Haibane.info

Category: Stranger than fiction

  • many worlds

    I have a bit of bias towards the Overcoming Bias blog, because of the way in which Eli pretends his Bayesian worldview is utterly pristine without a trace of dogma. That said, his recent forays into explaining quantum mechanics are superb… that is, until he revealed that his aim was to set up a tension between Science and Bayes. In a nutshell,

    Science-Goggles on: The current quantum theory has passed all experimental tests so far. Many-Worlds doesn’t make any new testable predictions – the amazing new phenomena it predicts are all hidden away where we can’t see them. You can get along fine without supposing the other worlds, and that’s just what you should do. The whole thing smacks of science fiction. But it must be admitted that quantum physics is a very deep and very confusing issue, and who knows what discoveries might be in store? Call me when Many-Worlds makes a testable prediction.

    Bayes-Goggles on: The simplest quantum equations that cover all known evidence don’t have a special exception for human-sized masses. There isn’t even any reason to ask that particular question. Next!

    And just like that – Science is dismissed. Many-Worlds must be true, after all, it makes the most sense and is the simplest possible explanation!

    Intriguingly, Eli has often dismissed the idea of God even though one could argue that God too is the “simplest” answer to any number of great Questions. Likewise, he often defends his robust atheism with an analogous assertion to “you can get along fine without supposing [God exists], and that’s just what you should do.”

    This is the sort of abuse of science that drives me crazy. People approach issues with a-prioris, such as “God doesn’t exist” or “The Singularity exists” or “Many-Worlds is True” and then contort poor physics and math into supporting positions that are purely situational.

    I don’t pretend to be overcoming bias myself. I am a scientist, I am deeply religious, and I think Bayes’ Theorem is useful in certain situations (ie, when measurements are not independent), but is hardly enough to build an entire worldview on.

    I am not implacably against the Many Worlds Interpretation, mind you. I enjoyed Tegmark’s article in Nature which really made the case more fairly. I just think that a false dichotomy between Bayes Theorem and Science as an institution serves only to muddle things rather than help us understand.

    As an aside, I wonder if Eli would be willing to prove his commitment to Bayes Theorem, by performing quantum suicide?

  • a theory of consciousness

    Moot! I’ve got your theory of consciousness right here: consciousness is an emergent property of increasingly complex thought.

    Corollary: computation is not, and never will be, a substitute for thought, no matter how bayesian you wanna get.

    Corollary 2: thought need not be intelligent.

    Now, define thought, and we can call it a day. Chipotle, anyone?

  • Sayonara, Ling Ling

    Japan’s giant panda, Ling Ling, has died of natural causes:

    TOKYO – Japan’s prime minister said Thursday he has asked to borrow some giant pandas from China after Ling Ling, one of the best-loved animals at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo, died of old age this week.

    Ling Ling, the only giant panda owned by Japan, died Wednesday at the age of 22 — the equivalent of 70 in human years.

    His death came just days ahead of a landmark visit to Tokyo by Chinese President Hu Jintao during which zoo officials are hoping for an agreement that will bring another panda to Japan.

    China has a long tradition of offering giant pandas as gifts to foreign governments to improve ties, but now only leases the animals abroad as they are an endangered species.

    I’ve only seen a panda once, at the San Diego Zoo. I wanted to visit Ling Ling that one day I had in Tokyo a few years back but just never got around to it.

    genma saotome in panda mode

  • proving Gödel

    The implications of Gödel’s Theorem are profound. A full understanding of its implications is not restricted to math professionals, however – there are numerous books that have addressed Gödel, aimed at a layman audience. Of these the most famous is Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter. That’s a book that every geek needs to have on their bookshelf. However, there are many more, and short excerpts from many of these books on the topic of Gödel have been compiled in one place.

    The most powerful explanation of Gödel is to simply restate its proof in general terms. That proof, originally published in Infinity and the Mind by Rudy Rucker, is reproduced below (courtesy of Miskatonic.org).

