bascule

I'd totally support Madeline Albright for President. It's too bad the only people working on fixing Article 2 are the Amend for Arnold yokels...

Yeah, thought so. Guess I need to refine my ideas a bit more, or just discard them entirely. One of these days I'll actually get around to writing a model... my own universe from scratch kind of thing. My assumption is that the system "normalizes" and its behavior moves from a period of extreme state flux to relatively minor and gradual changes as a stochaic process settles upon a more fixed kind of pattern. But yeah, I can't really explain jack with this model, can I... *sigh* Yeah, speculative propositioning doesn't really work at all, does it? Needs more, uhh, reality...

There is absolute truth. Humans just can't be absolutely sure of it. That sounds a lot like what they said about Newtonian Mechanics... Science: What is demonstratably true is accepted as such until falsified by more compelling evidence. Ooh, while I'm at it, I should try to claim Kent Hovind's $250,000 prize to prove evolution. Or Gene Ray's $10,000 prize to disprove that within the Cubic embodiment of Nature, there are 4 simultaneous 24 hour days within a single rotation of Earth. Nobody has won any of these prizes, therefore by specious reasoning GR/SR is wrong, evolution didn't happen, and TimeCube theory is correct! I think the distinction between absolute and relative truth is pointless. The real difference is that if you take something to be an "absolute truth", you expect that such beliefs will never be shown to be incorrect. This is a very unscientific point of view. Science accepts that if a compelling enough case can be presented against even the most fundamental of science's beliefs, then it should be abandoned and the demonstratably more reasonable explanation used in its place. You don't have truth. You have faith.

Ding Ding! We have a winner!

Can gauge theory be rerepresented as a discrete-time stochastic process which exhibits the Markov property (i.e. a Markov process)? If so, is anyone trying to do this? My apologies if I'm completely off base here...

The only way for something to travel faster than the speed of light according to Special Relativity is for it to have an imaginary mass (i.e. negative mass squared). These proposed particles with imaginary mass are called tachyons, and would travel backwards in time. I don't think very many people actually take this concept seriously.

Okay, I've done quite a bit more reading on the rapid evolutionary event I was curious about... the "Great Leap Forward" which occured 40-50,000 years ago. According to Dawkins it occured some 10-50,000 years after the initial development of language. Anyway, this New York Times article seems to cover the issue fairly well: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/health/article-page.html?res=9503E0DF173CF936A25754C0A9659C8B63

I think JC1 is simultaneously trying to talk about GR/SR *and* the post-modernist notion of (moral) relativism, which is in turn coupled with a sort of scientific relativism which stems from the inherent potential for falsifiability of any scientific ideas provided that's what the evidence corroborates. People want Divinely Inspired Absolute Truth, and that simply doesn't exist in our world. It's frustrating, but get used to it. As for practical applications of SR/GR, if these weren't taken into account the Global Positioning System wouldn't work. So when that airplane you're flying on stays on course, you can thank relativity for that.

Pretty much, here's the basic Creationist/IDiot logic: 1. Present a false dilemma: If Evolution is wrong, then surely Creationism/ID is right! 2. Look for any flaws you can possibly find. A flaw need not be an actual problem with the theory, just something you can't understand which you can then explain in a common sense manner to others why it's wrong because you don't understand it. For example, re: Acanthostega: http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/839 Aaaaaargh, I don't get it, legs would make it harder for Acanthostega to escape from preditors and the only piddly little advantage it provides is... a new way to escape from predators. It doesn't make sense, therefore it must've been designed! 3. Apply an absolutist mentality to science. If any little part of evolution shows the tiniest incongruity, then that's it, the whole theory is wrong, throw the baby out with the bathwater. One little chink in the theory's armor and the whole thing unravels, right? 4. Now that you've disproven evolution, you can use your original false delimma from #1 to prove that Creationism is right! Q.E.D!

Because he's trying to present his beliefs as scientific

Okay, I can state this even more succinctly... into one sentence at that: "Space is the ultimate state holder/computer which must be atomized into its underlying structure in order to have a unified theory of the universe." (Please note that's not a criticism to the quantum gravity theories at all, because as far as I can tell that's exactly what they're working on.) This seems to mesh well with Seth Lloyd's conjecture in his "computational universe" model. I'm suggesting it can be quantitized into a graph-like data structure to which successive transformations are applied. The system starts out with a "random" state and progressively normalizes towards values which remain largely fixed once established. The reality we experience is the system normalizing itself around its final ultimate structure. We see the system remains relatively static at this point (compared to the immense state flux of the big bang/inflation and before) and what we experience are the final normalizations of the system, when complex structures can finally arise from constructions of the normalized values of the previously chaotic system... and that's what gave rise to abiogenesis... we are at a point where resonances in the graph structure came together to create a replicating pattern, and that gave rise to all life as we know it. Anyway... there you have it. That's what I believe. So Martin, I saw your post on the Loops '05 conference, and it's my understanding that loop quantum gravity is a discrete and background independent theory of the universe. Would it be possible for you to try to give me a layman's description of how loop quantum gravity has quantitized space? (provided my understanding is correct)

Jung is so much cooler than Freud. All Freud did was make people focus on what's wrong. That's totally the wrong way of going about things! What you should do is look at what's right and try to strengthen that, then build from there.

