The only reason that this is now true is that Christianity has long since adapted to the cruel fact that the Bible, its nominal description of God, the origins of the Universe and humans in it, its accounting of history and morality, has been shown to be false everywhere that it matters. Shown long ago to be false. However, for most of the last 2000 years one would have been burned alive, hung, imprisoned, tortured, ostracized, or stoned to death for any such assertion because it is in fact the case that belief in Christianity and life outside of the Earth -- hell, belief in an "outside of the Earth" for there to be life in -- were mutually exclusive.
Christians have responded to the troubling news (as described, for example, in Cardinal Saint Bellarmine's letter to Galilieo -- http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1615bellarmine-letter.asp -- required reading for any Christian interested in the truth as opposed to excuses for continuing to accord partial faith to a stack of myths, legends, and self-serving lies) by simply eliding all of the contradicted and self-contradictory passages in the Bible out of their mental space. They do exactly the same thing that the selfsame Catholic Church has done with pederastic priests -- tried to pretend that they don't exist, or that they are "something else", for example metaphor, not literal truth, even though the original patriarch's of the church clearly thought they were literal truth and at least in the early 1600's acknowledged that if they were not, it was frighteningly probable that the whole structure of assertions of truth that is Christian Scripture was probably false -- probable enough to convince almost anybody, unless convinced otherwise by an increasingly tangled morass of "interpretation" of scripture that says one thing into something else entirely.
This has resulted in the shrinkage of sound core belief in Biblical scripture to the bare minimum to support Christianity -- at this point we are to believe that Christ existed, did all of these miracles, is misreported when he is asserted to have referred to Noah and the Flood as actual events, was crucified, died, rose from the dead, and will come back one day to judge humanity and bring in a golden age after a really big war against antichrists like myself where he will (one presumes) kill us for our disbelief and then condemn us all to a fiery furnace for eternity for the insult. Everything else is up for grabs as it contradicts yet another piece of science or historical analysis, but if Jesus did not exist, did not die and come back to life, then Christianity itself has no basis at all in fact.
Fortunately (for "Christianity", the hodge-podge of Christian faiths), it is impossible to disprove this because the events in question happened 2000 years ago, safely beyond the ability of telescopes to disprove them, and the Church itself long since destroyed any historical records that might have contradicted its account of the events of that time. All one can combat this with is sheer common sense -- the assertions are absurd -- and the fact that everywhere we can actually check the miraculous assertions of the Bible, they are false. The Bible is a false witness. It has zero credibility. It endorses slavery and marriage by rape. Moses, were he alive today, would face a Nuremberg-like trial for the slaughter and rape of the Midianites and be hung by the neck until he was dead. Its morality is not just suspect, it is openly wrong. The God it portrays is a cross between a tempery three-year old child whose name is "Jealous" and an ego-bound Earthly King.
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First of all, mod+1 for the reference to the minimum amount of heat -- I knew that such a limit existed but it was good to see the estimate and have links to the formal argument and beyond. Second, while we may or may not be able to reduce the heat released from the bits themselves as they change state, room temperature superconductors will still make two very significant improvements in processor design. First, reducing the resistance of everything BUT the bits will reduce the heat released by a chip by a nontrivial amount, rather a nontrivial fraction -- presuming that one can lay down the superconductor in VLSI circuits and mass produce them, as opposed to build them a molecule at a time. Second, electrical superconductors are usually thermal superconductors as well.
It is this latter property that is probably by far the most important. Note e.g. this article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/11/031112072719.htm -- if one were able to make the base of a chip out of a superconductor in good thermal contact with the actual semiconductor matrix a thin film on top of it, and couple that base directly to a superconducting heat sink, one could e.g. produce 10x to 50x the heat in the actual CPU and still remove it fast enough to keep the chip itself sufficiently cool. If the traces within the chip itself were superconducting, if clever use of superconducting material let one reduce the heat associated with switching closer to the limit, so much the better. Ultimately, it would probably mean that one could run chips at higher voltage and higher clock to produce faster reliable switching and still deal with the heat.
I don't have time to do a formal estimate of the speedup possible, but I'm guestimating that a real thermal superconductor -- one with "zero" resistance to the flow of heat -- suitable for use as the base material for a chip would permit a very rapid scale-up of chip speed by up to an order of magnitude in clock or effective clock. It also might make it possible to build a three dimensional CPU -- one reason chips are 2D is so that one can get the heat out; if one had a thermal/electrical superconductor one could in principle stack up layers and scale performance by one or more orders of magnitude, at first multiple cores on steroids but all at much higher clocks, later true 3d design and layout.
In any event, the impact would very probably be profound, at least if the hypothetical RTS was cheap and suitable for nanoscale integration as a substrate and/or trace material (and functioned as a thermal superconductor as well as noted).
Still, I think that simply eliminating resistivity in power transmission would have the greatest societal impact. PV solar power, for example, "instantly" becomes feasible because one can generate in the Mojave and use the electricity in Maine without transmission loss. That isn't huge, that is game-changing enormous. The Sahara become the electrical source for Europe and Africa, India for Asia, etc. Depending on the hypothetical materials magnetic properties (big if, actually!) it may well revolutionize electrical motor design, maglev trains and roadways, and more, but just letting us move power for free to where we use it makes Edison have the last laugh over Tesla -- human civilization can convert to low voltage DC electrical service. A civilization run on 5 VDC would make electrocution a historical oddity from pre-RTS times -- one can manage to kill yourself with as little as 9 volts (see my favorite Darwin Award, "Resistance is Futile" -- http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html) but 50 mA should be below the fatal threshold even for somebody that tries very hard.
Physical optical resolution depends on the diameter (directly). Larger area equals more brightness. Larger diameter means smaller angular resolution in the limit, IF one can compensate for other resolution limiting factors, e.g. gravitational and thermal deformation of the mirror(s) and atmospheric effects. Nowadays I believe they largely can, so bigger (larger diameter) is really better, as well as brighter.
I second this -- IIRC they are doing some enormously clever things with sampling and real-time computation to dynamically eliminate atmospheric distortion, in some cases by using two or more scopes looking at the same thing and in others by basically dynamically deconvolving the distortion to a stationary image. There is a resolution trade-off, not just brightness trade-off, in the size of the primary versus the atmosphere, and where we can (perhaps) compensate for the latter the former is hard physics. The only way to give the Hubble better resolution is to build a bigger Hubble, but one can take even older ground-based scopes and add things to improve compensation for the atmosphere.
"This is the dumbest thing I've heard in my life. And I don't say that lightly, this is, quite literally, the dumbest thing I have heard anyone say, ever.
From which one is tempted to infer that you are:
* Deaf;
* Raised by wolves until yesterday, just got back to civilization;
* A space alien from a planet where people never say foolish things;
* All of the above
because the rest us hear things that dumb every day at least once.
First off, the lung cancer may be more from vegetable deficiency disease and iodine deficiency disease and vitamin D deficiency disease and other messed up social processes leading to distress than from smoking. I'm not saying smoking is good for you generally, of course, but consider:
"Why I Recommend to NOT Stop Smoking"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9DZBzKppHQ [youtube.com]
Well, this really says all I need to know about where you are coming from regarding science.
Well, that was easy. You may, though, want to look into the history of the Everett Interpretation and/or the particular qualifications of the person I quoted. It has a well, and long, established inferential plausibility.
I teach quantum mechanics, sir, and it has nothing of the sort. As I said, evidence for it would be violation of the first or second law. Otherwise it is an interpretation -- meaning that it is an exotic but completely unsupported hypothesis beloved of the kind of nut cases that participated in making "What the Bleep do we Know" that think that we somehow consensually create the reality we observe, one at a time, with our minds. Schrodinger's Cat on steroids. All that they really show is that they don't really understand quantum theory, measurement, and the Nakajima-Zwanzig Generalized Master Equation.
As for your refusal to look at computational complexity (or your implicit belief that the human brain has some sort of miraculous capability in that regard) I can only repeat again -- real precognition, as opposed to insight brought about by deep study and knowledge, doesn't just bridge a gap of incomplete information with a brilliant guess, it leaps a gap of no knowledge, an impossible gap, to make a prediction that simply cannot be supported by the available evidence. It is knowing a complex future you cannot possible have known. It is the precog who walks up to the body lying on the sidewalk and says "the killer is blond, six foot three, male, and drives a red Porsche" in a city they've never visited for a body they've never seen, when the killer, car, and all actual witnesses to the event are long gone, not the detective who sees the postman deliver mail while they are looking at the body and, subconsciously seeing something out of place in the way the postman behaves, dreams that the postman did it and turns out to be right. If you want to believe that the former is possible, fine, but it violates the second law of thermodynamics and it is unobserved under anything like controlled circumstances. It is as implausible as developing an unexposed piece of film and discovering a perfect image of the Washington Monument on it, a month before visiting Washington and pointing the camera at the Monument. No matter how much "brain" you put in front of the camera, the fact is that none of the information required to reconstruct the picture has been received by it and hence information flow and entropy is backwards.
Regarding information representation -- the whole point of information theory is to avoid the issue of representation. It certainly presumes nothing about idealism versus materialism. In only one place does speaking of the Universe require representation, and it does require us to agree about the meaning of the term Universe.
The word Universe is often misused, and this misuse is at the heart of much bad reasoning. The Universe is everything that has real objective existence, in a time independent way. With this definition, we can do away with the multiverse because the concept simply describes additional complexity of the one Universe. We can do away with mind versus matter idiocy, because whichever one (or both) that is objectively real is foundational to the Universe. We can reduce the Universe itself to non-abstracted information -- self-encoded information, whether the self-representation is "mind" or "matter". This is real stuff not encoded in something else, but rather the only real something else capable of "encoding" anything at all.
