Rasetti^[12]^[13] and Girelli and Livine.^[14]

Weizsäcker's ur-alternatives

Physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker's theory of ur-alternatives (archetypal objects), first publicized in his book The Unity of Nature (1980),^[15] further developed through the 1990s,^[16]^[17] is a kind of digital physics as it axiomatically constructs quantum physics from the distinction between empirically observable, binary alternatives. Weizsäcker used his theory to derive the 3-dimensionality of space and to estimate the entropy of a proton falling into a black hole.

Pancomputationalism or the computational universe theory

Pancomputationalism (also known as pan-computationalism, naturalist computationalism) is a view that the universe is a huge computational machine, or rather a network of computational processes which, following fundamental physical laws, computes (dynamically develops) its own next state from the current one.^[18]
A computational universe is proposed by Jürgen Schmidhuber in a paper based on Konrad Zuse's assumption (1967) that the history of the universe is computable. He pointed out that the simplest explanation of the universe would be a very simple Turing machine programmed to systematically execute all possible programs computing all possible histories for all types of computable physical laws. He also pointed out that there is an optimally efficient way of computing all computable universes based on Leonid Levin's universal search algorithm (1973). In 2000 he expanded this work by combining Ray Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference with the assumption that quickly computable universes are more likely than others. This work on digital physics also led to limit-computable generalizations of algorithmic information or Kolmogorov complexity and the concept of Super Omegas, which are limit-computable numbers that are even more random (in a certain sense) than Gregory Chaitin's number of wisdom Omega.

Wheeler's "it from bit"

Following Jaynes and Weizsäcker, the physicist John Archibald Wheeler wrote the following:

[...] it is not unreasonable to imagine that information sits at the core of physics, just as it sits at the core of a computer. (John Archibald Wheeler 1998: 340)

It from bit. Otherwise put, every 'it'—every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. 'It from bit' symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe. (John Archibald Wheeler 1990: 5)

David Chalmers of the Australian National University summarised Wheeler's views as follows:

Wheeler (1990) has suggested that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. According to this 'it from bit' doctrine, the laws of physics can be cast in terms of information, postulating different states that give rise to different effects without actually saying what those states are. It is only their position in an information space that counts. If so, then information is a natural candidate to also play a role in a fundamental theory of consciousness. We are led to a conception of the world on which information is truly fundamental, and on which it has two basic aspects, corresponding to the physical and the phenomenal features of the world.^[19]

Chris Langan also builds upon Wheeler's views in his epistemological metatheory:

The Future of Reality Theory According to John Wheeler: In 1979, the celebrated physicist John Wheeler, having coined the phrase “black hole”, put it to good philosophical use in the title of an exploratory paper, Beyond the Black Hole, in which he describes the universe as a self-excited circuit. The paper includes an illustration in which one side of an uppercase U, ostensibly standing for Universe, is endowed with a large and rather intelligent-looking eye intently regarding the other side, which it ostensibly acquires through observation as sensory information. By dint of placement, the eye stands for the sensory or cognitive aspect of reality, perhaps even a human spectator within the universe, while the eye’s perceptual target represents the informational aspect of reality. By virtue of these complementary aspects, it seems that the universe can in some sense, but not necessarily that of common usage, be described as “conscious” and “introspective”…perhaps even “infocognitive”.^[20]

The first formal presentation of the idea that information might be the fundamental quantity at the core of physics seems to be due to Frederick W. Kantor (a physicist from Columbia University). Kantor's book Information Mechanics (Wiley-Interscience, 1977) developed this idea in detail, but without mathematical rigor.

The toughest nut to crack in Wheeler's research program of a digital dissolution of physical being in a unified physics, Wheeler himself says, is time. In a 1986 eulogy to the mathematician, Hermann Weyl, he proclaimed: "Time, among all concepts in the world of physics, puts up the greatest resistance to being dethroned from ideal continuum to the world of the discrete, of information, of bits. ... Of all obstacles to a thoroughly penetrating account of existence, none looms up more dismayingly than 'time.' Explain time? Not without explaining existence. Explain existence? Not without explaining time. To uncover the deep and hidden connection between time and existence ... is a task for the future."^[21] The Australian phenomenologist, Michael Eldred, comments:

The antinomy of the continuum, time, in connection with the question of being ... is said by Wheeler to be a cause for dismay which challenges future quantum physics, fired as it is by a will to power over moving reality, to "achieve four victories" (ibid.)... And so we return to the challenge to "[u]nderstand the quantum as based on an utterly simple and—when we see it—completely obvious idea" (ibid.) from which the continuum of time could be derived. Only thus could the will to mathematically calculable power over the dynamics, i.e. the movement in time, of beings as a whole be satisfied.^[22]^[23]

Digital vs. informational physics

Not every informational approach to physics (or ontology) is necessarily digital. According to Luciano Floridi,^[24] "informational structural realism" is a variant of structural realism that supports an ontological commitment to a world consisting of the totality of informational objects dynamically interacting with each other. Such informational objects are to be understood as constraining affordances.

Digital ontology and pancomputationalism are also independent positions. In particular, John Wheeler advocated the former but was silent about the latter; see the quote in the preceding section.
On the other hand, pancomputationalists like Lloyd (2006), who models the universe as a quantum computer, can still maintain an analogue or hybrid ontology; and informational ontologists like Sayre and Floridi embrace neither a digital ontology nor a pancomputationalist position.^[25]

Computational foundations

Turing machines

Theoretical computer science is founded on the Turing machine, an imaginary computing machine first described by Alan Turing in 1936. While mechanically simple, the Church-Turing thesis implies that a Turing machine can solve any "reasonable" problem. (In theoretical computer science, a problem is considered "solvable" if it can be solved in principle, namely in finite time, which is not necessarily a finite time that is of any value to humans.) A Turing machine therefore sets the practical "upper bound" on computational power, apart from the possibilities afforded by hypothetical hypercomputers.

Wolfram's principle of computational equivalence powerfully motivates the digital approach. This principle, if correct, means that everything can be computed by one essentially simple machine, the realization of a cellular automaton. This is one way of fulfilling a traditional goal of physics: finding simple laws and mechanisms for all of nature.

Digital physics is falsifiable in that a less powerful class of computers cannot simulate a more powerful class. Therefore, if our universe is a gigantic simulation, that simulation is being run on a computer at least as powerful as a Turing machine. If humans succeed in building a hypercomputer, then a Turing machine cannot have the power required to simulate the universe.

The Church–Turing (Deutsch) thesis

The classic Church–Turing thesis claims that any computer as powerful as a Turing machine can, in principle, calculate anything that a human can calculate, given enough time. A stronger version, not attributable to Church or Turing,^[26] claims that a universal Turing machine can compute anything any other Turing machine can compute - that it is a generalizable Turing machine. But the limits of practical computation are set by physics, not by theoretical computer science:

"Turing did not show that his machines can solve any problem that can be solved 'by instructions, explicitly stated rules, or procedures', nor did he prove that the universal Turing machine 'can compute any function that any computer, with any architecture, can compute'. He proved that his universal machine can compute any function that any Turing machine can compute; and he put forward, and advanced philosophical arguments in support of, the thesis here called Turing's thesis. But a thesis concerning the extent of effective methods—which is to say, concerning the extent of procedures of a certain sort that a human being unaided by machinery is capable of carrying out—carries no implication concerning the extent of the procedures that machines are capable of carrying out, even machines acting in accordance with 'explicitly stated rules.' For among a machine's repertoire of atomic operations there may be those that no human being unaided by machinery can perform." ^[27]

On the other hand, if two further conjectures are made, along the lines that:

hypercomputation always involves actual infinities;
there are no actual infinities in physics,

the resulting compound principle does bring practical computation within Turing's limits.
As David Deutsch puts it:

"I can now state the physical version of the Church-Turing principle: 'Every finitely realizable physical system can be perfectly simulated by a universal model computing machine operating by finite means.' This formulation is both better defined and more physical than Turing's own way of expressing it."^[28] (Emphasis added)

This compound conjecture is sometimes called the "strong Church-Turing thesis" or the Church–Turing–Deutsch principle.

Criticism

The critics of digital physics—including physicists^{[citation needed]} who work in quantum mechanics—object to it on several grounds.

Physical symmetries are continuous

One objection is that extant models of digital physics are incompatible^{[citation needed]} with the existence of several continuous characters of physical symmetries, e.g., rotational symmetry, translational symmetry, Lorentz symmetry, and electroweak symmetry, all central to current physical theory.

Proponents of digital physics claim that such continuous symmetries are only convenient (and very good) approximations of a discrete reality. For example, the reasoning leading to systems of natural units and the conclusion that the Planck length is a minimum meaningful unit of distance suggests that at some level space itself is quantized.^[29]

Locality

Some argue^{[citation needed]} that extant models of digital physics violate various postulates of quantum physics. For example, if these models are not grounded in Hilbert spaces and probabilities, they belong to the class of theories with local hidden variables that some deem ruled out experimentally using Bell's theorem. This criticism has two possible answers. First, any notion of locality in the digital model does not necessarily have to correspond to locality formulated in the usual way in the emergent spacetime. A concrete example of this case was recently given by Lee Smolin.^[30] Another possibility is a well-known loophole in Bell's theorem known as superdeterminism (sometimes referred to as predeterminism).^[31] In a completely deterministic model, the experimenter's decision to measure certain components of the spins is predetermined. Thus, the assumption that the experimenter could have decided to measure different components of the spins than he actually did is, strictly speaking, not true.

Physical theory requires the continuum

It has been argued^{[weasel words]} that digital physics, grounded in the theory of finite state machines and hence discrete mathematics, cannot do justice to a physical theory whose mathematics requires the real numbers, which is the case for all physical theories having any credibility.

But computers can manipulate and solve formulas describing real numbers using symbolic computation, thus avoiding the need to approximate real numbers by using an infinite number of digits.

Before symbolic computation, a number—in particular a real number, one with an infinite number of digits—was said to be computable if a Turing machine will continue to spit out digits endlessly. In other words, there is no "last digit". But this sits uncomfortably with any proposal that the universe is the output of a virtual-reality exercise carried out in real time (or any plausible kind of time). Known physical laws (including quantum mechanics and its continuous spectra) are very much infused with real numbers and the mathematics of the continuum.

"So ordinary computational descriptions do not have a cardinality of states and state space trajectories that is sufficient for them to map onto ordinary mathematical descriptions of natural systems. Thus, from the point of view of strict mathematical description, the thesis that everything is a computing system in this second sense cannot be supported".^[32]

For his part, David Deutsch generally takes a "multiverse" view to the question of continuous vs. discrete. In short, he thinks that “within each universe all observable quantities are discrete, but the multiverse as a whole is a continuum. When the equations of quantum theory describe a continuous but not-directly-observable transition between two values of a discrete quantity, what they are telling us is that the transition does not take place entirely within one universe. So perhaps the price of continuous motion is not an infinity of consecutive actions, but an infinity of concurrent actions taking place across the multiverse.” January, 2001 The Discrete and the Continuous, an abridged version of which appeared in The Times Higher Education Supplement.

