Curt Doolittle

Source: Facebook

  • PROHIBITING MAGICAL, SOCIALIST, POSTMODERN, AND PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC ARGUMENTS AS IM

    PROHIBITING MAGICAL, SOCIALIST, POSTMODERN, AND PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC ARGUMENTS AS IMMORAL DECEPTIONS

    (This is profound, and a lot to grasp. I have copied it here from elsewhere.)

    While one might say that ‘it does not matter what we do, that discipline over there, is none of our concern, because whether true or not, this technique is useful to us’. The fact is that such a statement is arbitrary and preferential and not ‘true’ remains.

    If instead of placing higher value on one’s personal utility in an isolated domain, one places higher value on suppressing immoral political speech such that freedom is possible, one might reach a different conclusion.

    Just as high trust ethics are possible by the suppression of additional immoral actions over low trust ethics, higher trust ethics are possibly by the suppression of further immoral actions.

    In low trust ethics, asymmetric knowledge is an ethical means of profit. In high trust ethics profit from asymmetric knowledge is immoral.

    In ‘higher trust ethics’ (In propertarianism) we place a greater ethical constraint, such that profit from obscurantism, mysticism, and platonism are prohibited.

    If operational language will allow you to express an idea and serves the needs of one’s function, then it is immoral to rely on platonic argument.

    If symmetrical knowledge will allow you to cooperate with another then it is immoral to express your thoughts in asymmetric terms. (incomplete information).

    If telling the truth will allow you to cooperate with another then it is immoral and unethical to express your thoughts in fraudulent terms.

    If voluntarily cooperating with someone such that you can obtain something without stealing, then it is immoral to steal from them.

    If is possible to cooperate with someone such that you can both survive then it is immoral to kill them.

    So, we must, in order to suppress increasingly complex forms of crime, ethical violation and immoral violation, we must forgo opportunities for self benefit by restraint, then to suppress the use of obscurant, mystical, platonic deceptions requires that we refrain, even at cost, from obscurant, mystical, and platonic statements.

    That this is in fact, what is required of Science (to make statements in operant language), then why is it that we cannot require this level of TRUTH in all other disciplines – especially if it prevents criminal, unethical, and immoral behavior, and enables as great a leap in cooperation as the high trust ethic did over the low trust ethic?

    Again, I believe I have solved the problem. But it may be just too much to ask for someone else to understand unless I am able to either condense it to a Confucian riddle, or extend it to a Hayekian narrative, or a Darwinian exposition of cases.

    ETHICAL BEHAVIOR COMES AT A HIGH COST.

    Ergo:

    If you want a politically ethical society we must pay this cost: the abandonment of the convenience of imaginary objects and confusing the utility of a conceptual tool with the existence and truth of that tool as a construction.

    This is how to make politics ‘scientific.’

    We outlawed violence.

    We outlawed theft.

    We outlawed fraud.

    We suppressed fraud-by-omission with warranty.

    We suppressed free riding with marital structure and property rights.

    We tried to suppress corruption with the constitution, but it failed. It failed because the constitution was not precise enough – in no small part because it should have specified original intent.

    We have failed to suppress mysticism, monotheism, marxian obscurantism, and Hegelian and postmodern conflation of mysticism and obscurantism.

    The requirement for scientific speech makes such arguments impossible. It means that public discourse is a property-commons, and one may not free ride or privatize it for one’s own convenience.

    Because it is immoral to do so.

    This is pretty profound. But again, it may be that such a profound statement is not of interest to you. But to me, as someone who has tried to solve the problem of ethics in an ethically and morally heterogeneious polity and to protect us from another dark age of ignorance and mysticism that Marx, Freud and Cantor have tried to drive us into, it is of a greater priority, and it is entirely worthy of the cost.

    -Cheers

    ================

    END NOTES FOR LATER REFERENCE

    1) If i say that the square root if two is the name for a function but is not reducible to a number, and cannot be demonstrated to be possible, that does not in fact prevent me from using the name of that function as a symbol in deduction, because in no circumstance is infinite precision applicable.

