Category: Science, Physics, and Philosophy of Science

–“Brian Gant: I’ve had this internal argument for years. Which is why certain folks we know who argue economic metaphysics is the only way of creating a predictive reality are batshit crazy 😉“––“Michael DeMond: LOL you mean folks like Curt Doolittle???? I would LOVE to hear his thoughts on this! 😀“–http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/?utm_source=atlfb Hi Michael. Be careful when you call the devil, because sometimes he comes. lol 😉 DR HOFFMAN 1) OVERSTATES THE CASE, 2) CONFUSES THE OBSERVER EFFECT AND THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE AND 3) MAKES A PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC ARGUMENT – IN OTHER WORDS, HE’S TALKING MOSTLY NONSENSE I call this, ‘new age mysticism’. —“Hoffman: We’ve been shaped to have perceptions that keep us alive, so we have to take them seriously. If I see something that I think of as a snake, I don’t pick it up. If I see a train, I don’t step in front of it. I’ve evolved these symbols to keep me alive, so I have to take them seriously. But it’s a logical flaw to think that if we have to take it seriously, we also have to take it literally. Gefter: If snakes aren’t snakes and trains aren’t trains, what are they? Hoffman: Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones. A snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.”— A FEATURE, NOT A BUG: COST 1 – the value of memory is in outwitting the current course of events by acting in response to stimuli (information). 2 – to act in response to stimuli we must process information quickly enough to act to change the course of events. information processing takes time, and more information takes more time and less information takes less time – if we remember or sense too much information (more than we can process in sufficient time to act – usually from 100ms to 2kms) then it inhibits our actions.) Information processing takes time, and more information takes more time and less information takes less time – if we remember or sense too much information (more than we can process in sufficient time to act – usually from 100ms to 2kms) then it inhibits our actions.) 3 – information processing is very expensive – our human brains are very, very, very expensive organs. The more expensive the information processing the more calories required to support information processing. (Humans have sacrificed strength for the ability to run long distances – longer than any other land creature – and to think.) 4 – we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, what we need to in order to act. We don’t see hear, smell, taste, feel what we do not need to in order to act – because it would be an unnecessary cost. 5 – Information carried by Electromagnetic Radiation (light) is cheap vs action-distance and energy required. But increases cost of processing. Same is true for hearing and smell (dogs), or vibration (spiders). Of these, light requires the least energy output by the entity that can be acted upon, over the longest actionable distance. Vibration the opposite. opponents and prey can control vibration and sound. sometimes they can control smell. and sometimes they can hide. They can only control light by hiding or darkness. It is hard to control all of them. 7 – we remember only the minimum information necessary to identify opportunities to act – because more so would be an unnecessary cost, or take unnecessary time. ANALOGY:PUZZLES Now, imagine you have a series of black and white photos of snakes.Put each of them (a lot of them) on panes of glass. Cut the images (not the glass) into small puzzle pieces. remove all the pieces that are not necessary to define the outline of the snake. We evolved to fear in snakes is their means of movement even more so than the shape. so now imagine that instead of photos we have 1 second animated gifs and we make all the pixels transparent that aren’t necessary to create a vague shape of this snake. Next, our eyes have lots of sensors in the very center of our focus and many fewer as we radiate outward. So take a picture of two ‘marker’ features like the pattern on the back, and the head and eyes. Now that’s just the visual component. This will also store a sort of color map of the snake. (There is a huge similarity to how we compress video and how the brain stores information, except there is more information in the video than our memories ) So when we see a snake we find those very small sets of puzzle pieces in many different memories, and we sort of experience them as a very fast movie, blended together. Then as we watch the snake, every 1000th of a second we add more and more visual detail to those memories. so we start out with a very simple picture, using substitution of memories to fill in what we glimpse, and increasingly we fill in with observations rather than just substitutions from memory. When this happens we start predicting the future by the difference between the substitutions and the vision we experience in real time. It is better to think of the brain as a producer of continuous, iterative search results with a two second afterglow(a half-second half-life). So a memory stay’s ‘on’ if it’s continuously activated and dim’s if it’s not. If we are lucky, we can create a model(space) from it, and so between shape and model and color and sound, and continuous excitement of the same we can imagine pretty ‘complete’ information about this thing. (I started working as a delivery runner for my dad at age 7. it was a small city. within a few years, i could draw a map of the city to scale by hand, and a