References

^ Jaynes, E. T., 1957, "Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics," Phys. Rev 106: 620.
Jaynes, E. T., 1957, "Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics II," Phys. Rev. 108: 171.
^ Jaynes, E. T., 1990, "Probability Theory as Logic," in Fougere, P.F., ed., Maximum-Entropy and Bayesian Methods. Boston: Kluwer.
^ See Fredkin's Digital Philosophy web site.
^ A New Kind of Science website. Reviews of ANKS.
^ Schmidhuber, J., "Computer Universes and an Algorithmic Theory of Everything."
^ G. 't Hooft, 1999, "Quantum Gravity as a Dissipative Deterministic System," Class. Quant. Grav. 16: 3263-79.
^ Lloyd, S., "The Computational Universe: Quantum gravity from quantum computation."
^ Zizzi, Paola, "Spacetime at the Planck Scale: The Quantum Computer View."
^ Zuse, Konrad, 1967, Elektronische Datenverarbeitung vol 8., pages 336-344
^ Zizzi, Paola, "A Minimal Model for Quantum Gravity."
^ Zizzi, Paola, "Computability at the Planck Scale."
^ Marzuoli, A. and Rasetti, M., 2002, "Spin Network Quantum Simulator," Phys. Lett. A306, 79-87.
^ Marzuoli, A. and Rasetti, M., 2005, "Computing Spin Networks," Annals of Physics 318: 345-407.
^ Girelli, F.; Livine, E. R., 2005, "[1]" Class. Quant. Grav. 22: 3295-3314.
^ von Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich (1980). The Unity of Nature. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
^ von Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich (1985) (in German). Aufbau der Physik [The Structure of Physics]. Munich. ISBN 3-446-14142-1.
^ von Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich (1992) (in German). Zeit und Wissen.
^ Papers on pancompuationalism
^ Chalmers, David. J., 1995, "Facing up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness," Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3): 200-19. This paper cites John A. Wheeler, 1990, "Information, physics, quantum: The search for links" in W. Zurek (ed.) Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley. Also see Chalmers, D., 1996. The Conscious Mind. Oxford Univ. Press.
^ Langan, Christopher M., 2002, "The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory, pg. 7" Progress in Complexity, Information and Design
^ Wheeler, John Archibald, 1986, "Hermann Weyl and the Unity of Knowledge"
^ Eldred, Michael, 2009, 'Postscript 2: On quantum physics' assault on time'
^ Eldred, Michael, 2009, The Digital Cast of Being: Metaphysics, Mathematics, Cartesianism, Cybernetics, Capitalism, Communication ontos, Frankfurt 2009 137 pp. ISBN 978-3-86838-045-3
^ Floridi, L., 2004, "Informational Realism," in Weckert, J., and Al-Saggaf, Y, eds., Computing and Philosophy Conference, vol. 37."
^ See Floridi talk on Informational Nature of Reality, abstract at the E-CAP conference 2006.
^ B. Jack Copeland, Computation in Luciano Floridi (ed.), The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of computing and information, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004, ISBN 0-631-22919-1, pp. 10-15
^ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "The Church-Turing thesis" -- by B. Jack Copeland.
^ David Deutsch, "Quantum Theory, the Church-Turing Principle and the Universal Quantum Computer."
^ John A. Wheeler, 1990, "Information, physics, quantum: The search for links" in W. Zurek (ed.) Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley.
^ L. Smolin, "Matrix models as non-local hidden variables theories."
^ J. S. Bell, 1981, "Bertlmann's socks and the nature of reality," Journal de Physique 42 C2: 41-61.
^ Piccinini, Gualtiero, 2007, "Computational Modelling vs. Computational Explanation: Is Everything a Turing Machine, and Does It Matter to the Philosophy of Mind?" Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85(1): 93-115.

External links

Luciano Floridi, "Against Digital Ontology", Synthese, 2009, 168.1, (2009), 151-178.
Edward Fredkin:
- Digital Philosophy site - Temporarily doesn't work.
- Introduction to Digital Philosophy - Temporarily doesn't work.
Gontigno, Paulo, "Hypercomputation and the Physical Church-Turing thesis"
Petrov, Plamen, and Joel Dobrzelewski, 1998. Digital Physics
Juergen Schmidhuber:
Konrad Zuse, PDF scan of Zuse's paper.

Digital physics. Mountain Math Software.
The Oxford Advanced Seminar on Informatic Structures
Wired: God is the Machine
Gualtiero Piccinini. Computation in Physical Systems Discusses the metaphysical foundations of digital physics in section 3.4.

First Alcibiades

2012-05-21T03:16:00.000-07:00


Papyrus fragment of Alcibiades I, section 131.c-e.

The First Alcibiades or Alcibiades I (Ancient Greek: Ἀλκιβιάδης αʹ) is a dialogue featuring Alcibiades in conversation with Socrates. It is ascribed to Plato, although scholars are divided on the question of its authenticity.

Content

In the preface Alcibiades is described as an ambitious young man who is eager to enter public life. He is extremely proud of his good looks, noble birth, many friends, possessions and his connection to Pericles, the leader of the Athenian state. Alcibiades has many admirers but they have all run away, afraid of his coldness. Socrates was the first of his admirers but he has not spoken to him for many years. Now the older man tries to help the youth with his questions before Alcibiades presents himself in front of the Athenian assembly. For the rest of the dialogue Socrates explains the many reasons why Alcibiades needs him. By the end of Alcibiades I, the youth is much persuaded by Socrates' reasoning, and accepts him as his mentor.

The first topic they enter is the essence of politics – war and peace. Socrates claims that people should fight on just grounds but he doubts that Alcibiades has got any knowledge about justice. Prodded by Socrates’ questioning Alcibiades admits that he has never learned the nature of justice from a master nor has discovered it by himself .

Alcibiades suggests that politics is not about justice but expediency and the two principles could be opposed. Socrates persuades him that he was mistaken, and there is no expediency without justice. The humiliated youth concedes that he knows nothing about politics.

Later Alcibiades says that he is not concerned about his ignorance because all the other Athenian politicians are ignorant. Socrates reminds him that his true rivals are the kings of Sparta and Persia. He delivers a long lecture about the careful education, glorious might and unparalleled richness of these foreign rulers. Alcibiades has got cold feet which was exactly the purpose of Socrates’ speech.

After this interlude the dialogue proceeds with further questioning about the rules of society. Socrates points to the many contradictions in Alcibiades’ thoughts. Later they agree that man has to follow the advise of the famous Delphic phrase: gnōthi seautón meaning know thyself. They discuss that the "ruling principle" of man is not the body but the soul. Somebody's true lover loves his soul, while the lover of the body flies as soon as the youth fades. With this Socrates proves that he is the only true lover of Alcibiades. "From this day forward, I must and will follow you as you have followed me; I will be the disciple, and you shall be my master", proclaims the youth. Together they will work on to improve Alcibiades' character because only the virtuous has the right to govern. Tyrannical power should not be the aim of individuals but people accept to be commanded by a superior.

In the last sentence Socrates expresses his hope that Alcibiades will persist but he has fears because the power of the state "may be too much" for both of them.

Authenticity

In antiquity Alcibiades I was regarded as the best text to introduce one to Platonic philosophy, which may be why it has continued to be included in the Platonic corpus since then. The authenticity of the dialogue was never doubted in antiquity. It was not until 1836 that the German scholar Friedrich Schleiermacher argued against the ascription to Plato.^[1] Subsequently its popularity declined. However, stylometrical research supports Plato's authorship,^[2] and some scholars have recently defended its authenticity.^[3]

Dating

Traditionally, the First Alcibiades has been considered an early dialogue. Gerard Ledger's stylometric analysis supported this tradition, dating the work to the 390's.^[4] Julia Annas, in supporting the authenticity of Rival Lovers, saw both dialogues as laying the foundation for ideas Plato would later develop in Charmides.

A later dating has also been defended. Nicholas Denyer suggests that it was written in the 350's BC, when Plato, back in Athens, could reflect on the similarities between Dionysius II of Syracuse (as we know him from the Seventh Letter) and Alcibiades—two young men interested in philosophy but compromised by their ambition and faulty early education.^[5] This hypothesis requires skepticism about what is usually regarded as the only fairly certain result of Platonic stylometry, Plato's marked tendency to avoid hiatus in the six dialogues widely believed to have been composed in the period to which Denyer assigns First Alcibiades (Timaeus, Critias, Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, and Laws).^[6]

R.S. Bluck, although unimpressed by previous arguments against the dialogue's authenticity, tentatively suggests a date after the end of Plato's life, approximately 343/2 BC, based especially on "a striking parallelism between the Alcibiades and early works of Aristotle, as well as certain other compositions that probably belong to the same period as the latter."^[8]

References

^ Denyer (2001): 15.
^ Young (1998): 35-36.
^ Denyer (2001): 14-26.
^ Young (1998)
^ Denyer (2001): 11-14. Cf. 20-24
^ Denyer (2001): 23 n. 19
^ Pamela M. Clark, "The Greater Alcibiades," Classical Quarterly N.S. 5 (1955), pp. 231-240
^ R.S. Bluck, "The Origin of the Greater Alcibiades," Classical Quarterly N.S. 3 (1953), pp. 46-52

Bibliography

Denyer, Nicholas, "introduction", in Plato, Alcibiades, Nicholas Denyer (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 1-26.
Foucault, Michel, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982 (New York: Picador, 2005).
Young, Charles M., "Plato and Computer Dating", in Nicholas D. Smith (ed.), Plato: Critical Assessments volume 1: General Issues of Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1998): 29-49.

External links

Greek text: Greek Wikisource, HODOI (with French translation and concordance)
First Alcibiades, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Project Gutenberg)

SNOLAB Grand Opening

2012-05-18T20:24:00.000-07:00

Particle Dark Matter

2012-05-17T06:04:00.001-07:00

Looks interesting.