    2) (Lest we lose sight of the source of my argument here, I am trying to define extensions of political morality such that we can create institutions that permit the cooperation of individuals and groups holding heterogeneous moral codes, each of which reflects a different reproductive strategy. If you are going to create a means of resolving differences between moral codes, what constraints does one place upon the formation of argument, procedure, policy, and law, such that suppression of discounts would be possible, and theft by obscurant means would be impossible.

    How do we prevent the use of deception via various forms of obscurantism in a polity consisting of morally and ethically heterogeneous individuals and groups?

    If, as I’m arguing, mathematics is justificationary, but need not be, and need not be without sacrifice of functionality, and if it can be such that mathematicians (or members of this group) can be fooled into justificationary positions, then how would we prevent the ‘leakage’ from either this group’s ideology or the platonism of mathematics, (or that of socialists and totalitarians) into law?

    3) limits solve the problem of arbitrary precision (general rules) when in physics, correspondence with reality provides the ‘limit’ of precision. This is the difference between math (the study of pure relations independent of context) and the study of reality (relations within context).

    But that does not mean that when we make a reference to any mathematical object, we are naming a function (label for the result of operations) not naming an extant entity.

    That by definition a number system can be used to construct the rules for any n dimensional construct deterministically because of the constancy of relations, we should not confuse the determinacy we have ourselves described in constant relations, with existence.

    I cannot speak something into material existence other than the vibrations caused with my voice.

    I actually find this subject fascinating because it sort of renders most of the world ‘childish’.

    4) what good does a personal philosophy of ethical (interpersonal) action, and moral (political) action do you when the others do not share a marginally indifferent ethic and moral code?

    So, for example, what good does it do you if the vast majority economically, politically, or physically deprive you of any ability to act on this code?

    Politics is a contract, not a personal philosophy. And you might say that you will offer others these terms that you prefer. But if you must construct a contract (constitution) what terms must exist in this contract to make your personal philosophy both ethical and moral, possible to act upon?

    5) a) Empirical means “observable”, not quantifiable: “based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.” Which is of course, the difference between the motion of planets vs unicorns (and infinity). That which is empirical is different from that which is imaginary. It is observable in time. (Very common mistake btw. You are not alone.)

    b) So, again, existence is different from utility. I can tell a fable with a unicorn, and I can imitate arbitrary precision with infinity. But that is different from saying such a thing exists scientifically (empirically). When you say that something is infinite, you are in fact, RELYING ON INDUCTION. (Ouch. I know.)

    c) God, and magic for that matter, are ‘older’ old hat. And they well served the purpose of their authors. Just as does infinity.

    d) Why is it that we need the ‘concept of limits’ (a form of justification)? It’s arbitrary precision instead of contextual precision – general rules independent of context versus precision determined by context. Why is it that we can use boolean logic (boolean algebra) for computation? (see Turing) And what utility does the function limit() serve in transforming contextual precision into arbitrary precision (general rule)?

    e) Constructivist, Intuitive, computational, operational, empirical, natural – all are expressions in math, logic, philosophy and science of attempts to circumvent the problem of reliance on justification.

    Departmental math, is justificationary.

    f) So, again, given that the difference is unnecessary and justificationary, and imaginary, while if stated operationally, math is descriptive, deductive, natural and ‘real’, and that the necessity of this conversation is DEMONSTRATION of the very problem of justificationary logic, even among people who assert that they deny the existence of justification, it should be somewhat obvious by now that there exists in fact the problem of externalizing immoral, unreal, illogical, platonism that is exported by justificationary departmental mathematics.

    g) Given that mathematical platonism is, like divine intervention, the hand of god, or some other magical mater of existence, ‘correctable’ without sacrifice of functionality in mathematics, then I will return to my asserted thesis that it is immoral to use non-operational, non-constructivist argument in public discourse (the export through obscurant language of error), because the institution of politics, exists for the purpose of transfer of wealth. Further, that we can, by placing the reuqirement for constructivist, operational, language on public discourse, we can (at least in theory) prohibit organized theft, corruption and immorality via justificationary psuedoscience, magic, or the pretense that mathematics can be used to describe phenomenon that is absent of constant relations (economics).

