My answer to this year’s Edge Question, “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”
Julien de La Mettrie would be classified as a quintessential New Atheist, except for the fact that there’s not much New about him by now. Writing in eighteenth-century France, La Mettrie was brash in his pronouncements, openly disparaging of his opponents, and boisterously assured in his anti-spiritualist convictions. His most influential work, L’homme machine (Man a Machine), derided the idea of a Cartesian non-material soul. A physician by trade, he argued that the workings and diseases of the mind were best understood as features of the body and brain.
As we all know, even today La Mettrie’s ideas aren’t universally accepted, but he was largely on the right track. Modern physics has achieved a complete list of the particles and forces that make up all the matter we directly see around us, both living and non-living, with no room left for extra-physical life forces. Neuroscience, a much more challenging field and correspondingly not nearly as far along as physics, has nevertheless made enormous strides in connecting human thoughts and behaviors with specific actions in our brains. When asked for my thoughts about machines that think, I can’t help but reply: Hey, those are my friends you’re talking about. We are all machines that think, and the distinction between different types of machines is eroding.
We pay a lot of attention these days, with good reason, to “artificial” machines and intelligences — ones constructed by human ingenuity. But the “natural” ones that have evolved through natural selection, like you and me, are still around. And one of the most exciting frontiers in technology and cognition is the increasingly permeable boundary between the two categories.
Artificial intelligence, unsurprisingly in retrospect, is a much more challenging field than many of its pioneers originally supposed. Human programmers naturally think in terms of a conceptual separation between hardware and software, and imagine that conjuring intelligent behavior is a matter of writing the right code. But evolution makes no such distinction. The neurons in our brains, as well as the bodies through which they interact with the world, function as both hardware and software. Roboticists have found that human-seeming behavior is much easier to model in machines when cognition is embodied. Give that computer some arms, legs, and a face, and it starts acting much more like a person.
From the other side, neuroscientists and engineers are getting much better at augmenting human cognition, breaking down the barrier between mind and (artificial) machine. We have primitive brain/computer interfaces, offering the hope that paralyzed patients will be able to speak through computers and operate prosthetic limbs directly.
What’s harder to predict is how connecting human brains with machines and computers will ultimately change the way we actually think. DARPA-sponsored researchers have discovered that the human brain is better than any current computer at quickly analyzing certain kinds of visual data, and developed techniques for extracting the relevant subconscious signals directly from the brain, unmediated by pesky human awareness. Ultimately we’ll want to reverse the process, feeding data (and thoughts) directly to the brain. People, properly augmented, will be able sift through enormous amounts of information, perform mathematical calculations at supercomputer speeds, and visualize virtual directions well beyond our ordinary three dimensions of space.
Where will the breakdown of the human/machine barrier lead us? Julien de La Mettrie, we are told, died at the young age of 41, after attempting to show off his rigorous constitution by eating an enormous quantity of pheasant pâte with truffles. Even leading intellects of the Enlightenment sometimes behaved irrationally. The way we think and act in the world is changing in profound ways, with the help of computers and the way we connect with them. It will be up to us to use our new capabilities wisely.
If that is your idea of reliable source of information, we are done here. By bye.
Reginald
Well perhaps it’s Bye Bye but that Behe site isn’t my sole source of information. I didn’t even know about it until I googled Michael Behe Ken Miller a day or two ago. And as I said, his first approximation in the malaria transport mutation scenario seems questionable. It would be nice if Miller and Behe sat down and tried to agree on a rational model with approximations, even if they assigned different probabilities to some parameters, and did it all without resorting to demonizing or ridicule. If they decoupled it from the larger emotive issue over ToE credibility and treated it as an isolated investigation, presented without ‘spin’, we may get somewhere. We could get professional statisticians involved as well. Refusing to admit an alternative hypothesis is not science and there are many IDers/creationists doing work of proven calibre in the analytical sciences. While they may have prejudices, so do those who accept ToE unquestioningly. I realise this sort of statement often produces a barrage of ‘if only you knew how far out of court this ID stuff is, and there are more peer reviewed ToE papers than atoms in the known universe etc’, but that is obfuscation, and, if Behe is flat wrong, and the mutation can be shown , with reasonable rigour, to be realistically probable, I expect he would admit it. The appeal to the authority of prior prejudice is historically a problem. Think Copernicus and the Church.