Dark matter is among the most important open problems in modern physics. Aimed at graduate students and researchers, this book describes the theoretical and experimental aspects of the dark matter problem in particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. Featuring contributions from 48 leading theorists and experimentalists, it presents many aspects, from astrophysical observations to particle physics candidates, and from the prospects for detection at colliders to direct and indirect searches. The book introduces observational evidence for dark matter along with a detailed discussion of the state-of-the-art of numerical simulations and alternative explanations in terms of modified gravity. It then moves on to the candidates arising from theories beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, and to the prospects for detection at accelerators. It concludes by looking at direct and indirect dark matter searches, and the prospects for detecting the particle nature of dark matter with astrophysical experiments. See:Cambridge University Press

NASA's Fermi Spots 'Superflares' in the Crab Nebula

2012-05-17T05:15:00.000-07:00

The famous Crab Nebula supernova remnant has erupted in an enormous flare five times more powerful than any previously seen from the object. The outburst was first detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope on April 12 and lasted six days.

The nebula, which is the wreckage of an exploded star whose light reached Earth in 1054, is one of the most studied objects in the sky. At the heart of an expanding gas cloud lies what's left of the original star's core, a superdense neutron star that spins 30 times a second. With each rotation, the star swings intense beams of radiation toward Earth, creating the pulsed emission characteristic of spinning neutron stars (also known as pulsars).

Apart from these pulses, astrophysicists regarded the Crab Nebula to be a virtually constant source of high-energy radiation. But in January, scientists associated with several orbiting observatories -- including NASA's Fermi, Swift and Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer -- reported long-term brightness changes at X-ray energies.

Scientists think that the flares occur as the intense magnetic field near the pulsar undergoes sudden restructuring. Such changes can accelerate particles like electrons to velocities near the speed of light. As these high-speed electrons interact with the magnetic field, they emit gamma rays in a process known as synchrotron emission.

To account for the observed emission, scientists say that the electrons must have energies 100 times greater than can be achieved in any particle accelerator on Earth. This makes them the highest-energy electrons known to be associated with any cosmic source.

Based on the rise and fall of gamma rays during the April outbursts, scientists estimate that the size of the emitting region must be comparable in size to the solar system. If circular, the region must be smaller than roughly twice Pluto's average distance from the sun.NASA's Fermi Spots 'Superflares' in the Crab Nebula

Like a July 4 fireworks display a young, glittering collection of stars looks like an aerial burst. The cluster is surrounded by clouds of interstellar gas and dust - the raw material for new star formation. The nebula, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina, contains a central cluster of huge, hot stars, called NGC 3603.

This environment is not as peaceful as it looks. Ultraviolet radiation and violent stellar winds have blown out an enormous cavity in the gas and dust enveloping the cluster, providing an unobstructed view of the cluster.

Most of the stars in the cluster were born around the same time but differ in size, mass, temperature, and color. The course of a star's life is determined by its mass, so a cluster of a given age will contain stars in various stages of their lives, giving an opportunity for detailed analyses of stellar life cycles. NGC 3603 also contains some of the most massive stars known. These huge stars live fast and die young, burning through their hydrogen fuel quickly and ultimately ending their lives in supernova explosions.

Star clusters like NGC 3603 provide important clues to understanding the origin of massive star formation in the early, distant universe. Astronomers also use massive clusters to study distant starbursts that occur when galaxies collide, igniting a flurry of star formation. The proximity of NGC 3603 makes it an excellent lab for studying such distant and momentous events.

This Hubble Space Telescope image was captured in August 2009 and December 2009 with the Wide Field Camera 3 in both visible and infrared light, which trace the glow of sulfur, hydrogen, and iron.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. in Washington, D.C. See:Starburst Cluster Shows Celestial Fireworks

Antimatter

2012-05-17T04:48:00.000-07:00

Don Lincoln Explains Antimatter | NOVA's Nature of Reality
brought to you by Livescribe

See: Antimatter 101

Euler Diagram

2012-05-16T06:39:00.000-07:00

This article is about Eulerian circles of set theory and logic. For the geometric Euler circle, see Nine-point circle.

An Euler diagram illustrating that the set of "animals with four legs" is a subset of "animals", but the set of "minerals" is disjoint (has no members in common) with "animals".

An Euler diagram is a diagrammatic means of representing sets and their relationships. The first use of "Eulerian circles" is commonly attributed to Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–1783). They are closely related to Venn diagrams.

Venn and Euler diagrams were incorporated as part of instruction in set theory as part of the new math movement in the 1960s. Since then, they have also been adopted by other curriculum fields such as reading.^[1]

Overview

Euler diagrams consist of simple closed curves (usually circles) in the plane that depict sets. The sizes or shapes of the curves are not important: the significance of the diagram is in how they overlap. The spatial relationships between the regions bounded by each curve (overlap, containment or neither) corresponds to set-theoretic relationships (intersection, subset and disjointness).
Each Euler curve divides the plane into two regions or "zones": the interior, which symbolically represents the elements of the set, and the exterior, which represents all elements that are not members of the set. Curves whose interior zones do not intersect represent disjoint sets. Two curves whose interior zones intersect represent sets that have common elements; the zone inside both curves represents the set of elements common to both sets (the intersection of the sets). A curve that is contained completely within the interior zone of another represents a subset of it.

Examples of small Venn diagrams (on left) with shaded regions representing empty sets, showing how they can be easily transformed into equivalent Euler diagrams (right).

Venn diagrams are a more restrictive form of Euler diagrams. A Venn diagram must contain all the possible zones of overlap between its curves, representing all combinations of inclusion/exclusion of its constituent sets, but in an Euler diagram some zones might be missing. When the number of sets grows beyond 3, or even with three sets, but under the allowance of more than two curves passing at the same point, we start seeing the appearance of multiple mathematically unique Venn diagrams. Venn diagrams represent the relationships between n sets, with 2ⁿ zones, Euler diagrams may not have all zones. (An example is given below in the History section; in the top-right illustration the O and I diagrams are merely rotated; Venn stated that this difficulty in part led him to develop his diagrams).

In a logical setting, one can use model theoretic semantics to interpret Euler diagrams, within a universe of discourse. In the examples above, the Euler diagram depicts that the sets Animal and Mineral are disjoint since the corresponding curves are disjoint, and also that the set Four Legs is a subset of the set of Animals. The Venn diagram, which uses the same categories of Animal, Mineral, and Four Legs, does not encapsulate these relationships. Traditionally the emptiness of a set in Venn diagrams is depicted by shading in the region. Euler diagrams represent emptiness either by shading or by the use of a missing region.
Often a set of well-formedness conditions are imposed; these are topological or geometric constraints imposed on the structure of the diagram. For example, connectedness of zones might be enforced, or concurrency of curves or multiple points might be banned, as might tangential intersection of curves. In the diagram to the right, examples of small Venn diagrams are transformed into Euler diagrams by sequences of transformations; some of the intermediate diagrams have concurrency of curves. However, this sort of transformation of a Venn diagram with shading into an Euler diagram without shading is not always possible. There are examples of Euler diagrams with 9 sets that are not drawable using simple closed curves without the creation of unwanted zones since they would have to have non-planar dual graphs.

History

Photo of page from Hamilton's 1860 "Lectures" page 180. (Click on it, up to two times, to enlarge). The symbolism A, E, I, and O refer to the four forms of the syllogism. The small text to the left says: "The first employment of circular diagrams in logic improperly ascribed to Euler. To be found in Christian Weise."

On the right is a photo of page 74 from Couturat 1914 wherein he labels the 8 regions of the Venn diagram. The modern name for these "regions" is minterms. These are shown on the left with the variables x, y and z per Venn's drawing. The symbolism is as follows: logical AND ( & ) is represented by arithmetic multiplication, and the logical NOT ( ~ )is represented by " ' " after the variable, e.g. the region x'y'z is read as "NOT x AND NOT y AND z" i.e. ~x & ~y & z.

Both the Veitch and Karnaugh diagrams show all the minterms, but the Veitch is not particularly useful for reduction of formulas. Observe the strong resemblance between the Venn and Karnaugh diagrams; the colors and the variables x, y, and z are per Venn's example.

As shown in the illustration to the right, Sir William Hamilton in his posthumously published Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (1858–60) asserts that the original use of circles to "sensualize ... the abstractions of Logic" (p. 180) was not Leonhard Paul Euler (1707–1783) but rather Christian Weise (?–1708) in his Nucleus Logicoe Weisianoe that appeared in 1712 posthumously. He references Euler's Letters to a German Princess on different Matters of Physics and Philosophy¹" [¹Partie ii., Lettre XXXV., ed. Cournot. – ED.]^[2]
In Hamilton's illustration the four forms of the syllogism as symbolized by the drawings A, E, I and O are:^[3]

A: The Universal Affirmative, Example: "All metals are elements".
E: The Universal Negative, Example: "No metals are compound substances".
I: The Particular Affirmative, Example: "Some metals are brittle".
O: The Particular Negative, Example: "Some metals are not brittle".

In his 1881 Symbolic Logic Chapter V "Diagrammatic Representation", John Venn (1834–1923) comments on the remarkable prevalence of the Euler diagram:

"...of the first sixty logical treatises, published during the last century or so, which were consulted for this purpose:-somewhat at random, as they happened to be most accessible :-it appeared that thirty four appealed to the aid of diagrams, nearly all of these making use of the Eulerian Scheme." (Footnote 1 page 100)

Composite of two pages 115–116 from Venn 1881 showing his example of how to convert a syllogism of three parts into his type of diagram. Venn calls the circles "Eulerian circles" (cf Sandifer 2003, Venn 1881:114 etc) in the "Eulerian scheme" (Venn 1881:100) of "old-fashioned Eulerian diagrams" (Venn 1881:113).

But nevertheless, he contended "the inapplicability of this scheme for the purposes of a really general Logic" (page 100) and in a footnote observed that "it fits in but badly even with the four propositions of the common Logic [the four forms of the syllogism] to which it is normally applied" (page 101). Venn ends his chapter with the observation that will be made in the examples below – that their use is based on practice and intuition, not on a strict algorithmic practice:

“In fact ... those diagrams not only do not fit in with the ordinary scheme of propositions which they are employed to illustrate, but do not seem to have any recognized scheme of propositions to which they could be consistently affiliated.” (pp. 124–125)

Finally, in his Chapter XX HISTORIC NOTES Venn gets to a crucial criticism (italicized in the quote below); observe in Hamilton's illustration that the O (Particular Negative) and I (Particular Affirmative) are simply rotated:

"We now come to Euler's well-known circles which were first described in his Lettres a une Princesse d'Allemagne (Letters 102–105). The weak point about these consists in the fact that they only illustrate in strictness the actual relations of classes to one another, rather than the imperfect knowledge of these relations which we may possess, or wish to convey, by means of the proposition. Accordingly they will not fit in with the propositions of common logic, but demand the constitution of a new group of appropriate elementary propositions.... This defect must have been noticed from the first in the case of the particular affirmative and negative, for the same diagram is commonly employed to stand for them both, which it does indifferently well". (italics added: page 424)

(Sandifer 2003 reports that Euler makes such observations too; Euler reports that his figure 45 (a simple intersection of two circles) has 4 different interpretations). Whatever the case, armed with these observations and criticisms, Venn then demonstrates (pp. 100–125) how he derived what has become known as his Venn diagrams from the "old-fashioned Euler diagrams". In particular he gives an example, shown on the left.
By 1914 Louis Couturat (1868–1914) had labeled the terms as shown on the drawing on the right. Moreover, he had labeled the exterior region (shown as a'b'c') as well. He succinctly explains how to use the diagram – one must strike out the regions that are to vanish:

"VENN'S method is translated in geometrical diagrams which represent all the constituents, so that, in order to obtain the result, we need only strike out (by shading) those which are made to vanish by the data of the problem." (italics added p. 73)

Given the Venn's assignments, then, the unshaded areas inside the circles can be summed to yield the following equation for Venn's example:

"No Y is Z and ALL X is Y: therefore No X is Z" has the equation x'yz' + xyz' + x'y'z for the unshaded area inside the circles (but note that this is not entirely correct; see the next paragraph).