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-14 07:54:00 UTC

  • I thought it would be hard to defeat rothbardian ethics while preserving Hoppe’s

    I thought it would be hard to defeat rothbardian ethics while preserving Hoppe’s insights.

    Not throwing out the baby with the bathwater so to speak.

    But it turned out that hoppe was right as far as private property was concerned.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-13 08:06:00 UTC

  • The hard part of philosophy, at least for me, is not so much understanding a giv

    The hard part of philosophy, at least for me, is not so much understanding a given problem, as it is understanding what others do not understand.

    I don’t attribute this to any particular genius, but rather the natural byproduct of an autistic bias for correspondence with reality, as a natural defense against the variation in human interpretations, because of the framing provided by language.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-13 06:57:00 UTC

  • RIFFING A CRITIC: THE IMMORALITY OF PLATONISM (important piece) CRITIC: –“The w

    RIFFING A CRITIC: THE IMMORALITY OF PLATONISM

    (important piece)

    CRITIC:

    –“The word ‘operationalise’ is a mantra for you. I understand many things without being able to operationalise them, such as how to use English, how to ride a bicycle, etcetera . But it’s important to pint out that most of our understandings are incomplete – and sometimes for insuperable logical reasons. Understanding a scientific theory is never complete. It’s information content ( that set of statements that it logically excludes) is infinite and thus cannot be completely grasped by any mind. For example , newtons theory contradicts Einstein’ and therefore each is part of the information content of the other . It would be silly to require Newton to know this, and ipso facto silly to have required him to operationalise his understanding of his own theory. The point is understanding is much more than making operations.”–

    CURT:

    (a) operationalizing, demonstrating, constructing, using as instrument, each of these terms implies action in time. Each is is a test of whether something can exist or not; and whether something is loaded or not; and whether something is obscured or not.

    (b) There are many things I can do, but there are many things I should not do. I should not shout fire in a theater. And my question is whether it is moral, once understood, given that plantonism produces such externalities as it has, to refer to platonic NAMES as extant, rather than as names of functions for the purpose of brevity (and possibly comprehension.)

    I dont so much care about what one does in one’s bedroom, or in one’s math department, as I do about the construct of moral argument and law. However, since math is the gold standard of the logics (despite being the simplest of them), and contains the same errors, mathematical philosophy is useful in demonstrating the problem in a more simplistic domain. If such an error can occur in math (it does), then of course it can happen anywhere (it does).

    (c) In response to your question above, I would have to understand the meaning of “understand” as you use it.

    If you can ride a bike you can demonstrate it, whether you can articulate it or not. You understand how to RIDE. And it’s observable that you can ride.

    You can think without articulating it, and I an observe (and test via turing) that you appear to be thinking.

    But you would have to tell me how ‘understanding’ applies to abstract concepts like a large number (which you cannot imagine except as a name) or the square root of two, or, infinity. Both of which are concepts that you can use, but not understand.

    Because you can fail to use something. You can USE something even if you do not know how to construct it. You can construct something. You can possess the knowledge of how to construct something.

    But understanding of use is different from understanding of construction. And one must make different claims depending upon which of them one is referring to.

    You can say you understand how to USE something, but you may not in fact understand how to construct it.

    This lack of understanding (constructive vs utilitarian) places constraints upon your truth claims. Just as it places limits upon the math (which consists of proofs) and logic (which consists of proofs) but both of which may or may not correspond to reality – and instead only demonstrate internal consistency. In other words, internal consistency is a demonstration of internal consistency but it is not a demonstration of correspondence.

    Given a distinction between internal consistency and external correspondence, which is a higher standard of truth? What does internal consistency demonstrate and what does correspondence with reality demonstrate?

    What is the difference between that which is BOTH internally consistent and externally correspondent, and that which is EITHER internally consistent OR externally correspondent?

    (c) I am hardly scorning scholarship given that it’s pretty much what I do: read all day. But demonstrating the point that one can ride a bike and show me that he can, and one can conduct an argument and show me that he can, or one can say he can ride a bike, and one can say he can conduct an argument.