Simon Packer – “Yes I am making pet points, because to me they do not seem to have lost their validity.”
They are valid, but not relevant to setting out an initial program for that research in my book. Programs are built around new ideas to test, and I hope that science generally will look at diagrams 2 & 3 on pages 9 & 10 of my book eventually and do some stats – not my job – I got the idea to set that program. Team effort – or not, we shall see. My aim is to point the way by valuable logic not currently known, rather than doing every bit of analysis myself.
I can see though, that you have NOT even bothered to take that time to read those couple of pages, so pointless to exchange further on the niceties of statistics using microbiology.
“Preset by whom, how? Known by…us, presumably.”
Again, obvious in the book. No person or God, sorry, just nature decompressing from an original state of compression. Obviously known to “us” as we discover.
David Cross – “Intelligence itself is a physical process and does not require consciousness. So there doesn’t need to be a design.”
Clearly, I have wasted my time giving you guys the reference to my book. There is an undeniable machine-design for a human anatomy that extends from fundamental principles from physics. If its beyond you (which I doubt, as the diagrams are drawn for a junior school student to understand), I am happy to explain further.
There are only two universal forces, gravitation & electromagnetism, and they combine for Strong & Weak (which are of less concern) as two additional supplementary forces.
Think for two seconds whether those forces, which are distinctly different, if not “opposite” in their methods (tiny atoms versus massive solar systems), shape all of nature. They shape nature from their alternative extremes of small & large, overlapping.
Of course thus is obvious, all the way from supernovae to solar systems and human life. The issue is understanding how they shape all of nature between them, including chemistry & biology. That is the basis for the design in my book. Track the consistent thread of those two forces and how they combine.
You guys need to consider whether you are literally bright enough for the task. I go to blogs and I find people who think that there are no completely new ideas to inform their existing knowledge. It is a lack of imagination, logic, and effort in those cases, nothing more.
JimV says:
““First, evolution by natural selection, if it produced consciousness, would have had to display conscious attributes before it produced them. This is clearly illogical.”
“If “this” refers to the preceding sentence, then I agree. It makes as much sense to me as saying that in order to evolve eyes, evolution would itself have to have eyes.
“On the other hand, if you mean simpler precursors among biological species, of course they exist. As my Gall’s Law quote suggested, a characteristic of evolution is to start with a simple system and add features to arrive at a complex system. Thus you have flat worms that can memorize a maze, monkeys that can count, add, and subtract numbers up to about eight, dogs that will recognize their spoken names and other words, apes that can learn sign language, and many other stages between those.”
Forget it, Jim. Simon is using an outdated Lamarckian view of evolution as a straw man, as I noted a long way above. You won’t get anywhere trying to argue with him on those terms.
Marcus
I may find time to look at your book, but here I am addressing ongoing points without introducing too much extra in the way of ideas and information.
Jim V
You seem to me to be only admitting Lamarckianism (is that a word?) and Neo Darwinism in your underlying paradigms, i.e. reductionist paradigms. Lamarck is mostly no longer taken seriously as you know, though some inherited traits seem to support him. I am not arguing from Lamarck, and there is no known mechanism for it. You are actually using a basic belief in evolution to prove evolution. That can be valid. Now that, as someone said, is Bayesian logic of sorts. What we are arguing about is whether you are still on track and justified by still holding fast to the EBNS hypothesis. If EBNS is true, then it flows against entropy and information theory, as many people have noticed. Some (Dawkins is one) say you must include the sun with the earth to restore entropy and known thermodynamics. They have a point; from the pure physics point of view you have satisfied nature. But if we confine ourselves to the study of life on earth, and we use a logic based on cause effect progressing in time, then it seems to be that unwarranted assumptions are made by EBNS. (I have stopped using the ToE acronym because it is used in physics for attempts to reconcile GR and QM).
At the risk of getting boring, I have basically two ‘pet theories’ or rather ‘pet problems’. Well, the dog did leak inside the house last night. Anyway, I digress. One unwarranted assumption I have noticed is about the chances of the concurrent genetic changes necessary to produce an elaborate new feature in an organism. For some systems like the eye, over which Darwin had doubts, one can envisage gradual sophistication increase being selected by sequential mutation, it might be able to climb Dawkin’s mount improbable. This is because it is just about possible, given an organism of sufficient complexity to start, to envisage small mutations producing a small advantage by forming a small structural phenotype change; e.g. mutation produces photoreceptor, photoreceptor happens to sit on a nerve ending, organism has enough analytical power to include photoreceptor input into decisions. Organism survives a little better and cycle iterates.