In Venn the 0th term, x'y'z', i.e. the background surrounding the circles, does not appear. Nowhere is it discussed or labeled, but Couturat corrects this in his drawing. The correct equation must include this unshaded area shown in boldface:

"No Y is Z and ALL X is Y: therefore No X is Z" has the equation x'yz' + xyz' + x'y'z + x'y'z' .

In modern usage the Venn diagram includes a "box" that surrounds all the circles; this is called the universe of discourse or the domain of discourse.
Couturat now observes that, in a direct algorithmic (formal, systematic) manner, one cannot derive reduced Boolean equations, nor does it show how to arrive at the conclusion "No X is Z". Couturat concluded that the process "has ... serious inconveniences as a method for solving logical problems":

"It does not show how the data are exhibited by canceling certain constituents, nor does it show how to combine the remaining constituents so as to obtain the consequences sought. In short, it serves only to exhibit one single step in the argument, namely the equation of the problem; it dispenses neither with the previous steps, i. e., "throwing of the problem into an equation" and the transformation of the premises, nor with the subsequent steps, i. e., the combinations that lead to the various consequences. Hence it is of very little use, inasmuch as the constituents can be represented by algebraic symbols quite as well as by plane regions, and are much easier to deal with in this form."(p. 75)

Thus the matter would rest until 1952 when Maurice Karnaugh (1924– ) would adapt and expand a method proposed by Edward W. Veitch; this work would rely on the truth table method precisely defined in Emil Post's 1921 PhD thesis "Introduction to a general theory of elementary propositions" and the application of propositional logic to switching logic by (among others) Claude Shannon, George Stibitz, and Alan Turing.^[4] For example, in chapter "Boolean Algebra" Hill and Peterson (1968, 1964) present sections 4.5ff "Set Theory as an Example of Boolean Algebra" and in it they present the Venn diagram with shading and all. They give examples of Venn diagrams to solve example switching-circuit problems, but end up with this statement:

"For more than three variables, the basic illustrative form of the Venn diagram is inadequate. Extensions are possible, however, the most convenient of which is the Karnaugh map, to be discussed in Chapter 6." (p. 64)

In Chapter 6, section 6.4 "Karnaugh Map Representation of Boolean Functions" they begin with:

"The Karnaugh map¹ [¹Karnaugh 1953] is one of the most powerful tools in the repertory of the logic designer. ... A Karnaugh map may be regarded either as a pictorial form of a truth table or as an extension of the Venn diagram." (pp. 103–104)

The history of Karnaugh's development of his "chart" or "map" method is obscure. Karnaugh in his 1953 referenced Veitch 1951, Veitch referenced Claude E. Shannon 1938 (essentially Shannon's Master's thesis at M.I.T.), and Shannon in turn referenced, among other authors of logic texts, Couturat 1914. In Veitch's method the variables are arranged in a rectangle or square; as described in Karnaugh map, Karnaugh in his method changed the order of the variables to correspond to what has become known as (the vertices of) a hypercube.

Example: Euler- to Venn-diagram and Karnaugh map

This example shows the Euler and Venn diagrams and Karnaugh map deriving and verifying the deduction "No X's are Z's". In the illustration and table the following logical symbols are used:

1 can be read as "true", 0 as "false"

~ for NOT and abbreviated to ' when illustrating the minterms e.g. x' =_defined NOT x,

+ for Boolean OR (from Boolean algebra: 0+0=0, 0+1 = 1+0 = 1, 1+1=1)

& (logical AND) between propositions; in the mintems AND is omitted in a manner similar to arithmetic multiplication: e.g. x'y'z =_defined ~x & ~y & z (From Boolean algebra: 0*0=0, 0*1 = 1*0=0, 1*1 = 1, where * is shown for clarity)

→ (logical IMPLICATION): read as IF ... THEN ..., or " IMPLIES ", P → Q =_defined NOT P OR Q

Before it can be presented in a Venn diagram or Karnaugh Map, the Euler diagram's syllogism "No Y is Z, All X is Y" must first be reworded into the more formal language of the propositional calculus: " 'It is not the case that: Y AND Z' AND 'If an X then a Y' ". Once the propositions are reduced to symbols and a propositional formula ( ~(y & z) & (x → y) ), one can construct the formula's truth table; from this table the Venn and/or the Karnaugh map are readily produced. By use of the adjacency of "1"s in the Karnaugh map (indicated by the grey ovals around terms 0 and 1 and around terms 2 and 6) one can "reduce" the example's Boolean equation i.e. (x'y'z' + x'y'z) + (x'yz' + xyz') to just two terms: x'y' + yz'. But the means for deducing the notion that "No X is Z", and just how the reduction relates to this deduction, is not forthcoming from this example.

Given a proposed conclusion such as "No X is a Z", one can test whether or not it is a correct deduction by use of a truth table. The easiest method is put the starting formula on the left (abbreviate it as "P") and put the (possible) deduction on the right (abbreviate it as "Q") and connect the two with logical implication i.e. P → Q, read as IF P THEN Q. If the evaluation of the truth table produces all 1's under the implication-sign (→, the so-called major connective) then P → Q is a tautology. Given this fact, one can "detach" the formula on the right (abbreviated as "Q") in the manner described below the truth table.
Given the example above, the formula for the Euler and Venn diagrams is:

"No Y's are Z's" and "All X's are Y's": ( ~(y & z) & (x → y) ) =_defined P

And the proposed deduction is:

"No X's are Z's": ( ~ (x & z) ) =_defined Q

So now the formula to be evaluated can be abbreviated to:

( ~(y & z) & (x → y) ) → ( ~ (x & z) ): P → Q

IF ( "No Y's are Z's" and "All X's are Y's" ) THEN ( "No X's are Z's" )

**The Truth Table demonstrates that the formula ( ~(y & z) & (x → y) ) → ( ~ (x & z) ) is a tautology as shown by all 1's in yellow column.**.
Square #	Venn, Karnaugh region	x	y	z	(~	(y	&	z)	&	(x	→	y))	→	(~	(x	&	z))
0	x'y'z'	0	0	0	1	0	0	0	1	0	1	0	1	1	0	0	0
1	x'y'z	0	0	1	1	0	0	1	1	0	1	0	1	1	0	0	1
2	x'yz'	0	1	0	1	1	0	0	1	0	1	1	1	1	0	0	0
3	x'yz	0	1	1	0	1	1	1	0	0	1	1	1	1	0	0	1
4	xy'z'	1	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	1	1	1	0	0
5	xy'z	1	0	1	1	0	0	1	0	1	0	0	1	0	1	1	1
6	xyz'	1	1	0	1	1	0	0	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	0	0
7	xyz	1	1	1	0	1	1	1	0	1	1	1	1	0	1	1	1

At this point the above implication P → Q (i.e. ~(y & z) & (x → y) ) → ~(x & z) ) is still a formula, and the deduction – the "detachment" of Q out of P → Q – has not occurred. But given the demonstration that P → Q is tautology, the stage is now set for the use of the procedure of modus ponens to "detach" Q: "No X's are Z's" and dispense with the terms on the left.^[5]
Modus ponens (or "the fundamental rule of inference"^[6]) is often written as follows: The two terms on the left, "P → Q" and "P", are called premises (by convention linked by a comma), the symbol ⊢ means "yields" (in the sense of logical deduction), and the term on the right is called the conclusion:

P → Q, P ⊢ Q

For the modus ponens to succeed, both premises P → Q and P must be true. Because, as demonstrated above the premise P → Q is a tautology, "truth" is always the case no matter how x, y and z are valued, but "truth" will only be the case for P in those circumstances when P evaluates as "true" (e.g. rows 0 OR 1 OR 2 OR 6: x'y'z' + x'y'z + x'yz' + xyz' = x'y' + yz').^[7]

P → Q , P ⊢ Q

i.e.: ( ~(y & z) & (x → y) ) → ( ~ (x & z) ) , ( ~(y & z) & (x → y) ) ⊢ ( ~ (x & z) )

i.e.: IF "No Y's are Z's" and "All X's are Y's" THEN "No X's are Z's", "No Y's are Z's" and "All X's are Y's" ⊢ "No X's are Z's"

One is now free to "detach" the conclusion "No X's are Z's", perhaps to use it in a subsequent deduction (or as a topic of conversation).
The use of tautological implication means that other possible deductions exist besides "No X's are Z's"; the criterion for a successful deduction is that the 1's under the sub-major connective on the right include all the 1's under the sub-major connective on the left (the major connective being the implication that results in the tautology). For example, in the truth table, on the right side of the implication (→, the major connective symbol) the bold-face column under the sub-major connective symbol " ~ " has the all the same 1s that appear in the bold-faced column under the left-side sub-major connective & (rows 0, 1, 2 and 6), plus two more (rows 3 and 4).

Gallery

A Venn diagram shows all possible intersections.
Euler diagram visualizing a real situation, the relationships between various supranational European organisations.
Euler diagram visualizing a real situation, the relationships between various supranational African organisations.
Humorous diagram comparing Euler and Venn diagrams.
Euler diagram of types of triangles, assuming isosceles triangles have at least 2 equal sides.
Euler diagram of terminology of the British Isles.