    But demonstration is a property of correspondence, which is a higher standard of truth than internal consistency. Because GENERAL RULES that are used for internal consistency come at the sacrifice of external correspondence – almost always because contextual correspondence provides greater precision (information) than does general rule independent of corespondent context.

    (d) Mathematics is quite simple because it is used to describe constant relations. It can describe more variation than the physical universe can demonstrate (which is both advantageous and a weakness). Economics does not consist of constant relations so that mathematics is of less use in predicting the future because those relations are not constant.

    Now, there is a great difference between internally consistent disciplines ( logic and math) and externally correspondent (science and economics). Mathematics and logic contain statements that are internally consistent yet not externally correspondent. Science and economics prohibit these statements. In those circumstances where there is a conflict, which is true?

    Furthermore, if something can be described in terms of correspondence why does one describe it in terms of internal consistency, except to create a general rule, through the loss of information provided by the context?

    (e) Now, the open questions apply to all of the logics: I can logically deduce general rules from the names of those functions that are incalculable and impossible (which is why mathematicians wish to retain the excluded middle, and require the axiom of choice). So why should I be prohibited from the logic of the excluded middle and the axiom of choice, when doing so comes at the cost of my ability to create general rules independent of context? Why should I be prohibited from using these deductive tools if their only purpose is to covert the analog (precision in context) to the boolean (general rule independent of context)?

    And the answer is, that of course, these “named functions” are entirely permissible for the purpose of creating and deducing general rules. These general rules demonstrably apply in a multitude of contexts.

    But just as calling fire in a theatre, or telling a lie, or stealing does in fact ‘work to achieve one’s ends’ that does not mean that it is moral to do so, because by such action, one externalizes the cost of one’s efficacy onto others (society).

    We do not permit theft. We do not permit fraud. We do not permit privatization of the commons. We resist privatizations of even the normative commons, and we try to resist socialization of losses. So, therefore why should we not resist efficacy in a discipline if it likewise produces externalities?

    Because that is what immorality and morality mean: the prohibition on the externalization of costs.

    Now, one could say that we should all have the right to pollute equally. One could say that we have the right to lie equally. One could say that we have the right to create obscurant language equally. One could say that we have the right to create Religious (magical) language equally. One could say that we have the right to create platonic language easily. Because in each of these circumstances, the utility to the users is in obtaining a discount on the cost of action, over the cost of NOT engaging in pollution, lying, obscurantism, mysticism, and platonism, because each is a form of theft from others for the purpose of personal convenience.

    So if you deny that one can use the falsehood of induction, or the falsehood of religion, or the falsehood of lying for utilitarian purposes, then why are you not equally prohibited from using the falsehood of infinity, and imaginary existence?

    Or are you selectively immoral when it suits you?

    CLOSING

    This should be a sufficient description of the relatedness of fields once they are united by morality. And that is the purpose of philosophy: comprehension that facilitates action by providing a framework for criticism of ideas.

    It should be sufficient for anyone with any philosophical or logical training to at least grasp.

    It should also be obvious that you will not be able to circumvent this argument.

    Thus endeth the lesson.

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-13 06:53:00 UTC

  • Jesus vs Aristotle Marx vs Smith Freud’s vs Nietzsche. Cantor vs Poincaré. ??? v

    Jesus vs Aristotle

    Marx vs Smith

    Freud’s vs Nietzsche.

    Cantor vs Poincaré.

    ??? vs Turing (there is no answer to turing)

    Do you see a pattern?

    I do.

    A desperate attempt to retain the dream state.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-13 06:39:00 UTC

  • What is the likelihood that attempts at saving money in research in the physical

    What is the likelihood that attempts at saving money in research in the physical sciences, by reliance on mathematical analysis rather than experimental science, has delayed development of the physical sciences?