If you don't have such a rigorous definition, sure, you can have God creating Universes, mind over matter or matter over mind, anything you like, because you can always throw the mystery into some other milieu that is, sadly, not accessible to experiment. It is the ultimate excuse to be sloppy in your approach to knowledge. I'll have nothing of it. If God exists, God is all, or perhaps part of the Universe according to this definition and cannot c
Further, your basic premise is quite broken within a multiverse model, as others have noted: [wikipedia.org]
Sure, so next, provide me with evidence that any sort of multiverse model is correct. Oh wait, there isn't any. In particular, if there were a multiverse with the possibility of coupling, violations of the first and/or second law are enabled, and we've never seen any.
As for your "empirical" knowledge that people can and do know complex futures in a statistically significant way, provide me with the double blind, statistically significant evidence and you can take the quotes off of the word "empirical". Otherwise you should be pronouncing it as "anecdotal", where in science anecdotal evidence isn't considered reliable, for some very good reasons. It isn't enough to think "maybe it will rain tomorrow" and then be right -- you have to have that feeling repeatedly and be right a statistically significant fraction of the time more than expected from just random chance, in an ensemble that includes all of the poor souls who have the feeling and are right less often than expected from random chance. Otherwise sure, you can cherrypick any experience you like where you thought "goodness, if I pick the lottery number 12 18 22 17 49 30 33 I'll win" and use it as evidence of precognition, in spite of the fact that there are few tens of millions of poor suckers that thought exactly the same thing but lost, in a game that sooner or later somebody is going to win.
Finally, your assertion that e.g. the NSA could conceivably predict the kind of stuff that would count as "precognition" simply demonstrates that you don't understand computational complexity. NSA cannot even predict a "mere" 4096 bit seed plus key that would decrypt my personal records, and that isn't even a difficult problem -- at worst it is a linear search that takes longer than the lifetime of the Universe to accomplish or stuff like that, and sure, it might be possible to do better with cleverness given a knowledge of the encryption algorithm. A difficult problem is solving for the exact quantum time evolution of (say) 1000 coupled two level atoms (vastly beyond our capability to even store the data required to represent the exact state to put into our coupled equations, and that is still only 1000 two level atoms -- a 10x10x10 cube, say, not 10^23 or more real atoms in a mostly unknown initial state).
You might take a bit of time and learn something about complexity and how phase spaces increase in size as problems scale up before making assertions of computability, as one rapidly -- and I do mean rapidly -- reaches numbers where every elementary particle in the visible Universe wouldn't suffice to abstractly store the information content of a much, much smaller subset of the Universe. The Universe is its own basically irreducible information theoretic representation, which is the fundamental reason an information-theoretic Laplace Demon argument is a proof that if God exists, God must be the Universe itself.
Do you really believe that we in our time are that much more advanced than they were?
Sure, absolutely! So do you if you read your own words: "we have understandings of the laws of nature, that they did not have". They believed in God and Devils because they needed explanations for things they could not explain correctly. We have physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, statistics, and have largely filled in the gaps that the mythical gods of the Bronze and Iron age filled. This makes us much, more more advanced than they were.
The central tenet of the Christian faith is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. To modern technological humans, the idea of resurrection from the dead in a totally new arrangement of matter that transcends time and space, violates KNOWN laws of physics. It is therefore still deemed to be a miracle. To me it is common sense, that the universe, especially life in it, is far too complex, to have come into being by the impersonal forces of nature. Therefore, it is not an unreasonable assumption (reasonable faith), that an intelligence far beyond our own created life in the beginning, whenever that was.
To modern technological humans, including yourself, the idea of resurrection from the dead is totally absurd. If I asserted that it happened you would instantly and without any doubt think that I was lying and/or mistaken. All of us would, because we not only have never observed it to happen, we now understand perfectly well why it cannot happen without violating a large number of laws and principles that work very well indeed, whenever and however we test them, to describe the world we see and experience. It's only when the presumed resurrection happened in the distant past and is knowledge transmitted by a mythological chain that would never, ever, be accepted as "testimony" in a court of law that you are willing to believe that it happened. You might want to read a few of Bart Ehrman's books on Jesus. They are rather eye-opening. As for common sense and the Universe -- to avoid a perceived problem with complexity in the Universe, you introduce a far greater problem by hypothesizing a still more complex entity that is its proximate cause. How is that common sense? You then believe in it as a matter of faith because there is no evidence that such a complex entity exists, not to mention the serious logical, mathematical, ethical, and physical problems one encounters the moment one tries to actually specify how all this is supposed to have worked. In other words, you can believe in it with faith as long as you don't think about it too long or too hard, because the moment you do you are forced to confront the fact that your beliefs make little sense and are almost certainly incorrect. It works only as long as it remains mysterious, which is why you are trying hard to argue that the world is a mysterious place filled with things that cannot be explained, with big gaps to hide your God in.
In actual fact, science has a perfectly reasonable explanation for how life arose and how we evolved that does not require the belief in any exterior intelligent agency, one that we can and do observe in action all of the time around us and that is supported by literally mountains of evidence. Science has allowed us to work out a remarkably detailed if still general picture of how the Universe has evolved according to consistent laws of nature as far back and far away as we can -- literally -- see. This picture contradicts the Bible in every single detail where both make and sort of statement on a common issue. The Bible is demonstrably a terrible guide to physical science and knowledge of the world in which we live.
The only difference between you and me and any other human being or other known life-forms, in the physical sense, is in the arrangement of otherwise totally identical atoms. This arrangement is coded by software, a program, information, stored in the DNA molecules. Is it the
The second law of thermodynamics is a statistical law -- it is the sense of plausibility. It prohibits nothing that doesn't violate the first law in absolute terms. It just says that it is very, very unlikely for certain states to be the future time evolution of current states. I really am rather familiar with e.g. random number generation and the idea that knowledge of a seed and a relatively small piece of code suffices to deterministically predict an apparently random sequence far into the "future", but the point with real decks of cards and real random number generators such as those embedded in cryptography is that they have sufficient entropy that one cannot reasonably perform precisely this sort of deterministic projection, so that we are forced to use a statistical description of the future. Precognition in a nutshell is like "just knowing" the 97124480233rd random number returned by a good random number generator, without knowledge of either the algorithm or generator used or the seed. It doesn't violate my "sense of plausibility", it just violates my simple common sense -- it will never happen!
Shuffling the deck "well" means that somebody takes the cards into another room and subjects them to a process where you lack the initial state information needed to even in principle solve the impossibly difficult physical problem of predicting the final card order. You don't even know how the cards are being shuffled -- riffle shuffle of a new pinochle deck, 52-pickup shuffle of a well-used preshuffled regular deck. You don't know how many cards are missing, or how many decks are being shuffled together. You don't even know if they are regular cards at all, or are e.g. Tarot cards or the "deeds" from a monopoly game. The ability to consistently predict the outcomes of this sort of process without any knowledge of initial state is indeed a pure violation of the second law and yeah, of common sense.
One can categorize supernaturalism in the same way one can categorize perpetual motion machines -- miracles of the first kind violate both the first law (and often, the second law as well) -- basically violate mass-energy conservation as well as entropy constraint, where miracles of the second kind violate only the second law -- they aren't "impossible" in the sense that the violate any fundamental conservation law, they are simply enormously improbable. You vastly underestimate the entropy associated with the 5 of hearts, which is a metaphor for drawing from the vast "deck" of future possibility in the case of actual precognition.
Precognition given a lack of knowledge of initial state or algorithm is a miracle of the second kind. Coming back from the dead is a miracle of the second kind. Telekinesis can be either one (sufficiently organized but enormously improbable motion of the air molecules can lift something up), but in general it is a miracle of the first kind. The first and second laws of thermodynamics are, in a nutshell, that "miracles don't (usually) happen", where "don't usually" for real second law violations in systems with many degrees of freedom is basically "never", and for the first kind it is "have never been observed" -- the first law is empirical and observational, but the second law is purely statistical. It's actually easier to believe in violations of the first law (which just means we have to redo some of the laws of microscopic physics) than the second.
A properly skeptical scientist doesn't waste time on perpetual motion machines or miracles. The default belief in such cases is to immediately reject claims of either one unless or until someone provides truly extraordinary evidence to support the literally unbelievable claim. In the meantime, the claimer is almost certainly lying or mistaken.
To paraphrase (IIRC) Sommerfeld: Our understanding of the laws of physics might well be wrong. People make mistakes in experiments all of the time. Our knowledge of physical science is enormously uncertain. However, when a result can be shown to violate the second law of thermodynamics, it is just plain wrong -- there is a deep error somewhere in there.
In the study of things like ESP and homeopathic remedies, a double blind experiment is essential because it is the method that controls for confirmation bias, the bete noire of this sort of research from the earliest days of e.g. the Rhine Institute and beyond. I am an expert in testing random number generators, and hence can convey an anecdote that illustrates how confirmation bias can corrupt the results even of people that are rather good at statistics. In the early days of random number testing, various people and groups published lists of "certified random numbers". These were numbers that were generated by one means or another and that had passed some modest array of tests for randomness. They'd be in compilations of tables e.g. Abramositz and Stegun or the CRC Handbook, or you could buy specialized tables. People would use them in simple Monte Carlo and so on, in the days before ubiquitous computers and software random number generators.
The problem is this -- by rejecting, one presumes, lists of random numbers that failed their tests, they ensured that whatever else the certified list might be, it was not random. It was not random even if the method used to generate it was a truly random process! If one applied a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to the aggregate p-values of a large number of "certified" lists and tests, that KS test would inevitably fail because by means of the accept-reject process they cut off the wings that any truly random process must have to be random. The lists were, on average, too uniform.
Even a tyro at randomness can actually understand this from a very simple example involving a single digit, but one that scales perfectly to as many digits in as many numbers as you like. I present you with a single digit of a single number, "7". Is it random?