Footnotes

^ Strategies for Reading Comprehension Venn Diagrams
^ By the time these lectures of Hamilton were published, Hamilton too had died. His editors (symbolized by ED.), responsible for most of the footnoting, were the logicians Henry Longueville Mansel and John Veitch.
^ Hamilton 1860:179. The examples are from Jevons 1881:71ff.
^ See footnote at George Stibitz.
^ This is a sophisticated concept. Russell and Whitehead (2nd edition 1927) in their Principia Mathematica describe it this way: "The trust in inference is the belief that if the two former assertions [the premises P, P→Q ] are not in error, the final assertion is not in error . . . An inference is the dropping of a true premiss [sic]; it is the dissolution of an implication" (p. 9). Further discussion of this appears in "Primitive Ideas and Propositions" as the first of their "primitive propositions" (axioms): *1.1 Anything implied by a true elementary proposition is true" (p. 94). In a footnote the authors refer the reader back to Russell's 1903 Principles of Mathematics §38.
^ cf Reichenbach 1947:64
^ Reichenbach discusses the fact that the implication P → Q need not be a tautology (a so-called "tautological implication"). Even "simple" implication (connective or adjunctive) will work, but only for those rows of the truth table that evaluate as true, cf Reichenbach 1947:64–66.

References

By date of publishing:

Sir William Hamilton 1860 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic edited by Henry Longueville Mansel and John Veitch, William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London.
W. Stanley Jevons 1880 Elemetnary Lessons in Logic: Deductive and Inductive. With Copious Questions and Examples, and a Vocabulary of Logical Terms, M. A. MacMillan and Co., London and New York.
John Venn 1881 Symbolic Logic, MacMillan and Co., London.
Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell 1913 1st edition, 1927 2nd edition Principia Mathematica to *56 Cambridge At The University Press (1962 edition), UK, no ISBN.
Louis Couturat 1914 The Algebra of Logic: Authorized English Translation by Lydia Gillingham Robinson with a Preface by Philip E. B. Jourdain, The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago and London.
Emil Post 1921 "Introduction to a general theory of elementary propositions" reprinted with commentary by Jean van Heijenoort in Jean van Heijenoort, editor 1967 From Frege to Gödel: A Sourcebook of Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, ISBN 0-674-42449-8 (pbk.)
Claude E. Shannon 1938 "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits", Transactions American Institute of Electrical Engineers vol 57, pp. 471–495. Derived from Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers edited by N.J.A. Solane and Aaron D. Wyner, IEEE Press, New York.
Hans Reichenbach 1947 Elements of Symbolic Logic republished 1980 by Dover Publications, Inc., NY, ISBN 0-486-24004-5.
Edward W. Veitch 1952 "A Chart Method for Simplifying Truth Functions", Transactions of the 1952 ACM Annual Meeting, ACM Annual Conference/Annual Meeting "Pittsburgh", ACM, NY, pp. 127–133.
Maurice Karnaugh November 1953 The Map Method for Synthesis of Combinational Logic Circuits, AIEE Committee on Technical Operations for presentation at the AIEE summer General Meeting, Atlantic City, N. J., June 15–19, 1953, pp. 593–599.
Frederich J. Hill and Gerald R. Peterson 1968, 1974 Introduction to Switching Theory and Logical Design, John Wiley & Sons NY, ISBN 0-71-39882-9.
Ed Sandifer 2003 How Euler Did It, http://www.maa.org/editorial/euler/How%20Euler%20Did%20It%2003%20Venn%20Diagrams.pdf

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Euler diagrams

Euler Diagrams. Brighton, UK (2004).What are Euler Diagrams?
Visualisation with Euler diagrams project

Where is LHC Headed?

2012-05-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

The speakers are: Michael Peskin (author of the famous QFT textbook) Nima Arkani-Hamed, Riccardo Rattazzi, Gavin Salam, Matt Strassler and Raman Sundrum (or Randall-Sundrum fame).

Illusions of Grandeur?

2012-05-15T07:06:00.000-07:00

Illusions of Gravity

Three spatial dimensions are visible all around us--up/down, left/right, forward/backward. Add time to the mix, and the result is a four-dimensional blending of space and time known as spacetime. Thus, we live in a four-dimensional universe. Or do we?

Amazingly, some new theories of physics predict that one of the three dimensions of space could be a kind of an illusion--that in actuality all the particles and fields that make up reality are moving about in a two-dimensional realm like the Flatland of Edwin A. Abbott. Gravity, too, would be part of the illusion: a force that is not present in the two-dimensional world but that materializes along with the emergence of the illusory third dimension.

UC Berkeley's Raphael Bousso presents a friendly introduction to the ideas behind the holographic principle, which may be very important in the hunt for a theory of quantum gravity. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Summer Lecture Series" [3/2006] [Science] [Show ID: 11140]

This is just a recoup of what had been transpiring since 2005. We have a pretty good picture of the ways such distinctions are held for perspective so that we may look inside the black hole? The labels of this blog entry help with this refreshing.

See Also:

Graviton in a Can?

CFT and the Tomato Soup Can

A Conformal Field Theory Approach?

Questions on the History of Mathematics

2012-05-14T11:58:00.000-07:00

Arthur Miller
Einstein and Schrödinger never fully accepted the highly abstract nature of Heisenberg's quantum mechanics, says Miller. They agreed with Galileo's assertion that "the book of nature is written in mathematics", but they also realized the power of using visual imagery to represent mathematical symbols.

For most people I am sure it is of little interest that such an abstract language could have ever amounted to anything,since we might have been circumscribed to the natural living that is required that we could do without it. But really, can we?

Paul Dirac

When one is doing mathematical work, there are essentially two different ways of thinking about the subject: the algebraic way, and the geometric way. With the algebraic way, one is all the time writing down equations and following rules of deduction, and interpreting these equations to get more equations. With the geometric way, one is thinking in terms of pictures; pictures which one imagines in space in some way, and one just tries to get a feeling for the relationships between the quantities occurring in those pictures. Now, a good mathematician has to be a master of both ways of those ways of thinking, but even so, he will have a preference for one or the other; I don't think he can avoid it. In my own case, my own preference is especially for the geometrical way.

So of course one appreciates those who start the conversation to help raise the questions in ones own mind. Might it be a shared response to something existing deeper in our society that it would warrant descriptions that we might be lacking in. Ways in which to describe something about nature. There is something definitely to be said about the geometer that can visualize the spaces within which they are working. It has to make sense. It has to describe something? Why then not just plain English(whatever language you choose)

String theory's mathematical tools were designed to unlock the most profound secrets of the cosmos, but they could have a far less esoteric purpose: to tease out the properties of some of the most complex yet useful types of material here on Earth.What Good are Mathematics in the Real World?

Do you know how many mathematical expressions are needed in order to describe the theory?

The language of physics is mathematics. In order to study physics seriously, one needs to learn mathematics that took generations of brilliant people centuries to work out. Algebra, for example, was cutting-edge mathematics when it was being developed in Baghdad in the 9th century. But today it's just the first step along the journey.Guide to math needed to study physics

Conversations on Mind, Matter, and Mathematics

How mathematics arose from cognitive realizations. Ex. Newton and Calculus. The branches of mathematics. Who are it's developers and what did they develop and why?

It may be as important as the history in relation to how one may perceive the history and development of mathematics. These were important insights into the way one might of asked how did emergence exist if such things could have been imagined in the mind of the beholder. To attempt to describe nature in the way that one might do by invention? So are these mathematical things discovered or are they invented? Why the history is important?

This is the basis of the question of what already exists in terms of information has always existed and we are only getting a preview of a much more complicated system. It does not have to be a question of what a MBT exemplifies in itself, but raises the questions about what already exists, exists as part of what always existed. Where do ideas and mathematics come from?

This is a foundation stance that is taken right throughout science? If it exists in the universe, it exists in you? How does one connect?

See Also:

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?

See Also: Some Educational links to look at then.

Wolfram\alpha
Khan Academy

The Birth of String Theory

2012-05-14T11:39:00.000-07:00

The Birth of String Theory

Edited by: Andrea Cappelli, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Florence
Edited by: Elena Castellani, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy
Edited by: Filippo Colomo, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Florence
Edited by: Paolo Di Vecchia, Niels Bohr Institutet, Copenhagen and Nordita, Stockholm

A Path With a Heart

2012-05-06T17:22:00.000-07:00

"All paths lead nowhere,so it is important to choose a path that has heart."
-- Carlos Castenada

Update: I am re-posting this article from 2006. I wanted to highlight this post in relation to the idea of intent. What it means to me. I wanted as well to show the need for, to be enable conventionality into our own lives. If one cannot find such meaning, does one find them self as if tossed on the waves of some chaotic life living by rote?

Yes, I find it important that this idea of "a tonal" leaves the impression in my mind and others of the closeness with which sincerity is expressed through our own feelings and the need for such convictions.

If we understand the the anticipated future is part of our living our lives then it should come as no shock that we are the architects of the time we have in living our lives as we do. That the probable futures and probable pasts come from taking a position in life regardless of the idea that not only is it causal toward our projections, but it also within the scope of our reason that we can live or lives as true as possible.

What happens to a culture raised in the early years that we might have felt that we were getting the messages from someone who understood something greater then ourselves. The baby boomers were all part of the process. I was part of the process in that I wanted to explore unconventional thinking.

While I have move forward to the principles of scientific standards today in my explorations I have to say this was indeed part of my past too. So what has come of the points about sophistical questions about our existence?

Shall we stay so blinded then to what could have transpire in our lives to have the myths transported from our own generations past to be carried forward to another today to have missed the understandings of the times then?

Some of the older folk probably have read the many books of Carlos Castaneda, like I have? Drawn into a strange world of thinking, it challenged my thought processes. Most of it I was not accustom too. Did Carlos Castaneda actually exist? Was he some fictional character created, to tell the stories?

Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary.

This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path. A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.

I have told you that to choose a path you must be free from fear and ambition. The desire to learn is not ambition. It is our lot as men to want to know.

The path without a heart will turn against men and destroy them. It does not take much to die, and to seek death is to seek nothing.

Well I am not going to tell you what to think. I am just going to show some of the things that attracted my attention and brought me to some of the views I have garnered around what the heart actually meant. The lesson was given by a person who told me the story of the picture of the scale weighting the feather, was to be a important one in my recognition of something profound and true. Possibly, to those who understood the message as well?

That was part of my lesson of learning. That a path with a heart was something better then no path at all.

Experimental philosophy

2012-05-05T06:55:00.000-07:00

Experimental philosophy is an emerging field of philosophical inquiry^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5] that makes use of empirical data—often gathered through surveys which probe the intuitions of ordinary people—in order to inform research on philosophical questions.^[6]^[7] This use of empirical data is widely seen as opposed to a philosophical methodology that relies mainly on a priori justification, sometimes called "armchair" philosophy by experimental philosophers.^[8]^[9]^[10] Experimental philosophy initially began by focusing on philosophical questions related to intentional action, the putative conflict between free will and determinism, and causal vs. descriptive theories of linguistic reference.^[11] However, experimental philosophy has continued to expand to new areas of research.