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-13 06:09:00 UTC

  • (Sketch) Solipsistic < ---- > Autistic (relation with the self) VS ( Empathic <-

    (Sketch)

    Solipsistic < —- > Autistic (relation with the self)

    VS

    (

    Empathic <——> Sociopathic (relation to others)

    AND

    Submissive <—-> Dominant

    )

    The desire for stimulation remains constant.

    The formation of higher brain areas exhibits variability.

    Brain structures

    Important research on personality traits and brain structures have been conducted, providing correlations between the Big Five personality traits and specific areas of the brain.

    Some research has been done to look into the structures of the brain and their connections to personality traits of the FFM. Two main studies were done by Sato et al. (2012)[67] and DeYoung et al. (2009).[68] Results of the two are as follows:

    Neuroticism: negatively correlated with ratio of brain volume to remainder of intracranial volume, reduced volume in dorsomedial PFC and a segment of left medial temporal lobe including posterior hippocampus, increased volume in the mid-cingulate gryus.

    Extraversion: positively correlated with orbitofrontal cortex metabolism, increased cerebral, volume of medial orbitofrontal cortex.

    Agreeableness: negatively correlated with left orbitofrontal lobe volume in frontotemporal dementia patients, reduced volume in posterior left superior temporal sulcus, increased volume in posterior cingulate cortex.

    Conscientiousness: volume of middle frontal gyrus in left lateral PFC.

    Openness to experience: No regions large enough to be significant, although parietal cortex may be involved.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-13 06:07:00 UTC

  • (MORE RETIREMENTS) 1) That there can be no science of art. 2) Addiction. THERE C

    (MORE RETIREMENTS)

    1) That there can be no science of art.

    2) Addiction.

    THERE CAN BE NO SCIENCE OF ART

    Jonathan Gottschall.

    JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL

    US academic and author who specialises in literature and evolution and teaches at Washington & Jefferson College, Pennsylvania

    Fifteen thousand years ago in France, a sculptor swam and slithered almost a kilometre down into a mountain cave. Using clay, the artist shaped a big bull rearing up to mount a cow, and then left his creation in the bowels of the earth. The two bison of the Tuc D’Audoubert caves sat undisturbed for many thousands of years until they were rediscovered by spelunking boys [cavers] in 1912. The discovery of the clay bison was one of many shocking 20th-century discoveries of sophisticated cave art stretching back tens of thousands of years. The discoveries overturned our sense of what our caveman ancestors were like. They were not furry, grunting troglodytes. They had artistic souls. They showed us that humans are – by nature, not just by culture – art-making, art-consuming, art-addicted apes.

    But why? Why did the sculptor burrow into the earth, make art, and leave it there in the dark? And why does art exist in the first place? Scholars have spun a lot of stories in answer to such questions, but the truth is that we really don’t know. And here’s one reason why: science is lying down on the job.

    A long time ago someone proclaimed that art could not be studied scientifically, and for some reason almost everyone believed it. The humanities and sciences constituted, as Stephen Jay Gould might have proclaimed, separate, non-overlapping magisteria – that the tools of the one are radically unsuited to the other.

    The prehistoric bison carving at the Tuc D’Audoubert caves in France

    The prehistoric bison carving at the Tuc D’Audoubert caves in France: ‘Our caveman ancestors had artistic souls.’

    Science has mostly bought into this. How else can we explain its neglect of the arts? People live in art. We read stories, and watch them on TV, and listen to them in song. We make paintings and gaze at them on walls. We beautify our homes like bowerbirds adorning nests. We demand beauty in the products we buy, which explains the gleam of our automobiles and the sleek modernist aesthetic of our iPhones. We make art out of our own bodies: sculpting them through diet and exercise; festooning them with jewellery and colourful garments; using our skins as living canvas for the display of tattoos. And so it is the world over. As the late Denis Dutton argued in The Art Instinct, underneath the cultural variations, “all human beings have essentially the same art”.

    Our curious love affair with art sets our species apart as much as our sapience or our language or our use of tools. And yet we understand so little about art. We don’t know why art exists in the first place. We don’t know why we crave beauty. We don’t know how art produces its effects in our brains – why one arrangement of sound or colour pleases while another cloys. We don’t know very much about the precursors of art in other species, and we don’t know when humans became creatures of art. (According to one influential theory, art arrived 50,000 years ago with a kind of creative big bang. If that’s true, how did that happen?) We don’t even have a good definition, in truth, of what art is. In short, there is nothing so central to human life that is so incompletely understood.