No test applied to the number itself can tell you if it is or if it isn't. If I give you a list of digits such as 2-6-5-3-5-8-9-7-9-3-2-3-6-4 you can't tell either. Perhaps they are random. Perhaps they are a few of the digits output from an algorithm computing \pi, hardly a "random" number, although irrational. Perhaps the digits of \pi would pass any test for randomness, perhaps not. There is a finite, usually rather simply calculated, probability that a truly random generator will generate any digit string you like.
So how do we tell if the "7" above is random? The answer is so simple it is almost self-evident (after the fact). If it was generated by a truly random process, then it is a truly random number. It isn't the number itself, it is how we get it that makes it random, or not random. We can apply tests to random number generators (software or e.g. quantum hardware), determine good ones (that pass the most rigorous tests consistently) and then just take what they give us as random numbers even if a particular subsequence they output is 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0 and doesn't "look" random at all to our pattern-greedy minds. If the 7 above resulted from me rolling a perfectly unbiased 10-sided die that turned up 7, it is a random number. If, on the other hand, I just made it up for illustrative purposes, it is not.
The point is that there are patterns even in pure noise. Even statisticians devoted to the study of noise historically have made horrible errors by e.g. rejecting noise with patterns as being "not random enough" in spite of the fact that it was generated by a good, reasonably random source of noise. Humans are greedy the other way, and tend to observe the patterns in noise and grasp at it as non-randomness, as the basis for the inference of some underlying order. It is only by comparing the patterns observed in some experiment to the patterns observed in some control that should be pure noise that we can differentiate what is (probably) truly a signal, real patterns that justify some sort of inference, and false patterns, the sort that turn up in any sufficiently lon
* The placebo effect is real, it is actually getting stronger, and MDs regularly use it. So how can you say homeopathy, even if it were to be nothing more than the placebo effect, does not work?
Hence the importance of the double blind experiment in medicine, which can control for the placebo effect. For example, comparing results when two groups are given water, are both told identical things about the water, when the people giving them the water and collecting information about the results don't themselves know which water is water and which water is homeopathic water, permits the final data to be analyzed to determine if homeopathic water has a differential healing effect compared to control water. Such experiments have been done and, of course, have failed. If you understood the nature of the double blind experiment, the statistically suspect nature of marginal or anecdotal results, and the need for plausible hypotheses to fit somehow into the framework of what we already know or be supported not by even ordinary evidence, but rather extraordinary, incontrovertible, reproducible evidence that has passed the most rigorous of public scientific skeptical scrutiny, you wouldn't be so quick to grasp at the straws of implausible, almost certainly incorrect ideas. That you are so eager to do so says more about you and your penchant for wishful thinking and confirmation bias than it does about the results you leap to endorse.
* Nutrition and lifestyle choices are probably the major determinant of good health most of the time for most people, yet MDs have next-to-no training in understanding or discussing that, and they spend little time with patients counseling on those things in practice, and so if an alternative medical care provider like a homeopath spends an hour with someone and talks about those things, that customer is going to be way ahead in health compared to going to an MD in many (not all) situations.
Being married to a physician (and regularly going to my doctor) I and nearly everybody else listening know just how much bullshit this sort of statement is. MDs have extensive training on the importance of nutrition, lifestyle, and counsel patients to stop smoking, either don't drink or regulate your drinking to 1-2 drinks a day, wear their seatbelts when they drive, brush their teeth and visit their dentist regularly, get enough sleep, eat a well balanced diet, exercise regularly, get out of abusive relationships, and generally take good care of themselves. Although insurance companies still don't do enough, most of them provide direct incentives for or actually cover at least some lifestyle improvements and choices. My wife probably spends 1/4 to 1/3 of each visit on average (a lot more in some cases, somewhat less in a few) on things like this, as does my own doctor who is forever nagging me to lose 20 pounds and exercise more regularly.
Now let's consider the statistical differences between visiting my wife when you are unwell and visiting a homeopath. If you visit my wife, she applies a deep knowledge of your symptoms and their possible connections to actual diseases. She will routinely take your blood, urine, and stool, and have a wide range of subtle metabolic tests and labs done that search for markers of diseases open and occult -- things like diabetes, cancer, liver disease, digestive disorders, and more can be negatively affecting your health or about to kill you without (yet) manifesting themselves as symptoms. If she has probable cause in her physical examination, her verbal examination, or the results of your labs, she will send you out for additional tests or labs -- MRI, cat scans, subspeciality consults -- or, if she discovers e.g. that your heartburn is actually probably heart disease she can send you directly to a hospital for admittance. When she treats you she uses, to the best of her knowledge and ability, the best treatments so far discovered for any given condit
Sure, I know absolutely nothing about consciousness, neural networks, computation, information theory, the brain or the mind. And you know this how? The fact that I held a provisional patent to build a self-aware computational engine for a year or two (and still have the algorithm in hand, but got distracted and didn't pursue the funding needed), have written one of the world's best neural networks for use in predictive modelling, am in a proposal to do work on this in collaboration with various e.g. neuroscientists, means nothing at all. It's a difficult problem, sure, but that doesn't mean that it is unsolvable or that we haven't made any progress towards its solution. With my help or without it, we are at most a decade or two away from self-aware machines.
Or, perhaps, maybe, I know and understand a rather lot more than you do, as you seek to exaggerate the problem and make it sound like there is something fundamentally mysterious about consciousness, something we cannot explain by simple mechanism, in spite of the rather overwhelming evidence that consciousness is complex mechanism that goes away when one breaks the supporting physical machine in almost any way.
The knowledge one person provides to another by means of "revelation" -- or rather, simple communication like this -- is subjected to the same common sense tests that knowledge obtained any other way is. Indeed, most scientific knowledge is obtained this way -- through the "revelation" process known as "education". I teach physics via verbal and symbolic presentation supported by spot checks of the science via laboratory work and other observation, simply because what human has time to verify the entire body of human knowledge personally?
We learn (from our spot checks and via reason and pure common sense) whom to "trust" in the communication of knowledge. Note well that the trust so rendered is not faith as you are attempting to introduce it. Faith is believing something without any good reason to do so. Knowledge is that which we believe for good reasons. Extended trust basically identifies an information source -- human or otherwise -- as "probably reliable", at least in some milieu. Many humans and human-derived sources we learn not to trust -- confidence men, religious shamans of all faiths, religious mythologies, tricksters, and our good friend Joe, at least when Joe is describing his exploits fishing or with women.
Humans are amazingly unreliable information sources, and the legal system is fully aware that "eyewitness testimony" is one of the worst forms of proof. Witness the large number of people being released from prison because objective, non-eyewitness evidence like "DNA tests" reveals that in spite of the eyewitness testimony against them, they actually did not commit the crime. Humans -- and I include myself -- are easily fooled by slight of hand or slight of mind; we see things and interpret them incorrectly, we constantly reprocess our memories, and what we think that we see is often strongly influenced by our prior beliefs. That's why science relies so heavily upon double blind experiments and careful statistics -- even scientists will see what they want to see unless they take strong measures to prevent it. Confirmation bias and the cherrypicking of data are pervasive in science even today (especially in medical research and climate research, where there are large sums of money at stake).
The big, enormous mistake you are making, however, is when you first put words in my mouth -- I didn't say ESP cannot be scientifically proven or disproven, I said that it is scientifically disproven, in the specific senses that a) there is no reliable evidence for it; and b) there is no physical model within the bounds of known (strongly believed) science that seems capable of explaning it. That doesn't mean, I agree, that it could not be true, but it does mean that if I were a betting man and tried to assign the probability that it is true using Bayes theorem, the result would be a very, very small number -- so small that one would have to use a log scale to even think of describing it. A lack of evidence is not positive evidence of lack, but it certainly makes lack more probable. A lack of rational explanation based on what we know does not positively imply that a rational explanation does not exist, but it makes it less likely that one exists. This is sheer common sense.
Hence the legitimate comparison of my "belief" that cars will, mostly, stay on their side of the road with my "belief" that ESP is (sadly) bullshit works this way. I drive. I understand the physical laws that govern the motion of cars -- rather well, since I teach them to undergrads every day. I understand things like static versus kinetic friction, the mechanical strength and structures of metals, the operation and design of heat engines, electrical systems, control systems, well enough to have good reason to believe that most cars, when one of the systems upon which they rely do not malfunction (which they do a statistically reasonable fraction of the time) are controllable by good d
That's a straw man, don't you think? Our brains have nothing like unlimited anything, especially input resolution, and from any given present the unknown state information makes possible futures sprout like mushrooms after a rain.
I also reiterate -- I don't consider "precognition" to be "It's raining now, I think it will rain tomorrow". There is no information-theoretic mystery in that kind of precognition, no violation of the second law if we're right, and we end up being wrong a number of times when tested that is easily understood in terms of probability. I object specifically to the assertion of precognition that cannot be explained in terms of using information at hand to project probable futures in a sensible way. Me "knowing" the card you're going to draw in a well-shuffled deck, for example. That is indeed a pure example of a 2nd law violation -- knowing something in the future without any information-theoretic basis for the knowledge.
That is incorrect. The violation of the second law of thermodynamics is the issue at stake. I won't go into complete detail (it would take a while) but the long and the short of it is that the probability of microscopically reversible interactions from general future events being causally connected over past time to coherent structures of any sort in the human brain are -- zero. Well, not really zero but a number so close to zero that it lives snugged up across the fence from zero, good friends, their kids go to the same schools. It's impossibility of precisely the same sort that lets you tell the direction of time in a movie of a glass that is broken by falling to the ground. Why does the broken glass never leap up into the air and weld itself back into a glass? Well, that sort of event might even be likely compared to the probability of (say) having a visualization of something that is going to happen (due to a causal chain of events completely disconnected with the visualization itself) a year into the future...