To me, these already unlikely scenarios get less and less likely when we get to something like the evolution of mammalian sexual reproduction. To me it is frankly, absurdly unlikely and nothing I have read have read has changed that. Dawkins took simplistic arguments and sloped the statistics. One of the point I have been trying to make, is that every time you try and write down a detailed scenario of how some new thing, like consciousness, evolved, you need to justify why matter began to organise itself in such a way that consciousness could be hosted, before there was any meaningful level of consciousness. I agree that one could envisage a scenario. Minimum ‘pre-consciousness set’. Organism accrues sensor for survival attribute, photoreceptor. Same organism accrues simple neurological or equivalent pathway. Organism accrues motor system. Organism mutates until the three things are connected as a system. Organism survives better without light. Organisms select for the ones which run from light and not to it. Organism acquires another sensor, etc etc etc. I just do not think the statistics would work by a very very long way. We have not even got onto Behe’s examples of irreducible complexity, but the basic idea/problem is the same.
My other point is more conceptual. We apply the logic born of consciousness to analyse how life got so sophisticated that we had consciousness and powers of analysis. We borrow phrases like ‘prefered to’ from the complex life that supposedly evolved, and impute those motives to matter much further back down the evolutionary tree. I have heard arguments to justify this, but they are pretty silly, and to me just do more to demolish the illusion that EBNS is some proven, cohesive theory.
Personal Summary of Hypotheses for Life and Consciousness
Lamarck: No Postulated Mechanism
Neo Darwinism: Inadequate Mechanism for Development of Life at Large
Creationsim/ID: No Postulated Mechanism. Doesn’t yield to scientific method. These points however do not inherently falsify it. Perhaps we just aren’t so smart.
Richard, rather than Jim V, should be the prime recipient, sorry, for my last long post. You started by quoting Jim V quoting me, which threw me.
Marcus
You either do not understand the Standard Model or you claim to have better understanding of the electroweak and QCD than the SM has so far achieved, which is frankly extremely unlikely. On that particular ‘extremely unlikely’, I am pretty sure I would get support from 99.99% practicing physicists.
Playing whack-a-mole with biology questions is not a good job for me nor the purpose of this blog. On the other hand, it’s possible that neutral observers may be swayed if they are left unanswered. To any such observers, the best thing I can say as a laymen is to consult the website TalkOrigins – it has whacked more moles than I could possibly do in a lifetime. Don’t take my word for anything either, my memory and intuition are fallible also. One last attempt:
Sexual reproduction is used by worms and molluscs. Mammals share the common ancestor which first used sexual reproduction with them. Mathematics says that sexual reproduction is a much more efficient mechanism for evolving than parthenogenesis, so that once it happened in a simple form it would spread, and branch into more complex forms. I agree that mammalian sexual reproduction is a rather grotesque form, but the evolutionary algorithm doesn’t have any bias against the grotesque, as long as it works. Speaking of percentages as you did, 99% of practicing biologists say you’re wrong about evolution (some still are theists, but understand and accept evolution, causing their idea of theism to evolve).
Your personal selection criterion for evolving ideas seems to be that if you can’t intuitively understand something in depth based only on popular science (including bad popular science), not peer-reviewed literature and study, it’s not true. History says that is a bad selection criterion, because it allows a lot of bad ideas to survive and suppresses a lot of good ideas. It is better to accept that the universe can be stranger than you can imagine and trust the data (with verification). All the data (fossil record, thousands of observations such as Darwin’s Finches, thousands of experiments such as Dr. Lenski’s 20-year experiment on E. coli) says that evolution did happen and is happening. There are unanswered questions about it which scientists are working on, but no other hypothesis works anywhere near as well to explain what we see and predict what we will find.