rough outline of all the houses in it. Just from memory. By the time I was twelve or fourteen I could draw the interior wood frame of a house by looking at it from the outside and drew dozens of houses in perspective showing their interior frames. We are capable of creating complex models. Even today I can generally diagnose what’s wrong with a car from just the sounds I hear. The point being that the map and the diagnosis are ‘accurate enough’ to act upon. Which is the author’s underlying argument.) (yet I cannot often read facial expressions which leads to the nest point: sensory differences) A FEATURE, NOT A BUG: SENSORY DIFFERENCES So some of us have highly attuned auditory (musical) senses. Some of us have perfect pitch and many of us do not. Some of us see different color densities and certainly the genders do. Some of us are more sensitive to vibrations. Some of us to ‘level’ (i can judge the level of a building and it bothers me terribly if it’s off.) Some of us cannot notice or do not notice at all. A FEATURE, NOT A BUG: VALUE JUDGEMENTS We know men, younger men, and females value differently. We know some cultures percieve similarities differently. THE DIVISION OF PERCEPTION, COGNITION, KNOWLEDGE, LABOR, AND ADVOCACY So while any single human possesses only so many cognitive puzzle pieces about any topic, a band, a tribe, a nation, and a civilization possess a phenomenal amount of information about reality. By communicating and testing each other’s communications. By cooperating (or not), and by exchanging (or not), or by investing (or not), or by boycotting (or not), or by fighing (or not) we transfer information between individuals, groups, and super-groups. The evidence is that over time our actions increasingly corresponde with reality – as long as we use (a) scientific truth (b) rule of law, (c) markets, (d) many small competing polities that produce commons. If we do not, use a-d, then we will at some point stagnate if not regress. If we do use a-d, then we will continue to advance. Ergo, the west evolves faster than the rest. SUBSET AND SUBSTITUTION AND VALUE IS DIFFERENT FROM FALSE So we don’t have an ‘erroneous’ understanding of reality. we have a limited understanding of reality. And together we gain increasingly accurate understanding of reality. So much so that we have near total dominion over everything but each other. WHY WE NEED SCIENCE AND TESTIMONIALISM In my work I am trying to correct not only pseudoscientific statements by rather silly scientists, but to counter 150 years of pseudoscience of egalitarianism brought about by the cosmopolitan enlightemnent (counter-enlightenment) by Boaz, Freud, Marx, Adorno,Cantor, Rothbard, Strauss, and hundreds of others who have sought to replace utopian christian mysticism with utopian egalitarian pseudoscience. We have incrementally suppressed all forms of crime through expansion of the common natural law. And I am attempting (i think successfully) to demonstrate how we can outlaw pseudoscience by demanding the same due diligence in public speech in the market for information that we do in the production of goods and services for the market for consumption of goods and services. We used to teach grammar, logic, and rhetoric. If we taught grammar, logic, rhetoric and testimony (how to warranty against falsehood), basic accounting, and micro-economics, rather than social-pseudoscience we would have as great a revolution in human achievement as we had under the development of empiricism. THE OBSERVER EFFECT (WIKI) Now, the good professor does not understand the Observer Effect. It’s not that the universe cares if we’re watching. It’s that we only seem to be able to inspect via the electromagnetic spectrum in one way or another (at present) and anything we do to make an observation (take a measurement) changes the state of the thing we measure. That’s all it means. But it seems that we cannot kill this falsehood any more than we can kill some conspiracy theories. Here is wikipedia: —“In physics, the term observer effect refers to changes that the act of observation will make on a phenomenon being observed. This is often the result of instruments that, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some manner. A commonplace example is checking the pressure in an automobile tire; this is difficult to do without letting out some of the air, thus changing the pressure. This effect can be observed in many domains of physics and can often be reduced to insignificance by using better instruments or observation techniques. In quantum mechanics, there is a common misconception (which has acquired a life of its own, giving rise to endless speculations) that it is the mind of a conscious observer that causes the observer effect in quantum processes. It is rooted in a basic misunderstanding of the meaning of the quantum wave function ψ and the quantum measurement process. According to standard quantum mechanics, however, it is a matter of complete indifference whether the experimenters stay around to watch their experiment, or leave the room and delegate observing to an inanimate apparatus, instead, which amplifies the microscopic events to macroscopic[3] measurements and records them by a time-irreversible process.[4] The measured state is not interfering with the states excluded by the measurement. As Richard Feynman put it: “Nature does not know what you are looking at, and she behaves the way she is going to behave whether you bother to take down the data or not.” Historically, the observer effect has also been confused with the uncertainty principle.”— Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute

–“Brian Gant: I’ve had this internal argument for years. Which is why certain folks we know who argue economic metaphysics is the only way of creating a predictive reality are batshit crazy 😉“––“Michael DeMond: LOL you mean folks like Curt Doolittle???? I would LOVE to hear his thoughts on this! 😀“–http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/?utm_source=atlfb Hi Michael. Be careful when you call the devil, because sometimes he comes. lol 😉 DR HOFFMAN 1) OVERSTATES THE CASE, 2) CONFUSES THE OBSERVER EFFECT AND THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE AND 3) MAKES A PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC ARGUMENT – IN OTHER WORDS, HE’S TALKING MOSTLY NONSENSE I call this, ‘new age mysticism’. —“Hoffman: We’ve been shaped to have perceptions that keep us alive, so we have to take them seriously. If I see something that I think of as a snake, I don’t pick it up. If I see a train, I don’t step in front of it. I’ve evolved these symbols to keep me alive, so I have to take them seriously. But it’s a logical flaw to think that if we have to take it seriously, we also have to take it literally. Gefter: If snakes aren’t snakes and trains aren’t trains, what are they? Hoffman: Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones. A snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.”— A FEATURE, NOT A BUG: COST 1 – the value of memory is in outwitting the current course of events by acting in response to stimuli (information). 2 – to act in response to stimuli we must process information quickly enough to act to change the course of events. information processing takes time, and more information takes more time and less information takes less time – if we remember or sense too much information (more than we can process in sufficient time to act – usually from 100ms to 2kms) then it inhibits our actions.) Information processing takes time, and more information takes more time and less information takes less time – if we remember or sense too much information (more than we can process in sufficient time to act – usually from 100ms to 2kms) then it inhibits our actions.) 3 – information processing is very expensive – our human brains are very, very, very expensive organs. The more expensive the information processing the more calories required to support information processing. (Humans have sacrificed strength for the ability to run long distances – longer than any other land creature – and to think.) 4 – we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, what we need to in order to act. We don’t see hear, smell, taste, feel what we do not need to in order to act – because it would be an unnecessary cost. 5 – Information carried by Electromagnetic Radiation (light) is cheap vs action-distance and energy required. But increases cost of processing. Same is true for hearing and smell (dogs), or vibration (spiders). Of these, light requires the least energy output by the entity that can be acted upon, over the longest actionable distance. Vibration the opposite. opponents and prey can control vibration and sound. sometimes they can control smell. and sometimes they can hide. They can only control light by hiding or darkness. It is hard to control all of them. 7 – we remember only the minimum information necessary to identify opportunities to act – because more so would be an unnecessary cost, or take unnecessary time. ANALOGY:PUZZLES Now, imagine you have a series of black and white photos of snakes.Put each of them (a lot of them) on panes of glass. Cut the images (not the glass) into small puzzle pieces. remove all the pieces that are not necessary to define the outline of the snake. We evolved to fear in snakes is their means of movement even more so than the shape. so now imagine that instead of photos we have 1 second animated gifs and we make all the pixels transparent that aren’t necessary to create a vague shape of this snake. Next, our eyes have lots of sensors in the very center of our focus and many fewer as we radiate outward. So take a picture of two ‘marker’ features like the pattern on the back, and the head and eyes. Now that’s just the visual component. This will also store a sort of color map of the snake. (There is a huge similarity to how we compress video and how the brain stores information, except there is more information in the video than our memories ) So when we see a snake we find those very small sets of puzzle pieces in many different memories, and we sort of experience them as a very fast movie, blended together. Then as we watch the snake, every 1000th of a second we add more and more visual detail to those memories. so we start out with a very simple picture, using substitution of memories to fill in what we glimpse, and increasingly we fill in with observations rather than just substitutions from memory. When this happens we start predicting the future by the difference between the substitutions and the vision we experience in real time. It is better to think of the brain as a producer of continuous, iterative search results with a two second afterglow(a half-second half-life). So a memory stay’s ‘on’ if it’s continuously activated and dim’s if it’s not. If we are lucky, we can create a model(space) from it, and so between shape and model and color and sound, and continuous excitement of the same we can imagine pretty ‘complete’ information about this thing. (I started working as a delivery runner for my dad at age 7. it was a small city. within a few years, i could draw a map of the city to scale by hand, and a rough outline of all the