Granted. I meant precognition as "seeing the future" without any rational predictive basis. On the other hand, the entire point of science in general and physics in particular is to be able to predict the future (or more subtly, understand the world-matrix of causality, the weaving of the threads by the Norns, in a manner that is microscopically time symmetric but macroscopically asymmetric, with entropy strictly associated with the arrow of chemically perceptually experienced time.
But I might have stated this more precisely. Physics good, inference good, "just knowing for no reason" bad.
However I do think that it is time for the biological and psychological sciences to catch up with physics.
But this is precisely the problem. Precognition violates the second law of thermodynamics. End of story. Not only does it violate it, it violates it badly. If "ESP" were demonstrated, especially things like precognition, it is very, very difficult to see how it could ever be made consistent with our current knowledge of physics. It would be as bad as Neo learning that his entire Universe is a sham, that we're all just power units in the Matrix with an entirely different physics one level up that trumps the apparent "rules" in this level at will.
Sure, sure, that would all be very exciting and might be true. But it is not plausible or best belief, without the very soundest and most reproducible of evidence. And sadly or not, we haven't a shred of reproducible evidence that thought is anything but a peculiar electrochemical process supported on the physical hardware of our brains in complete accord with, among other things, the second law of thermodynamics.
Compare this to something like climate science where both the data and the models are private. Kind of scary when a pseudo-science is practicing better science that "real" science.
I generally agree, but bear in mind that this is strongly dependent on agency supporting the research. NASA, for example, requires the publication of both methods and data. Hence if you want to replicate GISS, you can, or you can write your own alternative from the same data. HADCRUT, OTOH, has notoriously failed to provide full access to its source data and methodology. GISS is NASA, HADCRUT is whatever the hell supports climate research over in England. Different rules.
As I noted above, there is a lot of top-level pressure being exerted to change this (I've participated very briefly in some of the discussions) not just in climate science but in e.g. medical research where the costs of junk science and non-reproducible results or overt fraud are lost lives and billions of dollars. The problem is the journals -- they are not publicly funded, and have their own rules about publishing stuff on the side of the actual articles, plus the eternal paywall problem (where we the people pay for the research, but somehow have to pay again on an individual basis in order to read the publication of the results). The solutions to this sort of problem are all at least as bad as the problem itself -- I mean we don't really want the government in charge of the journals, do we? And yet neither is it reasonable for us to pay twice for the work they publish. And nobody has a good funding model that keeps the journals running independently without having individuals or institutions pay, even if a lot of what they use to pay with is (in the end) government grant money plus overhead galore. It's not a simple problem, although I think that we could solve it a lot of different ways if we really tried.
So yes, climate policies e.g. the "Carbon Tax" are enormously expensive, catastrophically expensive -- we're talking hundreds of billions of dollars a year, even more if they were fully implemented on a global basis -- so expensive that it actually becomes difficult to see how any plausible climate catastrophe hypothesized and projected to occur in 80 or 90 years could possibly compare to the catastrophic costs of the measures being taken to avoid it. The science projecting "catastrophe" is far from "settled" or universally accepted, in part because it is difficult -- the Earth's climate system is described by the coupled Navier-Stokes equation from hell, and is where Chaos theory was discovered -- and yet we find ourselves paying far more in the state of California alone to cut down on CO_2 emissions than it would cost to completely rebuild after a dozen catastrophic hurricanes. Common sense is lost in the circus of Chicken Little, with its "overheated" rhetoric. But this is just one manifestation of a far more general problem with the current science funding model, the constraints of the ivory tower (University system) and the journals.
That's the real controversy here. Many journals are biased against articles that describe attempts to replicate previously published results, even if the outcome is negative. This is a disincentive for scientists to engage in much of what would be very useful research.
This is dead on the money -- I agree. I keep Richard Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" address here: http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm permanently open in a browser tab just to remind me how important replication really is. There is a major effort at the highest levels of the government that sit in oversight of the granting agencies and that ultimately fund the journals themselves (indirectly) to change some of this, because it is this very reluctance (plus a tendency to publish "results" but hide the actual data and methodology from precisely the public access and scrutiny and critical replication that is essential to the scientific process) that leads to a huge amount of junk science being published every year, much of it (sadly) in social psychology, medicine, and climate science, where at least two of these have enormous costs associated with error.
ESP, fortunately isn't one of them. As you note, it (as a hypothesis) could be true, but there is so far no good reason to believe in it. Such evidence as there is is anecdotal and fails to stand up in a reproducible way to skeptical critical tests seeking to verify the anecdotes. However, we can go farther than this -- ESP may exist, but it is in some sense a rare phenomenon if it does. If it were universal and common, we could hardly have failed to discover this by now. The many experiments that have been done seeking to confirm the phenomenon (and failing) have the effect of gradually lowering the plausible boundary of its existence, just as the many (failed) experiments seeking e.g. magnetic monopoles don't disprove their existence but they do establish plausible limits on how common they are (at least in the forms being tested).
ESP, unlike monopoles, suffers from a serious flaw as a scientific hypothesis. I can understand how a monopole might exist, and can further see how their existence has considerable explanatory power and esthetic appeal -- electrodynamics would become more symmetric, charge quantization would be "explained", if there was at least one monopole in the Universe. They consistently fit in with our existing knowledge. ESP, on the other hand, does not. There is not one single theory (that I know of) that offers a consistent explanation of how ESP could function in terms of known physical law. Indeed, things like precognition overtly violate so very many physical laws -- for starters, the second law of thermodynamics -- that verifying it might well require the complete rewriting of all the laws of physics. This is actually a serious problem. It is like "coming back from the dead" or other forms of supernaturalism and magic -- sensible people reject such hypotheses as the default belief (often in the face of various offerings of anecdotal "evidence") because, to paraphrase somebody (Thomas Paine?) it is far more easy to believe that a human is a liar or mistaken than to believe that the stars themselves have gone out of their courses. If true precognition were reproducibly demonstrated, analyzing the requisite dynamical flow of information involved would very much make the stars go out of their courses, with future complex phenomena causing entropic shifts in current chemistry. We do not, as a general rule, ever observe entropy-shifting effects preceding their causes.
Actually, imaging of electromagnetic fields around the brain is done routinely, not so much by physicists but by scientists (e.g. biological psychologists and neurophysiologists) and physicians. The tools for doing so are things like EEG hardware, fMRI, SQUID-based transducers, implants, and more. The methodology has gotten so advanced that they can observe e.g. maps of lit neurons in the working visual cortex that correspond in a 1 to 1 manner to a presented visual field or differentiate the word you are thinking about from fMRI activity (from a palette of previously measured/associated words).
In spite of all of the many experiments that have indeed been done looking for a "soul" or a seat of consciousness outside of the actual physical brain, not one of them has succeeded and there isn't the slightest good reason to think that this is so. There is absolutely no observed or inferred relationship between subatomic particles and some ill-defined quantum of consciousness. Everything we know about consciousness (and at this point we know a rather lot) is entirely consistent with it being a high level manifestation of self-organizing critical behavior supported by an evolved and highly complex macroscopic physical substrate where the fundamental "units" of thought are neural transitions mediated by neurotransmitters -- pure electrochemistry, which is not only not subatomic it is molecular, superatomic involving many atoms.
However, observing the phylogenetic progression of intelligence and brain size, structure, and capacity, it is also perfectly clear that humans' ability to engage in "higher order thought" is intimately tied into language and semantics -- symbolic ontology -- which is at least two or three orders up from neural activity -- not only is it fundamental neurochemical, evolutionarily a control system for a complex pattern of entropy-generating biochemistry, it is the result of a subtle process of memetic evolution of self-consistent abstraction leading to the ability to actually "think" about our environment and make verbal, visual, symbolic inferences. In other words, it isn't based on smaller physical things, it is a reflection of coherent activity of the already macroscopic physical chemical processes of neural action, far more macroscopic and (by virtue of its organization) different in nature and character. As my (world-reknowned) instructor in statistical physics and complex systems (Richard Palmer) once remarked in a lecture on this very topic "more is different" and thought is the result of a lot more, and makes no sense at all interpreted as the motion of raw individual electrons, let alone "subatomic particles".
There is so much more to whack in your absurd statements. You assert that an "electromagnetic unit" is smaller than the smallest subatomic particle. Since physicists believe that "subatomic" (I assume that you mean "elementary") particles are point-like objects with no physical extent, that would be a neat trick. It is difficult to get smaller than "no size at all". You are obviously completely ignorant of actual electromagnetic theory, or you would be forced to put your statement in some sort of consistent relationship with our knowledge of the photon as an electromagnetic unit, electric charge as an electromagnetic unit, the actual elementary particles which have charge and which couple via electromagnetic interactions to other charged particles. Stating that all of this will be proven with studies "one day" when instruments have become even better is semantically null -- if scientists knew what would be proven "one day" without doing the experiments before the instruments in question have even been invented, they'd be -- wait for it -- psychic!
Oh, wait, I see, that's how you know all of this. And because you "just know" it via your ESP, you don't need to actually verify any of it by studying it or doing or even learning about the many subtle and excellent experiments that are done by neur
Ah, yes, but then you'd have to know how to rigorously test for uniform distributions to obtain and interpret p-values and the like, and seriously (speaking of probabilities) what are the odds that a psychologist who takes the hypothesis of precognition seriously knows either statistics or how to design double-blind experiments properly?
rgb (speaking ex cathedra as the author of dieharder, which does indeed know how to test for uniform distributions as well as test random number generators in general many, many ways...;-)
Actually, I think they became extinct because they were all eaten by a burgeoning post-Holocene human population. Although there was a subspecies population IIRC of miniature Mammoths that survived on an isolated island for couple thousand more years. They problem was they were too easy to kill and too slow to reproduce and lived in too small a habitable range in a protein-hungry human world. They weren't the only species to go down in this way -- lots of very large (and easily killed) mammals were wiped out around the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason that this is now true is that Christianity has long since adapted to the cruel fact that the Bible, its nominal description of God, the origins of the Universe and humans in it, its accounting of history and morality, has been shown to be false everywhere that it matters. Shown long ago to be false. However, for most of the last 2000 years one would have been burned alive, hung, imprisoned, tortured, ostracized, or stoned to death for any such assertion because it is in fact the case that belief in Christianity and life outside of the Earth -- hell, belief in an "outside of the Earth" for there to be life in -- were mutually exclusive.