    Recent years have seen more use of scientific tools and methods in humanities subjects. Neuroscientists can show us what’s happening in the brain when we enjoy a song or study a painting. Psychologists are studying the ways novels and TV shows shape our politics and our morality. Evolutionary psychologists and literary scholars are teaming up to explore narrative’s Darwinian origins. And other literary scholars are developing a “digital humanities” using algorithms to extract big data from digitised literature. But scientific work in the humanities has mainly been scattered, preliminary, and desultory. It does not constitute a research programme.

    If we want better answers to fundamental questions about art, science must jump in the game with both feet. Going it alone, humanities scholars can tell intriguing stories about the origins and significance of art, but they don’t have the tools to patiently winnow the field of competing ideas. That’s what the scientific method is for: separating the stories that are more accurate, from the stories that are less accurate. But make no mistake, a strong science of art will require both the thick, granular expertise of humanities scholars and the clever hypothesis testing of scientists. I’m not calling for a scientific takeover of the arts. I’m calling for a partnership.

    This partnership faces great obstacles. There’s the unexamined assumption that something in art makes it science-proof. There’s a widespread, if usually unspoken, belief that art is just a frill in human life – relatively unimportant compared with the weighty stuff of science. And there’s the weird idea that science necessarily destroys the beauty it seeks to explain (as though a learned astronomer really could dull the star shine). But the Delphic admonition “know thyself” still rings out as the great prime directive of intellectual inquiry, and there will always be a gaping hole in human self-knowledge until we develop a science of art.

    ADDICTION

    Helen Fisher.

    HELEN FISHER

    Biological anthropologist at Rutgers University, New Jersey and author of Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love

    “If an idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it,” Einstein reportedly said. I would like to broaden the definition of addiction and retire the scientific idea that all addictions are pathological and harmful. Since the beginning of formal diagnostics more than 50 years ago, the compulsive pursuit of gambling, food, and sex (known as non-substance rewards) have not been regarded as addictions; only abuse of alcohol, opioids, cocaine, amphetamines, cannabis, heroin and nicotine have been formally regarded as addictions. This categorisation rests largely on the fact that substances activate basic “reward pathways” in the brain associated with craving and obsession, and produce pathological behaviours. Psychiatrists work within this world of psychopathology – that which is abnormal and makes you ill.

    As an anthropologist, they appear limited by this view. Scientists have now shown that food, sex and gambling compulsions employ many of the same brain pathways activated by substance abuse. Indeed, the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM) has finally acknowledged that at least one form of non-substance abuse can be regarded as an addiction: gambling. The abuse of sex and food were not included. Neither was romantic love. I shall propose that love addiction is just as real as any other addiction, in terms of its behaviour patterns and brain mechanisms. Moreover, it’s often a positive addiction.

    Scientists and laymen have long regarded romantic love as part of the supernatural, or as a social invention of the troubadours in 12th-century France. Evidence does not support these notions. Love songs, poems, stories, operas, ballets, novels, myths and legends, love magic, love charms, love suicides and homicides: evidence of romantic love has now been found in more than 200 societies ranging over thousands of years. Around the world men and women pine for love, live for love, kill for love and die for love. Human romantic love, also known as passionate love or “being in love” is regularly regarded as a human universal.

    Moreover, love-besotted men and women show all of the basic symptoms of addiction. Foremost, the lover is stiletto-focused on his/her drug of choice: the love object. They think obsessively about “him” or “her” (intrusive thinking), and often compulsively call, write, or appear, to stay in touch. Paramount to this experience is intense motivation to win their sweetheart, not unlike the substance abuser fixated on his/her drug. Impassioned lovers also distort reality, change their priorities and daily habits to accommodate the beloved, experience personality changes (affect disturbance), and sometimes do inappropriate or risky things to impress this special other. Many are willing to sacrifice, even die for “him” or “her”. The lover craves emotional and physical union with their beloved too (dependence). And like the addict who suffers when they can’t get their drug, the lover suffers when apart from the beloved (separation anxiety). Adversity and social barriers even heighten this longing (frustration attraction).