    1. Someone introduces Gödel to a UTM, a machine that is supposed to be a Universal Truth Machine, capable of correctly answering any question at all.
    2. Gödel asks for the program and the circuit design of the UTM. The program may be complicated, but it can only be finitely long. Call the program P(UTM) for Program of the Universal Truth Machine.
    3. Smiling a little, Gödel writes out the following sentence: “The machine constructed on the basis of the program P(UTM) will never say that this sentence is true.” Call this sentence G for Gödel. Note that G is equivalent to: “UTM will never say G is true.”
    4. Now Gödel laughs his high laugh and asks UTM whether G is true or not.
    5. If UTM says G is true, then “UTM will never say G is true” is false. If “UTM will never say G is true” is false, then G is false (since G = “UTM will never say G is true”). So if UTM says G is true, then G is in fact false, and UTM has made a false statement. So UTM will never say that G is true, since UTM makes only true statements.
    6. We have established that UTM will never say G is true. So “UTM will never say G is true” is in fact a true statement. So G is true (since G = “UTM will never say G is true”).
    7. “I know a truth that UTM can never utter,” Gödel says. “I know that G is true. UTM is not truly universal.”

    As Rucker says, think about that a bit. It grows on you. Rucker goes on to explain,

    With his great mathematical and logical genius, Gödel was able to find a way (for any given P(UTM)) actually to write down a complicated polynomial equation that has a solution if and only if G is true. So G is not at all some vague or non-mathematical sentence. G is a specific mathematical problem that we know the answer to, even though UTM does not! So UTM does not, and cannot, embody a best and final theory of mathematics …

    Although this theorem can be stated and proved in a rigorously mathematical way, what it seems to say is that rational thought can never penetrate to the final ultimate truth … But, paradoxically, to understand Gödel’s proof is to find a sort of liberation. For many logic students, the final breakthrough to full understanding of the Incompleteness Theorem is practically a conversion experience. This is partly a by-product of the potent mystique Gödel’s name carries. But, more profoundly, to understand the essentially labyrinthine nature of the castle is, somehow, to be free of it.

    The castle to which he refers is Reason itself.

    Or, as The Hoft put it:

    Gödel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiom system is involved.

    (for more on the limitations of reason, and the false promise of what Hofstadter called “super-rationality”, see Super-Rational blog.)

  • paging Susan Calvin

    it seems that reality has caught up to science fiction – a robot has killed a man:

    Francis Tovey was distraught over having to move out of his home into foster care and built the robot from plans found on the Internet.

    A jigsaw power tool actuated a .22 caliber pistol with four cartridges. Tovey was hit with four rounds after activating the machine in his driveway, according to witnesses who ran to the house after the shooting.

    It’s a sad story, but part of me has to respect the ingenuity and determination of Mr. Tovey.

  • reality is filtered

    I’m loath to interject politics or religion here – I already have venues for both elsewhere – but I can’t help my reaction to this:

    wmap

    Is that the face of God? in one sense, yes. That’s the 5-year data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and it shows the residual photos from the Big Bang, now cooled down to 2.725 +/- 0.0002 degrees Kelvin. Yeah, the color variations on that scale are only 2/10 thousandths of a degree. But what’s more striking about this is the implication of how much we don’t see:

    The energy budget of the Universe is the total amount of energy and matter in the whole cosmos added up. Together with some other observations, WMAP has been able to determine just how much of that budget is occupied by dark energy, dark matter, and normal matter. What they got was: the Universe is 72.1% dark energy, 23.3% dark matter, and 4.62% normal matter. You read that right: everything you can see, taste, hear, touch, just sense in any way… is less than 5% of the whole Universe.

    The WMAP data also conclusively demonstrates that the Universe is flat, which has further implications about the inevitable and fundamental limitations of our observational capabilities:

    Our successors, whoever and wherever they are, may have no way of finding out about the Big Bang and the expanding universe, according to one of the more depressing scientific papers I have ever read.

    If things keep going the way they are, Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer of Vanderbilt University calculate, in 100 billion years the only galaxies left visible in the sky will be the half-dozen or so bound together gravitationally into what is known as the Local Group, which is not expanding and in fact will probably merge into one starry ball.

    Unable to see any galaxies flying away, those astronomers will not know the universe is expanding and will think instead that they are back in the static island universe of Einstein. As the authors, who are physicists, write in a paper to be published in The Journal of Relativity and Gravitation, “observers in our ‘island universe’ will be fundamentally incapable of determining the true nature of the universe.”

    Krauss has a piece in Scientific American where he expands on this:

    We are led inexorably to a very strange conclusion. The window during which intelligent observers can deduce the true nature of our expanding universe might be very short indeed. Some civilizations might hold on to deep historical archives, and this very article might appear in one—if it can survive billions of years of wars, supernovae, black holes and countless other perils. Whether they will believe it is another question. Civilizations that lack such archives might be doomed to remain forever ignorant of the big bang.