Christians have responded to the troubling news (as described, for example, in Cardinal Saint Bellarmine's letter to Galilieo -- http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1615bellarmine-letter.asp -- required reading for any Christian interested in the truth as opposed to excuses for continuing to accord partial faith to a stack of myths, legends, and self-serving lies) by simply eliding all of the contradicted and self-contradictory passages in the Bible out of their mental space. They do exactly the same thing that the selfsame Catholic Church has done with pederastic priests -- tried to pretend that they don't exist, or that they are "something else", for example metaphor, not literal truth, even though the original patriarch's of the church clearly thought they were literal truth and at least in the early 1600's acknowledged that if they were not, it was frighteningly probable that the whole structure of assertions of truth that is Christian Scripture was probably false -- probable enough to convince almost anybody, unless convinced otherwise by an increasingly tangled morass of "interpretation" of scripture that says one thing into something else entirely.
This has resulted in the shrinkage of sound core belief in Biblical scripture to the bare minimum to support Christianity -- at this point we are to believe that Christ existed, did all of these miracles, is misreported when he is asserted to have referred to Noah and the Flood as actual events, was crucified, died, rose from the dead, and will come back one day to judge humanity and bring in a golden age after a really big war against antichrists like myself where he will (one presumes) kill us for our disbelief and then condemn us all to a fiery furnace for eternity for the insult. Everything else is up for grabs as it contradicts yet another piece of science or historical analysis, but if Jesus did not exist, did not die and come back to life, then Christianity itself has no basis at all in fact.
Fortunately (for "Christianity", the hodge-podge of Christian faiths), it is impossible to disprove this because the events in question happened 2000 years ago, safely beyond the ability of telescopes to disprove them, and the Church itself long since destroyed any historical records that might have contradicted its account of the events of that time. All one can combat this with is sheer common sense -- the assertions are absurd -- and the fact that everywhere we can actually check the miraculous assertions of the Bible, they are false. The Bible is a false witness. It has zero credibility. It endorses slavery and marriage by rape. Moses, were he alive today, would face a Nuremberg-like trial for the slaughter and rape of the Midianites and be hung by the neck until he was dead. Its morality is not just suspect, it is openly wrong. The God it portrays is a cross between a tempery three-year old child whose name is "Jealous" and an ego-bound Earthly King.
br rgb
First of all, mod+1 for the reference to the minimum amount of heat -- I knew that such a limit existed but it was good to see the estimate and have links to the formal argument and beyond. Second, while we may or may not be able to reduce the heat released from the bits themselves as they change state, room temperature superconductors will still make two very significant improvements in processor design. First, reducing the resistance of everything BUT the bits will reduce the heat released by a chip by a nontrivial amount, rather a nontrivial fraction -- presuming that one can lay down the superconductor in VLSI circuits and mass produce them, as opposed to build them a molecule at a time. Second, electrical superconductors are usually thermal superconductors as well.
It is this latter property that is probably by far the most important. Note e.g. this article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/11/031112072719.htm -- if one were able to make the base of a chip out of a superconductor in good thermal contact with the actual semiconductor matrix a thin film on top of it, and couple that base directly to a superconducting heat sink, one could e.g. produce 10x to 50x the heat in the actual CPU and still remove it fast enough to keep the chip itself sufficiently cool. If the traces within the chip itself were superconducting, if clever use of superconducting material let one reduce the heat associated with switching closer to the limit, so much the better. Ultimately, it would probably mean that one could run chips at higher voltage and higher clock to produce faster reliable switching and still deal with the heat.
I don't have time to do a formal estimate of the speedup possible, but I'm guestimating that a real thermal superconductor -- one with "zero" resistance to the flow of heat -- suitable for use as the base material for a chip would permit a very rapid scale-up of chip speed by up to an order of magnitude in clock or effective clock. It also might make it possible to build a three dimensional CPU -- one reason chips are 2D is so that one can get the heat out; if one had a thermal/electrical superconductor one could in principle stack up layers and scale performance by one or more orders of magnitude, at first multiple cores on steroids but all at much higher clocks, later true 3d design and layout.
In any event, the impact would very probably be profound, at least if the hypothetical RTS was cheap and suitable for nanoscale integration as a substrate and/or trace material (and functioned as a thermal superconductor as well as noted).
Still, I think that simply eliminating resistivity in power transmission would have the greatest societal impact. PV solar power, for example, "instantly" becomes feasible because one can generate in the Mojave and use the electricity in Maine without transmission loss. That isn't huge, that is game-changing enormous. The Sahara become the electrical source for Europe and Africa, India for Asia, etc. Depending on the hypothetical materials magnetic properties (big if, actually!) it may well revolutionize electrical motor design, maglev trains and roadways, and more, but just letting us move power for free to where we use it makes Edison have the last laugh over Tesla -- human civilization can convert to low voltage DC electrical service. A civilization run on 5 VDC would make electrocution a historical oddity from pre-RTS times -- one can manage to kill yourself with as little as 9 volts (see my favorite Darwin Award, "Resistance is Futile" -- http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html) but 50 mA should be below the fatal threshold even for somebody that tries very hard.
rgb
Physical optical resolution depends on the diameter (directly). Larger area equals more brightness. Larger diameter means smaller angular resolution in the limit, IF one can compensate for other resolution limiting factors, e.g. gravitational and thermal deformation of the mirror(s) and atmospheric effects. Nowadays I believe they largely can, so bigger (larger diameter) is really better, as well as brighter.
I second this -- IIRC they are doing some enormously clever things with sampling and real-time computation to dynamically eliminate atmospheric distortion, in some cases by using two or more scopes looking at the same thing and in others by basically dynamically deconvolving the distortion to a stationary image. There is a resolution trade-off, not just brightness trade-off, in the size of the primary versus the atmosphere, and where we can (perhaps) compensate for the latter the former is hard physics. The only way to give the Hubble better resolution is to build a bigger Hubble, but one can take even older ground-based scopes and add things to improve compensation for the atmosphere.
"This is the dumbest thing I've heard in my life. And I don't say that lightly, this is, quite literally, the dumbest thing I have heard anyone say, ever.
From which one is tempted to infer that you are:
* Deaf;
* Raised by wolves until yesterday, just got back to civilization;
* A space alien from a planet where people never say foolish things;
* All of the above
because the rest us hear things that dumb every day at least once.
rgb
sadly, no mod points today...
First off, the lung cancer may be more from vegetable deficiency disease and iodine deficiency disease and vitamin D deficiency disease and other messed up social processes leading to distress than from smoking. I'm not saying smoking is good for you generally, of course, but consider: "Why I Recommend to NOT Stop Smoking" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9DZBzKppHQ [youtube.com]
Well, this really says all I need to know about where you are coming from regarding science.
Well, that was easy. You may, though, want to look into the history of the Everett Interpretation and/or the particular qualifications of the person I quoted. It has a well, and long, established inferential plausibility.
I teach quantum mechanics, sir, and it has nothing of the sort. As I said, evidence for it would be violation of the first or second law. Otherwise it is an interpretation -- meaning that it is an exotic but completely unsupported hypothesis beloved of the kind of nut cases that participated in making "What the Bleep do we Know" that think that we somehow consensually create the reality we observe, one at a time, with our minds. Schrodinger's Cat on steroids. All that they really show is that they don't really understand quantum theory, measurement, and the Nakajima-Zwanzig Generalized Master Equation.
As for your refusal to look at computational complexity (or your implicit belief that the human brain has some sort of miraculous capability in that regard) I can only repeat again -- real precognition, as opposed to insight brought about by deep study and knowledge, doesn't just bridge a gap of incomplete information with a brilliant guess, it leaps a gap of no knowledge, an impossible gap, to make a prediction that simply cannot be supported by the available evidence. It is knowing a complex future you cannot possible have known. It is the precog who walks up to the body lying on the sidewalk and says "the killer is blond, six foot three, male, and drives a red Porsche" in a city they've never visited for a body they've never seen, when the killer, car, and all actual witnesses to the event are long gone, not the detective who sees the postman deliver mail while they are looking at the body and, subconsciously seeing something out of place in the way the postman behaves, dreams that the postman did it and turns out to be right. If you want to believe that the former is possible, fine, but it violates the second law of thermodynamics and it is unobserved under anything like controlled circumstances. It is as implausible as developing an unexposed piece of film and discovering a perfect image of the Washington Monument on it, a month before visiting Washington and pointing the camera at the Monument. No matter how much "brain" you put in front of the camera, the fact is that none of the information required to reconstruct the picture has been received by it and hence information flow and entropy is backwards.
Regarding information representation -- the whole point of information theory is to avoid the issue of representation. It certainly presumes nothing about idealism versus materialism. In only one place does speaking of the Universe require representation, and it does require us to agree about the meaning of the term Universe.
The word Universe is often misused, and this misuse is at the heart of much bad reasoning. The Universe is everything that has real objective existence, in a time independent way. With this definition, we can do away with the multiverse because the concept simply describes additional complexity of the one Universe. We can do away with mind versus matter idiocy, because whichever one (or both) that is objectively real is foundational to the Universe. We can reduce the Universe itself to non-abstracted information -- self-encoded information, whether the self-representation is "mind" or "matter". This is real stuff not encoded in something else, but rather the only real something else capable of "encoding" anything at all.
