Why do you think, the arxiv article is more precise than classical astronomy? Actually, it is about “vague” philosophical interpretations of QM, in this case leading it back to classical, newtonean concepts. Whereas the classical physics was free of such issues.
ThomasR
Karma: 3
A related experiment with mice: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/circadian-disruption/
Once upon a time, there was a prisoner in solitary confinement, a former public enemy number one of France, aside the wards alone in the prison and allowed only to read science books. When he came across an astronomy textbook by Lagrange, he suddenly had the same idea as you express. http://ideafoundlings.blogspot.com/2009/10/nemo-eternal-returning.html
What do you think I would not undestand? Hinton’s Cubes share since ages a bad reputation of disturbing the minds of his followers, fitting nicely to contemporary theories of learning and habit-development of the brain. Only two mathematicians seem to have profited from an exposition to them in their childhood. Ans the one who played around with constructing 3D/4D-analogues to Penrose/Escher 2D/3D-”impossible figure” doubted that such an endeavor woud threaten his health. The info on Talmud etc. came from a well known scholar. Both examples fit to the questions above.
I find it interesting that the cofounder of the Singularity Institute now expresses so sarcastic about attempted work on AI the past decades. Has there been any related discussion on this or similar sites?
A (real)I’s should find the universe pretty boring, too boring to be (un)friendly. At talk touching that at the IAS by Wilczek: “Quantum theory radically transforms our fundamental understanding of physical reality. It reveals that the world contains a hidden richness of structure that we have barely begun to control and exploit. In this lecture, Frank Wilczek indicates the extraordinary potential ofquantum engineering (the size and nature of Hilbert space); reviews one important ongoing effort to harness it (topological quantum computing); and speculates on its ultimate prospects (quantum minds).”: http://video.ias.edu/wilczek I just looked it and found his remarks, that supersmart aliens may just have lost their interest in the universe, a nice confirmation of my idea, which came from an other route to the same conclusion: http://ideafoundlings.blogspot.com/2009/09/seti.html
Martin Gardner reported a case of No. 3 on people becoming mad after mistreating their minds wih “Hinton Cubes”. That are simple mechanical tools for developing a various parts of 4-dim. visual imagination (actually, when reading on regular solids etc., I can imagine such things without toys tools...). The unlucky practitioneers of a cult Hinton made out of that got mad because the trained ways of modified perception started working automatically, they could not stop that any more. Now imagine, someone would have confronted them with suitable analogues of impossible figures etc.…
An other case of No. 3 was reported by a jewish scholar on the Talmud this way: It’s 63 volumes are not only ‘passionate disputes’: By demanding the reader to follow them, they provide a training in the type of thinking used by those medieval, hermetic scholars. … Then a clever designed ‘mental trick lock’, an ‘intellectual vortex’ comes. The emotional and motivational aspect of all the training with repetitions, variations, rythms, starts working like a maelstrom along the previous levels of learning. The first ‘trick lock’ the student meets is the barrier of his own intellectual strength, a barrier artificially made thicker than necessary. Only then comes the real ‘trick lock’ for the student who thinks he has the trouble behind him: The now since long dragged-in mental concepts and thinking-ways are set into conflict. A Talmudist described it: ”… it puts the mind at war with itself; the more powerful the mind, the more destructive the conflict.”
I mean that substantial innovations came the past ca. 3 decades much rarer than one should have expected. Kasparov and Thiel say that in view of AI and communication technology, whereas my impression comes from science.
Not quite so. The n-Lab contains a page on it: http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/hyperstructure , but that is not that new. The usual deficiency of such constructs (and the many attempted definitions of n-categories) is their reliance on set theory. Grothendieck seems to have been the first to suggest to forget set theory as foundations, and Voevodsky’s way to build a homotopy-theoretic foundation of mathematics on some sort of computer language (leading to entirely new approaches to artificial theorem proving/checking): http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/hyperstructure may be interesting for Baas’ ideas too. Interestingly too, homotopy theory, n-category were caused by attempts to deal with topology, and Baas’ concepts come from the same background. He was apparently motivated by Charles Ehresmann’s ctitique that n-categories should be insufficient.