    In fact, besotted lovers express all four of the basic traits of addiction: craving; tolerance; withdrawal; and relapse. They feel a “rush” of exhilaration when with their beloved (intoxication). As their tolerance builds, the lover seeks to interact with the beloved more and more (intensification). If the love object breaks off the relationship, the lover experiences signs of drug withdrawal, including protest, crying spells, lethargy, anxiety, insomnia or hypersomnia, loss of appetite or binge eating, irritability and loneliness. Lovers, like addicts, also often go to extremes, sometimes doing degrading or physically dangerous things to win back the beloved. And lovers relapse the way drug addicts do: long after the relationship is over, events, people, places, songs or other external cues associated with their abandoning sweetheart can trigger memories and renewed craving.

    Of the many indications that romantic love is an addiction, however, perhaps none is more convincing than the growing data from neuroscience. Using brain scanning (functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI), several scientists have now shown that feelings of intense romantic love engage regions of the brain’s “reward system,” specifically dopamine pathways associated with energy, focus, motivation, ecstasy, despair and craving – including primary regions associated with substance (and non-substance) addictions. In fact, our group has found activity in the nucleus accumbens – the core brain factory associated with all addictions – in our rejected lovers. Moreover, some of our newest (unpublished) results suggest correlations between activities of the nucleus accumbens and feelings of romantic passion among lovers who were wildly, happily in love.

    Nobel laureate Eric Kandel recently said: “Brain studies will ultimately tell us what it is like to be human.” Knowing what we now know about the brain, my brain-scanning partner, Lucy Brown, has suggested that romantic love is a natural addiction; and I have maintained that this natural addiction evolved from mammalian antecedents some 4.4m years ago among our first hominid ancestors, in conjunction with the evolution of (serial, social) monogamy – a hallmark of humankind. Its purpose: to motivate our forebears to focus their mating time and metabolic energy on a single partner at a time, thus initiating the formation of a pair-bond to rear their young (at least through infancy) together as a team. The sooner we embrace what brain science is telling us – and use this information to upgrade the concept of addiction – the better we will understand ourselves and all the billions of others on this planet who revel in the ecstasy and struggle with the sorrow of this profoundly powerful, natural, often positive addiction: romantic love.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-12 15:52:00 UTC

  • TO “RETIRE” THE CONCEPT OF INFINITY (and cantor’s contribution to 20th century m

    http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/12/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement-edge-org?CMP=twt_fdTIME TO “RETIRE” THE CONCEPT OF INFINITY

    (and cantor’s contribution to 20th century mysticism with it)

    from: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/12/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement-edge-org?CMP=twt_fd

    —–

    MAX TEGMARK

    Physicist, researcher, precision cosmology; scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute; author of Our Mathematical Universe

    I was seduced by infinity at an early age. Cantor’s diagonality proof that some infinities are bigger than others mesmerised me, and his infinite hierarchy of infinities blew my mind. The assumption that something truly infinite exists in nature underlies every physics course I’ve ever taught at MIT and indeed all of modern physics. But it’s an untested assumption, which raises the question: is it actually true?

    There are in fact two separate assumptions: “infinitely big” and “infinitely small”. By infinitely big, I mean the idea that space can have infinite volume, that time can continue for ever, and that there can be infinitely many physical objects. By infinitely small, I mean the continuum: the idea that even a litre of space contains an infinite number of points, that space can be stretched out indefinitely without anything bad happening, and that there are quantities in nature that can vary continuously. The two are closely related because inflation, the most popular explanation of our big bang, can create an infinite volume by stretching continuous space indefinitely.