If you don't have such a rigorous definition, sure, you can have God creating Universes, mind over matter or matter over mind, anything you like, because you can always throw the mystery into some other milieu that is, sadly, not accessible to experiment. It is the ultimate excuse to be sloppy in your approach to knowledge. I'll have nothing of it. If God exists, God is all, or perhaps part of the Universe according to this definition and cannot c
Further, your basic premise is quite broken within a multiverse model, as others have noted: [wikipedia.org]
Sure, so next, provide me with evidence that any sort of multiverse model is correct. Oh wait, there isn't any. In particular, if there were a multiverse with the possibility of coupling, violations of the first and/or second law are enabled, and we've never seen any.
As for your "empirical" knowledge that people can and do know complex futures in a statistically significant way, provide me with the double blind, statistically significant evidence and you can take the quotes off of the word "empirical". Otherwise you should be pronouncing it as "anecdotal", where in science anecdotal evidence isn't considered reliable, for some very good reasons. It isn't enough to think "maybe it will rain tomorrow" and then be right -- you have to have that feeling repeatedly and be right a statistically significant fraction of the time more than expected from just random chance, in an ensemble that includes all of the poor souls who have the feeling and are right less often than expected from random chance. Otherwise sure, you can cherrypick any experience you like where you thought "goodness, if I pick the lottery number 12 18 22 17 49 30 33 I'll win" and use it as evidence of precognition, in spite of the fact that there are few tens of millions of poor suckers that thought exactly the same thing but lost, in a game that sooner or later somebody is going to win.
Finally, your assertion that e.g. the NSA could conceivably predict the kind of stuff that would count as "precognition" simply demonstrates that you don't understand computational complexity. NSA cannot even predict a "mere" 4096 bit seed plus key that would decrypt my personal records, and that isn't even a difficult problem -- at worst it is a linear search that takes longer than the lifetime of the Universe to accomplish or stuff like that, and sure, it might be possible to do better with cleverness given a knowledge of the encryption algorithm. A difficult problem is solving for the exact quantum time evolution of (say) 1000 coupled two level atoms (vastly beyond our capability to even store the data required to represent the exact state to put into our coupled equations, and that is still only 1000 two level atoms -- a 10x10x10 cube, say, not 10^23 or more real atoms in a mostly unknown initial state).
You might take a bit of time and learn something about complexity and how phase spaces increase in size as problems scale up before making assertions of computability, as one rapidly -- and I do mean rapidly -- reaches numbers where every elementary particle in the visible Universe wouldn't suffice to abstractly store the information content of a much, much smaller subset of the Universe. The Universe is its own basically irreducible information theoretic representation, which is the fundamental reason an information-theoretic Laplace Demon argument is a proof that if God exists, God must be the Universe itself.
rgb
Do you really believe that we in our time are that much more advanced than they were?
Sure, absolutely! So do you if you read your own words: "we have understandings of the laws of nature, that they did not have". They believed in God and Devils because they needed explanations for things they could not explain correctly. We have physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, statistics, and have largely filled in the gaps that the mythical gods of the Bronze and Iron age filled. This makes us much, more more advanced than they were.
The central tenet of the Christian faith is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. To modern technological humans, the idea of resurrection from the dead in a totally new arrangement of matter that transcends time and space, violates KNOWN laws of physics. It is therefore still deemed to be a miracle. To me it is common sense, that the universe, especially life in it, is far too complex, to have come into being by the impersonal forces of nature. Therefore, it is not an unreasonable assumption (reasonable faith), that an intelligence far beyond our own created life in the beginning, whenever that was.
To modern technological humans, including yourself, the idea of resurrection from the dead is totally absurd. If I asserted that it happened you would instantly and without any doubt think that I was lying and/or mistaken. All of us would, because we not only have never observed it to happen, we now understand perfectly well why it cannot happen without violating a large number of laws and principles that work very well indeed, whenever and however we test them, to describe the world we see and experience. It's only when the presumed resurrection happened in the distant past and is knowledge transmitted by a mythological chain that would never, ever, be accepted as "testimony" in a court of law that you are willing to believe that it happened. You might want to read a few of Bart Ehrman's books on Jesus. They are rather eye-opening. As for common sense and the Universe -- to avoid a perceived problem with complexity in the Universe, you introduce a far greater problem by hypothesizing a still more complex entity that is its proximate cause. How is that common sense? You then believe in it as a matter of faith because there is no evidence that such a complex entity exists, not to mention the serious logical, mathematical, ethical, and physical problems one encounters the moment one tries to actually specify how all this is supposed to have worked. In other words, you can believe in it with faith as long as you don't think about it too long or too hard, because the moment you do you are forced to confront the fact that your beliefs make little sense and are almost certainly incorrect. It works only as long as it remains mysterious, which is why you are trying hard to argue that the world is a mysterious place filled with things that cannot be explained, with big gaps to hide your God in.
In actual fact, science has a perfectly reasonable explanation for how life arose and how we evolved that does not require the belief in any exterior intelligent agency, one that we can and do observe in action all of the time around us and that is supported by literally mountains of evidence. Science has allowed us to work out a remarkably detailed if still general picture of how the Universe has evolved according to consistent laws of nature as far back and far away as we can -- literally -- see. This picture contradicts the Bible in every single detail where both make and sort of statement on a common issue. The Bible is demonstrably a terrible guide to physical science and knowledge of the world in which we live.
The only difference between you and me and any other human being or other known life-forms, in the physical sense, is in the arrangement of otherwise totally identical atoms. This arrangement is coded by software, a program, information, stored in the DNA molecules. Is it the
The second law of thermodynamics is a statistical law -- it is the sense of plausibility. It prohibits nothing that doesn't violate the first law in absolute terms. It just says that it is very, very unlikely for certain states to be the future time evolution of current states. I really am rather familiar with e.g. random number generation and the idea that knowledge of a seed and a relatively small piece of code suffices to deterministically predict an apparently random sequence far into the "future", but the point with real decks of cards and real random number generators such as those embedded in cryptography is that they have sufficient entropy that one cannot reasonably perform precisely this sort of deterministic projection, so that we are forced to use a statistical description of the future. Precognition in a nutshell is like "just knowing" the 97124480233rd random number returned by a good random number generator, without knowledge of either the algorithm or generator used or the seed. It doesn't violate my "sense of plausibility", it just violates my simple common sense -- it will never happen!
Shuffling the deck "well" means that somebody takes the cards into another room and subjects them to a process where you lack the initial state information needed to even in principle solve the impossibly difficult physical problem of predicting the final card order. You don't even know how the cards are being shuffled -- riffle shuffle of a new pinochle deck, 52-pickup shuffle of a well-used preshuffled regular deck. You don't know how many cards are missing, or how many decks are being shuffled together. You don't even know if they are regular cards at all, or are e.g. Tarot cards or the "deeds" from a monopoly game. The ability to consistently predict the outcomes of this sort of process without any knowledge of initial state is indeed a pure violation of the second law and yeah, of common sense.
One can categorize supernaturalism in the same way one can categorize perpetual motion machines -- miracles of the first kind violate both the first law (and often, the second law as well) -- basically violate mass-energy conservation as well as entropy constraint, where miracles of the second kind violate only the second law -- they aren't "impossible" in the sense that the violate any fundamental conservation law, they are simply enormously improbable. You vastly underestimate the entropy associated with the 5 of hearts, which is a metaphor for drawing from the vast "deck" of future possibility in the case of actual precognition.
Precognition given a lack of knowledge of initial state or algorithm is a miracle of the second kind. Coming back from the dead is a miracle of the second kind. Telekinesis can be either one (sufficiently organized but enormously improbable motion of the air molecules can lift something up), but in general it is a miracle of the first kind. The first and second laws of thermodynamics are, in a nutshell, that "miracles don't (usually) happen", where "don't usually" for real second law violations in systems with many degrees of freedom is basically "never", and for the first kind it is "have never been observed" -- the first law is empirical and observational, but the second law is purely statistical. It's actually easier to believe in violations of the first law (which just means we have to redo some of the laws of microscopic physics) than the second.
A properly skeptical scientist doesn't waste time on perpetual motion machines or miracles. The default belief in such cases is to immediately reject claims of either one unless or until someone provides truly extraordinary evidence to support the literally unbelievable claim. In the meantime, the claimer is almost certainly lying or mistaken.
To paraphrase (IIRC) Sommerfeld: Our understanding of the laws of physics might well be wrong. People make mistakes in experiments all of the time. Our knowledge of physical science is enormously uncertain. However, when a result can be shown to violate the second law of thermodynamics, it is just plain wrong -- there is a deep error somewhere in there.
rgb
In the study of things like ESP and homeopathic remedies, a double blind experiment is essential because it is the method that controls for confirmation bias, the bete noire of this sort of research from the earliest days of e.g. the Rhine Institute and beyond. I am an expert in testing random number generators, and hence can convey an anecdote that illustrates how confirmation bias can corrupt the results even of people that are rather good at statistics. In the early days of random number testing, various people and groups published lists of "certified random numbers". These were numbers that were generated by one means or another and that had passed some modest array of tests for randomness. They'd be in compilations of tables e.g. Abramositz and Stegun or the CRC Handbook, or you could buy specialized tables. People would use them in simple Monte Carlo and so on, in the days before ubiquitous computers and software random number generators.
The problem is this -- by rejecting, one presumes, lists of random numbers that failed their tests, they ensured that whatever else the certified list might be, it was not random. It was not random even if the method used to generate it was a truly random process! If one applied a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to the aggregate p-values of a large number of "certified" lists and tests, that KS test would inevitably fail because by means of the accept-reject process they cut off the wings that any truly random process must have to be random. The lists were, on average, too uniform.
Even a tyro at randomness can actually understand this from a very simple example involving a single digit, but one that scales perfectly to as many digits in as many numbers as you like. I present you with a single digit of a single number, "7". Is it random?