A weird version: http://www.vetscite.org/publish/items/005309/index.html
Some relates Q&A’s from a math student discussion group: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/28158/a-learning-roadmap-request-from-high-school-to-mid-undergraduate-studies http://mathoverflow.net/questions/1812/learning-new-mathematics http://mathoverflow.net/questions/28438/mathematics-and-autodidactism http://mathoverflow.net/questions/4580/pacing-for-learning-new-material
What do yuo mean with “Omega”? E.g. Chaitin’s Omega or large cardinals do not fit the remarks.
The talk you link to is below the level of 1960′s and 1970′s discussions of that issue. Exist no better contemporary discussions of such issues?
Concerning “Guns, Germs, and Steel “: Murray Gell-Mann is involved in some interesting research on general patterns of civilization. But his and Diamond’s schemes are just about some general and indirect indicators, not about what the essence of “civilization” is. To get an idea of that, I am curious about instances where “civilization” went down quickly. This puts e.g. “Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941”, and “Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization” on my desk. A very remarkable case is told about in Simone Weil’s “L’agonie d’une civilisation”. I scanned two essay by Zbigniew Herbert on decivilization from this—someone curious to get them? “The Dream of Scipio” by Ian Pears sketches (in typical french history-through-novels manner) a thrilling pattern of several critical moments of the last 1500 years of European history.
Just take “desk archeology” as metapher to be filled as one likes in that context.
A funny idea. My goal is to work further into these issues. Of course I have a precise idea what to do in which order, but as amateur-math reader my attitude is generic lazyness which only occasional deforms into real studying. Unfortunately some friends with whom I discuss those issues are away for more than a month, so there is not much of external motivation.
You may be curious about this information collecting project. Concerning “skeptical that we can do anything … through policy”: Just a few months before people teared down the Berlin wall, even the most respected researchers in sociology and economy estimated that East-Germany would last at least one hundret years more. Like cold war, which was generally extected to be solvable only by politics, but that this should be extremly complicated. Actually, it was easy. (And even more urgent than everyone had guessed, as an aquaintance had researched.
There is something which one could call the “Pirx paradigm”, coming from Stanislav Lem:
The complexity of really nontrivial questions surpasses that of the formalized methods used by the conscious part of the scientist’s mind. Only the whole mind’s complexity meets the questions in view of complexity and flexibility. Therefore, a great mind/scientist works with his complete personality, which e.g. expresses in the observable unique and personal way big scientists write their work. What one perceives as “humbleness”, puzzlement, irrational curiosity, unsecurity or absentmindedness are then actually the marks of essential parts of the personality outside the narrow frame of conscious procedures (personal feelings, memories, associations, Lem stressed explicitely “honesty” too, because that is the absence of conscious “trickyness”).
Lem discussed in some of his stories the contrasting side too—the deformation and degeneration of attempted, but conscious and therefore subcomplex, “rationality” into crackpot-science and crackpot-engineering. There, seemingly rational approaches gradually exchange the issues to be tackled (and the parts of nature in which they are embedded) by misfigured echos of the researcher/engineer’s neurosis and mental entropy. I recommend to take a look into Lem’s stories: The Inquest, Ananke, Test.
BTW, this MIT reserach program looks very much like one of Lem’s jokes...
Thanks!
That is hard to estimate, but I think I need the same or less time for studying them. But of course the issue is how one reads them and how much one spends into extracting the hidden ideas and translating them into one’s own mental structures (instead of turning one’s mind into an emulation of the author’s one) . One can study and understand very advanced papers fast and well without a productive “translation”, and the more one knows, the easier it is to restrict reading that way.