Disagreement about what experimental philosophy can accomplish is widespread. One claim is that the empirical data gathered by experimental philosophers can have an indirect effect on philosophical questions by allowing for a better understanding of the underlying psychological processes which lead to philosophical intuitions.^[12] Others claim that experimental philosophers are engaged in conceptual analysis, but taking advantage of the rigor of quantitative research to aid in that project.^[13]^[14] Finally, some work in experimental philosophy can be seen as undercutting the traditional methods and presuppositions of analytic philosophy.^[15] Several philosophers have offered criticisms of experimental philosophy.

History

Though in early modern philosophy, natural philosophy was sometimes referred to as "experimental philosophy",^[16] the field associated with the current sense of the term dates its origins around 2000 when a small number of students experimented with the idea of fusing philosophy to the experimental rigor of psychology.
While the philosophical movement Experimental Philosophy began around 2000, the use of empirical methods in philosophy far predates the emergence of the recent academic field. Current experimental philosophers claim that the movement is actually a return to the methodology used by many ancient philosophers.^[10]^[12] Further, other philosophers like David Hume, René Descartes and John Locke are often held up as early models of philosophers who appealed to empirical methodology.^[5]^[16]

Areas of Research

Consciousness

The questions of what consciousness is, and what conditions are necessary for conscious thought have been the topic of a long-standing philosophical debate. Experimental philosophers have approached this question by trying to get a better grasp on how exactly people ordinarily understand consciousness. For instance, work by Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz (2008) suggests that people may have two different ways of understanding minds generally, and Justin Sytsma and Edouard Machery (2009) have written about the proper methodology for studying folk intuitions about consciousness. Bryce Huebner, Michael Bruno, and Hagop Sarkissian (2010)^[17] have further argued that the way Westerners understand consciousness differs systematically from the way that East Asians understand consciousness, while Adam Arico (2010)^[18] has offered some evidence for thinking that ordinary ascriptions of consciousness are sensitive to framing effects (such as the presence or absence of contextual information). Some of this work has been featured in the Online Consciousness Conference.

Other experimental philosophers have approached the topic of consciousness by trying to uncover the cognitive processes that guide everyday attributions of conscious states. Adam Arico, Brian Fiala, Rob Goldberg, and Shaun Nichols,^[19] for instance, propose a cognitive model of mental state attribution (the AGENCY model), whereby an entity's displaying certain relatively simple features (e.g., eyes, distinctive motions, interactive behavior) triggers a disposition to attribute conscious states to that entity. Additionally, Bryce Huebner^[20] has argued that ascriptions of mental states rely on two divergent strategies: one sensitive to considerations of an entity's behavior being goal-directed; the other sensitive to considerations of personhood.

Cultural diversity

Following the work of Richard Nisbett, which showed that there were differences in a wide range of cognitive tasks between Westerners and East Asians, Jonathan Weinberg, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich (2001) compared epistemic intuitions of Western college students and East Asian college students. The students were presented with a number of cases, including some Gettier cases, and asked to judge whether a person in the case really knew some fact or merely believed it. They found that the East Asian subjects were more likely to judge that the subjects really knew.^[21] Later Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Nichols and Stich performed a similar experiment concerning intuitions about the reference of proper names, using cases from Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity (1980). Again, they found significant cultural differences. Each group of authors argued that these cultural variances undermined the philosophical project of using intuitions to create theories of knowledge or reference.^[22] However, subsequent studies were unable to replicate Weinberg et al.'s (2001) results for other Gettier cases, with cross-cultural difference appearing only when the Gettier case involved different models of American cars.^[23]

Determinism and moral responsibility

One area of philosophical inquiry has been concerned with whether or not a person can be morally responsible if their actions are entirely determined, e.g., by the laws of Newtonian physics. One side of the debate, the proponents of which are called ‘incompatibilists,’ argue that there is no way for people to be morally responsible for immoral acts if they could not have done otherwise. The other side of the debate argues instead that people can be morally responsible for their immoral actions even when they could not have done otherwise. People who hold this view are often referred to as ‘compatibilists.’ It was generally claimed that non-philosophers were naturally incompatibilist,^[24] that is they think that if you couldn’t have done anything else, then you are not morally responsible for your action. Experimental philosophers have addressed this question by presenting people with hypothetical situations in which it is clear that a person’s actions are completely determined. Then the person does something morally wrong, and people are asked if that person is morally responsible for what she or he did. Using this technique Nichols and Knobe (2007) found that "people's responses to questions about moral responsibility can vary dramatically depending on the way in which the question is formulated"^[25] and argue that "people tend to have compatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more concrete, emotional way but that they tend to have incompatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more abstract, cognitive way".^[26]

Epistemology

Recent work in experimental epistemology has tested the apparently empirical claims of various epistemological views. For example, research on epistemic contextualism has proceeded by conducting experiments in which ordinary people are presented with vignettes that involve a knowledge ascription.^[27]^[28]^[29] Participants are then asked to report on the status of that knowledge ascription. The studies address contextualism by varying the context of the knowledge ascription (for example, how important it is that the agent in the vignette has accurate knowledge). Data gathered thus far show no support for what contextualism says about ordinary use of the term "knows".^[27]^[28]^[29] Other work in experimental epistemology includes, among other things, the examination of moral valence on knowledge attributions (the so-called "epistemic side-effect effect")^[30] and judgments about so-called "know-how" as opposed to propositional knowledge.^[31]

Intentional action

A prominent topic in experimental philosophy is intentional action. Work by Joshua Knobe has especially been influential.^{[citation needed]} "The Knobe Effect", as it is often called, concerns an asymmetry in our judgments of whether an agent intentionally performed an action. Knobe (2003a) asked people to suppose that the CEO of a corporation is presented with a proposal that would, as a side effect, affect the environment. In one version of the scenario, the effect on the environment will be negative (it will "harm" it), while in another version the effect on the environment will be positive (it will "help" it). In both cases, the CEO opts to pursue the policy and the effect does occur (the environment is harmed or helped by the policy). However, the CEO only adopts the program because he wants to raise profits; he does not care about the effect that the action will have on the environment. Although all features of the scenarios are held constant—except for whether the side effect on the environment will be positive or negative—a majority of people judge that the CEO intentionally hurt the environment in the one case, but did not intentionally help it in the other.^{[citation needed]} Knobe ultimately argues that the effect is a reflection of a feature of the speakers' underlying concept of intentional action: broadly moral considerations affect whether we judge that an action is performed intentionally. However, his exact views have changed in response to further research.^{[citation needed]}

Criticisms

Antti Kauppinen (2007) has argued that intuitions will not reflect the content of folk concepts unless they are intuitions of competent concept users who reflect in ideal circumstances and whose judgments reflect the semantics of their concepts rather than pragmatic considerations.^{[citation needed]} Experimental philosophers are aware of these concerns,^[32] and have in some cases explicitly argued against pragmatic explanations of the phenomena they study.^{[citation needed]} In turn, Kauppinen has argued^{[citation needed]} that any satisfactory way of ensuring his three conditions are met would involve dialogue with the subject that would be engaging in traditional philosophy.
Timothy Williamson (2008) has argued that we should not construe philosophical evidence as consisting of intuitions, and that such a conception rests on the "dialectical conception of evidence".^{[citation needed]}

References and further reading

Bengson, J., Moffett, M., & Wright, J.C. (2009). "The Folk on Knowing How". Philosophical Studies, 142(3): 387-401. (link)
Buckwalter, W. (2010). "Knowledge Isn’t Closed on Saturday: A Study in Ordinary Language", Review of Philosophy and Psychology (formerly European Review of Philosophy), special issue on Psychology and Experimental Philosophy ed. by Edouard Machery, Tania Lombrozo, & Joshua Knobe, 1 (3):395-406. (link)
Feltz, A. & Zarpentine, C. (2010). "Do You Know More When It Matters Less?" Philosophical Psychology, 23 (5):683–706. (link)
Kauppinen, A. (2007). "The Rise and Fall of Experimental Philosophy", Philosophical Explorations 10 (2), pp. 95–118. (link)
Knobe, J. (2003a). "Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language", Analysis 63, pp. 190–193. (link)
Knobe, J. (2003b). "Intentional action in folk psychology: An experimental investigation", Philosophical Psychology 16, pp. 309–324. (link)
Knobe, J. (2004a). "Intention, Intentional Action and Moral Considerations", Analysis 64, pp. 181–187.
Knobe, J. (2004b). "What is Experimental Philosophy?" The Philosophers' Magazine, 28. (link)
Knobe, J. (2007). "Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Significance", Philosophical Explorations, 10: 119-122. (link)
Joshua Michael Knobe; Shaun Nichols (2008). Experimental philosophy. Oxford University Press, USA. ISBN 978-0-19-532326-9.
Knobe, J. and Jesse Prinz. (2008). "Intuitions about Consciousness: Experimental Studies". Phenomenology and Cognitive Science.(link)
Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press.
Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2004). "Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style". Cognition 92, pp. B1-B12.
May, J., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Hull, J.G. & Zimmerman, A. (2010). "Practical Interests, Relevant Alternatives, and Knowledge Attributions: An Empirical Study", Review of Philosophy and Psychology (formerly European Review of Philosophy), special issue on Psychology and Experimental Philosophy ed. by Edouard Machery, Tania Lombrozo, & Joshua Knobe, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 265–273. (link)
Nichols, S. (2002). "How Psychopaths Threaten Moral Rationalism: Is It Irrational to Be Amoral?" The Monist 85, pp. 285–304.
Nichols, S. (2004). "After Objectivity: An Empirical Study of Moral Judgment". Philosophical Psychology 17, pp. 5–28.
Nichols, S. and Folds-Bennett, T. (2003). "Are Children Moral Objectivists? Children's Judgments about Moral and Response-Dependent Properties". Cognition 90, pp. B23-32.
Nichols, S. & Knobe, J. (2007). Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions. Nous, 41, 663-685. (link)
Sandis, C. (2010). "The Experimental Turn and Ordinary Language". Essays in Philosophy Vol. 11: Iss. 2, 181-196. (link)
Schaffer, J. & Knobe, J. (forthcoming). "Contrastive Knowledge Surveyed". Nous. (link)
Sytsma, J. & Machery, E. (2009). "How to Study Folk Intuitions about Consciousness". Philosophical Psychology. (link)
Weinberg, J., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2001). "Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions". Philosophical Topics 29, pp. 429–460.
Williamson, T. (2008). The Philosophy of Philosophy. Wiley-Blackwell.
Spicer, F. (2009). "The X-philes: Review of Experimental Philosophy, edited by Knobe and Nichols". The Philosophers' Magazine (44): 107. Retrieved 2009-01-08. (link)