If there's one thing which has remained more or less constant throughout human evolutions it's been... humans, or more to the point our brains. We've seen some incremental genetic changes which have improved performance but more or less humanity has existed on a timescale which precludes any major revisions to the overall design. Meanwhile, we've evolved into a society beseiged with information overload. To quote historian James Burke, "Never before in history have so many known so little about so much of the world around them." By this he's referencing the grid, the complex set of human interdependencies which allow us all to pool our resources and collectively attempt to solve all our own problems by solving other problems for someone else. Nobody can possibly comprehend how "the grid" as a whole works, it's the most complex contrivance that has ever existed. That's about to change... Neurotechnology and the Semantic Web will make information ubiquitous. Anyone with a neural implant will have access to all of human knowledge any time, anywhere. Any assumptions in our internal ontology of the world will be replaced by scientific knowledge, or at least a consensus of what everyone else is thinking. The Internet is slowly being transformed into an enormous information sorting machine. Blogs/podcasts are the start of this, but after the Semantic Web transforms the entire Internet into one big ontology (and projects like the Semantic MediaWiki allow all information everywhere to be easily cross-referenced) we can start using a Markov Process to solve the access issue that has always existed with the distribution of ideas... someone may have good ideas but have no way of finding someone else who wants to hear those ideas. Similarly, those looking for good ideas have a terrible time finding them because they have to sort through so many bad ideas when people without any reputation are given equal access. A Markov process lets you essentially sort out the "dumb people" from the "smart people" by building a reputation system which functions more or less in the same manner as Google's PageRank. Everyone starts out on an even playing field, then the algorithm looks at who's paying attention to who. Anyway, once we have: 1) An ontology describing all of human knowledge 2) A way of ranking those who contribute to the development of the ontology so as to sort the beneficial from the pathological 3) Ubiquitous access to this ontology at the speed of human thought The rate at which society evolves will increase dramatically. Anything which improves the way in which the above operate will further compound this rate. I think all of this will happen within our lifetimes. It really spells out the end of human society as we know it, when all of the fundamental problems with human interaction and thought have been removed and we are able to think, collectively, at the speed of light. Science has been trying to get there. We can see that all of the sciences are fundamentally interconnected. I would say everything naturally follows from physics, which is trying to find an exact description of the ontology of the universe itself. That's perhaps one of the most important pursuits imaginable, but it's become so complex as to be completely inaccessible to the vast majority of the population. Anyway, just some ideas I thought I'd bouce off everyone...

The Maya couldn't predict that their society would collapse due to overfarming and their inability to create sustainable agriculture. Why would people consider them an authority on the end of the world? I believe Terrence McKenna was onto something philosophically with his extrapolations upon Alfred North Whitehead's ideas, specifically in regards to novelty vs. habit in life systems. I don't think there's any validity to Timewave Zero, although I really do wonder if Terrence McKenna really did stumble upon December 21st, 2012 for the point at which the "timewave" is damped independent of knowledge of the Mayan calendar (I really doubt this is the case, due to his extensive knowledge of ancient civilizations). But I can say this much... the "singularity" is coming (just as Kurzweil predicted)...

My favorite Dawkins quote: "Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators"

I've certainly seen kittens freak out over their own reflections...

That's awesome

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/ These people seem like they're onto something big... and I've always thought it was a sort of missing link between quantum gravity/string theory and memetics. Somehow human thought and behavior is altering entropy data being collected by random event generators, in a way that can be correlated worldwide. Ed: And wow, guess I've posted about this before... repeatedly, but urgh, oh well

That's exactly what I'm proposing. Movement through the system would take place in the form of the wave-like state information being transferred from one node to the other, setting a fixed fundamental limit of one node per timestep (similar to the way light can travel only one Planck length per Planck time) The "distribution table" for the input wave energy would eventually settle onto more or less fixed values with only slight variation, much like a Markov chain. I suppose, to put it more bluntly, I'm saying that the entire universe can be modeled as one gigantic Markov chain. Only that it's wave-like... I don't really know how to answer that, or innumerable other questions such as... If the number of nodes in the system is fixed, then what determined how many there were to begin with? What set the initial state? What kind of underlying structure is the whole thing built out of?