Dr. Behe’s malaria story by the way was his example of something unlikely which evolution could and did do. His argument was that it was “at the edge” of what evolution could do, and that there are things that evolution can’t do. I think all biologists would agree with that last clause as a general statement. For example, Homo sapiens can’t evolve a better knee joint at this point in our development (or a less ridiculous form of reproduction – except via technological evolution rather than biological evolution). His problem is that every example he gave in his “Black Box” novel has been refuted. Biological links between the flagellum and simpler cell mechanisms have been identified; the Kreb’s cycle will work (less efficiently) with four of its seven components removed; the hagfish has only two of the three components in its blood-clotting mechanism which Dr. Behe said were essential. (My sources for those are Dr. Nick Matzke, Dr. Ken Miller, and Dr. Ken Miller. TalkOrigins probably has details and reference cites.) (I could refute his mouse-trap example myself, as have others. The evolution of the mousetrap from precursors is obvious to an engineer.) Evolution has been able to do things he thought were impossible to it by mechanisms he didn’t imagine. (Including malaria evolution – practicing evolutionary biologists studied malaria populations and found seven existing chemical pathways to the mutation in question whereas he only thought of one. There may be others.) At this point his credibility as a biochemist pontificating on evolutionary biology is very low. As I said before, with a few billion years and a massively-parallel system, biological evolution can do a lot of things that individual humans couldn’t imagine. That’s not evolution’s problem, that’s our problem. That’s why we have to use data more than imagination.
Jim
Suffice to say I still disagree with your subjective statements and you disagree with mine. Both about the likely probabilities and about the inherent veracity of a lot of academic stuff in so far as it refers to evolution. Sorry. I am starting to feel annoying, so perhaps I should wind down on all this, I have made my points.
I acknowledged the multiple pathways on Summers diagram for the toxic transport mutations. I recommended an attempt to put numbers on it rather than to say evolution did it.
I have already been through a lot of the to-ing and fro-ing over Darwin’s Black Box several years ago and remain convinced of the relevance of his objections. Intermediate mutations will, in general, not survive well enough for EBNS to work.
The fossil record is another can of worms. The Cambrian Explosion? Big inconsistencies in isometric dating. I am not a young earther, but neither do I see the fossil record as endorsement of unguided EBNS.
As for popular science books, I studied QM mostly as academic maths and, years later, got a great deal of valid historical and conceptual perspective from popular science books on the subject, including Sean’s book on the Higgs.
I know you are an engineer but
‘My Geneticist colleague David Botstein often begins lectures by explaining that the essence of biology is living with uncertainty. He especially emphasises this to audiences of physicists…..I happen to know that most biologists consider the physicists’ obsession with certainty and correctness to be exasperatingly childish and evidence of their limited mental capacities. Physicists, in contrast, consider tolerance of uncertainty to be an excuse for second rate experimentation and a potential source of false claims’ —Robert Laughlin ‘A Different Universe’ pp9. He goes on to explain that he sees this difference as a product of physics evolving with engineering, while biologists are more intimately acquainted with medicine and agriculture; stuff that is already finished and mostly working. Science is not some uniform continuum. Laughlin used to design nuclear weapons but he sees the rough edges and occasional daftness of science as a whole. If you want orthodox triumphalism, Michio Kaku is your man.
So yes, my comment on the broad acceptance of the standard model backfired a bit, but maybe science is not uniform with regard to analytical rigour. I could not function as an engineer unless I accepted certain laws are true. I don’t believe the same is true for biologists regarding EBNS; there are practicing PhD pharmacists who are IDers.
Yes there are theists who accept EBNS, and I believe Francis Collins, former Director of the Human Genome Project, is one. I do not agree with him personally, because I interpret the Bible differently.
Simon Packer “You either do not understand the Standard Model or you claim to have better understanding of the electroweak and QCD than the SM has so far achieved, which is frankly extremely unlikely. On that particular ‘extremely unlikely’, I am pretty sure I would get support from 99.99% practicing physicists.”
What exactly is that comment, apart from a lazy attempt at crystal ball gazing? If you are not interested in reading ANY of the book here http://sdrv.ms/1a4HBbk
then don’t. But don’t bore me with your lazy conjectures with no idea whatsoever about the contents. You clearly exaggerate my claims into some kind of direct challenge to the Standard Model, which it is not. Don’t create a straw man from rank ignorance of the work and put it up for ridicule. Where do I directly challenge the Standard Model?