References

^ Lackman, Jon. The X-Philes Philosophy meets the real world, Slate, March 2, 2006.
^ Appiah, Anthony. The New New Philosophy, New York Times, December 9, 2007.
^ Appiah, Anthony. The 'Next Big Thing' in Ideas, National Public Radio, January 3, 2008.
^ Shea, Christopher. Against Intuition, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 3, 2008.
^ ^a ^b Edmonds, David and Warburton, Nigel. Philosophy’s great experiment, Prospect, March 1, 2009
^ The Experimental Philosophy Page.
^ Prinz, J. Experimental Philosophy, YouTube September 17, 2007.
^ Knobe, Joshua. What is Experimental Philosophy?. The Philosophers' Magazine, (28) 2004.
^ Knobe, Joshua. Experimental Philosophy, Philosophy Compass (2) 2007.
^ ^a ^b Knobe, Joshua. Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Significance, Philosophical Explorations (10) 2007.
^ Knobe, Joshua. What is Experimental Philosophy? The Philosophers' Magazine (28) 2004.
^ ^a ^b Knobe, Joshua and Nichols, Shaun. An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto, in Knobe & Nichols (eds.) Experimental Philosophy, §2.1. 2008.
^ Lutz, Sebastian. Ideal Language Philosophy and Experiments on Intuitions. Studia Philosophica Estonica 2.2. Special issue: S. Häggqvist and D. Cohnitz (eds.), The Role of Intuitions in Philosophical Methodology, pp. 117–139. 2009
^ Sytsma, Justin. The proper province of philosophy: Conceptual analysis and empirical investigation. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1(3). Special issue: E. Machery, T. Lombrozo, and J. Knobe (eds.), Psychology and Experimental Philosophy (Part II), pp. 427–445. 2010.
^ Machery, Edouard. What are Experimental Philosophers Doing?. Experimental Philosophy (blog), July 30, 2007.
^ ^a ^b Peter Anstey, "Is x-phi old hat?", Early Modern Experimental Philosophy Blog, 30 August 2010.
^ Huebner, B., Bruno, M., and Sarkissian, H. 2010. "What Does the Nation of China Think about Phenomenal States?", Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1(2): 225-243.
^ Arico, A. 2010. "Folk Psychology, Consciousness, and Context Effects", Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1(3): 371-393.
^ Arico, A., Fiala, B., Goldberg, R., and Nichols, S. forthcoming. Mind & Language.
^ Huebner, B. 2010. "Commonsense Concepts of Phenomenal Consciousness: Does Anyone Care about Functional Zombies?" Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9 (1): 133-155.
^ Weinberg, J., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2001). Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions. Philosophical Topics 29, pp. 429–460.
^ Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2004). Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style. Cognition 92, pp. B1-B12.
^ Nagel, J. (forthcoming). "Intuitions and Experiments: A Defense of the Case Method in Epistemology". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
^ Nahmias,E., Morris, S., Nadelhoffer, T. & Turner, J. Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions about Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Philosophical Psychology (18) 2005 p.563
^ Nichols, Shaun; Knobe, Joshua (2007). "Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions". Noûs 41 (4): 663–685. (PDF p.2)
^ Phillips, Jonathan, ed. (15 August 2010). "X-Phi Page". Yale. (§Papers on Experimental Philosophy and Metaphilosophy)
^ ^a ^b Phelan,M. Evidence that Stakes Don't Matter for Evidence
^ ^a ^b Feltz, A. & Zarpentine, C. Do You Know More When It Matters Less? Philosophical Psychology.
^ ^a ^b May, J., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Hull, J. & Zimmerman, A. (2010) Practical Interests, Relevant Alternatives, and Knowledge Attributions: An Empirical Study. Review of Philosophy and Psychology^{[dead link]}
^ Beebe, J. & Buckwalter,W. The Epistemic Side-Effect Effect Mind & Language.
^ Bengson, J., Moffett, M., & Wright, J.C. The Folk on Knowing How, Philosophical Studies, 142(3): 387-401.
^ Sinnott-Armstrong, W. Abstract + Concrete = Paradox, 'in Knobe & Nichols (eds.) Experimental Philosophy, (209-230), 2008.

External links

The Experimental Philosophy Page
The Experimental Philosophy Blog - with several prominent contemporary philosophers as contributors.
- (As of July 2009, The Experimental Philosophy Page and Blog list around 120 different contributors who are actively involved with research in experimental philosophy.)
'Yale's Experimental Philosophy Lab (EPL)
Experimental Philosophy Society (XPS)
Arizona's Experimental Philosophy Lab
Indiana's Experimental Epistemology Lab
Schreiner's Behavioral Philosophy Lab
Bristol's Experimental Philosophy Page
Buffalo's Experimental Epistemology Research Group (EERG)
Metro Experimental Research Group (MERG)
Experimental Philosophy on PhilPapers (Edited by Mark Phelan).
Xphilosophy YouTube Channel
Early Modern Experimental Philosophy Blog (University of Otago, New Zealand)

Being Able to See

2012-05-04T06:46:00.004-07:00

How does one turn on the internal vision when we use our eyes to look at the day to day happenings with eyes wide open?

What made this interesting for me was the fact that sensory examination could have been used physically by people by no fault of their own under the auspice ofSynesthesia.. This is an examination where the internal wiring causes overlaps in sensory perceptions. So anyway the idea here is that we look at what intentionality means here in the progress toward science and examination of what we can gain in understanding a way in being able to see differently.

Experimental research
In recent years, there has been a large amount of work done on the concept of intentional action in experimental philosophy.^[1] This work has aimed at illuminating and understanding the factors which influence people's judgments of whether an action was done intentionally. For instance, research has shown that unintended side effects are often considered to be done intentionally if the side effect is considered bad and the person acting knew the side effect would occur before acting. Yet when the side effect is considered good, people generally don't think it was done intentionally, even if the person knew it would occur before acting. The most well-known example involves a chairman who implements a new business program for the sole purpose to make money but ends up affecting the environment in the process. If he implements his business plan and in the process he ends up helping the environment, then people generally say he unintentionally helped the environment; if he implements his business plan and in the process he ends up harming the environment, then people generally say he intentionally harmed the environment. The important point is that in both cases his only goal was to make money.^[2] While there have been many explanations proposed for why the "side-effect effect" occurs, researchers on this topic have not yet reached a consensus.

So we understand that there is a physiological effect to how perception can be altered by understanding the effect of Synesthesia? Such alteration can be given to the idea that if we change the way we see experimental processes as in sound application what comparative analogy can be safe? Can we say that it would be acceptable to science?

For example, in 1704 Sir Isaac Newton struggled to devise mathematical formulas to equate the vibrational frequency of sound waves with a corresponding wavelength of light. He failed to find his hoped-for translation algorithm, but the idea of correspondence took root, and the first practical application of it appears to be the clavecin oculaire, an instrument that played sound and light simultaneously. It was invented in 1725. Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, achieved the same effect with a harpsichord and lanterns in 1790, although many others were built in the intervening years, on the same principle, where by a keyboard controlled mechanical shutters from behind which colored lights shne. By 1810 even Goethe was expounding correspondences between color and other senses in his book, Theory of Color. Pg 53, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, by Richard E. Cytowic, M.D.

What if you caused intentional blindness in the sense that you isolate the sensory effect of allowing eyes to be deprived of light. Force the condition to effect internalize vision to take place? So, what happens in isolation? Does the mind then rely on the world constructs that we had had during our lifetimes to say that the whole internal world is then the effect of what we had gained in experience through seeing. How do you the separate the effect of or emotive states from the understanding that our perceptions colored the world of experience and then forced it toward a memory induced fabrication of what we had experienced?

Now you say, how did that happen? Such a fast shift from what is apparent in the looking at the world is to see that we had lost control of the visual capabilities of see reality as it is? There is this understanding that without intentionality a ruthless world of our emotive states can take over quite easily as we say that all of reality is clean and perfect without the recognition of what science is to mean.

5 types of ATLAS event shape data

The data is first processed using the vast and all-powerful ATLAS software framework. This allows raw data (streams of ones and zeroes) to be converted step-by-step into ‘objects’ such as silicon detector hits and energy deposits. We can reconstruct particles using these objects. The next step is to convert the information into a file containing two or three columns of numbers known as a "breakpoint file". It can also be used as a "note list". This kind of file can be read by compositional software such as the Composers Desktop Project (CDP) and Csound software used for this project. See: How is Data Converted into Sounds

So while you do experiments it is important to have "intentionality" in regard to your experiments? If this is so then what you had done is prepare for the excursion to what you want to find out? You already had some idea? You want to put controls in the environment?

How do you separate consciousness from the clean lines of experimentation and reality seeking? You can't? Because without it you were not able to put the controls in that you need too, in order to find something out. You are part of the vibrations.

The very fact that all of the environment is based on the factors of sound would have you believe then that such conversions are possible and that all sounds are envisioned within the context of the world of sound controlled?

I want to force you to be able to see differently. I want to convert the reality of existence of seeing in a vibrational mode. How does this translate then into consciousness and experimentation? What will we be able to find out if we change the constraints on or examinations of reality if we force the mind to see so?

The Ganzfeld effect

2012-05-03T20:07:00.001-07:00

The Ganzfeld effect (from German for “complete field”) is a phenomenon of visual perception caused by staring at an undifferentiated and uniform field of color. The effect is described as the loss of vision as the brain cuts off the unchanging signal from the eyes. The result is "seeing black"^[1] - apparent blindness.

History

In the 1930s, research by psychologist Wolfgang Metzger established that when subjects gazed into a featureless field of vision they consistently hallucinated and their electroencephalograms changed.

The Ganzfeld effect is the result of the brain amplifying neural noise in order to look for the missing visual signals. The noise is interpreted in the higher visual cortex, and gives rise to hallucinations. This is similar to dream production because of the brain's state of sensory deprivation during sleep.

The Ganzfeld effect has been reported since ancient times. The adepts of Pythagoras retreated to pitch black caves to receive wisdom through their visions^[2], known as the prisoner's cinema. Miners trapped by accidents in mines frequently reported hallucinations, visions and seeing ghosts when they were in the pitch dark for days. Arctic explorers seeing nothing but featureless landscape of white snow for a long time also reported hallucinations and an altered state of mind.

The effect is a component of a Ganzfeld experiment, a technique used in the field of parapsychology.
The artist James Turrell (partly inspired by clear blue skies) has created many such "Ganzfelds" throughout his oeuvre.

References

^ Ramesh B. Ganzfeld Effect.
^ Ustinova, Yulia.Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind: Descending Underground in the Search for Ultimate Truth, Oxford University Press US, 2009. ISBN 0199548560

Wolfgang Metzger, "Optische Untersuchungen am Ganzfeld." Psychologische Forschung 13 (1930) : 6-29. (the first psychophysiological study with regard to Ganzfelds)

EGG: Did you reach this conclusion through more traditional media, like painting or sculpture?