houses in it. Just from memory. By the time I was twelve or fourteen I could draw the interior wood frame of a house by looking at it from the outside and drew dozens of houses in perspective showing their interior frames. We are capable of creating complex models. Even today I can generally diagnose what’s wrong with a car from just the sounds I hear. The point being that the map and the diagnosis are ‘accurate enough’ to act upon. Which is the author’s underlying argument.) (yet I cannot often read facial expressions which leads to the nest point: sensory differences) A FEATURE, NOT A BUG: SENSORY DIFFERENCES So some of us have highly attuned auditory (musical) senses. Some of us have perfect pitch and many of us do not. Some of us see different color densities and certainly the genders do. Some of us are more sensitive to vibrations. Some of us to ‘level’ (i can judge the level of a building and it bothers me terribly if it’s off.) Some of us cannot notice or do not notice at all. A FEATURE, NOT A BUG: VALUE JUDGEMENTS We know men, younger men, and females value differently. We know some cultures percieve similarities differently. THE DIVISION OF PERCEPTION, COGNITION, KNOWLEDGE, LABOR, AND ADVOCACY So while any single human possesses only so many cognitive puzzle pieces about any topic, a band, a tribe, a nation, and a civilization possess a phenomenal amount of information about reality. By communicating and testing each other’s communications. By cooperating (or not), and by exchanging (or not), or by investing (or not), or by boycotting (or not), or by fighing (or not) we transfer information between individuals, groups, and super-groups. The evidence is that over time our actions increasingly corresponde with reality – as long as we use (a) scientific truth (b) rule of law, (c) markets, (d) many small competing polities that produce commons. If we do not, use a-d, then we will at some point stagnate if not regress. If we do use a-d, then we will continue to advance. Ergo, the west evolves faster than the rest. SUBSET AND SUBSTITUTION AND VALUE IS DIFFERENT FROM FALSE So we don’t have an ‘erroneous’ understanding of reality. we have a limited understanding of reality. And together we gain increasingly accurate understanding of reality. So much so that we have near total dominion over everything but each other. WHY WE NEED SCIENCE AND TESTIMONIALISM In my work I am trying to correct not only pseudoscientific statements by rather silly scientists, but to counter 150 years of pseudoscience of egalitarianism brought about by the cosmopolitan enlightemnent (counter-enlightenment) by Boaz, Freud, Marx, Adorno,Cantor, Rothbard, Strauss, and hundreds of others who have sought to replace utopian christian mysticism with utopian egalitarian pseudoscience. We have incrementally suppressed all forms of crime through expansion of the common natural law. And I am attempting (i think successfully) to demonstrate how we can outlaw pseudoscience by demanding the same due diligence in public speech in the market for information that we do in the production of goods and services for the market for consumption of goods and services. We used to teach grammar, logic, and rhetoric. If we taught grammar, logic, rhetoric and testimony (how to warranty against falsehood), basic accounting, and micro-economics, rather than social-pseudoscience we would have as great a revolution in human achievement as we had under the development of empiricism. THE OBSERVER EFFECT (WIKI) Now, the good professor does not understand the Observer Effect. It’s not that the universe cares if we’re watching. It’s that we only seem to be able to inspect via the electromagnetic spectrum in one way or another (at present) and anything we do to make an observation (take a measurement) changes the state of the thing we measure. That’s all it means. But it seems that we cannot kill this falsehood any more than we can kill some conspiracy theories. Here is wikipedia: —“In physics, the term observer effect refers to changes that the act of observation will make on a phenomenon being observed. This is often the result of instruments that, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some manner. A commonplace example is checking the pressure in an automobile tire; this is difficult to do without letting out some of the air, thus changing the pressure. This effect can be observed in many domains of physics and can often be reduced to insignificance by using better instruments or observation techniques. In quantum mechanics, there is a common misconception (which has acquired a life of its own, giving rise to endless speculations) that it is the mind of a conscious observer that causes the observer effect in quantum processes. It is rooted in a basic misunderstanding of the meaning of the quantum wave function ψ and the quantum measurement process. According to standard quantum mechanics, however, it is a matter of complete indifference whether the experimenters stay around to watch their experiment, or leave the room and delegate observing to an inanimate apparatus, instead, which amplifies the microscopic events to macroscopic[3] measurements and records them by a time-irreversible process.[4] The measured state is not interfering with the states excluded by the measurement. As Richard Feynman put it: “Nature does not know what you are looking at, and she behaves the way she is going to behave whether you bother to take down the data or not.” Historically, the observer effect has also been confused with the uncertainty principle.”— Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute