...otherwise known as "anecdotal reports", not science.
Especially when the "result" being reported is a subjective experience described verbally by the two subjects to researchers looking for the result. What could go wrong?
So I take it you don't believe in the Big Bang? Or is it turtles all the way down?
I'm quite fond of turtles. But saying that we do not know the cause of the big bang is not the same thing as saying that it definitely had no cause. Then it comes down to what you want to believe. I find that it is a lot easier to believe that the big bang happened as part of a causal chain (in the sense of cause used in physics, not cause as in hairy thunderer) than that it "just happened". This is certainly consistent with observed physical law and conservation of mass energy, so it's not quite religion.
Out of curiosity, did you reason out every word you use? Or do you propose using "sort of things with puppies" instead of "sort of things with kittens" was a quantum fluctuation? Or would you recognize that humans have yet to reach the point of complete self-analysis and that when people speak of "intent" and "thought", they may all originate physically but it's currently impossible (I tend to believe simply impossible) to specify a cause for them all. That it is in some level "random" doesn't take away from intent because, as you argue, you believe you have reason in a physical universe that is founded on randomness. Obviously if you make a distinction at that level, you can make a distinction with altruism.
I don't know exactly what I did -- or am doing -- as I type these words. It's difficult to say that I don't reason them out, as they make reasonable sense when I'm done. I even thought of using kittens in my example with a puppy, but deliberately chose puppies instead. But why didn't I use tapeworms? Don't they deserve love too? Hard to say.
Everything else you state here I already explicitly stated: "So I have to assume that when you define altruism as an act without a cause, you mean an act without a known cause, just as random acts of violence aren't at all random, although it may be impossible to narrow down the cause to the day some poor child got Malibu Barbie for Christmas." My point isn't to plumb the origins of the interior monologue, because where does the interior monologue itself come from? It isn't "without cause", but its cause isn't the interior monologue itself or I'd never manage to think a thought or type a sentence at all. I'd argue even more strongly -- that however cogent an argument I myself generate, if you ask me to explain how and why I generated that cogent argument all I could say is "I dunno, it just sort of happens in my head".
Which again leads me back to the point that it isn't the (in)ability to articulate a non-selfish reason for an altruistic act that makes an act altruistic -- by that standard, all acts are altruistic simply because we cannot articulate where articulation itself comes from in our minds and most of the things we do we do spontaneously. Where do the answers to crossword puzzle clues come from as I fill in the crossword? I have no idea, but wherever/however it is, it is "me".
Personally, I think evil is more random. Literally. Indeed, that principle is familiar to us all as the second law of thermodynamics. Good tends to be organized, and hence less likely because it is LESS random. Evil is easy.
The point is that to explain altruism, one has to -- um -- show that it isn't really altruism.
No, the problem is that "to explain altruism" is taken to mean "altruism is the effect of something else". Yet the very definition of altruism is that it is an act without cause. Trying to explain altruism is like trying to explain random acts of violence. The truth is, a lot of acts aren't altruistic or random.
Ah, but you see, I'm a physicist and I don't really believe in effects without causes. So I have to assume that when you define altruism as an act without a cause, you mean an act without a known cause, just as random acts of violence aren't at all random, although it may be impossible to narrow down the cause to the day some poor child got Malibu Barbie for Christmas.
BTW, your assertion that altruism is an act without a cause does not appear to be correct:
There is nothing in the definition that suggests that altruism is causeless or random. Altruism is defined to be the performance of good or self-sacrificing acts without the specific cause of some expectation of reward. To quote further:
Much debate exists as to whether "true" altruism is possible. The theory of psychological egoism suggests that no act of sharing, helping or sacrificing can be described as truly altruistic, as the actor may receive an intrinsic reward in the form of personal gratification. The validity of this argument depends on whether intrinsic rewards qualify as "benefits."
According to your definition, only if I decide to give $100 to Unicef if I flip a coin and it comes up heads, then flip the coin (and it comes up heads) is it random, or causally linked to a truly unpredictable event, and hence "altruism". According to the correct definition, the altruism occurred in the decision to give money to Unicef in the first place (conditionally or not) without expecting any reward back from Unicef or the children it helps, and in order for that to be considered causeless or random all of my thoughts, decisions, actions would have to be considered causeless or random. In all cases, I have some reason for making the decision, because humans are mechanistic organism built on top of natural laws that are intrinsically causal. It could be a near-random reason -- the amplified outcome of a quantum fluctuation in my neural synapses (in which case it isn't real "altruism" because "I" didn't chose to be altruistic, a mechanistic accident resulted in the action) or it could be something that I could clearly enough articulate, explainable in human high level concepts, in which case it still has a cause, but the cause could be that I was raised to consider altruism a virtue and to wish to be virtuous through a complex system of conditioning -- rewards and punishments -- when I was too young to resist. I rather suspect that altruism is mostly "caused" by this latter process, somewhat and sometimes by the former process, and sometimes related to still older processes that are evolutionary in origin -- mammals sometimes adopt babies across species not necessarily because they are randomly altruistic towards another species, but because they are slightly miswired and repurpose a healthy genetic tendency to protect their own soft and furry offspring into the act of protecting some other animals soft and furry offspring instead. Humans do exactly the same sort of thing with puppies, and can often rationalize the actions elaborately using verbal reasoning.
So no, I don't think altruism is selfless action without cause, any more than random acts of violence are random or my decision to reply to your reply is random, although it is altruistic enough -- I get no direct benefit from you changing your mind, I get only the satisfaction of knowing that I've helped you (perhaps) towards
The point is that to explain altruism, one has to -- um -- show that it isn't really altruism. Even Christianity's take on altruism isn't that it is a truly selfless act, only that you get your reward later, in heaven. The closest you can probably come in human affairs is to consider an atheist (no karma-weighted rebirth, no post-mortem reward or punishment) who sacrifices their life to save the life of a complete stranger. And even there, one can come up with a sort of "happy people make for a happy world" and "it is better to live in a happy world than an unhappy world" and a "I'm going to die anyway and it is existentially a pointless coin flip whether I die now or die later, but I'll get a lot of momentary satisfaction from the process of sacrificing myself for others so that we overall can live in a happier world right now" argument that makes it if not expressed self-interest in the classic sense, a rational choice (mistaken or not) made by a self-aware entity and hence of some immediate "benefit" to the individual making the choice in a strictly utilitarian sense.
A variant of this happy people thing is the basis of Buddhism, an atheist altruistic philosophy. Suffering is bad, suffering is universal, we would individually be better off suffering less, but since we live in a collective society where we can inflict suffering on others and have others inflict suffering on us, it is in our own self-interest to at the very least be compassionate and act in a way that is both protective of our own happiness (minimizes our own suffering) and either avoids inflicting additional suffering on others or actively helps them to avoid suffering and thereby become more content. It's quite rational -- I'd much rather live in a world where people are for the most part contented with their lot, secure economically, safe physically, Maslow's hierarchy of needs well-met than to live in a world of chaos and backstabbing, war and robbery, where the strong impose their will on the weak and inflict endless suffering upon them. Even the lot of the strong in a world like that is less to be desired than life in a "just" society that strongly enforces the inverse golden rule (do not unto others as you would have them not do unto you).
At the end of the day, we'd all be a lot better off if we just sat around having a few beers with our neighbors, taking turns buying. Metaphorically if not otherwise -- allowing for the fact that 10% or thereabouts of the human species are potential or actual alcoholics, as we haven't finished evolving alcohol tolerance in only 10,000 or so years, and alcoholism is a moderately weak selection pressure (and one that for much of the last 6000 years, has been a survival advantage on multiple counts).
Or, y'know, you're a white dude born March 29, 1955 in Raleigh, North Carolina. [duke.edu]. But nice try. I never said anybody got in "only" because of their family's wealth. But stress levels in the first six months of life have a huge impact on brain function. Affluence is strongly correlated to better education at all levels. Worse yet, the study is sampling from profs at US universities. And affluence in the US is strongly correlated to race. Not even bothering to look at institutions in India, Japan, China, Russia, or Korea. There's a huge amount of mathematical talent in these countries that is largely unknown to American mathematicians. Gonna be hard to tease "whitey with a Y-chromosome" out of the data.
Again, I don't argue with any of that, although it isn't 1970 any more and there's a lot more racial balance than you perhaps might think especially in the top institutions that get their pick of the best people in the world, not just the US. Our department chair is female and chinese, for example. In our department we have tenured faculty from China, Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, as well as non-white and/or non-male faculty who are second generation plus American citizens. We're way past the point where any of this is a "token" representation, and Duke has been actively trying to increase the diversity of its faculty with new hires for decades at this point. We still suffer somewhat from damage done back in the 70's and 80's (or earlier) -- it takes 25+ years to grow a physics Ph.D., maybe 30 to get them through a postdoc and get on a tenure track, and there is still a disparity in the numbers of women that are majoring in physics and pursuing a Ph.D. but the gap is gradually narrowing.
As for whether or not it is a shit study -- sure, maybe it is. One of many things I study is how the brain learns and what sort of factors might count as "intelligence". Intelligence itself is quite difficult to define or measure, and there are numerous studies that suggest that it is remarkably easy to obtain biased results when studying it, especially if one uses a comparatively narrow definition and ignores selection biases such as the ones you describe. It is also fairly well known at this point that a person's intelligence is governed by many factors, BOTH genetic AND environmental, and that for a person to attain the sort of peak accomplishments in math or science that the study is using as an inclusion criterion, one very likely has to HAVE both factors in some sort of fortuitous constellation.
But again, the only way you can properly conclude that it is a shit study is from looking well beyond the level of description in the top article. In particular, the only way you can know is to know how they are going to manage their Bayesian priors and how they are designing the selection process beyond "pulling from top math and physics departments". And statistics (especially Bayesian statistics) is a particular area of study of mine, BTW, so I know more than a bit about what I'm talking about. The quality of their results will depend on how they utilize that which is already known and control for the very biases you list. They CAN almost certainly arrange for their sample to be well-distributed across different races and/or country of origin and gender, depending on how many participants they end up with and how deep they go into the pool of top-ranked Universities even just in the US, as the US has been pulling a large fraction of the best mathematicians and scientists of the world for close to a century just because it is a comparatively nice and safe place to live. Whether they WILL do this depends on the motivations of the people conducting the study, whether they have some hypothesis stated or otherwise that they wish to prove, their competence in statistics and methodology, none of which I can speak to.
But again, all of these things are critical factors in ANY study of genetic traits desirable or undesirable that might be conducted. If you were looking at the genetics of ex
Well, or I grew up in India and walked daily through poverty that most Americans never see or experience in my blind privilege. But it's really hard to tell exactly what life experiences a total stranger has had, isn't it? Look, clearly you think that the top article's search technique is less than ideal, and as I said I might even agree with you, although I have absolutely no idea how one would conduct the "broad survey" you suggest and look for outliers, given the general unreliability of things like IQ tests and the dependence of their results on cultural background and education (see e.g. the Flynn effect). You also have to factor in Bayes' theorem. Just what do you think the prevalence of mathematical genius in the general population is? How would you test for it? What is the false positive/false negative rate of your test?
There could be a Ramanujan living in the Amazonian rainforest today, but the only manifestation of their genius might be their enormous insight into the ways of an environment that would kill either of us overnight plus their skill as a tribal shaman. Or they might be tribal outcasts or dead -- there is some evidence that genius comes at the expense of repurposing cortex devoted to social or other brain function. How would you identify such a person in your survey not just as potentially mathematically competent, but as a mathematical genius? I think you are just plain mistaken when you assert that their selection mechanism is fundamentally incorrect -- at the very least it pulls from a group that is highly filtered by many things, one of which is, without question, intelligence and mathematical ability compared to most (but sure, probably not all) of the general population.
We might also agree that what they are planning to look at with regard to their genetics is narrow and stupid IF that is really ALL they are planning to look at (which I doubt). They really need to run a huge battery of tests on the individuals in their group and in various control groups and in first and second degree relatives of the in-group and more, both genetic and the other kind. I suspect that they will simply replicate the findings of many others who have already conducted similar studies, that intelligence and accomplishment (as outliers) have a tendency to regress back to the mean (within Flynn effect amplification that might be associated with "privilege") between generations.
But none of this is a particularly good reason to make the whole thing into some sort of quasi-racist nazi class war (on their part). Yes, their sample is in some sense at least partially self-selected and hence subject to all sorts of biases. OTOH, the group they are looking for is one that is going to be very difficult to identify any other way, and the educational system of the world has never been MORE egalitarian and blind to privilege than it is today, and the world has never been more affluent than it is today both. That isn't to say that we are even particularly close to a long term goal of complete social and economic equality (of opportunity if nothing else, since so far we cannot do anything about the distribution of abilities and yes, I have a brother with Down's syndrome so don't tell me everybody is a genius if only the proletariat would rise up against their capitalist oppressors) but at this point the pool of the most talented tenured faculty in math and physics worldwide has plenty of members who were not "born to privilege".
I'm sure that there are few there who probably DID only get there because of intelligent and wealthy parents as I've met them (although even they aren't stupid or they wouldn't make the cut into Princeton or MIT or for that matter Duke). And I'm certain that our educational system fails to attract some of the brightest into academia because they'd rather make money or because they attend a really shitty school and never have a chance to succeed (although as I said, real genius has been known to transcend THAT barrier time and again). And even th
We're not talking about "basic numeracy" here, though. We're talking about being mathematically gifted. I'll cheerfully agree that there is a huge range of math abilities that are related to or proportional to quality of education, but talent in math is not, or at least, while one might well lose some gifted persons from extremely poor backgrounds, the pool of college educated persons is broad enough, and the opportunities for support for gifted students great enough, that there is more than adequate sample of gifted individuals among those that attended a University, majored in mathematics, and displayed the real gift to an extent that made graduate continuation and an academic career likely regardless of the student's original socioeconomic group.
Again, I'm not even talking about students that make it through a math or physics graduate program with a Ph.D., as that merely indicates "competence", not necessarily brilliance. I'm saying that within this competent group there are individuals that are brilliant, and honestly, I don't think there is that much bias preventing the brilliant from rising to the top once they get into college in the first place. That's the real barrier, that and the possibly terrible education they received up to that point. But mathematical brilliance is surprisingly proof against even a poor education, as math geniuses aren't taught to be geniuses, they just are. That's the way their brains work.
In some sense I envy them. I'm merely competent, or perhaps competent-plus, not brilliant, so while I (for fun) sometimes toy with some of the famous math puzzles or unproven (but probably true) theorems I'm pretty unlikely to solve them by insight or by slogging hard work either one. A Ramanujan would just look at many of these puzzles and see the answer all at once without any "work" or "slogging" at all.
Of course in some cases those math geniuses seem to obtain their brilliance in part by repurposing cortex used for other, e.g. social purposes, so you have Godel starving to death because he simply forgot to eat, but the thought of being such a bright spark in the dark night is tempting even at such a cost. I suspect that this is the "kind" of thing that they are trying to study in the top article, and while I personally think studying dynamic brain function with e.g. fMRI and a host of other tools would be more generally productive than looking for genetic correlates, I applaud the idea of trying to figure it out. Mankind's post-Enlightenment history of knowledge and discovery has been one of slow, slogging progress in the hands of the competent to competent plus punctuated by revolutionary, paradigm shifting discoveries by those very brilliant lights, who often seem to accomplish what they do directly, intuitively and effortlessly (compared to the slogging).
Understanding brain function and capacity (both genetic and developmental), insight, and above all, how to TRAIN both our own brains and the brains of those that we educate how to increase the probability of insight, optimize their own intelligence (given their genetics), and alter the probability of revolutionary discovery for the better seems like a worthwhile target for anyone concerned with the improvement of the world.
Disclaimer: I'm a theoretical physicist. You mean like Ramanujan? Or Riemann? Or any of the zillion other exceptions?
Not that I don't agree with the rest of your comment, BTW, only the "predominantly arise in highly privileged segments of society" bit. I actually rather think that there are significant genetic difference between at least some kinds of mathematical prodigies and "normal humans", or at least, there are significant differences in their brains. I don't know how "highly privileged" I am outside of getting a good education that permitted me to take advantage of my intelligence, but I do know that I'm no Ramanujan, I'm not a "lightning calculator", but I've taught and advised a good number of very bright students from all economic classes over the decades and there are some that are simply scary intelligent in math independent of their privilege or opportunity level. I'm not certain precisely how one would do the "broad survey" you suggest -- the people who have the true gift(s) that I think they are looking for will either (like Ramanujan) be so exceptional that they float to the top out of whatever social strata they start in or they will be more or less undetectable. At least, surveying from the select pool of people who have e.g. discovered famous theorems or otherwise made breakthrough discoveries makes it a lot simpler to find "outliers in the data" by concentrating on groups that are almost all outliers in the data.
Having rich, white parents might get you into a top-ranked school, but (almost) nobody becomes a famous mathematician or physicist because their parents were wealthy. Parental money doesn't equate to ability to work with complex algebras, solve differential systems, derive important abstract results in number theory, or even understand differential geometry well enough to work with it coherently. Otherwise physics graduate schools would be filled with the scions of rich white people instead of people of all races and colors (including a huge number of Chinese and Indian persons that have no possible claim to either). I dunno, maybe you can buy a math Ph.D. But I doubt it.
And one can build a desktop-scale Tesla coil and get at least 100-250 keV electrons (that I have done at home:-) and over 0.5c, and larger ones can reach 500+ keV and 0.9 c. But a betatron is probably a better use of your magnet wire if you want to hit the MeV range and start to add 9's.
One actually needs to be careful with Tesla coils (as with CRTs) not to generate hard x-rays by accident, for example by allowing electrons to outflow through a vacuum until they strike glass or some other confining solid. CRT television tubes contained a lot of lead precisely to guard against that, making their disposal problematic as toxic waste although the lead is pretty well bound up in class and leaded crystal has the same issues.
What would be really cool would be to be able to build a 100 MeV electron accelerator on a desktop and then have a way of inverting the electrons directly into muons at high efficiency, then using the muons to catalyze fusion events. Sadly, I don't think we know any way of creating a "virtual neutrino" the way the free electron laser generates a virtual photon in the wiggler in the rest frame of the electrons passing through to get high gain forward scattering conversion. AFAIK, the only significantly populated pathways to muons involve e.g. pions as an intermediate step and this drops the efficiency to less than 10% in the channel, but if one could come up with a direct channel to muons at a much higher conversion rate, muon catalyzed fusion could still end up being viable as an energy source.
Perhaps if we ever get a better handle on just what neutrinos ARE...
We're talking 1930's and 1940's here, a self-confining inductive transformer, and a 5 MeV electron has \gamma \approx 10 and travelling at roughly 0.995c. It doesn't make a good beam source though both because it is pulsed and because the electrons have to make it out through a rapidly varying fringe field.
I'm guessing that there are a half-dozen ways of producing MeV scale electrons at the desktop, although most of them aren't going to be "useful" sources in that they produce anything like a coherent beam. Hmmm, Google suggests that there are a half dozen ways and some of them ARE useful at the desktop scale and indeed are in use at e.g. CERN as devices for injecting electron beams into accelerators for testing purposes. I'd guess that an ordinary electric arc produces "some" MeV scale electrons just from the tail of the MB distribution -- small tail, sure, but there are a lot of electrons and an arc can be quite hot.
Still, building a homemade cyclotron -- wow, I wish I could have done that when I was a kid. I built a bunch of stuff, but never thought of building that.
Hawking radiation is produced when vacuum fluctuations near the event horizon produce a particle pair, one of the two fall in, and the other escapes. In order to make the process make mass-energy sense, the particle that falls in is more probably the antiparticle of the pair so that the BH supposedly emits normal matter and decays. For tiny/microscopic black holes this process is supposedly extremely rapid so that they "evaporate". For "large" BHs, it takes so long that one can nearly ignore the process compared to e.g. the influx of ordinary matter.
However, Hawking has been shown to be wrong in a lot of his original work on this theory -- or rather, the theory has been shown to be inconsistent with Quantum Mechanics -- and the real entropy increases associated with this sort of process or the process of ordinary infalling matter have been shown not to exist. Leonard Susskind's book The Black Hole Wars: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics walks you through all of this at the accessible-to-normal-humans level (as opposed to the level of QFT/String theory, which he also does elsewhere).
All pretty heady stuff, of course. Theorists can really go to town when the nearest known potential physical realization of an idea is order of 10^22 meters distant and only visible at all from synchrotron radiation from infalling charged particles emitted some distance away from the supposed event horizon. But I do agree that a TOE needs to be conservative of quantum information at least until we reproducibly and believably observe a direct violation of this principle somewhere.
...and open up thorium mining in the western part of the state, ideally while pushing hard for LFTR or other thorium based meltdown proof non-pressurized-vessel nuclear. NC alone could supply the entire energy needs of the US for the next 17,000 years, according to one assessment I've read, while yes, producing lots of rare-earth metals. Currently they don't mine the rare earths because the admixed Thorium is viewed as toxic waste!
... after owning a succession of Nintendo systems over decades while raising three sons as a computer-geek adult gamer, Nintendo's stature as a gaming system peaked with the 64. The WII sucked (and continues to suck today). The new WII sucks worse. I own one of each, and here are a few of their manifold flaws:
* Expensive, especially for what you get. * Game availability strictly limited, and the games that exist suck with literally only one or two exceptions. Like Zelda, Zelda, and Zelda. And maybe one or two more that aren't completely terrible, but compared to the PS-series? Major laugh (we have a PS3 upstairs too, and had a PS2 in its day and always have game-class PC's as well. We don't have a PS4 prepurchased at this point because my kids are all out of the house and nobody is bugging me to get one -- yet -- but I'm guessing that in a year or three we will for the next generation of grandchildren as they come of age if not my college-age kids coming home for Christmas). * The Wii Mii actually managed to out-suck the Wii. It's toplevel operating system is insane. No, I don't want to have to generate an avatar that forcibly participates in a faked-out social media experience designed to convince an idiot or small child that the interface is somehow "cool". It is a total PITA to boot, get through the setup, and listen to its eternal background music with Zeldoid-chirps representing avatar communications until you actually start up an app to shut it up. Even children don't need that or find an app layout over/around a crowd of avatars to be "simple". Adults or teens find it absolutely mind-numbing. * I'm still telling it to ignore an email loopback step in the network setup every time it reboots. Why? Why is this there in the first place? It will ignore it forever; it just forces me to hit one extra icon during startup over and over and over and doesn't in any meaningful way interfere with the only thing I want the damn thing to do, which is hook into my wireless network and function. I Do Not Need for it to validate some sort of marketing link with Nintendo that effectively gives them my email address as a target for an eternity of spambot activity. Nothing else it does needs to know about my avatar either. In fact, it doesn't need an avatar system at all. * The secondary Wii Mii pad looks cool at first, but in practice it turns out to be a PITA. It has an active backlit screen and tiny battery, so you cannot run it for as long as one single evening of watching e.g. Amazon or Netflix (my primary use for it these days) unless it is permanently plugged into the USB cable. Apps tend to split functionality between the controller pad and the screen in an unusual way as well -- the Amazon app for example has you constantly switching between the pad and the screen to look for icons to click or functions to press. The old Wii with a basic nunchuk controller was far easier to use, as you only had to look one place and although that controller has ITS flaws as well, they are at least compensated for by being able to actually use swords or fish in Zelda. * The MII operating system was initially a bugfarm with serious networking problems. That's gradually diminished with updates, but both Netflix and Amazon's movie app have serious buffering issues in spite of the fact that I've got 30 Mbps internet into the house.
In the end, I would have been better off spending the money on any of the following:
* A laptop to plug the TV directly in to. That way I could play the full range of PC games e.g. WoW, use the system to work in linux, watch netflix or amazon movies or DVDs, and so on. * Almost any set-top box. Less than half the price and all I functionally give up is Zelda, and I've already DONE Zelda. I keep going to Best Buy thinking "Maybe today Nintendo will have released a halfway decent Wii/Mii game", and every time I am disappointed. * An android tablet. My galaxy tab has an HDMI cable that lets me use it almost exactly the same way that the Mii pad works, o
I'm sure that this is right, which is why I tried to point it out. That is the point of the Nakajima-Zwanzig projection-valued operator. There is a nice 1999 paper by Breuer, et. al. that you can retrieve from Google Scholar or arXiv that walks one through the derivation of the quantum theory of open systems, including examples and a fairly nice discussion of how the open system can be reduced to one that has Markovian dynamics (for weak coupling or strong coupling to only a few degrees of freedom). It doesn't spend as much time discussing the full non-Markovian integrodifferential solution as it might, but it still is a really nice short paper that walks you through the partitioning, projection, and various ways of treating the "bath" (rest of the quantum Universe) stochastically because of its MISSING INFORMATION, not because the original density matrix was itself necessarily indeterminate.
The point, in the end, is that probability in quantum theory comes from mere ignorance, precisely the same way it appears in classical theory, not because quantum theory is fundamentally indeterminate. This is a widespread error, although to be honest I don't hear it made often by physicists, who understand, if they don't always specify in conversation or discussion, that the "probability" that enters an experiment involving e.g. a filtering apparatus does so because of the unknown quantum state of the filtering apparatus and a perturbative separation of the interaction of the "system" with the apparatus "bath". It absolutely pervades the public semiclassical perception, though, and even physicists who (if pressed) understand that quantum theory is not intrinsically indeterminate all agree that measurement is! In precisely the same way that I am certain that all of the air in the room is not going to bounce just right and end up as a blob of liquid air in one corner, I am certain that things like quantum decay in a weakly coupled vacuum are purely probabilistic, because we do not know all of the state and phases of the rest of the Universe that relativistically represents that vacuum.
In this regard, note especially the discussion of the Jaynes-Cummings model in the paper. My own interest in the subject arose back when I worked in quantum optics and developed a Langevin (Markovian) set of coupled stochastic ODEs that could be used to trace the microscopic dynamics of an collection of driven two-level atoms coupled to radiative decay field modes (the "bath") inside a resonant cavity. Jaynes was a reigning deity of both information-theoretic statistical mechanics and quantum optics, and his insight into the correct description of spontaneous emission (and construction of a computable model of same) is still in my own mind at least a great achievement.
Except that this doesn't address whether or not the Universe is non-deterministic. It addresses whether or not one can perform a certain set of measurements on a tiny subset of the Universe -- where we could then spend a lot of energy speaking about just what a "measurement" is and how to define it and build an algebra associated with it -- and then make a unique prediction about the outcome of a second set of measurements made in the future. Or, we could find a copy of Julian Schwinger's classic book "Quantum Kinematics and Dynamics", which lays out the axiomatic basis for Quantum Mechanics better than anyone else I've ever read in his first three chapters (where the first two chapters are titled "The Algebra of Measurement" and "The Geometry of States", saving us all that work).
We could then take note at some point that measurement is an irreversible process in physics. That's basically one way of viewing the point of Schwinger's THIRD chapter. We could also take note that we make all sorts of mistakes when we assume that time has some definitive arrow when analyzing microscopic events, because the underlying microscopic equations are time-reversal invariant.
Bell's inequality makes sense only when one considers a strictly time-ordered sequence of irreversible measurements with an assumption of locality. If one tries to analyze the time reversal of the series of measurements, where we know that every single interaction involved is time-reversal symmetric so that the system must evolve back from a supposedly classically resolved state in the detectors to the specific entangled state in which it began, we begin to see why it can be perfectly correct and yet have nothing to do with whether or not the Universe is or isn't deterministic. We may not know the phases and states of all of the interactions and objects in the detectors used to perform the measurements, but we can see that what we interpreted as as a classically irreversible process is really reversible, and the apparent change in entropy is illusory and a consequence of our ignorance of the fully entangled, time-symmetric state of the detectors with the fully entangled state of the system!
But it is a lot easier to just consider a closed quantum system -- the density matrix of your choice. Put it in an initial state. Time evolve it. Show me something indeterminate in its time evolution. Time evolution is unitary and reversible, classically or quantum mechanically. Bell's inequality is the moral equivalent of the paradox of friction as a "non-conservative force" in a classical universe where only conservative forces exist -- it is much more a statement of probabilities and incomplete information and if you look hard enough, you find that where you thought entropy was increasing, it's only increasing when you integrate/sum over all variables for which you have incomplete information.
So I absolutely agree that we cannot predict the outcome of many quantum experiments, but that is not because they do not (or will not) have a definite, unique outcome, not does it mean that two Universes prepared in exactly the same initial state will every evolve into different states. As I point out, try it! Take two density matrices for closed quantum systems! Show me how the same laws of nature and e.g. the Heisenberg description cause them to evolve into different density matrices. Then we can talk about "evidence" for non-determinism.
Of course if you want to claim that the consistent laws of physics themselves are incorrect, so that physics really is non-deterministic, well, good luck with that. That's the part that is very difficult to challenge empirically, because we whenever we check (as closely as we can check) that's not what we find, and isn't what the theory of quantum mechanics actually says.
Or, you could pick up a book on quantum physics (which I teach from time to time, BTW) or take a course or two on statistical mechanics (which I've done a career's worth of research in) and note that quantum field theory is microscopically reversible, and that since reversible dynamics is precisely the kind of dynamics that doesn't change entropy, the entropy of the Universe is really unchanging at the microscopic level of description. That doesn't make it predictable, but it does mean that if you want to understand entropy you have to understand things like the Nakajima-Zwanzig construction and why quantum filtering experiments are unpredictable without actually entailing a change in the information content of the Universe.
There is a difference, my friend, between deterministic and predictable. There is an entire literature on deterministic (classical) chaos, how reversible microdynamics in classical physics nevertheless leads to non-computable classical trajectories because we cannot specify microstate to infinite precision. Most of that reasoning applies to the utterly deterministic time evolution built into quantum theory. An isolated system in a quantum stationary state is if anything MORE deterministic than a similar classical system.
You might want to read Susskind's lovely book on Quantum Wars -- it is pretty much devoted to the notion that a consistent physical theory must be microreversible and have zero (and unchanging) entropy.
And don't forget the joy of pouring over the counter muriatic acid on aluminum foil, how easy it is to make a surprisingly potent explosive out of over the counter batteries and hydrogen peroxide, how much one can learn about orbital and collision dynamics playing Angry Birds Space, and the fact that kids now have nearly instant access to all of human thought and knowledge not actively covered by copyright (and summarized access to much of that!).
What they lose from not building a crystal radio or tinkering with cars (that have grown so complex that they are sadly no longer particularly tinkerable) they gain building a functional social network and tinkering with electronic devices that were pure science fiction for the first half of my life. To the extent that complexity of environment stimulates growth of intelligence as a possible partial explanation of the Flynn effect (and more, there are other metrics) children today grow up in very complex environments and do different things within it than we did.
It is thus silly to judge one generation in terms of the metrics of a previous one, especially a previous one that grew up in an entirely different political/historical context. Most of us would truly suck at stalking a deer armed only with a bow we made ourselves using nothing but a stone knife and arrows tipped with arrowheads we chipped out of river rocks. Most of us would simply die if we were dumped into the wild to survive a winter. We are therefore idiots by the standards of, say, 12,000 years ago. I suspect most of us would struggle with political dynamics from the feudal era and would rapidly find ourselves enslaved or hung if dropped into the world 1000 years ago. My own kids don't appreciate the stresses associated with growing up in the middle of a cold war that meant that every day there was a finite chance of the world of the survivors of a nuclear exchange regressing 1000 years overnight. I struggle to appreciate the stresses THEY experience growing up in a world that increasingly concentrates power in a hidden class of elites that have turned government into theater and that manipulate world-spanning conflicts between insane mythologies or hypothesized world-spanning disasters into excuses for concentrating ever more wealth and power in the hands of a criminal class that grew rich on laundered money in my lifetime.
I'm not certain what you mean when you say "all of them exist at the same time" -- it is this that I would assert is NOT in any meaningful sense the case. I take it we are in agreement that "the wavefunction of the Universe" must be a zero-entropy stationary state, and that all discussions of entropy involve some mix of our inability to determine its precise description (ignorance) plus a very fundamental issue with information theory wherein one cannot, in general, represent the state of any physical system more compactly than a self-representation -- it takes more "stuff" to store a precise representation of the state of an object even classically than the stuff consisting of the object itself. This is one of several reasons that it is useful for physicists to study information theory and encoding -- in a very deep sense the problem of constructing a complete physical theory of everything requires an understanding of the limitations of encodings in general, because we have to somehow construct a (sufficiently complete) representation of system A in the "stuff" of system B, which typically requires both an efficient encoding scheme and sufficiently large state space in system B.
Then it all makes a reasonable amount of sense -- in order to encode even partial information about any part of the Universal state in some other part of the Universe, one requires precisely the sort of things that computer scientists worry about: One cannot do a good job coding binary information at a level like 1 bit per electron (using single electron spin) because the system is under normal circumstances too susceptible to noise associated with our fundamental lack of knowledge of quantum microstate of the entire system. That is, there is damn well entropy in the form of our ignorance whether or not there is "real" entropy, and the entropy associated with mere lack of knowledge works just as well as the other kind to screw up information stored at the truly quantum level.
This requires us to use "large numbers" of quantum particles to store even elementary bits of information, to waste a huge amount of the CONCEPTUAL capacity of the device in what amounts to redundancy associated with state coherence sufficient to survive long enough to permit the stored bit to be read again and otherwise manipulated with reasonably deterministic dynamics. Indeed, there are some lovely theorems and connections between bit-level storage of information, its stability, temperature, and entropy -- switching REQUIRES entropy in all physical systems we know of (so far) that are capable of encoding and storing information at the bit level:
The issue of whether or not this is true for so-called "quantum computing" -- reversible dynamics computing involving entangled states that are protected from entropy by means of careful isolation (and involving processes that can complete inside the coherence time of the compute element given that isolation) opens up at least the possibility of some sort of "consciousness" that could be supported within a quantum entanglement, but personally I think this is pretty absurd. Again, as computational systems scale up in the number of components involved in any kind of computational transaction, they become increasingly susceptible towards the bleed-in of the great unknown state outside of the components themselves which BEHAVES like local entropy increase and effectively destroys the stored information by irreversibly conveying it into the external Universe whose state beforehand we do not know so that we cannot even in principle recover it. Since "consciousness" -- as far as we can tell or understand at this time -- absolutely requires rather huge numbers of switching components, immense amounts of sufficiently stable information storage, complex but moderately deterministic feedback loops, and more -- think of all of the structure in the wetware of your brain or in the hardware of a com
Most of this has been known and stated fairly clearly in the quantum theory of open systems for some time now. The Nakajima-Zwanzig (generalized master) Equation is derived based on the assumption of a "universal" quantum description that is partitioned into "system" and "everything else", with a projection of all dynamics from everything else onto the system variables. The universe is, of course, completely deterministic, but entropy (and hence "time" as an arrow) enters the system from the incomplete information available on the system "bath", everything else.
The proper treatment of this completely eliminates the common quantum "paradoxes" such as Schrodinger's Cat because one can clearly see where one makes an incorrect assumption about the possibility of quantum entanglement of the cat and the microscopic decay process independent of "everything else". The entire "system" consisting of cat and box is coupled to the rest of the Universe and the apparently "purely random" decay that creates the supposedly tangled state that is resolved by opening the box is continuously resolved because the box and all of its contents is already tangled, so to speak, with everything else. It also helps to properly view and include time-reversibility in the description and not treat the quantum process of measurement non-relativistically and semi-classically. The same thing is true of the EPR paradox -- if it is treated relativistically there can obviously be no such thing as wavefunction collapse per se with some sort of transluminal communication of phase information, because the time reversal of this process makes no sense at all. The GME resolves this entirely because it correctly describes the infusion of classical entropy in a measurement process from the bath in an e.g. thermodynamic state within e.g. the random phase approximation.
Personally, I think the Nakajima-Zwanzig treatment and master equations are one of the most neglected areas of quantum theory, often completely untaught in graduate-level quantum series. It is one of the better ways to rigorously derive things like spontaneous emission and in the process explain a lot of things about the process that are otherwise mysterious, such as how "exponential decay" arises from the coupling of a two-level quantum emitter to a multimode bath (and how it does NOT occur if one, for example, couples a two-level quantum emitter to a single field mode). Loudon has a nice discussion of this point, and Agarwal describes the application of the GME to spontaneous emission including radiative shift. The outcome of this approach in quantum mechanics is often to transform exponential processes that typically move one out of the basis one begins in almost instantly (entanglement) to projective dynamics within the basis and with e.g. discrete dynamical transitions replacing cats that are half dead or half alive in an entangled state, a Langevin approach where the actual system really does either kill the cat or doesn't, at a particular time, with the correct probability distribution for an ensemble of diabolical cat-killing engines, because the rest of the Universe always functions as a "measuring apparatus" -- one cannot "disentangle" the cat, the poison, the radioactive source from the Universe by merely putting it in a box, and at the instant of the cat's death the future time evolution of the entire Universe is unique to this and only this outcome.
You can see some small part of the malaise that infects the terminology of quantum theory in the phrase above: "An external god-like observer sees no difference" -- the hardest single thing one has to deal with when correctly considering the quantum description of the Universe is the notion that there is no outside, most especially no outside from which the inside can be "seen". Seeing is the exchange of information, mediated by a field interaction. The Universe cannot possibly be "seen from the outside" because if the "outside" in question can see it at all, it is a part of it. It cannot
As I said, if one believes in the laws of physics (and as a physicist, I am inclined to do so:-) then everything is deterministic and free will in one sense cannot exist. It doesn't exist because we don't consider looking things up in a decision tree to be "free will", no matter how complex a decision tree we create. We consider it free of will. To the extent that the Universe is a unique solution to the problem of its own dynamics, to the extent that the laws of physics are microscopically reversible so that physics itself has no entropy at the microscopic level, free will is an illusion.
At the same time, free will doesn't mean random, or non-deterministic. A decision made by flipping a perfectly random coin isn't "free will" either. So even if you want to consider quantum mechanics as being perfectly non-deterministic, as long as our consciousness ultimately depends on quantum chemistry and quantum electronics one cannot consider our will to truly be free.
So we can start by noting that truly free will doesn't exist anywhere, and then try to discern the difference between free agent HIs like ourselves and non-free agent AIs of all sorts. At this point there are many, many structural differences. There are different KINDS of AI systems -- semantic systems that are closer to stochastically weighted heuristic decisioning trees that reason according to high-level rules and low level non-semantic systems such as NNs have no idea what the number "seven" is even as they are trained to recognize numbers that are divisible by seven when a binary encoded integer is presented on a set of discrete inputs.
We can definitely say that a perfectly deterministic decisioning system has no free will. We can definitely say that a perfectly random decisioning system also doesn't have free will. Human intelligence is information-theoretically incapable of being aware of its own state information, so even though it might well be deterministic microscopically, it cannot predict its own future state any way other than computing it, given its past state plus its equally unpredictable future inputs. Most current realizations of naive (or even more sophisticated) AI systems lack even this kind of indeterminacy -- they are their precisely specified and known state information. Would a sufficiently complex AI become a free-willed HI? Sure, maybe, probably. I'd sure like to try to design and build one (and think I probably could!). Are plain old feed-forward NNs in any defensible sense free agents? Of course not. Are human in any defensible sense what you seem to be asserting, semantic decision trees? Personally, I'd have to say no. For one thing, at the hardware level they are NNs, and NNs per se have no idea what the number "seven" is no matter how accurately they can identify it or what they are trained to do with it. Humans, however, can manipulate their OWN NNs to do computations based on the notion of "seven-ness" completely independent of its neural representation or lack (of a unique one) thereof.
When I divide 179 by 7, I use a complex set of heuristic/semantic rules to get 25 4/7. Try to reduce this completely understandable heuristic to neural events! When I use a NN to divide 179 by 7, I do so either by training it to build a nonlinear map that takes inputs that are (for example) a binary representation of 179 and outputs the number 25 4/7 according to some other nonlinear map on a set of output neurons, or to "recognize" the answer somehow. At no point can any NN I've ever heard of be said to comprehend "sevenness".
One day this gap may be bridged. At the moment, the gap is severe, and because in some deep sense heuristic/semantic reasoning is an emergent self-organized critical phenomenon that appears empirically to occur when an underlying nonlinear system LIKE a NN has enough complexity to embrace semantic reductions of some input space, it isn't clear when we will get even close to sufficient complexity for even a very
Sure, while being utterly deterministic in their decisioning action, and while being completely transferrable so that one can load a given NN onto twenty different systems, present them with the same input data, and get precisely the same output. Indeed, one can write a specification so exact that one could tell somebody else in another solar system how to do the computations to exactly the same precision on precisely simulated (if necessary) hardware and load the same weights to the same precision and present the data to the same precision and get precisely the same output. The only source of variation is effectively random hardware errors, that is, the inevitable bleed of entropy into any precisely specified system in the real world, but in principle the computation algorithm has zero entropy (there is no missing information between the program, the weights, and the data). The computation is reproducible.
In the case of HI, it is by no means clear whether or not one can, in fact, specify the state of the system sufficiently precisely to cause it to consistently produce the same decision given the same data. It isn't even clear if the same system, prepared in exactly the same state, would consistently produce the same decision given the same data, because unlike the case in a simulated (not real) digitized NN, one has both of the uncertainties associated with numbers drawn from an apparent continuum (the quantum phases necessary to fully specify even the system state) and with the non-separability of the system from its environment (the bleed-in of entropy at the microscopic level from our lack of knowledge of "the wavefunction" and our practical inability to specify the external state of the Universe even if we could somehow precisely reproduce the state of the human "system".
The same sorts of issues arise in random number generation (which I'm moderately expert in). Pseudorandom number generators can produce numbers that satisfy any number of tests for randomness, but of course they are not, in fact, random. The generators have a definite state, and if one prepares the state a given way (e.g. feed them a given seed) they will always produce the same sequence. Furthermore, if one does very, very careful testing, the generators typically fail in their empirical "randomness" in some sufficiently high dimensionality. A "free will decision" is not a synonym for a random decision, but at the same time we have a very hard time asserting that a decision that is completely determined by state is in any sense free!
The point is that there is a necessary connection between entropy and freedom. One cannot meaningfully assign a measure of "free will" to a fully deterministic system with a definite state and zero entropy, because that is not what we mean by free -- it is not only constrained, it is perfectly constrained. One cannot meaningfully assign a measure of "free will" to a completely random, non-deterministic decisioning system such as flipping an ideal, truly random coin (with or without any biasing in the decision) because again, deterministically choosing even from a biased set of outcomes based on a non-deterministic event is not what we mean by free.
To a physicist, then, no system can even conceptually possess true free will. To claim that I possess true free will is to claim that my decisioning is somehow independent of the underlying deterministic or non-deterministic superstructure of the decisioning system, that I'm somehow ultimately different from my quantum physics and quantum chemistry. Free will cannot have too much entropy or too little entropy. Decisioning in some sense has to be irreversible, so that it has to be accompanied by global entropy increases, and cannot be precisely describable in microscopic terms or it disappears to be replaced by zero entropy deterministic outcomes. It is a meta phenomenon that is describable by rules only on a macroscopic scale that dis
Actually, this isn't even true classically, as "duplicating everything" involves specifying an infinite number of digits, all significant, for what amounts to the entire Universe. Then there is quantum theory, where again, if one follows the usual Nakajima-Zwanzig construction to assess the outcome of the myriad of microscopic quantum transactions underlying the chemistry and interactions supporting consciousness, at some point one has to average over the state of "everything else" in a classical/stat mech way and the outcome becomes unpredictable. With that said, human decisions are unpredictable in the same sense as a dice roll or the quantum transition is unpredictable -- because of entropy/missing information.
But it is precisely this sense that is missing in AI. We come close in NN's -- by the time a NN has been trained to make a "decision" the underlying network is often too complex for us to be able to answer even simple questions concerning the "heuristics" the net is using and we can only probe those heuristics indirectly, but we can still explain precisely how the net resolves its questions and can trace its action "neuron by neuron" through the system. We can imagine the network using RNGs to add stochastic noise to the network and make its decisioning process non-deterministic, and if the RNGs are either e.g. thermal/entropic hardware or quantum hardware generators as opposed to seeded iterated deterministic maps we can in the process obtain indeterminacy but it still isn't quite the same kind as HI.
As a few people noted above, one major difference is that human decisions arise within a consciousness loop that we haven't yet succeeded in properly duplicating AFAIK in AI. The loop means that there is always a potential for feedback positive and negative, interference, nucleation and growth, oscillations, resonance, chaos, and more in various projective views of the underlying processes, PLUS those processes are often seeded by what amounts to random noise. Simply adding stochastic input to an otherwise deterministic AI (NN or hard coded) doesn't begin to capture the complexity of consciousness.
Outside of that I actually agree with most of the comments regarding our fear of AI, although I do think that there is a big difference between the fear of (say) a very religious individual worried about the Frankenstein myth and the complete lack of fear of a computer scientist or physicist such as myself who have worked on this and would eagerly build a "true" AI if somebody would just give me/us a few gazillion dollars to do so. I'm not so sure about TFA, though -- even the Turing test is in a sense a qualitative heuristic and I don't think "intelligence" or "self-awareness" or "consciousness" in any of its many forms can easily be reduced to a set of quantitative projective tests, and IMO there is no question that my "awareness" and interior monologue intentionally directed self is a comparatively thin (but important!) vessel floating on a deep and uncharted sea of unconscious processes that my conscious self can neither control nor predict because it is an OUTCOME of those processes as much or more than it is a cause.
That's the specific sense in which AI and HI are so far distinct. HI loops back into this sea and can partially steer the boat even as the sea surges this way and that. For humans the sea is dark and impenetrable, and when currents emerge that carry us towards some particular destination we often cannot fight them -- but sometimes we can. For AI the sea itself is transparent and so far, there is no boat, only the emergent currents. Metaphor, sure, but it conveys the point.
Slashdot Mirror
...otherwise known as "anecdotal reports", not science.
Especially when the "result" being reported is a subjective experience described verbally by the two subjects to researchers looking for the result. What could go wrong?
rgb
So I take it you don't believe in the Big Bang? Or is it turtles all the way down?
I'm quite fond of turtles. But saying that we do not know the cause of the big bang is not the same thing as saying that it definitely had no cause. Then it comes down to what you want to believe. I find that it is a lot easier to believe that the big bang happened as part of a causal chain (in the sense of cause used in physics, not cause as in hairy thunderer) than that it "just happened". This is certainly consistent with observed physical law and conservation of mass energy, so it's not quite religion.
Out of curiosity, did you reason out every word you use? Or do you propose using "sort of things with puppies" instead of "sort of things with kittens" was a quantum fluctuation? Or would you recognize that humans have yet to reach the point of complete self-analysis and that when people speak of "intent" and "thought", they may all originate physically but it's currently impossible (I tend to believe simply impossible) to specify a cause for them all. That it is in some level "random" doesn't take away from intent because, as you argue, you believe you have reason in a physical universe that is founded on randomness. Obviously if you make a distinction at that level, you can make a distinction with altruism.
I don't know exactly what I did -- or am doing -- as I type these words. It's difficult to say that I don't reason them out, as they make reasonable sense when I'm done. I even thought of using kittens in my example with a puppy, but deliberately chose puppies instead. But why didn't I use tapeworms? Don't they deserve love too? Hard to say.
Everything else you state here I already explicitly stated: "So I have to assume that when you define altruism as an act without a cause, you mean an act without a known cause, just as random acts of violence aren't at all random, although it may be impossible to narrow down the cause to the day some poor child got Malibu Barbie for Christmas." My point isn't to plumb the origins of the interior monologue, because where does the interior monologue itself come from? It isn't "without cause", but its cause isn't the interior monologue itself or I'd never manage to think a thought or type a sentence at all. I'd argue even more strongly -- that however cogent an argument I myself generate, if you ask me to explain how and why I generated that cogent argument all I could say is "I dunno, it just sort of happens in my head".
Which again leads me back to the point that it isn't the (in)ability to articulate a non-selfish reason for an altruistic act that makes an act altruistic -- by that standard, all acts are altruistic simply because we cannot articulate where articulation itself comes from in our minds and most of the things we do we do spontaneously. Where do the answers to crossword puzzle clues come from as I fill in the crossword? I have no idea, but wherever/however it is, it is "me".
Personally, I think evil is more random. Literally. Indeed, that principle is familiar to us all as the second law of thermodynamics. Good tends to be organized, and hence less likely because it is LESS random. Evil is easy.
rgb
No, the problem is that "to explain altruism" is taken to mean "altruism is the effect of something else". Yet the very definition of altruism is that it is an act without cause. Trying to explain altruism is like trying to explain random acts of violence. The truth is, a lot of acts aren't altruistic or random.
Ah, but you see, I'm a physicist and I don't really believe in effects without causes. So I have to assume that when you define altruism as an act without a cause, you mean an act without a known cause, just as random acts of violence aren't at all random, although it may be impossible to narrow down the cause to the day some poor child got Malibu Barbie for Christmas.
BTW, your assertion that altruism is an act without a cause does not appear to be correct:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism
There is nothing in the definition that suggests that altruism is causeless or random. Altruism is defined to be the performance of good or self-sacrificing acts without the specific cause of some expectation of reward. To quote further:
Much debate exists as to whether "true" altruism is possible. The theory of psychological egoism suggests that no act of sharing, helping or sacrificing can be described as truly altruistic, as the actor may receive an intrinsic reward in the form of personal gratification. The validity of this argument depends on whether intrinsic rewards qualify as "benefits."
According to your definition, only if I decide to give $100 to Unicef if I flip a coin and it comes up heads, then flip the coin (and it comes up heads) is it random, or causally linked to a truly unpredictable event, and hence "altruism". According to the correct definition, the altruism occurred in the decision to give money to Unicef in the first place (conditionally or not) without expecting any reward back from Unicef or the children it helps, and in order for that to be considered causeless or random all of my thoughts, decisions, actions would have to be considered causeless or random. In all cases, I have some reason for making the decision, because humans are mechanistic organism built on top of natural laws that are intrinsically causal. It could be a near-random reason -- the amplified outcome of a quantum fluctuation in my neural synapses (in which case it isn't real "altruism" because "I" didn't chose to be altruistic, a mechanistic accident resulted in the action) or it could be something that I could clearly enough articulate, explainable in human high level concepts, in which case it still has a cause, but the cause could be that I was raised to consider altruism a virtue and to wish to be virtuous through a complex system of conditioning -- rewards and punishments -- when I was too young to resist. I rather suspect that altruism is mostly "caused" by this latter process, somewhat and sometimes by the former process, and sometimes related to still older processes that are evolutionary in origin -- mammals sometimes adopt babies across species not necessarily because they are randomly altruistic towards another species, but because they are slightly miswired and repurpose a healthy genetic tendency to protect their own soft and furry offspring into the act of protecting some other animals soft and furry offspring instead. Humans do exactly the same sort of thing with puppies, and can often rationalize the actions elaborately using verbal reasoning.
So no, I don't think altruism is selfless action without cause, any more than random acts of violence are random or my decision to reply to your reply is random, although it is altruistic enough -- I get no direct benefit from you changing your mind, I get only the satisfaction of knowing that I've helped you (perhaps) towards
The point is that to explain altruism, one has to -- um -- show that it isn't really altruism. Even Christianity's take on altruism isn't that it is a truly selfless act, only that you get your reward later, in heaven. The closest you can probably come in human affairs is to consider an atheist (no karma-weighted rebirth, no post-mortem reward or punishment) who sacrifices their life to save the life of a complete stranger. And even there, one can come up with a sort of "happy people make for a happy world" and "it is better to live in a happy world than an unhappy world" and a "I'm going to die anyway and it is existentially a pointless coin flip whether I die now or die later, but I'll get a lot of momentary satisfaction from the process of sacrificing myself for others so that we overall can live in a happier world right now" argument that makes it if not expressed self-interest in the classic sense, a rational choice (mistaken or not) made by a self-aware entity and hence of some immediate "benefit" to the individual making the choice in a strictly utilitarian sense.
A variant of this happy people thing is the basis of Buddhism, an atheist altruistic philosophy. Suffering is bad, suffering is universal, we would individually be better off suffering less, but since we live in a collective society where we can inflict suffering on others and have others inflict suffering on us, it is in our own self-interest to at the very least be compassionate and act in a way that is both protective of our own happiness (minimizes our own suffering) and either avoids inflicting additional suffering on others or actively helps them to avoid suffering and thereby become more content. It's quite rational -- I'd much rather live in a world where people are for the most part contented with their lot, secure economically, safe physically, Maslow's hierarchy of needs well-met than to live in a world of chaos and backstabbing, war and robbery, where the strong impose their will on the weak and inflict endless suffering upon them. Even the lot of the strong in a world like that is less to be desired than life in a "just" society that strongly enforces the inverse golden rule (do not unto others as you would have them not do unto you).
At the end of the day, we'd all be a lot better off if we just sat around having a few beers with our neighbors, taking turns buying. Metaphorically if not otherwise -- allowing for the fact that 10% or thereabouts of the human species are potential or actual alcoholics, as we haven't finished evolving alcohol tolerance in only 10,000 or so years, and alcoholism is a moderately weak selection pressure (and one that for much of the last 6000 years, has been a survival advantage on multiple counts).
rgb
Well, if they build the Humongous Hardon Collider, it should nicely fill the hole.
Or, y'know, you're a white dude born March 29, 1955 in Raleigh, North Carolina. [duke.edu]. But nice try. I never said anybody got in "only" because of their family's wealth. But stress levels in the first six months of life have a huge impact on brain function. Affluence is strongly correlated to better education at all levels. Worse yet, the study is sampling from profs at US universities. And affluence in the US is strongly correlated to race. Not even bothering to look at institutions in India, Japan, China, Russia, or Korea. There's a huge amount of mathematical talent in these countries that is largely unknown to American mathematicians. Gonna be hard to tease "whitey with a Y-chromosome" out of the data.
Again, I don't argue with any of that, although it isn't 1970 any more and there's a lot more racial balance than you perhaps might think especially in the top institutions that get their pick of the best people in the world, not just the US. Our department chair is female and chinese, for example. In our department we have tenured faculty from China, Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, as well as non-white and/or non-male faculty who are second generation plus American citizens. We're way past the point where any of this is a "token" representation, and Duke has been actively trying to increase the diversity of its faculty with new hires for decades at this point. We still suffer somewhat from damage done back in the 70's and 80's (or earlier) -- it takes 25+ years to grow a physics Ph.D., maybe 30 to get them through a postdoc and get on a tenure track, and there is still a disparity in the numbers of women that are majoring in physics and pursuing a Ph.D. but the gap is gradually narrowing.
As for whether or not it is a shit study -- sure, maybe it is. One of many things I study is how the brain learns and what sort of factors might count as "intelligence". Intelligence itself is quite difficult to define or measure, and there are numerous studies that suggest that it is remarkably easy to obtain biased results when studying it, especially if one uses a comparatively narrow definition and ignores selection biases such as the ones you describe. It is also fairly well known at this point that a person's intelligence is governed by many factors, BOTH genetic AND environmental, and that for a person to attain the sort of peak accomplishments in math or science that the study is using as an inclusion criterion, one very likely has to HAVE both factors in some sort of fortuitous constellation.
But again, the only way you can properly conclude that it is a shit study is from looking well beyond the level of description in the top article. In particular, the only way you can know is to know how they are going to manage their Bayesian priors and how they are designing the selection process beyond "pulling from top math and physics departments". And statistics (especially Bayesian statistics) is a particular area of study of mine, BTW, so I know more than a bit about what I'm talking about. The quality of their results will depend on how they utilize that which is already known and control for the very biases you list. They CAN almost certainly arrange for their sample to be well-distributed across different races and/or country of origin and gender, depending on how many participants they end up with and how deep they go into the pool of top-ranked Universities even just in the US, as the US has been pulling a large fraction of the best mathematicians and scientists of the world for close to a century just because it is a comparatively nice and safe place to live. Whether they WILL do this depends on the motivations of the people conducting the study, whether they have some hypothesis stated or otherwise that they wish to prove, their competence in statistics and methodology, none of which I can speak to.
But again, all of these things are critical factors in ANY study of genetic traits desirable or undesirable that might be conducted. If you were looking at the genetics of ex
Ah, for a mod point. C'mon people who have them, this is funny!
Well, or I grew up in India and walked daily through poverty that most Americans never see or experience in my blind privilege. But it's really hard to tell exactly what life experiences a total stranger has had, isn't it? Look, clearly you think that the top article's search technique is less than ideal, and as I said I might even agree with you, although I have absolutely no idea how one would conduct the "broad survey" you suggest and look for outliers, given the general unreliability of things like IQ tests and the dependence of their results on cultural background and education (see e.g. the Flynn effect). You also have to factor in Bayes' theorem. Just what do you think the prevalence of mathematical genius in the general population is? How would you test for it? What is the false positive/false negative rate of your test?
There could be a Ramanujan living in the Amazonian rainforest today, but the only manifestation of their genius might be their enormous insight into the ways of an environment that would kill either of us overnight plus their skill as a tribal shaman. Or they might be tribal outcasts or dead -- there is some evidence that genius comes at the expense of repurposing cortex devoted to social or other brain function. How would you identify such a person in your survey not just as potentially mathematically competent, but as a mathematical genius? I think you are just plain mistaken when you assert that their selection mechanism is fundamentally incorrect -- at the very least it pulls from a group that is highly filtered by many things, one of which is, without question, intelligence and mathematical ability compared to most (but sure, probably not all) of the general population.
We might also agree that what they are planning to look at with regard to their genetics is narrow and stupid IF that is really ALL they are planning to look at (which I doubt). They really need to run a huge battery of tests on the individuals in their group and in various control groups and in first and second degree relatives of the in-group and more, both genetic and the other kind. I suspect that they will simply replicate the findings of many others who have already conducted similar studies, that intelligence and accomplishment (as outliers) have a tendency to regress back to the mean (within Flynn effect amplification that might be associated with "privilege") between generations.
But none of this is a particularly good reason to make the whole thing into some sort of quasi-racist nazi class war (on their part). Yes, their sample is in some sense at least partially self-selected and hence subject to all sorts of biases. OTOH, the group they are looking for is one that is going to be very difficult to identify any other way, and the educational system of the world has never been MORE egalitarian and blind to privilege than it is today, and the world has never been more affluent than it is today both. That isn't to say that we are even particularly close to a long term goal of complete social and economic equality (of opportunity if nothing else, since so far we cannot do anything about the distribution of abilities and yes, I have a brother with Down's syndrome so don't tell me everybody is a genius if only the proletariat would rise up against their capitalist oppressors) but at this point the pool of the most talented tenured faculty in math and physics worldwide has plenty of members who were not "born to privilege".
I'm sure that there are few there who probably DID only get there because of intelligent and wealthy parents as I've met them (although even they aren't stupid or they wouldn't make the cut into Princeton or MIT or for that matter Duke). And I'm certain that our educational system fails to attract some of the brightest into academia because they'd rather make money or because they attend a really shitty school and never have a chance to succeed (although as I said, real genius has been known to transcend THAT barrier time and again). And even th
We're not talking about "basic numeracy" here, though. We're talking about being mathematically gifted. I'll cheerfully agree that there is a huge range of math abilities that are related to or proportional to quality of education, but talent in math is not, or at least, while one might well lose some gifted persons from extremely poor backgrounds, the pool of college educated persons is broad enough, and the opportunities for support for gifted students great enough, that there is more than adequate sample of gifted individuals among those that attended a University, majored in mathematics, and displayed the real gift to an extent that made graduate continuation and an academic career likely regardless of the student's original socioeconomic group.
Again, I'm not even talking about students that make it through a math or physics graduate program with a Ph.D., as that merely indicates "competence", not necessarily brilliance. I'm saying that within this competent group there are individuals that are brilliant, and honestly, I don't think there is that much bias preventing the brilliant from rising to the top once they get into college in the first place. That's the real barrier, that and the possibly terrible education they received up to that point. But mathematical brilliance is surprisingly proof against even a poor education, as math geniuses aren't taught to be geniuses, they just are. That's the way their brains work.
In some sense I envy them. I'm merely competent, or perhaps competent-plus, not brilliant, so while I (for fun) sometimes toy with some of the famous math puzzles or unproven (but probably true) theorems I'm pretty unlikely to solve them by insight or by slogging hard work either one. A Ramanujan would just look at many of these puzzles and see the answer all at once without any "work" or "slogging" at all.
Of course in some cases those math geniuses seem to obtain their brilliance in part by repurposing cortex used for other, e.g. social purposes, so you have Godel starving to death because he simply forgot to eat, but the thought of being such a bright spark in the dark night is tempting even at such a cost. I suspect that this is the "kind" of thing that they are trying to study in the top article, and while I personally think studying dynamic brain function with e.g. fMRI and a host of other tools would be more generally productive than looking for genetic correlates, I applaud the idea of trying to figure it out. Mankind's post-Enlightenment history of knowledge and discovery has been one of slow, slogging progress in the hands of the competent to competent plus punctuated by revolutionary, paradigm shifting discoveries by those very brilliant lights, who often seem to accomplish what they do directly, intuitively and effortlessly (compared to the slogging).
Understanding brain function and capacity (both genetic and developmental), insight, and above all, how to TRAIN both our own brains and the brains of those that we educate how to increase the probability of insight, optimize their own intelligence (given their genetics), and alter the probability of revolutionary discovery for the better seems like a worthwhile target for anyone concerned with the improvement of the world.
rgb
Disclaimer: I'm a theoretical physicist. You mean like Ramanujan? Or Riemann? Or any of the zillion other exceptions?
Not that I don't agree with the rest of your comment, BTW, only the "predominantly arise in highly privileged segments of society" bit. I actually rather think that there are significant genetic difference between at least some kinds of mathematical prodigies and "normal humans", or at least, there are significant differences in their brains. I don't know how "highly privileged" I am outside of getting a good education that permitted me to take advantage of my intelligence, but I do know that I'm no Ramanujan, I'm not a "lightning calculator", but I've taught and advised a good number of very bright students from all economic classes over the decades and there are some that are simply scary intelligent in math independent of their privilege or opportunity level. I'm not certain precisely how one would do the "broad survey" you suggest -- the people who have the true gift(s) that I think they are looking for will either (like Ramanujan) be so exceptional that they float to the top out of whatever social strata they start in or they will be more or less undetectable. At least, surveying from the select pool of people who have e.g. discovered famous theorems or otherwise made breakthrough discoveries makes it a lot simpler to find "outliers in the data" by concentrating on groups that are almost all outliers in the data.
Having rich, white parents might get you into a top-ranked school, but (almost) nobody becomes a famous mathematician or physicist because their parents were wealthy. Parental money doesn't equate to ability to work with complex algebras, solve differential systems, derive important abstract results in number theory, or even understand differential geometry well enough to work with it coherently. Otherwise physics graduate schools would be filled with the scions of rich white people instead of people of all races and colors (including a huge number of Chinese and Indian persons that have no possible claim to either). I dunno, maybe you can buy a math Ph.D. But I doubt it.
rgb
And one can build a desktop-scale Tesla coil and get at least 100-250 keV electrons (that I have done at home:-) and over 0.5c, and larger ones can reach 500+ keV and 0.9 c. But a betatron is probably a better use of your magnet wire if you want to hit the MeV range and start to add 9's.
One actually needs to be careful with Tesla coils (as with CRTs) not to generate hard x-rays by accident, for example by allowing electrons to outflow through a vacuum until they strike glass or some other confining solid. CRT television tubes contained a lot of lead precisely to guard against that, making their disposal problematic as toxic waste although the lead is pretty well bound up in class and leaded crystal has the same issues.
What would be really cool would be to be able to build a 100 MeV electron accelerator on a desktop and then have a way of inverting the electrons directly into muons at high efficiency, then using the muons to catalyze fusion events. Sadly, I don't think we know any way of creating a "virtual neutrino" the way the free electron laser generates a virtual photon in the wiggler in the rest frame of the electrons passing through to get high gain forward scattering conversion. AFAIK, the only significantly populated pathways to muons involve e.g. pions as an intermediate step and this drops the efficiency to less than 10% in the channel, but if one could come up with a direct channel to muons at a much higher conversion rate, muon catalyzed fusion could still end up being viable as an energy source.
Perhaps if we ever get a better handle on just what neutrinos ARE...
rgb
Oh, please. Old technology, and not even the right technology. If you want desktop MeV electrons, use a betatron:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betatron
We're talking 1930's and 1940's here, a self-confining inductive transformer, and a 5 MeV electron has \gamma \approx 10 and travelling at roughly 0.995c. It doesn't make a good beam source though both because it is pulsed and because the electrons have to make it out through a rapidly varying fringe field.
I'm guessing that there are a half-dozen ways of producing MeV scale electrons at the desktop, although most of them aren't going to be "useful" sources in that they produce anything like a coherent beam. Hmmm, Google suggests that there are a half dozen ways and some of them ARE useful at the desktop scale and indeed are in use at e.g. CERN as devices for injecting electron beams into accelerators for testing purposes. I'd guess that an ordinary electric arc produces "some" MeV scale electrons just from the tail of the MB distribution -- small tail, sure, but there are a lot of electrons and an arc can be quite hot.
Still, building a homemade cyclotron -- wow, I wish I could have done that when I was a kid. I built a bunch of stuff, but never thought of building that.
rgb
Oops. 10^13 x 10^6 = 10^19 meters. Converted to meters twice...
Hawking radiation is produced when vacuum fluctuations near the event horizon produce a particle pair, one of the two fall in, and the other escapes. In order to make the process make mass-energy sense, the particle that falls in is more probably the antiparticle of the pair so that the BH supposedly emits normal matter and decays. For tiny/microscopic black holes this process is supposedly extremely rapid so that they "evaporate". For "large" BHs, it takes so long that one can nearly ignore the process compared to e.g. the influx of ordinary matter.
However, Hawking has been shown to be wrong in a lot of his original work on this theory -- or rather, the theory has been shown to be inconsistent with Quantum Mechanics -- and the real entropy increases associated with this sort of process or the process of ordinary infalling matter have been shown not to exist. Leonard Susskind's book The Black Hole Wars: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics walks you through all of this at the accessible-to-normal-humans level (as opposed to the level of QFT/String theory, which he also does elsewhere).
All pretty heady stuff, of course. Theorists can really go to town when the nearest known potential physical realization of an idea is order of 10^22 meters distant and only visible at all from synchrotron radiation from infalling charged particles emitted some distance away from the supposed event horizon. But I do agree that a TOE needs to be conservative of quantum information at least until we reproducibly and believably observe a direct violation of this principle somewhere.
rgb
...and open up thorium mining in the western part of the state, ideally while pushing hard for LFTR or other thorium based meltdown proof non-pressurized-vessel nuclear. NC alone could supply the entire energy needs of the US for the next 17,000 years, according to one assessment I've read, while yes, producing lots of rare-earth metals. Currently they don't mine the rare earths because the admixed Thorium is viewed as toxic waste!
Yeah, the most valuable toxic waste in the world.
rgb
... after owning a succession of Nintendo systems over decades while raising three sons as a computer-geek adult gamer, Nintendo's stature as a gaming system peaked with the 64. The WII sucked (and continues to suck today). The new WII sucks worse. I own one of each, and here are a few of their manifold flaws:
* Expensive, especially for what you get.
* Game availability strictly limited, and the games that exist suck with literally only one or two exceptions. Like Zelda, Zelda, and Zelda. And maybe one or two more that aren't completely terrible, but compared to the PS-series? Major laugh (we have a PS3 upstairs too, and had a PS2 in its day and always have game-class PC's as well. We don't have a PS4 prepurchased at this point because my kids are all out of the house and nobody is bugging me to get one -- yet -- but I'm guessing that in a year or three we will for the next generation of grandchildren as they come of age if not my college-age kids coming home for Christmas).
* The Wii Mii actually managed to out-suck the Wii. It's toplevel operating system is insane. No, I don't want to have to generate an avatar that forcibly participates in a faked-out social media experience designed to convince an idiot or small child that the interface is somehow "cool". It is a total PITA to boot, get through the setup, and listen to its eternal background music with Zeldoid-chirps representing avatar communications until you actually start up an app to shut it up. Even children don't need that or find an app layout over/around a crowd of avatars to be "simple". Adults or teens find it absolutely mind-numbing.
* I'm still telling it to ignore an email loopback step in the network setup every time it reboots. Why? Why is this there in the first place? It will ignore it forever; it just forces me to hit one extra icon during startup over and over and over and doesn't in any meaningful way interfere with the only thing I want the damn thing to do, which is hook into my wireless network and function. I Do Not Need for it to validate some sort of marketing link with Nintendo that effectively gives them my email address as a target for an eternity of spambot activity. Nothing else it does needs to know about my avatar either. In fact, it doesn't need an avatar system at all.
* The secondary Wii Mii pad looks cool at first, but in practice it turns out to be a PITA. It has an active backlit screen and tiny battery, so you cannot run it for as long as one single evening of watching e.g. Amazon or Netflix (my primary use for it these days) unless it is permanently plugged into the USB cable. Apps tend to split functionality between the controller pad and the screen in an unusual way as well -- the Amazon app for example has you constantly switching between the pad and the screen to look for icons to click or functions to press. The old Wii with a basic nunchuk controller was far easier to use, as you only had to look one place and although that controller has ITS flaws as well, they are at least compensated for by being able to actually use swords or fish in Zelda.
* The MII operating system was initially a bugfarm with serious networking problems. That's gradually diminished with updates, but both Netflix and Amazon's movie app have serious buffering issues in spite of the fact that I've got 30 Mbps internet into the house.
In the end, I would have been better off spending the money on any of the following:
* A laptop to plug the TV directly in to. That way I could play the full range of PC games e.g. WoW, use the system to work in linux, watch netflix or amazon movies or DVDs, and so on.
* Almost any set-top box. Less than half the price and all I functionally give up is Zelda, and I've already DONE Zelda. I keep going to Best Buy thinking "Maybe today Nintendo will have released a halfway decent Wii/Mii game", and every time I am disappointed.
* An android tablet. My galaxy tab has an HDMI cable that lets me use it almost exactly the same way that the Mii pad works, o
I'm sure that this is right, which is why I tried to point it out. That is the point of the Nakajima-Zwanzig projection-valued operator. There is a nice 1999 paper by Breuer, et. al. that you can retrieve from Google Scholar or arXiv that walks one through the derivation of the quantum theory of open systems, including examples and a fairly nice discussion of how the open system can be reduced to one that has Markovian dynamics (for weak coupling or strong coupling to only a few degrees of freedom). It doesn't spend as much time discussing the full non-Markovian integrodifferential solution as it might, but it still is a really nice short paper that walks you through the partitioning, projection, and various ways of treating the "bath" (rest of the quantum Universe) stochastically because of its MISSING INFORMATION, not because the original density matrix was itself necessarily indeterminate.
The point, in the end, is that probability in quantum theory comes from mere ignorance, precisely the same way it appears in classical theory, not because quantum theory is fundamentally indeterminate. This is a widespread error, although to be honest I don't hear it made often by physicists, who understand, if they don't always specify in conversation or discussion, that the "probability" that enters an experiment involving e.g. a filtering apparatus does so because of the unknown quantum state of the filtering apparatus and a perturbative separation of the interaction of the "system" with the apparatus "bath". It absolutely pervades the public semiclassical perception, though, and even physicists who (if pressed) understand that quantum theory is not intrinsically indeterminate all agree that measurement is! In precisely the same way that I am certain that all of the air in the room is not going to bounce just right and end up as a blob of liquid air in one corner, I am certain that things like quantum decay in a weakly coupled vacuum are purely probabilistic, because we do not know all of the state and phases of the rest of the Universe that relativistically represents that vacuum.
In this regard, note especially the discussion of the Jaynes-Cummings model in the paper. My own interest in the subject arose back when I worked in quantum optics and developed a Langevin (Markovian) set of coupled stochastic ODEs that could be used to trace the microscopic dynamics of an collection of driven two-level atoms coupled to radiative decay field modes (the "bath") inside a resonant cavity. Jaynes was a reigning deity of both information-theoretic statistical mechanics and quantum optics, and his insight into the correct description of spontaneous emission (and construction of a computable model of same) is still in my own mind at least a great achievement.
rgb
Except that this doesn't address whether or not the Universe is non-deterministic. It addresses whether or not one can perform a certain set of measurements on a tiny subset of the Universe -- where we could then spend a lot of energy speaking about just what a "measurement" is and how to define it and build an algebra associated with it -- and then make a unique prediction about the outcome of a second set of measurements made in the future. Or, we could find a copy of Julian Schwinger's classic book "Quantum Kinematics and Dynamics", which lays out the axiomatic basis for Quantum Mechanics better than anyone else I've ever read in his first three chapters (where the first two chapters are titled "The Algebra of Measurement" and "The Geometry of States", saving us all that work).
We could then take note at some point that measurement is an irreversible process in physics. That's basically one way of viewing the point of Schwinger's THIRD chapter. We could also take note that we make all sorts of mistakes when we assume that time has some definitive arrow when analyzing microscopic events, because the underlying microscopic equations are time-reversal invariant.
Bell's inequality makes sense only when one considers a strictly time-ordered sequence of irreversible measurements with an assumption of locality. If one tries to analyze the time reversal of the series of measurements, where we know that every single interaction involved is time-reversal symmetric so that the system must evolve back from a supposedly classically resolved state in the detectors to the specific entangled state in which it began, we begin to see why it can be perfectly correct and yet have nothing to do with whether or not the Universe is or isn't deterministic. We may not know the phases and states of all of the interactions and objects in the detectors used to perform the measurements, but we can see that what we interpreted as as a classically irreversible process is really reversible, and the apparent change in entropy is illusory and a consequence of our ignorance of the fully entangled, time-symmetric state of the detectors with the fully entangled state of the system!
But it is a lot easier to just consider a closed quantum system -- the density matrix of your choice. Put it in an initial state. Time evolve it. Show me something indeterminate in its time evolution. Time evolution is unitary and reversible, classically or quantum mechanically. Bell's inequality is the moral equivalent of the paradox of friction as a "non-conservative force" in a classical universe where only conservative forces exist -- it is much more a statement of probabilities and incomplete information and if you look hard enough, you find that where you thought entropy was increasing, it's only increasing when you integrate/sum over all variables for which you have incomplete information.
So I absolutely agree that we cannot predict the outcome of many quantum experiments, but that is not because they do not (or will not) have a definite, unique outcome, not does it mean that two Universes prepared in exactly the same initial state will every evolve into different states. As I point out, try it! Take two density matrices for closed quantum systems! Show me how the same laws of nature and e.g. the Heisenberg description cause them to evolve into different density matrices. Then we can talk about "evidence" for non-determinism.
Of course if you want to claim that the consistent laws of physics themselves are incorrect, so that physics really is non-deterministic, well, good luck with that. That's the part that is very difficult to challenge empirically, because we whenever we check (as closely as we can check) that's not what we find, and isn't what the theory of quantum mechanics actually says.
rgb
Or, you could pick up a book on quantum physics (which I teach from time to time, BTW) or take a course or two on statistical mechanics (which I've done a career's worth of research in) and note that quantum field theory is microscopically reversible, and that since reversible dynamics is precisely the kind of dynamics that doesn't change entropy, the entropy of the Universe is really unchanging at the microscopic level of description. That doesn't make it predictable, but it does mean that if you want to understand entropy you have to understand things like the Nakajima-Zwanzig construction and why quantum filtering experiments are unpredictable without actually entailing a change in the information content of the Universe.
There is a difference, my friend, between deterministic and predictable. There is an entire literature on deterministic (classical) chaos, how reversible microdynamics in classical physics nevertheless leads to non-computable classical trajectories because we cannot specify microstate to infinite precision. Most of that reasoning applies to the utterly deterministic time evolution built into quantum theory. An isolated system in a quantum stationary state is if anything MORE deterministic than a similar classical system.
You might want to read Susskind's lovely book on Quantum Wars -- it is pretty much devoted to the notion that a consistent physical theory must be microreversible and have zero (and unchanging) entropy.
rgb
And don't forget the joy of pouring over the counter muriatic acid on aluminum foil, how easy it is to make a surprisingly potent explosive out of over the counter batteries and hydrogen peroxide, how much one can learn about orbital and collision dynamics playing Angry Birds Space, and the fact that kids now have nearly instant access to all of human thought and knowledge not actively covered by copyright (and summarized access to much of that!).
What they lose from not building a crystal radio or tinkering with cars (that have grown so complex that they are sadly no longer particularly tinkerable) they gain building a functional social network and tinkering with electronic devices that were pure science fiction for the first half of my life. To the extent that complexity of environment stimulates growth of intelligence as a possible partial explanation of the Flynn effect (and more, there are other metrics) children today grow up in very complex environments and do different things within it than we did.
It is thus silly to judge one generation in terms of the metrics of a previous one, especially a previous one that grew up in an entirely different political/historical context. Most of us would truly suck at stalking a deer armed only with a bow we made ourselves using nothing but a stone knife and arrows tipped with arrowheads we chipped out of river rocks. Most of us would simply die if we were dumped into the wild to survive a winter. We are therefore idiots by the standards of, say, 12,000 years ago. I suspect most of us would struggle with political dynamics from the feudal era and would rapidly find ourselves enslaved or hung if dropped into the world 1000 years ago. My own kids don't appreciate the stresses associated with growing up in the middle of a cold war that meant that every day there was a finite chance of the world of the survivors of a nuclear exchange regressing 1000 years overnight. I struggle to appreciate the stresses THEY experience growing up in a world that increasingly concentrates power in a hidden class of elites that have turned government into theater and that manipulate world-spanning conflicts between insane mythologies or hypothesized world-spanning disasters into excuses for concentrating ever more wealth and power in the hands of a criminal class that grew rich on laundered money in my lifetime.
rgb
I'm not certain what you mean when you say "all of them exist at the same time" -- it is this that I would assert is NOT in any meaningful sense the case. I take it we are in agreement that "the wavefunction of the Universe" must be a zero-entropy stationary state, and that all discussions of entropy involve some mix of our inability to determine its precise description (ignorance) plus a very fundamental issue with information theory wherein one cannot, in general, represent the state of any physical system more compactly than a self-representation -- it takes more "stuff" to store a precise representation of the state of an object even classically than the stuff consisting of the object itself. This is one of several reasons that it is useful for physicists to study information theory and encoding -- in a very deep sense the problem of constructing a complete physical theory of everything requires an understanding of the limitations of encodings in general, because we have to somehow construct a (sufficiently complete) representation of system A in the "stuff" of system B, which typically requires both an efficient encoding scheme and sufficiently large state space in system B.
Then it all makes a reasonable amount of sense -- in order to encode even partial information about any part of the Universal state in some other part of the Universe, one requires precisely the sort of things that computer scientists worry about: One cannot do a good job coding binary information at a level like 1 bit per electron (using single electron spin) because the system is under normal circumstances too susceptible to noise associated with our fundamental lack of knowledge of quantum microstate of the entire system. That is, there is damn well entropy in the form of our ignorance whether or not there is "real" entropy, and the entropy associated with mere lack of knowledge works just as well as the other kind to screw up information stored at the truly quantum level.
This requires us to use "large numbers" of quantum particles to store even elementary bits of information, to waste a huge amount of the CONCEPTUAL capacity of the device in what amounts to redundancy associated with state coherence sufficient to survive long enough to permit the stored bit to be read again and otherwise manipulated with reasonably deterministic dynamics. Indeed, there are some lovely theorems and connections between bit-level storage of information, its stability, temperature, and entropy -- switching REQUIRES entropy in all physical systems we know of (so far) that are capable of encoding and storing information at the bit level:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle
The issue of whether or not this is true for so-called "quantum computing" -- reversible dynamics computing involving entangled states that are protected from entropy by means of careful isolation (and involving processes that can complete inside the coherence time of the compute element given that isolation) opens up at least the possibility of some sort of "consciousness" that could be supported within a quantum entanglement, but personally I think this is pretty absurd. Again, as computational systems scale up in the number of components involved in any kind of computational transaction, they become increasingly susceptible towards the bleed-in of the great unknown state outside of the components themselves which BEHAVES like local entropy increase and effectively destroys the stored information by irreversibly conveying it into the external Universe whose state beforehand we do not know so that we cannot even in principle recover it. Since "consciousness" -- as far as we can tell or understand at this time -- absolutely requires rather huge numbers of switching components, immense amounts of sufficiently stable information storage, complex but moderately deterministic feedback loops, and more -- think of all of the structure in the wetware of your brain or in the hardware of a com
Most of this has been known and stated fairly clearly in the quantum theory of open systems for some time now. The Nakajima-Zwanzig (generalized master) Equation is derived based on the assumption of a "universal" quantum description that is partitioned into "system" and "everything else", with a projection of all dynamics from everything else onto the system variables. The universe is, of course, completely deterministic, but entropy (and hence "time" as an arrow) enters the system from the incomplete information available on the system "bath", everything else.