No test applied to the number itself can tell you if it is or if it isn't. If I give you a list of digits such as 2-6-5-3-5-8-9-7-9-3-2-3-6-4 you can't tell either. Perhaps they are random. Perhaps they are a few of the digits output from an algorithm computing \pi, hardly a "random" number, although irrational. Perhaps the digits of \pi would pass any test for randomness, perhaps not. There is a finite, usually rather simply calculated, probability that a truly random generator will generate any digit string you like.
So how do we tell if the "7" above is random? The answer is so simple it is almost self-evident (after the fact). If it was generated by a truly random process, then it is a truly random number. It isn't the number itself, it is how we get it that makes it random, or not random. We can apply tests to random number generators (software or e.g. quantum hardware), determine good ones (that pass the most rigorous tests consistently) and then just take what they give us as random numbers even if a particular subsequence they output is 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0 and doesn't "look" random at all to our pattern-greedy minds. If the 7 above resulted from me rolling a perfectly unbiased 10-sided die that turned up 7, it is a random number. If, on the other hand, I just made it up for illustrative purposes, it is not.
The point is that there are patterns even in pure noise. Even statisticians devoted to the study of noise historically have made horrible errors by e.g. rejecting noise with patterns as being "not random enough" in spite of the fact that it was generated by a good, reasonably random source of noise. Humans are greedy the other way, and tend to observe the patterns in noise and grasp at it as non-randomness, as the basis for the inference of some underlying order. It is only by comparing the patterns observed in some experiment to the patterns observed in some control that should be pure noise that we can differentiate what is (probably) truly a signal, real patterns that justify some sort of inference, and false patterns, the sort that turn up in any sufficiently lon
* The placebo effect is real, it is actually getting stronger, and MDs regularly use it. So how can you say homeopathy, even if it were to be nothing more than the placebo effect, does not work?
Hence the importance of the double blind experiment in medicine, which can control for the placebo effect. For example, comparing results when two groups are given water, are both told identical things about the water, when the people giving them the water and collecting information about the results don't themselves know which water is water and which water is homeopathic water, permits the final data to be analyzed to determine if homeopathic water has a differential healing effect compared to control water. Such experiments have been done and, of course, have failed. If you understood the nature of the double blind experiment, the statistically suspect nature of marginal or anecdotal results, and the need for plausible hypotheses to fit somehow into the framework of what we already know or be supported not by even ordinary evidence, but rather extraordinary, incontrovertible, reproducible evidence that has passed the most rigorous of public scientific skeptical scrutiny, you wouldn't be so quick to grasp at the straws of implausible, almost certainly incorrect ideas. That you are so eager to do so says more about you and your penchant for wishful thinking and confirmation bias than it does about the results you leap to endorse.
* Nutrition and lifestyle choices are probably the major determinant of good health most of the time for most people, yet MDs have next-to-no training in understanding or discussing that, and they spend little time with patients counseling on those things in practice, and so if an alternative medical care provider like a homeopath spends an hour with someone and talks about those things, that customer is going to be way ahead in health compared to going to an MD in many (not all) situations.
Being married to a physician (and regularly going to my doctor) I and nearly everybody else listening know just how much bullshit this sort of statement is. MDs have extensive training on the importance of nutrition, lifestyle, and counsel patients to stop smoking, either don't drink or regulate your drinking to 1-2 drinks a day, wear their seatbelts when they drive, brush their teeth and visit their dentist regularly, get enough sleep, eat a well balanced diet, exercise regularly, get out of abusive relationships, and generally take good care of themselves. Although insurance companies still don't do enough, most of them provide direct incentives for or actually cover at least some lifestyle improvements and choices. My wife probably spends 1/4 to 1/3 of each visit on average (a lot more in some cases, somewhat less in a few) on things like this, as does my own doctor who is forever nagging me to lose 20 pounds and exercise more regularly.
Now let's consider the statistical differences between visiting my wife when you are unwell and visiting a homeopath. If you visit my wife, she applies a deep knowledge of your symptoms and their possible connections to actual diseases. She will routinely take your blood, urine, and stool, and have a wide range of subtle metabolic tests and labs done that search for markers of diseases open and occult -- things like diabetes, cancer, liver disease, digestive disorders, and more can be negatively affecting your health or about to kill you without (yet) manifesting themselves as symptoms. If she has probable cause in her physical examination, her verbal examination, or the results of your labs, she will send you out for additional tests or labs -- MRI, cat scans, subspeciality consults -- or, if she discovers e.g. that your heartburn is actually probably heart disease she can send you directly to a hospital for admittance. When she treats you she uses, to the best of her knowledge and ability, the best treatments so far discovered for any given condit
Sure, I know absolutely nothing about consciousness, neural networks, computation, information theory, the brain or the mind. And you know this how? The fact that I held a provisional patent to build a self-aware computational engine for a year or two (and still have the algorithm in hand, but got distracted and didn't pursue the funding needed), have written one of the world's best neural networks for use in predictive modelling, am in a proposal to do work on this in collaboration with various e.g. neuroscientists, means nothing at all. It's a difficult problem, sure, but that doesn't mean that it is unsolvable or that we haven't made any progress towards its solution. With my help or without it, we are at most a decade or two away from self-aware machines.
Or, perhaps, maybe, I know and understand a rather lot more than you do, as you seek to exaggerate the problem and make it sound like there is something fundamentally mysterious about consciousness, something we cannot explain by simple mechanism, in spite of the rather overwhelming evidence that consciousness is complex mechanism that goes away when one breaks the supporting physical machine in almost any way.
rgb
The knowledge one person provides to another by means of "revelation" -- or rather, simple communication like this -- is subjected to the same common sense tests that knowledge obtained any other way is. Indeed, most scientific knowledge is obtained this way -- through the "revelation" process known as "education". I teach physics via verbal and symbolic presentation supported by spot checks of the science via laboratory work and other observation, simply because what human has time to verify the entire body of human knowledge personally?
We learn (from our spot checks and via reason and pure common sense) whom to "trust" in the communication of knowledge. Note well that the trust so rendered is not faith as you are attempting to introduce it. Faith is believing something without any good reason to do so. Knowledge is that which we believe for good reasons. Extended trust basically identifies an information source -- human or otherwise -- as "probably reliable", at least in some milieu. Many humans and human-derived sources we learn not to trust -- confidence men, religious shamans of all faiths, religious mythologies, tricksters, and our good friend Joe, at least when Joe is describing his exploits fishing or with women.
Humans are amazingly unreliable information sources, and the legal system is fully aware that "eyewitness testimony" is one of the worst forms of proof. Witness the large number of people being released from prison because objective, non-eyewitness evidence like "DNA tests" reveals that in spite of the eyewitness testimony against them, they actually did not commit the crime. Humans -- and I include myself -- are easily fooled by slight of hand or slight of mind; we see things and interpret them incorrectly, we constantly reprocess our memories, and what we think that we see is often strongly influenced by our prior beliefs. That's why science relies so heavily upon double blind experiments and careful statistics -- even scientists will see what they want to see unless they take strong measures to prevent it. Confirmation bias and the cherrypicking of data are pervasive in science even today (especially in medical research and climate research, where there are large sums of money at stake).
The big, enormous mistake you are making, however, is when you first put words in my mouth -- I didn't say ESP cannot be scientifically proven or disproven, I said that it is scientifically disproven, in the specific senses that a) there is no reliable evidence for it; and b) there is no physical model within the bounds of known (strongly believed) science that seems capable of explaning it. That doesn't mean, I agree, that it could not be true, but it does mean that if I were a betting man and tried to assign the probability that it is true using Bayes theorem, the result would be a very, very small number -- so small that one would have to use a log scale to even think of describing it. A lack of evidence is not positive evidence of lack, but it certainly makes lack more probable. A lack of rational explanation based on what we know does not positively imply that a rational explanation does not exist, but it makes it less likely that one exists. This is sheer common sense.
Hence the legitimate comparison of my "belief" that cars will, mostly, stay on their side of the road with my "belief" that ESP is (sadly) bullshit works this way. I drive. I understand the physical laws that govern the motion of cars -- rather well, since I teach them to undergrads every day. I understand things like static versus kinetic friction, the mechanical strength and structures of metals, the operation and design of heat engines, electrical systems, control systems, well enough to have good reason to believe that most cars, when one of the systems upon which they rely do not malfunction (which they do a statistically reasonable fraction of the time) are controllable by good d
That's a straw man, don't you think? Our brains have nothing like unlimited anything, especially input resolution, and from any given present the unknown state information makes possible futures sprout like mushrooms after a rain.
I also reiterate -- I don't consider "precognition" to be "It's raining now, I think it will rain tomorrow". There is no information-theoretic mystery in that kind of precognition, no violation of the second law if we're right, and we end up being wrong a number of times when tested that is easily understood in terms of probability. I object specifically to the assertion of precognition that cannot be explained in terms of using information at hand to project probable futures in a sensible way. Me "knowing" the card you're going to draw in a well-shuffled deck, for example. That is indeed a pure example of a 2nd law violation -- knowing something in the future without any information-theoretic basis for the knowledge.
rgb
That is incorrect. The violation of the second law of thermodynamics is the issue at stake. I won't go into complete detail (it would take a while) but the long and the short of it is that the probability of microscopically reversible interactions from general future events being causally connected over past time to coherent structures of any sort in the human brain are -- zero. Well, not really zero but a number so close to zero that it lives snugged up across the fence from zero, good friends, their kids go to the same schools. It's impossibility of precisely the same sort that lets you tell the direction of time in a movie of a glass that is broken by falling to the ground. Why does the broken glass never leap up into the air and weld itself back into a glass? Well, that sort of event might even be likely compared to the probability of (say) having a visualization of something that is going to happen (due to a causal chain of events completely disconnected with the visualization itself) a year into the future...
Granted. I meant precognition as "seeing the future" without any rational predictive basis. On the other hand, the entire point of science in general and physics in particular is to be able to predict the future (or more subtly, understand the world-matrix of causality, the weaving of the threads by the Norns, in a manner that is microscopically time symmetric but macroscopically asymmetric, with entropy strictly associated with the arrow of chemically perceptually experienced time.