What I said above, which you have clearly ignored along with the work, in preference for putting your lazy disregard forward as your obvious stance, is that there are four forces of nature. Never heard that before? And those four forces are divided between basic atomic forces Strong & Weak, and more significant (in my view) forces of electromagnetism & gravitation using those adjunct forces. Hardly a revolutionary overturning of the Standard Model!
The level of your exchanges is so low, Simon. All you need to do is read, but obviously you resist lifting a single finger as your consistent stance – bully for you. You don’t have to lift a finger, you just have to realize that those two forces shaping atoms and solar systems in fact are universal. they shape everything by their limitations, including chemistry and biology, and perhaps even psychology, unless of course you think the fundamental aspects of electromagnetic atomic behaviour, for example, suddenly ceases to be of relevance to life.
Clearly from your stance and ridiculous Straw Man crystal ball gazing with a 99.99% chance I am just talking rubbish – is rubbish! All you have to do is realize than in fact those two forces literally make the world go around, and you are on it and they literally shape every step you take on Earth. Anyone got something interesting to say other than – “I’ve got stance”. I mean some facts an analysis to bring the human anatomy closer to machine level analysis – involving the mechanisms of electromagnetic & gravitational rotations? No takers?
I started out this comment with the question, what exactly are you on about Simon? Why on earth would anyone flatten notions like those I have set out above, to link machine levels of physics and life with no basis whatsoever? That is the topic of discussion, and coincidentally my views and my work correspond closely to de La Mettrie’s Machine Man. This is an education in blockage or blocked numb thinking, and the principal reason why so little progress is made by science, and so many gaps exist. People appear to go around in a stupor of their own hubris. You are way out of your depth in this discussion, Simon, that’s my reasonable conclusion.
“Marcus
I may find time to look at your book, but here I am addressing ongoing points without introducing too much extra in the way of ideas and information.”
Simon, you have no idea which way to jump from the basics I have given you here, and obviously I am not going to bother answering questions answered by two diagrams I indicated, from my book. Don’t look at the two diagrams to get some visual context to how evolution works by lower orbital bonding, I don’t care. Of course, don’t read “the book” if those diagram are of no interest, but what I am saying now Simon is, don’t even take one minute to look at the two diagrams. It appears to be better for your soul to reel of reams in any direction you choose in rank ignorance of the point. As I said bully for you, hope you are having fun.
I have no idea of your background Simon, or your methods. Perhaps you are a scientist, I assume so, and I made the comments about progress in science on that assumption. But perhaps you are just one out of the box, or not a scientist at all, in which case you are not part of the blockage to progress so much as a product of it. That is just a lazy rant off on its own tangent.
Marcus
You said:
“There are only two universal forces, gravitation & electromagnetism, and they combine for Strong & Weak (which are of less concern) as two additional supplementary forces.”
I was taking this statement of yours at face value as my starting point.
There are Standard Model particles, bosons, to mediate, individually, the four forces, although the graviton is arguably speculative. The SM has an excellent handle on the strong (boson=gluon), weak (boson=w,z) and e/m (boson=photon) through the QCD (strong) and electroweak (weak, e/m) theories, although those two theories are not fully reconciled. Both are excellent individual analytic predictors for experimental results. The gravitational force is proving much harder to integrate. Theories are in progress, but the state of consolidation is that the four forces are separate mechanisms and only two have been adequately reconciled into a single model. Three of the four forces are well covered by concise predictive QM analytical models. Some people are not really including gravity when they use the term ‘Standard Model’. So your statement is a bit ‘far out’.
I have a BSc in Applied Physics from Durham in the UK. I practised electronic engineering in the UK for 15 years, working on first generation digital microwave data links, aerospace power supplies and quite a bit else.
I have summarised my perspective on objections to EBNS already. I would only be rehashing previous statements.
And yes, you are all correct, my perspective on EBNS looks a bit far out too.
Simon Packer “far out”?
No idea what that means, or why your details about the gaps in knowledge within the Standard Model are in any way relevant. So what? I am talking about graviatation & electromagentism, and I am not the slightest bit interested in Strong & Weak for the purposes of explaining how lower orbital electromagnetic bonding for ALL COMPOUNDS on a gravitational surface here on Earth (with its landscapes) determines evolution.
You are off on your tangent again, really wasting your time with all that guff about the gaps. You can get into that if you read the book, because I do cover it, but not here, and not for the purposes of the basic proposition above. I see you have a degree, but I do not think you can track an argument to have a discussion. You just dip off, and take a stance not to even look at 2 diagrams, and waffle on about your own issues with the Standard Model.