    Why is the present universe so special? Many researchers have tried to argue that the existence of life provides a selection effect that might explain the coincidences associated with the present time [see “The Anthropic Principle,” by George Gale; Scientific American, December 1981]. We take different lessons from our work.

    First, this would quite likely not be the first time that information about the universe would be lost because of an accelerating expansion. If a period of inflation occurred in the very early universe, then the rapid expansion during this era drove away almost all details of the preexisting matter and energy out of what is now our observable universe. Indeed, one of the original motivations for inflationary models was to rid the universe of pesky cosmological objects such as magnetic monopoles that may once have existed in profusion.

    More important, although we are certainly fortunate to live at a time when the observational pillars of the big bang are all detectable, we can easily envisage that other fundamental aspects of the universe are unobservable today. What have we already lost? Rather than being self-satisfied, we should feel humble. Perhaps someday we will find that our current careful and apparently complete understanding of the universe is seriously wanting.

    So, that WMAP data above? An ephemeral wisp of data that will fade away. We are fortunate in that sense to be able to see the face of God, because it’s not going to be there forever.

    Sometimes I wonder if we really aren’t living in Douglas Adams’ universe after all. Where else, in a Universe where the Ultimate Answer is 42, and the Last Message to Creation is “we apologize for the inconvenience”, would it be true that someday, the Big Bang is destined to someday be a mythological event whose existence will be unprovable by the best available evidence? Will the WMAP data become the icon for Unintelligent Design?

  • The mysteries of time

    An email, from a vendor of a time-keeping system, to a friend of mine who heads the IT department, regarding the implementation of Daylight Savings Time:

    On 3/9 there are only 23 hours in the day. This is controlled by NASA and Greenwich Mean Time. There is nothing that can be done to correct it, it is not broken; it is the planned design. In TIM time is an exact science.

    As well in Fall when time moves back to Standard Time there will be 25 hours in the day. Schedules must be adjusted to work the required number of actual hours if they cross the span that includes 2am when this occurs. In order to receive a full 8 hour shift employees scheduled ending times will need to be adjusted at both time changes.

    I understand. NASA, Dennis Kucinich, orbital mind control lasers, the whole bit. Not to mention a conspiracy of cartographers. It all makes sense.

    Meanwhile, I remain stubbornly opposed to reading the rationale behind DLS, so that I may hate on it unimpeded by pesky facts. Sometimes I have to insulate myself against my own reasonableness.

  • the economics of interstellar trade

    Paul Krugman may be known as a fire-breathing liberal economics professor today, but back in the 70s when he was just another aspiring junior faculty, he wrote one of the coolest things in economics since.. well, Freakonomics. Namely, a short treatise on the economics of interstellar trade (PDF). Here’s the title and abstract:

    The Theory of Interstellar Trade

    This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.

    The tone of the manuscript itself was even more light-hearted – for example, here is Figure 2, reproduced in its entirety:

    Impressive, no? (Krugman notes that readers who find Figure 2 puzzling should recall that a diagram of an imaginary axis must, of course, itself be imaginary).

    But the main contribution of the paper were Two Fundamental Theorems of Interstellar Trade, both truly proved with genuine rigor (or so I assume, the math seems fine to me but the theory is beyond my expertise). These theorems are:

    1. When trade takes place between two planets in a common inertial frame, the interest costs on goods in transit should be calculated using time measured by clocks in the common frame, and not be clocks in the frames of trading spacecraft.
    2. If sentient beings may hold assets on two planets in the same inertial reference frame, competition will equalize the interest rates on the two planets.

    It occurs to me that this is a rich field to mine for speculative fiction. Consider the case where two planets are not in the same inertial frame, like the homeworlds of the Pierson’s Puppeteers? Could someone on either world then take advantage of the violation of the Theorems above and make a fortune?

    Of course, there are less sophisticated ways to profit as well:

    Hi my name is Prince Valtor Tazalutium the Third from the distant planet Nigeron 7. I have dispatched the fastest cargo ships in my fleet to Earth filled with the rich treasures of my home planet. However because of the vast distance between our two planets my ships will not reach Earth until I am long dead and therefore will not receive a return on my initial investment. As I have no heirs I am looking for one trustworthy stranger to buy these ships and their cargo en route to your planet. I am willing to sell them for $50,000.00 US DOLLARS. If interested please contact me at valtorlol@aol.com.