JT: I haven't had anything to do with either sculpture or painting. I have done works that look painted or works that have form and look like sculpture. I make these spaces that apprehend light for your perception. In a way, it's like Plato's cave, where we are sitting in the cave looking at the reflection of reality with our backs to reality. I make these spaces where the spaces themselves are perceivers or in some way pre-form perception. It's a little bit like what the eye does. I mean, I look at the eye as the most exposed part of the brain, as something that is already forming perception. I make these rooms that are these camera-like spaces that in some way form light, apprehend it to be something that's physically present.

EGG: What happens when you use space this way?

JT: This results in an art that is not about my seeing, it's about your direct perception of the work. I'm interested in having a light that inhabits space, so that you feel light to be physically present. I mean, light is a substance that is, in fact, a thing, but we don't attribute thing-ness to it. We use light to illuminate other things, something we read, sculpture, paintings. And it gladly does this. But the most interesting thing to find is that light is aware that we are looking at it, so that it behaves differently when we are watching it and when we're not, which imbues it with consciousness. Often people say that they want to touch some of the work I do. Well, that feeling is actually coming from the fact that the eyes are touching, the eyes are feeling. And this happens because the eyes are quite sensitive only in low light, for which we were made. We're actually made for this light of Plato's cave, the light of twilight. See: Interview with James Turrell

psychomanteums

The room is set up to optimize psychological effects such as trance. Its key features are low light or near-darkness, flickering light, and a mirror. The dimness represents a form of visual sensory deprivation, a condition helpful to trance induction, the undifferentiated colour without horizon producing the Ganzfeld effect^[4], a state of apparent "blindness". The Ganzfeld experiment replicates the conditions of a psychomanteum where a state of trance may be induced by a uniform field of vision. In the way of strobe or flashing light, stimulus is provided by indirect, moving light in the psychomanteum. Flickering candles or lamps are sometimes recommended to induce hallucination. It is supposed the indeterminate depth of the mirror’s darkness allows the eyes to relax and become unfocused, a state that reduces alertness.^[2]

Dr. Raymond Moody, author of the 1981 book about near death experiences, Life After Life, included the psychomanteum in his research trialling 300 subjects which he recorded in his 1993 book, Reunions. Moody viewed the room as a therapeutic tool to heal grief and bring insight.^[2]

A Superset Universe?

2012-04-30T18:19:00.001-07:00

How would you draw a Universe with all theories as being part of, as a subset?

Pictorial representations can be very useful in presenting information or assisting reasoning. Venn diagram is an example. Venn diagrams are used to represent classes of objects, and they can also assist us in reasoning about the relations between these classes. They are named after the English mathematician John Venn (1834 - 1923), who was a fellow at Cambridge University.

A few may have taken in the link supplied to a lecture given by Thomas Campbell with regard to his MBT book he had written. Now, I was drawn to the idea of a Venn diagram presented in his lecture and the idea of how one might have use this diagram as a question about the universe and it's subsets? How would you draw it?

I give a current posting by Sean Carroll with regards to his opinion on a book written by Lawrence Krauss. So there all these theories about the nature of the universe and some scientists of course have their opinions.

............Or not, of course. We should be good empiricists and be open to the possibility that what we think of as the universe really does exist within some larger context. But then we could presumably re-define that as the universe, and be stuck with the same questions. As long as you admit that there is more than one conceivable way for the universe to be (and I don’t see how one could not), there will always be some end of the line for explanations. I could be wrong about that, but an insistence that “the universe must explain itself” or some such thing seems like a completely unsupportable a priori assumption. (Not that anyone in this particular brouhaha seems to be taking such a stance.) SEE:A Universe from Nothing?

Physicists have proposed several theories to explain why Λ is so small. One of the most popular -- the "anthropic principle" -- states that Λ is randomly set and has very different values in different parts of the universe (figure 1). We happen to live in a rare region, or "bubble", where Λ has the value we observe. This value has allowed stars, planets and therefore life to develop. However, this theory is also unsatisfactory for many scientists because it would be better to be able to calculate Λ from first principles.

See also:

Plinko Sounds a Bit like the Galton Board

Justified true belief

Memories Arise Out of a Equilibrium

Particle Constructs

2012-04-27T09:20:00.002-07:00

Several large experimental groups are hot on the trail of this elusive subatomic particle which is thought to explain the origins of particle mass. Higgs Update Today

What use the Higg's Mechanism?

Just as one might look at GRB examples of motivation that come to us in natural cosmic particle collisions, by looking back in time is it not to strange to wonder how such compositions are given to the contacts and explorations of where any beginnings may materialize. So we are given clues?

The structure is being detail as if in association to identifying the elements in between Mendeleev's elemental table components? Seaborg's octaves? It is an analogy in comparison as you might track LHC components of particle expressions?

this increases his resistance to movement, in other words, he acquires mass, just like a particle moving through the Higgs field

Latest research can pinpoint what I am saying yet it is through such expressions we might ask how is it an Einstein crossing the room can gather so many minds and ideas to it? Can we say then that consciousness is much the same, yet, it isn't the idea of a heat death that such notions are not palatable with what happens in the brain but the idea that new ideas can enter. You see?

See Also:

What Does the Higgs Jet Energy Sound Like?

Higgs Update Today

Ambigram, Higgs, and Feynman rules

Infographics: Magnifying the Universe

2012-04-26T23:37:00.000-07:00

I thought this kind of neat and wondered.....maybe a scientist could correct if any misrepresentation is evident in the following demonstration.

The Universe made possible by Number Sleuth

Brian Greene: Why is our universe fine-tuned for life?

2012-04-25T05:28:00.000-07:00

At the heart of modern cosmology is a mystery: Why does our universe appear so exquisitely tuned to create the conditions necessary for life? In this tour de force tour of some of science's biggest new discoveries, Brian Greene shows how the mind-boggling idea of a multiverse may hold the answer to the riddle.

Brian Greene is perhaps the best-known proponent of superstring theory, the idea that minuscule strands of energy vibrating in a higher dimensional space-time create every particle and force in the universe.

See Also:

The Smoking Gun

Do Gamma rays hint at dark matter?

2012-04-25T05:18:00.002-07:00

Using a new statistical technique to analyse publicly available data from NASA's Fermi Space Telescope, an astrophysicist in Germany says he may have spotted a tell-tale sign of exotic particles annihilating within the Milky Way. If proved to be real, this "gamma-ray line" would, he claims, be a "smoking-gun signature" of dark matter.

There is a wide body of indirect observational evidence that an invisible substance accounts for some 80% of the matter in the universe. Although physicists can measure the effects that this dark matter has on the visible universe, they have very little understanding of what this mysterious stuff actually is. As well as looking for direct evidence of dark matter by detecting it – or even producing it – here on Earth, researchers are also scouring the skies for signs of the particles that dark matter might produce when self-annihilating. An excess of high-energy positrons (anti-electrons) observed by the Italian-led PAMELA spacecraft in 2008, and confirmed by Fermi last year, might be such a signature. However, it is possible that these positrons are produced by processes unrelated to dark matter. See:Gamma rays hint at dark matter

Also a Physics World see: Has Fermi glimpsed dark matter?

What Does the Higgs Jet Energy Sound Like?

2012-04-24T13:09:00.002-07:00

Top quark and anti top quark pair decaying into jets, visible as collimated collections of particle tracks, and other fermions in the CDF detector at Tevatron.

HiggsJetEnergyProfileCrotale and HiggsJetEnergyProfilePiano use only the energy of the cells in the jet to modulate the pitch, volume, duration and spatial position of each note. The sounds being modulated in these examples are crotales (baby cymbals) and a piano string struck with a soft beater, then shifted up in pitch by 1000 Hz and `dovetailed'.

In HiggsJetRythSig we are simply travelling steadily along the axis of the jet of particles and hearing a ping of crotales for each point at which there is a significant energy deposit somewhere in the jet.

HiggsJetEnergyGate uses just the energy deposited in the jet's cells. At each time point (defined by the distance from the point of collision) the energy is used to define the number of channels used from the piano sound file. So high energy can be heard as thick, burbly sound whilst low energy has a thinner sound. See: Listen to the decay of a god particle

LHCsound (LHCsound) / CC BY 3.0

See Also:

The Sound The Universe Makes

Songs of the Stars: the Real Music of the Spheres

2012-04-23T19:46:00.002-07:00

With the discovery of sound waves in the CMB, we have entered a new era of precision cosmology in which we can begin to talk with certainty about the origin of structure and the content of matter and energy in the universe.-Wayne Hu

The Pythagoreans 2500 years ago believed in a celestial "music of the spheres", an idea that reverberated down the millennia in Western music, literature, art and science. Now, through asteroseismology (the study of the internal structure of pulsating stars), we know that there is a real music of the spheres. The stars have sounds in them that we use to see right to their very cores. This multi-media lecture looks at the relationship of music to stellar sounds. You will hear the real sounds of the stars and you will hear musical compositions where every member of the orchestra is a real (astronomical) star! You will also learn about some of the latest discoveries from the Kepler Space Mission that lets us "hear" the stars 100 times better than with telescopes on the ground See:Don Kurtz, University of Central Lancashire-Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 7:00 pm

See Also:

Listen to the Songs of the Stars: Stellar Sounds at Perimeter's Public Lecture on May 2

Dialogos of Eide

The Incandescent Sun

BroadBand Technology

Hypercomputation

Contents

History

Hypercomputation and the Church–Turing thesis

Hypercomputer proposals

Analysis of capabilities

Taxonomy of "super-recursive" computation methodologies

Criticism

See also

References

Further reading

External links

Digital Physics

Contents

History

Digital physics

Overview

Weizsäcker's ur-alternatives

Pancomputationalism or the computational universe theory

Wheeler's "it from bit"

Digital vs. informational physics

Computational foundations

Turing machines

The Church–Turing (Deutsch) thesis

Criticism

Physical symmetries are continuous

Locality

Physical theory requires the continuum

See also

References

Further reading

External links

First Alcibiades

Contents

Content

Authenticity

Dating

References

Bibliography

External links

SNOLAB Grand Opening

Particle Dark Matter

NASA's Fermi Spots 'Superflares' in the Crab Nebula

Antimatter

Euler Diagram

Contents

Overview

History

Example: Euler- to Venn-diagram and Karnaugh map

Gallery

Footnotes

References

External links

Where is LHC Headed?

Illusions of Grandeur?

Questions on the History of Mathematics

The Birth of String Theory

The Birth of String Theory

A Path With a Heart

Experimental philosophy

Contents

History

Areas of Research

Consciousness

Cultural diversity

Determinism and moral responsibility

Epistemology

Intentional action

Criticisms

References and further reading

References

External links

Being Able to See

Experimental research

The Ganzfeld effect

History

See also