You are just “off”. Don’t even bother reading any of the book, honestly, the level of education for logical discussion is just so low, its amazing, but I don’t get to blogs that often. Ever heard of de La Mettrie? He’s the bloke we are supposed to be discussing – Machine Man – or my book The Human Design (a machine design). Clearly not, and clearly you have nothing to offer on it.
Here is a question on your subject and off the subject of the thread, but you won’t be able to explain it. There are gaps in the Standard Model, and there are even bigger gaps in logic applied by Physicists.
The Uncertainty Principle says “it is impossible to determine accurately both the position and the direction and speed of a particle at the same instant.” In fact you cannot nail either using one spatial position at one time. Direction and motion are defined by two positions, for motion or speed between them, and direction or angle between them. Motion is defined by spatial and temporal positions, plural, as X miles in Y minutes, moving between positions & moments to satisfy that very definition. Direction is likewise defined using two spatial positions or temporal moments (time positions). The gap can only be closed to a wavelength, as a smear. No magic exists in the gap. Physics has a shocking disrespect for definitions.
How did physics get it so messed up?
Marcus
Yes current physics fades out into uncertainty in places but the places are fairly well defined, as is the current body of well consolidated knowledge. Sometimes it looks like we have found an underlying uncertainty in reality, like the uncertainty principle or the Planck Era, sometimes we just don’t get it yet at all, i.e. progress beyond the existing standard model. Physics does still see reality in contextual nibbles and that is what progress from or within the standard model is about; to get beyond that.
It is OK to hypothesise provided you consolidate at each stage with established knowledge, maths and experiment before you make a final case.
I am fairly happy with most phycisists’ idea of what is established physics knowledge.
Simon Packer, you completely missed the point as far as I can see.
My point was to get your opinion as a scientist on why physics made a massive fuss – Einsteing, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, they debated endlessly what the meaning of the U.P. might be. They talked about observers influencing to prevent exact measurement of momentum at one location in one instant, and everything else under the sun. They did not realize that motion & direction are BY DEFINITION, two locations and two times, for motion between them, and direction likewise.
They were literally smashing their heads against concrete defnitions as if they could be broken – only their heads got broken – into notions that nature is amazingly “uncertain”, and “who knows what happens in the unobserved gap!” – cats are alive or dead! What absolute nonsense around the concrete fact of DEFINITIONS. Amazing, don’t you think so? Do you really have confidence in physics?
Yes physics at present says that there are gaps in determinism, and yes, there could be room for an unexpected ghost or two in the QM machinery.
Day to day we tend to conduct our lives, scientific or otherwise, by determinism.
The process by which QM hands off to big lumps of stuff is usually called decoherence.
Yes physics is still in ‘nibbles’.
Yes I have confidence in it, on the whole, when each ‘nibble’ is working well within it’s known remit.
Simon Packer – “Yes physics at present says that there are gaps in determinism, and yes, there could be room for an unexpected ghost or two in the QM machinery.”
So let me get this straight. You have again completely ingnored the point. My point has nothing to do with your vague “gaps in deterrminism” whatever that means – I won’t bother to ask.
You have again completely ignored the fact that a major pillar, if not “the” major pillar of Q.M. is utter rubbish! Do you not know the definitions of motion and position?
Let me ask you a straight out question, because it is absolutely clear that you cannot be given information to digest for an opinion about it. In school, students are given a statement and asked to comment or discuss what is interesting about it. You have utterly failed to grasp any of the very basic information I have given you to comment, and you give some vague comment about “gaps in determinism”.
I gave you specific defintions of motion & direction, and wondered how could physics assume that either of them can by known in a freeze frame of one position at one instant? So I will ask you, as you are a low level professional phsysicist :
“How do you freeze frame motion & direction at one position and instant? Would that not be a violation of the definitions of motion & direction, which move BETWEEN postions & instants, and angle a direction BETWEEN them?
Do you understand at all what I am asking. Thus far not at all, despite the rank simplicity of it. Or perhaps you are just ashamed to admit that the famous U.P is nothing whatsoever of any value.
Marcus
“How do you freeze frame motion & direction at one position and instant? Would that not be a violation of the definitions of motion & direction, which move BETWEEN postions & instants, and angle a direction BETWEEN them?