  • The Ultimate Answer

    On a whim, I searched my RSS reader for any instances of 42. The result was disturbing. I think, just for a sense of completeness, I’m going to blog every reference of 42 I can find. Note that the politics-content of Haibane.info is still intended to remain zero. I instead request that commentary on these items be restricted to the larger and more important issue of how the occurrence of 42 in the story at hand might lend clues towards divining the Ultimate Question.

    Let’s get started. Today’s 42ism comes from the UK, appropriately enough.

    Gordon Brown is facing the threat of his first defeat in the Commons since taking over as prime minister, after a Guardian survey found strong – and growing – opposition among Labour MPs to the government’s plans to detain terror suspects without charge for up to 42 days.

    (followed by lots of blah blah about governmental something or other)

    Intriguing. This suggests that 42, manifesting as a number of days for incarceration, is a proxy for the balance between the principles of human rights versus society’s need for security. Perhaps more broadly we might say that here 42 is a stand-in between the forces of chaor and order, where chaos is the expressive element of the Universe and order is the emergent structure that arises from it.

  • singularity skeptic

    kurzweil

    I am not a luddite by any means, but I just have to state my position plainly: I think all talk of a “Singularity” (of the Kurzweil variety) is nothing more than science fiction. I do not have an anti-Singularity manifesto but rather just a skeptical reaction to most of the grandiose predictions by Singularians. I’d like to see someone articulate a case for Singularity that isn’t yet another fancy timeline of assertions about what year we will have reverse engineered the human brain or have VR sex or foglets or whatever. I am also leery of the abusive invocation of physics terms like “quantum loop gravity” and “energy states” as if they were magic totems (Heisenberg compensators, anyone?).

    If I were to break down the concept of Singularity into components, I’d say it relies on a. genuine artificial intelligence and b. transhumanism. Thus the Singularity would be the supposed union of these two. But I guess it’s not much of a surprise that I am an AI skeptic also. AI is artificial by definition – a simulation of intelligence. AI is an algorithm whereas true intelligence is something much less discrete. I tend towards a stochastic interpretation of genuine intelligence than a deterministic one, myself – akin to the Careenium model of Hoftstadter, but even that was too easily discretized. Let me invoke an abused physics analogy here – I see artificial intelligence as a dalliance with energy levels of an atom, whereas true intelligence is the complete (and for all purposes, infinite) energy state of a 1cm metal cube.

    The proponents of AI argue that if we just add levels of complexity eventually we will have something approximating the real thing. The approach is to add more neural net nodes, add more information inputs, and [something happens]. But my sense of the human brain (which is partly religious and partly derived from my career as an MRI physicist specializing in neuroimaging) is that the brain isn’t just a collection of N neurons, wired a certain way. There are layers, structures, and systems within whose complexities multiple against each other.

    Are there any neuroscientists working in AI? Do any AI algorithms make an attempt to include structures like an “arcuate fasciculus” or a “basal ganglia” into their model? Is there any understanding of the difference between gray and white matter? I don’t see how a big pile of nodes is going to have any more emergent structure than a big pile of neurons on the floor.

    Then we come to transhumanism. Half of transhumanism is the argument that we will “upload” our brains or augment them somehow, but that requires the same knowledge of the brain as AI does, so the same skepticism applies. The other half is physical augmentation, but here we get to the question of energy source. I think Blade Runner did it right:

    Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very very brightly, Roy.

    Are we really going to cheat thermodynamics and get multipliers to both our physical bodies and our lifespans? Or does it seem more likely that one comes at the expense of the other? Again, probably no surprise here that I am a skeptic of the Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) stuff promoted by Aubrey de Gray – the MIT Technology Review article about his work gave me no reason to reconsider my judgment that he’s guilty of exuberant extrapolation (much like Kurzweil). I do not dismiss the research but I do dismiss the interpretation of its implications. And do they address the possibility that death itself is an evolutionary imperative?

    But ok. Lets postulate that death can simply be engineered away. That human brains can be modeled in the Cloud and data can be copied back and forth from wetware to silicon. Then what do we become? A race of gods? or just a pile of nodes, acting out virtual fantasies until the heat death of the universe pulls the plug? That’s not post- or trans-humanism, its null-humanism.

    I’d rather have a future akin to Star Trek, or Foundation, or even Snow Crash – one full of space travel, star empires, super hackers and nanotech. Not a future where we all devolve into quantum ghosts – or worse are no better than the humans trapped in the Matrix, living out simulated lives for eternity.