The proper treatment of this completely eliminates the common quantum "paradoxes" such as Schrodinger's Cat because one can clearly see where one makes an incorrect assumption about the possibility of quantum entanglement of the cat and the microscopic decay process independent of "everything else". The entire "system" consisting of cat and box is coupled to the rest of the Universe and the apparently "purely random" decay that creates the supposedly tangled state that is resolved by opening the box is continuously resolved because the box and all of its contents is already tangled, so to speak, with everything else. It also helps to properly view and include time-reversibility in the description and not treat the quantum process of measurement non-relativistically and semi-classically. The same thing is true of the EPR paradox -- if it is treated relativistically there can obviously be no such thing as wavefunction collapse per se with some sort of transluminal communication of phase information, because the time reversal of this process makes no sense at all. The GME resolves this entirely because it correctly describes the infusion of classical entropy in a measurement process from the bath in an e.g. thermodynamic state within e.g. the random phase approximation.
Personally, I think the Nakajima-Zwanzig treatment and master equations are one of the most neglected areas of quantum theory, often completely untaught in graduate-level quantum series. It is one of the better ways to rigorously derive things like spontaneous emission and in the process explain a lot of things about the process that are otherwise mysterious, such as how "exponential decay" arises from the coupling of a two-level quantum emitter to a multimode bath (and how it does NOT occur if one, for example, couples a two-level quantum emitter to a single field mode). Loudon has a nice discussion of this point, and Agarwal describes the application of the GME to spontaneous emission including radiative shift. The outcome of this approach in quantum mechanics is often to transform exponential processes that typically move one out of the basis one begins in almost instantly (entanglement) to projective dynamics within the basis and with e.g. discrete dynamical transitions replacing cats that are half dead or half alive in an entangled state, a Langevin approach where the actual system really does either kill the cat or doesn't, at a particular time, with the correct probability distribution for an ensemble of diabolical cat-killing engines, because the rest of the Universe always functions as a "measuring apparatus" -- one cannot "disentangle" the cat, the poison, the radioactive source from the Universe by merely putting it in a box, and at the instant of the cat's death the future time evolution of the entire Universe is unique to this and only this outcome.
You can see some small part of the malaise that infects the terminology of quantum theory in the phrase above: "An external god-like observer sees no difference" -- the hardest single thing one has to deal with when correctly considering the quantum description of the Universe is the notion that there is no outside, most especially no outside from which the inside can be "seen". Seeing is the exchange of information, mediated by a field interaction. The Universe cannot possibly be "seen from the outside" because if the "outside" in question can see it at all, it is a part of it. It cannot
As I said, if one believes in the laws of physics (and as a physicist, I am inclined to do so:-) then everything is deterministic and free will in one sense cannot exist. It doesn't exist because we don't consider looking things up in a decision tree to be "free will", no matter how complex a decision tree we create. We consider it free of will. To the extent that the Universe is a unique solution to the problem of its own dynamics, to the extent that the laws of physics are microscopically reversible so that physics itself has no entropy at the microscopic level, free will is an illusion.
At the same time, free will doesn't mean random, or non-deterministic. A decision made by flipping a perfectly random coin isn't "free will" either. So even if you want to consider quantum mechanics as being perfectly non-deterministic, as long as our consciousness ultimately depends on quantum chemistry and quantum electronics one cannot consider our will to truly be free.
So we can start by noting that truly free will doesn't exist anywhere, and then try to discern the difference between free agent HIs like ourselves and non-free agent AIs of all sorts. At this point there are many, many structural differences. There are different KINDS of AI systems -- semantic systems that are closer to stochastically weighted heuristic decisioning trees that reason according to high-level rules and low level non-semantic systems such as NNs have no idea what the number "seven" is even as they are trained to recognize numbers that are divisible by seven when a binary encoded integer is presented on a set of discrete inputs.
We can definitely say that a perfectly deterministic decisioning system has no free will. We can definitely say that a perfectly random decisioning system also doesn't have free will. Human intelligence is information-theoretically incapable of being aware of its own state information, so even though it might well be deterministic microscopically, it cannot predict its own future state any way other than computing it, given its past state plus its equally unpredictable future inputs. Most current realizations of naive (or even more sophisticated) AI systems lack even this kind of indeterminacy -- they are their precisely specified and known state information. Would a sufficiently complex AI become a free-willed HI? Sure, maybe, probably. I'd sure like to try to design and build one (and think I probably could!). Are plain old feed-forward NNs in any defensible sense free agents? Of course not. Are human in any defensible sense what you seem to be asserting, semantic decision trees? Personally, I'd have to say no. For one thing, at the hardware level they are NNs, and NNs per se have no idea what the number "seven" is no matter how accurately they can identify it or what they are trained to do with it. Humans, however, can manipulate their OWN NNs to do computations based on the notion of "seven-ness" completely independent of its neural representation or lack (of a unique one) thereof.
When I divide 179 by 7, I use a complex set of heuristic/semantic rules to get 25 4/7. Try to reduce this completely understandable heuristic to neural events! When I use a NN to divide 179 by 7, I do so either by training it to build a nonlinear map that takes inputs that are (for example) a binary representation of 179 and outputs the number 25 4/7 according to some other nonlinear map on a set of output neurons, or to "recognize" the answer somehow. At no point can any NN I've ever heard of be said to comprehend "sevenness".
One day this gap may be bridged. At the moment, the gap is severe, and because in some deep sense heuristic/semantic reasoning is an emergent self-organized critical phenomenon that appears empirically to occur when an underlying nonlinear system LIKE a NN has enough complexity to embrace semantic reductions of some input space, it isn't clear when we will get even close to sufficient complexity for even a very
Sure, while being utterly deterministic in their decisioning action, and while being completely transferrable so that one can load a given NN onto twenty different systems, present them with the same input data, and get precisely the same output. Indeed, one can write a specification so exact that one could tell somebody else in another solar system how to do the computations to exactly the same precision on precisely simulated (if necessary) hardware and load the same weights to the same precision and present the data to the same precision and get precisely the same output. The only source of variation is effectively random hardware errors, that is, the inevitable bleed of entropy into any precisely specified system in the real world, but in principle the computation algorithm has zero entropy (there is no missing information between the program, the weights, and the data). The computation is reproducible.
In the case of HI, it is by no means clear whether or not one can, in fact, specify the state of the system sufficiently precisely to cause it to consistently produce the same decision given the same data. It isn't even clear if the same system, prepared in exactly the same state, would consistently produce the same decision given the same data, because unlike the case in a simulated (not real) digitized NN, one has both of the uncertainties associated with numbers drawn from an apparent continuum (the quantum phases necessary to fully specify even the system state) and with the non-separability of the system from its environment (the bleed-in of entropy at the microscopic level from our lack of knowledge of "the wavefunction" and our practical inability to specify the external state of the Universe even if we could somehow precisely reproduce the state of the human "system".
The same sorts of issues arise in random number generation (which I'm moderately expert in). Pseudorandom number generators can produce numbers that satisfy any number of tests for randomness, but of course they are not, in fact, random. The generators have a definite state, and if one prepares the state a given way (e.g. feed them a given seed) they will always produce the same sequence. Furthermore, if one does very, very careful testing, the generators typically fail in their empirical "randomness" in some sufficiently high dimensionality. A "free will decision" is not a synonym for a random decision, but at the same time we have a very hard time asserting that a decision that is completely determined by state is in any sense free!
The point is that there is a necessary connection between entropy and freedom. One cannot meaningfully assign a measure of "free will" to a fully deterministic system with a definite state and zero entropy, because that is not what we mean by free -- it is not only constrained, it is perfectly constrained. One cannot meaningfully assign a measure of "free will" to a completely random, non-deterministic decisioning system such as flipping an ideal, truly random coin (with or without any biasing in the decision) because again, deterministically choosing even from a biased set of outcomes based on a non-deterministic event is not what we mean by free.
To a physicist, then, no system can even conceptually possess true free will. To claim that I possess true free will is to claim that my decisioning is somehow independent of the underlying deterministic or non-deterministic superstructure of the decisioning system, that I'm somehow ultimately different from my quantum physics and quantum chemistry. Free will cannot have too much entropy or too little entropy. Decisioning in some sense has to be irreversible, so that it has to be accompanied by global entropy increases, and cannot be precisely describable in microscopic terms or it disappears to be replaced by zero entropy deterministic outcomes. It is a meta phenomenon that is describable by rules only on a macroscopic scale that dis
Actually, this isn't even true classically, as "duplicating everything" involves specifying an infinite number of digits, all significant, for what amounts to the entire Universe. Then there is quantum theory, where again, if one follows the usual Nakajima-Zwanzig construction to assess the outcome of the myriad of microscopic quantum transactions underlying the chemistry and interactions supporting consciousness, at some point one has to average over the state of "everything else" in a classical/stat mech way and the outcome becomes unpredictable. With that said, human decisions are unpredictable in the same sense as a dice roll or the quantum transition is unpredictable -- because of entropy/missing information.
But it is precisely this sense that is missing in AI. We come close in NN's -- by the time a NN has been trained to make a "decision" the underlying network is often too complex for us to be able to answer even simple questions concerning the "heuristics" the net is using and we can only probe those heuristics indirectly, but we can still explain precisely how the net resolves its questions and can trace its action "neuron by neuron" through the system. We can imagine the network using RNGs to add stochastic noise to the network and make its decisioning process non-deterministic, and if the RNGs are either e.g. thermal/entropic hardware or quantum hardware generators as opposed to seeded iterated deterministic maps we can in the process obtain indeterminacy but it still isn't quite the same kind as HI.
As a few people noted above, one major difference is that human decisions arise within a consciousness loop that we haven't yet succeeded in properly duplicating AFAIK in AI. The loop means that there is always a potential for feedback positive and negative, interference, nucleation and growth, oscillations, resonance, chaos, and more in various projective views of the underlying processes, PLUS those processes are often seeded by what amounts to random noise. Simply adding stochastic input to an otherwise deterministic AI (NN or hard coded) doesn't begin to capture the complexity of consciousness.
Outside of that I actually agree with most of the comments regarding our fear of AI, although I do think that there is a big difference between the fear of (say) a very religious individual worried about the Frankenstein myth and the complete lack of fear of a computer scientist or physicist such as myself who have worked on this and would eagerly build a "true" AI if somebody would just give me/us a few gazillion dollars to do so. I'm not so sure about TFA, though -- even the Turing test is in a sense a qualitative heuristic and I don't think "intelligence" or "self-awareness" or "consciousness" in any of its many forms can easily be reduced to a set of quantitative projective tests, and IMO there is no question that my "awareness" and interior monologue intentionally directed self is a comparatively thin (but important!) vessel floating on a deep and uncharted sea of unconscious processes that my conscious self can neither control nor predict because it is an OUTCOME of those processes as much or more than it is a cause.
That's the specific sense in which AI and HI are so far distinct. HI loops back into this sea and can partially steer the boat even as the sea surges this way and that. For humans the sea is dark and impenetrable, and when currents emerge that carry us towards some particular destination we often cannot fight them -- but sometimes we can. For AI the sea itself is transparent and so far, there is no boat, only the emergent currents. Metaphor, sure, but it conveys the point.
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