You have to take into account the Special Theory of Relativity. The Doppler effect exhibited by light is relativistic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_Doppler_effect

The other thing I may not have properly articulated is that particles/nodes/objects as I have described them are merely holders of state, and "particles" as we understand them in the Standard Model would merely be contructs manifsted in that state. The particles/nodes/objects in my model would be space, which holds a state, and matter/energy as we know it is that state which can flow freely between particles/nodes/objects. I mean, doesn't this explain relativity, that calculating things like distance travelled over time and so forth can only be performed relative to an observer's frame of reference really indicate that all of space is referrential? Wouldn't the inherent state propagation limit of c originate from an inherent limit at which "space" can pass state information over distance? So I'm proposing that c as a causality propagation limit comes from the rate at which these sort of spatial state container objects can pass state from one to the other, which is, fundamentally, once per universal "timestep"

Picked it up yesterday, and my oh my is it awesome

That's what I postulated here, but it's nothing more than a gut instinct. I would just say that in the past things which at first appeared continuous have been found to be fundamentally clumpy (e.g. photons), so I don't think anyone should be surprised if time is discrete.

A mapping onto what? On one timeframe onto another? Yes' date=' that the number of nodes that exist in the graph in any given timestep is always the same. Furthermore the state data they pass to each other is quantifiable and constant throughout the system. Conservation of matter/energy... it can't be created or destroyed, only transformed. I'm doing it wrong. I think I can explain this a lot more simply. Let's think about a closed system of n particles. These particles are constantly exchanging forces with each other... or more to the point, every particle in the system is emitting forces which are affecting the state of every other particle in the system. At the same time, that particle is being affected by the forces of every other particle in the system. However, the intensity with which another particle's forces affect another generally varies with distance... ala the inverse square law. So the forces a particle emits affect certain particles in the system more than others. The amount of state which is transferred is dependent on how close the particles are to each other. Particles which come in contact with each other transfer a large amount of state to each other; particles which are far away may seemingly transfer no state at all to each other. If we could somehow magically throw away the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and get a gestalt view of the entire system for a certain amount of time, we should be able to build, as a graph, a big map of how all the particles in the system affected all of the other ones. So what I'm really saying is that all of space is made of these "nodes" which are interconnected as a big graph, and particles have internal states which are altered by the combined action of every other particle in the universe. All of this incoming state change information is mixed with the internal state of the particle and sent out again to every other particle in the universe. But you can think of each particle as possessing some kind of matrix which defines what percentage of the incoming state is passed onto all the other particles in the universe, and for all intents and purposes this is going to be zero for the majority of the system and a very large percentage for a very small number of "neighbor" particles. If this is the case, we can begin looking at the graph structure as just being data, and come up with a transform which will simultaneously recompute the states of every node within it since they're all interdependent on each other. So, that's it, the universe is a big graph of particles which exchange wave-like state information between each other, this state is mixed with the internal state including this sort of "intensity table" which controls how the flow of state information is redistributed. This all starts out very chaotic but eventually groups of these particles form which exhibit patterns as the state begins oscillating around inside the group and stabilizes. If that makes any more sense... Yeah, to tell you the truth memes are exactly what I was thinking about when I came up with this. I was thinking of humans as a big graph of state exchangers/transformers and I thought "Well, why can't the entire universe work like that?" I'm into this idea of resonances, that things that work well do because they're in resonance with the underlying system. Life works so well because we're made of big groups of cells which are in many ways isolated and self-contained yet are constantly exchanging all sorts of other things with their neighbors. Our brains are made of cells like this, which each have their own internal state made of proteins and nucleic acids and so forth, and are constantly exchanging state information between each other which in turn alters the state of everything else. Humans work like this... we have our collective memories of the world which we constantly share with others, and our memory is constantly being added to so our internal state is always changing. And we alter the states of other people by saying things to them. And now we have computers which are little more than finite state machines (with very complex states nowadays), but now they're all linked together, in a giant graph, and alter each others' states by sending and receiving information from each other. I think all these things work as well as they do because of similarities they each bear to the underlying system. After reading Consciousness Explained, it's really easy to see that the way we think is a lot like the way humans think collectively. I'd like to describe this as each process being resonant with the underlying system, but I think it's just more that they have similari properties of graphs. You can throw object oriented programming in here as well... that's all you're really building is a big graph of state management structures. And I guess I'd just like to think that everything can be expressed as big graphs of state management structures which undergo continuous change with time. I just glanced over some information about Seth Lloyd and yeah, it seems like he's definitely onto the same thing, only his ideas are a lot more developed than mine...