I think I may see your point. My summary of what I think you mean is ‘The uncertainty principle is usually stated in terms of momentum and position. Definitions of velocity and therefore momentum, and obviously also position, require precision measurements in space and time. Since these are impossible, how do we even get started? Because of the uncertainty relationship, there is a ‘smear’ in our ability to measure these, and then another ‘smear’ in the result.’
If that is what you are saying, I would answer as follows. I am no great physicist, as you say.
QM is a mathematical construct primarily that gives excellent answers. The meaning of its inner workings is up for grabs conceptually, even by great physicists. We do not experience QM type behaviour directly, we experience Newtonian behaviour. QM hands off into the everyday by a process called decoherence. You just have to know when to use QM and for what. It is a set of mathematical abstractions that works. Momentum does have a similar meaning in QM to classical, at least at speeds much less than c. Position is the same concept as classical.
QM here does use Euclidean space as it’s background fabric. Euclidean space can be defined, in principle, to any precision you like. So can time. There is no uncertainty or smear in the definition here.
It is because a particle is seen as a collapsed wave function, after de Broglie/Schrodinger, that we get the uncertainty. Wave functions of particles progress in time and space. That space/time itself may be defined to arbitrary precision using everyday Euclidean conceptualisation. However within the wavefunction, momentum and position are orthogonal conjugates, and are related by Fourier transform. Inherent in the Fourier transform is the fact that precision in one parameter necessitates ‘smear’ in the other.
So even if space/time are Euclidean and continuous, and Schrodinger’s equation is correct, then uncertainty results in the QM parameters.
This in itself is of no relevance to the consciousness discussion. However I believe the science behind QMcontrasts with the science behind EBNS, widely assumed to have produced consciousness. Physics (QM or otherwise) must have mathematical models to be accepted. QM is weak with regard to conceptualisation, but strong with mathematical predictors. Evolution is stronger on conceptualisation, having accepted potential mechanisms, but weak on mathematical (or any other) predictors.
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“Two little trolls will fight it out until one little troll does the other one’s will” — Elvis Costello (almost)
Yes, people, I became a bit if a troll, sorry. Just trying to finish conversations properly and be reasonably polite.
Richard, you can be as slack as you like, not my problem, You are a lazy troll.
Simon Packer, you are not pursing an argument, you are diverting onto ad hominem territory to avoid it. Bully for you Richard, persuding Simon Packer to that route.
Simon Packer, you simply failed to answer any of the most basic questions.
Richard. He doesn’t have to answer them, as the point would be to show him things that are logically indefensible about the U.P. as constructed by physics! He is a free individual, and I am likewise free to point out that he continually avoids basic questions. His right, and mine. So butt out, lazy troll with nothing to say on the points at issue!
Now Simon Packer, as I just said there to the interjecting troll who does not like people to put questions and seek answers by increasingly simplified questions, you are a free man. I am not a troll, if that is your suggestion, but perhaps you are?
Nor are you are interested in an exchange about fundamentals of physics. You are not interested in Machine Man and mechanical bases for human antomies, explied in my book directly on subject, and linked to electromagnetism & gravitation directly in comments here. That’s fine. You are not interested in a massive gaff by fundamental physics. That’s fine. What you are doing here is your business, but clearly when it comes to an argument with me about interesting issues, you do not exist at all! You are a ghost, so stay a ghost and I just hope you are not an intentional troll. What a bizarre exchange.
Marcus
I did attempt to answer your point, for some reason my comment is awaiting moderation and invisible to you.
Richard/Marcus
I have confessed! The troll accusation in my case is presumably because I have drifted off subject and got into a discussion on the meaning/reliability of Quantum Mechanics/Uncertainty Principle here. Elsewhere I have helped slant off discussions in the direction of the veracity of EBNS. Not without help from others, but there is some truth to the accusation! I plead partly guilty and ask if flexibility in the scope of discussion could be considered. And a lenient sentence please.
If the troll accusation regards failure to ever answer existing points, or outright rudeness, then I will plead innocence. If failure to conform to scientific prejudice rather than scientific rigour, in the case of EBNS, guilty as charged but the charge is silly. (Oops; contempt of court). If occasionally humorous responses, also guilty. Isn’t blogging fun?