    A galaxy photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope

    ‘We don’t actually need the infinite to accurately describe the formation of galaxies.’ Photograph: Scott Camazine/Alamy

    The theory of inflation has been spectacularly successful, and is a leading contender for a Nobel prize. It explained how a subatomic speck of matter transformed into a massive big bang, creating a huge, flat and uniform universe with tiny density fluctuations that eventually grew into today’s galaxies and cosmic large-scale structure, all in beautiful agreement with precision measurements from experiments such as the Planck satellite. But by generically predicting that space isn’t just big, but truly infinite, inflation has also brought about the so-called measure problem, which I view as the greatest crisis facing modern physics. Physics is all about predicting the future from the past, but inflation seems to sabotage this: when we try to predict the probability that something particular will happen, inflation always gives the same useless answer: infinity divided by infinity. The problem is that whatever experiment you make, inflation predicts that there will be infinitely many copies of you far away in our infinite space, obtaining each physically possible outcome, and despite years of tooth-grinding in the cosmology community, no consensus has emerged on how to extract sensible answers from these infinities. So strictly speaking, we physicists are no longer able to predict anything at all!

    This means that today’s best theories similarly need a major shakeup, by retiring an incorrect assumption. Which one? Here’s my prime suspect: infinity.

    A rubber band can’t be stretched indefinitely, because although it seems smooth and continuous, that’s merely a convenient approximation: it’s really made of atoms, and if you stretch it too much, it snaps. If we similarly retire the idea that space itself is an infinitely stretchy continuum, then a big snap of sorts stops inflation from producing an infinitely big space, and the measure problem goes away. Without the infinitely small, inflation can’t make the infinitely big, so you get rid of both infinities in one fell swoop – together with many other problems plaguing modern physics, such as infinitely dense black hole singularities and infinities popping up when we try to quantize gravity.

    In the past, many venerable mathematicians expressed scepticism towards infinity and the continuum. The legendary Carl Friedrich Gauss denied that anything infinite really existed, saying “infinity is merely a way of speaking” and “I protest against the use of infinite magnitude as something completed, which is never permissible in mathematics”. In the past century, however, infinity has become mathematically mainstream, and most physicists and mathematicians have become so enamoured of infinity that they rarely question it. Why? Basically, because infinity is an extremely convenient approximation for which we haven’t discovered convenient alternatives. Consider, for example, the air in front of you. Keeping track of the positions and speeds of octillions of atoms would be hopelessly complicated. But if you ignore the fact that air is made of atoms and instead approximate it as a continuum, a smooth substance that has a density, pressure and velocity at each point, you find that this idealised air obeys a beautifully simple equation that explains almost everything we care about: how to build airplanes, how we hear them with soundwaves, how to make weather forecasts, etc. Yet despite all that convenience, air of course isn’t truly continuous. I think it’s the same way for space, time and all the other building blocks of our physical word.

    Let’s face it: despite their seductive allure, we have no direct observational evidence for either the infinitely big or the infinitely small. We speak of infinite volumes with infinitely many planets, but our observable universe contains only about 10 to the power of 89 objects (mostly photons). If space is a true continuum, then to describe even something as simple as the distance between two points requires an infinite amount of information, specified by a number with infinitely many decimal places. In practice, we physicists have never managed to measure anything to more than about 17 decimal places. Yet real numbers with their infinitely many decimals have infested almost every nook and cranny of physics, from the strengths of electromagnetic fields to the wave functions of quantum mechanics: we describe even a single bit of quantum information (qubit) using two real numbers involving infinitely many decimals.

    Not only do we lack evidence for the infinite, but we don’t actually need the infinite to do physics: our best computer simulations, accurately describing everything from the formation of galaxies to tomorrow’s weather to the masses of elementary particles, use only finite computer resources by treating everything as finite. So if we can do without infinity to figure out what happens next, surely nature can too – in a way that’s more deep and elegant than the hacks we use for our computer simulations. Our challenge as physicists is to discover this elegant way and the infinity-free equations describing it – the true laws of physics. To start this search in earnest, we need to question infinity. I’m betting that we also need to let go of it.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-12 15:51:00 UTC

  • Curt Doolittle shared a photo

    Curt Doolittle shared a photo.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-12 11:13:00 UTC