But I might have stated this more precisely. Physics good, inference good, "just knowing for no reason" bad.
rgb
However I do think that it is time for the biological and psychological sciences to catch up with physics.
But this is precisely the problem. Precognition violates the second law of thermodynamics. End of story. Not only does it violate it, it violates it badly. If "ESP" were demonstrated, especially things like precognition, it is very, very difficult to see how it could ever be made consistent with our current knowledge of physics. It would be as bad as Neo learning that his entire Universe is a sham, that we're all just power units in the Matrix with an entirely different physics one level up that trumps the apparent "rules" in this level at will.
Sure, sure, that would all be very exciting and might be true. But it is not plausible or best belief, without the very soundest and most reproducible of evidence. And sadly or not, we haven't a shred of reproducible evidence that thought is anything but a peculiar electrochemical process supported on the physical hardware of our brains in complete accord with, among other things, the second law of thermodynamics.
rgb
Because they have a well-developed sense of the boundary between fantasy and reality?
I'm just sayin'...
rgb
Compare this to something like climate science where both the data and the models are private. Kind of scary when a pseudo-science is practicing better science that "real" science.
I generally agree, but bear in mind that this is strongly dependent on agency supporting the research. NASA, for example, requires the publication of both methods and data. Hence if you want to replicate GISS, you can, or you can write your own alternative from the same data. HADCRUT, OTOH, has notoriously failed to provide full access to its source data and methodology. GISS is NASA, HADCRUT is whatever the hell supports climate research over in England. Different rules.
As I noted above, there is a lot of top-level pressure being exerted to change this (I've participated very briefly in some of the discussions) not just in climate science but in e.g. medical research where the costs of junk science and non-reproducible results or overt fraud are lost lives and billions of dollars. The problem is the journals -- they are not publicly funded, and have their own rules about publishing stuff on the side of the actual articles, plus the eternal paywall problem (where we the people pay for the research, but somehow have to pay again on an individual basis in order to read the publication of the results). The solutions to this sort of problem are all at least as bad as the problem itself -- I mean we don't really want the government in charge of the journals, do we? And yet neither is it reasonable for us to pay twice for the work they publish. And nobody has a good funding model that keeps the journals running independently without having individuals or institutions pay, even if a lot of what they use to pay with is (in the end) government grant money plus overhead galore. It's not a simple problem, although I think that we could solve it a lot of different ways if we really tried.
So yes, climate policies e.g. the "Carbon Tax" are enormously expensive, catastrophically expensive -- we're talking hundreds of billions of dollars a year, even more if they were fully implemented on a global basis -- so expensive that it actually becomes difficult to see how any plausible climate catastrophe hypothesized and projected to occur in 80 or 90 years could possibly compare to the catastrophic costs of the measures being taken to avoid it. The science projecting "catastrophe" is far from "settled" or universally accepted, in part because it is difficult -- the Earth's climate system is described by the coupled Navier-Stokes equation from hell, and is where Chaos theory was discovered -- and yet we find ourselves paying far more in the state of California alone to cut down on CO_2 emissions than it would cost to completely rebuild after a dozen catastrophic hurricanes. Common sense is lost in the circus of Chicken Little, with its "overheated" rhetoric. But this is just one manifestation of a far more general problem with the current science funding model, the constraints of the ivory tower (University system) and the journals.
rgb
That's the real controversy here. Many journals are biased against articles that describe attempts to replicate previously published results, even if the outcome is negative. This is a disincentive for scientists to engage in much of what would be very useful research.
This is dead on the money -- I agree. I keep Richard Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" address here: http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm permanently open in a browser tab just to remind me how important replication really is. There is a major effort at the highest levels of the government that sit in oversight of the granting agencies and that ultimately fund the journals themselves (indirectly) to change some of this, because it is this very reluctance (plus a tendency to publish "results" but hide the actual data and methodology from precisely the public access and scrutiny and critical replication that is essential to the scientific process) that leads to a huge amount of junk science being published every year, much of it (sadly) in social psychology, medicine, and climate science, where at least two of these have enormous costs associated with error.
ESP, fortunately isn't one of them. As you note, it (as a hypothesis) could be true, but there is so far no good reason to believe in it. Such evidence as there is is anecdotal and fails to stand up in a reproducible way to skeptical critical tests seeking to verify the anecdotes. However, we can go farther than this -- ESP may exist, but it is in some sense a rare phenomenon if it does. If it were universal and common, we could hardly have failed to discover this by now. The many experiments that have been done seeking to confirm the phenomenon (and failing) have the effect of gradually lowering the plausible boundary of its existence, just as the many (failed) experiments seeking e.g. magnetic monopoles don't disprove their existence but they do establish plausible limits on how common they are (at least in the forms being tested).
ESP, unlike monopoles, suffers from a serious flaw as a scientific hypothesis. I can understand how a monopole might exist, and can further see how their existence has considerable explanatory power and esthetic appeal -- electrodynamics would become more symmetric, charge quantization would be "explained", if there was at least one monopole in the Universe. They consistently fit in with our existing knowledge. ESP, on the other hand, does not. There is not one single theory (that I know of) that offers a consistent explanation of how ESP could function in terms of known physical law. Indeed, things like precognition overtly violate so very many physical laws -- for starters, the second law of thermodynamics -- that verifying it might well require the complete rewriting of all the laws of physics. This is actually a serious problem. It is like "coming back from the dead" or other forms of supernaturalism and magic -- sensible people reject such hypotheses as the default belief (often in the face of various offerings of anecdotal "evidence") because, to paraphrase somebody (Thomas Paine?) it is far more easy to believe that a human is a liar or mistaken than to believe that the stars themselves have gone out of their courses. If true precognition were reproducibly demonstrated, analyzing the requisite dynamical flow of information involved would very much make the stars go out of their courses, with future complex phenomena causing entropic shifts in current chemistry. We do not, as a general rule, ever observe entropy-shifting effects preceding their causes.
rgb
Actually, imaging of electromagnetic fields around the brain is done routinely, not so much by physicists but by scientists (e.g. biological psychologists and neurophysiologists) and physicians. The tools for doing so are things like EEG hardware, fMRI, SQUID-based transducers, implants, and more. The methodology has gotten so advanced that they can observe e.g. maps of lit neurons in the working visual cortex that correspond in a 1 to 1 manner to a presented visual field or differentiate the word you are thinking about from fMRI activity (from a palette of previously measured/associated words).
In spite of all of the many experiments that have indeed been done looking for a "soul" or a seat of consciousness outside of the actual physical brain, not one of them has succeeded and there isn't the slightest good reason to think that this is so. There is absolutely no observed or inferred relationship between subatomic particles and some ill-defined quantum of consciousness. Everything we know about consciousness (and at this point we know a rather lot) is entirely consistent with it being a high level manifestation of self-organizing critical behavior supported by an evolved and highly complex macroscopic physical substrate where the fundamental "units" of thought are neural transitions mediated by neurotransmitters -- pure electrochemistry, which is not only not subatomic it is molecular, superatomic involving many atoms.
However, observing the phylogenetic progression of intelligence and brain size, structure, and capacity, it is also perfectly clear that humans' ability to engage in "higher order thought" is intimately tied into language and semantics -- symbolic ontology -- which is at least two or three orders up from neural activity -- not only is it fundamental neurochemical, evolutionarily a control system for a complex pattern of entropy-generating biochemistry, it is the result of a subtle process of memetic evolution of self-consistent abstraction leading to the ability to actually "think" about our environment and make verbal, visual, symbolic inferences. In other words, it isn't based on smaller physical things, it is a reflection of coherent activity of the already macroscopic physical chemical processes of neural action, far more macroscopic and (by virtue of its organization) different in nature and character. As my (world-reknowned) instructor in statistical physics and complex systems (Richard Palmer) once remarked in a lecture on this very topic "more is different" and thought is the result of a lot more, and makes no sense at all interpreted as the motion of raw individual electrons, let alone "subatomic particles".
There is so much more to whack in your absurd statements. You assert that an "electromagnetic unit" is smaller than the smallest subatomic particle. Since physicists believe that "subatomic" (I assume that you mean "elementary") particles are point-like objects with no physical extent, that would be a neat trick. It is difficult to get smaller than "no size at all". You are obviously completely ignorant of actual electromagnetic theory, or you would be forced to put your statement in some sort of consistent relationship with our knowledge of the photon as an electromagnetic unit, electric charge as an electromagnetic unit, the actual elementary particles which have charge and which couple via electromagnetic interactions to other charged particles. Stating that all of this will be proven with studies "one day" when instruments have become even better is semantically null -- if scientists knew what would be proven "one day" without doing the experiments before the instruments in question have even been invented, they'd be -- wait for it -- psychic!
Oh, wait, I see, that's how you know all of this. And because you "just know" it via your ESP, you don't need to actually verify any of it by studying it or doing or even learning about the many subtle and excellent experiments that are done by neur
Ah, yes, but then you'd have to know how to rigorously test for uniform distributions to obtain and interpret p-values and the like, and seriously (speaking of probabilities) what are the odds that a psychologist who takes the hypothesis of precognition seriously knows either statistics or how to design double-blind experiments properly?
rgb (speaking ex cathedra as the author of dieharder, which does indeed know how to test for uniform distributions as well as test random number generators in general many, many ways...;-)
Actually, I think they became extinct because they were all eaten by a burgeoning post-Holocene human population. Although there was a subspecies population IIRC of miniature Mammoths that survived on an isolated island for couple thousand more years. They problem was they were too easy to kill and too slow to reproduce and lived in too small a habitable range in a protein-hungry human world. They weren't the only species to go down in this way -- lots of very large (and easily killed) mammals were wiped out around the same time.
rgb